So we must have a category of Jesus that doesn’t mean you’ll never be tempted or you’ll never have imperfect motives, but you can live a life of ordinary faithful obedience. One of the problems when we don’t have that category is when we think, You know what? I never really obey. Everything in my life is just polluted, sinful, filthy rags. That is when we need to hear the alarm bells going off. We don’t hear it like we should.

Good Works vs. Obedience
There’s a really important but simple distinction we need to make in thinking about our good works or our obedience. And that is that our good works can be truly good even though they’re not perfectly good. They’re never without some imperfections. They’re always tinged with some kind of selfishness.
I remember a pastoral intern asking me years ago, “Pastor Kevin, how do you know that when you’re stepping up into the pulpit there’s not some part of you that’s doing this to be seen and to be heard or to draw attention to yourself?”
And I said, “That’s a really good question. I’ll let you know when I’m certain there’s no part of that in my heart.”
It’s not to excuse sin, but it’s to say, Yeah, there are layers to the onion of the human heart. So there’s always that presence of indwelling sin. It’s imperfect, and yet the best theologians have said that it can be truly obedient. I think that’s a new concept for some people, though it shouldn’t be, because Paul often praises the churches for their obedience. Jesus, in the Great Commission, said, “Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And there’s no escape hatch that says, Oh, by the way, of course, you can’t really be obedient to anything.
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There’s no way to understand the pastoral epistles unless you realize Paul has a category for Christians who are living a faithful, obedient life, and a category for those who are not repentant, in whom there’s no progress. They’re so marked intractably by these sins without fighting, without struggle, giving themselves over to them that the only conclusion one can reach is, I don’t think you’re really Christians. I don’t think you’re really born again. And the path that you’re on does not lead to eternal life.

Good Works vs. Obedience
There’s a really important but simple distinction we need to make in thinking about our good works or our obedience. And that is that our good works can be truly good even though they’re not perfectly good. They’re never without some imperfections. They’re always tinged with some kind of selfishness.
I remember a pastoral intern asking me years ago, “Pastor Kevin, how do you know that when you’re stepping up into the pulpit there’s not some part of you that’s doing this to be seen and to be heard or to draw attention to yourself?”
And I said, “That’s a really good question. I’ll let you know when I’m certain there’s no part of that in my heart.”
It’s not to excuse sin, but it’s to say, Yeah, there are layers to the onion of the human heart. So there’s always that presence of indwelling sin. It’s imperfect, and yet the best theologians have said that it can be truly obedient. I think that’s a new concept for some people, though it shouldn’t be, because Paul often praises the churches for their obedience. Jesus, in the Great Commission, said, “Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And there’s no escape hatch that says, Oh, by the way, of course, you can’t really be obedient to anything.
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We believe that if God is for us, no one can stand against us (8:31). We believe that we are more than conquerors through him who loved us (8:37) and that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (8:38–39).” ‘Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age’ has everything to do with the armor of God, because this book is a book about truth—truth you may have never heard, truth you may have forgotten, or truth you already know but haven’t dared to embrace.

