Old Testament books aren’t often high on the list of go-to books for women’s Bible studies. They can seem intimidating, with difficult narratives and prophecies we can’t easily interpret. Yet Jen Wilkin believes women not only can study the Old Testament but should study it. She has authored several Bible studies on Old Testament books, including deep dives into Genesis and Exodus, a coauthored study of Proverbs, and a new study on Joshua. I asked her to reflect on her passion for studying the Old Testament, best practices for studying Joshua, and why we can all benefit from studying this often quoted yet easily misunderstood book. While many believers shy away from the Old Testament, you love to teach it. Why does helping women study these books excite you? Most of my students fall into one of two buckets when it comes to the Old Testament: unfamiliarity or overfamiliarity. The unfamiliar person is a marvelous blank slate. I want her to learn a new book with good tools in a way that builds her library of Bible knowledge and also fuels her faith. If she has spot-knowledge of a book—maybe she knows the story of the fall of Jericho thanks to VeggieTales—I want her to gain the full sweep of the narrative of Joshua. The overfamiliar person has likely been in church her whole life. She has done reading plans and studies and has heard Sunday school lessons and sermons for years. I want to help her discover how much more there is to learn or perhaps that what she already knows needs to be placed in the larger story of redemption. How does the book of Joshua fit into the full story of Scripture? Many of us are familiar with the metanarrative structure of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. This arc plays out across all of Scripture, with the book of Joshua falling within the story of redemption, but it also plays out in smaller arcs. In the Old Testament, we see an arc stretch from Genesis 12 to the end of Joshua. Israel is “created” as a people in Genesis 12–50, the story of the patriarchs. Israel “falls” into slavery in Egypt and is “redeemed” by Moses. Joshua then “restores” their inheritance. We can trace an even smaller arc if we see Passover as “creation” of a free nation, wilderness rebellion as “fall,” Canaanite conquest as “redemption,” and promised land allotments as “restoration.” Joshua, the man, is often looked to as a hero of our faith. But why is it important that we ultimately understand Joshua as pointing forward to Jesus? The “main characters” of the Old Testament all contribute something to our ability to anticipate Christ’s person and work. When we look at our own lives as a wilderness wandering, we see Christ’s first coming typified in the work of Moses, who institutes sacrifice for sins and accomplishes our freedom from sin’s slavery. The ‘main characters’ of the Old Testament all contribute something to our ability to anticipate Christ’s person and work. We see Christ’s second coming typified in the work of Joshua, who places every enemy under our feet and grants us our inheritance. Israel’s conquest of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership was ultimately incomplete. When Christ appears as a warrior king in Revelation—eradicating wickedness and establishing justice, inaugurating the eternal promised land—he shows himself as the true and better Joshua. What does a book like Joshua—hard moments and all—teach us about God’s character? It teaches us that God hates sin more than we do. It also teaches us he is more committed to justice than we are. One of the biggest misconceptions about the book of Joshua is that it displays God’s hatred of the Canaanites and his love of the Jews. Only a spot-knowledge of the book can support this reading. When Achan disobeys God in chapter 7, he receives the same fate as the Canaanites: herem, devotion to destruction. His story shows us that God does not hate Canaanites; he hates sin. All of it. No matter who commits it, the penalty is the same. I don’t mean to imply that we should feel fine about the account of the Canaanite conquest. I think we’re right to feel discomfort. But by the time we reach the book of Joshua, we have the entire Torah testifying to the goodness of God. Thus, we read Joshua through that lens, asking, “How might this account speak of the goodness of God in a way I can’t readily see?” And then we take our time letting the answer emerge. What are some best practices for studying Old Testament books like Joshua? Joshua is one of the Old Testament’s historical narratives. In one sense, narratives are easy reading. They move at a storytelling pace, which is less verbally dense than a psalm or an epistle. As we read these narratives, it’s important to read for detail, looking for the shape of each individual “scene” and noting how each one builds the story as a whole. It’s also helpful to look back at the first five books of the Bible for repeated themes, symbols, or imagery that are also included in Joshua. Then we look forward to the rest of Scripture to make more connections. Finally, we make application in three layers: (1) what the text meant for them and for then (original audience), (2) what the text means for us and for always (the church in any generation), and (3) what the text means for me and for now (individual application, if appropriate). Joshua is clearly written to serve us, the people of God, so we emphasize corporate application. One challenge in studying Old Testament narratives, as you mentioned above, is that some readers are ‘overfamiliar’ with them. How does gaining additional context into well-known stories in the Old Testament change or enhance our understanding? I want to answer this carefully because I don’t love when an obscure historical or grammatical fact is brought to bear on a text in a way that