Daily Doctrine is not a groundbreaking work of systematic theology and is not intended to be. Rather, it is an introductory work that focuses on easing people into the subject. It introduces the discipline as a whole, describes the most important terms, and explains the key ideas. In that way, it provides a framework for Christian doctrine and then builds upon it over the course of a year.

I once participated in a panel discussion alongside a seminary professor. He had far more education than I did and far greater expertise in the subject matter. A few moments before we took to the platform together, the moderator went over some of the questions he would be asking us. I found it strangely comforting to see that professor pull out his iPad, dig up some old notes, and begin to skim through them. “I need to remind myself what I believe about that,” he told me.
The fact is, we are forgetful people and often need not just to learn what we believe but to re-learn it. There are exams we might pass at one stage in life but fail in another, not because our doctrine has changed or because we have apostatized, but because we have become forgetful. It’s not that we are ever likely to forget the fundamental doctrines of the faith like the inspiration of Scripture or the divinity of Jesus, but we can certainly grow hazy on some of the lesser matters and waver on some of the secondary issues.
A while back I realized I needed to brush up on some of these and began to organize a system of spaced repetition—a way to encounter these doctrines on a regular basis, thus reinforcing them and keeping them fresh in my mind. And it was right then that I learned about Kevin DeYoung’s Daily Doctrine: A One-Year Guide to Systematic Theology. In fact, an Advance Reading Copy showed up in the mail and I knew immediately it was what I was looking for.
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 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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But by the power of God and the fervency of His people, the list of hopeful outcomes goes on and on. And standing above all of this, uniting and summarizing every good outcome, is the transcendent and paramount glory of God, who undoubtedly will receive the honor and praise.

As you’ve likely heard, on June 24, 2022 the Supreme Court upheld a 2018 Mississippi law and in the process, overturned Roe v. Wade.  The decision will allow individual states to determine the parameters and accessibility of abortion in their respective states.  The practical result will be a smorgasbord of state-by-state parameters on abortion that are determined by state legislatures.  It is likely that the result will be the limiting, and in some places severe limiting, of access to abortions.
The decision of the court is both good and at the same time a little strange; but mostly it’s really good.  Good because this decision promotes and moves towards a more righteous standard of living by the proper use of the sword entrusted to governing authorities for the thwarting of evil (Romans 13:1-7).
“When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers” (Proverbs 21:15).
These prohibitions are long overdue.  In the last 50 years more than 50 million babies have been aborted in America (1.5 billion worldwide).  Abortion in America disproportionately targets minorities, girls, and children with physical disabilities (more than 90% of down syndrome babies are aborted in America each year).  And the reality is that an overwhelming number of abortions in America are not out of necessity but out of fear or convenience or ease.
At moments like this the church must not waver in her commitment to pursue that which is honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise (Philippians 4:8).  Human life is not a random concurrence of human tissues that magically evolve into a little version of a person at some supposed week of gestation, but rather human life is a sheer act of creation, fearfully and wonderfully crafted, by a living God who breathes life and then sustains that life minute after minute of every day according to His power.  And so, the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of man (1 Corinthians 1:25).  It is a  good decision because righteous laws and precepts bring glory to God.
At the same time, the decision of the court is also quite strange to me.  Strange because it comes at the advent of what has been described as a post Christian era.  And yet, this decision of the court is happening now and not say 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, where a student of history might expect to find it.  In the late 1900s, while Christianity maintained an outsized influence on society, abortion continued rather freely as a normative part of our society.  While many stores remained closed on Sundays and prayer was still being offered at major sporting events, before gay marriage was legal or transgender was a thing, abortion stood out as an odd and progressive outlier of our society.  Now, as all of society seems to be changing at light-speed, when the majority of Americans seem to have no serious religious convictions at all, we experience this decision of the court that will promote goodness and righteousness.
So, since this decision is both good and oddly placed, Christians find themselves in a curious position.  We rejoice over just outcomes but we also struggle to find our place in a world where we can so often feel like the annoying antagonists of an apathetic generation.  The clear message for the church is this: there is work to be done if we can expect any lasting change. A just legal standard has been established but the hearts of this people are still overwhelmingly against the Lord.  My prayer has been that God would use the potency of the law to sear hearts and so to revive many.  To accomplish this, the Lord often uses the movements of history to direct the affairs of His kingdom, movements like the ones we now witness.  And He has called us to be part of this work and so work we must. “I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest” (John 4:35).  There is work to be done!  To that end I offer a few simple suggestions:
Pray.  Pray for our elected officials, at every level, that they would pursue righteousness apart from vain ambition.  Pray for our judges that they would seek the truth, be guided by God, and that they would sense the gravity of the work they undertake.  Pray for expectant mothers of wanted and unwanted children that, whatever their circumstances, perhaps God would give them a tender affection for their children, husbands who love and care for their families, a community that will support them, and the courage to honor the image of God in the gift of life.  Pray for revival in our communities and neighborhoods, for hearts to be turned to the Lord, that many would “cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s case” (Isaiah 1:16).
