Friends, our cultural flashpoints have been seen before. They are precedented. Our fathers and mothers in the faith faced a cultural onslaught that makes ours tame by comparison. And they overcame. Yes, often through great suffering and persecution. And we ought to consider their example. 

I think I am becoming more and more known for my phrase, “These are precedented times.” It is one of my missions in life to help people avoid cultural anxiety and panic, the roots of which are often the sense that the world has never before seen the challenges we face, and the fruits of which are things like desperately clinging to bad people and bad ideas (e.g., Donald Trump, “Christian” Nationalism).
That said, there is a sense in which our challenges are new. They are relatively new for us. It is jarring to live in a culture saturated for so long in Christian atmosphere suddenly obsessed with things like cross-dressing and genital mutilation. In the context of the Christian west this is a very new development. But in the context of pagan societies, it is as old as fallen time: androgyny, cross-dressing, and bodily mutilation has always gone hand-in-hand with paganism. You can read all about it here.
Our current cultural upheavals are best seen as symptoms of a deeper problem. The last wisps of Christendom’s oxygen are fading and we are experiencing the re-paganization of the Western world. You can read all about that in Steven Smith’s Pagans & Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac. Or, for a more concrete “on the ground” view, Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions For a Godless World. The “old gods” never really went away. They went underground, and they are making a strong reemergence right before our eyes.
And what do they care about? Well, what are our cultural flashpoints? Here are my top three. First, racial discord—how can different peoples coexist and settle their grievances? This is manifest in the rise of Critical Theory, and its answers do more to stoke grievances between people groups than settle them. Abortion makes the top three, too, going by the moniker “bodily autonomy.” And, finally, total sexual autonomy; the right to sleep with whomever one wants, to morph and bend one’s sexual behavior and to mutilate one’s body in essence.
Racial identity, disposal of unwanted children, and free sex. Those are the top priorities for a significant segment of western society—perhaps even half of society.
Here is a CNN report just this week: “Under strict abortion law, Texas had nearly 10,000 more births than expected in last nine months of 2022, research suggests.” The article is a fairly straightforward recitation of the facts, but the online world of progressivism put a pretty strong opinion spin on the story: namely, that this is some kind of tragedy. How awful that ten thousand babies were allowed to be born in the oppressive, theocratic state of Texas! Those babies represent, you see, a violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy.
This all brings me to what I really want to share with you this week. The other day I was reading a translation of a very ancient document and was reminded—and just completely astonished—of how … precedented our times are. It was written in the context of the Greco-Roman pagan world. No one knows for certain the identity of its author (although Charles Hill has argued that it’s Polycarp). It simply says, in Greek: “Mathetes.” That could certainly be his name, but “mathetes” in Greek simply means “Disciple.” It could be a term used to preserve anonymity; it is written by a disciple of Jesus.
“Mathetes” wrote a letter to someone named “Diognetus,” and scholars generally date this letter to around A.D. 130—one thousand, nine hundred years ago. Why did he write it? Because this “Diognetus,” apparently a pagan of some sort, was curious about this newfangled group of people called “Christians.” Mathetes writes:
Since I see the, most excellent Diognetus, exceedingly desirous to learn the mode of worshipping God prevalent among the Christians, and inquiring very carefully and earnestly concerning them, what God they trust in, and what form of religion they observe […] I cordially welcome this thy desire, and I implore God, who enables us both to speak and to hear, to grant to me so to speak, that, above all, I may hear you have been edified, and to you so to hear, that I who speak may have no cause of regret for having done so.
Just think of that. We have a document from the very earliest days of the Christian movement, the days when Christians were an extreme minority often suffering brutal persecution. And the document describes who Christians are.
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A nation as broad and diverse as ours has a great many challenges and a great many divisions…But we do have a system—devised and founded by men who understood the depravity of man and the corruptions of concentrated power—whereby no one faction gets a permanent upper hand, and there are exceedingly few permanent political victories. 

It has been quite a week. On Tuesday I published a 6,000-word book review that got an enormous response by Square Inch standards. As expected, the author of that book and his tribe did not like it, but I did not write it in hopes that they would. They’ve been busy trying to come up with something to say, and from what I can see on Twitter they’ve landed on: “Mattson doesn’t understand Bavinck.” Or that I don’t understand what the author was actually saying.
I understand both perfectly well.
At any rate, as a result there are a lot of new faces around here. So welcome! Make yourself at home. If you are interested in weekly cultural commentary on a wide variety of topics, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking for a steady stream of negative polemical content like that book review, you might have come to the wrong place. I rarely write purely polemical essays. In fact, I think I have written two in the last decade, and it only happens when a strong sense of duty demands it. When theologian David Bentley Hart wrote a heretical essay on the resurrection of the body, I couldn’t rest until he was answered. And after watching for weeks people cheering this new book on Christian Nationalism, I decided to read it for myself. And, well, I was again compelled by a strong sense of duty.
