Journaling has been a hugely therapeutic and constructive outlet for me over the past year. The following is an essay written mostly for myself in response to questions I’ve asked over the past 3 years. I’m pleased with how it turned out and am sharing if it might be of interest to others. I ask you to read it with the care you would show towards someone else’s journal, and am happy to hear any feedback via email. Thanks!
There are heavy themes of violence (in many forms) in here. Please feel free to skim past any sections or take a break.
A few weeks ago, I noticed a bumper sticker on the car in front of me. What at first appeared to be the Coexist icon turned out to spell out “Costco”, with the same interfaith symbols used, and a small-font footer reading “$1.50 hot dogs”. (source) I laughed at this modern form of worship but thought no more of it at the time.
In the following days, my mind formed new connections based on this motif. Was this bumper sticker satirizing the modern interfaith movement — all good feelings but weak in the face of actual differences? Was it revealing Costco to be its own site of pluralist identity? Thinking through my average month, Costco may be the most religiously diverse place I frequent. In the entry and checkout lines, I have rubbed shoulders with women in hijab and Hindu families dressed for temple.
Where our schools and political parties feel deeply divided, Costco remains a place of all-inclusive diversity, even over other grocery stores. You have your young Trader Joe’s professionals and your health-conscious Whole Foods moms. Your ethnic Hispanic, kosher, Asian, and South Asian stores. But as long as you are feeding a family on a budget, you still head to Costco. I have not shopped at Walmart for a while, which may fill a similar niche, but something about Costco uniquely strips away the marketing that can become wrapped up in left-versus-right ideologies — diversity clothing campaigns or a nod to Christian values — and instead says, “here, buy this value-neutral stuff that gets the job the done.” It is an appeal to not a lowest common denominator, but a common denominator based on frugal living, resourcefulness, knowing how to run a home well, and a healthy serving of family values. This ends up cross-cutting among many religious identities.
Such Costco stores are an exemplar of what we have managed in American society, and is played out in other Western nations as well. Now, news of the past decade has thrown up challenges to the idea of religious pluralism, but I want to suggest that the overall effect of living in such multicultural spaces is to soften the differences that exist between peoples. At least in my experience, as a Christian, I see these neighbors of mine and recognize shared longings, family values, challenges, and virtues as in my own story. All of this plays out in a small part of my subconscious while shopping in Costco.
Such personal formation often provides a substrate for one’s future thinking about religion — more specifically, the problem of the religions. Compared to centuries past, inhabitants of the modern West are both more proximate to practitioners of many different religious traditions and often meet many “good people” from these traditions. While Islam may have done some serious societal damage in Europe, speaking from my perspective in the US, it seems like the only bad religion one finds here is Christianity.
So, the situation is that one can easily find good people of many faiths. And this basic experience starts to apply pressure to individuals of faith and their schools of thought. It is a deeply personal pressure for many people who are brought up in a faith and begin to question it as they grow up. Many leave their faith and become agnostics or atheists. For those who hold on, it is a question that can diminish in importance but never fully goes away: what about all the other religions?
Now, for the purposes of this essay, I want to focus on a particular outworking of this pressure. I want to suggest that the interfaith phenomenon has led many Christians to adopt a more conservative theology than what was present in biblical times. There has been a sort of bifurcation of options into liberal interfaith-positive Christianity and conservative outsiders-be-damned Christianity, with the conservative stream winning out in terms of demographics. (Historically, this would have first played out as a problem of many Christian denominations, before taking on today’s interfaith framing.)
“Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God continues to live forever.” —1 John 2:15-17, NASB 2020
Voddie Baucham passed away in September 2025. One of his sermons making the rounds was on this passage. I have not watched very much of the sermon, but based on Baucham’s past anti-culture stances, I have an idea what direction he would take it. To me, Baucham represents heavily conservative, biblical evangelicalism — he seeks to be guided by the biblical text (“sola scriptura”) while arriving at a theology that sets Christians apart from the outside world.
The conservative interpretation of this text identifies “the world” with non-Christians, and if I were to summarize, their condition is godlessness. Those not following Jesus are plagued by the dual sins of godlessness A — living sinful lives — and godlessness B — not recognizing their true Creator. In case anyone doubts their state of godlessness A, a conservative evangelical might bring out some proof texts to show that even a small sin is serious in God’s eyes.
