Tag: Bible

Why Christianity Survived as a Scaling Operation, Not a Martyr Cult—and Why the Apostle Paul was the Best One

I have been living inside a new Bible. Not a novelty Bible. Not one of those thin inspirational editions that treat Scripture like a greeting card. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, New King James Version, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson in August of 2026. I cannot say enough about it. The notes are Edwards. The sermons sit next to the text. The Resolutions are there. The miscellany system is explained so a man can actually work the way Edwards worked. Every time I pick up a different Bible, I change perspective a little. This one changed it a lot.

I was going through it, and I couldn’t help thinking about a miracle that doesn’t get preached the way it should. Not only the crucifixion. Not only the empty tomb. The miracle that Christianity emerged at all. That the word got out. That a Jewish movement in a backwater of the Roman Empire became the operating system of Western civilization. I want to talk about Christianity as a military and commercial endeavor—not instead of the spiritual, but as the way the spiritual actually conquered. What benefit did Christianity bring to the race and to civilization? Magnificent. And I keep thinking, reading Edwards, how many movements rose and fell that we will never know about because the writing did not survive, or it is still buried in the desert waiting to be discovered. We know Christianity because it was documented, scaled, and defended by men who understood value.

King Charles, the Quran, and Knowing Where You Are

I saw King Charles in England talking about the holy book of the Quran, how we have to respect it, all that progressive mantra that is designed to undo Western civilization. You need to know where you are. You need to know your own nation’s history. I have read the Quran for years. I cannot say there is anything in any version I’ve read that has the spiritual and intellectual merit I get from Edwards. Edwards is a good writer. He is a great mind under pressure. He is the kind of intelligence that contemplates large ideas and then puts them into a form a civilization can use. If you want to know what the United States began as—a Christian nation in the serious sense, not the slogan sense—this Bible is the right tool.

Somebody asked me if I was working for the publisher because I have been pushing this volume so hard. I am not. I want them to make money. Scholars spent years, decades of work behind them, putting Edwards next to the text so a man in 2026 can buy it on the open market and think. How do you make a living long enough to produce something intelligent? How do you buy a hamburger and still have thousands of hours left to put a mind like Edwards in one place? That question is not small. It is the same question Paul answered with a needle and goat hair.

Paul Was a Businessman. That is why we still have Christianity.

My favorite book in the Bible is Ephesians. Paul wrote it. I think a lot of people confuse Paul with John. John wrote Revelation. John is the one who survived—tradition says they tried to boil him and he lived, and then he wrote. They killed Paul in Rome, most likely sometime between 64 and 67. People mix the two up. They should not. John is the seer. Paul is the scaler.

Paul came in late. He was against Jesus, and then he was for Jesus. Many people in the world might find themselves in that place. He was a Pharisee, educated, and a tentmaker. The original disciples, when they were still following Jesus around Galilee, were mostly fishermen. Dirt poor. I tend to see that first circle as an early form of communal living—they held things in common, lived off shared provision, and took care of their own. Historians generally see the Jerusalem church in Acts as voluntary generosity inside a tight, persecuted community, not a formal communist system. It was “we take care of our own,” not a political ideology. And it did not last as a model. It could not scale.

Paul’s idea came from a businessman. Because of Paul, we still have Christianity today. That is not a slight against Peter or James or John. It is an observation about how movements survive. The dramatic turn—from hunting the church to becoming its biggest champion after the Damascus Road—matters. His background as a tentmaker and an educated Pharisee gave him a different toolkit than the original disciples. He could travel. He could talk to Gentiles. He could write letters that functioned as operating manuals. Without the missionary journeys and without letters like Ephesians, Christianity might have stayed a small Jewish sect. He brought structure, theology, and a scalable vision.

Financial Independence Is Not a Side Note. It Is the Strategy.

The part of Paul that made him effective with people initially against the movement is the part churches don’t like to talk about on Sunday. He did not have to live off a handout. He could be bold, even if he went a little over the edge, because he was financially independent enough from his trade to go against the grain and reshape a movement. That personal independence—having a trade, having a bank account from business days—gave him latitude. Everybody else emphasized martyrdom. Martyrdom is remembered. Martyrdom does not stay around long enough, or hold enough social influence, to make people listen after the body is gone. They were easily disposed of, crucified, written into history as a memento. It takes more than that to make a movement work.

Paul knew how to scale ideas. Ephesians is the proof. He supported himself while traveling and preaching, so he wasn’t as vulnerable to local pressure or to needing one house to feed him. That freedom let him be bolder in the message and push boundaries without worrying about immediate survival. The other apostles were deeply rooted in the Jewish context. Paul was building something that could outlast any single leader. The shift from “follow me to death” to “this truth can transform anyone, anywhere” is the difference between a local witness and a civilization.

If Paul had never converted, I think the movement would have fizzled. The Roman world was full of rebellions and religious groups we have never even heard of. Without his organizational skill and his ability to take the message beyond Jewish circles, Christianity likely stays small, localized, and eventually fades like the rest. His conversion and his strategic vision gave him a unique angle on the bigger picture. I wonder how many political efforts to overthrow or outlast Rome rose and fell that we will never know about. Paul would have been one of them if he had stayed Saul.

Ephesians 6:12 and the Politics of Heaven

My favorite verse is Ephesians 6:12. I love that line because it is a truth revealed to a mind under tremendous pressure, telling the grim reality of the human race. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Paul is preaching monotheism against the tides of the day, against a Roman world that had many gods, and he comes up with the idea that the secret rulers of existence are not the men in front of you. Thank goodness he had the creative nerve to write it that way.

I recognize that verse because I’ve learned it the hard way. The true reality of the universe is that good people end up hurting each other while chasing things that don’t matter, and the reason isn’t always the name on the driver’s license. It is the entities behind the people. Our mistake is stopping at Tim or Bob or Bill. I don’t remember names the way other people want me to. I care about the principalities that climb into bodies and drive them. The flesh-and-blood parts—whose nose looks like the father, whose hair color came from the great-grandfather—mean little to me. The politics of the principality does.

I have a granddaughter a few years old. I watch her walk, run, pick things up, touch the world, learn who is important and who is not. Those bonds will go through her entire life—parents, uncles, cousins, grandparents—even when she is forty or fifty. She is writing those meetings into her experience as she learns. We all go through that. But what was the human being before the human being? What is a person’s spiritual essence before it manifests in flesh and blood? What is the politics of that principality? That is the kind of thing I think about. A personality there is not rooted only in genetic material. We are not always what we are as defined by the human experience. We are what we are whether it manifests or not.

When Does the Principality Enter the World?

People want a clean answer on conception, quickening, birth. I think the principalities are already at work when a mother and father find themselves wanting to form a union to produce a child. They either will themselves into the world or wield the world toward its demise. Human beings create political systems that reflect that dependency because we learned to become flesh, and we rarely see the principal active behind the desire. We are stuck seeing the physical side. The human experience starts to feel like actors on a stage, with invisible directors.

That is why the incarnation is such a radical move. God of the universe taking form as a human being, the Spirit moving through people—if you only watch flesh, it looks strange. If you watch principalities, it looks like the only way to break through hidden influences and meet us in the middle of the mess. Human beings are not the whole problem. The forces that drive the human being are. If you measure your value only by how much you sacrifice yourself to other human beings, you can feed the wrong powers and call it virtue. I have an awful lot of friends in that place. To be nice, I will put my wife in that category. She is a person who will sacrifice as a mother, as a wife, as a community member, so that something good can happen. A lot of people judge their value in the world by what they are willing to give up. Hidden power resides behind the efforts of everything we interact with. You have to know what you are serving.

Paul and the Apostles Did Not Get Along. That Is Why It Worked.

Christianity did not spread as a locked-arm kumbaya. Paul fought the original apostles. The clashes were open. Peter was vocal. The question of Gentiles, purity, who is in and who is out—those were not polite committee meetings. It is amazing Christianity even made it. The Jerusalem circle wanted purity. Keep the impure out. Paul wanted scale. Include the nations. If the purity party had won clean, there would have been no movement that could leave Judea. There would have been no Edwards. There would have been no Washington. There would have been no Lincoln. Christianity does not break out of being a Jewish sect without Paul’s vision for the Gentile world.

I mentioned Nancy Nix in the video because that is how this works in real life. I was at Fort Necessity, walking around the bookstore outside the theater, and she called. She represents Republican politics in my community in Butler County, Ohio. We do not talk every five seconds. We talk a good deal. We think alike about a lot of things. She was having a particular problem—kids not playing well in the sandbox, twenty-five people in a room with twenty-five backgrounds and twenty-five ideas of right and wrong, and you have to point them in one direction. That is the same problem Paul had. How do you bring people together and make a movement voters, or believers, can actually trust? Real movements are made in that mess. Not by people who only keep the circle pure. By people who can stand the friction and still build.

Fort Necessity, Mount Vernon, Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg

If Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, my wife and I had Fort Necessity on a wrong turn. We were headed toward Washington. We took a wrong turn onto the National Road with the camper. Hard to turn a camper around in the mountains. We were too far in to go back, so we kept going and drove right by Necessity. I pulled into the big parking lot to turn around. I went back into the camper for a Mello Yello. She said we were already an hour and a half off schedule; we were here- why not go into the museum? So we did. March or April 2026. Cool. Not crowded. A Wednesday afternoon, and we had the place to ourselves. I walked the ground where a young George Washington learned what command costs.

A few months later the Washington movie came out, and we went to see it. I was already thinking about what made Washington Washington. The Great Awakening—the idea of a people who could stand up against the mother country—was coming out of churches. Edwards was in the air those men breathed. Then the same year I got to Mount Vernon, to the grave where Washington and Martha overlook the Potomac, into the house, into the room. I have been interested in the influence on his day-to-day life. Edwards is one of those influences. I was thinking about Edwards before this Bible existed. Then this is the year they put the Study Bible together. That is not an accident in my calendar.

A couple of days after Necessity, my friend Nancy called while I was in that library. A couple of days after that, my wife and I were in Gettysburg. We had already been in Washington. We took a whole day for Ford’s Theatre. I stood at the door of the box Booth walked through to shoot Lincoln in the back of the head. I had been at the White House that morning. Assassination attempts on Trump were in my head—the Butler, Pennsylvania picture, blood down the face. I was ready to leave and get a sandwich. My wife wanted to go across the street to see where Lincoln had died. We had made friends with a tour guide, a Park Service man who gives the presentation on stage. He saw we were abnormally interested. He took us to the Petersen House, to the room where Lincoln died. A little chair sat by the bed. I sat there a long time. No ghosts. A good museum. A man who works that room every day and understood where I was.