It is not just the theology that bothers me, bad as it is. (I didn’t have “Calvinists for the inherent goodness of man” on my 2022 bingo card, but here we are.) It is the insatiable thirst that people have for power, and this is becoming a defining feature of our political landscape. I expect it from the progressive Left, which has always been about constraining people to their vision of the good. Ronald Reagan wasn’t lying when he said that a liberal is someone who wants to reach around your shower curtain to adjust the temperature of the water. Now the far Right wants in on that action, too, to achieve a State large and powerful enough to direct all of society to some higher, “common good.”
It is this coziness to and lust for State power that we ought to find alarming. Conservatives often mock the socialists who constantly argue that “true socialism has yet to be tried.” But I daresay it is impossible to listen to the nationalist crowd without hearing the exact same note: true nationalism hasn’t yet been tried. The problem has been poor implementation of an all-encompassing State; the right people haven’t done it yet; Stephen Wolfe’s hoped-for “Great Man” has not yet arrived.
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In the year Anno Domini 2022 Stephen (of “Wolfeshire,” his bio says) has launched a manifesto sparking the imagination and enthusiasm of a large cohort of energetic, young, American men. There is a Holy Land to liberate from infidels and their enablers—the anemic and compromised relics of the post-war generation. That Holy Land is the United States of America. His manifesto is a theological train wreck and a political mishmash of dangerous and historically deadly ideas. I hope that many will turn away in disillusionment before they get to wherever they are headed, because the waters are not going to part.

Stephen Wolfe’s The Case For Christian Nationalism (Moscow: Canon Press, 2022) is a manifesto that has garnered a great deal of online publicity. Scoring as the #1 bestseller in Amazon’s “Nationalism” category, the book has enjoyed a large boomlet of popularity across a wide and diverse conservative Christian audience. More noteworthy is the sheer intensity of reaction the book seems to get out of its readers—both its lovers and its haters. “I am not exaggerating,” writes one Twitter fan in possession of an advance copy: “this book is the most comprehensive work of Christian political theory written in the modern age.”
That certainly raised my eyebrows. In a modern age that boasts, say, Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations, something has arrived to take us to even greater heights of understanding about Christianity, Christendom, pluralism, the state, the church, and nations? Alas, the hype is unwarranted. The book has an initially impressive veneer, but it is exceedingly thin. I evaluate this book as a serious work of scholarship not because it is, but because I know that unsuspecting readers might believe that it is. And I care a great deal about unsuspecting readers.
Let me begin at the end of the book, which in my view occurs on page 118:
One of the conclusions from the previous chapter is that neither the fall nor grace destroyed or abrogated human natural relations. The fall did not introduce the natural instinct to love one’s own, and grace does not ‘critique’ or subvert our natural inclinations to love and prefer those nearest and most bound to us. The fall introduced the abuse of social relations and malice towards ethnic difference. Grace corrects this abuse and malice, but it does not introduce new principles of human relations. The instinct to love the familiar more than the foreign is good and remains operative in all spiritual states of man. (117-18, emphasis added)
You might ask why I would describe this paragraph on page 118 as the “end” of a 475-page book? Because the sentence that follows begins, “Having established these conclusions…” Since, as I will explain at length, Wolfe has in no way “established” these conclusions, everything that follows from page 118 to page 475 is essentially superfluous. There may be some material of interest—and some of it will elicit comment—but none of it reaches the heart of the matter.
As for that admirably distilled paragraph, I observe that one of the most obvious and central concerns of the New Testament is precisely a “new principle of human relations.” It is a principle that brought no small amount of controversy, completely occupied the agenda at the very first church council, and continued to find stubborn resistance in the churches of Asia Minor, particularly in Ephesus and Galatia. Jews and Gentiles, separated for all previous ages, are now brought together into one household. One family. One body. One man. Those who continued to act on their “natural instincts” to love the familiar more than the foreign, who thought that grace does not “critique” or “subvert” their natural inclinations to love and prefer those nearest and most bound to them, were, Paul clearly says, opposed to “the truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:14). So strong were these “natural” inclinations and so strong was the tribal peer pressure involved that even the Apostle Peter succumbed to it.
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. (Gal. 2:11-13).
