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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When we Christians shoehorn Creedal Christianity into any of these ideological positions we obscure the Gospel mingling it with the Law and strip the Good News of its catholicity.
The Confessions instead look forward and provide a critique of the world and of all my various religions and idolatries.
Where once we confessed reliance only in ourselves and our own power, now we confess reliance on Christ alone. So, for our relationship before God, our confession of faith matters.
The question at hand was quite short, “Who is Jesus Christ?
Much like Jacob wrestling with God in the desert, we find our intellectual hips continuously put out of joint as we engage the culture around us.
The author, Flannery O'Connor, said, "All I can say about my love of God is, Lord help me in my lack of it."
Hus held that Christ alone grants salvation and that popes do not.
And your life, weary and broken as it is, is hidden by God in Christ—tucked away in God’s enduring and eternally given Word, in Jesus.
God is the God of failures, for He became one for you. There is no failure of ours that is bigger than Jesus’ cross, no sin of ours that can overshadow the cross.
Mordor’s bleak existence and the successful salvific mission of Frodo and Samwise is what makes Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings such a psychologically enjoyable epic.
The little psychologist within us is often hard at work to pinpoint the origin of life’s problems.
How should we read Paul, ya’ll? Why reading the Bible like a Southerner makes sense of confusing passages.