The Hebraic Doctrine of God , DOGE as a Cyberattack & the Slowing Decline of US Christianity
Here’s your weekly-ish roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, February 23–March 8, 2025.
Thought-Provoking Content
Hebraic Philosophy, Systematic Theology, and the Doctrine of God by Ryan T. Mullins on The Reluctant Theologian (podcast):
I don't particularly care what your tradition says because it contradicts what the Hebraic philosophical tradition says. As a good Protestant, I care about going back to the sources, the earlier traditions. The Hebraic philosophical tradition is much older than Augustine and his predecessors. So I am really following the true tradition.
Elon Musk Now Has 13 Children: A Conservative Pro-Family Scholar Says He’s Missing Something by Adam Wren with Brad Wilcox in Politico:
“Musk hasn’t yet demonstrated an appreciation for the important role that marriage as an institution plays in stabilizing family life, and also in creating a more just and really socially equal society.”
“I think some people on the right think that just as long as you have the right genes or enough money that’s what matters. Because then some people responded to my comments on Twitter, that [Elon Musk’s] child will have plenty of money, and so the child will be fine. But we actually know from the research, including research that I talk about in my book Get Married, that even wealthy kids who are raised in non-intact families are more likely to flounder than wealthy kids who are raised in an intact family. Money matters, no doubt, but it’s also a case too, that having two married parents in your home is a really big deal for kids as well.”
DOGE as a National Cyberattack by Bruce Schneier in Schneier on Security:
This is beyond politics—this is a matter of national security. Foreign national intelligence organizations will be quick to take advantage of both the chaos and the new insecurities to steal US data and install backdoors to allow for future access.
Federal Technology Staffers Resign Rather Than Help Musk and DOGE by Brian Slodysko and Byron Tau at AP:
More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk—not improving government technology.
Why I Complain by Samuel D. James in Digital Liturgies:
As you leave childhood, you face the fact that life is harder than anyone told you it would be and more disappointing than you were prepared for. As you realize this, three different options—specifically, two delusions and one truth—appear in front of you that you can believe.
The Young Person’s Delusion: Life Can Be Easier If I Myself Change
The Old Person’s Delusion: Life Can Be Easier If Other People Would Change
The Truth: Life is Hard, There is No Unmixed Joy, and The More You Try to Control This the Worse it Will Get.
Rednecks and Barbarians of France by Vincent Lloyd in Plough:
Where Bouteldja’s earlier work argued for “indigenous self-determination” in the face of the stranglehold of racism, Rednecks and Barbarians shifts the emphasis. Now Bouteldja is concerned with the way anti-racism has been institutionalized by the state, and how the state and cultural elites ascribe racism to the white working class (“rednecks”). The real racists, in Bouteldja’s view, are the elites: they control structures born of the legacies of racism, perpetuating racism. The white working class are scapegoats; in fact, they are subjugated by elites.
The Assemblies of God: A Denomination That May Be Growing by Ryan Burge in Graphs About Religion:
A reason that I believe that the AG has recorded long term growth while most other larger denominations have been going the other direction—the AG has continued to move in the direction of racial diversification.
The Scientific Art of Negotiating with a Possibly Irrational Opponent by William Spaniel on Lines on Maps (YouTube):
None of us know how these situations are going to end ahead of time. Because for us to know, the actors would have to be behaving predictably. But that is exactly the opposite of what the rational Trump and the folks in Greenland, Canada, or Panama, or whoever else is in this situation should be doing.
The Puzzling Diplomacy over Ukraine’s Future by Ryan Evans with Liana Fix, Michael Kofman, and Justin Logan on War on the Rocks (podcast):
Michael Kofman, Justin Logan (Cato), and Liana Fix (the Council on Foreign Relations) joined Ryan to help him understand the negotiations underway about Ukraine’s fate. From the minerals deal to Zelensky’s approach to Trump to the prospects for a European peacekeeping force, they cover it all, and have a few friendly arguments along the way.