Christians are in substance no different from these non-Christians — we are supposedly not morally superior. The text for this is found in Ephesians 2: “Among them we too all previously lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our wrongdoings, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) … For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.” The renewed standing of a Christian is because of God’s grace, and anyone can attain this just by believing in Jesus. So Christians will often say, “you (outsider) and I (insider) are the same, and I am a sinner just as much as you.” And yet, so much of Protestant evangelicalism projects superiority and judgment on others.
I wonder if this is because of the problem of the good non-Christian shaping our theology. Christianity clearly offers itself as a universal religion, implying a universal necessity of salvation. And yet, why would a good Buddhist need to convert to Christianity? This question seems to me to be the start of so many wrong turns in evangelicalism. The answers: small sins are as deserving of God’s judgment as big sins, sinners are destined for hell, we are all born with a sinful nature and cannot please God on our own.
Should we then retreat from the strictures of Christian faith and embrace something more inclusive instead? A God-is-love theology that sees all world faiths in the same boat and opens its arms to dialogue? I find myself drawn in this direction at many moments, yet the end state of liberal Christianity in the West forms a cautionary tale. A brief sketch of reasons one might want a better alternative:
For those seeking to rehabilitate the Christian message in our age, yet feel uneasy about a Christianity intent on judging the world, we can begin to construct an alternative paradigm by asking, “what is God opposed to?”
The answer is the same as before: God is opposed to sin. Except, some authors begin to add a capitalization, so it becomes: God is opposed to Sin.
When we exit the Costco warehouse, when we look past the parts of American society that are diverse and function well, is not Sin all around us? The things that make our faces fall are the things that grieve God’s heart as well.
The abuse of children. Jesus said, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it is better for him if a heavy millstone is hung around his neck and he is thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:42) It is possible that this exclusively applies to the little ones committing sin, yet we see in it Jesus' heart for the vulnerable. Conscripting child soldiers to carry out your killing certainly applies. How about addicting children to social media on smartphones where they harm and are harmed by each other? If we hone in on the general idea of being abused by one in authority, we have a pronouncement of God’s judgment on abusers of little girls and boys in the Catholic Church, Kanakuk Kamps, and USA gymnastics — the girls and boys did not necessarily sin, and yet Sin’s grip was upon them and their abusers.
Murder and war. In the story of David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11), David arranges to have the pawn carrying his political downfall murdered. Stalin and Mao killed off their enemies, and the US arranged for assassination of leaders in Latin America. Humanity is in the grips of a power: Sin. The gas chambers of The Final Solution represent a synergy between humanity’s accelerating achievements in science and technology and our capacity for moral blindness.
Mammon — the god of money. Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth (Greek: mamonas).” (Matthew 6:24) The economy may be healthy, yet if we look around, we see profit-seeking leading to destruction. Social media companies, marketers, drug dealers — all predatory in their aims. The gun lobby. Silicon Valley VCs and their priorities.
So far, so good. This is quite representative of progressive American Christianity. The worry though is that it subsumes the Bible and Jesus into our political categories and framings, without anything new to offer. It also lacks the interpretative power to handle the Bible verses that sound “conservative.”
“It is quite true that centuries of interpretation went forward with virtually no awareness of the apocalyptic foundation of New Testament theology at all, but now that it has been recovered and shown to be the predominant thought-world of the New Testament, we can no longer choose to ignore it." (Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p. 319)
One of my past Bible teachers, Nick, brought up the movie Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro during a talk on the book of Revelation. As many people are familiar, Revelation contains many fantastical descriptions of dragons, horsemen of the apocalypse, trumpets sounding, scrolls opening, and so on. Pan’s Labyrinth also contains a fantasy story — a young girl who ventures into a magical garden ruled by a faun. The girl crosses back and forth between the garden and her real life, yet instead of the garden being an escape (a la The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe), it parallels the tragic events happening in the real world. The rest of the girl’s life takes place in Spain during World War II under the dictatorship of Franco, and we see scenes of abuse and murder. The heightening bloodshed is imagistically reflected in the labyrinth, providing a cosmic perspective to the girl’s trauma. The end of the film reveals that the labyrinth is only visible to the pure in heart and offers an ultimate redemption to the lives claimed by violence. (I have not watched the movie, so pardon any inaccuracies.)
