I have been encouraged and even energised by Brierley’s work. He has equipped us with fresh evidence of the Christian faith, with a vigorous recasting of old evidence, and a renewed confidence in the intellectual and logical rigour of Christianity. He has given us a fund of podcasts to share with others on their journey. But we must always remember that Jesus has conquered sin and the curse at its root – “It is finished!” – and that he made a promise: “I will build my church.”

My congregation lives within an 80 x 60 x 50 kilometre triangle, an area larger than the Principality of Liechtenstein. So I drive a lot. I don’t enjoy a view of the Swiss Alps, but I do get to listen to podcasts.
Right now, what makes me actually look forward to driving is the chance to listen to more of Justin Brierley’s wonderful series: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity. The podcast complements his 2023 book of the same name, published by Tyndale House.
One word to describe Surprising Rebirth? Refreshing. Brierley is smart, informed, nuanced, and confident in the truth. He has a beautiful turn of phrase and oozes positivity. Listening to him I get the same kind of feeling as when I read C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, or J.I. Packer’s Knowing God.
The thesis of the series is in the title.
In the mid-2000s the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement – Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and their (somewhat) fearless leader Richard Dawkins – scooped up millions of sales with books like The End  of Faith (2005), The God Delusion (2006), God is Not Great (2007), and other vaunted takedowns of mainstream religion.
As sarcastic as Voltaire, as certain as Senator McCarthy, as pompous as Sir Humphrey Appleby, and as populistic as Abba, they made a lot of God-suppressors feel more snug in their idolatry.
Dawkins even fronted a bus campaign: “There is Probably No God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.” Despite the lame hedging of the word “Probably”, it went down well in the burbs of Oxford. Not sure what famine-wracked Somalians would have made of it. Or incarcerated Uighurs.
But the devil has been cursed to only ever kick own goals.
The Four Horsemen’s arguments earned C-minuses all round from real philosophers – theists and atheists alike. Their arguments had all been raised and answered countless times across the past two millennia. Moreover, they failed to offer even a postage stamp of terra firma on which to build a life of meaning and purpose, but instead revelled in a universe that has, “at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Yet they failed, as Nietzsche and Camus did not fail, to follow through with their nihilist suppositions, persisting that basic human ethics – strangely reminiscent of the ethics of the Second Table – could still be derived from their god-free milieu.
People learned inductively that atheism was rather like an egg left too long in the sun – smooth on the outside, an agglomeration of stinky gas and nothingness within. Moreover, the Horsemen whipped up millions to begin talking again about the target of their attacks – God. Oscar Wilde said it: “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”   
Twenty years later it turns out that the New Atheists, rather like Pharaoh’s foremen but without their reasonableness, cause millions to lift up their heads to the possibility of something better – that there might in fact be real substance to the claims of Christian theism.
Justin Brierley tells the story in sixty-to-ninety-minute podcasts, twenty-two of which have appeared so far. I will engage with a few of the more remarkable of these and make some observations about the oeuvre as a whole.
In “The Rise and Fall of New Atheism” (Ep. 1), Brierley storms the beach with a bracing retelling of the rise of Dawkins et al. They flowed with Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith. They had the wind in their sails. Yet how brittle it was. “Elevatorgate: How the Culture Wars Killed New Atheism” (Ep. 2) shows how the movement ripped itself apart over sexism, LGBT and trans rights, and other highly charged public debates. Yes their impact lingered, but not in the way they hoped.
In “Thank God for Richard Dawkins” (Ep. 3), Brierley interviews a number of public intellectuals who turned to theism, and even to Christian faith, after the undergraduate naïveté of the Horsemen’s books opened their eyes to the better arguments of Christianity. An interview with prominent YouTube atheist Alex O’Connor (Ep. 4) is a case study of this.
“The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon” (Ep. 5) is one of the most exciting episodes, tracing the rise to popularity in 2018 of a gifted but unknown psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Peterson was the doctor’s hammer that tapped all kinds of reflexive tendons. First when he stood against state laws forcing people to use preferred pronouns as an attack on free speech, which Peterson argues is an attack on thought itself. Second for his 2018 Twelve Rules for Life, which has sold over ten million copies and urges people to take responsibility for their lives – young men in particular.
Then Peterson began to lecture on the Bible. Gifted pastor-preachers with half-empty churches were treated to the sight of thousands of predominantly young men paying up to a hundred dollars to pack out large lecture theatres to hear Peterson’s passionate, rambling, and often emotional reflections on Genesis. Reading the text through the prism of Jungian archetypes and symbols, he fails to understand it. Yet millions of people were now hearing from the weeping prophet of Canada all about God and the Bible and a God-given purpose and destiny for life.
In Episode 6, “The Meaning Crisis: Why we’re all religious deep down”, Brierley builds on the idea of the innate sense of meaning and purpose that Peterson was tapping into. He works backwards from the funeral for Elizabeth II, when “a latent spirituality surfaced.” Having been reared on a diet of “you can be whatever we want to be” – what Charles Taylor called “expressive individualism” – and having rejected theocentrism for anthropocentrism, young occidentals were unmoored. And terribly unhappy.
The great bonus of listening to Brierley is that you will discover, through his adroit choice of interlocutors, all manner of wonderful Christian communicators. In Episode 6 you will meet Graham Tomlin, a C of E bishop and author of the superbly titled Why Being Yourself is a Bad Idea (2020). Our anthropocentrism has meant that we are looking in the wrong place for meaning. Social media’s smashing of community has exacerbated this. Refusing to enter “the story of our society”, we have failed in our attempt to invent our own. Sociologist Max Weber described the “disenchantment” of the industrial West. But nature abhors a vacuum and we’ve learnt to worship other entities: ourselves primarily. This is not working well for anyone.
Interviews with Australian historian Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, who converted to Christianity from atheism, and social-psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has catalogued the catastrophic increase in levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide since 2010 – when a new generation was being shaped by smartphones and social media – trace the modern mental health crisis to an existential crisis, which itself derives from an identity crisis which is, at its heart, a spiritual crisis. Brierley sums it all up: “If we are made to live in a story that is bigger than us then I don’t think we can simply play-act a part in something we know is ultimately just a fiction.”
At the moment New Atheism imploded, new voices began to be heard.
“The New Thinkers: A new conversation on God” (Ep. 7) introduces four highly prominent and well-regarded public intellectuals who are all making positive noises about Christianity: Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Louise Perry. Of the four, the human rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the only one who has come to belief in Christian theism (Ep. 8). She is a friend of Richard Dawkins, who has publicly expressed his disappointment in Ali’s conversion; though even Dawkins has recently called himself “a cultural Christian.” We should ask: “From whence that culture, Prof Dawkins?” Ex nihilo nihil fit.
In “Paul Kingsnorth & Martin Shaw: A poet and mythologist convert” (Ep. 9), Brierley introduces two recent converts. Shaw is an academic and mythologist who read the Gospels and “found Christ disturbing.”
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What do you make of the X of Xmas? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a Hallmark movie or two and shedding a tear. There’s nothing wrong with singing “Jingle Bells” or wanting hippopotamuses for Christmas.  But we don’t want to miss what Christmas is really about and that is the eternal Son of God coming into the world to save sinners.
Good news of great joy for all people