feels out of reach for the average learner. That being said, our job as readers is to ask what the original hearers understood. To answer that question, we should educate ourselves about their basic assumptions, shaped by their time in history, their geography, their communication rules, and their knowledge of the Torah. In other words, what should we assume the original audience knew intuitively? Let’s take geography as an example. I know Texas geography, so if you mention Amarillo, I immediately know the scenery is as flat as a pancake. The original audience for Joshua knew the geography of Canaan. They knew that the Jordan sat in a deep valley and that Jericho was in a strategic location for military conquest. When we study passages that reference specific locations, we need to consider how these locations relate to critical scenes. These are not obscure details, and they help us understand the placement and the movement of the narrative. Consider Rahab’s mention of the Red Sea crossing and of Sihon and Og (Josh. 2:10). These two events mark the beginning and the ending of Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness. They are specifically mentioned for a reason. Because the original hearers knew the Torah, that reason would be immediately apparent to them in a way that it isn’t for modern ears unschooled in the Old Testament. Why do those date stamps matter to Rahab? Why should they matter to us? When we apply context to a passage, we begin to ask better questions. What encouragement and advice would you offer women about studying Old Testament books like Joshua that might seem intimidating? My general rule for myself is this: The more boring, scary, or opaque a book of the Bible feels, the more I need to press myself to learn it. Those are the books that languish while we return again and again to short books of more accessible genres (I’m looking at you, Pauline Epistles). If all Scripture is indeed profitable, we should seek understanding from all of it. Life is short. We can’t afford to play favorites with a handful of New Testament books at the expense of the rest of Scripture. We can’t afford to play favorites with a handful of New Testament books at the expense of the rest of Scripture. And we can’t expect those New Testament books to yield the depths of their treasures without their Old Testament foundation. We need treasures both old and new from the storeroom of God’s Word. I no longer see the Canaanite conquest as an embarrassing episode in Israel’s history, incongruent with the character of a loving God. I no longer think land allotments are something to skip over in a reading plan. That took work, but it was work worth doing. It’s work that’s meant to be done with others, not just alone in your room with a journal and a pen. I write studies as a means to draw others into conversation about books of the Bible they either think they already know or they’re afraid to tackle alone. Joshua is a book you need on your Bible literacy bookshelf. Let’s explore it together.

A seasoned pastor once told me, “Satan recycles.” In context, he was saying that the same heresies and philosophical errors tend to resurface throughout history. It’s similar to what C. S. Lewis meant at the end of The Silver Chair when the Narnians were celebrating the rescue of Prince Rilian and the downfall of the Green Witch: “Those Northern Witches always mean the same thing, but in every age they have a different plan for getting it.” There’s nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9). In Magician and Mechanic: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution, Michael Horton shows that the surge in people identifying as “Spiritual but Not Religious” (SBNR) has deep roots in Western culture. In the first volume in the Divine Self series, Shaman and Sage, Horton—professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California—traces SBNR back to at least the Axial Age (c. 600 BC). This second volume continues that chronological journey into more familiar territory for many readers. Horton’s retelling of Western intellectual history undermines common assumptions about the origins of modernity. Many of modernity’s problems—which often get blamed on Protestantism—were issues the Reformation was already trying to address. The best solution to the errors of any age is often to look deeper at the ancient Christian gospel, rather than trying to find truth from new perspectives. Defusing the Disenchantment Thesis For many critics of Protestantism—whether they’re pagan, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox—the disenchantment thesis, popularized by sociologist Max Weber, offers convincing evidence that the Reformation was a mistake. The basic argument is that Western culture became individualistic and antisupernatural because Luther and the other reformers who followed him accelerated an inward psychological turn along with an emphasis on the transcendence of God rather than divine immanence in the material world. Secularism, environmental abuse, a sense of meaninglessness in life, the prosperity-gospel movement, and expressive individualism each has its roots in Luther’s emphasis on justification by faith alone. About the only modern problem I haven’t seen the Protestant Reformation blamed for is tooth decay. Magician and Mechanic doesn’t take on the critics directly. Yet, as Horton provides a heap of evidence, he clearly has the disenchantment thesis in his sights. He writes, “The story of modernity, particularly its central dogma of the divine self, is less the product of disenchanting naturalism than the ‘divine madness’ of natural supernaturalism” (26). We have to look back to the previous volume, Shaman and Sage, to be reminded that “natural supernaturalism refers to the pantheistic or