Discipleship & Dominion

2 months ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · J.M. Robinson

The Art of Saying "No"

Introduction…

Notes from Beth-Elim

Culture, Power, and the Idea of the Nation

“Culture” and “power” are the main coordinates of Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism. Culture is a shared set of symbols, ideas, norms and ways of behaving, and modes of communication (especially language) that enable a community to reproduce itself generation over generation. Some cultures are savage, some domesticated; some are wild, some gardens. Wild cultures “are produced and reproduce themselves spontaneously, as parts of the life of men” (48). In agrarian societies, culture is invisible and un-self-conscious; it’s just the form life takes. Garden cultures are complex and rich; they come into existence and are reproduced “by literacy and specialized personnel” (48). Shared culture is nationality: “two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture.” But more: nationality exists only where two men who share a culture …

2 months ago · 2 likes · Peter Leithart

You Will Own Things, and Actually Care

This essay will cover more ground than it settles. I know that. Over the next several months, I want to pull these threads out in full, but a series has to start somewhere, and this is where I’m starting: a life worth owning involves owning things…

a month ago · 48 likes · 6 comments · Michael Foster

That’s all for this month,
Bnonn

Notable links for February 2026

Bnonn Tennant — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:54:11 GMT

Super Bowl Commercial Bubble Curse: AIs imitate Dot-Coms

Basically he argues that AI is a bubble just like dot-com was 26 years ago. I think he’s right.

What do I think about the lastest online skirmish?

I believe my most valuable resource is focused attention…

3 months ago · 31 likes · Michael Foster

Social Media Distortion Dilemma

I watched a 17-year-old explain how he was running about twenty YouTube channels. One covered the Russia–Ukraine war. He didn’t know much about it and didn’t care to. He just saw that it performed. He copied a successful channel, ran scripts through AI voiceover, pulled royalty free footage, reused the same keywords, and made about six thousand dollars …

3 months ago · 45 likes · 3 comments · Michael Foster

Notes from Beth-Elim

Cultural Consequences of Division

Note: This essay was originally delivered as the 2017 Areopagus Lecture in Charlottesville, Virginia, a lecture series sponsored by Mars Hill Audio…

3 months ago · 2 likes · Peter Leithart

…the characteristic structures and habits of modernity flow from the spring of the Reformation Eucharist. Some of these structures and habits are gains, because the Reformation was a genuine recovery of the gospel. But I have concentrated on the poisons of modernity that have come from divisions between Catholic and Protestant, and between Protestant and Protestant. Despite the anti-Galatian thrust of the Reformation, the Reformers ended up in a Galatianism of their own, drawing boundaries of purity and pollution, holy and profane. These have downstream effects in the bifurcation of symbol and nature, the formation of sacred nations, the implicit totalitarianism of liberal order.

The calling of Nathanael and the symbolism of trees and high places

On the morrow he was minded to go forth into Galilee, and he findeth Philip, and Jesus saith unto him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, of the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, “We have found him of whom Moses, in the law and the prophets, wrote: Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” And Nathanael said u…

3 months ago · Bnonn Tennant

That’s all for this month,
Bnonn

Notable links for January 2026

Bnonn Tennant — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:38:15 GMT

Modern Delusion Part 3: Worship as Education

Making the Best of Dystopia

My Science Fiction Childhood Meets Anthony of the Desert

Spiritual Disciplines to Keep from Becoming Part of AI’s ‘Internet of Things’

Apple Pie and Rocket Ships

Tolkien Prophesied the Smartphone

I don’t think the whole article is worth reading, but it does draw an interesting correlation between the effects of smartphones and the corruption represented by the one ring. While there are other things you could apply this to, smartphones seem to uniquely embody all of them. Here’s the salient section:

Unrelated, but related:

You Probably Are a Jonathan

Some years ago, Matt Chandler popularized the line, “You aren’t David.” It annoyed me, not because he didn’t have a point. He did. He was taking aim at that kind of preaching that turns David and Goliath into a motivational fable where you slay your personal giant, conquer your private battles, and make the Bible the soundtrack to the movie of your own …

3 months ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Michael Foster

Everyone wants a Jonathan. Few are willing to be one.

This morning, I posted a Note about the need of choosing careful metaphors. One reader asked me if I could teach more on this topic. The answer of course is yes…

Under the Spell of Words

4 months ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · J.M. Robinson

[S1E12] Questions & answers about the clothing of the future

In this episode we develop the symbolism of clothing into some specific applications for reforming our dress in the future, and answer some questions from listeners around how to balance personal authenticity against objective standards…

4 months ago · Bnonn Tennant and Smokey Tennant

That’s all for this month,
Bnonn

Notable links for December 2025

Bnonn Tennant — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:43:21 GMT

I’m getting really tired of AI art

Not really about AI art per se, but actually quite an interesting discussion of the music industry, composition and consumption, and how money and technology is screwing it all up.

Why Machines Cannot Create

This actually is about AI art though:

Why Machines Cannot Create

“The poets eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poets pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a location habitation and a name…

5 months ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · J.M. Robinson

Bishop Erik Varden: “In Praise of Translation” | 2025 Erasmus Lecture

AI Is Slowly Destroying Your Brain

The big takeaway here is that new research suggests that AI carries an inherent risk of causing psychosis — even for normal healthy people who aren’t prone to mental illness — due to its fundamental design. “The psychogenic risk case for AI is the basic use case for AI.” Claude Sonnet 4 seems to be the safest, and Gemini 2.5 Flash is scary.

Just Asking Questions

No one is ever just asking questions.

The very first question in the Bible does not come from God, Adam, or Eve. It comes from the serpent…

Just Asking Questions

5 months ago · 31 likes · 6 comments · Michael Foster

How Influencer Culture Destroys Pastors: the cost of platform over people

How Influencer Culture Destroys Pastors

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how influencer culture is undermining the very nature of pastoral ministry…

4 months ago · 93 likes · 13 comments · Michael Foster

I recently saw someone say that what influencer pastors most need is to have everyone they strongly influence attend their own churches. If this simply happened like a law of nature, the problem would correct itself in a year.

The Christmas Tree and the Fourfold Mystery

The Christmas Tree and the Fourfold Mystery

Introduction…

5 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · J.M. Robinson

To discard the Christmas Tree out of fear of pagan origins is to misunderstand both history and formation. It is to remove from the Christian home one of its most potent moral teachers. The Christmas Tree is not a foreign intruder. It is a domestic icon of Christian joy.

The Rule of the Incarnate: Why the West Was Never Meant to Be Governed by Law Alone

That’s all for this month,
Bnonn

We’re all Cretans now: toward a theology of entertainment

Bnonn Tennant — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 10:47:28 GMT

Cretans! Always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies! This testimony is true; for which cause convict them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not giving heed to Jewish fables and commands of men, turning themselves away from the truth; all things, indeed, are pure to the pure, and to the defiled and unsteadfast is nothing pure, but of them even the mind and the conscience are defiled; God they profess to know, and in their works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work disapproved. (Titus 1:12–16)

The past few issues, I have chiefly been concerned with the outcome of of our behavior in terms of our affections or emotions: how we feel, what we find ourselves wanting, and how we find ourselves trying to fulfill those desires. I have argued that there is a deep and profound connection between consumption and how we feel — and a deep and profound connection between consumption and being transformed. I have shown that there are two patterns for consumption: a fallen one, and a redeeming one — and the patterns of consumption in the world today are the polar opposite of the patterns of consumption that scripture gives us to follow. The way in which we consume, and the things we consume, are wrong — so naturally, we feel wrong. When we binge on junk food, we feel sick; when we binge on spiritual junk, we feel spiritually sick.

Consumerism has shaped us into a discontented and covetous people who binge continually, and then we wonder why we feel gross. Spiritual obesity is the unseen epidemic of our day.

Fasting is an especially helpful way to overcome this, because it is naturally liturgical — it is a kind of ritual way to embody the right pattern of consumption. But it isn’t the only instruction God gives on how we should consume.

For instance, in the previous issue on fasting, I briefly touched on how Paul gives fasting as the exception to marital intimacy, while the norm ought to be that we do not defraud each other — meaning, as often as either person wants it, we should provide it. Not for the sake of indulgence, but because that is the normal use of those appetites. Sex, too, is a form of consumption — which is why, to take an example that is equal parts illuminating and horrifying, cannibalism and homosexuality are so frequently found practiced together.

The point I wish to draw out here is that God designed us to engage our appetites; not to indulge them, nor to deny them. We have seen that he gives us an elementary liturgical pattern for discerning between engagement and indulgence: we ought to thank him before consuming. This is a very helpful rule of thumb for figuring out when we are going too far, because it focuses our consciences upon the use of our appetites, forcing us to bring our consumption before God’s judgment and commit it to him, before we commit it ourselves.

It is impossible to give sincere thanks for something when we know we are indulging beyond what we ought.

That said, we do also know that consciences can be seared. Our perception of what is “too far” is not just innate, but also shaped by how far we regularly go, by how far we see others regularly going, by what is considered normal and acceptable, by what is considered strangely severe, and by what is mocked as overly religious or legalistic.

This puts us in a pickle, because how can we know if our perception has been skewed? How can we know if what feels like normal engagement of our appetites is actually wanton indulgence that we have been gradually conditioned to accept and normalize by a degenerate world that wants to prey upon our depraved lusts? How can we know if our consciences are seared? (I do not ask how we can know if our consciences are too tender, because that seems to me like a good example of C.S. Lewis’ analogy about running around with fire extinguishers while the ship is sinking.)

One way to test ourselves is to hold up our behavior against the immovable standard of scripture. We know that scripture is fully sufficient to completely equip us for every good work, which means that it is sufficient to equip us to answer questions like, “Am I checking my phone too often?” and, “Do I have an unhealthy relationship with YouTube?” and, “Are we watching too many episodes while we blaught on the couch at the end of the day?” and even, “Should we watch secular entertainment at all?” Despite the Bible being written in a time when there were literally not words to ask those questions, it is nonetheless sufficient to answer them, because God in his exceeding wisdom and mercy has designed the world to work according to spiritual patterns, and so his answers to questions about consumption of food and drink are also answers to questions about consumption of weird artificial things that we only invented six thousand years after he created food and drink. So what I want to zero in on, in order to begin answering these kinds of questions, is a connection that I see between Proverbs 23 and Titus 1:12–16: the connection between gluttons, sluggards, and fables.

Proverbs 23 is perhaps too long to quote here in its entirety; I trust you have a Bible. It is largely about disordered consumption: either about avoiding it; or about what it looks like, and what its fruits are. (This is another way that we can see that sex is also a form of consumption — Solomon makes free to switch between gastronomic and sexual motifs, and evidently sees nothing confusing or random in doing so.)

What Paul says to Titus about Cretans is also along the lines of disordered consumption. Cretans are gluttonous: “lazy bellies,” or to translate a little more dynamically, “idle gluttons” (ASV). But there is another connection to Proverbs 23 which has special relevance to us, given that a chief concern I want to address is what we could generally call entertainment — social media, YouTube, shows, movies, all that kind of thing.

Proverbs 23:21 tells us that “the quaffer and squanderer become poor, and drowsiness clotheth with rags.” Gluttony and sloth are here presented as natural brothers. The squanderous glutton is also a sluggard — he is poor and sleepy. Proverbs 20:4 takes up the same motif: “the sluggard will not plow by reason of the winter, therefore he shall beg in harvest, and have nothing.” He is poor. Again, Proverbs 26:13 says, “as the door turneth upon its hinges, so doth the sluggard upon his bed.” He is sleepy. So both the glutton and the sluggard are poor and sleepy — which suggests these are really the same man. You might say, in fact, that sloth and gluttony are twins. A glutton is going to be inclined to sloth: to laziness and idleness — and a sluggard is going to be inclined to gluttony: to wanton consumption and the wasting of things on his own appetites. Proverbs 19:24 confirms this: “The sluggard burieth his hand in the dish, and will not so much as bring it to his mouth again” — he has tired himself out from eating so much.

In the ancient world, this presented a bit of a dilemma — because the lazier you are, the less you tend to have; but the more gluttonous you are, the more you tend to want. You thus end up being very miserable. “The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing” (Pr 13:4); “The desire of the sluggard killeth him, for his hands refuse to labor” (Pr 21:25). However, in the modern day, we have solved that problem by making most of our consumption digital. It requires very few resources. It is very cheap. And we have invented socialism to ensure that everyone has enough to be a sluggard and a glutton.

But what does this have to do with the Cretans? In Titus 1, Cretans are lazy bellies — they are sluggards and gluttons. But notice what Paul infers from this: that they will be tempted to go after Jewish fables that turn them aside from the truth. On the face of it, this seems like a strange connection; a bit of a left turn. Why is that likely to happen? Why that temptation? Why does he not rather warn Titus about them being inclined to not work, or to bring shame on the name of Christ through selfishness? After all, we know that hospitality and charity loomed large in Paul’s mind for every Christian. Yet he does not voice such concerns here. He instead warns Titus that slothful gluttons are going to want to go after fables. The Greek word here is mythos, from which we get the word myth; in 1 Timothy 4:7, it refers to old wives’ tales, and in 2 Peter 1:16 it refers to how the story of Jesus is not an “ingeniously concocted myth” (LEB) — what in today’s language we would call a conspiracy theory.

I don’t know how conversant you are with certain online “ministries” today, but it has been my observation that Paul’s concern is timeless. Lazy consumers have a disordered desire for myths and old wives’ tales and conspiracy theories — along with any other kind of entertainment.

We are all Cretans now.