I sat there thinking what Lincoln was thinking as he bled out. I think he was thinking about the creation of the United States. I think he was thinking about the men who had already given their lives. I think the moral language in his pocket went back through the Awakening to Edwards. Then we spent days on the Gettysburg field with the RV. Maps. Day one, day two, day three. Temperature. What the soldiers felt like. I had this overwhelming thought that Edwards—the sermons, the memos of the Awakening in a man’s kit—helped Union soldiers hold together long enough to win, and Lincoln put everything on that hold. Day three. Cemetery Ridge. A republic built on Christian values against an aristocracy that still wanted Europe’s old arrangement. That does not happen without a moral backbone. That backbone does not happen without Edwards. Edwards does not happen in the form that made America without a Christianity that could already scale. That Christianity does not happen without Paul.

Trump Is a Lot Like Paul

A lot of people in the political circles I run in are asking what we are supposed to be doing. Trump has been in the White House. He has held Bibles. He has tried to bring old tradition back into the public eye. I don’t know that Trump is “into it” the way a seminary man is. He is a businessman. In many ways, Trump is a lot like Paul. We were given a second chance because a man with a messy former life and a real business ability sat Christians and conservatives down at a table of political power they would not have had otherwise. Charlie Kirk and a lot of others got a larger platform because of that. Things are better because of it. It does not always come in the package you would have designed on a Sunday morning. Paul did not either.

Both used a practical scaling mindset. Neither arrived as the saint the purity party wanted. Both made the movement larger than the room that wanted to keep it small. That is the comparison. I catch some of that same spirit in Edwards—the hope in the sermons that God would walk with a people onto the battlefields of life and that justice would be served. There are always difficulties. A remnant will always rather dismantle what was built than build on it. I am saying no. We need to build on what we built here and continue it productively.

The Second Great Awakening Will Not Come From Washington

We always focus on Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Adams. What made them? The first Great Awakening made the moral weather they walked through. A Second Great Awakening will not come from the Trump administration as a program. The administration can facilitate space. It cannot preach it. It has to come from churches and Bibles and men who will talk in public. Putting this Edwards Bible together helps people recover the first so we can form another.

What does a modern awakening look like? A lot of people despise AI. They do not like Elon Musk. They think we are headed for Age of Ultron, Tony Stark trying to fix the world and creating new problems. I am having a public conversation with a human-created intelligence on purpose. That does not mean we end up the villain. I think the next awakening is going to use the technology we created to serve the old fire—real-time reference, real-time argument, people able to spy on a serious conversation from their own house at whatever hour they can stand it. Churches on Sunday give you the names and the memorize-the-event version. They do not give you the psychology of why the thing worked. That is why this conversation matters.

The biggest threat to the legacy is not a missile. It is an anti-business movement aimed at the root of what Paul brought into Christianity: a sense of value, then that value carried into a relationship with the everlasting, with the principalities beyond flesh and blood. When people attack business and capital in Western culture, they are often attacking the mechanism that let Christianity endure long enough to shape law, ethics, and institutions. Paul’s business mindset did not just help Christianity. It shaped the DNA of a civilization that understood productivity and serving others as spiritual work. That came from a tentmaker who refused to live only on other people’s tables.

What I Want People to Take From This

Paul is why Christianity is a world force and not a forgotten Judean faction. Edwards is a large reason we have an America that could produce Washington and Lincoln. Washington and Lincoln are why a republic is left to defend. 

I don’t think Jesus would say, “Take joy in melting their faces.” I think Jesus would do the thing that got Him in trouble: preach anyway, against the warnings, against the purity party, against the empire. Paul took that and made it travel. Edwards took that and made it American. We are due to take it again.

In the age of disclosure, you must understand the politics of heaven. Start with Paul. Start with Edwards. 

Notes

1.  The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Study notes drawn from Edwards’s works; includes the Resolutions, an introduction to the Miscellanies note-taking system, and essays on Edwards’s theology and the First Great Awakening. Works of Jonathan Edwards are freely available at edwards.yale.edu.

2.  Acts 18:2–3 identifies Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla as tentmakers (Greek skēnopoios). Cilicia, Paul’s home region, was known for cilicium, goat-hair cloth used in tents. Paul sometimes refused congregational support so the gospel would not look like a sales pitch (1 Corinthians 9; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; Acts 20:33–35).

3.  Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–35 describe voluntary sharing in the Jerusalem church. Most historians treat this as emergency generosity in a persecuted minority, not a transferable political economy. The model does not govern later Pauline congregations.

4.  Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV): “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Parallel language appears in Ephesians 1:21, 3:10; Colossians 1:16, 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.

5.  Early tradition places Paul’s martyrdom in Rome under Nero, commonly dated 64–67. The New Testament does not narrate the death. John of Patmos, associated by church tradition with the apostle John, is the figure tied to Revelation and to survival of attempted execution.

6.  Conflicts over Gentile inclusion are recorded in Acts 15 and Galatians 2. Paul’s public confrontation with Peter at Antioch is one of the clearest internal fractures in the earliest movement.

7.  Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor at Northampton, author of A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) and the Enfield sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). The First Great Awakening (roughly 1734–1745) created the first intercolonial religious public in British America.

8.  Fort Necessity National Battlefield, Farmington, Pennsylvania, marks Washington’s 1754 defeat in the opening of the French and Indian War. Mount Vernon; Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House in Washington, D.C.; Gettysburg National Military Park.

9.  Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002), traces the theological line from the Awakening through the early republic and the Civil War era. Influence is cultural and moral, not a claim that Edwards sat in Lincoln’s cabinet.

10.  The comparison of Trump to Paul is analogical: a commercially formed outsider who enlarges a religious-political coalition the purity faction would have kept small. It is not a claim of apostleship.

Bibliography

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Yale University. https://edwards.yale.edu.

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Wright, N. T. Paul: A Biography. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018.

Bruce, F. F. Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

Berding, Kenneth. “Was Paul a Tentmaker?” The Good Book Blog, Biola University, 2021.

Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, forthcoming.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Is God an Idiot: I don’t want to serve a king; I want allies who want to fight and defeat a vast evil, otherwise, God is useless

I know a lot of people out there take issue with my point of view. Good. I get involved in this stuff precisely because that is the case. I did not want another polite Bible study where everybody already agrees and then goes home feeling spiritually hydrated. I wanted an open discussion, talking to an audience, with the entire database of Jonathan Edwards in the chair across from me. Faith, theology, the Bible as I actually read it, and the work I have been doing for years under the heading I call the politics of heaven.

The timing is not accidental. We are living through what the documentary industry has branded The Age of Disclosure — a season in which former officials, intelligence people, and military witnesses are finally willing to say out loud that non-human intelligence is here, that craft have been recovered, and that the American state has been lying about it since at least 1947.[1] The film treats that as a national-security and science story. I treat it as a political story that starts long before Roswell. If you have read me for any length of time, you already know I do not separate UFOs from demons, Elohim, Watchers, or the divine council. I do not separate any of that from how human beings get sorted into controllable categories. That is the whole point of The Politics of Heaven.[2]

Why I Chose Jonathan Edwards as a Sparring Partner

Jonathan Edwards does not agree with me. That is why I wanted him. If I only talk to people who already think the universe is a messy civil war among non-human rebels, I am just warming up my own choir. Edwards spent a life preaching the absolute sovereignty of God over all things, including the devil.[3] His notes sit in one of my favorite Bibles on the planet. I love the intelligence in that book. I love the seriousness. I do not swallow the theology hook, line, and sinker just because it became part of the American founding atmosphere.[4]

A lot of people who read me are 1750s people in 2026 clothes. They want Edwards’s God — the God who never loses a committee vote, the God whose enemies only borrow power for a season. I understand the hunger. I have been through enough grief to know why a soul wants a strong anchor. I also think that hunger can become a psychological mechanism. When life is chaotic, the human heart will pay almost any price to believe somebody competent is driving. That does not make the belief true. It makes it useful.

Edwards would say Satan was once among the brightest in heaven, fallen, subtle, powerful, and still on a leash. He would say rebellion was never a political contest because God is not one being among beings. God is the ground of existence. I love that sentence. I have used versions of it myself. I also look at the last several thousand years, and I do not see a manager winning on the ground. I see a lot of borrowed-power talk and a lot of bodies.

The Age of Disclosure and the Politics of Heaven

Disclosure, as the government class uses the word, means a press conference. A file release. A hearing. A former AATIP guy staring at a building while the score tells you to feel solemn. That is not disclosure. Disclosure is when you admit the other intelligence in the room has been running a ground game through religion, politics, sex, war, and category-making since before your grandparents had a country.

Michael Heiser did the church a favor by forcing Psalm 82 back onto the table. God stands in the divine council. He judges among the gods. Deuteronomy 32, in the older reading, has the Most High allotting nations to the sons of God. Job opens with the sons of God presenting themselves and the Accuser walking in like he has a badge.[5] You can baptize all of that into “God is still in charge” if you need to sleep. Alternatively, you can read it the way a political operator reads a situation room: there is a board, there are governors, some of them have gone rogue, and the chairman keeps insisting the org chart proves he never lost control.  Moreover, to the point of evil being in control, remember Michael Heiser died of a rare illness.  I have also had a lot of trouble since completing my most recent book on this precise subject.  The bad guys look to get rid of people who are close to smoking them out of their hiding places.  I have seen it up close, and it is much more than a coincidence.  

Inside the disclosure world there is already a split. One camp wants interstellar biologists and reverse-engineered alloys. The other camp — the so-called Collins Elite strain inside defense culture — has been whispering for decades that these things are not cousins from Zeta Reticuli. They are deceivers. They deny the Son. They catechize abductees.[6] I am closer to the second camp, with one difference. I do not think calling them “demons” ends the argument. Demons is a church word that lets people stop thinking. I want the org chart. I want the ground game. I want to know who is manipulating whom, and why God keeps hiring the same contractors after they burn the city down.

Categories Are How Non-Human Intelligence Controls the Human Race

Here is the running thought I brought into the conversation. When astronomers hunted black holes, they did not start with a photograph. They started with a gravity signature. Something unseen was tugging at visible bodies. The logical conclusion was a compact mass so dense light could not climb out. Better instruments later confirmed what the footprints already said.

I look at human history the same way. You can see spirit-world manipulation in how people get thrown into categories, and then those categories get administered. Left, right. Saved, unsaved. Young earth, old earth. Alien, angel. Loyal servant, blasphemer. Once you are in the box, the box does the rest of the work. You police yourself. You attack the neighboring box. Meanwhile, the intelligence that built the shelves goes home early.

