The Under-Used Bible

No.247: February 14, 2025

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

Happy Valentines Day! My regular Valentine is off galavanting around rock and gem shows in Arizona, so this year my date is a ten-year-old. We are considering dressing up to the nines and heading out to the sushi restaurant, hoping to maybe get a seat at the counter or something. Or maybe we’ll just rain-check that idea and cook something special right here at home. We shall see!

A few things of interest before really getting into it today.

I cannot give you any in-depth commentary on political happenings because honestly no one person can keep track of developments. We seem to have re-entered the RealityTV Presidency (which is, to be sure, what the majority of voters wanted), and the star of the show will not take a break from the cameras or stop talking or stop signing documents. The new administration has flooded the zone with executive orders and has purposely destabilized the equilibrium of the Federal government (the mode is not a particularly conservative one: break things and then sift through the rubble to see if you can salvage anything). Many agencies are unsure whether they actually still exist, employees don’t know if they still have jobs, and every hour brings breathless news of some new scandalous appropriation uncovered by Elon Musk and his Whiz Kidz. I think I’ll let the dust settle a little.

I can predict that partisans on both sides are likely to be extremely disappointed. The Left claims to be petrified that President Trump wants to be a lawless dictator and that we are facing the “end of democracy.” But the truth is more like they want Donald Trump to act like a dictator; they need him to act like a dictator, which is why they claim everything he does is dictatorial and lawless. It is what fuels them. They will be disappointed because our system of government is designed to absorb attempts at radical change and authoritarianism, and it happens to more or less work.

On the other hand, the gleeful jubilation of the Right is also likely misplaced. So far there has been progress on the margins (if it shocks any of you that the Federal government is full of ridiculous, unaccountable, and wasteful spending, you’re pretty special), but whether it amounts to lasting structural change is questionable. As Peter Zeihan helpfully put it, Donald Trump is “squeezing the blob” of government, and personnel and resources are being re-routed and shuffled around; he is not actually shrinking the blob—the size and scope of the Federal government. At some point, most of this stuff is going to take Congressional action.

I’ll call things as I see them, twenty-six days in: I like getting DEI out of everyone’s business; I like accounting and cleaning up corruption and waste; I like protecting women’s sports; I like protecting children from genital mutilation; I dislike tariffs; ticking off our neighbors and friends and accusing them of “ripping us off” when they aren’t; reneging on asylum we have already granted for refugees; flattering Vladimir Putin; having the Secretary of Defense very publicly take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table only to have the President contradict him the following day (otherwise known as “amateur hour”); Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard; libertarian-minded small-government conservatives suddenly excited that the Federal government is going to “Make America Healthy Again”; and having my intelligence insulted by the notion that “Gulf of America” is a thing, much less an important thing.

That’s my current scorecard, and you can feel free to weigh it all differently.

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A new volume of lectures from the great Herman Bavinck has been translated and published. I haven’t got my copy yet, but this review by Gray Sutanto should whet the appetite. This is Bavinck on a “hot mic,” saying what he really thinks in unguarded moments, sometimes undiplomatically. Suffice it to say, a couple of years back when I was writing essays on the notion of Reformed “retrieval” of Medieval scholasticism, this might explain why I took a fairly skeptical posture. It makes sense that someone whose thinking has been shaped by Bavinck would—surprise!—share Bavinck’s own view. The “Reformed” Thomas Aquinas fan club will not be pleased.

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Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, spent the bulk of his life as a skeptical philosopher but recently wrote a really lengthy testimony of how it came about that he has become a Christian. An hour and a half long video version can be found here.

I wonder when we start calling this a trend? Justin Brierley thinks it is, and explains why in his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. With the recent high-profile conversions of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her husband Niall Ferguson, and now Larry Sanger, not to mention Jordan Peterson’s endless (and frankly tiresome) flirtation with Christianity, it is getting harder to deny that this might be a trend.

Sanger’s whole testimony is well worth the read, but I want to focus on this passage describing what happened when he finally at long last picked up the Bible and began to seriously read:

When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expecting. I looked up answers to all my critical questions, thinking that perhaps others had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out positions about them. I did not believe their answers, which sometimes struck me as contrived or unlikely. But often, they were shockingly plausible. The Bible could sustain interrogation; who knew? It slowly dawned on me that I was acquainting myself with the two-thousand-year-old tradition of theology. I found myself positively ashamed to realize that, despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, I had never really understood what theology even is. Theology is, I found, an attempt to systematize, harmonize, explicate, and to a certain extent justify the many, many ideas contained in the Bible. It is what rational people do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its richness. The notion that the Bible might actually be able to interestingly and plausibly sustain such treatment is a proposition that had never entered my head.

A proposition that had never entered my head. This is something I wish more Christians and non-Christians alike appreciated more; very often scholars and academics who are hostile to Christianity are wholly ignorant of the subject matter. For a Christian, appreciating this fact ought to produce a certain boldness in defending his or her faith—not cockiness or an ignorance all their own, but a confidence that it is unlikely the skeptic is coming up with some kind of new critique nobody has ever thought of, and may even lack the basic knowledge of what they are claiming to critique. For a non-Christian skeptic, appreciating this fact ought to temper his or her skepticism and produce a bit of humility and even soul-searching. Larry Sanger found himself ashamed to discover that, despite having a PhD in philosophy, he never really even understood what theology is. How does that happen?