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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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.
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.
Cyril’s fervor for pure explication of the gospel was present throughout his career.
Finding the balance between indifferentism and obsessiveness has never been easy, and it’s especially difficult in our environment.
Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.
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.
History is the painful realization that we aren’t the ones who can save the world but, rather, we’re the ones who get saved.
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
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.
Through Martin Luther, God would unleash a far greater storm than the one which overwhelmed Luther on July 2, 1505.