In Nick’s telling, these features overlap with the genre of Jewish-Christian literature known as apocalyptic, of which Revelation is the best-known example. The modern scholarly consensus holds that the predominant “meaning” of Revelation is an address to early Christians facing persecution under leaders such as Emperor Nero. Tortured and fed to the beasts in the Colosseum, Christians were doubting the sovereignty of God. Revelation is a poetic description of the view “from God’s eyes”, that despite Christians being slaughtered God is against the forces of evil and his rule will come to pass. The number 666 or 616 is commonly held to be a numeric encoding of Nero‘s name.
Revelation is the most vivid account of apocalyptic literature in the New Testament, and we get the term “apocalyptic” from the Greek word “apokalypsis” meaning “revelation” or something revealed. Yet there were many other prior and concurrent works of apocalyptic literature in that period. If we assume that Revelation was intended to be understood by its readers, it follows that Christians of that period would have been familiar with such ways of communicating. We can find other apocalyptic works in the late Old Testament prophets (Daniel), in Second Temple Judaism literature, and in other Christian writings of the time.
What is perhaps more surprising is that the New Testament gospels and epistles also contain themes of apocalyptic embedded within. The gospel of Matthew contains many of Jesus' teachings that sound similar to Revelation, with an extended section on Jesus' second coming in Matthew 24-25. Paul famously depicts a cosmic battle in Ephesians 6:11-12 and the surrounding section: “Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.” This passage has been a comfort to many Christians and has probably saved the Church from worse sins, as it teaches that resistance to God’s ways is ultimately not because of human actors — which would justify the sword — but of greater spiritual powers that lie behind them. I believe it has been an inspiration to practitioners of nonviolence.
Conservative evangelicals readily acknowledge the above. But the influence of the apocalyptic worldview runs deeper, touching on the central question of what Jesus saves us from.
In Galatians 1:3-4, Paul writes that “our Lord Jesus Christ … gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age”. There is a sense that we are under a foreign dominion. Ephesians 2:1-2: “And you were dead in your offenses and sins, in which you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.” Colossians 1:13-14: “For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” There is a realm of Sin which we are under, a realm in which we both commit sins and are controlled by Sin.
Probably the trickiest book of the New Testament to work through is Romans. Growing up, I read Romans through a lens of individual salvation, and it still rings quite clearly in my ears. There have been many attempts to jettison this “Martin Luther approach” and offer alternative interpretations. Not having read that literature, what I can venture to say with some confidence is that Romans 6-7 contains the apocalyptic theme. “But sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead … for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it, killed me … For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am fleshly, sold into bondage to sin” (Romans 7:8,11,14). I have heard that the triune powers depicted in Paul’s telling are Sin, the Law, and Death. To add emphasis, we might do well to capitalize these, so for instance Romans 6:23 reads: “For the wages of Sin is Death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In the gospel of John and the letter of 1 John, the phrase “the world” (kosmos) makes multiple occurrences: from the famous verse “for God so loved the world…” (John 3:16), to Jesus' prayer and teachings that the disciples be in but not of the world in John 17 and 15, to Jesus' declaration “my kingdom is not of this world” in John 18:36, to the command not to love the world in 1 John 2:15. Here we might be able to revisit Voddie Baucham’s exegesis. I remarked earlier that for a conservative evangelical, the problem with the non-Christian world is its godlessness — the lack of recognition for God paired with an acceptance of sinful behavior. Christians might say they are surrounded by “worldly people” and “worldly desires”. And yet if the apocalyptic perspective is true, the phrase “the world” acts as a symbol, like the dragon in Revelation or one of the fantasy beings in Pan’s Labyrinth. “The world” is a domain that is opposed to God, which we human actors either join ourselves to and become partners with, or remain faithful in resisting. This is a bigger vision than the problem of individual transgressions that displease God; it recognizes that opposition to God — Sin — is a bloodthirsty power that grows in its strength over human societies and holds individuals in bondage. All in all, we end up not so much replacing the conservative diagnosis — the world is a realm of godlessness — so much as layering a cosmic, political texture onto it.