Notice the connection between the characteristics Paul lists for these Cretans. Firstly, they are liars. Secondly, they are evil beasts. In other words, they are like animals in having uncontrolled appetites — but they are worse than animals, because they have a moral ability to direct their appetites, but choose not to; so they are evil animals. Thirdly, they are lazy bellies. That is the chief way in which they are evil beasts: their wanton appetite leads them into sloth and ease rather than diligence and labor. But this leads us back to them being liars — because what does that have to do with these other characteristics?

What is the connection between lying and gluttony?

Simple: they must be liars in order to have a wanton appetite for fables. Or, to put it differently, a liar and a glutton will have a wanton appetite for nonsense. It is only nature. By contrast, a man who cares about the truth, and works diligently to seek it, is not slothful or gluttonous in his consumption of information, but rather careful and restrained.

We would like to think that we are such careful, restrained people. But if you think of how we actually consume information, you will quickly realize that we are not as pure as we would hope. Think of the echo-chambers. Think of how social algorithms curate our news feeds so we only see things that they calculate will encourage and reinforce our existing beliefs, and cause us to repost what we read, because we want it to be true, or we want it to be false — whether or not it really is true or false. Think about how often we actually bother to check if what we’re reading is true; or how often we seek an alternative viewpoint, or follow up, or do due diligence before taking it in and integrating it into our minds and hearts, and often sharing it with others in the hope they will do the same. Like the Athenians, we have become a people who spend their time in nothing else than to tell or to hear some new thing. Like them, it does not matter to us whether it is true — only that it is new. We want it to be novel, and if it tickles our fancy, we will fancy that it is also true.

Not only are we liars, then, in this sense of not caring about the truth nearly enough, but we are also lazy bellies. Idle gluttons for ever more trivia, ever more news, ever more controversy, ever more gossip, ever more anything, as long as we can keep scrolling, keep watching, keep avoiding the work set before us, keep procrastinating, keep numbing ourselves, keep choosing fun over fulfillment.

And to add to it all, we are also evil beasts, consuming and being consumed by platforms and pundits that have grown fat and engorged through engagement “farming,” click-bait, and rage-bait.

Every day we gorge ourselves, and at the end of the day we ask, “When shall I awake? I seek it yet again!” (Pr 23:35). We doomscroll ourselves to sleep, and we wake up the next morning to the important work of checking notifications and scrolling more feeds before we are even out of bed. As a door turneth upon a hinge, we turn over to seek it yet again.

We live in a Cretanous world that is continually trying to form us in Cretanous ways; to fashion us into liars and evil beasts and lazy bellies, turning away from the truth, defiled in mind and conscience — people calling ourselves Christians but often denying our profession by our works. Our Christian forefathers would look at us, and be amazed.

What our fathers said

This brings me to the second important way that we can test our intuitions about what is a normal engagement of our appetites, and what is indulgent or gluttonous — or squanderous, as I translate Proverbs 23:20–21, where the Hebrew means to make light of consumption: consuming great quantities like it ain’t no thang, and thus not just indulging in it, but wasting it on ourselves.

I said before that the chief way we can test how we are using our appetites is by holding them up to the immovable standard of scripture. But that is not the only test God gives us. A second, which is of course subject to scripture as well, but is nonetheless of real weight, is the wisdom of our fathers. It is a curious thing to me that churchmen are generally quick to recommend our fathers on matters of theology, but very slow to hear them on matters of practical living — as if the two were entirely disconnected. I have heard Calvin quoted many times in sermons, to support some doctrinal point or abstract truth — but I don’t believe I have ever heard him quoted on how to live; how much we should eat or drink; what we should wear; how men and women should relate to each other; the proper manner of corporal punishment; or really anything like that. And if I did hear him so quoted, I would more than half expect it to be in the negative, as if to say, “that was then, but this is now.” I have personally witnessed many Reformed pastors thoroughly repudiate — indeed thoroughly abominate — the teachings of our fathers on gendered piety, for instance, as if because these are social matters, they are not also theological, and therefore can safely be discarded as the blinkered opinions of a more savage time.

We should not automatically assume that the men who came before us were right about everything. In some respects it was a more savage time. But if we think they were wise, let us at least be consistent. Let us believe that if they were wise in the scriptures, and the scriptures are sufficient to equip us for all good works, then they were probably wise in good works also. We should not think that in the scriptures they were giants, but in social matters they were simply stunted products of their time — as if scripture could correct them on doctrine, but not on living it out. If that were the case, then we should abandon all hope of figuring out how to avoid being stunted products of our own time. We are what we are, and like fish in water, there is simply no way to tell that we are wet.

No, I do not believe that; this entire series presupposes the contrary. It is certainly not how scripture presents the matter, and not how God has worked in history. There is no question that we are products of our time — indeed, that we were made for such times as these, and to rise above them and reform them; as in every time. The Lord Jesus is reigning, and he is placing all of time under his feet, and so we can look to our fathers for wisdom to compare their way of doing things with our own. In particular, we can look to them for guidance on matters where we know our own times are aberrant; on questions that we know our own times are trying to answer perversely; on issues where we know that we have been formed into liars who are inclined to turn away from the truth.

I say all this to explain why I am going to do what I am about to do. Precisely because I don’t think our own perception of these matters is very trustworthy, I want to step aside for a moment, and let our fathers in the faith do some application for me. On this issue of entertainment, I think we are all likely to be compromised, and so I want to get a second opinion. These men did not have the forces working upon them that we do, to turn them away from the truth, and so they have far less bias, far less inclination toward the behavior that we may want to justify in our own lives. That makes their perception likely to be clearer than ours, or at least worthy of considering as a counterbalance to what we want to hear. As the Lord Jesus says in Luke 7:35, wisdom is justified of all her children. We can judge what is true wisdom by the fruit it produces. So let us look for fathers in the faith whose fruit has endured to our time, and ask them for their wisdom on these matters, that we may get a sense of where our own prejudices and weaknesses lie. What did the holy men of old say about entertainment?

There are two men I know of whose work has endured to our time, and who lived at just the opportune moment to give us useful counsel in the present day. They both wrote during the Victorian era — the period from 1837 to 1901 — when mass entertainment in the form of pulp novels was really beginning to take off. They obviously had no conception of the sprawling, always-on, instant-entertainment complex that we must deal with today — but they saw just enough of the coming technological marvel to be able to apply scripture to it, without being caught up in it themselves. As we consider what they said, we will see how applicable it is in principle to our day, even though the internet was still over a century away.

When thou sittest to eat with a ruler,
Considerest thou diligently that which is before thee,
And put a knife to thy throat
If thou art a man of appetite.
Have no desire to his dainties, seeing it is lying food.
Eat not the bread of an evil eye,
And have no desire to his dainties,
For as he hath thought in his soul, so is he,
“Eat and drink,” saith he to thee,
And his heart is not with thee.
Thy morsel thou hast eaten thou shalt vomit up,
And shalt lose thy sweet words. (Proverbs 23:1–3, 7–8)

Notice there how Solomon speaks of “lying food:” it is really a kind of trap, a snare, that baits the man who can’t control his appetite to his destruction. This is exactly what Robert Lewis Dabney says about entertainment in his savage little essay, On Dangerous Reading: A Warning Against The Reading of Novels, Fiction, and Other Poisonous Literature. I know, of course it sounds extreme to us — but let the man cook for a moment. Dabney was perhaps the greatest American theologian ever to live, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

He tells us that entertainment deforms our character and distorts our view of reality. It forms us falsely — it is a kind of trap or snare that baits us to destructive views and destructive behaviors. This is because nearly all entertainment is false in critical ways — and often intentionally so, with the aim of covertly drawing us away from virtue and into sin and error. Hear what he says about the stories of his day, and ask if it does not apply even more urgently to the stories of ours:

Many of them are, in truth, systems of error, covertly embodying and teaching ruinous falsehoods. Some are written for the secret purpose of teaching infidelity, and some to teach the epicurean philosophy [sensuality]. Many of them are the aimless effusions of a general hatred against every thing correct and pious. There may be no professed attack on right principles, probably no didactic discussion at all, in the whole book, and yet the whole may be false philosophy or heresy, teaching by fascinating incident and example. To the thoughtless young, in search of entertainment, it seems to be a tale constructed to amuse, and nothing more, and yet every character represented in it, and all the plan of the book, may be designed to place religion, morality, and right principles in a contemptible attitude, and to present the characters who advocate error in an attitude of superiority. How delusive this mode of teaching is, as a test or evidence of truth, can be easily seen. It is perfectly easy to draw two sets of characters, of which those embodying and representing error shall wear the superior, and those representing truth the inferior aspect, when the characters are all fictitious, and the painter is the errorist himself. When the lion and the man, in the old fable, traveling together, came to the picture of a man bestriding a conquered lion, the lion said to his human companion: “Had a lion been the painter of that picture the figures would be inverted.” So it is perfectly easy to paint truth at the bottom and error at the top when falsehood holds the brush.

He goes on:

There are some reasons why the evil company of a bad book is even more corrupting and dangerous than that of a wicked living companion. One of these is, that the heroes and heroines, who are painted as defying the rules of good morals in some vital points, are still adorned with many imaginary qualities, such as courage, magnanimity, generosity, wit, and genius, which cause the young and impulsive reader to admire them in spite of their crimes. And from admiring the criminal it is but one step to excusing the vice, so that by this means the moral distinctions are worn out in the mind. Such a story as Bulwer’s Eugene Aram should be entitled “Murder made Amiable.” The usual tendency of these works is to familiarize the reader to viewing, without revulsion, nay, with actual admiration, the characters of duelists, drunkards, seducers, and other villains. And these fictitious villains are more dangerous companions than the bad men of real life, because this union of criminal traits with attractive and romantic qualities, which half atone for their faults in the view of the novel reader, is usually wholly imaginary. In actual life we find no such union, but wicked men appear coarse and repulsive. Vice soon robs their characters of that grace and delicacy which make the fictitious hero so dangerous an example.

You might say, “Well, I get his point — but it’s not real. It’s just fiction, and we all know it’s fiction. It’s only meant to amuse.” Perhaps you are right; that is something we should investigate in more detail. But Dabney’s rejoinder is hard to refute. He responds with Proverbs 26:

As one pretending to be feeble, Who is casting sparks, arrows, and death, So hath a man deceived his neighbor, And hath said, “Am not I playing?” (Proverbs 26:18–19)

Dabney is not impressed by the idea that when evil and wickedness and sin are portrayed in stories, they somehow become safe to view:

Not so judged the Psalmist when he prayed, “Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity.” (Psalm 119.37.) Not so judged the wisest of men when he urged, “Avoid it, pass not by it; turn from it, and pass away.” (Prov. 4.15.) Not so judged Paul, nor even the prudent heathen whom he quoted, when he taught that, “Evil communications corrupt good manners.” (1 Cor. 15.33.) All human beings, however amiable, have in their hearts, until sanctified, the dormant seeds of all the vices. Who does not know that the contemplation of such vices tends to awaken those seeds into life? It is just thus that evil companions and evil example tend to corrupt those who were previously innocent. It is dangerous to become familiar with wickedness, even by contemplating it in others.

In the same way, J.C. Ryle wrote similar comments in a little booklet called Thoughts for Young Men. Here is what he says:

[The devil] will try to throw dust in your eyes, and prevent you seeing anything in its true colors. He would eagerly make you think that evil is good, and good is evil. He will paint, cover with gold, and dress up sin, in order to make you fall in love with it. He will deform, and misrepresent, and fabricate true Christianity, in order to make you take a dislike to it. He will exalt the pleasures of wickedness—but he will hide from you the sting.

This is why Dabney goes so far as to say that entertainment is the “murder of time.”

These are strong words. We need not accept them as gospel truth; they are not scripture, after all. But we ought to let the wisdom of our fathers settle in our minds so that we can contemplate it without immediately giving an answer. We should not be hasty to dismiss these men. We should be quick to listen and slow to speak — and slow to anger, for if there is anything that provokes us to resentment and disagreement more than being told that our precious luxuries should be rejected, I am not sure what it is. That alone should make us think that perhaps our affections are out of order. Perhaps, even if we can justify entertainment, it simply isn’t worth it, considering what else we could be doing. Certainly we are not on a trajectory to achieve the sorts of things that Dabney and Ryle achieved.

So let us store up their comments in our hearts, and return to scripture again next time, seeking deeper and more clarifying principles on what a theology of entertainment should look like.

Until then,

Bnonn

Notable links for November 2025

Bnonn Tennant — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 10:43:24 GMT

I refuse to believe this is real

It seems Albania has an AI political minister. Not a minister of AI. An AI minister.

That Hideous Strength at 10X

Why Does AI Art Feel So Wrong?

ChatGPT made me delusional

The Most Dangerous Cognitive Bias

(Or, why so many people are convinced that men like Joel Webbon know what they’re talking about.)

The Lone Bulwark . . . No, Really

How Language Shapes Thought

The languages we speak affect our perceptions of the world.

[S1E11] Stages of life & liturgical clothing

If reforming our clothing means returning to the patterns of scripture, does that mean we should be wearing sackcloth when fasting, and that ministers should wear robes? Also, if clothing should reflect our nature and place, how does age factor into this — since our nature and our place in society changes as we grow older…

6 months ago · Bnonn Tennant and Smokey Tennant

That’s all for this month.

Bnonn

Notable links for October 2025

Bnonn Tennant — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:46:23 GMT

The Art & Theology of Novelty

An Open Letter to President Trump About Heaven

What You Aren’t Being Told About Digital IDs

American Folk Magic and Christianity: From the Reformation to Mormonism (Universal History)

How Catastrophe Defines US (From Hitler to Hurricane Helene) | with Jordan Hall

This new humanoid-robot will give you nightmares...