The devil is a liar.
And not just any old liar, a very good one. He normally avoids direct assaults. He prefers deceit, and misdirection. Think of the snake in the garden of Eden, merely suggesting that God’s word might not be fully trustworthy. !e devil specializes in traps and snares (2 Tim. 2:26). He masquerades as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). He blinds the minds of unbelievers (4:4). Our enemy, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, is wicked, tricksy, and false (Rev. 12:9). He is a father of lies (John 8:44).
The devil lies to us in many ways. He may not speak through a snake, but he knows how to make his voice heard. Sometimes he may bring something directly to mind. Or perhaps he keeps us from seeing and hearing what we should. More often, I imagine, he speaks through the half-truths and quarter-truths we find in a thousand movies, television shows, and “news” reports. His voice can be heard in our universities and from the halls of power. If we listen carefully, we may detect his slithering speech in Christian books and in spiritual blogs, even from pastors and churches. That is why the book you are holding is so important. Make no mistake, this courageous book is bracing. You won’t agree with every sentence. But it is hard to imagine anyone who shouldn’t listen to what Rosaria has to say. Strike that— not what Rosaria has to say, but what God has said that Rosaria knows we need to hear. Rosaria Butterfield is a friend of mine, and she is eager to speak to you as a friend too—if you will let her. She is smart, caring, self-deprecating, and—here’s one thing I hope you’ll learn to love—in a world awash in soft heads and brittle hearts, Rosaria isn’t afraid to tell you what she really thinks. May her tribe increase.
There is a war raging between good and evil in our world, and though we might prefer the conflict to be fought somewhere else, we don’t get to pick the times in which we live. The front lines today are battles over sex, gender, and identity. We must be ready for a fight in precisely these places. Don’t underestimate the power of your opponent. The devil wants us to join him in his rebellion against God. He wants to make us cowards and traitors. He wants us to believe the myth of our own autonomy. He wants us to raise the white flag and side with the enemy—the enemy without or the enemy within, it doesn’t matter to him. The devil hates every spiritual blessing in Christ. He hates Christ’s power. He hates Christ’s forgiving grace. He hates Christ’s transforming grace. He hates the gospel and the church. He hates happy marriages and well-ordered families. He hates personal holiness and obedience. The devil hates Christians who stand their ground.
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We pray “that [Christ] would be pleased so to exercise the kingdom of his power in all the world, as may best conduce to these ends.” Notice the ecclesial logic. The “these ends” have to do with the proclamation of the gospel, the saving of the lost, and the edification of the saints. In other words, Christ rules over all things for the good of the church. The kingdom of power is subservient in purpose to the kingdom of grace (giving way to the kingdom of glory), not the other way around.

In the last several years, we have seen a resurgence of interest among Christians in political theology. On the whole, I believe this has been a good thing intellectually. I’m less certain this has been a good thing ecclesiastically. 
We need smart, well-read Christians talking about natural law, the magisterial Reformers, Enlightenment philosophy, and American history. We need experts weighing in on the differences between classic liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, progressivism, and post-liberalism. Having done my doctoral work on John Witherspoon, I am personally very interested in reading about Locke and the Founders, in analyzing the Declaration and the Constitution, and in examining what political principles we can glean from the Bible and from the wisdom of the church through the ages. More Christians reading deeply and thinking carefully about political theology is a welcome development.
Okay, you’re wondering, so where’s the “but”?
The “but” is about political theology that supplants the centrality of the church. This can happen by deliberate conviction (the political theology calls for it), but it can also happen by the sheer weight of interest in politics. The issue isn’t merely idolatry (“You are too concerned about politics!”). The bigger issue is when Christians—and pastors worst of all—make the church intellectually, affectionally, and teleologically subservient to the world of politics and nation-states, instead of the other way around.
A Little Help from the Larger Catechism
Let me get at this concern in a roundabout way by highlighting a great section from the Westminster Larger Catechism. Question 191 asks, “What do we pray for in the second petition [of the Lord’s Prayer]?” Here’s the answer:
In the second petition, (which is, Thy Kingdom come,) acknowledging ourselves and all mankind to be by nature under the dominion of sin and Satan, we pray that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, the fullness of the Gentiles brought in; the church furnished with all gospel officers and ordinances, purged from corruption, countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrates; that the ordinances of Christ may be purely dispensed, and made effectual to the converting of those that are yet in their sins, and the confirming, comforting, and building up those that are already converted: that Christ would rule in our hearts here, and hasten the time of his second coming, and our reigning with him for ever: and that he would be pleased so to exercise the kingdom of his power in all the world, as may best conduce to these ends.
Notice three things about this answer.
First, the Catechism understands “Thy Kingdom come” to be about sin, salvation, and the church. The Westminster divines do not understand the petition to be about general human flourishing or about national renewal. The focus of the prayer is on the propagation of the gospel, the conversion of the lost, the health of the church, the destruction of the devil, and the renovation of our hearts. More on this ecclesial focus in a moment.
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DISCLAIMER: The Aquila Report is a news and information resource. We welcome commentary from readers; for more information visit our Letters to the Editor link. All our content, including commentary and opinion, is intended to be information for our readers and does not necessarily indicate an endorsement by The Aquila Report or its governing board. In order to provide this website free of charge to our readers,  Aquila Report uses a combination of donations, advertisements and affiliate marketing links to  pay its operating costs.