Paul is not talking about mere ecclesiastical fellowship. Those with a dualistic cast of mind, as Wolfe most certainly has, might be tempted to think that this controversy was over “spiritual” or “heavenly” matters rather than the “earthly” or mundane—plenty more on that later. But this controversy is as mundane as it gets: Peter will not eat with the Gentiles, and certain Jews followed his example and together they formed a little clique full of familiar faces. A scene from an average high school cafeteria on any given day. And this “natural” inclination was contrary to the truth of the gospel.
This episode, recounted for us in Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, does not appear in Stephen Wolfe’s book. Nor does Pentecost. Nor does the Jerusalem council. Not even the Tower of Babel warrants a mention. Key biblical texts dealing with questions of ethnicity and nations do not exist within the covers of The Case For Christian Nationalism. Stephen Wolfe has written a conclusory paragraph that appears to flatly contradict one of the central gospel themes of the New Testament directly related to his topic, and this raises at least two questions: how did we get here? And, more important, how might we avoid getting here? It will be useful and perhaps illuminating to back up.
Preliminary Matters

Be that as it may, Wolfe invokes a right to simply assume the “Reformed theological tradition,” and it is certainly true that we all must start somewhere and assume something. And so the book is filled with quotations from what seems an impressive collection of Reformed luminaries. There are two problems.
First, the Reformed tradition is not monolithic; not only has it experienced an age of robust theological development and refinement, there have been centuries of intramural debate all along the way over a host of issues, some of which rather importantly impinge upon Wolfe’s case—the extent of the fall and its noetic effects; the “wider” and “narrower” senses of the image of God; the relation of revelation and reason, and more. Wolfe himself sometimes acknowledges these internal debates in his lengthier footnotes. Page 44 reveals that “Thomas Goodwin disagreed with this view, taking what I estimate to be a minority view […].” In the footnote on the following page Wolfe claims that while “many in the Reformed tradition” believed that Adam was under a probationary period, “this position is imposed on the text of Genesis and is theologically unsound.”
And right there is the second problem, and it is called being caught on the horns of a dilemma. Now that Wolfe is, by his own admission, estimating and evaluating and picking and choosing which views to embrace within the variegated, broad stream of Reformed thought, and even making bold claims about the exegesis of Genesis and what is or is not theologically sound, he can no longer avail himself of the excuse that he is “not a theologian nor biblical scholar.” After all, on what grounds does he decide that Turretin is right and Goodwin is wrong? How is he discriminating between the two? Mere preference? Whomever happens to be most helpful to him in the moment? (The answers are likely yes, and yes.) Wolfe wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Either one is competent in biblical exegesis and systematic theology or not. If one wishes to confess ignorance of such things so as to avoid the hard work of attending to the Bible, so be it. But one may not then try to sneak competence in on the cheap through the back door.
So it is sleight of hand for Wolfe to claim that he is merely “assuming” some kind of settled Reformed tradition, when in fact he is actively piecing together a collection of selected witnesses  and quotations to support a project few of them, if any, would actually support. Wolfe recognizes his work might give this appearance, so he attempts to blunt the criticism:
To my knowledge, my theological premises throughout this work are consistent with, if not mostly taken directly from, the common affirmations and denials of the Reformed tradition. To be sure, some of my conclusions are expressed differently than this tradition. After all, Christian nationalism was not used in the 16th through the 18th centuries. But none of my conclusions are, in substance, outside or inconsistent with the broad Reformed tradition” (17).
This is untrue, as we shall shortly see. But for now I wish to simply observe that Wolfe is, in fact, actively generating a theological jigsaw puzzle, and he draws his lines just squiggly enough to keep inconvenient facts from view. In later chapters, for one example, he enthusiastically appeals to Samuel Rutherford on whether a people may resist and depose a civil magistrate. But on the very first page of Rutherford’s Lex Rex, indeed the very first question, Rutherford argues that while “civil society” (family, tribes, voluntary associations, customs, mores, etc.) is “natural,” (meaning part of the created design), the state, or what he calls “magistracy,” is not natural, but rather a contingent reality. Readers would never know that Rutherford opposes one of Wolfe’s central claims. Likewise, readers may think that his frequent appeals to Herman Bavinck indicate some kind of sympathy for Wolfe’s proposals. But on that score, too, Bavinck will have none of it: “The church no more belongs to the original institutions of the human race than the state” (Bavinck, RD IV:391).
From my point of view, since Wolfe does, after all, seem to believe himself biblically and theologically competent, readers ought to hold his paltry recourse to scripture against him. His habit—I’m sorry, it is impossible to call it that. What I mean is that when he does get around to actually quoting the Bible, which occurs by my count 16 times in a 475-page volume, he habitually quotes a single phrase or a few words in an incidental or purely illustrative fashion. There is zero exegesis of scripture or biblical interpretation of any kind in The Case For Christian Nationalism.