panentheistic cosmotheology of [the Orphic] tradition,” which prioritizes individual human experience and interpretation of reality. Horton’s book is terminologically dense. He’s arguing that the world isn’t disenchanted, even for atheistic materialists; they’ve just made the individual the center of enchantment. And once you see that, it’s impossible to unsee. For example, arch-materialist Carl Sagan famously said, “The cosmos is . . . within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” When everything is divine, there’s no need for God. Furthermore, as Horton argues, “If there are no gods to worry about interfering with our lives, we become gods ourselves, free to create our own meaning and purpose in this life” (13). Many of modernity’s flaws have more to do with the failure of the Reformation to transform the world than with its success. Reasons for Reformation Horton’s careful retelling of the story of early modern European philosophy upends other common tropes. For example, he shows that Friedrich Schleiermacher’s idea of “absolute dependence,” which birthed modern liberal theology, isn’t the result of the Reformation’s emphasis on individual justification. Rather, it draws more from the idea of the divine self that Christendom never eradicated and that was often embraced by self-described Christians. Many of modernity’s flaws have more to do with the failure of the Reformation to transform the world than with its success. In many cases, individualistic pagan practices were tolerated among church leaders “as long as they were properly glossed by their creators as prophetic allusions to Christ’s advent rather than an alternative religion” (5). However, Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino did more than blur the lines when he combined Neoplatonism and astrology with his official beliefs as an ordained Catholic priest. It’s telling that Ficino is by no means the most prominent figure within the church’s hierarchy who did more than dabble in Orphic spiritualism. There were popes performing magic and consulting astrological predictions for important decisions. The upshot is that Christendom wasn’t an example of pristine Christianity by either Roman Catholic or Protestant definitions. When contemporary writers like Paul Kingsnorth and Rod Dreher call for a return to a pre-Reformation enchantedness as part of the solution to the malaise of modernity, we should have follow-up questions about what that entails. Medieval and early modern European spirituality were mixed bags, at best. Though Horton doesn’t address the question extensively in this volume, it becomes obvious why the reformers insisted so vigorously on sola scriptura. They were resisting claims—from both Rome and the radicals—of personal, supernatural revelation that went beyond and often conflicted with Scripture. On the one hand, the extrabiblical authority of the pope and human tradition provided an insufficiently stable foundation for the Christian faith. On the other hand, “Anabaptist spiritualists were the first critics of the Bible, shifting the locus of authority from external sources to the inner autonomy of the enlightened individual” (345–46). The canon of Scripture—the unchanging Word of God—reliably ties Christians of every age to “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Implications for Justification At points when reading the series’ first volume, I found it hard to tell where this project fits within Horton’s work as a Christian theologian. However, in Magician and Mechanic, we begin to see more clearly how the Divine Self series meshes with Horton’s consistent concern for the doctrine of justification. In particular, he shows that concern for the salvation of the individual soul isn’t a medieval or early modern invention. That claim raises questions about some basic assumptions of the New Perspective on Paul. Krister Stendahl’s 1963 essay, which arguably launched the New Perspective, argues that Luther misread a crisis of conscience back into Paul’s letters. According to this perspective, concern for individual salvation was a modern idea that must have been foreign to the apostle to the Gentiles, so an emphasis on justification of the individual by faith alone must be anachronistic. Paul could only have been wrestling with corporate rather than personal salvation, because the crisis of conscience is a medieval development perfected by Luther and Freud. These key ideas run through debates about the gospel over the last seven decades. The canon of Scripture—the unchanging Word of God—reliably ties Christians of every age to ‘the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.’ In contrast, Horton shows in Shaman and Sage that the concept of the divine self existed in ancient cultures at least as far back as the Axial Age. Though there are certainly wrinkles throughout time, variations on the divine-self theme run through Western culture all the way to the modern age. Concern for the state of the individual soul was common. It need not follow, then, that Paul’s wrestling with his conscience in view of the law (see Rom. 7) is an anachronistic reading introduced by Augustine and adopted by Luther. In light of the first two volumes in the Divine Self project, the traditional Protestant view of Paul seems much more likely. Critics of modernity often insist that the solution to its spiritual malaise lies in recovering enchantment by turning inward toward the divine self. Horton shows why that impulse only deepens the problem. The reformers’s insistence on sola scriptura and justification by faith alone was a necessary response to the individualistic spiritualism of their day. In Magician and Mechanic, Michael Horton renews our confidence that the  gospel is the church’s enduring answer to modernity’s recycled errors.