We are awash in a world that refuses to believe that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Thankfully, while the pastoral and personal issues are complicated, the Biblical teaching on the trans issue is not. Deuteronomy 22:5 states matter-of-factly. 

During one of my summers as a college student—over 25 years ago now—I served as a counselor at a Christian camp. One of our responsibilities as counselor, besides keeping watch over a rowdy bunch of kids and teenagers and trying to teach them something about Jesus, was to come up with skits for the many large group gatherings during the week. Some of the skits were supposed to be serious, but most of them were supposed to make the campers laugh.
The camp director, an older man who has since gone to be with the Lord, told us there were two new rules we had to follow in putting together our brilliant sketch comedies. One, we couldn’t do anything so gross that some poor camper might get sick. Two, no crossdressing. The first rule was disappointing, but made sense. You don’t want to ruin a camper’s week by doing some nauseating food gag. But the second rule felt more inconvenient. After all, it was a staple of zany camp hijinks to have counselors dress up in outlandish outfits, especially men stuffing their shirts full to look like models of exaggerated femininity.
The director didn’t explain his rationale in great detail, and I don’t think it is always wrong for people to wear silly clothes in silly contexts. But I’ve often thought about the prescience in that older man’s wisdom. He knew that we were performing for puberty-throttled teenagers. Even in the late 1990s, he could see the potential confusion that a week of crossdressing skits might cause. Likely, no one would have been scared or led down a path of sexual deviance, but he figured why risk it? Why risk making teenagers feel (even more) insecure about their bodies? Why risk presenting drag—and I’m not sure we even knew the term at the time—as a fun, playful option for Christians? Maybe he was stricter than he needed to be. Or maybe he was ahead of his time.
Anyone with half an ear open to the news knows that we are living through a disturbing and disorienting cultural moment in which grown men and women don’t know (or pretend like they don’t know) the difference between men and women.
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 Mormons believe Jesus died for sins and rose again from the dead. The atonement is the central event in history and essential to their theology. And yet, Mormons do not have a precise doctrine of the atonement. They do not emphasize Christ as a wrath-bearing substitute, but emphasize simply that Christ somehow mysteriously remits our sins through his suffering.

The aim of this article is to provide a brief overview of Mormon history and theology. My purpose is not to debunk Mormonism or to prove Christianity. But I hope this quick survey will demonstrate that the two are not the same.
A quick note on secondary sources: Christian materials do not always treat Mormonism fairly or go the extra mile to present Mormon ideas as a Mormon would recognize them. One book that does is Andrew Jackson’s Mormonism Explained: What Latter-day Saints Teach and Practice. I also recommend A Different Jesus? The Christ of the Latter-Day Saints by BYU professor Robert Millet. Richard Mouw concedes too much in his Foreword and Afterword, but it is still helpful to get Mormon Christology from a Mormon himself.
Mormon History
Joseph Smith was born in rural Vermont in 1805, the fourth of nine children. With little success farming in Vermont, the Smith family moved west to Palmyra, New York. There Joseph Smith was exposed to different revival movements, and most of his family became Presbyterians, though Smith later said he leaned toward Methodism.
The presence of so many variations of Christianity bothered Smith. Which one was right? How could he choose? At one revival meeting, a preacher quoted from James 1:5 “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (KJV). Smith, 14 years old at the time, went home, reflected on these words, and went into the woods to pray.
According to Mormon tradition, this is when Joseph Smith had his first vision. In this vision, which is foundational to the Mormon faith, Smith claimed to see two “personages.” The one—God the Father—pointed to the other and said, “This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!”  Smith asked them what sect he should join. They answered that he should join none of them. They were all wrong. All their creeds were an abomination, and all their believers were corrupt.
Three years later, Mormons believe Smith received another vision. In this vision the angel Moroni told Smith of golden plates buried under a hill near Palmyra. The plates were revealed in 1827 when Smith was provided with two reading crystals—Urim and Thummim—by which he could translate the writing (Smith claimed the plates were written in hieroglyphics). In 1830 Smith published The Book of Mormon, which contains the story of the lost Israelites who migrated to America in the sixth century BC but were killed in battle in AD 428. Smith later received another vision from John the Baptist giving him the Aaronic Priesthood.
That same year (1830) Smith founded the “Church of Christ.” In 1838 he changed the name to “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”
Smith continued to receive revelations telling him to move from New York to Ohio to Missouri and eventually to Illinois where he and his followers built a town called Nauvoo. There Smith and his followers tried to live out a utopian vision of society. They also instituted polygyny as early Mormon leaders argued that Jesus had had many wives. Smith and his brother were arrested in 1844. Later a mob stormed the jail and killed them both. Mormons consider Smith a martyr. Others say he died in a violent shoot-out.
Following Smith’s death there was a schism. A small group called the Josephites became the Reorganized Church with headquarters in Missouri. Most followed Brigham Young, who became their First President and prophet. In 1847, Young took the followers to Utah and built Salt Lake City.
Today, according to LDS figures, there are nearly 17 million Mormons worldwide—with about 7 million living in the United States. Mormonism is the largest new religious movement from the West since Christianity (which can be said, more accurately, to have come from the Near East). Mormonism is also the first homegrown American religion. Mormonism continues to grow (though at a slower rate) because of its missionary impulse, its relatively high birthrate, and its commitment to doctrinal and ethical distinctives.
Mormon Theology
Let me highlight seven areas of Mormon doctrine. I won’t try to refute the Mormon position, but I hope you will see the explicit (and often intentional) deviation from historic Christianity.

