Batshit Theological Debates That Consumed My Youth (February 19, 2022, the severed branch)
What will God do to America if we elect John Kerry? Does Kofi Annan's opposition to the Iraq War prove he is the Antichrist? Can people who don't believe in predestination truly be saved from Hell?
Above: John Calvin, 16th-century Reformation theologian (public domain)
The pastor instructed us all to bow our heads in prayer for the American soldiers who were embarking on the Second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq. I was sixteen. Our whole congregation had just finished loudly rejoicing at the recent victory of George W. Bush in the 2004 election.
“I’m not technically allowed to tell you how to vote,” the pastor had said. “But you all know in your hearts the difference between right and wrong.” He mentioned the gays who might get married, the abortions that could become more widespread, the children who would be led astray by Darwinism. He led us in a prayer without naming any candidates in particular.
The Sunday after the election, he hyped up the congregation into an outpouring of jubilation. The people of Michigan, in a constitutional amendment by referendum, had defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. John Kerry, who would have coupled an inadequate resolve against our Muslim enemies with the teaching of an unbiblical science in our schools, had been defeated. The Democrats, who had abandoned even the pretense of being committed to maintaining America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, had been vanquished. Had Election Day played out differently, the wrath of God could have been upon us.
The pastor compared America to ancient Israel. We were a nation at risk of turning away from our duties as God’s chosen people. Our country was God’s vehicle to work His plans among mankind. This was why the United States was so powerful. Because the Lord chose us to be. But the blessings He granted us were not unconditional. The Jerusalem of antiquity had forsaken the Lord, and He had accordingly sent the fierce armies of Babylon to crush that city. We too could fall away from His good graces if we deviated from His commands. “We need to indoctrinate our children,” the pastor declared. “They say that’s a bad word, indoctrination. It’s not.”
The pastor read to us from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. Implicitly, the words of God, once meant for the Israelites, were now a warning for Americans. God had given this land to our forefathers, the Puritan settlers, to conquer and subdue, spreading His worship across North America. And how have we repaid Him? We have steadily degenerated from the greatness of that 17th-century Massachusetts theocracy. Thus declares the Lord to Israel / America, lamenting the spread of ungodliness in our culture:
What wrong did your fathers find in me
that they went far from me,
and went after worthlessness, and became worthless?
….And I brought you into a plentiful land
to enjoy its fruits and its good things.
But when you came in, you defiled my land
and made my heritage an abomination.
(Jeremiah 2:6-7)
What would be the consequences for America, a nation chosen by God, should we respond to the blessings of the Lord by electing the reprobate John Kerry? What should become of our nation if we should then turn against His most basic commandments about sexuality and gender? If we should be so arrogant as to keep the Bible out of public schools? If we let scientists brainwash children into believing in evolution instead of God’s six-day creation? There would certainly be profound implications for international politics. Thus declares the Lord:
Behold, I am bringing against you
a nation from afar, O house of Israel….
It is an ancient nation,
a nation whose language you do not know….
They shall eat up your harvest and your food;
they shall eat up your sons and your daughters;
they shall eat up your flocks and your herds;
they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees;
your fortified cities in which you trust
they shall beat down with the sword.
(Jeremiah 5:15-17)
I did not agree with my pastor that God’s proclamations to Israel could be applied so directly to modern America. But I certainly concurred that our power over other nations was a blessing from God, and that He could possibly take it away as punishment for our sins.
My slightly more serious disagreement with church leadership dealt with eschatology, the study of the end of the world. Here, I was sympathetic to those Postmillennialists who abide by Dominion theology. To me, this meant that Jesus would not return to the Earth until the planet had been under the control of a Christian theocracy for a thousand years. Through the edifying inquisition of that universal episcopate, whose constitution would be the Bible, the Earth itself could be gradually purified of even slight deviations from divinely sanctioned types of sex. This could ideally be modeled after the learned John Calvin’s 16th-century Geneva, where the heretic Servetus was rightfully burned alive for rejecting the Trinity and predestination. The re-election of George W. Bush could only hasten the inevitable rise of that elevating regime. Watching him give a speech on Fox News a few days before the election, I wondered if I’d adequately savored his reign. I prayed for another chance.