At the end of the class on cultural apologetics I teach at Beeson Divinity School, I assign a group exercise. The students need to compose 10 questions and answers from a modern-day catechism. Historically, catechisms have emerged during times of cultural transition and confrontation—such as our own time, in the aftermath of Christendom and the Enlightenment, awaiting whatever develops with post-liberalism. So catechisms aren’t merely a relic of our past but a vital resource for the present that prepares us for the future. I’m delighted with how The New City Catechism, especially our devotional, still serves readers. And I’m delighted by a new volume, The Gospel Way Catechism: 50 Truths That Take on the World (Harvest House), written by my friends Trevin Wax and Thomas West. Tim Keller said, “We need a counter-catechism that explains, refutes, and re-narrates the world’s catechisms to Christians.” And that’s what Trevin and Thomas have done in The Gospel Way Catechism. Trevin is a fellow at The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics and serves as vice president of research and resource development at the North American Mission Board. Thomas is the pastor of Nashville First Baptist Church. In This Episode 00:00 – What’s wrong with the world: deeper than ignorance or injustice 00:34 – Collin’s “modern catechism” assignment and why catechisms return in transitions 01:03 – Introducing The Gospel Way Catechism and Keller’s “counter catechism” vision 01:36 – Welcoming Trevin Wax and Thomas West 01:54 – “Can Baptists write a catechism?” and Baptist catechesis history 02:57 – Influential catechisms: Keach, Spurgeon, Heidelberg, Luther, Calvin, Westminster 03:23 – Most controversial truths today: sexuality and deeper “me-first” narratives 04:51 – “What has gone wrong?”: ignorance, injustice, expressive individualism 07:14 – Moving beyond whack-a-mole to the Bible’s deeper diagnosis 09:37 – Western self-centeredness and sin as being “curved in on ourselves” 12:24 – Writing process and Keller’s influence: every catechism is counter-catechesis 13:48 – Origin story at The Kilns (C. S. Lewis’s home) and testing in a London church 15:45 – Objections: “we don’t need this” and why cultural frames change catechesis needs 20:18 – Returning from London: seeing American wealth, waste, and politics differently 24:13 – Why Leviticus gets a chapter: sacrifice, scapegoating, and modern idols 27:59 – Catechesis and spiritual formation: tools, Word-centeredness, and Gen-Z hunger 31:38 – Encouragement from readers: cultural narratives filtered, doctrine re-centered 33:09 – In 20 years: transhumanism, bioethics, reproductive tech, assisted dying 36:06 – “What is human?” and “What is truth?”: new iterations of old questions 36:39 – Closing thanks and sign-off Resources Mentioned: The Gospel Way Catechism by Trevin Wax and Thomas West New City Catechism with introduction by Kathy Keller A Heart Aflame for God by Matthew Bingham SIGN UP for my newsletter, Unseen Things. Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today. Don’t miss an episode of Gospelbound with Collin Hansen: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube TGC Updates

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