A brief retrospective on why I find the Pan’s Labyrinth illustration so helpful. It keys into apocalyptic as a literary genre, a way of telling stories and recounting reality. For certain evils such as those experienced in 1940s Spain, we reach the limits of language if we only rely on factual, historical descriptions. I also wonder if trauma uniquely invites one to think apocalyptically, to think fantastically and poetically. The logical side of our brain would go into overload in explaining suffering, so we start to think in images instead. Finally, Pan’s Labyrinth reveals that the historical reality and the symbolic reality are not separate, but are simply two windows into an underlying reality in unity. To talk of Sin, Mammon, or the World is not to invent a new object out of thin air, but rather to speak of our everyday reality in terms that more adequately capture its character.
Earlier, I raised the question, why would a good Buddhist need to convert to Christianity? The Christian religion presents itself as both universal and necessary. In trying to justify the necessity of Christ in this age, I surmised that a segment of Christians has sought answers in the idea of hell as a place for punishment for sins. Faced with that future, the questions of universality and necessity become hard to argue with.
I don’t yet feel like I have landed upon answers in terms of how to understand the language of hell in the Bible. (Perhaps the apocalyptic perspective has insights to bear — the word “hell” in our Bibles is the Greek word “Gehenna,” which has a Jewish backstory.) And yet, I wish to turn back to the question of necessity. What does a need for Jesus look like in our modern situation?
I started outlining this piece shortly after an encounter with someone lost in his life. I had met him just a handful of times through a Christian men’s group. My friend shared with us that he had wanted to die at one point, and it was at a party, hopeless, that he was reminded of his past experience of God and of Christians he had met. He wanted to give God one more shot and that was how we crossed paths again. Over a few more weeks, he shared that he was continuing to struggle, both with despair and with addiction. Shame and fear were stopping his words from coming out, but over the course of an hour, we got enough of a picture that we decided to put into motion an intervention to prevent him from taking his life.
When I saw him on the other side of the intervention, he looked different. Mark 5:15: “they came to Jesus and saw the man who had been demon-possessed sitting down, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had previously had the ‘legion'; and they became frightened.” He basically said God met him, showed him the true light, and he wanted to live for Him now and tell others about Him. We had taken away and kept his phone for a time. He said that upon receiving it back, he immediately felt temptation, but was fighting with his life against it. He said that one time, “I saw my phone and wanted to destroy it.”
My friend’s story is still being written, but his testimony thus far has been a challenge to my often preferred Christian sentimentality. In it, I see dual strands of apocalyptic powers over his life.
On the one hand is addiction — we are wrapped up in our sin, and it tightens its grip on us as we let it grow. When my friend referred to his phone, I thought of Tolkien’s image of the ring of power and its consuming and dehumanizing effect on Gollum.
On the other hand is shame, guilt, and despair. The condemnation that comes with sin imposes itself on us as a moral weight. Even in the absence of wrongdoing, external humiliation and degradation can be internalized as shame and drive one to consider suicide. Either way, Shame becomes a master over us.
The deliverance from shame and the burdens that have been afflicted on us is a theme that has historically been emphasized by liberation theologians, whereas the deliverance from addiction resonates with the evangelical emphasis on personal culpability. Yet in both sides, there is basis for speaking of Addiction and Shame as powers.
I hope this makes the argument of the necessity of Christianity more clear. We do not need to fixate on hell to justify our missionary endeavors. The Bible does look forward to deliverance from a future reality, and the language of salvation does often refer to that realm. Yet there are many moving accounts where the Christian hope is offered right here, right now. The story of the Philippian jailer: “When the jailer awoke and saw the prison doors opened, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, thinking that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul called out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!' And the jailer asked for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas, and after he brought them out, he said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?' They said, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.'” (Acts 16:27-30) The good news reaches a man caught on the edge of despair, and he is delivered from what he thinks is certain death at the hands of his Roman superiors.
What about the universality of Christianity? Does this necessarily apply to everyone? I think what has changed in my approach here is that instead of thinking of “good people” who may not need a Savior, I have been inhabiting the concept of people in a broken realm. No matter how good our intentions are, the forces of evil seek to overpower us. Resistance through seeking to do good may not be possible.
How does Jesus save us from all this? Here is a brief presentation that is not new. It riffs off of John Calvin’s doctrine of the Threefold Office of Christ, called munus triplex in Latin.
The three offices are Jesus as Prophet, Priest, and King, fulfilling the three types of figures who were set apart by anointing in the Old Testament. Some have corresponded these types to the characters of Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings.
