Perseverance (of the Saints): “They, whom God hath accepted in His Beloved, effectually called, and sanctified by His Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved. (Phil. 1:6, 2 Pet. 1:10, 1 John 3:9, 1 Pet. 1:5,9)” (Westminster Confession of Faith 17.1).

A robust understanding of the nature of God, his redemptive plan in Christ, and the duties of the Christian life will give us peace, confidence, and resoluteness in a world filled with anxiety, doubt, and shifting standards. We will also be more effective in sharing the gospel with unbelievers.
Our “10 Words Every Christian Should Know (and Be Able to Explain)” post featured key words to help believers grow in love for all Christ has done for them. Here are 10 more words to know in order to “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Pet. 3:15). Definitions are taken from the Westminster Confession of Faith, Westminster Larger Catechism, Westminster Shorter Catechism, and Heidelberg Catechism.
1. God
“God is a Spirit, (John 4:24) in and of himself infinite in being, (Exod. 3:14, Job 11:7–9) glory, (Acts 7:2) blessedness, (1 Tim. 6:15) and perfection; (Matt. 5:48) all-sufficient, (Gen. 17:1) eternal, (Ps. 90:2) unchangeable, (Mal. 3:6, James 1:17) incomprehensible, (1 Kings 8:27) every where present, (Ps. 139:1–13) almighty, (Rev. 4:8) knowing all things, (Heb. 4:13, Ps. 147:5) most wise, (Rom. 16:27) most holy, (Isa. 6:3, Rev. 15:4) most just, (Deut. 32:4) most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth. (Exod. 34:6)” (Westminster Larger Catechism Q. 7).
2. Trinity
“In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost: (1 John 5:7. Matt 3:16–17, Matt. 28:19, 2 Cor. 13:14) the Father is of none, neither begotten, not proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; (John 1:14, 18) the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son. (John 15:26, Gal. 4:6)” (Westminster Confession of Faith 2.3).
3. Covenant
“The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, (Gal. 3:12) wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity, (Rom. 10:5, Rom. 5:12–20) upon condition of perfect and personal obedience. (Gen. 2:17, Gal. 3:10)” (Westminster Confession of Faith 7.2).
“Man, by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, (Gal. 3:21, Rom. 8:3, Rom. 3:20–21, Gen. 3:15, Isa. 42:6) commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein He freely offers unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, (Mark 16:15–16, John 3:16, Rom. 10:6–9, Gal. 3:11).
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We don’t need our why answered we need God.  We don’t need to know what God is doing in our suffering, what good he will bring about, we need God.  We don’t just need him when the suffering ends but as we sit in the dust and ashes.  And we’ve seen in Job that suffering doesn’t separate us from God, God has always been protecting Job and with Job even when it hasn’t felt like it to him.  If we have God then every other loss is worth nothing.  If we can’t say that yet, we ought to pray for God to open our eyes to who he is like he did for Job.

What do you long for when you suffer?  It’s an end to the pain.  It’s what we tell people when they face operations – it’ll hurt for a while but then be better, it’s what we hope for when we take someone to get treatment for an injury – something that will take the pain away and bring healing.  It’s what we tell people when they grieve or suffer a relationship loss – that the pain fades over time.  It’s one of the reasons why I think we find it hard to know how to help those with mental health struggles – because we know that this may be a long term need, with many dark nights of the soul.
And all too often relationship with God is postponed until afterwards.  We’ll think about God when we feel better, are in a better place, have more capacity.  But Job shows us how wrong that is, that we’re missing something.  Job is in a world of agony, he’s lost not one but all of his children, his wealth, he’s covered with sores and hovers near death, wracked with grief and all he has left is a wife who calls him to curse God and die and friends whose comfort only deepens his confusion, questions and isolation.
That’s where Job is as chapter 42 opens.  He hasn’t been restored he‘s still stripped of everything.  Still has nothing.  That makes his words here all the more amazing.  He’s comforted before he is restored – we must see that.  This is comfort in suffering not comfort from or after suffering.  This is the kind of comfort we need, our friends need, in the white hot heat, or pitch black oppressive darkness, of suffering.