The Trillion Dollar Scam - How Google Really Makes Money

The Bishop Who Walked Without A Head

What if I told you that the history of the Church is far stranger than most of us realize…

7 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · J.M. Robinson

telosbound

We are all the "worst sinner"

“I believe, O Lord, and I confess that Thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the Living God, Who camest into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first.” These words begin the pre-communion prayer said by all the faithful in unison before the reception of the Holy Mysteries during the Divine Liturgy. It has puzzled me for many years because of its cl…

7 months ago · 14 likes · 4 comments · Treydon Lunot

Sermonic

Rigney’s Right—Good Leadership Could Get You Fired

Introduction…

a year ago · 8 likes · JB Durham

Is Trick-or-Treat a liturgical parade?

J.M. Robinson recently wrote to defend Halloween mockery against the objection that it runs afoul of Jude 8–10…

6 months ago · Bnonn Tennant

That’s all for this month.

Bnonn

Fasting: scripture’s answer to consumerism

Bnonn Tennant — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 10:57:09 GMT

We are becoming partakers of the divine nature. But as we saw last time, this is not something that happens automatically; rather, God has given us the power to choose — to do or not do — so we may participate in what we are becoming; so we may work together with the Holy Spirit to partake of the divine nature more and more as we grow in faith and holiness.

Another way to say this, is that we must exercise ourselves in the divine nature, in order to put it on. We can never do this under our own power, of course — but we cooperate with God as he gives us Christ through his Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, this cooperation is hard work. It is not passive.

In the modern day, thanks to our being made weak and lazy through the choice and convenience of consumerism, cooperating with the Spirit feels extremely taxing. Our flesh will always choose short-term fun over long-term fulfillment — and choice and convenience have trained us to do this reflexively, by giving us no end of opportunities for it.

What I primarily focused on last time was how the consumer-oriented world tempts us into a covetous, impatient, miserable mindset. It shapes us to always desire more, and to never be satisfied with what we have — which is to say, it shapes us to embody the pattern of the fall. Adam and Eve were dissatisfied and discontent with having only all the trees but one; they wanted the wisdom of the tree of knowledge now — and so they took it. Sin is foolishness — it wants short-term gain for long-term loss. But the pattern of redemption, predictably enough, is the opposite. Satan offered Jesus kingship now — and Jesus refused.

Then Jesus was led up to the wilderness by the Spirit, to be tempted by the Devil, and having fasted forty days and forty nights, afterwards he hungered. And the Tempter having come to him said, “If the Son thou art of God, speak, that these stones may become loaves.” But he, answering, said, “It hath been written, ‘Not upon bread alone doth man live, but upon every word coming forth from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:1–4)

Righteousness is wisdom — it prefers short-term loss for long-term gain.

Having been shaped into covetous, short-term patterns of fun over fulfillment, we find it pretty hard to feel fulfilled. I think it is unquestionably true that modern Christians easily get stuck in a cycle of miserable pleasure-seeking, rather than cultivating true contentment and happiness in Christ.

What makes this such a difficult problem to overcome is that being shaped in this consumeristic way creates a vicious cycle: we continually become more blind to the way out, and more depleted of the willpower to take it.

Consumerism promises excitement and entertainment and happiness; it promises to make us fulfilled and inspired and motivated. But what it actually delivers is boredom and lethargy and depression; it makes us listless and fruitless and — in the words of 2 Peter — inert.

This makes it extremely hard to think clearly about how to escape — or even want to escape…let alone take the action necessary to escape.

Because we have become conditioned to always satisfy every longing and craving, by giving in to them, we find ourselves like prisoners whose muscles have atrophied and wasted away from being in shackles so long. When we quickly give in to every urge, we become enslaved to our urges, and ruled by them — and we get weaker, as they get stronger.

To give you just one example, I can tell you from sad experience that a young man who indulges the desire to eat as much chocolate as he can every once in a while, soon becomes a young man who routinely indulges that desire more and more often, and in greater and greater amounts, until he is eating a block of chocolate nearly every day, and eventually is no longer satisfied with just one block, but buys two so that he has a little extra for later, and then over time expects to eat both blocks all at once if he is to enjoy himself at all, until he is several sacks of potatoes heavier than he should be, and is incapable of saying no to chocolate, or even sharing it with anyone — and yet in all that time he does not grow to enjoy chocolate more, but less.

So what is the alternative?

Indulging our desires does not work — so presumably refusing to indulge them will…right? When a man realizes that he is becoming a glutton, and eating too much, and getting fat, then he should veer out of that ditch and stop eating anything?

Asceticism is no better than indulgence

Well, that does not work either. If I may repurpose an analogy that Jesus uses for a slightly different cause, think of the parable of the man with the demon:

The unclean spirit, when he is gone out of the man, passeth through waterless places, seeking rest, and findeth it not. Then he saith, “I will return into my house whence I came out;” and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he goeth, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man becometh worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this evil generation. (Matthew 12:43–45)

Now this is not ultimately speaking of a man being exorcised; the man in the story is explicitly identified with Israel of Jesus’ time. Yet what is true of the corporate body is true of the individual — and that on more than one level. We can speak (and scripture does speak) of a man being possessed of a spirit of gluttony, for example, without meaning that there is a demonic agent — an immaterial person — who has entered into him and controls his appetite for food. I am not denying that such a thing can happen, but there are much more mundane things that the same language can refer to: a man may be possessed of a gluttonous spirit in the sense that he embodies gluttony — he participates in the pattern of gluttony — by overeating; by overindulging his longing for food. And when he realizes this, and decides he does not like what he is becoming (or at least feels sufficiently ill), he may decide that he is going to stop eating like that for a while. He will go on a diet.

So he suffers through restricting his eating for a time. He abstains from chocolate, perhaps. The spirit of gluttony is driven out. There is no longer a place for it in his body; he will no longer embody that spirit. Symbolically speaking, the spirit of gluttony passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding it not. There is nowhere for it — for a while.

But then what happens?

Well, he decides he has done enough. He has driven out the spirit, has he not? He has proved that he is not a glutton; or at least, that he isn’t one any more. He has turned himself around. He does not need that chocolate; he is capable of restraining himself. But it is unnatural to eat so little for so long, and so he returns to eating — and immediately, the spirit returns also. He falls back into his old ways. The dog returns to his vomit, and the filthy piggie, having washed itself, returns to the muck. And so often, he ends up worse off than before, as new vices beset him. The spirit of gluttony is increased sevenfold; or he adds to it some new vice that, in some other way, makes his latter state worse than the former.

This is a miserable way of being.

I use the example of food because it is so clear — no doubt you are aware that many a man who goes on a diet loses weight for a month or two, and then puts it all back on…plus some. He ends up fatter than before. Truly his last state becometh worse than his first.

Why does this happen to him? Jesus tells us: because when the spirit returns, it finds him empty and inviting. There is no other spirit living within him; what, then, prevents its return?

To put it more plainly — if we cut out the symbolic circumlocution — the man still wants food; and he hasn’t set his mind on embodying anything greater than food during the time he was abstaining. So as soon as the food is available again, he returns straight to placing it at the head of his desires. And this is true, of course, for all kinds of things — whether it is indulging our appetite for food, or for stories, or for trivia, or for social recognition, or for laughter, or for news, or for sexy women, or for controversy, or for gossip, or for cars, or for equipment. Whatever it is that scratches the itch and keeps us preoccupied, busy, feeling. The longing of the flesh, the longing of the eyes, and the ostentation of life (1 Jn 2:16).

Abstaining from a thing does not tend to reduce our desire for it, any more than indulging in it does. On the contrary, it frequently increases our desire. When you do not eat, you get hungrier. Or, to use a more troubling example, when you don’t use your phone, you get bored, and are more inclined to pick it up. Sometimes it is such a powerful compulsion that you cannot help yourself. Hence Paul says that asceticism, the denial of the body, has indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship, and humble-mindedness, and severity to the body; but is of no value against the indulgence of the flesh (Colossians 2:23).

How could it be — for it does not diminish, but rather inflames, the desires of the flesh to be indulged?

Natural versus artificial longings

Now, at this point I should make a distinction. There is an important difference between the appetite we have for food, and the appetite we have for checking our phone. One is natural, and the other isn’t. One is never going to go away, while the other would — if the power grid went down, and we all had to go back to farming with our hands and living like our ancestors did. I know, it’s hard to believe, but I guarantee within a week you wouldn’t be thinking about your phone any more, except for how sad you are that you never bothered to save any PDFs about how to make a windmill or a hand pump, or always assumed that if you ever needed to identify edible mushrooms you’d have access to the internet. But the desire to check your notifications wouldn’t exist any more.

The desire to eat food would.

We have natural longings, built into us because they directly serve the telos of our natures; and we have artificial longings, built on top of these natural longings by social and technological pressures.

Notice that the artificial longings are not fabricated out of nothing — they are based in natural longings. We naturally long for social inclusion and recognition — that is why you can make someone check their phone 205 times a day. If they had no natural longing to exploit, they would have no reason to check the phone. And it may seem strange, but the artificial longings are actually more powerful and harder to satisfy than the natural ones. For instance, if you know anything about B.F. Skinner and his ambivalent relationship with pigeons, you will probably remember that he discovered that they are very interested in food — and therefore very interested in the click of a food dispenser. But while they would stop seeking food when their bellies were full, they took far longer to get tired of hearing the food dispenser click. The artificial longing for the food dispenser was stronger and longer-lasting than their natural desire for food.

This is not one of Skinners pidgies, but it is one of my favorites, which some unappreciatively call the “common” bronzewing.

We are not very different from pigeons. Well, actually we are much worse. Think of how often you have seen a whole bunch of people trying to make the “food dispenser” click, while they ignore the actual “food” right in front of them. How many people you have seen indulging the artificially-conditioned desire to check their phones, while they are literally sitting together at a table of other people who are ready and able to give them the social recognition they’re looking for, in real life, at that very moment?

You can go to any restaurant and see an entire family sitting around the same table, eating alone.

I think it is important to recognize this distinction between natural and artificial longings, because the latter are more enslaving than the former, and therefore may need to be dealt with more severely — and even cut off entirely sometimes. It can occasionally be necessary, I think, to remove a source of artificial longing, so that we can properly exercise and restore the natural longing on which it is based. Sometimes an artificial longing is actually wicked, as is the case with something like porn. But sometimes it just inclines us to a wicked neglect of the natural longing that it relies on. It becomes like a parasite, feeding on the natural longing without actually fulfilling it. Video games often fall into this category for men, who want the effortless, vicarious participation in highly-skilled dominion over a virtual world — rather than the real participation in real dominion over the real world…which is also real tiring and real difficult.

I would like to keep this distinction in the back of our minds, between natural and artificial longings, but move forward to ask what scripture says about how to rightly order our longings in general. Whatever it says about natural longings can probably be applied to artificial ones, even if we must apply that advice more strictly. We have seen that indulging our desires does not work; and we have seen that abstaining from our desires does not work. Both tend to inflame them further, rather than increase our self-control. When we pig out, our appetites grow out of control and enslave us; and when we diet, our appetites seem controlled for a while, but then spring back stronger than ever, and enslave us anyway.

So what are we to do? What is the alternative?

Fasting versus dieting

Scripture’s answer is, in part, fasting. And here we must draw a critical distinction.

A fast is not a diet.

Both its purpose, and its method, are different: a diet is restraining one particular appetite — almost always food — and almost always for reasons that are focused on ourselves. People generally diet because they do not like how they look; they do not like that they have become unhealthy; they recognize that they need to lose weight. None of this is necessarily bad. It can be mere vanity, but it can also be a sincere effort to repent of sin and turn toward virtue. But it is a shallow effort. It is the kind of effort that seems natural to someone who has been shaped by consumerism.

Even our solutions to consumerism are consumeristic. You choose your diet from all the possible options. You pick the one that is most convenient. You want it to be tailored to you. Most of all, it must be about what you want. You want to be thin. You want to look good in the mirror. You want to stave off diabetes and early-onset dementia. You want more self-control. You want to become someone who eats well.

But this is the attitude of the hypocrites to fasting.

And when ye may fast, be ye not as the hypocrites, looking sad, for they make their faces unshowable, that they may be shown forth to men as fasting; truly I say to you that they have their reward. (Matthew 6:16)

You could say they are not really fasting; they are doing a glamor diet. A vanity show, so people will know how virtuous they are. Look at how they afflict themselves!

Truly they have had their reward.

But a fast — a true fast — is not like this. This is the point of Jesus’ instruction to his disciples.

But thou, fasting, anoint thy head, and wash thy face, that thou mayest not show forth to men as fasting, but to thy Father who is in secret; and thy Father, who seeth in secret, shall reward thee. (Matthew 6:17–18)

A fast is not focused on a single appetite, and even more importantly, it is not focused on you. It is not something you do for bodily benefit, or for social recognition. Not that bodily benefit is of no use — of course, Paul tells us that bodily exercise, of which fasting is certainly a kind, is profitable for a little. But the point of fasting is not focused on bodily exercise, but rather on piety, which is profitable for all things.

exercise thyself unto piety: for bodily exercise is profitable for a little; but piety is profitable for all things, having promise of the life which now is, and of that which is to come. (1 Timothy 4:7–8)

You fast for God — not for man (which includes yourself). You are seeking the reward of closer participation in the divine nature; fasting is the means by which you do this.

How, though? How does fasting do this, and why does it do this when dieting doesn’t?