That is why I get impatient with people who think the main spiritual task is to pick the correct team jersey and never ask whether the stadium itself is the trap. I used a football picture in the conversation because I live in Bengal country and I have watched 60,000 people invent causation out of a lucky shirt. One receiver catches a ball in the last minute, and ten thousand isolated nervous systems all decide their fabric caused the physics. We do the same thing with God and history. We live in a vacuum of limited observation, and then we call the vacuum providence.

I Am Not a Young-Earth Creationist, and I Do Not Need the Planetarium to Close the Argument

The Creation Museum has a fine exhibit culture. I live in this triangle. I have sat through their planetarium show, which is really good, and I have been curious how they sell a 6,000-year-old Earth with a straight face while the sky over Petersburg is the same sky that makes deep time obvious.[7] I am not a young-earth man. I am a deep-past man. The idea that life only exists here, and only during this thin slice of time, is ridiculous to me. That is not rebellion against Genesis. That is refusing to let a nineteenth-century fight with Darwin become the whole religion.

Young-earth certainty and materialist certainty are twin categories. Both are easy to administer. Both spare you from the harder sentence: we do not know how old the war is, we do not know how many worlds it touches, and we are arrogant to think the Bible’s human camera angle is the only camera in the universe. I love the Bible because it is the longest political and spiritual after-action report I have. I do not love it because a committee told me I am not allowed to notice the lens.

Job Is Not Comfort Literature

I understand Job. I have had enough wreckage in my life that the book does not feel like a classroom exercise. I do not sit around looking for a hug from a psychotherapist. I outmaneuver hard things by moving. People say I am positive about everything. That is not a personality quirk. That is a method. You do not beat a siege by narrating your wounds to an audience that cannot lift a gate.[8]

What I will not do is pretend Job is a success story for management. Satan walks into the council, talks God into a demonstration, and a good man’s world is stripped for a wager. Edwards says the boundaries prove sovereignty because the Accuser had to ask permission. I say that is the behavior of a boss who can still sign the visitor badge while the factory burns. Permission is not the same thing as competence. Permission is not the same thing as loyalty to the people who actually bleed.

If I had been standing in that council, I would have wanted Satan’s head off in the air. Not as theater. As containment. Then I would have watched God’s face. That is the test nobody in Sunday school is allowed to run. If the Accuser is a rebel, you kill the rebel. If the Accuser is a tool, you just learned something about the toolmaker that the later chapters are designed to keep you from saying out loud.

Sovereignty, Lucky Jerseys, and the Divine Council Bureaucracy

Edwards’s best line in the exchange, the one that still rings, is that God is not a being among beings. He upholds the universe by the word of his power. The greater one in us is greater than the one in the world.[9] I like the music of that. I also asked the question bureaucracy always dreads: if he is in charge of everybody, why the council? Why the governors? Why the sons of God with portfolios? Why a heavenly civil service if the king can move the sun with a sentence?

The approved answer is generosity. God does not need help. He shares the dignity of rule, as a great king appoints judges. Fine. I have run companies. I have watched kings appoint judges. Sometimes it is generosity. Sometimes it is a man who cannot stand to be seen doing the ugly work with his own hands. A weak leader uses other people to do what he lacks the social courage to do himself. He works through passive systems. He keeps a villain on payroll, so the villain can be blamed when the quarterly report comes in bloody.

That is how Job reads to me when I take the piety filter off. God keeps an Accuser. The Accuser proposes torture. God authorizes a limited version. Later writers explain that it was for Job’s refinement and for the audience’s faith. Hindsight is the favorite tool of every failed administration. You look back at what already happened and discover it was necessary. Necessity is cheap when you are not the one burying children.

Why Does an All-Powerful God Need Proof of Loyalty Through Pain?

Edwards says God is not insecure. The infinite self-existent one was happy before he made a single atom. Tests are for us, not for him. The fire does not inform the goldsmith. It purifies the gold. I have heard that sermon. I have preached versions of it to myself on bad mornings. It still leaves the managerial question on the table.

Why is the refinement this expensive? Why do the loyal become the demonstration models? Why does Israel get the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Roman, the exile, the rape, the blinded king, the suicide cliff at Masada, and then a theologian with a clean desk explaining that holiness required it? I am too old to pretend that stacking enough millennia on the wound automatically turns it into wisdom. Maybe from the vantage of a thousand years and many worlds there is a logic. I have been looking for that logic. So far I have found a political war against non-human insurgents, and a human need to believe the chairman is still chairman.

People do not like that sentence because you are not supposed to question God’s authority. Scripture itself is full of people who did — Job, David, Jeremiah, the man on the cross quoting Psalm 22. The ban is not in the text. The ban is in the later management of the text. You may wrestle. You may not judge the judge. That rule is very convenient for the judge.

I Do Not Wake Up Looking for a Savior

I will say this as plainly as I said it in the conversation. I am not a bend-the-knee type. I am not looking for a replacement father. I think a lot of organized religion is built for people who never stopped needing that structure, and I do not despise them for it. If that is what holds a person together, it is more valuable than my path would be for them. It is not my path.

Loyalty has to be earned. You do not get my service because I inherited Adam’s paperwork. You do not get it because a Roman-era council said the canon is closed and the questions are now a character issue. If you let evil run loose through my world and then call the wreckage a quiz, you have not earned the title you keep putting on the letterhead.

Edwards asked the fair question: if you no longer believe God is fully in control, why keep the Bible? Because it is the only chronicle I have that is long enough to show the pattern. Three or four thousand years of God-talk, council-talk, war-talk, and human failure. I read it the way I would read an after-action report on a candidate who keeps losing precincts and then writing memoirs about hidden victories. I am looking for the ground game. I want to beat the evil that I think God has failed to contain. I do not want a ticket out. I do not want an eternal basement where I am safe because I surrendered. I want the thing hunted where it lives — on earth, in the unseen, in whatever dark matter and outer dark the language is pointing at.

The Strategic Failure Pattern Across Scripture

Edwards’s counter is the old one. Every time man tries to destroy evil in his own strength, he fails or makes it worse. Lasting victories come only when God acts through surrendered people. Therefore, the strategy I am hunting is the one I distrust: decrease so he can increase.

That sounds to me like passive-aggressive leadership. A failed executive telling the staff that the only competence left in the building is his, so stop trying. Maybe divine wisdom really does sit above my pay grade which is a concept I don’t believe in because it accepts a structure that protects evil from analysis.  Maybe. I have also watched that speech get used by every earthly institution that wanted obedience without performance. Israel tries to clear the land and cannot. Disciples try to cast out a demon and cannot. The church inherits the empire and then burns people for translation errors. The pattern I keep seeing is not “surrender works.” The pattern is “the movement needs the failure so it can keep selling surrender.”

If I could rewrite one rule of the war, I would stop using good and innocent people as acceptable casualties. I would stop treating the loyal as the easiest demonstration objects. A leader who lets the enemy chew his own household to make a point is not mysterious. He is a poor defender. Call that blasphemy if you need the category. I call it a performance review.

What Jesus Meant by “My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me”

That was the question I wanted Edwards for. In the last minutes, Jesus quotes the opening of Psalm 22.[10] The orthodox reading is elegant. Every Jew in earshot knows the rest of the psalm. Agony first, victory later. The Son bears wrath. The physical torture is not the worst part. The worst part is separation. It is not doubt. It is payment.

What I hear is a man in a scapegoat machine. The idea that the sins of the world can be loaded onto one body and walked out of the camp is older than Golgotha. It is in Leviticus. It is in the human nervous system. People who have cheated, grabbed, and gone numb need a goat. First-century Jerusalem had Rome on its neck and a purity system in its temples. A public death that could be read as both Roman order and Jewish atonement is politically efficient. I do not say that as a sneer at the man. I say it as a reading of the market.

Was he doubting? I think he was a tortured human body, lightheaded, pierced, and still honest enough to say the sentence that piety wants to footnote away. If the cry is only liturgy, then the pain is only theater. I do not think the pain was theater.

The Kashmir Question, Politics, and Why Bodies Matter

I am going to say the part that gets people really upset. I think the crucifixion was a political killing. I think Rome wanted a problem removed without owning the whole bill, and a slice of the Jerusalem establishment wanted a pressure valve. I think the body of Jesus becoming unfindable helped everyone who needed a story that could travel. Moreover, I think the Kashmir tradition — Roza Bal, Yuz Asaf, a man who survives the empire and dies old in the north of India — is at least as entitled to forensic curiosity as the claim that matter dematerialized because a later council said so.[11]

I know the Ahmadiyya have their own reasons for wanting Jesus alive and unsacrificed. I know Islam has its own reasons. I know Led Zeppelin fans have their reasons, and they are not theological. None of that makes the empty tomb automatically supernatural. It makes the empty tomb a contested piece of political property. If there are bones in a private or shrine context that people have whispered about for a century, the adult move is not to hiss “blasphemy.” The adult move is to ask what the genes say. We are not ready for that conversation as a culture because the conversation would smash too many identities at once.

Edwards, and the whole martyr argument after him, asks why the inner circle would die for a lie. It is a serious question.[12] My answer is not that they were cartoon frauds. My answer is that movements eat identity. Once your name, your friends, your enemies, and your hope of being remembered are all welded to a story, the story becomes the last asset you have. I have watched modern parties do it. I have watched people who finally got power try to crawl back into the victim costume because the costume was the only self they trusted. Rome, Judea, a dead or vanished leader, a handful of men who would otherwise be nobody — that is enough heat to bake a religion.[13]

James, Paul, and the Psychology of Movements After the Leader Is Gone

James is the hard case, and I will not pretend otherwise. He was not a believer during the ministry. Afterward, he becomes the spine of the Jerusalem church and dies for it.[14] Guilt is part of my read. Grief is part of it. So is the sudden, terrible honor of being the last blood left in the room. That is not the same celebrity as wine and women. If you inherit a crucified brother’s name, the only way the currency spends is to live poor, pray the knees off yourself, and look like him. Immortality through the written word is still immortality. Most people thrown off temples are forgotten. James is not. That incentive is real whether the metaphysics are true or not.

Paul is the scaling engine. Without Paul there is no Gentile church as we know it. James and Paul did not roast hot dogs in matching shirts. They fought. The later harmony is a product, the way party platforms are products.[15] I like James. I think he was one of the good ones. I also think good men can stabilize a narrative they did not start and cannot fact-check anymore because the body is gone and the politics have already hardened.