But the minister adhered to an eschatology of the Post-Tribulation Premillennialist variety. As I had conceived it in middle school, this meant that, at any moment, every true Christian in the world would vanish into thin air. Those who still walked the Earth would then be ruled over by the Antichrist, who would rise to power promising peace and progressive values. I thought he might be the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, with his Nazi-enabling opposition to the Iraq War (Saddam Hussein was just like Hitler). With a liberal like Annan in charge, guided by the invisible hands of Satan, the demons of Hell would run rampant across the Earth torturing people. Then, after these seven years of horrifying mayhem, which are known as the Tribulation, Jesus would come back. He would throw Kofi Annan into the Abyss. He would inaugurate his kingdom of a thousand years. Hence: Post-Tribulational Premillennialism.
I grew up hearing stories about the Rapture. I was cautioned not to be deceived by the Antichrist’s promises of peace. Pastors told us to always be ready, because He could return at any time. If our hearts weren’t ready, we would be left behind. And after all the Christian pilots vanished mid-flight, the atheist science teachers who taught us evolution would find themselves in planes plummeting from the sky. Actually, some believers said they wouldn’t, because every airline in the world apparently has a policy whereby at least one pilot is always a non-Christian, just in case.
But the science teachers would be dealt with once they landed. The international institutions that the Democrats so foolishly support, like the United Nations, would radically expand their powers until they smothered out all national sovereignties, uniting the whole world under the beloved Kofi Annan. The peace-loving progressives who had opposed the Iraq War would eagerly accept the Mark of the Beast offered to them by this false god, perhaps in the form of a microchip or tattoo. He may force the whole world to bend the knee and worship him.
To me it was of course impossible for a Democrat to truly be a Christian. Eventually, the Democrat kids at school would be tortured by giant locust-demons. They would jump from the tops of buildings, trying to kill themselves to escape the pain. But by God’s design, they would survive every time, their bodies mangled and bloody, their limbs twitching as the locust-demons descended to play with the thing that remained.
Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torment them for five months, but not to kill them…. And in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them. (Revelation 9:3-6)
“You think global warming is going to destroy the world?” a pastor whom I listened to asked once. “Just wait until you see what Jesus is going to do to it.”
And all of this can only happen once the Jews demolish the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple which the Romans destroyed in AD 70. That’s why it was such an imperative to support Israel against the Palestinians.
But these disagreements were minor. I was open-minded to all these possibilities. What I instead found truly disheartening was that the pastor believed that human beings receive salvation by their own free will.
As I had learned from my academic heroes John Calvin and RC Sproul, and from the Bible, humans are far too evil to choose from their own voluntary will to come to God. “Behold,” says David in Psalm 51:5, “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” Our very nature is defined by a desire to rebel against the Lord. We are so deeply sinful as to be innately incapable of inclining toward the awesome Holiness of God. His is a Righteousness that every part of our fallen flesh instinctively rejects. There are no exceptions to this, for “the godly has perished from the Earth, and there is no one upright among mankind” (Micah 7:2-4). This concept is called “Total Depravity,” the first point of Calvinism.
This is what Jesus meant when he said that it is not what enters a man that defiles him. We don’t need any outside source like the devil to corrupt us. We need only to look to our own hearts. “For from within,” says Jesus, “out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immortality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.” (Mark 7:21-22) Nor can any consideration of evidence bring us to the Lord, “for the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” (Romans 8:7)
God’s awesome Righteousness demands that we be eternally tortured. Jesus’s sacrifice saves us, but only if we accept Him as Lord, which our hopelessly evil human nature prevents us from accomplishing.
Humans can therefore only be saved if God proactively transforms our wicked hearts so they can love Him. As Jesus said elsewhere, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” (John 6:44) “For there is no distinction,” elaborates the Apostle Paul in Romans 3:22-23, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift.”