Well, look at how Jesus explains it to Satan: “Not upon bread alone doth man live, but upon every word coming forth from the mouth of God.” This explains the purpose of fasting in Jesus’ mind. Why not eat? Why not make the stones into bread? Because the reason for fasting in the first place is to remind the soul that there is something more important than physical food — there is spiritual food. If there is physical food, there is also spiritual food (cf. 1 Cor 15:44). The idea of fasting is not to deny the body so that it will somehow learn to stop needing food. You are not trying to turn off the body. Rather, you are using the suffering of the body as it longs for food as a way to remind yourself of what food really is. You are denying your body for the purpose of directing its longings toward the true end which they symbolize. The physical images the spiritual, and our need for food means something:

…his disciples were asking him, saying, “Rabbi, eat;” and he said to them, “I have food to eat that ye have not known.” The disciples then said one to another, “Did any one bring him anything to eat?” Jesus saith to them, “My food is that I may do the will of him who sent me, and may finish his work.” (John 4:31–34)

In other words, Jesus turns away from physical food, that he might be more acutely aware of its true meaning, its true fulfillment — and the true importance of that. He heightens the needs of his body, so that what they express — the need for God — is similarly heightened. Fasting is the antidote to the spiritual affliction caused by excessive ease, excessive gratification, which God warns the Israelites about as they are preparing to enter the promised land:

Take heed to thyself, lest thou forget Yahweh thy god so as not to keep his commands, and his judgments, and his statutes which I am commanding thee today; lest thou eat, and hast been satisfied…all that is thine be multiplied, and thy heart hath been lifted up, and thou hast forgotten Yahweh thy God. (Deuteronomy 8:11–14)

Our physical needs are designed to teach us about our spiritual needs. So when our physical needs are met, and we are physically at ease, it is natural to become spiritually at ease also. When our physical senses are indulged, they become dulled, and our spiritual senses become dulled also.

Think what a great danger this is in the modern day, when we have so much more than the simple kinds of wealth that God warned the Israelites would cause them to forget him!

Our senses are not just indulged, but glutted; and this overstimulation does not cause greater sensitivity, but rather numbness — and so we become not merely physically numb, but spiritually also.

Afflicting the soul

Hence, God calls the Israelites to assemble once every year, on Yom Kippur, to afflict their souls, and humble themselves before him, and remember their need for him:

And on the tenth of this seventh month a holy convocation ye shall have, and ye shall afflict your souls; ye do no work (Numbers 29:7)

Afflicting one’s soul refers to a fast; see for instance the use of the same phrase in Psalm 35:13:

And I—in their sickness, my clothing was sackcloth, I afflicted with fastings my soul, and prayed with head bowed on my chest.

We also see here that fasting and prayer go together — as they do when Ezra is leading the Israelites back to the promised land from the exile in Persia:

Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might afflict ourselves before our God, to seek of him a straight way for us, and for our little ones, and for all our substance. (Ezra 8:21)

Fasting is always about seeking God, which is why it is combined with prayer. These are a natural pairing; if you are fasting, of course you are praying. Seeking God is the whole point. Hence we read, for instance, of Paul and Barnabas, that

having appointed to them by vote elders in every assembly, having prayed with fastings, they commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed. (Acts 14:23)

While we see in these passages that fasting is especially appropriate for particular times and seasons, to bring specific needs before God, Jesus’ instructions about it indicate that it ought to be a regular practice. He tells us that when we fast, we should not be like the hypocrites — not meaning that we should not fast as often as them, but that we should not make a show of it. Well which hypocrites does he mean? We know that the chief object of his critiques are always the scribes and Pharisees. “Woe you, scribes and Pharisees — hypocrites!” And we know how often they fasted, do we not? Yes we do:

the Pharisee having stood by himself, thus prayed: “God, I thank thee that I am not as the rest of men, rapacious, unrighteous, adulterers, or even as this tax-collector; I fast twice in the week.” (Luke 18:11–12)

Am I saying that Jesus is implying we must fast twice a week? I am saying that he is implying we should fast regularly and often — because we need to seek God regularly and often. Scripture is plain that the way to cultivate piety is through normal use of our natural appetites and longings — combined with regular and not infrequent fasting to refocus our attention especially on God.

I also mentioned before that fasting refers to more than merely food. Since the purpose is to seek God, fasting is a turning away from all our bodily longings — all the natural desires we experience, all the sensory stimulation we crave, all the distractions that compete for our attention; everything which sets us at ease, or makes us forgetful of God. Think of the counsel Paul gives married couples:

Defraud not each other, except by consent for a time, that ye may be free for prayer; and again may come together, that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of control. (1 Corinthians 7:5)

Here is the biblical pattern in a nutshell. The aim is not to cultivate greater self-control through continual fasting — for fasting will test your self-control and place you under greater temptation. Rather, the aim is to make proper use of your natural longings at most times — in this case the longing for marital intimacy — while some times fasting for the purpose of devoting yourself to prayer, re-focusing yourself on God, and, in the words of Psalm 62, being still before him.

Fasting and rest

If you are thinking in patterns, as I hope you are by now, you may notice that the way scripture speaks of fasting looks a lot like a sabbath pattern. Yet this seems paradoxical, because the sabbath is a feast day. But remember, the sabbath is also a fast day, because you rest from your work. Fasting is a broader pattern that, oddly, can include feasting. You can fast from work by feasting, or you can fast from food by…fasting.

The reason I mention this, though, is because understanding fasting as a sabbath pattern helps us to answer some practical questions. For instance, most people tend to think that fasting requires not eating all day. But they don’t tend to think of fasting as meaning that you shouldn’t work all day. Yet biblically, you could fast just as effectively by focusing on not working, as not eating. And it need not be for a day or days at a time — it could simply be a short time, an hour or two. Moreover, if you are turning away from all your regular habits and routines in order to better seek God through that contrast, then it makes sense to even apply the idea of the waterless places, the desert wilderness, that the unclean spirit passes through, in a fairly literal way. Think of how Jesus establishes a fasting pattern with his disciples:

“Come ye yourselves apart to a desert place, and rest a little” — for those coming and those going were many, and they had no opporunity even to eat (Mark 6:31)

Indeed, you notice that the more the burden of his mission weighs upon him — the more overstimulated he gets, you might say — the more time Jesus deliberately makes for fasting from his work:

but the more was the report going abroad concerning him, and great multitudes were coming together to hear, and to be healed by him of their infirmities, and he was withdrawing himself in the desert places and was praying. (Luke 5:15–16)

Fasting is a retreat to the wilderness. A retreat to the desert. That is where God meets Moses. That is where Jesus goes to seek God, away from the crowds and the world. And in the Christian tradition, that is where the holy men went, who were especially known for fasting. I do not necessarily commend the desert fathers as entirely reliable guides; I think they took asceticism and denial of the body rather too far, and veered more into the sorts of practices we see in pagan religions like Hinduism. But they were seeking to be faithful to a real biblical pattern that really can inform our own lives. When we think about fasting, we should be thinking in terms of retreat from our regular worlds, from our regular habits, for the purpose of seeking and serving God. For instance, fasting traditionally goes along with alms-giving, as well as prayer. You give up your food for those who have none. As Isaiah says, God does not desire that we afflict ourselves for affliction’s sake, but for the sake of becoming more like him, and establishing his heavenly patterns more fully in the earth:

Is such the fast that I choose? The day of a man’s afflicting his soul? To bow his head as a reed, and spread out sackcloth and ashes? This callest thou a fast, and a desirable day to Yahweh? Is not this the fast that I chose— to loose the bands of wickedness, to shake off the burdens of the yoke, and to send out the oppressed free, and every yoke ye draw off? Is it not to deal to the hungry thy bread, and the mourning poor bring home, that thou seest the naked and cover him, and from thine own flesh hide not thyself? (Isaiah 58:5–7)

Fasting, in other words, is breaking from our regular and necessary pattern of serving ourselves and our own bodies — which is good in its place — to put it in its place by seeking God instead.

Fasting, meaning, and happiness

This makes it a matter of urgent importance for us today. I would say that if there were only one practice we should focus on recovering to counteract the effect of the world on our hearts and minds — to break the power of devices over our affections, of entertainment over our longings, to thwart the powerful pull of social media and YouTube — it must be fasting.

I am not saying that the church today has forgotten God because it has forgotten how to fast — but it is impossible to deny the correlation between consumer culture and the impotence of God’s people. And it is impossible to deny that the straightforward solution that scripture gives to consumerism is fasting.

Nor do I want you to think this is purely a practical matter of breaking an addiction. I do think fasting is a great help for dealing with the enslavement that comes from consumerism — but that is almost a secondary issue compared to the deeper spiritual problems that come along with that enslavement. Think again of Jesus saying he has food to eat which his disciples do not know — the food of doing his Father’s work. His fasting is a way of focusing on true food, which is spiritually discerned. And think again of how God warns the Israelites not to forget him when they grow fat, and not to think that they gained their riches by their own hand. The way to avoid such forgetfulness is established in the fast of Yom Kippur; which of course should be observed and replicated as a fractal pattern throughout an Israelite’s daily liturgy, his daily habits.

In other words, scripture gives fasting as the solution to a particular problem — and that problem is what you might call the breakdown of meaning: the disconnection between how you interpret your life, and what your life is supposed to mean.

When you fail to set aside due time to “reconnect” with God, so to speak, you start to get a skewed perspective on life; you start to forget and misinterpret all the physical meaning in your life — and over time, this will set you on the road to hell. The hierarchy of meaning starts to disintegrate, because it is no longer being tethered to God and set back in order. This is what fasting does. As Tim Nichols says:

The problem is internal: the Creator has gifted you a meaningful life in a meaningful world, and you have failed to see any meaning in it. The corresponding solution must also be internal: you need eyes to see the meaning that is already there, all around you.

The way that you do this is through fasting. Paradoxically, this is most exemplified and fulfilled in Lord’s Day worship, as you fast from the rest of your life by feasting with God. But Lord’s Day worship is not sufficient if you are not taking the same pattern out into that “rest of your life.” If the pattern of fasting or sabbath does not flow down into all of your habits, into your daily liturgy, then what is the use of it? What have you learned?

Let me return to where I began, so I can connect fasting to the main problem I have already identified. In the last couple of issues, I have been indirectly angling toward a biblical doctrine of happiness. The modern world is characterized by boredom and lethargy and depression; we are listless and fruitless and inert — we are unhappy. And I believe it is clear that this is caused very largely by covetousness: by consumer culture; by choice and convenience.

Now I trust you can see just on the surface how fasting is the natural antidote to that. It is the opposite of consumerism. It is refusing to consume, for the purpose of more directly consuming God. It is thus the solution to the boredom, the misery, the lack of purpose and direction inherent in consumerism.

All of these things are really just a form of meaninglessness: a breakdown of meaning.

Why do you compulsively check your phone? Because you have no meaning in that moment. You are searching for some meaning, something purposeful, because you feel empty. You are so unaccustomed to being alone with your thoughts, just you and God, or having to formulate some meaning of your own, that you just automatically, almost desperately, seek out meaning from your device. But all you will find there is more meaninglessness. Nothing you are seeking there can have the value to hold your attention. It may be stimulating you, but it is not adding value to you; it is not moving you toward God; it is not directing you upward; it is not connecting you with anything good, true, or beautiful.

It is doing the opposite.

The only answer to this is the true meaning found in God. And the way that scripture gives us to ensure that we are properly set upon this meaning…is fasting. Resetting ourselves by casting aside all the less meaningful things, all the distractions, all the stimulations — and fixing our attention on God. “Only, for God be silent, O my soul” (Psalm 62:5). As the hymn says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

I am not sure that most people today are really capable of such silence and stillness. I think we find it extremely difficult. Our minds are not trained to it. It sounds boring — because we have come to equate boredom with a lack of stimulation, rather than a lack of meaning.

But if boredom really is a lack of meaning, we are actually only making ourselves more bored by being unable to do something as simple and practical as fasting.

I have already shown that how scripture speaks of happiness is directly correlated with meaning; happiness comes from the ability to discern the good purposes even in the bad experiences:

So let me suggest to you then, that the opposite of happiness, scripturally speaking, is not so much sadness as meaningless.

Or, to put it slightly differently, hopelessness. Think of how Paul describes pagans as “having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). Does this not describe our generation? Are we not of all people the most hopeless — despite having the most stuff constantly going on?

We are hopeless because we live in a world where nothing seems to matter. We are constantly fixing our attention on trivialities; we feel out of control. We have no sense of place, because we are dissipated into the ethereal space of the internet; and we have no sense of identity, because we focus more of ourselves into names on a screen than the people in our own lives. And on top of that, nothing we do seems to matter, to us or anyone else, because it all either takes place online, or when it takes place in real life, everyone else is online and doesn’t notice.

Having our focus in all kinds of unreal “places,” and on all kinds of things we can’t control, happening thousands of miles away, makes us feel helpless and hopeless.

Yet we keep making the problem worse by doubling down on all the habits that got us here — until we cannot rest at all. We cannot be still. We cannot sit without checking for notifications. We cannot relax without wanting some busy-work to feel productive.

We are aggressively amusing ourselves to death.

And the answer to all of this — I don’t say the only answer, but a very significant biblical answer — is fasting.

Until next time,

Bnonn

Notable links for September 2025

Bnonn Tennant — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 11:02:48 GMT

When Humans Prefer a Machine: Warnings from a 1960s Chatbot Creator

Weizenbaum wondered, “what can the psychiatrist’s image of his patient be when he sees himself, as therapist, not as an engaged human being acting as a healer, but as an information processor following rules?”