View of history. In Mormon thinking, the rise of Mormonism was not merely a reformation or renewal of the church. It was a complete restoration. Following the death of Christ’s apostles, the church fell into complete apostasy. The church lost divine authority and true doctrine. There is no unbroken continuity from the early church to the present. Christianity, for almost all of its history, was false and without the truth—until Joseph Smith and his revelation. Mormonism not only rejects historic orthodox Christianity, the entire religion is based on the need for such repudiation.

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Our God speaks, and he speaks not simply to be heard and not merely to pass along information. He speaks so that we can begin to know the unknowable and fathom the unfathomable (1 Cor. 2:9; cf. Isa. 48:8). You may think you’ve seen it all, and you’ve heard it all, and you’ve experienced everything there is to experience. But you haven’t seen or heard or imagined what the God of love has prepared for those who love him (1 Cor. 2:9). 

What We Want Most

Most of us, deep down, want the same things out of life. Of course, I’m talking about ultimate things, not immediate things. On the immediate level, people have a wide variety of desires. Some people like to travel. Some people like fine dining. Some people prefer indoor plumbing and a comfortable bed. And other people like camping. There are a million different tastes, interests, and hobbies. But if we get to the level of the heart, I think people all around the world generally want the same things: We want purpose. We want to be happy. We want to know we are okay. We want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. We want to be known by someone bigger than ourselves. We want to live forever.

And if you dig around in those desires, you’ll find that most people are waiting for some word from somewhere so that they can finally know this good life. They want a law or a list that will tell them steps to take to get there. They want their teacher to say, “You’ve passed,” or their parents to say, “I love you.” They want to get a call from their dream job or their dream date. They want to hear good news about their retirement fund or their health or their kids. Many of them are listening intently to hear from the most sacred voice they know: their own. And some are desperate to hear from God.

The doctrine of the necessity of Scripture reminds us of our predicament: the One we need to know most cannot be discovered on our own. And it assures us of a solution: this same ineffable One has made himself known through his word. As the Westminster Confession of Faith explains, “Although the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation.” Holy Scripture, the Confession goes on to say, is therefore “most necessary” (WCF 1.1). The Scriptures are our spectacles (to use Calvin’s phrase), the lenses through which we see God, the world, and ourselves rightly. We cannot truly know God, his will, or the way of salvation apart from the Bible. We need Scripture to live the truly good life.