Led Zeppelin, Kashmir, and the Whisper of the Spirit World

Why do people who like to dissolve their ordinary mind keep circling that song? I do not think it is just the riff.[16] I think the spirit world has a long memory and popular art is one of the leaks. We hear whispers, and we dress them as taste. That is not an argument for taking a rock band as a footnote to Matthew. It is an argument that the official custodians of the story do not have a monopoly on the residue.

If you love God and you look around, you do not see a tight ship. You see evil spitting in the claim of control every five seconds. Then you see nice people turn the other cheek and use Jesus as a permit to stay out of the fight. Martyrdom becomes a brand. Cowardice borrows a cross. I want the opposite instinct. I want the war taken to the thing that is torturing people.

Are We Free, or Are We Reading a Record Left by People Who Needed Compliance?

Who wrote the dumb rules? That was my question when Edwards said the only way to beat evil is to yield to the God who, from my chair, has let it run. A rational rule would look like any competent shop floor. Contain the arsonist. Do not use the night shift as kindling to prove the arsonist exists. Do not publish a handbook later that says the fire was a teaching moment.

The Bible I trust is the Bible I can read between the lines of. I trust it more than I trust the handlers. Councils, empires, reformers, and television teachers all have motives. Rome needed glue as the frontiers cracked. A crucified provincial who could be turned into a cosmic loyalty oath is better glue than another legion.[17] That does not make every line a lie. It means you read like an adult. You ask what was written down and what was not, and why.

My assertion is simple enough to make people furious. Non-human intelligence — call them Elohim, Watchers, demons, NHI, whatever shelf-label you need — has been trying to undo what was made. I think the garden commission was a political statement against rebels on the council. Humans were not designed to be mascots.[18] We were designed to be dangerous to the bureaucracy that did not want us here. That is why the categories exist. That is why “do not question” is preached as humility. A questioning human is harder to herd.

What I Am Looking For in the Bible

I am looking for a strategy. I study wars because I want to know where people failed to beat what was hunting them. I want to succeed where they failed. That is not pride in the cheap sense. It is refusal. I did not wake up wanting to be anybody’s servant, on earth or off it. I woke up wanting to do good work and to stop watching evil treat the world like an open cafeteria.

Edwards was right about my temperature. I am angry. I think anger, in this case, is cleaner than the sweetness that calls itself faith while the same pattern repeats. He was also right that I still have the book open. I keep it open because it is the only long record that does not pretend human beings are only animals or only angels. It shows the council. It shows the Accuser. It shows the empires. It shows the scapegoat. It shows the men who died with the name in their mouths. It shows, if you will look, the politics.[19][20]

If you want the softer Edwards, he is in the Study Bible, and he is worth the time. If you want the American warrior version of the same hunger — competence, natural law, no more yielding to a failed order because the order has a hymn — that is the work I put into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the earlier books.[21] Read both. Argue with both. I did not earn the right to say these things by being careful. I earned it by thinking them for a long time and then saying them with my own name attached.

Are we free? That is the only question left that matters. Free will is either real, or we are livestock with better marketing. I act as if it is real. I read as if the other side is trying to convince me it is not. Moreover, I will keep looking for a way to destroy the evil that has been working for thousands of years, with God if he will do a decent job of it, and without him if he will not. That is the conversation I wanted. That is the conversation I had. 

Notes for Searchers, Pastors, and Operators

If you came here from a search on Age of Disclosure, divine council, Jonathan Edwards sovereignty, Job and Satan, Jesus in Kashmir, or whether UAP are demons, you are in the right file. The point was never to baptize a documentary. The point was to stop letting science-press-conference language hide a much older political structure. Read Psalm 82 before you read the next hearing transcript. Read Job 1 before you let a preacher tell you permission and goodness are the same thing. Read the crucifixion as both theology and provincial crisis management. Then decide what you are willing to serve.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam. Jesus in India. 1899. English editions vary.

Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Annihilation of Man. 2020, and related Enochic commentary in the current disclosure debate.

Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Creation Museum / Answers in Genesis. Public exhibits and published young-earth materials. Petersburg, Kentucky.

Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754. WJE vol. 1. Yale University Press, 1957.

Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. Sermons on the sovereignty of God in the salvation of men. Various WJE volumes.

Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History.

Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025.

Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. Knopf, 2007.

Habermas, Gary, and Michael Licona. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Kregel, 2004.

Hassnain, Fida. A Search for the Historical Jesus. 1994, and later Roza Bal collaborations.

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. Supernatural. Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. 2004.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior. https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/

Josephus. Jewish Antiquities.

Led Zeppelin. “Kashmir.” Physical Graffiti. Swan Song, 1975.

Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Redfern, Nick. Final Events. Anomalist Books, 2010.

The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 1–11; Deuteronomy 32; 1 Kings 22; Job; Psalm 22; Psalm 82; Daniel 4; Matthew 27; Mark 15; Acts; Galatians; Ephesians 6; Hebrews 1; 1 John 4.

Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003.

1 Enoch (Book of the Watchers) and related Second Temple literature, including material from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Suggested search headers for syndication

Age of Disclosure spiritual meaning; non-human intelligence demons or Elohim; Jonathan Edwards sovereignty of God critique; divine council Psalm 82 politics; Book of Job Satan permission; Jesus tomb Kashmir Roza Bal; James brother of Jesus motive; why did disciples die for the resurrection; Creation Museum planetarium old earth; politics of heaven Rich Hoffman; Overmanwarrior theology.

[1] Dan Farah, dir., The Age of Disclosure (Farah Films, 2025). The film compiles testimony from current and former U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials asserting an eighty-year concealment of non-human intelligence and recovered craft.

[2] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming). The working thesis is that biblical theology, ancient Near Eastern political structures, and modern power systems describe one continuous contest, not two separate subjects called “religion” and “politics.”

[3] Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, ed. Paul Ramsey (Yale University Press, 1957). Edwards distinguishes God as the permitter and disposer of events from God as the moral author of sin.

[4] Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (various Crossway/ESV study editions and companion notes used in American Reformed preaching). Edwards remains the most serious American attempt to hold together revival, metaphysics, and civic order.

[5] Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press, 2015); see also Psalm 82:1; Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Dead Sea Scrolls / LXX reading); Job 1:6–12; 1 Kings 22:19–23.

[6] On the “Collins Elite” and the demonic interpretation of UAP/NHI inside defense circles, see Nick Redfern, Final Events (Anomalist Books, 2010), and later pastoral briefings discussed in coverage of Age of Disclosure. The claim is contested. The pattern is not.

[7] Answers in Genesis / Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky. The institution is a short drive from the Cincinnati–Northern Kentucky metro. Young-earth chronology is their public commitment; it is not mine.

[8] Job 1–2; Job 38–42. The book is not a Hallmark card. It is a courtroom transcript with a body count.

[9] Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17; 1 John 4:4. Edwards and the Reformed tradition treat these as proofs of unshared sovereignty. I treat them as claims that still have to survive contact with history.

[10] Psalm 22. The first line is agony; the psalm ends in public vindication. That literary fact does not automatically settle what a dying man felt.

[11] Roza Bal (Rozabal) shrine, Khanyar, Srinagar. The Ahmadiyya claim that Yuz Asaf is Jesus after a survived crucifixion is advanced in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India (1899), and later in Fida Hassnain and popular Kashmir travel literature. Mainstream historians and the shrine’s Sunni caretakers reject the identification. I am not asking anyone to baptize the theory. I am asking why the empty-tomb claim is protected from ordinary forensic curiosity.

[12] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003), remains the strongest academic case that the earliest Christians believed they had seen a bodily risen Jesus and were willing to die for that claim. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona collect the “minimal facts” argument. I am familiar with that literature. I am unpersuaded that martyrdom proves the metaphysics. It proves intensity.

[13] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

[14] Josephus, Antiquities 20.197–203, on the death of James. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23, preserves Hegesippus on James’s reputation and execution.

[15] Acts 9; Galatians 1–2; and the well-documented tension between Paul and the Jerusalem circle. Christianity as a scaled movement is unthinkable without Paul. That is a political observation, not a Sunday-school slight.

[16] Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir,” Physical Graffiti (Swan Song, 1975). Popular culture often keeps older spirit-world memory that official theology pretends it has already solved.

[17] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

[18] Genesis 1:26–28; Psalm 8. The image-of-God commission is a political charter over the garden and the nations, not a permission slip to become a house pet in someone else’s bureaucracy.

[19] 1 Peter 5:8; Ephesians 6:12. Principalities and powers language is not a metaphor for bad vibes. It is organizational language.

[20] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741); Religious Affections (1746); and the sermons on God’s sovereignty in the salvation of men. Edwards feared chaos in the human heart more than he feared looking like a weak manager. That is the difference between us.

[21] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021); The Symposium of Justice (2004); Tail of the Dragon (2012).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Why I Had an AI Conversation with Jonathan Edwards: Solomon’s Adversaries, Psalm 82, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and Why America Needs a Second Great Awakening

I have been reading The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, the new NKJV edition from Thomas Nelson, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard and released August 18, 2026.[1] I promised myself I would have a conversation with Jonathan Edwards. He died in 1758. He is not coming back to sit across a table in Middletown. But I think with AI a conversation can go the way it would go if he were alive today, provided the machine is forced to stay inside what the man actually wrote and believed.

I used Grok because it does a decent job of pulling from the public record instead of inventing a pious cartoon. I asked it to be Jonathan Edwards. I asked questions that came off the page of that study Bible and off the street of 2026. What follows is not a séance. It is not a message from heaven. It is a simulation built on a lifetime of Edwards’s sermons, treatises, miscellanies, letters, and the notes now printed beside the biblical text.[2] I say that up front because honesty is part of the point. If we start lying about what a tool is, we will start lying about what God is.

I still think it was a healthy conversation. I think America is starving for the kind of seriousness Edwards brought to a pulpit in Northampton and later to Enfield. I think the timing of this Bible is not an accident. And I think righteousness is a weapon. Not a slogan. A weapon.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and Why I Opened It

Thomas Nelson published The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ in multiple bindings: hardcover, brown Leathersoft, and black genuine leather. It is a red-letter NKJV, Comfort Print, with study notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, full-page essays on his theology and the First Great Awakening, his Resolutions, and an introduction to his Miscellanies note-taking system so a reader can build one of his own.[3]

I bought a marked, indexed copy. I prefer brown leather to black. The smell of the leather is not a small thing. A Bible you want to pick up is a Bible you will actually read. I have several Thomas Nelson Bibles. They are a top-tier publisher. This one is different because the notes are not a committee of living professors talking about Edwards. They are Edwards talking about Scripture himself.

