There is much in this book worth thinking about and reflecting upon, even if one may well end up having almost as many questions as answers after going through its 480 pages. I still have a number of very real questions and do not agree with everything being said. A number of further articles will be needed to fully and properly present what he is saying, and how I might react to it. This is a significant and valuable volume looking at some key issues and questions that have been debated for many centuries now.

This book is getting a lot of attention – and opposition. But it is worth being aware of:
In America at least plenty of folks are talking about ‘Christian nationalism’ – usually used as a term of abuse and derision. The secular left (and some Christians) see it as some sinister plot along the lines of what is found in The Handmaid’s Tale.
So when a Christian author comes along seeking to make the case for Christian nationalism, all hell tends to break loose. Already a number of books have appeared on this, both pro and con. The most substantial and significant volume seeking to make the case for it is by Stephen Wolfe.

This is the second of several pieces that looks at his new book which is getting a lot of attention, as well as causing no small amount of controversy. Given that it is a tightly argued and carefully crafted work of nearly 500 pages, dealing with rather complex and difficult topics, a short review can hardly do it justice.

Thus I am doing a series of articles on this volume. Yesterday I looked at one particular aspect of the book.
Here I just want to offer some big-picture preliminary thoughts, before I can even attempt to try to both describe and assess the case he is seeking to make. So here are some prefatory remarks that are worth making. Stay tuned for future articles which will be a bit more in line with a proper book review.
Before I go any further, let me make one minor criticism. This large book has no index. So before I could adequately discuss it or properly review it, I had to create my own index. That I did over a 24-hour period, listing at least the major issues and points of note. In what follows I will include page numbers along the way.
And before listing my preliminary concerns, let me try – as foolish as it might be – to give the skimpiest of outlines of his case. It would run something like this:

There was, even before the fall, the need for some sort of social organisation and order.
Love of family, kinship, and even liking one’s nation are not necessarily bad things (although they can become bad).
There is no neutral public square. If it is not one informed by Christianity, it will be informed by some other competing worldview.
There is a place for like-minded Christians having communities and nations reflecting their beliefs and values – including the use of civil rulers to help affirm and maintain this to some extent.

Wolfe says his intent is this: “[M]y goal is to reinvigorate Christendom in the West – that is my chief aim” (119). But that term, like ‘Christian nationalism,’ needs to be carefully defined – which Wolfe seeks to do. However, as mentioned, I will seek to tease all this out much further in some sort of proper book review – or two! So stay tuned. But here are a few prefatory remarks.
First, this is an important book. That is because it deals with some very important topics, especially including the two things we are NOT supposed to discuss in polite society: politics and religion. These are topics that have been discussed for millennia by philosophers, theologians, historians, political scientists, and ethicists. They are bound to be big topics, and thus not easily digested or understood in short sound bites or quotes.
But to say this book is important is not to say that I necessarily agree with all of it. Das Kapital is important, as is The Origin of the Species (not that I am lumping Wolfe’s book in with these two). One can differ quite a bit with significant titles. But they are worth being aware of and interacting with.

Also, like most authors writing about such topics, there will be a starting point, a worldview, or a set of presuppositions that guide the writer. If one has fundamental differences with those starting points, then chances are the argument as a whole may not be embraced.

Wolfe certainly has his own points of reference. First of all, he is an American, and much of this book of course reflects Christianity in America, along with the rest of the West. In many respects America did have a unique founding – many would argue a Christian founding – so those from other nations may not be fully in sync with what is being presented here.
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Whether it is Pastor Story Hour or something else, we want our children to see us active in the world. We do not want them to grow up hiding from culture. We do not want them to believe that our faith is private, quiet, and secretive. We do not want them to grow up afraid to engage. We want them to feel encouraged to labor for Christendom. Excited and eager to see King Jesus reclaim territory for His Kingdom in their lifetime. And we want them to see themselves in that work, encouraged that God might use them to do something extraordinary for Jesus. When we model it to them, they will catch a vision of doing it themselves.