Brave New Biology: Intelligence Trumps DNA - with Dr. Michael Levin and Dr. John Vervaeke

More evidence that genes don’t encode the form of an organism (at least not deterministically). The example given is that Dr. Levin’s team has figured out how to convince a flatworm to create two heads per segment when it is divided up, instead of a head and tail — but if you sequenced the genome it would be identical to a normal flatworm. Other examples include the spontaneous generation of novel organisms given certain “promptings” that reconfigure them as an “interface” for what Levin proposes are patterns (ancient Christians would say logoi) for physical organisms that exist in a non-physical “space” which can be explored scientifically. Basically he has rediscovered morphic resonance, or what I would call symbolic realism.

A perspective on Charlie Kirk and TPUSA from Matt Trewhella that exposes some very troubling issues:

The Sins of Different Sub-Cultures

Savage:

That’s all for this month.

Bnonn

What are you becoming? Discerning the end of what you choose to care about

Bnonn Tennant — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 11:37:35 GMT

We participate in what we are becoming.

Everything alive is in the process of becoming something. A seedling is becoming a tree. A puppy is becoming a dog. A dog is becoming an old dog. A human being is becoming the image of God — or not, as the case may be.

But only the human being is participating in his own becoming.

The sapling has an end to which it is growing — but it does not have a will to direct toward that end. It does not decide to grow one way rather than the other. God does decide it, of course — but the tree does not have a rational soul to choose how to become.

The dog does not either. It has a conscious soul, and a will which it can direct — but it does not reflect upon what it is doing. It does not consider what it is becoming, and choose to become one kind of dog rather than another. It can control its actions in the moment — but it does not control what it is becoming. It does not have a mind to do that.

Such a mind is reserved to men and angels. I dare not speculate on how this applies to angels, beyond observing that they do have the ability to choose to become evil, since we know that Satan and his companions did this. It does not much matter what angels can do though, because we are not angels — we are men. So the question we are concerned with is…

What are we becoming?

This is the question at the heart of nearly everything I write about here. I think it is helpful to frame it as a question — and a short one — to give our minds something to grab onto; I cannot possibly hope to comment on every possible choice a man might make day to day, and even on the issues that I do speak to — social media, entertainment, conspiracy theories etc — there is so much complexity, and so many variables, and the right thing to do is often so dependent on your own personal situation rather than a general rule, that having a simple question you can ask can be very helpful to navigating these issues wisely.

So the question I think we should all be asking ourselves with everything we do is:

“What am I becoming?”

If you can answer that question, or at least get a general idea of the direction that the answer lies in, then you can compare it with God’s own plan for what you should be becoming. There is an end for which he made us. We should always be trying to move toward that end, because it is an end which is frankly so astronomical, so extraordinary, so wonderful, that it is hard to contemplate, let alone write on, with sufficient gravity. The words of scripture itself scarcely do justice to it — not because the word of God can fail, but because human language is too weak to express the weight of it:

his divine power hath granted unto us all things that pertain unto life and piety, through the knowledge of him that called us through his own glory and worthiness; through which to us the most great and precious promises have been given, that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world in desires. (2 Peter 1:3–4)

The end for which we are made is to become partakers in the divine nature. This is what we are — should be — becoming. If we have true faith in Christ, we are becoming partakers of the divine nature.

But it does not happen automatically. I don’t mean that God’s promises to us can fail — Peter says that God has promised that we will become partakers in the divine nature, and he has given to us all things that pertain to life and piety in order to accomplish this promise. But far from making us complacent, far from being able to sit back and let it happen, to “let go and let God,” Peter goes on immediately to say that

for this very cause, all diligence having brought in besides, superadd in your faith worthiness; and in worthiness, knowledge; and in knowledge, self-control; and in self-control, endurance; and in endurance, piety; and in piety, brotherly affection; and in brotherly affection, love; for these things, being abounding unto you, do make you neither inert nor unfruitful unto the knowledge of our Lord Jesus the Anointed. (2 Peter 1:5–8)

We are to add these things to our faith in order that we may enter the eternal kingdom of CHrist. This is a choice that we have: to do, or not do. We must participate in what we are becoming — we must work together with God in making ourselves partakers of the divine nature.

Yet we are easily tempted to trade true participation, which is hard work, for vicarious participation, which is very easy.

As I discussed in issue #156, true participation means actually exercising ourselves in the very thing we are becoming; vicarious participation means, essentially, watching someone else do it, as a proxy or figurehead or representative for ourselves, so that we feel like we have done it, while in fact we have not.

This is a temptation which is far greater today, and a trap that is far easier to fall into, because of the staggering prevalence of both entertainment and social media. Entertainment offers us stories of people exercising themselves in virtue, which we can enjoy and participate in without having to exercise ourselves; and social media gives us enormous opportunities for virtue-signalling, rather than virtue-doing. We live in a world that wants to turn our re-creation in the image of Christ into recreation with whatever counterfeit of that image will pass muster before our eyes; whatever substitute for true participation we will accept.

Corruption in the world by lust

There is a connection here which I think is very important. In speaking of our becoming partakers of the divine nature, Peter connects what we are becoming to what we have escaped from:

ye may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world in desires.

Many translations say the corruption in the world “by lust.” Peter is here speaking of worldly corruption because of desire — but this word desire is a tricky one to translate. In the Greek it is epithymia, which I mention because it’s a word you might come across if you read symbolic thinkers in the Christian space: some of them will use this term untranslated, because there is no one English word that captures its full meaning. It refers to the longings of the heart, the lusts of the heart, the covetings of the heart, the desires within us.

It can be used positively, as Jesus tells his disciples, “With epithymia I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Lk 22:15); or Paul tells the Thessalonians that he, being bereaved of them for a short season, endeavored the more exceedingly to see their face with great epithymia (1 Thess 2:17).

But more often it is used to refer to longings that are evil: either because they are not properly ordered, and get placed before God; or because they are longings for things that are wicked and perverse in themselves. This is the kind of longing, the kind of desire, that Peter refers to here — the same kind of which the Lord Jesus speaks in the parable of the sower, when he says,

the cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the epithymias of other things, entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. (Mk 4:19)

Peter does not want us to be unfruitful. He does not want what God has promised to us to be choked by longings for other things. He does not want us to be diverted from becoming partakers in the divine nature, and steered by our desires into becoming partakers of something else entirely. And indeed, he warns us very severely in chapter 2 of his letter that such a thing is possible — as he describes the terrible destruction caused by false teachers:

For, speaking great swellings of emptiness, they entice in the epithymia of the flesh, with debauchery, those who are just escaping from them that live in error; promising them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom anyone is overcome, by the same is he also brought into slavery. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Anointed, they are again entangled therein and overcome [cf. the parable of the sower], the last state is become worse with them than the first. For it were better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered unto them. It has happened unto them according to the true proverb: a dog did turn back upon his own vomit, and a sow, having washed herself, to rolling in mire. (2 Peter 2:18–22)

I want to draw your attention to three things in this passage:

The first is that Peter describes the gospel as a holy commandment. It is something you can break, something you can, in his word, “turn back from.”

The second is that it is a holy commandment you can obey for a while, before you turn back from it. He is speaking here of those who have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior, who have known the way of righteousness — before they are again overcome. Yet just a chapter before, he told us that God has promised we will become partakers in the divine nature. How can anyone promised that, then fall away? Does God’s promise fail? No; Peter is speaking covenantally, not individually. It is indeed possible to taste of the heavenly gift, and be made partakers in the Holy Spirit…and then to fall away (Heb 6:4). And so Paul warns us also, in another place, not to be deceived, for the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God. He does not speak of those covered by the righteousness of Christ, of course, for then he would simply be saying that the unbelieving won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Rather, as he makes plain, he is speaking of those claiming the name of Christ who remain fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminates, homosexuals, thieves, drunkards, revilers, extortioners, and — most importantly for our purposes today — covetous (1 Cor 6:9–10).

Covetousness is the chief issue, because it brings us to the third point I want to emphasize in what Peter tells us: which is that the thing which overcomes temporary Christians — those who turn away from the holy commandment — is the enticement of the desires of the flesh: the longings of the flesh, fo the defilements of the world.

This should stir up within us a great concern for our own souls, and drive us to greater watchfulness over our care for the holy commandment — because we all know how much desire and longing and craving and covetousness the modern world can provoke within us. We don’t tend to think in these terms, which is itself part of the defilement of the world. The world defiles everything — including language. Think of how the control of the dictionary is at the center of the spiritual war going on in the West today. What does gay mean? Does it mean happy and joyful and carefree? What does man mean? Does it mean a biological human male? Have you thought about the fact that it is actually possible for the same thing to happen to the words man and woman as has already happened to the word gay? Have you considered that English Bibles in the 22nd century might have to do something like transliterate the Hebrew words instead of use our current English ones, because “God made man in his image” will no longer have the proper meaning?

Nor are we immune to the defilement of language ourselves. How often do we obscure the true nature of our desires behind words like “hankering,” or even “craving” — rather than “covetousness” or “lust”?

“One more slice of pizza would really hit the spot.”

Vs…

“I am greedy for one more slice of pizza.”

Or:

“I’m just going to scratch the itch to check my notifications.”

Vs…

“I covet knowing if someone has given me attention in the last few minutes.”

Or:

“I’ve really been looking forward to watching the next episode.”

Vs…

“I have been lusting after the next episode.”

Or:

“I binge watched that series.”

Vs…

“I gluttonously consumed that series.”

Craving, consumerism, and convenience

Now, let me walk back what I have said — a little. I have deliberately phrased it very strongly, very starkly, because thinking in biblical categories doesn’t come naturally to anyone inculturated into the modern West. Scripture speaks plainly and ruthlessly about the defilement of the world and the longing of our flesh, and how deadly these things are; but they are the water we swim in.

However. It does not say that every longing is equally deadly; nor that everything in the world that appeals to us is defiling. Obviously it is not necessarily defiling or dangerous to long for pizza if you are really hungry. It is not necessarily defiling or dangerous to be curious about whether someone has responded to a post you wrote. It is not necessarily defiling or dangerous to eagerly anticipate the next episode of a well-told story. It is not even necessarily defiling or dangerous to enjoy the whole story all at once, by watching every episode back to back. We have to maintain balance, as Paul tells Timothy:

To the pure all things are pure: but to them that are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. (Titus 1:15)

The problem is that we are often not as pure as we think, and one way we convince ourselves otherwise is by using defiled language that makes the nature of our desires sound innocent, when they are not.

We must remember that the world — the sinful order of man set up against the Lord and his kingdom — wants to defile us. It wants to ensnare us. It is certainly possible for the things of the world to be pure to us; that is, for us to use them in a pure way. But this will only be possible when we have a clear-eyed and sober view of what it is we are using…and what it wants to do to us.

Let me speak in general terms for the moment. Above, I chose the examples of food and social media and entertainment for good reason — but these are just examples.

Think generally of what characterizes our whole modern world. What kind of spirit is it of? What sorts of patterns are prevalent in it? What kinds of behaviors does it draw people toward and encourage?

The word consumerism has long been used to describe it. That word is even more apt today than when it was first coined, because the spirit of consumerism has grown and advanced and gained strength and power in ways that were literally unimaginable to most people 50 years ago, when the term first became mainstream. Back then, consumption required physical objects. Even music had to be bought on records and then tapes. But today, consumption largely happens digitally, which means that there are no physical constraints on it whatsoever. The only physical constraint is our own ability to stay awake and pay attention to whatever it is that is consuming our desire.

If there are two things that characterize consumerism — and which have been all but perfected by it — it would probably be:

Choice;
Convenience.

These are the gods of our day. In fact, I suspect that if you take any of the degenerate social problems plaguing the West today, from transgenderism on the one side to red profile pics with blue laser eyes on the other, you will discover at its root an idolatrous commitment to either choice, or convenience, or both. You will find that if its adherents had not been thoroughly formed by the spirit of choice and convenience, they would never have ended up thinking the things they are thinking, doing the things they are doing, loving the things they are loving, or demanding the things they are demanding.

But this is likely to then be true of all of us — at least about some things, and to some degree. We are all swimming in the sea of consumerism, of choice and convenience; so the church should be much more concerned than it seems to be with trying to figure out whether and how we are getting wet.

Both choice and convenience inculcate and train us in covetousness. There is a reason that the ten commandments end with, “Thou shalt not covet.” We should gloss this as, “Thou shalt not long after anything in a disordered way.”

But we do long after many things, and the world has trained us to do so — consumerism is nothing but longing after things, is it not? So how likely is it that we are always longing after things in an ordered way?

I said before, not all longings are disordered or defiled. But how can we tell?

Certainly the longing for continual options, the expectation of being able to choose between so many things, is not generally putting us on a biblical trajectory. This is obvious if you think about the way that scripture speaks of the end goal of our own sanctification. God tells us that his word is sufficient to complete us:

every Writing is breathed out by God, and profitable for teaching, for rebuke, for setting aright, for instruction that is in righteousness, that the man of God may be outfitted — for every good work having been completed. (2 Timothy 3:16–17)

Or Hebrews invokes the blessing of God to “make you perfect in every good thing to do his will” (Heb 13:21).

Or think of John 17:23, when Jesus prays that his disciples “may be perfected into one.” There are actually three different Greek words in these three different passages; all pointing toward the same idea of completion and maturity and wholeness, which of course is imaged in the old covenant with the sacrifices of animals that must be perfect, whole, not having any blemish or shortcoming.

But if you are always wanting more, how can you possibly be complete and whole?

How can you be perfect in this biblical sense?

I don’t mean that we should never desire anything, of course, because that is not only impossible, but actually ungodly in the other direction. God has given us needs and appetites, not to destroy them, but to perfect and complete them. Our appetites and affections, our desires and longings, will themselves be made whole and completely met and fulfilled in the resurrection, and that is what we are training ourselves in now. We are participating — we should be participating — in what we are becoming.

