May 1, 2026

Today the church is asking what it actually believes about judgment — and whether soft versions of the faith can hold under pressure. Christianity Today runs a blunt piece arguing the doctrine of hell isn't a liability to be managed but a truth the church has quietly abandoned at its own cost. The Gospel Coalition is asking a companion question: what exactly is Jesus doing in heaven right now — and whether his priestly intercession is an ongoing work or a completed one. These aren't antiquarian debates. They're about whether Christianity has a God who takes evil seriously. The Aquila Report gets at the pastoral side of it — rage feels like a response to injustice, but the piece argues that God's justice, not ours, is the only thing large enough to hold real evil. Then news from Afghanistan: Christianity Today reports that an underground church was massacred after extremists found what believers had most feared to expose. The doctrine of judgment isn't abstract when the people being killed were hiding because they believed it.

Mere Orthodoxy is picking a fight worth having — asking who holds authority when applied science reshapes what it means to be human, and whether the church has anything left to say or has already ceded the ground. That question hasn't gone away — earlier this week we were watching the same tension surface around desire and formation, around whether our minds and bodies are even being shaped by forces we've consented to. TGC adds to it with a piece on AI's embedded values — five assumptions the technology carries whether users notice them or not. The church isn't just navigating culture. It's being asked to evaluate systems that have already made theological commitments. Ryan Burge's data on the Nones complicates the picture: they don't uniformly hate religion, but their relationship to it is more transactional than hostile — which may be harder to reach than outright opposition. And Christianity Today reports that Afropessimism is gaining ground among younger Black Christians, eroding the long hope-oriented tradition of the Black church. Different communities. Same pressure: does faith have enough weight to hold when the evidence keeps accumulating against it.