As people across the nation have been hearing about our Pastor Story Hour, I thought it would be helpful to sketch out some of my thoughts on why we are doing an event such as this. And while I prefer to sit and talk about this over a dark roast coffee, I would like to be brief enough here to be truly helpful. Of course, considering that I am a preacher, my goal may already be in jeopardy. Nevertheless, I would like to provide a few significant thoughts on why we believe this event is so helpful, useful, and necessary.
1) GOSPEL – The doctrine behind every conversion and the heartbeat fueling every Christian is the Gospel. It is the power of almighty God, and it is not only the MOST ESSENTIAL doctrine that we could ever learn as individuals, but it is the most essential doctrine that our children could ever learn as well! The Gospel is the doctrine that will guard their hearts and minds should they find themselves in a secular university. The Gospel is the balm for their weary soul when they walk through the pain and suffering life will inevitably throw at them. The Gospel is the life raft for their doubts, the comfort in their sadness, and the fuel for all their joy and gladness. As parents, we are responsible for preparing them for life without us. But, to do that well, we must actively, deliberately, and passionately teach them the Gospel.
As elders and pastors, we take that work seriously (1 Ti 4:1-2). We want to be a resource for our parents in helping you understand the Gospel so that you can also train your children to know God’s glorious Gospel!
2) PASTORAL LEADERSHIP – We believe pastors have been called to bring the truth of the Scriptures to bear on every facet of God’s people’s lives. We do not want to produce people who can behave like Christians during a Sunday morning service. Instead, we want to develop people who are impacted by the Gospel at every level, in every nook and cranny of their lives, so that all of their life looks like Christ. To do that, we must not take for granted that people are leaving the safety of our churches on Sunday to enter the battlefield on Monday. While we are reading commentaries and preparing messages throughout the week, our people are inundated with the enemy’s lies, saturated with every wind of cultural dogmatism, and pressured to compromise. Frankly, if we are not actively seeking to help our people develop a Biblical worldview, then we are preparing them for failure.
As pastors, we stand with one foot in the Biblical world of truth and theology and the other foot in the world of liberal and secular ideology. We stand on the wall and see the trends coming, the pagan philosophies forming, the secular ideologies gathering steam, and we are the exact people God called to help. We are the ones who help equip God’s people to think about things from a Biblical worldview, and that duty must never be abandoned. For this reason, an event like Pastor Story Hour is so helpful because we can pick and choose topics to teach that do not usually come up on a Sunday morning. Further, we can take those topics and use them as an opportunity to train our children and equip our parents. That is pastoral leadership.
3) FAMILY WORSHIP – The more we become acquainted with the Gospel, the more we realize that it is not just a Sunday doctrine and not the kind of thing that can be contained in a one-hour church service each week. The Gospel finds its way into every aspect of our life, which means we must also teach the Gospel in every area that our children live. This is why the Gospel must be read in books, sung in songs, prayed at dinner tables, tucked in with them when they go to bed, and the aroma of the home they will awaken into.
For this reason, Pastor Story Hour is not only for the children to learn the Gospel, but it is also an intentional environment for parents to come and watch us teaching their children and to observe how we do it. We want moms and dads to see how we do it and get ideas and inspiration on how to do the same thing for their children in their own homes. We want you to feel comfortable, competent, and confident in knowing how to instruct your children in the Gospel. We believe Pastor Story Hour can be a wonderful part of that! Our goal is that Pastor Story Hour will be a blessing to every member of the family and that it will invigorate family worship in our community and beyond!
4) CHRISTIAN EDUCATION – Along with family worship, we believe the Church has a God-ordained responsibility to educate all of our people in the Gospel and to help equip them for service in His Kingdom.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
The Reformation, Protestant and Catholic, may have been fueled by pamphlets. But who, beyond a small group of scholars, reads those pamphlets today? To the rest of us they are, at best, the throwaway productions of a bygone age, at worst an example of the way in which human beings can treat each other with pride and venom and no concern for the truth. 

It is in many ways odd that we observe Reformation Day on October 31. Setting aside the somewhat fruitless debates about whether Luther actually posted the Ninety-Five Theses on the Wittenberg castle church door on that day in 1517 (for the record, I believe he did), it is well-known that he had said more radical things about the Church before (for example, in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology in September 1517) and would do so again shortly afterward (at the Heidelberg Disputation in April 1518). Intellectually, either is a better candidate for the dating of the inception of the Reformation than the often obscure theses against indulgences that triggered Luther’s rise to fame.
Still, the very obscurity of many of the individual theses points to an interesting element in the Reformation’s popular success. The Reformation was not a popular success solely—or even primarily—because the populace read and embraced the arguments of the Reformers. As a Protestant, I rejoice that the Reformers carried the day in many places, with their appropriate emphasis on biblical authority, divine grace, and the finished work of Christ. They recovered the gospel and paved the way for many of the freedoms we in the West now take for granted. But I am not naïve enough to believe that they won simply by force of argument. Few people would have had the background to understand the issues, and that would have applied to many subsequent debates, particularly regarding the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Few members of the populace could actually read. So what made the Reformation a popular success in so many places?
There is no simple answer to this, but a key element was the pamphlet war: the production of short, cheap, polemical publications, often illustrated with woodcuts, that served to shape the mind of the populace. Both Protestants and Catholics engaged in this pamphlet war, which was perhaps the first battle for the popular mind in Western history. What is interesting about these pamphlets is that they were not in general designed to seek and establish truth, but rather to discredit the opposition. It takes no advanced degree in theology to understand the intended message of woodcuts depicting the pope being excreted from the backside of a horned and cloven-hoofed devil. And it takes no training in Thomist metaphysics to understand the intended message of sexually explicit pictures of Luther and his wife. It is also rather obvious what kind of publication—major expositions of the faith by Calvin and Bellarmine, or the penny dreadfuls that the presses churned out in vast numbers—had more immediate effect.
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