We need Scripture to live forever. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). There is no other book like the Bible. It reveals a different kind of wisdom, comes from a different source, and tells of a different love.

A Different Source

So where do we go to learn the things God has revealed? Do we look to the trees? What about the inner light? How about community standards? Maybe human reason and experience? The clear testimony of 1 Corinthians is that only God can tell us about God. Just as the spirit of a person discloses the thoughts and feelings and intentions of that person, so also no one can make known the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:11). The only Being knowledgeable enough, wise enough, and skillful enough to reveal God to you is God himself.

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The book as a whole is thoroughly researched and effectively argued. Hall’s work is a needed reminder that even if America never was, and is not now, “Christian” in every sense of the word, we can never fully separate—nor should we want to separate—Christianity from America. The fight for liberty, not least of all religious liberty, is ongoing and should be the concern of all Americans.

There are few artifacts more enduring in the American imagination and more symbolic of our national ethos and essence than the Liberty Bell. The bronze “State House bell” was ordered from the Whitehouse Foundry in London by Isaac Norris, the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, in 1751. After the bell cracked on its first ring, local metal workers John Pass and John Stow melted down the bell and cast a new one. Famously, after 90 years of hard use, their “Liberty Bell” also developed a crack—a crack made more noticeable in 1846 when technicians attempted (unsuccessfully) to repair the bell and stop the crack by making it wider. Today the 2,000-pound bell sits in the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia and is viewed by more than a million visitors every year.
The bell is so well known as a historical artifact, and “liberty” has such a universal and positive ring for most Americans, we forget that the Liberty Bell is a manifestly Christian artifact and symbol. The name “Liberty Bell”—first employed, in 1835, by an anti-slavery publication—comes from the biblical inscription that runs around the bronze exterior: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereto” (Leviticus 25:10). During the nineteenth century, the bell’s inscription became a rallying cry for abolitionists. After the Civil War, the bell traveled across the country for displays and commemorations, helping to remind the fractured nation that the colonies once fought together for liberty from British tyranny. If there was anything that could bring the country back together after four years of conflict and 600,000 deaths it was an appeal to the nation’s past—a shared history that believed in freedom and believed in the Bible, even if both of these beliefs were sometimes held to with tragic inconsistency.
A Narrow Purpose
Mark David Hall’s new book Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans (Fidelis Books, 2023) seeks to remind us of this shared history. Hall, a Professor of Politics at George Fox University and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, is no stranger to his subject matter, having written or edited books on America’s Christian founding, on faith and the founders, and on religion and public life in the founding era. The best way to read this new work is to understand that Hall is making an argument. That is to say, Hall does not attempt anything like a comprehensive analysis of freedom and equality in American life, nor does he seek to provide an exhaustive evaluation of Christianity’s contribution to public life in America.
No doubt, the biggest criticism of the book will be along these lines: that Hall has given a truncated, one-sided, overly rosy picture of Christian influence in America. Such criticisms, however, miss the point of what Hall is trying to accomplish. If Hall pushes hard in one direction—defending the salutary effects of Christianity in America and defending the American experiment more generally—it is because so many have pushed hard in the other direction. From academics claiming that the Enlightenment triumphed over Christianity in the American Founding, to the 1619 Project asserting that the American Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, to Christianity Today’s former editor insisting that America was positively not founded on Christian principles, it has become commonplace for many Americans, even religious ones, to assume that the American founding was negligibly Christian and that Christianity has had an overwhelmingly negative influence when it comes to freedom and equality in this country. Hall disagrees:
This book…focuses on the ways in which Christians have advanced liberty and equality in the American context. Contrary to many academics and popular authors, I show that Christians have regularly been motivated by their faith to create fair and just institutions, fight for political freedom, oppose slavery, and secure religious liberty for all. Of course, some Christians have appealed to the Bible and Christian theology to oppose such reforms or to justify evil practices. Americans of other faiths and no faith have also worked to advance liberty and equality for all. Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land cannot tell all of these stories; its more modest goal is to put to rest the myth that Christianity has been a regressive force with respect to positive political, legal, and societal reform in the United States. (2)
In this “modest goal,” Hall is successful.
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