God has just drawn Job’s attention to the two chaos monsters we looked at last week.  Behemoth and Leviathan, savage, uncontrollable, forces of evil and chaos that man cannot tame.  But who as created supernatural beings are on God’s leash, under his sovereignty, only permitted to do what God allows and who will ultimately be destroyed by him.
How does Job react?  (1-3)Firstly, Job confesses God’s absolutely sovereignty and might.  Back in ch38v2 God asked Job “Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?”  Now Job confesses that he was wrong, he spoke from what he knew and could see but “I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”
It’s always tempting to think we know what’s going on.  To look at the world and see what we can see and draw conclusions from it.  And so to assume it tells us about God, his love, his actions, his sovereignty or lack of it.  But Job confesses that as he did that he was hopelessly short sighted.  He couldn’t see God’s care of creation, he couldn’t see eternity and God’s plans, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to him that God was sovereign but now he knows.  “I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted.”
This morning, are you ready to confess that?  Ready to say to God; Lord I have been wrong.  Lord you are the almighty sovereign ruler who is just and does what’s right, who governs creation wisely and rightly and does things I just cannot comprehend, I cannot see it all, but I know enough of you and your goodness and love and so I will trust in you not in what I see or what I think?
But Job isn’t finished because he’s learned something else(4-5), that he had a limited grasp of God.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Thursday, May 9, 2024
There’s a copious amount of discussion about family structures in this book, but Todd adds to that an overlay of religion. He sees Protestantism, rather than the market, industry, or technology as the heart of the modern West. Its most critical impact was a drive for universal literacy, so that all the people could read the Bible in their own language. It also created the famed Protestant work ethic. An educated, industrious populous led to the takeoff of economic growth in Protestant countries. Indeed, Protestant countries were the most advanced industrial economies in Europe and basically remain the leaders. (Todd believes France benefitted from being adjacent to a band of Protestant nations).

French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd was the first person to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He noted that, unusually, its infant mortality rate was rising, and that they had even ceased publishing that statistic. Based on this and other data, he concluded that the Soviet Union had entered “the final fall.”
In something of a parallel to that work, his new book, La défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), published in January, says that the West is on track to lose the conflict in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, this was received poorly by critics who accused him of repeating Kremlin propaganda.
What caught my attention was that Todd blames the fall of Protestantism for unleashing a crisis in the heart of the West itself. And that this rather than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the true source of our problems. He writes, “The real problem facing the world today is not Russian will to power, which is very limited. It’s decadence at its American center, which is unlimited.” (You can see why people hated this). I read the book for myself to see what he had to say about Protestantism.
My earliest readers will know that that I’ve been learning French. I’ve mastered enough to essay Todd’s book, but am still sub-fluent. So you should validate the translations I provide here before relying on them, as they are a mixture of Google Translate and my own work.
Much of Todd’s research work has focused on the influence of historic family structures on ideologies. For example, he argues that the Russian family structure created a social state that was amenable to communism. Russian families were strongly patriarchal, and all of the sons lived with their father. This created an ideal of, simultaneously, authoritarianism (of the father) and equality (between the brothers). Communism was, in a sense, an embodiment of this type of social order.
There’s a copious amount of discussion about family structures in this book, but Todd adds to that an overlay of religion. He sees Protestantism, rather than the market, industry, or technology as the heart of the modern West. Its most critical impact was a drive for universal literacy, so that all the people could read the Bible in their own language. It also created the famed Protestant work ethic. An educated, industrious populous led to the takeoff of economic growth in Protestant countries. Indeed, Protestant countries were the most advanced industrial economies in Europe and basically remain the leaders. (Todd believes France benefitted from being adjacent to a band of Protestant nations).
If Protestantism brought positives to Europe, it also introduced the idea of inequality in a profound way, through its idea of the elect and the damned. Hence Protestant countries also created the worst forms of racism (as in the United States) and antisemitism (as in Germany). He cites the fact that Protestant areas of Germany were more supportive of the Nazis than Catholic ones.
The root of the nation state is also in Protestantism, not in the French Revolution or anything of that nature. He writes, “With Protestantism, there appeared peoples who, by too much Bible reading [in their vernacular], believed themselves chosen by God.”
In this analysis, he seems to basically be recapitulating Max Weber, of whom Todd describes himself as a student.
