November 11, 2026

Several evangelical writers are pressing on what Christianity actually requires a person to believe about God's character, and whether those beliefs can survive honest scrutiny. Russell Moore, writing in his newsletter, answers the staying question personally: he is still a Christian, and kind of back where he started, which suggests the journey clarified rather than eroded the core. Michael Kruger at Crossway names the specific doctrine that most strains that core for modern readers: divine judgment. His argument is that people reject hell not because they have examined it but because they have misunderstood it, and two misconceptions are doing most of the work. Michael Bird's Substack essay on atonement presses the same nerve from the biblical side, asking why Scripture is so insistent on blood, sacrifice, and forgiveness as a package. Each writer is trying to make the same thing legible: a God who judges is not a God who has failed.

Desiring God carries a piece on the prosperity gospel's spread in Africa, where African leaders are now publicly confronting a distorted picture of God as a wealth-dispenser. The article frames that distortion as an American export and the African pushback as a recovery of the true gospel, which connects back to Kruger's point: wrong pictures of God produce real spiritual damage. The Gospel Coalition's essay on a child's cancer moves in the opposite direction, not correcting a false God but finding the true one in the dark, where Peter Morris writes that God's care was most evident not in good moments but in the worst nights. That pairing matters: the theological essays and the personal testimony are both trying to hold together a God who is good and a God who does not remove suffering, a question that earlier this week surfaced in a different key around suffering, lament, and human dignity. The writers here are not all saying the same thing, but they are circling the same problem: whether the God Christianity actually proclaims is one people can trust when it costs them something.