One might think this judgment pedantic or unfair. What does it matter, so long as the concepts are true and his argumentative logic holds? But how would we know if the concepts are true? How are we to evaluate them? Consider, by way of illustration: when O’Donovan wrote Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, he self-consciously set out to write a Christian account of nations. For him that meant carefully attending to and interrogating the text of the Bible. He sought to learn from scripture what the concepts are and ought to be; what a “nation” is and what “nationhood” ought to entail, and what is God’s plan for the nature and role of nations in redemptive history. Wolfe’s approach is the opposite: “I proceed from the meaning or denotation of the words involved, particularly nation and nationalism, and I then consider nationalism modified by the term Christian” (9). And again: “Christian nationalism is nationalism modified by Christianity. My definition of Christian nationalism is a Christianized form of nationalism or, put differently, a species of nationalism” (10).
So Wolfe begins with a ready-made definition of “nation” and “nationalism” that comes from who-knows-where and only later considers how the Christian faith “modifies” it—the answer being, as it strangely turns out, that it doesn’t modify it at all. Indeed, on his terms Christianity by definition cannot modify it, because “grace does not destroy, abrogate, supersede, or undermine nature” (23). Since he has projected his construal of “nationhood” right back into the prelapsarian Garden of Eden (really, that is the entire thesis in a nutshell), it is therefore invulnerable to any alteration or modification by redemptive grace. That is what that exceptionally lovely and helpful theological phrase, “grace restores nature,” now comes to mean in the hands of Stephen Wolfe—but I am getting well ahead of myself. Wolfe’s “Christian nationalism” is just garden-variety nationalism taken from his own intuitions with an obvious assist from the first few chapters of Aristotle’s On Politics, involving a “Great Man” (31, 290), the “Christian Prince” (277), who is the “nation’s god”(287) and the “vicar of God” (290), and who is in charge of “ordering” everybody and everything to the “national good” (31). I half-expected him to announce that he’s volunteering for the job.
Kicking God Upstairs
Wolfe’s ambivalence toward the Bible has deeper roots, however, than mere feigned ignorance about how to do biblical interpretation. The fact is rather that he doesn’t think he needs to do any biblical interpretation in the first place. The irrelevance of the Bible to the task at hand—political theory—is deeply embedded in his own understanding of reason and revelation, nature and grace. He says it rather straightforwardly:
The primary reason that this work is political theory is that I proceed from a foundation of natural principles. While Christian theology assumes natural theology as an ancillary component, Christian political theory treats natural principles as the foundation, origin, and source of political life, even Christian political life […] Whereas Christian theology considers the Christian mainly in relation to supernatural grace and eternal life, Christian political theory treats man as an earthly being (though bound to a heavenly state) whose political life is fundamentally natural. (18)
Thus begins a work that relentlessly assumes and invokes a divided reality between two realms: supernatural and natural, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, grace and nature. And politics and political theory belongs squarely in the latter category; divine special revelation is not its norm, but reason and natural law are its guides. Wolfe is upfront as to the source of this dichotomy: Thomas Aquinas, whom he believes “heavily influenced” Reformed theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries (17).
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This devotional aspect is perhaps uncommon in systematic theologies, but it is characteristic of The Wonderful Works of God. Christian families should have some reference work or guide to help make sense of the Bible and theology and to consult when confronted by confusing or difficult matters. Many books provide answers that satisfy the mind; better still is the book that presses those answers into the heart to elicit worship and praise.

Following the watershed publication of his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics in English at the turn of this century, interest in Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) has sharply increased. Indeed, it almost seems as though Bavinck’s destiny is to influence the 21st century far more than the 19th century, during which he wrote most of his dogmatic work. A steady stream of new translations and editions of his other works has emerged (e.g., Saved by Grace, Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, The Christian Family, On Preachers and Preaching, Philosophy of Revelation, Reformed Ethics, The Sacrifice of Praise, Christian Worldview).
But there is a book that has almost been forgotten in this flurry of interest and excitement. Translated by Henry Zylstra and originally published by Eerdmans in 1956 under the title Our Reasonable Faith, this single-volume systematic theology represents Bavinck’s own distillation of his four-volume magnum opus. Though available for more than half a century, it has remained fairly obscure outside the walls of Reformed seminaries.
The reasons for this obscurity are mysterious, for the book has a plausible claim of being the best single-volume Reformed systematic theology ever produced. It’s therefore welcome that Westminster Seminary Press has now restored the author’s title (Magnalia Dei, or The Wonderful Works of God), and re-released it in a format worthy of such a book.