“Then the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord’.” (Luke 2:10–11, NKJV)
It’s the time of year where there are deals galore. All you need to do to get them is enter a special code in the appropriate box and the percentage off will be applied at checkout.
A Christian publishing house offered a site-wide discount using the code XMAS. One customer contacted them taking them to task for using XMAS instead of CHRISTMAS. She claimed they were taking Christ out of Christmas and should know better.
The publisher wrote back and explained that X actually had a long tradition in Christian publishing. Before the invention of the printing press, scribes would copy the Greek New Testament by hand. In so doing, they might abbreviate the name for Christ (Χριστός) with the Greek letter Chi, which looks like the letter X in our English alphabet.
So Xmas is scribal shorthand of sorts for Christmas. The X represents Christ, but that’s only if you are in the know. Xmas could mean different things to different people, depending on your perspective.
Let me suggest four possible perspectives for the X in Xmas, including what each perspective might think of the biblical account of Christ’s birth and a representative seasonal song.
The Atheist Perspective
This point of view (POV) crosses Christ out of Christmas. In fact, it’s not crazy about the word Christmas to begin with. Holiday greetings are more like it.
These are people who are actually doing what that complaining customer was talking about, Xing Christ out of Christmas. It’s kind of a mission statement for them. Religion is enslaving and an opiate to the mindless masses. They are saving people from themselves.
What would this POV think about the biblical account? It’s nothing but a fairy tale, ranking right up there with Frosty and Rudolph. The problem, though, is there are people who actually believe the nativity nonsense.
How about a seasonal song? One candidate is “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Nothing about Jesus and the season does carry danger to the naive.
The Commercial Perspective
The X in this POV is like the X the salesman puts on the contract to show you where to sign to close the deal on your purchase. Christmas is indeed the most wonderful time of the year because it’s when the bottom line moves most dramatically into the black.
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Yes, we fail, we sin, and we are not yet finally delivered from the indwelling corruption that always sees and feels the Law as enemy and condemner. But a radical change has taken place. The law of God is once again the delight of God’s sons, bringing liberty to us. So what is the place of the Law in the life of the Christian? Simply this: We are no longer under the Law to be condemned by it, we are now “in-lawed” to it because of our betrothal to Christ! He has written the Law, and love for it, into our hearts!

Since the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the question has been asked endlessly: “What is the role of the law of God in light of the gospel?” The Apostle Paul found himself asking it (for example, Gal. 3:19: “What purpose then does the law serve?” NKJV). He had a profound sense of the place of the Law in the history of redemption and in the covenant purposes of God. But he also answered the question in terms of the life of the believer (for example, in Romans 8:3–4). Ever since, Christians have faced the challenge of walking the thin red biblical line that avoids the dangers of legalism on the one hand and antinomianism on the other.
The anonymous author of Hebrews was fascinated by the relationship between the Law and the gospel. He explained how the Mosaic administration was like a shadow cast backwards into the old covenant period by the work of Christ in the new covenant (Heb. 8:5). Now that the new covenant has been forged in the blood of Christ, the old is revealed for what it always was, shadow rather than reality. Now it is “obsolete” (8:13).
Using the word “obsolete” about the Law makes some Christians nervous! So here, first of all, is something to think about: Unless I can say loudly enough for others to hear: “In Christ, God has made the Mosaic covenant obsolete” I must cease reading Hebrews, or at least stop reading it before I get to chapter 8, verse 13! The ability to absorb into one’s mental and spiritual constitution the full force of what is being said here is surely a hallmark of true New Testament liberty.
The author of Hebrews (a pastoral theology genius if ever there was one) resolves our problem in a remarkable way. The new covenant renders the old obsolete. And one of the ways God renders it so is this: “I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33, cited in Heb. 8:10; 10:16).
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