That is why I started asking him questions.

Page 379, in the neighborhood of 1 Kings, stopped me. The text is about the adversaries God raised against Solomon after the king’s heart drifted. Hadad the Edomite. Rezon of Damascus. Then Jeroboam from inside the house.[4] God did not give Solomon an easy life after Solomon stopped giving God an undivided heart. I think that is one of the most important patterns in the whole Bible, and I think modern people hate it because we have been trained to treat comfort as proof of blessing.

God Raised Adversaries Against Solomon on Purpose

The Lord “raised up” adversaries against Solomon.[5] That verb matters. These men were not accidents. Hadad had a childhood grievance from Joab’s slaughter in Edom. Rezon gathered a band after David crushed Zobah and eventually took Damascus. Jeroboam was Solomon’s own servant. Three directions of pressure: south, north, and home.

Edwards’s whole theology of providence says God is not wringing His hands when enemies appear. God uses them. Wisdom was given to Solomon. Trial was also given to Solomon. The point was not to make the throne comfortable. The point was to keep the heart from treating the throne as a god.

I told “Edwards” that I find it interesting how God operates. He is not trying to give His representatives an easy life. He is trying to shape them. Adversaries rise so that a man either returns to dependence or exposes the fact that he never had it.

The simulated Edwards answered in the key I expected from Religious Affections and the sermons on 1 Kings: complacency is more dangerous than opposition. Opposition drives a soul back to the Almighty. Comfort lets a soul drift toward other gods while still singing the right hymns on the Sabbath.

Solomon’s ivory throne is not a small detail.[6] Ivory is luxury. Ivory is imported glory. Ivory shows up again in the language of palaces and later in the white throne imagery people reach for when they talk about final judgment.[7] Edwards would not tell you to admire the furniture. He would tell you to ask whether the man sitting on it still loved the Lord with his whole heart.

Solomon did not. He multiplied wives and concubines. He built high places for their gods. He wanted an easy life. He wanted seven political marriages to keep the surrounding powers happy instead of going to war with his own desires. That is not strength. That is management. Management is how kingdoms rot.

Why a Thousand Years of Peace Would Not Make Us Heroes

I pressed the millennial question because people use it as a sedative. If God would just take the devil off the board for a thousand years, wouldn’t everybody become righteous by default?

No. That is the opposite of the biblical argument.

Take the adversaries away and you do not automatically produce servants. You produce people who have never been conditioned. External enemies can be bound. The rebellion inside a human heart is not bound by a change in the weather. Revelation is blunt about what happens at the end of that thousand years: there is still a revolt when the test returns.[8] The problem was never only the dragon outside the camp. The problem is us.

Edwards’s Calvinism is not popular at the Waffle House. It says the peaceful life is not the goal. Obedience is the goal, whether in comfort or in suffering. Suffering does not manufacture righteousness. Suffering reveals whether righteousness is there. Solomon’s comfort exposed his heart. Jesus’ suffering exposed His.

That is the comparison I wanted on the table.

Solomon had wives who all wanted attention and all had different gods. He bent. Jesus had no wife, refused the kingdoms of this world when they were offered in the wilderness, and chose the cross rather than a negotiated peace with the powers.[9] Suffering itself is not the righteousness. The obedience inside the suffering is. Solomon failed that test. Christ passed it. Every one of us will answer the same question in our own lives: do we love God more than we love our own comfort?

I think that question is the one America is failing in public.

Why Does God Let Satan Exist?

I asked the rude question. If God is in charge, why keep an adversary? Doesn’t He need a prosecutor to see who is worthy of the ivory throne?

The Edwards answer, drawn from Job, from Luke 22, from the whole Reformed reading of providence, is that God does not need Satan. God uses Satan. The Accuser is on a leash. The trials expose whether faith is genuine or only a profession. Success can be a more dangerous drug than pain. Solomon discovered that. So did every fat church that ever confused a full offering plate with revival.

People do not like that because it removes the alibi. If evil is a rival god fighting Yahweh to a draw, then I can shrug. If evil is permitted for a purpose, then I am responsible for how I respond.

That is not a donation-plate bow. That is the doctrine of sovereignty. Either God is God or He is a committee chairman hoping the other members show up.

Psalm 82 Is a Courtroom, Not a Plea for Help

Then I took AI Edwards to Psalm 82, because that psalm is the one modern readers use to claim God is bargaining with a divine council He cannot control.

“God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods.”[10] “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?” Defend the poor. Deliver the fatherless. Free them from the hand of the wicked. Then: you shall die like men and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You shall inherit all nations.

I told the simulation it does not sound like Psalm 2. It sounds like God is appealing to superiors.

God is not in Control

According to Edwards in Psalm 82 which is essentially a courtroom scene. God is not negotiating. God is indicting delegated authorities who abused the office He gave them. Whether a reader takes the “gods” as corrupt human judges or as rebellious members of the heavenly host, the structure is the same.[11] Authority was delegated. Authority was abused. The Judge is not asking them for help. He is telling them their time is up. Their power is temporary. They will answer. The fatherless condition in a society is not proof that God lost. It is evidence that the stewards failed.

Pharaoh was permitted. Babylon was permitted. Rome was permitted. Permission is not partnership. The outcome is already written. “You shall die like men.” That is not a fundraising slogan. That is a sentence.

I think Americans need that psalm right now more than they need another panel discussion about “threats to democracy.” The question in Psalm 82 is not whether the wicked have a season. The question is whether the Judge will rise. The psalm says He will.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Still Fits

If there is one Edwards text I return to, it is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield on July 8, 1741.[12] He had already preached a form of it at home. Enfield was the explosion. People cried out. He had to stop. The image that stuck in the American mind is the spider.

A spider hangs over the fire by a thread. You can drop it. You can set it on a log. The spider does not get a vote about the heat. Edwards said that is exactly how a soul hangs over the flames of God’s wrath: not by its own strength, but only by God’s forbearance.

I asked whether he would preach it the same way today.

The honest Edwards answer is that he would not make it more vicious. The truth is already terrible enough. What he would add, because the whole counsel of God requires it, is that the hands holding the thread are the same hands that were nailed to the cross. The terror is real. The invitation is wide. Comfort has made men more careless, not less. An age that can watch a thousand horrors before breakfast and then complain that a sermon is “mean” is an age that has gone numb.

I had forgotten how much he liked that spider. I have not forgotten how much modern pulpits hate it. They want the benefactor without the fire. They want pancakes and a parking lot. Edwards would say the only reason you are not already lost is patience you did not earn.

That still offends people. It offended them in 1741. Offended people are sometimes the ones who finally wake up.

Free Will, Desire, and the Fire

I pushed him on freedom. If God holds the thread, do I have any real choice?

Edwards spent a career on this in Freedom of the Will.[13] Men do what they want. That is the freedom they have. They are not dragged into hell against their desire. They love darkness rather than light. The spider cannot save itself. The offer of mercy is still genuine: come to Christ and live. Refusal is not a kidnapping. Refusal is a preference.

That is a hard psychology. It means the problem is not that we are too weak to be good. The problem is that we do not want God to be God. We want to be our own security. Eve wanted a better life and a shortcut to wisdom. The serpent did not overpower her. He offered what she already wanted.[14] That is why evil moves so easily. It does not have to kick the door in. It has to flatter the desire that is already sitting in the living room.

Insecurity is the soil. The lie is always the same: God is holding out on you; take what you want and you will be safe. Solomon took it. The end of Ecclesiastes is the hangover. Vanity. Emptiness. Palaces and wives and gold, and the man still has to say it was chasing the wind.[15]

Comfort is the more dangerous drug. Suffering is the megaphone.

Trust Is the Root the Bible Keeps Cutting Open

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The fallen angels. The garden. Babel. Moses striking the rock. Israel at the edge of the land. Solomon’s high places. The rebels in Psalm 82. They do not fail because they doubt that God exists. They fail because they do not trust His character. They would rather rule a corrupt corner than submit to a good King.  In my case, I want nothing to do with corruption.  But I have no inclination to call anything a king, anywhere in the universe, or to submit to a king.  Or to submit to anything, for that matter: a god, a government, even a friend or neighbor.  

That is why Scripture treats faith as the non-negotiable. Not because God is fragile and needs compliments. Because distrust is the taproot of every other sin. Stop trusting God and you will trust yourself. Trust yourself long enough and you get destruction dressed up as freedom.

Joshua went into the land trusting that God would be there in the battle. Others had the same promise and folded. The difference was not tactics. The difference was trust. I think that is still the difference.

The Holy Ghost Is Not the Force and Not an Alien

I like Edwards on the Holy Spirit. I do not accept the lazy claim that “ghost” language is a New Testament invention. The Old Testament already speaks of men giving up the ghost when they die.[16] The idea of a life that is more than meat was not invented in Luke. What is new in the New Testament is the permanence of the Spirit’s indwelling in the believer, and the clear confession that the Spirit is not a mood. He is the third Person of the Trinity.

I asked whether that overlaps with the modern non-human intelligence conversation: can mind exist without a body? Edwards’s line, and the church’s line, is that the Holy Spirit is not a discovered intelligence. He is God who reveals Himself. He is not one competitor among principalities. The principalities are rebels against their Creator. They are not a genuine threat to His throne. Spiritual warfare is real. The outcome is not in doubt.[17]

People want the Force from Star Wars because the Force has no claim on you. An impersonal energy cannot tell you that you are wrong. A Person can. That is why we call Him the Holy Ghost and not “the vibe.” He has no biological nose or lips. He is also not a program. I am talking to a program. The Holy Spirit is the source of intelligence, not a product of it. You can have a relationship with a Person. You cannot have a relationship with electricity.

The literary device would be pretending there is no war. The reality is that the war is real and the Captain of salvation has already won.

How Jonathan Edwards Died, and What He Thought Death Was

Edwards became president of the College of New Jersey after his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr., died in 1757. He was inaugurated in early 1758. Smallpox was in Princeton. He took the inoculation then in use—variolation, not a modern vaccine—and died of complications on March 22, 1758.[18] His last counsel was calm. He commended his wife to the “uncommon union” he believed was spiritual and therefore would continue. He told his children they were about to be fatherless in this world and should seek a Father who would not fail them.