Congress Can Stop This Tariff Madness Right Now by Charles C. W. Cooke in National Review:
The Constitution gives absolute control over tariffs to Congress. As such, any power that the president enjoys must be delegated.
I understand that Congress does not want to do this because, despite their protestations when their guy is out of power, both parties like the imperial presidency.
Speaker Mike Johnson Is Living in a D.C. House That Is the Center of a Pastor’s Secretive Influence Campaign by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica:
In 2021, Steve Berger, an evangelical pastor who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic,” set off on an ambitious project. His stated goal: minister to members of Congress so that what “they learn is then translated into policy.” His base of operations would be a six-bedroom, $3.7 million townhouse blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
Recently, the pastor scored a remarkable coup for a political influence project that has until now managed to avoid public scrutiny. He got a new roommate.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has been staying at the home since around the beginning of this year, according to interviews and videos obtained by ProPublica.
The house is owned by a major Republican donor and Tennessee car magnate who has joined Berger in advocating for and against multiple bills before Congress.
Trump May Have Already Planted the Seeds of His Political Collapse by Matt K. Lewis in The Hill:
His approval ratings just went underwater, meaning he hit this particular milestone even faster than Biden. According to a new Ipsos poll, three in five Americans think the cost of living—you know, the issue that likely won Trump the 2024 election—is “going in the wrong direction.”
Rather than acknowledge the flawed approach, Republicans are already laying the groundwork for the inevitable fallout of Trump’s policies by claiming that Americans are willing to suffer high prices for Trump.
Trump and Vance Are Stripping Away Foreign Policy Illusions by Ross Douthat in The New York Times:
Everything Trump is doing and saying, and everything his vice president is saying and doing, is ruthlessly stripping away pretenses around the United States, its alliances and the situation in the world.
However: Pretense in foreign policy is not always the same thing as self-deception. It’s also just a form of politesse, of circling uncomfortable subjects and making countries that are in your debt or whom you need to strong-arm feel like they’re friends and not just subjects. It’s a way to give foreign leaders space to do what you want while also handling their own domestic audiences, making sure that you aren’t accidentally empowering parties hostile to your policies (as may happen in our northern neighbor if Trump’s war of words with Justin Trudeau saves the Liberal Party in the next election), and generally draping power politics in the garments of idealism.
Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off: Findings From the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study by Gregory A. Smith, et al. at Pew Research Center:
For lasting stability to take hold in the U.S. religious landscape, something would need to change. For example, today’s young adults would have to become more religious as they age, or new generations of adults who are more religious than their parents would have to emerge.
The Conservative Lifestyle Is Suddenly in Fashion by Noah Rothman in National Review:
Led by Republicans, the public is increasingly inclined to embrace a “traditional view of gender roles,” but that attitude has not been accompanied by a newfound comfort with “gender discrimination.”
Americans still believe that women face undue prejudice in the workplace and society. They resent the extent to which American society discourages what they call “stereotypically feminine qualities” in men, “like being affectionate and caring.” They still “reject stereotypically masculine behaviors like fighting, getting drunk, sleeping around, and talking about women in a sexual way.” And they don’t think the measure of a man is the size of the brood he sires. What Americans are disinclined toward are hostile cultural attitudes toward conventional masculine virtues.
Music
And you have your choices
And these are what make man great
His ladder to the stars
But you are not alone in this
Originally written in 1845 about the United States deciding to go to war with Mexico and admit more slave states into the Union
Father, I thank you because you have protected me
Guide me through times of trouble
Guide me, my Eternal One through affliction
Worthy is the
Lamb who was slain
Holy, holy is He
Sing a new song
To Him who sits on
Heaven's mercy seat
Devotionals
God the Son
The Son is the divine person who relates to us as the ideal human.
In the Bible, to be a “son” of something is to have its characteristics because, as we say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. For example, people who are loud and threatening are “sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17), and those who deceive others are “sons of the devil” (Acts 13:10). So “son of God” is someone who has divine qualities.