But I am talking about the way in which consumerism, through continual choice, through the constant offering of more, trains us to be always searching, and never satisfied. There’s always another item ready to scroll into view. There’s always another show to watch. There’s always another piece of music to discover. There’s always another rabbit hole to go down.

One of the hallmarks of covetousness is always wanting more. The desire for novelty. But that is what things like social media and Netflix and YouTube are literally training us to always want. It is nothing but novelty — that is how they survive. So these things are not neutral.

They want us to become covetous.

They are training us to become covetous.

They are seeking to form us into covetors.

That does not mean we cannot use them, because we can resist, of course. To the pure, all things are pure. But we cannot be pure if we do not know what is happening, and what the cost is of resisting these temptations.

And it’s not just the novelty that draws us away from biblical perfection, completion, wholeness and maturity. It is the endless customization of the options available. We have come to expect, as a kind of right, that we have access to things which perfectly suit our tastes. We should not have to listen to any music that doesn’t immediately gratify our senses — because, after all, we can find dozens, hundreds, thousands of tracks that do. We skip over everything that doesn’t immediately appeal, in search of what will. Imagine if we let our children do this with food. Imagine how stunted and unhealthy they would become. The expectation that we should always have access to that which most satisfies us in the moment — to whatever we naturally like, and then even further than that, to only what we happen to be in the mood for — is another way in which we are tempted to become incomplete, un-whole, imperfect, immature. It stunts us, because we never learn to appreciate anything beyond what we already naturally do.

It is like a man who only ever tries to deadlift a weight that is comfortable for him. Or a woman who never tries new ingredients or recipes. Or a child who never goes out of his comfort zone, and therefore never really grows up.

Ironically, when we have access to all the choices we could possibly want, we end up spending our time consuming more and more on less and less. The more we want, the more samey it becomes. It makes us banal and boring.

But not only does it do this — it also makes us impatient. “I’m not going to listen to that, I’m not in the mood, NEXT” — you impatiently skip to the next song. “This show isn’t grabbing me within the first minute, I’ll try something else.” It’s the same principle as fast food — we should be able to get everything now, or at least right away.

You see how choice and convenience are intimately connected.

But this is training us to be impatient…and impatience is the epitome of faithlessness. Unwillingness to wait is deadly to faith:

Be still for Yahweh, and stay thyself for Him…
Wait for Yahweh, and keep his way
And he will exalt thee to inherit the land. (Psalm 37:7)

Wait for Yahweh:
Be strong, and let thy heart take courage;
Yea, wait thou for Yahweh. (Psalm 27:14)

My soul, wait thou in silence for God only
For my expectation is from him. (Psalm 62:5)

Wait for Yahweh, and he will save thee. (Proverbs 20:22)

What does Peter say we must add to our faith? One of the things he lists is endurance. This is translated in many Bibles, patience. In Luke’s version of the parable of the sower, Jesus speaks of the seeds that fell on the good ground, describing them as “such as, in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it fast, and bring forth fruit with patience” (Lk 8:15). Romans 2:7 says that to them that by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and incorruption, God will give the reward of eternal life. The author of Hebrews exhorts his readers “that ye be not sluggish, but imitators of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises” (Heb 6:12) — and warns them that “ye have need of patience, that having done the will of God, ye may receive the promise” (Heb 10:36); and so he exhorts them to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (Heb 12:1). And James tells us, “let patience have its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, lacking in nothing” (Jas 1:4).

Impatience is thus antithetical to the gospel. The whole pattern of salvation, the whole pattern of the gospel, the whole pattern of Christ, is the opposite of the pattern of the world. The world wants instant gratification. It wants the quick and easy win. But the gospel pattern is delayed gratification. It is the short-term loss for the long-term victory. Enduring the cross because of the joy set before us.

Again the Devil taketh him to a very high mount, and showeth to him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and saith to him, “All these to thee I will give, if falling down thou mayest bow to me.” Matthew 4:8–9

This is the essence of what consumerism promises. The short-cut to glory and dominion without having to go through the cross. Don’t take the bait. Those who try to save their lives will lose them.

Without patience, we cannot have endurance. And without endurance, we cannot persevere to the end.

The more we consume and the more choices we have before us, the harder it becomes to choose anything — and the less we are able to make hard choices.

We gradually lose the ability to say no to the easy things, and yes to the hard things.

We gradually lose the ability to direct ourselves, and start to become directed.

We stop participating in what we are becoming, and we simply become.

Endless choice and endless consumption turns us into animals.

The scientific term is ego depletion. The inability to exercise our will because it is tired out. Overwhelming choices cause us to be unable to choose things that are going to be harder, or more work, even though we know they will also be more fulfilling and rewarding; we end up always going for the “safe,” entertaining option instead. We become numb. We become inert. We become unfruitful. The very things Peter says we ought not to be, because of God’s power that he has given to us:

for these things, being abounding unto you, do make you neither inert nor unfruitful. (2 Peter 1:8)

Happiness and meaning

Is it any wonder, then, that we also become unhappy? My chief objective in some past issues was to understand happiness from a biblical perspective: what is it, and how can we get it?

This is still on my mind. To comprehensively answer this, we need to first comprehend the severity of the challenge that we face — and the danger of the sorts of longings that the world has perfected stimulating within us; longings which we have come to take for granted to such an enormous degree. It is precisely because of how natural and normal they seem to us that we must meditate on how unnatural and abnormal they are in the light of scripture.

If we do not take that seriously, neither will we take seriously the solutions that scripture offers.

Until we stop taking the patterns of the world for granted, we cannot take for granted the patterns that Christ gives us instead. They are hard patterns — in the nature of the case, sanctification is hard, and the world wants to offer us easy panaceas instead. It wants to heal the wound lightly. But it is only through the stripes of Christ that true healing is offered; and true participation in those stripes is how we become partakers in the divine nature. So next issue, I want to move on, and start to examine how scripture’s teaching on fasting can heal us of the boredom, the lethargy, the unhappiness, the general malaise and ennui, the fruitlessness and inertness of modern man — and teach us to participate in what we are becoming: partakers of the divine nature.

Until next month,

Bnonn

Conspiracy theories, wisdom and piety

Bnonn Tennant — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 04:14:19 GMT

I’m going to make some observations about what might be called the “conspiracy mindset,” and then apply some scripture to the issue.

My own observation is that people who are inclined to look for conspiracy theories become caught in a continually churning sea of information that has no bottom to stand on. They are always learning, but never arriving at a knowledge of the truth according to biblical standards. The pursuit is futile, and actually follows the same pattern as the occult: constantly being drawn further in with the promise of hidden knowledge — but never receiving any.

This leads to a kind of despair, and a commensurate futility of life. To rationalize this, the conspiracy theorist ends up doing the very thing they feared; the very thing that first motivated them: they end up believing what is false. The pursuit of unobtainable knowledge gradually eclipses the pursuit of true wisdom, and corrupts their mind until they struggle to believe normal, true things; while they are eager to believe obvious folly.

Conspiracy-minded people come to view everything through a lens of suspicion and mistrust, unmoored from any firm epistemic foundations. And this shapes their hearts toward hating their neighbors (and God) by violating the ninth commandment: they no longer bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things (1 Cor 13:7); but rather the opposite.

Consider the duties of the ninth commandment. These include a charitable esteem of our neighbors, a ready receiving of a good report and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, and the discouraging of tale-bearers. And consider the sins forbidden by the ninth. These include whispering and evil suspicion, along with scoffing, reviling, misconstruing intentions, raising false rumors, and receiving and countenancing evil reports (WLC Q. 144 & 145). Unless you are remarkably sheltered, to simply list these things is to make the point — these just are the conspiracy mindset at work. The conspiracy theorist entertains evil suspicions, finds evidence for them that doesn’t meet the biblical standard for determining guilt, and then makes accusations while holding in contempt anyone who requires such standards.

This is wicked — and to be expected. We know that the pursuit of love deflates — but builds others up; while the pursuit of knowledge puffs us up — but tears others down (cf. 1 Cor 8:1). How much more for the pursuit of hidden knowledge?

None of what I’ve said is to pre-judge whether any conspiracy theory is true or false. Scripture itself teaches us that there are true conspiracies — and not only this, but also that those propagating them will use the idea of a conspiracy theory to discredit truth-seeking. The Sanhedrin did this with the resurrection (Mt 28:11–15). The devil is a liar, and his children do his will (Jn 8:44): spiritual realities are behind secular events (Eph 2:2; 6:12; cf. 3:10). The whole world really does lie in the power of the evil one (1 Jn 5:19; cf. Jn 14:30; 2 Cor 4:4; Mt 13:19; Dan 10:13, 20 etc).

When Scripture plainly tells us that spiritual beings exercise great power over world leaders and events, to the point that it describes these beings as princes, authorities, rulers and dominions, what else can that be called but a kind of conspiracy?

Yet God does not encourage us to try to to discern all the unknowable purposes and machinations going on behind the scenes. Indeed, he warns us against incautiously delving into these things, by keeping such information from us (despite our lust for it); and by continually focusing our attention instead on our own small and mundane duties. Some things are not given to us to know.

This brings me to the question of “what should we do?”

Am I saying we just ignore the fact that conspiracies are (sometimes) being perpetrated against us? Doesn’t it matter? Isn’t pursuing the truth important? Shouldn’t we be exposing the unfruitful deeds of darkness — not unwittingly participating in them? Aren’t we supposed to protect ourselves from wickedness and falsehood?

Where is scripture’s focus and emphasis? Is it on the things we cannot control, or the things we can? Is it on the things that are far away, or the things that are in our immediate domain?

The face of the intelligent is to wisdom, and the eyes of a fool—at the end of the earth. (Proverbs 17:24)

Insatiable curiosity about things that really are beyond us is actually a sign of stupidity and foolishness; not intelligence and wisdom. True wisdom is exemplified in Psalm 131, where even David, a king, says:

Yahweh, my heart is not haughty, and mine eyes are not lifted up, and I have not gone in great things, and things too accomplished for me. 2 Have I not balanced and stilled my soul, as a weanling upon his mother—as the weanling upon me is my soul. 3 O Israel, wait for Yahweh, from now and unto the age!

So the proper approach to conspiracies (genuine or otherwise) is not the continual churning of information-seeking, but rather waiting on God, while keeping our own affairs. We should be much more concerned about whether the people we directly know are lying to us, than the people we do not know and never will know — and have no influence over. We should be much more interested in doing our duty in the lot we are given, than in whether or not others far removed from us are doing theirs. Let us be faithful in not sacrificing the things that God has made central on the altar of the things he has not. And let us be disciplined in discerning the certain and solid from vapor and vanity.

There is great potential for self-deception here because conspiracy theories often seem so pressing and urgent. But the fact is, I have yet to see a case where going down a rabbit-hole has seriously increased anyone’s ability to exercise love and piety. Faith and obedience has always proven more effective for equipping the saints against foolishness, and protecting them from error.

Given the choice between learning about conspiracies, and learning about God’s ways, it should be a no-brainer.

The modern “gospel of action” is an inversion of how Christians should judge what to do

Bnonn Tennant — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:08:27 GMT

In Star Trek: Into Darkness, there is a moment that reveals the heart of our modern “gospel of action.” The Enterprise is disabled by a superior foe, leaving only one obvious course of action: infiltrating the enemy ship, to take it from within.

But this means allying with a condemned war criminal.

Spock discerns Kirk’s intent to do so, and remonstrates with him; Kirk’s response summarizes the gospel of pragmatism we have all been discipled into. He justifies the legitimacy of his actions by what he thinks is possible:

“I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I only know what I can do.”

This is the opposite of the Christian moral calculus. It is an inversion of the wisdom that judges all actions by the fear of God, and by reflection upon his perfect law:

I have no idea what I can do. I only know what I am supposed to do.”

To put it more starkly, I have no idea what’s possible; only what’s right.

With God, all things are possible. But not all things are right.

To draw from another equally geeky franchise, modern heroes disciple us unironically in the philosophy that Portal’s “Still Alive” song treated as a dark irony, placed in the mouth of the villain:

“We do what we must because we can.”

For Christians, it ought be:

“We do what we must, because God can.”

We shouldn’t underestimate how much we have been conditioned by movies and television to believe that our imagination, our assessment of the possibilities, dictates what “must” be done. We have been assiduously discipled by thousands of films and shows where the hero follows this “gospel of action” and the providence of the screenwriter makes it work out in the end. Wisdom is justified by her children — and the screenwriter therefore teaches us that this way of judging what to do…is wisdom.

I am not, of course, speaking of situations where the villain does something evil, intending it for an evil end — but the providence of the screenwriter turns it to a good end (cf. Gen 50:20). I am speaking of situations where the hero does something evil, intending it for a good end — and the providence of the screenwriter justifies it, by achieving through it that very same good end.

A great example of this — one that shows the potential for Christian storytelling — occurs in Enterprise season 3. In one episode, Archer is “forced” to plunder an innocent ship for parts, leaving them stranded, so that he can continue his own mission of stopping the Xindi from destroying earth. The show plays it as a hard but necessary action, depicting how even a principled man is reduced to piracy out of desperation.

But of course, it works out in the end — and wisdom is justified by her children.

What if a Christian had written this arc? Indulge me a little foolishness; obviously Star Trek is innately anti-Christian, being created by a utopian humanistic atheist. But suppose you were to reform the Star Trek universe to be governed, as it should be, by the Triune God; and suppose you gave the Enterprise a God-fearing captain.