Format
By “format” I mean that the volume itself is beautiful, from its richly textured dust cover, to the cloth cover beneath, to its high-quality Smyth-sewn paper. Annotations will resist bleeding through the paper, and the book will lay open on your desk. The aesthetics are impressive.
Inside one finds an attractive new typesetting for Zylstra’s translation, along with much more. Westminster Seminary professor R. Carlton Wynne helpfully introduces Bavinck and the book’s background, and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto translates for the first time Bavinck’s original foreword, which Zylstra had omitted.
Most helpful of all is a massive subject and Scripture index compiled by Charles Williams, which will enhance the book’s usefulness for students and researchers.
Content
As for the content, it is—as already mentioned—Bavinck’s own distillation of his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics into a single volume. But that is actually misleading: it’s not an abridgment of the four volumes. It is, rather, Bavinck’s fresh restatement of his dogmatic work for a lay audience. In 1910, one reviewer put it this way: “None but a learned man could have written this book, but he has hidden his tools.” Bavinck has put aside the kitchen equipment and delivered the meal.
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Do you find it accidental or coincidental that immediately after Jesus, Paul, and Peter all instruct us to be the kinds of people who refuse to “fight fire with fire” or “punch back twice as hard” their very next words are about persecution and suffering? This is not an accident. Far from being “unsuited” for our times, the cultural world into which God gave all of these commands was far worse, far more hostile, and far more polarized than our own. There was no asterisk on these commands, no “do this unless you live in a hostile world.” The hostile world was already baked in. And you know what? This was not a recipe for being dominated by the world. It was a recipe for overcoming the world. Christianity conquered the Roman Empire with this ethic.

Almost a decade ago I spoke at a conference in Portland, Oregon. I recently came across my prepared remarks, which honestly I’d completely forgotten. I’m going to borrow from it liberally for this newsletter, since the conference is long-forgotten and my remarks were never published. Consider that I said the following in 2013:
We live in a very challenging cultural environment. Have things ever seemed as polarized as they are right now? Right vs. Left, Gay vs. Straight, Tolerance vs. Bigotry, and we could go on all night rehearsing the divisions! During the 90s I remember pundits and social observers confidently declaring that the so-called “culture wars” were over. It would be an age of peace and economic prosperity, with no more conflict over thorny moral questions like abortion, euthanasia, or homosexuality. If only! I trust I do not need to tell people living in Portland, Oregon, that these sorts of cultural conflicts are alive and well.
Heh. What did I know? Have things ever seemed as polarized? We hadn’t seen anything at all yet, had we? That was all pre-Woke Mobs, pre-Trump, and pre-Portland-being-a-graffiti-painted-post-apocalyptic wasteland. I went on to describe our shifting culture and predicted that the LGBTQ agenda—actually I don’t think there was a Q on it back then—would be a major catalyst for increasing hostility toward Christians.
I continued on with this illustration, which I think holds up very well:
Being on the West Coast, I understand that Oregon occasionally gets earthquakes. I’ve personally never experienced one. But what is the first instinct when the ground literally starts to move under your feet? I imagine you reach out and grab for something stable, usually frantically and in a panic. We need to be steadied and balanced. And cultural earthquakes are no different. When things shift and change, when definitions change, cultural mores radically shift, when the old things cannot be taken for granted anymore, we can feel extremely vulnerable. We can feel afraid, alone, helpless, and without resources. Usually the shift feels completely new, something we’ve never experienced before. And we then automatically think that nobody else has ever experienced it before.
And when we think nobody else has experienced it before, nobody else has had to face the hostility we now face, then next step seems clear enough: our forefathers and foremothers are of no help to us. Our “old’ way of engaging culture must be the culprit, not the solution, for the hostility we face. Hence, the current claims that old ways of doing things are “unsuited for the times.”
There is a humorous Sci-Fi cult classic book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by British writer Douglas Adams. In the story, the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself is, in fact, a galactic encyclopedia designed to give vital information to the lonely galactic traveler. And on the cover of that vast resource is a warm, smiley face accompanied by the words: “Don’t Panic!”
It seems to me that as we Christians make our way through an unpredictable, sometimes crazy, sometimes hostile world, we have the ultimate guide: God himself. God speaks. And you know what the number one message of the Bible is for people living in the midst of cultural hostility? Don’t panic. You live in precedented times and you are not alone.
It is the most frequent command in the Bible: “Do not be afraid.”
“Fear not.” Over and over again. God knows that we are prone to fear. And God exhorts us again and again to not fear. This isn’t because God is naïve. He knows that sometimes there is legitimate reason to fear.
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