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Evangelical

2026-03-16T08:45:41-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

How Technique Undermines Mission

Last updated on: March 16, 2026 at 8:45 am By Brad Vaughn

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Contemporary missiology is increasingly shaped by pragmatic strategies that emphasize measurable outcomes—numerical church growth, evangelistic efficiency, and programmatic scalability. While these goals reflect a legitimate desire to spread the gospel effectively, the uncritical adoption of such strategies risks subordinating theological reflection to functional success. Jacques Ellul’s critical analysis of technique is a timely warning about the dangers of this trend. In The Technological Society and Presence in the Modern World, Ellul exposes how the unrestrained pursuit of efficiency can distort... Read more

2026-03-15T13:23:18-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

How Biblical Sacrifices Vindicate God’s Glory

Last updated on: March 15, 2026 at 1:23 pm By Brad Vaughn

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What if we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of biblical sacrifice? While popular theology focuses on appeasing divine wrath through substitutionary punishment, I argue in chapter 5 of my book The Cross in Context that sacrifices work by accomplishing something far more profound: vindicating God’s honor. Sin doesn’t merely break divine law; it spits in God’s face, defaming his name and treating the Creator King as common. Sacrifices serve as honor-giving gifts that acknowledge God’s unique worth while also removing the... Read more

History and Religion

2026-03-15T13:09:01-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

What Exactly Does Christ Purify?

Last updated on: March 15, 2026 at 1:09 pm By Brad Vaughn

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The connection between morality and cleanness runs deep in human psychology. We instinctively associate wrongdoing with being “dirty”— victims of assault describe feeling stained, those complicit in moral failures speak of feeling unclean. This visceral link between purity and righteousness permeates biblical thought, making purification one of the most prominent metaphors for atonement in Scripture. Yet I’ve discovered that our contemporary understanding of this imagery often misses crucial nuances in how biblical writers actually employed purity language. My research into... Read more

2026-03-15T12:46:22-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Sin of Most Political Debates Isn’t What You Think

Last updated on: March 15, 2026 at 12:46 pm By Brad Vaughn

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A pastor friend recently made an observation about political discussions that deserves careful reflection. In years of ministry, he has never met a Christian who believes there should be no laws or no borders at all. Neither has he met a Christian who believes immigrants should simply be rejected because they are foreigners. In practice, almost everyone agrees on both principles: governments should enforce laws and borders to some degree, and Christians should welcome and care for immigrants. The disagreement... Read more

Politics and Religion

2026-01-21T08:33:29-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

How Western Individualism Quietly Undermines the Solas

Last updated on: January 21, 2026 at 8:33 am By Brad Vaughn

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Evangelicals love the solas. They’re short, sturdy, and hard to wiggle out of. Scripture alone. Faith alone. Grace alone. Christ alone. God’s glory alone. They remind us that Christianity is not a religion of self-improvement or of spiritual résumé-building but a means of rescue. Salvation doesn’t come from human effort, church credentials, or religious performance. Salvation comes from God. Something strange, however, has happened in the modern West. In a lot of churches, the solas don’t function as anchors for... Read more

2026-04-28T07:12:25-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Why Do I Wear a Guillotine Around My Neck?

Last updated on: April 28, 2026 at 7:12 am By Brad Vaughn

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“Why do you wear a guillotine around you neck?,” someone asked me. Just recently, a student gave me a guillotine pendant after we finished reading A Tale of Two Cities. I now wear it, openly, around my neck, certainly not as an endorsement of revolutionary violence, but as a reminder and a provocation to genuine reflection. In A Tale of Two Cities, the guillotine is never just a machine. It is an idea. A promise. A hope. And Dickens insists... Read more

2026-04-14T06:50:52-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Why Christianity Needs Individuals but Rejects Individualism

Last updated on: April 14, 2026 at 6:50 am By Brad Vaughn

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One of the great confusions of modern Western culture is that we’ve learned to use the words individual and individualism as if they were interchangeable. They are not. They name radically different visions of what a human being is. This confusion runs so deep that many Christians feel forced into a false choice: either you resist “individualism” and risk crushing the person, or you celebrate individuality and slide into expressive autonomy. However, that is a false dilemma. The biblical vision... Read more

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2026-03-16T14:13:42-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Gulag Theology of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Last updated on: March 16, 2026 at 2:13 pm By Brad Vaughn

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Some books wear their theology on the surface. Others do not say much about God directly, yet they force us to ask theological questions because they strip life down to the bone. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is that kind of book. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short novel is set in a Soviet labor camp under Stalin. It follows one ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, through one ordinary day. There is no dramatic escape. No heroic revolt. No stirring... Read more

Politics and Religion

History and Religion

2026-03-17T07:35:49-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

We Don’t Believe What’s True. We Believe What’s Entertaining

Last updated on: March 17, 2026 at 7:35 am By Brad Vaughn

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A strange thing happened in one of my classes recently. It was one of those moments that teachers live for, not because it was tidy, but because it was revealing. We were talking about how people decide what to believe, especially when looking for what’s true online. How Do You Know What’s True? I started with a simple observation: nobody evaluates every claim from scratch. We all rely on authority of some kind. We trust doctors about medicine, historians about... Read more

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Politics and Religion

2025-07-21T13:03:24-07:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

What are Essential Elements of Atonement?

Last updated on: July 21, 2025 at 1:03 pm By Brad Vaughn

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What exactly is atonement? Despite its importance, this question receives oversimplified answers that miss the biblical text’s own logic. Read more

History and Religion

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