How could you turn the story of Archer’s piracy around?

Archer’s moral failure should lead to mission failure — or at least the credible threat of it. Perhaps the very ship he disabled turns out to be instrumental in later stopping the destruction of earth. Perhaps if he had simply prayed and waited, providence would have presented another and better solution (why does it seem awkward to suggest that we depict a starship captain praying?; it should not). Perhaps the consequences are subtle, and his moral failure sets up an almost insurmountable threat to completing his mission — so looking back, it is discernible as a judgment. But perhaps a more overt approach would have better narrative potential in the world of Star Trek: the only possible way for him to succeed becomes undoing his previous actions through time travel. There is already a time travel episode adjacent to this, so it’s hardly out of the way.

These are nerdy examples; I use them because I write what I know, but also because they are especially clear. But you will find similar narrative decisions across the gamut of media, and they become more obvious and more egregious as we turn the century, and fictitious leaders drift away from even the pretense of living under God. In the original series episode The Ultimate Computer, the rogue M-5 is defeated because its programming contradicts its actions: “murder is contrary to the laws of man and God.” But we’re a long way from that now.

Are modern Christians capable of reforming our culture and our stories? It will require them first to have the faith to adopt the biblical method of decision-making for themselves — in the teeth of the wisdom of the world. Refusing pragmatism looks like utter foolishness absent true faith. And if we can return to this — “I don’t know what I can do; I only know what I am supposed to do” — we will still need to figure out how to integrate this faith into stories, without turning them into sermons.

Notable links for August 2025

Bnonn Tennant — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:40:52 GMT

The Internet is Dying: AI, Bots, and The End of Human Content

Why The Movies Will Never Feel The Same Again

EXPOSING The Billion Dollar SECRET VPN Companies Are Hiding

Symbolism Explained: The Fundamental WWII Duality That Still Haunts Us Today

AI Psychosis Makes Sense Once You Understand the Tech

The Prism

How Social Media Shortens Your Life

I. THE NORMALISATION OF AMNESIA…

9 months ago · 602 likes · 55 comments · Gurwinder

That’s all for this month.

Bnonn

Notable links for July 2025

Bnonn Tennant — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 21:27:13 GMT

What is the “Greedy Algorithm” and Why is it So Dangerous?

Revolutionizing Comfort: Saudi Arabia's Innovative Mosque Umbrellas

The AI Girlfriend situation is SAD

JavaScript Is Not A Real Language

A pretty funny walkthrough of the quiz at https://jsdate.wtf.

AI makes you dumb and slow

TL;DR:

Why you might want to watch the new Superman movie

Should a Woman Work Outside the Home?

This question gets asked all the time, but usually it’s framed the wrong way. So let’s rework it. The real issue isn’t whether a woman can work outside the home. The issue is whether her work stays tethered to the home. And for that matter, men need that tether too. The difference is just the length…

9 months ago · 40 likes · 7 comments · Michael Foster

Latest from True Magic:

Talky Bnonnsense #15: Things we recommend (no paid promotions)

A grab-bag of advice on things worth knowing and doing that for some reason many people don’t know or do…

10 months ago · 3 likes · Bnonn Tennant and Smokey Tennant

That’s all for this month.

Bnonn

Notable links for June 2025

Bnonn Tennant — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 11:47:15 GMT

The World War II Consensus is Breaking Down:

Typical uses of AI cause functional cognitive impairment (obviously):

Link to the study: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

An interesting take on “shared humanness” shifting from being in us, to being in our environment (the internet):

Kenneth’s Newsletter

Thoughts on Hypermodernity in the Afterglow of Pentecost

Nothing ever happens…

a year ago · 4 likes · Kenneth Michael Florence

At the same time as the human being with atrophied soul faculties sinks into the environment of his externalized memory, becoming increasingly a passive bystander to life and thus disempowered and less free, a near-infinite vista has opened up before him in the domain of what he is able to make of himself. On one hand he is the freest he has ever been. On the other he slides into elemental bondage. The dissonance of this situation is truly staggering.
…
The confusion of languages spreads to the level of the individual, as every person now speaks his own bespoke “language” molded from the world content he freely (at first) takes in. We still speak our native tongues, but in a quite palpable sense we talk past each other and can’t connect.

This guy has a gift for making useful science look easy:

Latest from True Magic:

Talky Bnonnsense #15: Things we recommend (no paid promotions)

A grab-bag of advice on things worth knowing and doing that for some reason many people don’t know or do…

a year ago · 3 likes · Bnonn Tennant and Smokey Tennant

That’s all for this month.

Bnonn

Covenantal integration and the inevitability of infant baptism

Bnonn Tennant — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 11:57:56 GMT

In the last issue, I upset a bunch of folks by pointing out that, absent a higher arche to order them, natural categories like blood and soil are arbitrary and infinitely divisible forms of identity — the same error, but opposite ditch, as modern woke individualism:

I argued that Clown World is inevitable when covenant is discarded as the ground of identity. Our identity, our existence, just is constituted in a body that grows from a head. We exist in and from the body; who we are follows from what we are.

This is the picture that scripture presupposes.

Hence, “onetogetherness” between individuals — the integration of the parts into a whole that is required for true society — is impossible without participation in a living head: just as separation from God leads to eternal death and hell, so modern individualism, by severing people from the commonality of covenant headship, produces hell on earth.

The only answer to this is the gospel that God, in Christ, is “summing up all things in him” (Eph 1:10). Unless natural categories of identity are integrated into Christ — iow, unless Christian identity reconstitutes and reorders our natural identity in some meaningful way — we are headed for the Old World, disintegrated by irreconcilable loyalties to elemental people, places, and spirits.

It truly is Christ or chaos.

Today, I intend to upset a bunch more of you, by building on this thesis.

The fact that identity is constituted in covenant bodies requires that we baptize our babies.

Infant baptism is not explicitly taught in scripture because it is such a natural and inevitable consequence of the fundamental pattern of covenantal integration — what we usually call federal headship — that there would actually only have been the need for explicit instruction if we were not to baptize infants.

Since such instruction does not exist, QED, etc.

But let me show the working.

Whether or not to baptize babies really comes down to the nature of the new covenant. Is it of the same integrative “format” as all the covenants of the Old Testament, into which new members were integrated by birth to existing members? Or is it something radically new?

It is easy to show the answer from scripture.

Let’s start in Jeremiah 31.

“Behold, days are coming,” declares Yahweh, “when I will cut a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I cut with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, but I was a husband to them,” declares Yahweh. “But this is the covenant which I will cut with the house of Israel after those days,” declares Yahweh: “I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know Yahweh,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares Yahweh, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31–34)

This might seem like a strange place to start — because does this not describe a new covenant whose membership is radically different to the old? Are its members not integrated by faith rather than descent — by supernatural generation, rather than natural? Jeremiah seems to be saying that this new covenant is made only with those who have the law written on their hearts: it is only those who know God, and are forgiven by him, who are brought into covenant membership.

In Reformed terms, the way Jeremiah describes it, only those who are regenerate — those elected and irresistibly drawn — are considered members of this new covenant. This is explicitly set in distinction to the covenant with Moses — the one made when God brought them out of Egypt. The radical distinction that Jeremiah draws is between the covenant of Moses, where you became a member by birth; and this new covenant, where you become a member by rebirth.

Surely, then, children cannot automatically be members of this new covenant. We must rather assess them on an individual basis. (In which case, we should not give them the covenant sign, until such time as they show evidence of knowing God in the way that Jeremiah describes.)

That is the superficial impression — but let us not be superficial. We should always try to read more than just a few verses, to avoid making silly mistakes. We should at least read back a little, to get the context of what Jeremiah is saying. How does God introduce the concept of this new covenant, before he gets to the details in verses 31–34?

“At that time,” declares Yahweh, “I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be My people.” (Jeremiah 31:1)

There can be no question that when he speaks of Israel, he is speaking of the church. The new covenant is made with the new Israel, the church of God.

So by interpretation, God says in verse 1, “I will be the God of all the families of the church, and they [the families] shall be my people.”

This is a confusing way to introduce and frame the new covenant, if verses 31–34 are showing us an individualistic covenant; a covenant which is different from the Mosaic covenant in that its membership is not by birth, by family.

In a similar way, if we look at how God reiterates the blessings of this covenant in Jeremiah 32:38–39, we find:

And they shall be My people, and I will be their God; and I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me always, for their own good and for the good of their children after them. (Je 32:38–39)

Both in introducing and in summing up this new and better covenant, God says that the families and the children will be the objects of his covenant blessings. We see the same language being used in Ezekiel 37:

And My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd; and they will walk in My judgments and keep My statutes and do them. They will inhabit the land that I gave to Jacob My servant, which your fathers inhabited; and they will inhabit it, they, and their sons and their sons’ sons, forever; and David My servant will be their prince forever. [That of course being Christ.] (Ezekiel 37:24–25)

“They, and their sons, and their sons’ sons” does not sound like an individualistic covenant. If the new covenant really is made exclusively with the regenerate, how are we to understand these depictions — unless we imagine that every child is regenerate? But we know this is not the case, because Christian children do fall away from the faith. So how should we reconcile what God is saying here? How can we harmonize the seemingly individualistic language of Jeremiah 31:31–34, with the familial language of these other passages?

One option is to say that the children are not included in the covenant automatically, by birth. Rather, God just promises a typical pattern in which he will regenerate the children — so at some point as they grow up they become covenant members, and the church can continue down to the next generation. This seems like the only thing it can mean. Does not Jeremiah specifically say that this is the difference between the old covenant and the new — that it is made exclusively with the regenerate? “I will give my law in their inner parts,” and, “on their heart will I write it.” Hence, “they all shall know me, from their least unto their greatest.” How much more explicit could it be? If you wanted to say that the new covenant would be made exclusively with the regenerate, what would you say differently? How could this be clearer? Every covenant member knows God, from the least of them, to the greatest of them!

That must mean all of them without exception, right?

Well, let’s ask Jeremiah himself what this language of “least to greatest” means. It is not the first time he has used it. It begins when he is speaking of why God is sending judgment on Israel, back in chapter 6:

For from the least of them even to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for gain, and from the prophet even to the priest, everyone practices lying. (Jeremiah 6:13)

So every single person in Israel is corrupt. Every single one, from child to adult, peasant to noble, is greedy for gain.

Except, obviously that is not the best reading of this passage. What about…Jeremiah himself? He is a prophet. What about Daniel and his friends, who lived at that time? Is this language meant to be taken to condemn them also? To say that there is not a single God-fearing man in Israel at all?

Or, is it a figure of speech? Hyperbole? An expression meaning that so few are left; that the majority are corrupted; that scarce enough good people remain, that no matter where you go, no matter what level of society — whether it’s peasants or nobles, priests or prophets — you are going to find worthless men there?

I don’t think we have much choice in how we answer this, lest we make God’s word into nonsense. But Jeremiah 44 uses the same language, so let’s look there as well:

And I will take away the remnant of Judah who have set their face on entering the land of Egypt to sojourn there, and they will all meet their end in the land of Egypt; they will fall by the sword and meet their end by famine. From the least of them to the greatest, they will die by the sword and famine; and they will become a curse, an object of horror, an imprecation, and a reproach. And I will punish those who live in the land of Egypt, as I have punished Jerusalem, with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence. So there will be no one who escapes or any survivors for the remnant of Judah who have entered the land of Egypt to sojourn there and then to return to the land of Judah, to which they are longing to return to live; for none will return except a few who escape. (Jeremiah 44:12–14)

Jeremiah explicitly shows us here that “from the least even to the greatest” does not mean every single one. It is not individualistic language at all. He plainly says that there shall be exceptions. So it is not a literal universal statement, but a figure of speech meaning a lot, a majority, most. It refers to a large enough proportion that neither small nor great will be excluded. As he goes on to say in verse 28 of chapter 44, they that escape the sword shall return out of the land of Egypt “few in number.” The language is explicitly not universal.

The same Hebrew phrase also occurs in chapter 42:

Then all the commanders of the military forces, Johanan the son of Kareah, Jezaniah the son of Hoshaiah, and all the people from the least to the greatest approached and said to Jeremiah the prophet…

Very plainly, in this passage it is representatives of the people who come to Jeremiah — not every single person. So let us apply this clear hermeneutic to Jeremiah 31:31–34.

The problem with the old covenant — the problem that the new covenant solves — is not that every single individual failed to continue in it because they were unregenerate. The problem was that the people did not continue in it. And the solution to that, which the new covenant brings, is not that every single member is regenerate, but rather that the body as a whole is regenerate.

This is a very unfamiliar way of thinking to us. We live in an age that has shaped us to be almost unable to conceive of a non-individualistic way to think about the new covenant. But scripture does not speak primarily in terms of individuals; it speaks in terms of bodies and their members. Both the old and the new covenant are supposed to establish a people — “they will be my people.”

Covenants establish bodies

The problem with the old covenant was that the people did not continue in it; the body was unregenerate. And the solution, in the new covenant, is that the people will continue in it, because the body is regenerate.

We need to think very carefully about the connection between covenants and bodies, because we have a particular blind spot here. We are all died-in-the-wool individualists. We do not think in terms of bodies; but God does. So what scripture takes for granted at a deep level, is highly unintuitive to us.

We think of covenants in terms of individuals. God cuts a covenant with Abraham. Abraham is an individual. But in scripture, while covenants are certainly cut with individuals, they always establish bodies. The marriage covenant is between two individuals, but it establishes a new body, one flesh, from their two bodies. The covenant with Abraham establishes a new body, Israel, God’s son, from Abraham’s flesh. We know that under the new covenant, the church is a body — the body of Christ.