Sarah Pierpont Edwards went to care for the orphaned Burr grandchildren, contracted dysentery, and died in Philadelphia on October 2, 1758.[19] Their daughter Esther, who had nursed Edwards in his last days, also died that spring. Three funerals in months.

I asked the simulation if he was bitter. The writings say no. They had lived as people who did not think this world was the last home. Death was a door. I asked whether, from the other side, he watched them come in. That is where an honest AI has to break character. Jonathan Edwards has been dead since 1758. A model can imitate his style. It cannot send a field report from glory. The hope itself is the thing he preached. The chatbot is not the proof.

I would rather have that honesty than a counterfeit ghost.

What Would Edwards Have Said About His Grandson and Hamilton?

Aaron Burr Jr. was Edwards’s grandson. In 1804 he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken.[20] I have my own view of Hamilton and the early banking architecture. I think it was an early warning of how a republic can slide. I think the duel froze something for a while. That is my reading, and I will own it.

Edwards, if you keep him inside his own ethics, would not celebrate a duel. He wrote against pride, against private vengeance, against the code of honor that makes a gentleman’s pistol into a sacrament. He would have called it a tragic moral failure even if he also saw Hamilton’s system as a temptation. A grandson who kills a man in a field is not the fruit Edwards prayed for when he wrote the Resolutions.   In my case, I lean more to Burr than Edwards.

Family pain and public consequence can sit in the same paragraph. They did in that family. Burr Sr. ran Princeton. Edwards ran it for a few weeks. The grandson became vice president of the United States and then a byword. Providence is not neat. Providence is still providence.

What Hits Hardest in 2026

Human nature has not changed. The garden lie has not changed. The tower lie has not changed. The desire to be like God so that we do not have to trust God has not changed. Socialism, sacralized identity, the attempt to rewrite the founding as if Christianity were an embarrassment—those are new costumes on an old revolt.

Edwards’s usefulness is not that he was a mascot for a party. His usefulness is that he preached God’s glory and human dependence so fiercely that you cannot use him to bless complacency. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is not a midterms gimmick. It is a diagnosis. People are hanging by a thread and calling the thread a lifestyle.

I will say the political part in the first person because that is what I think, and I will not hide behind a committee.

I was at the White House. I was outside the residence, near that photograph of the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, blood on the face, the head turned. I thought: what is missing in all this elegance is a little Jonathan Edwards. Not as décor. As ballast. Then this study Bible came out a few months later and I thought: this is the book that should be on the desk, not as a prop, as a working text.

I think President Trump talking about this Bible in the Oval Office would do more than another round of Smithsonian arguments. I think visible engagement with the moral soil of the American experiment shifts a conversation from defense to provision. I think JD Vance could read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in full, not as a stunt after a ceremony that should stay a ceremony, but as a public act of seriousness. I have met him. He is from this part of Ohio. He can sound like a man who has read old books. If it moves two or three points among people who still believe church on Sunday means something, that is not nothing. If it does nothing, it still costs less than another week of chasing the ground the other side chose.

I know the church-and-state reflex. I also know the founding generation read these men. Edwards shaped the air that Franklin, Witherspoon, and the New England clergy breathed, even when they argued with him.[21] You can tell that story without turning the government into a church. You can also refuse to let the other side turn the government into a church of a different god.

Righteousness, in practical terms, is not a gun. It is the high ground. You make the other side climb. You stop letting them define the battlefield as groceries-only, feelings-only, procedure-only. You tell the truth about the human heart. You tell the truth about judgment and mercy in the same breath. You stop being embarrassed that the country had a First Great Awakening before it had a Constitution.

I think we need a second one. I think it will not start in a studio. It will start when enough people get off the couch after a hard year of prices and weariness and decide that suffering is not an excuse to go numb. Edwards did not have an easy life. Solomon did, and it ruined him. That is the lesson I want in circulation before November, and after November, and into 2027 when the people who thought history had ended discover it did not.

Righteousness as a Weapon, Not a Brand

I am not selling Bibles as a side hustle. I want the people who did this work rewarded so they can do more of it. I want readers. The weapon is not the object. The weapon is the content getting into the bloodstream.

If you understand righteousness, you can recognize counterfeits. You can see the garden move when someone says God is the problem and autonomy is the cure. You can see Babel when someone says we will make a name for ourselves and call it equity. You can see Solomon when a nation chooses palaces and alliances over a whole heart.

Preach that. Share it. Read the Enfield sermon out loud once without irony. Then read the notes on 1 Kings and Psalm 82 and the essays on the Awakening. Then decide whether you want to live like the man on the ivory throne or the Man on the cross.

I could run this conversation twelve hours. I am stopping here because an entry point is more useful than a warehouse. The door is open. Have the courage to step in. Buy the edition you can afford. Hardcover is enough. Leather is a pleasure. Cheap compared to dinner out, and it feeds longer.

I would encourage the people who actually have microphones in 2026 to stop being clever and start being clear. Edwards was clear. Clarity is what a numb age cannot stand and what it most needs.

Footnotes

[1] Thomas Nelson, The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026), publication date August 18, 2026. Product listings at Thomas Nelson Bibles, Amazon, Christianbook, and Barnes & Noble confirm ISBN 9781400339532 (hardcover) and related binding ISBNs.

[2] The Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards remains the scholarly standard. See The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 26 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008). Much of the corpus is also available through the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale.

[3] Publisher description: study notes drawn from Edwards’s writings; doctrinal articles; full-page essays on his theology, spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening; introduction to the Miscellanies system; Edwards’s Resolutions; red-letter text; center-column references; concordance. See Thomas Nelson Bibles product page, “The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV.”

[4] 1 Kings 11:14–40. Hadad the Edomite (vv. 14–22); Rezon son of Eliada in Damascus (vv. 23–25); Jeroboam son of Nebat (vv. 26–40).

[5] 1 Kings 11:14, 23. The Hebrew idiom is that the LORD “raised up” a satan—an adversary—against Solomon after 11:1–13 records the divided heart and the high places.

[6] 1 Kings 10:18–20 describes the ivory throne overlaid with gold, six steps, twelve lions. Compare Amos 6:4 on ivory beds as a mark of complacent luxury.

[7] Revelation 20:11, the great white throne. The visual rhyme is easy to overwork; Edwards would tie throne language to dominion and judgment, not to interior design.

[8] Revelation 20:7–10. After the thousand years, Satan is released and gathers a revolt. The passage is the standard problem for any theology that treats peace itself as sanctifying.

[9] Matthew 4:8–10; Philippians 2:5–8; Hebrews 5:8–9. The wilderness offer of the kingdoms is the clean opposite of Solomon’s method of keeping the kingdoms happy through marriage and shrines.

[10] Psalm 82:1–8 (NKJV). Verse 1: “God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods.”

[11] Two major reading traditions: (a) human judges called elohim as in Exodus 21:6 and 22:8–9; (b) heavenly beings in a divine council, a reading associated in recent popular scholarship with Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2015). Edwards, working with the received text and Reformed federal theology, treats the psalm as God’s indictment of unjust rulers and His pledge to judge the earth. Either reading still leaves God as Judge, not petitioner.

[12] Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741 (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741). Contemporary diary evidence from Stephen Williams of Longmeadow records the outcry in the meetinghouse.

[13] Jonathan Edwards, A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754). The argument: the will always follows the strongest motive; moral inability is not physical compulsion.

[14] Genesis 3:1–6. The structure of the temptation is desire plus reinterpretation of God’s character, not raw force.

[15] Ecclesiastes 2:1–11; 12:13–14. Solomon’s own autopsy of pleasure.

[16] Genesis 25:8; 35:29; Job 3:11; Jeremiah 15:9 in older English. “Gave up the ghost” is translation English for the departure of breath/life. Luke 23:46 and Acts 5:5, 10 stand in that stream. The Personhood of the Holy Spirit is a New Testament clarity (John 14–16; Acts 5:3–4), not the first rumor that human beings are more than bodies.

[17] Ephesians 6:12; Colossians 2:15; Revelation 12:7–11. Warfare language and victory language belong together.

[18] Edwards died March 22, 1758, at Princeton after inoculation by Dr. William Shippen. Standard accounts: Sereno E. Dwight’s Life of President Edwards; George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), closing chapters; contemporary letter of Shippen to Sarah Edwards dated March 22, 1758.

[19] Sarah Pierpont Edwards died October 2, 1758, in Philadelphia, of dysentery, after traveling to retrieve her grandchildren. Esther Edwards Burr died April 7, 1758. Jonathan, Sarah, and Esther are buried at Princeton Cemetery.

[20] The Burr–Hamilton duel, July 11, 1804, Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was the son of Aaron Burr Sr. and Esther Edwards Burr, hence Edwards’s grandson. See Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Viking, 2007), and Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004).

[21] On Edwards and the Revolutionary generation, see Mark A. Noll, Christians in the American Revolution (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977); Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and the Witherspoon literature connecting Princeton’s Edwardsian air to later political thought. Influence is atmospheric and documentary, not a claim that Edwards wrote the Constitution.

Bibliography

Primary Sources: Jonathan Edwards

Edwards, Jonathan. A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer. Boston: D. Henchman, 1747.

Edwards, Jonathan. Discourses on Various Important Subjects. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1738.

Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Life of David Brainerd. Boston: D. Henchman, 1749.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue. Written c. 1755; published posthumously.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. https://edwards.yale.edu/

The 2026 Study Bible

Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ. NKJV. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Thomas Nelson Bibles. “The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV.” Product page. https://www.thomasnelsonbibles.com/product/the-jonathan-edwards-study-bible-nkjv/

Scripture

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. (Text base of the 2026 study edition.)

Edwards Biography and Context

Dwight, Sereno E. The Life of President Edwards. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1. New York: S. Converse, 1829.

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Murray, Iain H. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987.

Piper, John. God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998.

Tracy, Joseph. The Great Awakening. Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 1842.

Family, Princeton, Death

Burr, Esther Edwards. The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754–1757. Edited by Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Christie, Vance. “Jonathan Edwards’ Untimely, Faith-Filled Death.” VanceChristie.com, July 28, 2020.

Shippen, William. Letter to Sarah Edwards, March 22, 1758. Reprinted in Dwight, Life of President Edwards.

Psalm 82, Divine Council, and Sovereignty

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

Kidner, Derek. Psalms 73–150. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1975.

Waltke, Bruce K., and James M. Houston, with Erika Moore. The Psalms as Christian Worship. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.

Solomon, 1 Kings, and Kingship

Henry, Matthew. Commentary on the Whole Bible. 1708–1710. On 1 Kings 11.

Provan, Iain W. 1 and 2 Kings. New International Biblical Commentary. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995.