But then how does God choose who receives this gift?
In the book of Genesis, when Rebekah conceives two twins, Jacob and Esau, God chooses one to love and one to hate. He tells her there are “two nations in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” (Genesis 25:23) Jacob’s descendents are the Israelites, whose armies will crush Esau’s descendents, the Edomites, some centuries later, all as a part of God’s plan for human history.
Was there something inherently better about Jacob? Is that why God chose him, not Esau?
The Apostle Paul explains that no, there was nothing better about him.
Even before they [Jacob and Esau] had been born or had done anything good or bad (so that God’s purpose of election might continue, not by works but by his call) she [Rebekah] was told, “The elder shall serve the younger.” As it is written,
“I have loved Jacob,
but I have hated Esau.”What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses,
“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, “I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses. (Romans 9:12-18)
“Whomever he chooses,” with no elaboration. This is the second point of Calvinism: “Unconditional Election.” Salvation does not come from the works and efforts of people choosing on their own to worship God. We are not saved based on any criteria beyond the seemingly random exercising of God’s divine right to choose some people for Heaven and some for Hell, just as some nations are blessed and some are not. And to suggest that humans can choose to serve God on their own is blasphemy, as it denies the full extent to which we have all fallen short of God’s Holiness. Our Salvation is truly unconditional.
Then there is “Limited Atonement,” the idea that Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross only applies to “the Elect,” who were chosen before they were born. The fourth point is “Irresistible Grace,” meaning that, if you have been chosen, God will give you such a strong desire to follow Him that there is no possibility of opting out. You’ll just want to go to Heaven and worship Him forever. And finally, “Perseverance of the Saints.” All those who are truly chosen will always be Christians. Anyone who abandons the faith was never really saved to begin with, and there is no way for us to know in any given moment who is truly saved and who is destined for Hell, including ourselves. TULIP is the acronym people use to remember these Five Points of Calvinism.
But why do all this? Why create such a world?
The only purpose for the existence of the universe is to showcase the glory of God. This demands to be recognized both for its mercy (the redeeming power of Christ’s blood which He shed for us lets certain people into Heaven even though they don’t deserve it) and for its justice (displayed by the awesome eternal fires that shall consume non-Christians for billions of years). Without both mercy and justice, God is incomplete, and so He designed a world that would fulfill each.
The Elect have been predestined for salvation, while anyone who does not choose the Lord was predestined for Hell. Both groups have a function in God’s plan, and, if left to their own devices, both groups would go to Hell anyway. They are so irredeemably evil that they should be grateful that anyone is saved at all. If they are saved, the ultimate purpose is to provide the Lord with mesmerized worshipers in the Kingdom of Heaven, enhancing His glory.
And that’s why it’s so foolish when people question why it was acceptable for the Israelites to murder all those people when they conquered the Holy Land in the Old Testament. All those “innocent” people the Israelites exterminated were vile sinners. They deserved to be killed, just like everybody else does. We are so odiously immoral that every breath we take is only thanks to the completely undeserved mercy of Yahweh. The difference between the Gentiles who were slaughtered in the Promised Land and the Israelites who genocided them and their kin was simply that God had chosen the Israelites, but He hadn’t chosen the Philistines.
No human being has any intrinsic value beyond their place in the plan for the glory of the Lord. The only way for any of us to truly be happy is to embrace this eternal servility, and to love it. But we are so inclined to rebel against God that the very idea of this obedience repulses us.
“Okay sure, but what about all the Hindus in India?” A German exchange student asked me this during government class in eleventh grade. We were answering textbook questions about Rousseau, or some other Enlightenment crypto-pagan like him. “Are they all going to burn in Hell? A billion fucking Hindus? What if they haven’t even heard the Gospel? How is that fair?”
“Of course it’s fair,” I told him, lamenting having to repeat myself yet again. I reminded myself that this German’s heart had been hardened by the Lord. “Just like you and me, they deserve to burn in Hell by default. I’ve told you this a million times dude. We are all in rebellion against the Lord. We are innate sinners. We should just be grateful that anyone is saved at all.”
“So some Hindu guy who has never even heard of Jesus will go to Hell?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why wouldn’t he?”
“Man, that doesn’t make any fucking sense,” he told me.
“How does it not make sense?” I asked him. “It would be a waste of time for them to hear the Gospel. Their hearts are hardened against the Lord.”
He laughed. “You’re crazy, Andrew,” he said.
“God has hardened your heart against Him,” I said.
The German kid smacked his knees as he convulsed from laughter.
“You won’t be laughing when you’re being tortured for eternity in Hell,” I pronounced.
Our government teacher came to our table. “Any questions about the worksheet?”
“Did you vote for Kerry or Bush?” I asked the teacher.
He hesitated for a moment. “Kerry.”
I scoffed. “He’s a baby-killer.”
“Good choice,” smiled the German. “Don’t listen to this crazy guy.”
My teacher elaborated that he had considered both sides but leaned toward Kerry in the end. I looked up at him, shaking my head in disappointment. “That’s very sad,” I said. One day, when the UN took over the world, he would probably take the Mark of the Beast from Kofi Annan.
That wayward German liberal’s obstinate heathenry is so typical of the godless socialist progressives who inhabit the Fallen Europe of our age. Nevertheless, several times I informed him that everything in all human history happens only because God wants it to happen for the fulfillment of His divine plan. “Yes,” I told him, exasperated by his sinful inability to submit to this basic law of nature, but always reminding myself that only the Lord could remold his rebellious heart, “even the Holocaust. Ultimately, all those people deserved to die anyway.”
“But I thought God was purely good,” the German said.
“God intends for evil to happen, he says so,” I told the German. I recalled one of the many Bible verses I had memorized to support my arguments in these situations. “God Himself says in Isaiah 45:6-7, ‘I am the Lord, and there is no other. I create light and I create darkness. I make well-being and create calamity. I am the Lord, who does all these things.’”
It might have been then that the kid at the neighboring table called me “a fucking freak.”
When it came to all the kids at school who refused to acknowledge the truths I was telling them, I remembered how Jesus dealt with it. Frustrated by the Messiah’s habit of speaking to the Pharisees in mysterious parables, His disciples asked Him why He did so. “To you,” Jesus answered, meaning to me, “it has been given to understand the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” (Matthew 13:11). I was a light shining in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended me not.
This was not a battle to be fought at school, but rather among Christians who were prepared to accept the absolute infallibility of God’s Word. My church was a Baptist one. The misguided Baptists generally believe in free will. I needed to combat the Church Elders’ problematic opinion that humans are good enough to choose on our own to follow Christ.
I took charge of the youth group bulletin, in which I wrote a short essay each week. I wanted the other young people to appreciate that we need to be grateful for God’s grace in our salvation, that we shouldn’t take any credit for ourselves by claiming to have come to believe in Him on our own. Our salvation could only be to the glory of God, not to ourselves for having chosen Him.
It was my personal ambition to never think or say anything which could not be supported by Scripture. Thus my writing was saturated with Bible references, sometimes multiple verses listed out at the end of every single sentence. There were two passages in particular to which I repeatedly returned, each by the Apostle Paul:
For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. (Romans 8:30)
He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious Grace. (Ephesians 1:4-6)
I would convince my readers that I was right and the pastor was wrong.
There was a girl at church that I planned to shepherd. I would husband her for the Lord; I would help her understand these sacred teachings. As the Apostle Paul wrote: “For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Savior.” (Ephesians 5:23) When we hung out, I strove to fortify her susceptible female mind with the authentic truths of the holy books, especially those that contradicted the doctrines of our church leaders who would otherwise corrupt her. I sent her Bible verses every night over AIM, hoping to irrigate her mind with my wise interpretations of the Scriptures. But one night as we sat discussing theology in her living room, she told me that no one believed it was really me writing these essays in the bulletin. She asked me how it was possible that a sixteen year old could know so many Bible verses. I explained to her that all I did with my free time was read the Bible and books about the Bible. “Well, everyone says you’re just plagiarizing,” she said. “Like, you’re just a kid. Why would you know all that?”
I was distressed, but soon we moved on to discussing wine. Our pastor had just told the congregation that he knew there were Church Members among us who kept alcohol in their very homes. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” he said. “I’ve entered homes serving wine to their guests.” I told her this was just another example of how our church had deviated from the actual Bible. Which, although it condemns “drunkenness” (Galatians 5:21), clearly does not forbid alcohol in moderation. Was it not Jesus who turned water into wine?
At the youth group that Wednesday, the pastor made a rare appearance to address any theological questions we might have. The girl I wanted to shepherd raised her hand. “Someone here told me,” she said, “that it’s okay to drink alcohol but not okay to get drunk.” The pastor frowned. He looked at the ground, began to pace. She continued. “I… I… I don’t think that’s right.”
Distressed that she had challenged my authority, I thought about what the Apostle Paul said: “The women should keep silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak, but must be in submission.” (1 Corinthians 14:34)
The pastor claimed that the wine Jesus made was really just grape juice. The youth minister spoke to the girl after the session, perhaps trying to identify the heretic going around claiming that Jesus turned water into wine. I began to notice the way he looked at me with concern.
I spoke to the girl afterward, telling her it was absolutely true that Jesus created alcoholic wine. “Why would I believe you?” she asked me. “The pastor has a doctorate.”
Repulsed, I concluded that these supposedly highly educated men were failing in the spiritual responsibility of our sex to diligently cultivate a correct understanding of the Scriptures in the delicate minds of the young women whom the Lord had entrusted to their care. They were willfully twisting the Bible to fit into their own preconceived Baptist notions about alcohol.
But I also blamed the sinful natures of my peers. Once they invited me to a gathering. There, I was deeply disturbed to encounter my fellow Christians playing Halo. I couldn’t understand why they would waste a second on video games when we could be discussing the scriptural evidence behind various theological perspectives. No wonder they were so easily deceived by the pastor. They had forsaken the Christian duty to nurture an independent understanding of the Bible.
The next Wednesday at youth group, a Church Elder came to talk to us about why the King James Version of the Bible was the only truly infallible version of God’s Word in English. He claimed that in the early seventeenth century, King James had divided the translators up into groups, and they all miraculously came back with the “exact same thing.” Having studied the matter in depth, I wanted to point out to him that this wasn’t really accurate, since each group had been assigned different sections of the Bible to translate.
But then he began to explain to us the definition of theology and the years of study required to truly understand it. Was this his way of discrediting my newsletter? After all, I had been becoming even more explicit about the theology of Calvinism. Recently, I had implied that true salvation is only possible for the person who acknowledges that they are so deeply sinful that they could never have come to Jesus by their own free will. I felt that anyone who denies this fundamental truth about human nature is not a true Christian, because their repentance falls short of a full acknowledgement of just how utterly depraved they are. And for that they will burn in Hell as insufficiently remorseful sinners. I sensed I was becoming a problem to be rooted out by youth group visits from the pastor and his minions. I was like the prophets rejected by the Israelites.
I approached the girl whom I had placed into my care, and I told her about how this so-called “theologian” had lied to us about the King James Version. She rolled her eyes.
Then, that Sunday, the pastor explicitly emphasized to the congregation that it was absolutely essential for us to believe in free will. He said God needs us and wants us to willingly love Him. He alerted his flock to the false Calvinist doctrine of predestination infiltrating their midst.
The tragically misled female, for whose salvation I was now deeply afraid, said they might take away my bulletin. But a few people approached me encouragingly, discreetly letting me know that they were on my side about the Calvinism stuff.
Eagerly preparing for the coming doctrinal confrontation with my supposed intellectual superiors, I spent my last month as a sixteen-year-old fortifying my capacity for theological combat. Alone in my room in the evenings, I reviewed the classic debates surrounding the condemnation of Pelagius, the fifth-century heretic who was among the original proponents of the blasphemy that human beings are not dominated by our sinful nature. He argued that humans were not inherently tainted by Original Sin, but could come to abstain from wickedness on our own. He was condemned by the synod of Jerusalem in 415, thanks partly to the work of one of my heroes, St. Augustine, that great advocate of fallen humanity’s absolute corruption.
But I also sought out the writings of my enemies. I procured a copy of God’s Strategy in Human History by Paul Marston and Roger Forster. I annotated it in an effort to better understand my opponents. The book is an argument against Calvinism by a pair of Arminian theologians. (“Arminian” is one of the words denoting Christians who believe in a role for free will).
But then in a moment of weakness, emerging perhaps from my Total Depravity, I listened to Something Corporate on my iPod during a break between chapters. It made me remember the non-Christian friends I had before I had become so obsessed with all this bullshit. I read their Xangas and Livejournals and wished I’d been there for all these memories. All I wanted was to stop spending so many nights alone consumed by these stupid debates. Soon after, I was seventeen, and it was New Year’s Eve, 2004 turning into 2005. That night, I rejoined my old group of friends. I completely stopped going to church.
Soon after, a (different) girl I had known at the church called me on my cell phone.
“Hey Andrew,” she said. “I just wanted to know if you found another church yet.” She hinted at a purge of the Calvinists by the Baptist leadership. They had been driven out of the congregation. “Me and my family, we believe what you believe. We are Calvinists too, I mean. So yeah, I just wanted to see if you and your family found a new church yet.”
My friend looked at me. “Who the fuck is that?” he asked, clutching his bag of Taco Bell.
“No,” I said to her quietly. “We haven’t.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Bye.” I quickly hung up, cutting off her last confused words.
“Who was that?” my friend asked.
“Some weirdo,” I said.
There was a girl I liked in the grade below me. She didn’t know about any of this. I didn’t want her to find out about it all and think I was some kind of freak.
And yet I still had to give a whole presentation at school about my research project on various Christian approaches to eschatology. Because that was the project I had chosen several months ago when I cared about it. Shaking and humiliated, I stood up there and used a series of PowerPoint slides to explain to my public-school class the most crucial distinctions between Pre-Tribulational Premillennialism, Post-Tribulational Premillennialism, Postmillennialism, Amillennialism, and Preterism, carefully outlining the scriptural evidence for and against each position. “You’re a fucking freak,” one of my classmates told me afterward.
In another class, the German brought up my old views again. I perceived he was eager to listen to my doctrines and laugh at me like he used to. He quoted back to me some crazy shit I had once said about Hindus. “How can you seriously believe all that?”
“I don’t,” I told him, wishing for the conversation to end as quickly as possible.
The German shook his head at me with disgust. “What do you mean?”
“I just don’t believe it anymore,” I said quietly.
He scoffed and never spoke to me again. I was boring now. I was no longer a freaky religious American for him to go tell the Germans back home about.
Soon after that, I went to Florida with my dad and grandpa for a multi-day theological conference hosted by my Calvinist hero RC Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries. I had proposed this trip to Florida with them when I was still deeply isolated from my peers at school. For my grandpa’s sake, I pretended to still be the passionate aspiring minister he believed I was. But now all I could think about was the fun weekend with my friends from which this conference excluded me. And how that symbolized the countless months of quality time with them I had already missed in the last year.
We saw RC Sproul himself talking about predestination. Then two old ladies seated in front of us said it was inspiring to see a young man like me at a conference like this.
“It was his idea,” my grandpa said proudly. “He wants to be a pastor.”
The white-haired ladies held their Bibles close to their hearts as they took me in. Me, a rare glimmer of hope for a fallen generation. I smiled back but said nothing.
All Bible verses from the English Standard Version