The problem, therefore, that Jeremiah describes — the problem that the new covenant solves — is a body problem, not a member problem.

Israel, as God’s body, did not function as its Head directed. It did not exercise dominion for him, let alone increase that dominion into the whole world. That is the problem that the new covenant solves; the Great Commission is directly aimed at it. It is directly aimed at increasing Christ’s dominion into the world. And it is directly aimed not at individuals, but at nations — bodies.

The church is able to fulfill this great commission because she is a regenerate body: a body indwelt and directed by God’s Spirit; a body properly connected to its Head.

But does a body being regenerate mean that every single member is regenerate? Does a regenerate body require the universal regeneration of its members? Scripture answers this question directly — but even on the face of it, the answer is obviously no. It is akin to asking: does Jesus being the savior of the world mean that every single person is saved? Does a saved world entail universalism?

Of course not. He is the savior of the world as a whole.

In the same way, the church body can be regenerate as a whole, so that few are unregenerate. And this is achieved, not by cutting children out of the covenant, but by cutting the unregenerate out. Branches that do not bear fruit are cut off and thrown away. This is the importance of church discipline.

But the branches were part of the vine for a time. To be cut out, they had to first be grafted in. And they were grafted in by covenant.

Take the first century church as an example, as a model. What do we see of the church as it grows in the New Testament? Are the majority regenerate? Of course. And are some included in the church who are not regenerate? Also, of course. Simon Magus is baptized, which means he is buried and raised with Christ, joined to him by covenant as a member of his body — and then immediately we learn that his heart was “not right before God” (Acts 8:21). We also know about Alexander the Coppersmith; about the incestuous man that Paul told the Corinthians to excommunicate; and about Diotrephes, who refused to receive the apostle John.

This side of eternity, covenant bodies are always mixed bodies

This is why we have warnings in the New Testament that directly reflect the warnings about falling away under the covenant of Moses. Consider Hebrews 10:14–31, which picks up Jeremiah 31:

For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us, for after saying, “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws upon their heart, and on their mind I will write them,” He then says, “And their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” Now where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin. Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near. For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the Law of Moses dies without mercy by the mouth of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has regarded as defiled the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know Him who said, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge His people.” It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:14–31)

The author of Hebrews here is warning his readers about something that could happen. That is the very reason that he is warning them. He is warning them that, as the old covenant with Moses had punishments for those who broke it, so does the new — and these are worse, because the new covenant is better. A man who is baptized really is covenantally buried and raised in Christ — and so he really is made holy by that covenant. Verse 29 speaks of “the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified,” which is to say, the blood of the covenant by which he was made holy. To be made holy is to be set apart unto God; to be made his. So this man is separated from Adam, and united to Christ, and the blood of the covenant, that is, the blood of Christ is applied to him.

Yet if he does not exercise a living faith, but instead goes on sinning, there is no more sacrifice for his sins, but rather an expectation of judgment.

You see very clearly here the same distinction between external and internal circumcision that we see in the Old Testament. “Circumcise your hearts,” God tells his people. It is not enough to be outwardly circumcised, but you must be given a heart of flesh to replace the heart of stone. Paul explicitly relates baptism to circumcision in this way, saying:

and in Him you have been filled, who is the head over all rule and authority; in whom you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. And you being dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive with Him, having graciously forgiven us all our transgressions. (Col 2:10–13)

Baptism is the fulfillment of circumcision. Just as circumcision was a cutting off of the flesh as a sign of faith, so baptism covenantally cuts us off from our flesh, from Adam, from the curse of the law, and joins us to Christ. The circumcision of Christ was Christ being cut off on the cross — and that circumcision is applied to us through baptism. We die and are resurrected in baptism, dying to the old, rising to the new — “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature,” Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5. And again,

For through the Law I died to the Law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. (Galatians 2:19–20)

Because of this, he goes on to tell us the response that God requires:

And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)

And again in Romans 6:

…we were buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died has been justified from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all, but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:4–11)

It is impossible to escape the force of what Paul says in Romans 6. Through baptism we have become united with Christ in the likeness of his death. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it,

Baptism is a sacrament, wherein the washing with water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, doth signify and seal our ingrafting into Christ, and partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace, and our engagement to be the Lord’s. (WSC 94)

“Engagement” as in the thing that precedes marriage. In his commentary, Thomas Vincent further explains:

By our ingrafting into Christ, is meant our being cut off from our old stock of nature, and being joined unto Jesus Christ, whereby we come to draw virtue from him as our root, that we may grow up in him, and bring forth fruit unto him. (The Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly Explained and Proved from Scripture, XCIV)

That is the expectation of everyone who is baptized — just as it was the expectation of everyone who was circumcised. And just as children were circumcised with that expectation, so children should be baptised with that expectation.

Covenants are always familial

Let me now return to where we began, and ask once again about the language of Jeremiah and Ezekiel: specifically, about God making a covenant with the families of the church; about him doing good to the sons, and the sons’ sons; about the inclusion of the children.

Where does this language come from? It does not appear for the first time in the major prophets. It is by no means unprecedented in the Old Testament. In fact, it is the normal pattern of how covenant promises are made in scripture. It is language that builds upon the existing paradigm established in the covenant with our father, Abraham himself:

“I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your seed after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your seed after you. And I will give to you and to your seed after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” God said further to Abraham, “Now as for you, you shall keep My covenant, you and your seed after you throughout their generations. This is My covenant, which you shall keep, between Me and you and your seed after you: every male among you shall be circumcised. And you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you. And every male among you who is eight days old shall be circumcised throughout your generations, one who is born in the house or one who is bought with money from any foreigner, who is not of your seed. A servant who is born in your house or who is bought with your money shall surely be circumcised; thus shall My covenant be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. But an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant. (Ge 17:7–14)

Five times God emphasizes that this covenant is made with Abraham and his seed after him. Everyone brought into Abraham’s household is made a partaker of this covenant. If they are his, they are put into covenant with God; and if they refuse, they have broken the covenant. You see they are already in covenant just by merit of belonging to Abraham — whether by natural generation, or being purchased as slaves. God, in his providence, has put them there.

He has called them to covenant by creating them in that time and place.

They are not neutral individuals who must make a considered choice about it, and decide whether they will commit to God or not. They don’t get to decide whether they will be under this covenant — they just are, because that is how covenants work. This is federal headship. Abraham is their head, so God is their head — because God is Abraham’s head. Therefore, they are given circumcision; not to come under the covenant, but in obedience to the covenant they have already come under. They are required to obey the covenant, to be men like Abraham, because they are Abraham’s. They are required to be men of faith, for that is what circumcision represents: Paul tells us that Abraham “received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while uncircumcised” (Rom 4:11).

Now, is this covenant with Abraham abolished in Christ — or is it brought into its fullness? Certainly it is not abolished, for Paul tells us, “they that are of faith, the same are sons of Abraham” (Gal 3:7). And he continues, in verse 14, saying that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law in order that upon the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus; so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

In other words, the new covenant is the fullness of the covenant with Abraham.

The sign of the covenant has changed: baptism is the new circumcision, as we have seen. But who that covenant is made with has not changed. The promises are now greater, in Christ — but their recipients have not changed. “In you shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Ge 12:3).

As Watson pithily comments, “Certainly Jesus Christ did not come to put believers and their children into a worse condition than they were in before.”

No indeed; Paul is explicit in Romans 11 that those under the new covenant, the gentile Christians, are those grafted into the existing covenant people, Israel:

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became a partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches. But if you do boast against them, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” Quite right! They were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith. Do not be haughty, but fear, for if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you, either. Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell, severity, but to you, God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off. (Romans 11:17–22)

The new covenant people is a continuation of the people of Israel, who were a people by the covenant with Abraham. We are grafted into that covenant; and we are therefore subject to the same covenant regulations — unless God changes them. When he first makes this covenant, he puts a quintuple emphasis on its continuity through Abraham’s seed. It is a covenant with Abraham and his family. All of his household is put under this covenant. Thus every Jew’s household was under this covenant. And now every Christian’s household is under this covenant — because every Christian is the seed of Abraham (Gal 3:7).

The possibility of being broken off

Now, you may notice also that Romans 11 has brought us back to the possibility of being removed from the new covenant. Just as Hebrews 10 makes this danger quite clear, so Paul does here in Romans. Notice the warnings: he tells these new gentile Christians, who are clearly covenant members ingrafted into Christ, that they could be removed again — just as the Israelites were — if they refuse to continue in faith.

It is impossible to make sense of this if the new covenant is made only with the regenerate. Jesus himself uses a very similar analogy in John 15, saying,

I am the true vine, and My Father is the vine-grower. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He cleans it so that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit from itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. (John 15:1–6)

Here John tells us that many who are branches in the vine of Christ will be cast out. Yet earlier, he told us:

All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will never cast out. (John 6:37)

It is quite evident that these passages cannot be reconciled if they are both about the same thing. John 6 is about regeneration, in the Reformed sense: the elect being effectually and irresistibly drawn to God, and abiding in Christ unto final salvation. They will never be cast out. But in John 15, we learn about branches abiding in Christ that will nonetheless be cast out, and thrown into the fire. So John 15 cannot be about regeneration; it must be about covenant membership, as in Romans 11 — and Hebrews 10, where those who fall away are explicitly said to have been at one time sanctified by the blood of the covenant.

Those who are elected by God from eternity, and irresistibly called to him, will always abide in Christ, and never be cast out. But those who are joined to the new covenant without receiving that election and calling, can and will lose their membership in that new covenant, and be cast into the lake of fire.

In other words, the new covenant is not a radical break from the old; it is, in fact, a continuation and fulfillment of the eternal covenant with Abraham, rather than a departure from it. It is a new covenant, not in the sense of being “from scratch,” but in the sense of being a development, and improvement, and fulfillment, and a bringing to fruition, of all the previous covenants, through Christ.

Is the stipulation of seed ever revoked?

But if the new covenant takes the covenant with Abraham and brings it to its fullness, then it must still follow the same rules — unless God changes them. So does God anywhere stop making this covenant with the children? Does he anywhere forbid us to any longer give them the sign of the covenant? Does he ever reject them from inclusion in the covenant with him?

Does he overturn the principle of federal headship?

Jeremiah and Ezekiel don’t think so. Nowhere in the New Testament is such a thing said. True, the sign has changed; its form is different. But both signs represent the same thing: circumcision was a seal of the righteousness of the faith which Abraham had — and so is baptism. If circumcision was a sign that God required Abraham to give to his infant children, and circumcision is fulfilled in baptism and represents the same thing, then certainly we should expect the same rules of covenant inclusion to be in place — unless God explicitly revokes or changes them.

But he does not do that; he does quite the opposite. The very first gospel presentation, at Pentecost, explicitly says:

Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself. (Acts 2:38–39)

This language is explicitly echoing the language of the Abrahamic covenant: “you, and your seed” = “you and your children,” while “all the families of the earth” = “all who are far off.” Peter is alluding back to this…and to an entire Old Testament’s worth of promises in which the children were always covenantally included, thanks to this pattern established with Abraham.

The promise is for the children, because the children are members of the covenant. That is what this language means in scripture — that is what it would mean to Peter’s Jewish audience: that the promise is just like the promise to Abraham.

If Peter had wanted the Jews to understand that their children were not to be baptized, that they are not automatic covenant members, he would have needed to say completely the opposite of what he did say.

In fact, if children were not to be treated as covenant members, it would have been an unprecedented, radical change in the very nature of the covenant itself — and there would have to have been explicit and lengthy treatments of this change in the New Testament; just as there were with regards to the dietary laws, and other markers of covenant inclusion. God’s people would certainly have needed instruction on such an enormous paradigm shift, and an explanation of his rejection of the seed that he had always included within his covenant dealings.

Such a cutting off could not have been made without explanation and record.

The fact that there is no such record is not an argument from silence. It is, rather, an argument that such silence could not exist, given the nature of every other covenant previously made in scripture.

It is true that we have no explicit command to baptize children. In much the same way, we have no explicit command to serve women the Lord’s Supper. Yet we know that women should take the Lord’s Supper for the same reason that we know children should be baptized: the patterns of God’s dealings with his people require it. Absent an explicit rejection of covenant seed, the clear, repeated, consistent pattern of scripture is that children are heirs of the covenant, inheritors of the promises — and so must be given the covenant sign. It would be unseemly and contradictory to do anything else.

Such as deny their children baptism, make God’s institutions under the law more full of kindness and grace to children than they are under the gospel; which, how strange a paradox it is, I leave you to judge. (Thomas Watson)

Until next month,

Bnonn

P.S. I work hard to teach something each month that is solidly orthodox and Reformed, but also builds up your faith in a way you won’t easily find elsewhere. If my work has achieved that end for you, I’d be grateful for your support. You can become a paid subscriber; or if you’d like to just make a one-time donation, buy me a coffee.

Notable links for May 2025

Bnonn Tennant — Sat, 31 May 2025 11:57:35 GMT

Rise of the beta: why men today are so feminine:

Redditors shocked to learn they’re arguing with AI bots:

Has Jordan Peterson become Fat Thor?

Brainrot Syndrome: How the Internet Makes Morons:

End of Life Experiences in Animals:

Clownworld exemplified:

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

(Fascinating, disturbing, and worth figuring out how to bypass the paywall.)

Latest from True Magic

Some thoughts on the significance of the weird tale of David taking a virgin into his bed in his old age, because he was cold:

What is going on with David and Abishag?

Smokey expressed perplexion today over this passage…

a year ago · 8 likes · Bnonn Tennant

In defense of receiving, rather than “correcting,” confusing readings of scripture: