April 12, 2026

Today the church is asking who holds authority — over the soul, over the state, over the body — and whether Christians have a coherent answer. The Aquila Report argues that Christ's coronation reframes every political claim: kings govern under a King, which means neither Caesar nor therapeutic consensus gets the final word. That same logic runs through TGC's response to Bart Ehrman, who contends you can build ethics without God. Scholars aren't persuaded. The question isn't whether secular people can behave well — plainly some do — but whether goodness without a Lawgiver is anything more than preference dressed up as principle. American Reformer pushes further, arguing that modern anthropology has severed man from his natural end, leaving nothing but appetite where purpose used to be. These three pieces aren't saying the same thing, but they're circling the same void.

Christianity Today's report on Iran's underground Christians lands differently against that backdrop. These are people for whom the authority question is not theoretical — the state has an answer, and it involves prison. Meanwhile, South Dakota and Mississippi are legislating against abortion pills, and the U.S. Army is quietly replacing chaplains with life coaches, stripping the role of any explicitly spiritual function. That last one is easy to miss. It shouldn't be. What the Army is really deciding is whether souls are a category the institution needs to acknowledge at all. On March 30 we were watching the question of desire and formation — whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things. Today the frame is harder. It's not just whether we can want rightly. It's whether the structures around us will even leave room for the question.