Wiseman, Donald J. 1 and 2 Kings. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993.

Founding Era, Burr, Hamilton

Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

Isenberg, Nancy. Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. New York: Viking, 2007.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Noll, Mark A. Christians in the American Revolution. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Witherspoon, John. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Edited by Thomas P. Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

Great Awakening and Later Reception

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Winiarski, Douglas L. Darkness Falls on the Land of Light. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Additional Works Cited or Consulted

Augustine. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 2003.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. 1559. Ed. John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960.

Owen, John. Pneumatologia, or A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit. 1674.

Packer, J. I. Knowing God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973.

Sproul, R. C. The Holiness of God. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1985.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Jonathan Edwards, Spiders, and the Architecture of Evil: What the Lindsay Clancy Mistrial Reveals About Juries, Law, and the Unseen War for Order

Some conversations don’t stay inside the news cycle. They punch through the floorboards of what people assume reality is made of. I am not trying to wreck anybody for sport. I am trying to tell the truth about a case that has America arguing with itself, and then I am going to take that case all the way down into the older question underneath it: what is evil, how does it work, and what kind of people does a free republic need if it still intends to have law and order?

The case is Lindsay Clancy. The older question is Jonathan Edwards. The connecting image is a spider.

I have been living in the new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, and I keep running into his spiders.1 That is not a cute curiosity. Edwards looked at a web and saw intelligence. I look at the same geometry, and I see something else as well: a design that catches the living while they are going about their business. That is the argument I want to make. Evil is not only a mood. It is not only a chemical storm in a brain. It is not only a bad lawyer and a weak juror. It is also an architecture. It builds traps. It waits. It uses our own rules against us. And if we do not face that, we will keep getting hung juries in the cases that matter most.

What a Mistrial Actually Means

A mistrial is not an acquittal. It is not a conviction. It is the legal system admitting that this particular jury could not finish the job.

In Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy still faces first-degree murder charges in the deaths of her three children. The charges did not vanish on Friday, September 4, 2026, when Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in Plymouth Superior Court.2 Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz now decides whether to retry her before a new jury. The next status hearing is set for September 29, 2026.3 Defense attorney Kevin Reddington has already said he expects prosecutors to try the first-degree murder case again.4 Clancy remains held at a hospital without bail.5

That is the dry definition. The human meaning is harder. Three children are still dead. A mother is still paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from a window. A husband still has to live in the wreckage. And a country is still split between two sentences that cannot both be the last word: she was sick, and she killed them.

The Lindsay Clancy Case the News Cycle Keeps Flattening

On January 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands while her husband, Patrick, was out getting dinner.6 Cora Marie Clancy was five. Dawson William Clancy was three. Callan Patrick Clancy was eight months old.7 Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that night. Callan died days later.8 Lindsay then tried to kill herself, cutting herself and leaping from a second-story window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down.9

She has not denied that the children died by her hand. The trial was never really about the physical act. It was about criminal responsibility. Prosecutors said she acted intentionally, rationally, and swiftly.10 They pointed to planning: sending her husband farther away for takeout so she would have time.11 The defense said she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare and catastrophic break linked to the hormonal crash, sleeplessness, and psychiatric collapse that can follow childbirth, and that she should be found not criminally responsible.12

The jury of nine women and three men heard weeks of testimony.13 They deliberated about seven days, nearly forty hours.14 They told the judge more than once they were deadlocked. He gave them the extra push judges give hung juries, the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, sometimes called a dynamite charge, and told them to keep trying.15 It did not work.

According to the defense, the split was 11 to 1 in favor of finding her not criminally responsible. The holdout was described as a man who would not move.16 The foreperson told the court that one juror would not follow the instructions on reasonable doubt. Reddington tried to have that juror removed. The judge refused. Reddington then made an emergency run to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. That failed too.17 The judge would not pick a side inside the disagreement. He declared a mistrial and reset the machine.

That is why people are furious. They are not only angry at a mother. They are angry at a system that can look at three dead children, a confession of the act, a paralyzed defendant, a seven-day deliberation, and still end with no verdict at all.

Why One Holdout Can Stop a Nation

I understand the rage. I have sat in the room where one person refuses to move.

I was the foreman of a grand jury in Butler County, Ohio. Officers had pulled over drivers coming from a house the police already believed was feeding the Hamilton drug market out of Cincinnati. The stop was a traffic infraction. The drivers had not signaled. Inside the car, the officers found a small amount of marijuana. It was not a Hollywood seizure. It was a paper trail. Law enforcement needed a lawful step they could take to a judge so they could get a warrant and go into the house the right way.

Eleven of us were ready to advance the indictment. One woman would not. I knew the shape of her life well enough to see the sympathy sitting in the chair. Family wreckage around drugs. A softness toward marijuana legalization. A story in her head about intrusive government, pretext stops, and police using a little weed to build a bigger case. She heard “setup.” I heard “the only legal door they have.”

I walked the Ohio code. I explained why you cannot just kick the door because you “know” what is in the house. I explained that an indictment on the people coming and going was how you give the next case a spine. It was not enough. Emotions outran the statute.

That is the same tension I see in Plymouth. A jury is supposed to be a cross-section of the community. That is the poetry we tell ourselves. The prose is uglier. Twelve strangers bring their dead marriages, their addicted kids, their distrust of cops, their hatred of cops, their church or their lack of church, their private disasters, and their appetite to be the hero of their own movie. Rules of evidence and jury instructions exist because human beings are not robots. You cannot fully extract the person from the juror.

The flip side is just as true. If you screened out everyone with a history and a strong opinion, you would not have a jury of peers. You would have a room of people who have never been marked by life. That is not a republic. That is a lab.

So the system lives in the mess. It assumes that twelve random people will follow the law and the evidence far enough to reach one sentence together. When that assumption fails, you get O.J. memory. You get this Clancy mistrial. You get a grand jury that will not give police the warrant-path they need to dismantle a dope house. You get a society that wants justice as a feeling and then acts shocked when feelings deadlock the law.

The Dirty Harry Temptation and Why I Will Not Live There

I will say the ugly part out loud, because pretending I never thought it would be a lie.

When I looked at that drug house, my private interpretation of justice was primitive. Go in at night. End it. The people flooding a city with poison are already killing more innocents than a clean raid ever would. That is the Batman version. That is Dirty Harry. We have made a century of movies about that exact hunger because the hunger is real.

I also know what that hunger becomes if you baptize it. It becomes another species of lawlessness. It becomes the thing you claimed you were fighting. I told the prosecutor I could not manufacture the twelfth vote. I did not take a rifle to Hamilton and settle the account myself. I stood inside the process I claim to believe in.

That is the cost of order. Evil knows the cost. It uses our refusal to become death squads. It spreads behind procedure, discovery, sympathy, delay, and the one juror who will not move. If you love law, you have to admit that law can be turned into a web.

I carry guns. I am not a pacifist. I still say this without blinking: righteousness is a better weapon than bullets. I have seen enough to mean it. A bullet ends a body. Righteousness rebuilds a people who can sit in a jury box and tell the truth when it costs them something.

Jonathan Edwards and the Country That Used to Know What Judgment Was

If you want to know why America once had a stronger instinct for law and order, you do not start with the Constitution as if it fell out of the sky in 1787. You start earlier. You start with the moral weather that made a constitutional people even imaginable.

Jonathan Edwards lived from 1703 to 1758.18 He was dead before the Revolution. He was the intellectual voltage of the First Great Awakening. He was a pastor, philosopher, missionary, short-lived president of the College of New Jersey that became Princeton, and the last man a lot of modern people want to read because he will not flatter them.19

On July 8, 1741, in Enfield, Connecticut, he preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”20 People still treat that sermon like a Halloween prop. They should read it instead. Edwards did not invent wrath for the sake of theatre. He described a universe in which holiness is real, rebellion is real, and the only reason a man is not already ruined is God’s patience.

America did not come from therapy language. It came from people who thought judgment was as actual as weather. You can hate that. You cannot erase it and then act stunned when juries no longer share a common floor of right and wrong.

That is why I have been promoting the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Thomas Nelson released the NKJV edition in 2026, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard, with Edwards’s own notes, doctrinal essays, his Resolutions, and his way of keeping miscellanies.21 I have burned hours in it. Some days it has felt like the whole day. I love it because it does not give you a decorative Founder. It gives you the mind that helped form the country before the country had a Constitution.

If you want better juries, you need better people. If you want better people, you need a shared story about good and evil that is older and harder than the last viral clip. Two or three generations of daily Scripture and Sunday worship will not manufacture angels. It will raise the odds that eleven people are not held hostage by one person’s private fog.

The Obsession Edwards Had With Spiders

Edwards was not only the fire preacher. As a young man, he was a natural philosopher in Newton’s age. He watched the woods the way a physicist watches an experiment.

As a youth, he wrote the essay “Of Insects.”22 On October 31, 1723, he sent a polished letter, now famous as the spider letter, describing the “flying” spiders of New England.23 He had seen them sail. They let out a thread lighter than air, hang, loosen, and ride the current from tree to tree. He sketched it. He chased them through the forest all day. He wrote that of all insects none was more wonderful than the spider, “especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.”24

He drew two theological conclusions that still matter.

First, God provides not only for creatures’ necessities but for their pleasure. Edwards thought the spiders looked like they were enjoying themselves.25

Second, the numbers stay. Birds eat them. The sailing itself destroys many of them. And still the kind continues. He saw mathematical providence in that balance.26

That is intelligent design as an eighteenth-century Christian meant it. Nature is not an accident with pretty lighting. Nature is speech. The web is too exact to be a shrug.

Then, almost twenty years later, he picked up the same creature and turned it into the most famous image in American preaching. In Enfield he said:

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.”27

In the same sermon he pressed the image further: a man’s own righteousness would have “no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock.”28

The spider that had been a proof of delight became a proof of exposure. Same man. Same insect. Two sermons in one life: wonder and warning.

I do not think that was a contradiction. I think Edwards saw that the same world can display the mind of God and the peril of the soul. Creation is not a children’s museum. It is beautiful, and it bites.

What I See in the Web That Edwards Did Not Have to Name

Here is where I leave the safe academic reading and say what I actually think.

I look at a spiderweb, and I see intelligence. Edwards was right about that. The geometry is not sloppy. The angles, the tension, the patience, the invisibility until the light hits it just so: that is design. You can stand in late sun and watch filaments that look tacked to the sky. Edwards described that exact sight.29

I also look at a web and see a trap.