“The sins of others work for good to the godly, as they set them the more a-praying against sin.  If there were not such a spirit of wickedness abroad, perhaps there would not be such a spirit of prayer.  Crying sins cause crying prayers.  The people of God pray against the iniquity of the times, that God will give a check to sin that he will put sin to the blush” (Thomas Watson, All Things For Good ).
Declare.  Declare our God and declare His truth to the watching world.  Too often over the last 50 years the church has emphasized a call to be compassionate and gracious at the expense of the call to be righteous and true.  We have been suppressed or have wrongly thought that the only way to appeal to the world is through love and kindness, and so we’ve neutered our message and created a version of truth that seems more amiable to those around us.  Yet there is rarely a time the Word of God mentions love apart from truth or kindness in the absence of righteousness.  Contrary to human wisdom, the declaration of God’s righteousness is often the very tool that He uses to draw people unto Himself.  Look no further than Nineveh upon whom Jonah pronounced judgment leading to their repentance.
“For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10).
We must be active in our communities and influential in culture and engaged in science and medicine and fervent in our exhortation and in conversations with neighbors and discussions in our book clubs or trivia groups.  With abortion, the masses have been duped into believing a sterile and inconsequential version of manslaughter.  Those types of opinions don’t change overnight but rather with thought provoking conversation and by the grace of God.  Let us be winsome, humble, measured, and peaceful – but let us not cower from the moment as we distinguish between what is good and evil, right and wrong, true and false.  And where the Bible speaks clearly, may God make us willing and able to speak clearly ourselves.
Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”  And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them (Jonah 3:2-5).
Advocate.  Here is where I hope to leave you with maybe the greatest burden and exhortation to action.  For many years, legal abortion has disguised and concealed the vulnerabilities of many of our neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family.  Many single mothers have been saddled with the weight of carrying a child by themselves, and often, without obvious means to care for that child, abortion has offered a “manageable alternative.”  Other mothers have had to deal with the heaviness of discovering their baby had a disability that would impact them for the rest of their lives and abortion offered a way to maintain a “normal life.”  Some have been affected by the sin of others through rape or other terrible actions and are without answers, save one, abortion.  Many argued that these women and others would be left helpless, without any answers, and many thousands of them would endure great pain and suffering, some may even lose their lives.  Let’s not pretend that some version of these are not a logical and expected outcomes.  However, far from being a call to relent and give ground to “necessary evils,” this is a call to the church to step up and let faith be demonstrated by action.  Consider some of the great triumphs of American history that were simultaneously overtly righteous and exceedingly painful.  The abolition of slavery and the triumph of WWII come to mind. These were costly decisions that were blatantly righteous.  More importantly, they were opportunities for godly men and women and the church to step into the void and to courageously go where God might lead and to act as God might call them, serving the afflicted and the oppressed.
So too is the moment before us.  Now is our time.  Christians everywhere must step-up, in an uncomfortable and sacrificial way, in the lives of those impacted by the changes in abortion laws.  Young women in many communities need advocates and support networks and help with childcare, with access to flexible work, and encouragement completing their education.  Young men need male role models exhorting them to take responsibility and ownership of their decisions and espousing the beauty of fatherhood.  Pregnancy and crisis centers will need more counselors, advocates, volunteers, money, and support from our churches.  And many, many more Christian families must be willing to be involved with foster care and adoption in their communities in even some of the most challenging situations (e.g., children with disabilities).  In most affluent countries the ratio of abortions to adoptions is somewhere between 100:1 to 500:1. This cannot be the case for us.  The church must heed the call of our Lord, seize the opportunity before us, and step into the void with unequivocal truth and self-sacrificial love.  It will be costly.  It must be costly.
“Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”  James 2:18
Finally, let’s not forget that the law cannot bring life, only Christ brings life.  Just as the Mosaic law does not give life or change hearts, likewise the American courts and legal determinations cannot give life or change hearts.  But the law is by design a guide for what is good and a visible deterrent of that which is wrong.  The expected outcome of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the overturning of Roe v. Wade will inevitably produce this type of consequential legal standard.
We cannot estimate how many people will decline to even consider having an abortion if they understand it to be illegal or dubious under the law.  Or how many of those same people will ask clear and discerning questions about the value of life and the source of truth.  Or the numbers of human lives that will be saved by limiting access.  Or the activities and agendas of ungodly people that will be limited or muffled through the curbing of the work of organizations like Planned Parenthood.  But by the power of God and the fervency of His people, the list of hopeful outcomes goes on and on. And standing above all of this, uniting and summarizing every good outcome, is the transcendent and paramount glory of God, who undoubtedly will receive the honor and praise.
Bryan Rigg is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is pastor of Mercy PCA in Lynchburg, VA.
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