The divine son is not the only being identified as God’s son. In the following biblical texts, you can find examples of others who are called sons (that is, children) of God:
Job 1:6: the angels
Psalm 2:7: King David
Luke 3:38: Adam the first human
Matthew 5:9: the peacemakers
Look up Colossians 2:9 to learn why God the Son is not merely a son of God but the Son of God.
Unlike the other children of God, the Son has divine existence and so has all of the characteristics of God. So while humanity was created in God’s image, God the Son “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Colossians 1:15).
To show us exactly what God is like, the divine son relates to us as an ideal oldest brother. According to Jesus’s friend Paul, who recognized Jesus as the divine son in human form, how far was God the Son willing to go in order to show us exactly what God is like? Find out in Philippians 2:6–8.
By uniting his divine existence with human existence, God the Son not only showed us exactly what God is like. God does not want to dominate us with his power but win our confidence by demonstrating that his character is trustworthy through the ultimate display of self-sacrificing love. But exactly how can we be like God (Philippians 2:5)? According to Paul in Romans 8:29, what the Son did for us was part of a plan that the divine persons predestined according to their foreknowledge of the future. What was the goal of that plan?
Most of us, no matter how good our intentions, struggle to have the sort of love for others that Jesus showed. How do we come to the place where we can have the humility of God and live our lives according to the same pattern that Jesus demonstrated? According to Paul, we need to have a certain experience with God that changes our status with God. What spirit does Romans 8:14–15 tell us we need to receive?
We need to recover our sense of ourselves as God’s children to have the loving characteristics of God. This experience is like an orphan who is given into the care of others only to discover that their birth parent is still living and desires to be adopted. Not only that, but we have an older brother who shows us how to go through this difficult but worthwhile process: “… if indeed we suffer with him so we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:17).
God the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is the divine person who relates to us through our self-consciousness.
Part of what it means for us to be made in God’s image is that, like the divine persons, we are persons who are self-aware of our self-awareness. This allows us to have feelings about our feelings, want to want better things, talk to ourselves, and so on.
In the Bible, this self-consciousness—this self-aware self-awareness—can be called a person’s “spirit.” As Paul put it in a rhetorical question: “Who among men knows the things of a man except for the man’s spirit within him?” (2 Corinthians 2:11a).
The expected answer: No one. Our self-consciousness is our own. We don’t ‘hear’ other people talking to themselves in their thoughts, and they don’t ‘hear’ us—with one big exception. Read the rest of 2 Corinthians 2:11 and verses 12–13.
Just as our internal deliberations are held in the privacy of our thoughts, the deliberations between the three divine persons are unsearchable by God’s creatures (for an example of divine deliberation, look up Genesis 1:26). But for us to cooperate with God, we need to know God. So, God sends the Holy Spirit to communicate with our spirits.
In other words, the Holy Spirit relates to us in that invisible, immaterial way that we otherwise only relate to ourselves. Look up the following verses to find some specific ways he does this.
John 16:8: makes us aware of our need for God
Romans 5:5: causes us to feel God’s love
Acts 10:19: places his words into our thoughts
1 Corinthians 12:4: gives us abilities we didn’t know we had
2 Peter 1:21: directs us to work toward certain goals
Ezekiel 37:1: alters human consciousness in dreams and visions
If the Holy Spirit can do all this, it seems it would be easy for him to dominate our wills in order to accomplish the divine agenda. But because God wants us to be his willing, morally-free partners—not his pets or puppets—we can choose to resist the coaxing of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 7:51 on this point). Look up Ephesians 4:30 to find out how the Holy Spirit feels when we do this.
On the other hand, it is also possible to invite the Holy Spirit to become more active in our conscious experience. In Luke’s research into the life of Jesus, he found that Jesus encouraged us to pray to the Father to send us the Holy Spirit because the Father loves to give good gifts to his children (Luke 11:13). Look up Acts 2:1–4 to find out what Jesus’s followers were doing before the Holy Spirit came and gave them a special ability.
The Holy Spirit is good company. He interacts with us more and more as we become more open to his presence and power. So why not invite him now?
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:13).
Sermon
The Faith of a Nomad (Series: The Story of God and Us, The Patriarchs)