This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.
On its journey from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, this special place helps us understand the broader arc of Christian history, which goes on until Christ's return.
We needn’t fear statistics and studies as palm readings into a certain future. God is God, and his Spirit is alive through his Word.

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Cranach became the evangelical interpreter for the masses
There is only one antidote to the venom of sin and death: the Savior who becomes the serpent so that every snake-bitten-sinner might live.
To “trust in God in trial” means we fight our battles by kneeling and praying to “the Holy One of Israel,” who works out our deliverance by himself.
Take heart: God is near and he is here for you.
We bring nothing with us that contributes to the preaching or the hearing of God’s promise to us.
At the heart of The Idiot is Dostoevsky's confession of faith and the confession of all Christians.
Faith is like a horse with blinders because it only beholds God’s promise. It is obsessed with what God has already said.
The spirit indeed is willing and desires bodily death as a gentle sleep. It does not consider it to be death; it knows no such thing as death.
With Christ as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, the future is secure already. It’s solid right now, even when the cords seem to be fraying.
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
In the place of God, Marx sets the material, autonomous, self-creating man.
Moses is no Jesus but he, like us, is saved by Him. The law cannot enter the promised land, and yet the true and greater promised land is occupied by nothing but lawbreakers.