Protestantism Active, Zombie, and Zero
If Protestantism lies at the heart of the West, then the disappearance of Protestantism is a crisis for the West.
Todd divides religions in modern societies into three states: the active state, the zombie state, and the zero state.
In an active state, people attend church regularly. They have families on the Christian model, and they do not cremate their dead. (Christianity has always frowned on cremation as denying the hope of the resurrection of the body).
In a zombie state, people no longer attend church regularly, but still turn to the church for baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Critically, in a zombie state, people still hold to the habits and values of the old religion. So in a Protestant zombie state, people would still have the Protestant work ethic, place a value on literacy (education), etc. They largely retain Protestant practices around family and avoiding cremation. Especially they retain “the ability for collective action.”
In a zero state, people no longer even have church weddings or funerals. They don’t have their children baptized. In the zero state, the habits and values of the old religion have disappeared. People embrace cremation. And they abandon the Christian family structure. Todd sees the arrival of “marriage for all” as marking the definitive point of arrival at a religious zero state.
I did not note exactly when he said the United States entered a Protestant zombie state, but it encompassed the first part of the twentieth century up until about 1965. Todd notes that the zombie Protestant era was very good for America, with an extended period of triumph from FDR to Eisenhower. But that does not mean a zombie state always produces good outcomes. He also sees Nazism as arising out of a Protestant zombie state in Germany.
Around 1965, America entered a transition phase towards a zero state. In his treatment of the UK, Todd illustrates the loss of the habits and values of Protestantism by pointing to a softening of the culture of the English public schools (which, confusingly to Americans, are actually their most elite private schools). The same phenomenon occurred to a lesser extent here at elite prep schools and colleges. We see the transition in a few phenomena. One has been steady grade inflation over time. Todd cites figure showing that students spend significantly less time studying today than they used to as well. Another is the loss of the ethic of public service and self sacrifice. Many of the graduates of those schools fought, and even died in World War II. Rather than go directly to college, George H. W. Bush joined the Navy right after graduating from Phillips Andover to fight as an aviator in the Pacific theater. By Vietnam this became the exception. A recent newsletter from Matthew Yglesias on why colleges students need to study more covers similar territory here.
But just as the positive qualities of Protestantism began to unravel, so did the negative. In particular, Todd see the civil rights movement and the entire subsequent efforts toward full social and economic integration of blacks into mainstream society as a product of Protestant decay. To him, racism and discrimination against blacks were not just regrettable byproducts of a Protestant belief in inequality, but played a core function in structuring American society. Putting blacks into the role of “the damned” in society was what allowed there to be equality among whites themselves.
With the Obergefell decision in 2015, the transition phase ended and America definitively arrived at a Protestant zero state.
I’m more going to present Todd’s theories than attempt to rigorously analyze them, but it is worth noting that there are things one could critique here. For example, while there may have been a base level racial equality among whites, all whites were certainly not viewed as equal, as prewar Catholics and Jews could attest.
Also, the 1950s are supposedly part of the Protestant zombie era, and yet that was the high water mark of church attendance in the United States. Todd pooh-poohs the idea that America has been that distinct from Europe on that front. He says research shows people inflate their church attendance levels in surveys. But no one disputes that the 1950s were an era of high church attendance.
Todd also brutally dismisses the evangelical movement, seeing it as heretical and not really Protestant at all. But the only source he cites for that take is Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion, which does not suggest he has a sophisticated understanding of American evangelicalism.
That brings up one of the key weaknesses of Todd’s analysis of America. His analysis of contemporary America leans heavily on writers like Douthat, names that are known and are legitimate, but are in an important sense dissident or peripheral. Others in this vein that he refers to are Joel Kotkin and John Mearsheimer. This will weaken the credibility of his arguments with many American readers who defer to mainstream consensus authorities – although those reading here definitely cast a wider net that includes dissident sources. American evangelicals, of course, are likely to discount critiques coming from Catholic commentators like Douthat.
I was particularly struck that Todd’s framework aligns quite well with my own three worlds model. The transition from zombie Protestantism starting circa 1965 is also when I say the status of Christianity (especially Protestantism) starts to go into decline in America. That transition phase covers my Positive and Neutral Worlds.
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