Jesus as Prophet points us to the true way of being human, in resistance to the Powers. His life and preaching witnesses to the possibility of an intimate life with God here on earth. His Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) exposes Sin for what it is, for instance in the words against Mammon or in the injunctions against harboring lustful or angry thoughts in one’s heart. The Christian Church continues to pass on Jesus' teachings and to call others into His way of life. This includes the example Jesus sets in his acts of humility and journey to the cross.
Jesus as Priest offers himself as a sacrifice on behalf of humanity to reconcile us to God. At the cross, he exchanges himself for us, dying in our place for our sins. Believers participate in Jesus' death and resurrection through a posture of trusting faith and through receiving grace and sacraments in the Church. For those who in this sense are “in Christ Jesus”, “there is now no condemnation at all” (Romans 8:1). “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:2) By opening a path back to God, Jesus' death purchases our freedom from bondage to the Flesh, atones for our Guilt, and redeems us from Shame.
Jesus as King rules over a domain that has been set free from the Powers. At the cross, “when He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.” (Colossians 2:15) As the ascended Lord, he has had all things put “in subjection under his feet”, including Death (1 Corinthians 15:26-27). The Church is on mission to carry out the reign of Jesus, reaching and rescuing people from the powers of darkness.
Isaiah 9:2,6-7:
The people who walk in darkness
Will see a great light;
Those who live in a dark land,
The light will shine on them.
…
For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace
On the throne of David and over his kingdom,
To establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness
From then on and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of armies will accomplish this.
This has been a meandering reflection on apocalyptic theology, a frame of mind that I argued was present among the writers of the New Testament but is often passed over today. I have focused on how apocalyptic theology may help Christians map out a middle way between fundamentalism and interfaith Christianity. The Bible speaks of a duality or opposition between God’s realm and the world. The fundamentalists take “the world” to refer to heathens, who until they enter the Christian fold, are irredeemable sinners who will be judged as such. In seeking to respect the primacy of Scripture, I set forth an interpretation of “the world” as the cosmic agents of Sin that prey upon humanity and with which humanity often becomes a partner. This reorients the position of the non-Christian — instead of guilty perpetrator whom God cannot stand, they take the place of one exposed to or subservient to the present evil age. This apocalyptic diagnosis of humanity’s problem is expansive enough to house both traditional and modern understandings of Christ’s atonement.
For myself, the takeaway is to kindle the apocalyptic perspective when I am reading the Bible or seeking to “read” the events around me. In this coda, I write to encourage myself in this endeavor.
One’s readiness to think apocalyptically may depend on personality, but it certainly depends on social location. In the West, or at least the educated, elite West, we celebrate progress and often do not experience cracks in our society. In a context where everyone has moderately well-off families, where are the problems of Addiction and Shame that I earlier referred to?
Appropriating a phrase from the black experience, to persevere in radical vision requires “staying woke.” In Pan’s Labyrinth, not everyone can see the creatures. “Apocalypse” means “something revealed.” Harboring a vision of what’s wrong with the world is important for ethics, lest we become numb. Here are four points that I outlined to encourage this.
First, Western society sells a Costco / Coexist story. I wonder if that is too harsh, but our economic markets do best when everyone gets along and can put political and religious differences aside.
Second, against Western worship of progress and innovation, I thought of the reality of urban decay in Steubenville, Ohio. Steubenville, only because it was mentioned in a podcast episode I was listening to, with Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn on as a guest. Chuck spoke eloquently about how we have failed countless cities in the US, and how greed and hubris play a role in that.
Third, I wrote down to remember the lesser wars going on throughout the world that our news does not highlight.
And fourth, I had mentioned above the role that science played in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. This brought to mind a parallel with abortion. To the extent that I am willing to name Mammon as a force, it feels only right to partly follow the conservatives who have long railed against a Power behind widespread abortion and its acceptance in society. I bring this up as a reminder to myself of how evil can be hidden, how even the enlightened of us can turn a blind eye to sin, and how technological progress can become a collaborator with the Powers of this world.
Sources that have shaped my thinking and influenced this piece:
All Scripture quotations are from the NASB 2020.
For anyone experiencing thoughts of suicide, I encourage you to open up to a trusted friend or mentor. If you’re in the US, you can call 988 for support at no cost.
Started brainstorm 2025-10-20, started writing 2025-10-26, finished writing 2025-10-29. Made some edits on 2025-12-14 for the public version.