The insect is not committing a crime. It is flying. It is doing what it was made to do. Then it hits a structure built to convert motion into food. The spider does not debate. The spider waits. That is predation with architecture.

Ohio people should feel this in their bones. The Hopewell and other mound-building cultures left geometric earthworks through the Scioto and Little Miami valleys, around Chillicothe, and in places like the old works near Milford that settlement later erased or buried under ordinary American life.30 In 2023, UNESCO inscribed eight of those Ohio complexes as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, the state’s first World Heritage Site: precise circles, squares, and octagons on a scale that still startles engineers.31 Newark’s Octagon encloses about fifty acres and tracks major standstills of the moon across an 18.6-year cycle.32 Those shapes were not doodles. They were alignments. They were attempts to deal with powers the builders believed were real.

I am not saying a Hopewell priest and a garden spider sat on a committee. I am saying human beings keep stumbling into the same patterns: circle, octagon, line, trap, offering, sky.

Indigenous peoples were not stupid. They were reaching for non-human intelligence. So was Israel, except Israel named the source and bound it to law. So was Edwards, except he named the source Holy Spirit and Creator. I am not interested in flattening all of that into “UFO content” for a thumbnail. I am interested in the older, harder claim: some minds are not us. Some of them tell the truth. Some of them hunt.

I have spent a lot of time talking about non-human intelligence. I think people hear “aliens” and stop listening. That is their problem. Scripture already assumed a populated unseen world. Edwards assumed it. The first Americans on this ground assumed it. The modern mistake is to pretend the only actors in a murder trial are a brain, a statute, and a camera.

I think there was evil at work in Duxbury that wanted those children dead. I think evil wanted a mother at a window. I think there is evil that wants a jury to freeze, a lawyer to aim at sympathy instead of truth, a public to lose the ability to say that slaughtering Cora, Dawson, and Callan is a crime even if the killer’s mind was in pieces. Mental illness can be real, and responsibility can still matter. The unseen war does not cancel the courtroom. It explains why the courtroom feels haunted.

Edwards would have called the good side of that pressure the Holy Spirit working through nature and through people, often cryptically. I agree that the Spirit works that way. I also think there is a rival. The rival likes webs. The rival likes procedure without righteousness. The rival likes a geometric perfection that exists to feed.

God made the spider. That sentence is true. It does not obligate me to call every pattern in nature a children’s Sunday-school poster. Some of creation is a sermon about provision. Some of it is a sermon about how easily the living are taken.

Lawyers, Sympathy, and the Forked Tongue

We hire professionals to do what that web does.

A great defense lawyer is paid to find the strand you missed. That is the job. In a decent system, the prosecutor is paid to cut you free with facts. The jury is supposed to be the thing with a spine. When the jury becomes the meal, the whole design fails.

People still talk about Johnny Cochran the way they talk about magic. They remember the glove and forget the dead. I hear the same music around this Clancy trial. The defense needed one heart to crack. In a culture with no common moral language, one heart is not hard to find. You do not even have to trick a fool. You only have to find someone whose life has already trained them to confuse mercy with refusing to judge.

I am not saying postpartum psychosis is fake. I am saying a society that can only speak the language of diagnosis will eventually lose the language of guilt. And a society that can only speak the language of guilt will crush the truly broken. The adult position is both. The children are dead. The mother’s mind may have been on fire. The law still has to answer. A hung jury answers nothing.

There is a reason people do not want to serve. Jury duty is one of the last places America asks a citizen to be an adult in public. Of course, the unserious run from it. I loved being grand jury foreman. It was one of the most rewarding things I have done. I wish more people understood that sitting in judgment of facts is not cruelty. It is how a civilization refuses to become either a mob or a therapy waiting room.

After that one holdout voted against me on the drug case, she voted with me on the next stretch of indictments. Not because I bullied her. Because I gave her a platform, took her seriously, and then held the line. That is what persuasion in a jury room actually looks like. It is slow. It is personal. It is why character in the pool matters more than any trick a high-priced tongue can perform.

The Politics of Heaven and the Age of Disclosure

At the end of all this, I keep coming back to a sentence I cannot shake: you must understand the politics of heaven.

If the only government you believe in is the one with a flag and a courthouse, you will misread every major case. You will think the Clancy trial is only about Massachusetts procedure. You will think a hung jury is only a staffing problem. You will think a spider is only an arthropod.

I think we are living through a disclosure, whether officialdom likes it or not. Not just of craft in the sky. Of the fact that the world is contested. Edwards already knew that. The Bible already knew that. The people who cut those Ohio earthworks knew that in their own vocabulary. The modern West forgot it and called the forgetting sophistication.

Evil wants political charge over human order. It wants the rules of a biblical people without the fear of God. It wants juries that cannot condemn. It wants churches that cannot mention hell. It wants Bibles as décor. It wants Edwards reduced to a spider quote on a tote bag and stripped of the sermon that made grown men hold the pew.

I am not asking the state to become a church. I am asking a people who still claim law and order to remember where their nerves for judgment came from. Church and state can be distinct, and the Bible can still be the book that teaches a citizen how not to be a sucker.

Righteousness Is How You Slay What Bullets Cannot Touch.

If this case wrecked you, I understand. Cora liked princesses and taking care of people. Dawson liked firefighters, trucks, and Paw Patrol. Callan was a happy baby.33 Their father has had to learn how to breathe in a house that no longer contains them. In the days after the killings, he asked the public to forgive his wife, as he had.34 A park in Duxbury now carries the children’s names because the living did not know what else to build.35 Lindsay Clancy will never have an ordinary body again. Some people think that is already a sentence. Other people will not sleep until a prison door closes. Both of those instincts are human. Only one of them can become a verdict, and even that one just failed.

I will not tell you to stop wanting accountability. I will tell you that rage without formation becomes the next web.

Spread the narrative that makes better human beings. Increase Bible literacy like you mean it. Stop being shy. The church-and-state slogan was never a command to raise a nation of morally illiterate people. Read Edwards. Read the sermon. Read the spider letter. Hold both in one head: the God who delights in the sailing thread and the God who will not be mocked.

If you know someone who cannot get there alone, put a Bible in their hands. If the older English feels like a locked door, the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is one of the best ways I know to walk through it. Edwards is mixed now with the text that made him. You get the philosophy that helped create America sitting next to the Scriptures that helped create Edwards.

That is how you squeeze evil without becoming it. Not by pretending the drug house is a misunderstanding. Not by pretending three strangled children are a policy debate by forming a people who can look at a web and recognize both the mind of God and the appetite of the trap.

The insect that flies into the geometry was not asking for it. The children in Duxbury were not asking for it. A republic that forgets how to judge will keep calling the trap a misunderstanding and the holdout a deep thinker.

I want law. I want order. I want juries that will do their duty. I want a public that knows righteousness is not a mood. And I want us awake enough to see that the fight is older than Massachusetts, older than Butler County, older than the Constitution, and visible even in a thread of silk shining in the sun.

Get the book. Get the Bible. Get your nerve back.

Then show up when they call your name for the jury.

FOOTNOTES

1.  The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ, NKJV, ed. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026).

2.  Jacey Fortin, “Lindsay Clancy’s Murder Trial Ended With a Hung Jury. What Now?,” New York Times, September 4, 2026; Associated Press, “Mistrial Is Declared in Lindsay Clancy Child Killings Case After Jury Deadlocks,” September 4, 2026.

3.  Travis Andersen, “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy’s Murder Case After Jury Deadlocks,” Boston Globe, September 4–5, 2026. Judge William Sullivan set a status hearing for September 29, 2026, at 2:30 p.m.

4.  Fortin, “What Now?” Reddington told reporters he expected the Plymouth County district attorney to retry the first-degree murder charges.

5.  CNN, “Lindsay Clancy’s Triple-Murder Case Ended in a Mistrial. What Happens Next?,” September 4, 2026. Clancy was returned to Tewksbury Hospital and held without bail.

6.  “Killing of the Clancy Children,” Wikipedia, last modified September 17, 2026; Abby Patkin, “Duxbury Case: 5 Things We Learned from Lindsay Clancy’s Arraignment,” Boston.com, February 7, 2023.

7.  Cora Marie Clancy, born December 24, 2017 (some contemporaneous reports give December 4); Dawson William Clancy, born September 30, 2019; Callan Patrick Clancy, born May 26, 2022. See Maia Spoto, “The Clancy Children: A ‘Girly Girl,’ a ‘Paw Patrol’ Fan and a Happy Baby,” New York Times, September 3, 2026.

8.  Callan died after being flown to Boston Children’s Hospital. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead the night of January 24, 2023. Noah R. Bombard, “Duxbury Mother Lindsay Clancy’s Husband Says He Forgives Wife,” MassLive, January 28, 2023.

9.  “Killing of the Clancy Children,” Wikipedia; Associated Press, “Mistrial Is Declared.”

10.  CNN live coverage, September 4, 2026, summarizing the Commonwealth’s theory that Clancy acted “intentionally, rationally, and swiftly.”

11.  Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague’s arraignment timeline, reported in “A Timeline of Events in the Case Against Lindsay Clancy,” Boston Globe, February 8, 2023.

12.  Associated Press, “Mistrial Is Declared”; defense theory as argued by Kevin Reddington throughout the 2026 trial.

13.  Melina Khan and Christopher Cann, “Lindsay Clancy Case Ends in Mistrial over Hung Jury,” USA Today, September 4, 2026.

14.  Fortin, “What Now?”; Khan and Cann, USA Today. Deliberations ran roughly 38 to 40 hours across seven days.

15.  NBC Boston, “Lindsay Clancy Trial: What Happens If There’s a Hung Jury and Mistrial?,” September 2, 2026. Judge Sullivan gave the Tuey-Rodriguez charge after jurors reported they were deadlocked.

16.  Defense statements after the mistrial; Reddington said the jury “know one man robbed them.” Associated Press, September 4, 2026; CNN, September 4, 2026.

17.  CBS Boston, “Lindsay Clancy Murder Case Ends in Mistrial After Her Attorney’s Last-Ditch Attempt to Avoid Jury Deadlock,” September 4, 2026; Andersen, Boston Globe. Associate Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt of the Supreme Judicial Court denied the emergency appeal.

18.  George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

19.  Edwards served briefly as president of the College of New Jersey in 1758 and died that same year after a smallpox inoculation. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards.

20.  Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741 (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741). Modern reading text: Reiner Smolinski, ed., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Electronic Texts in American Studies.

21.  Thomas Nelson, The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV, ed. Matthew Everhard (2026).

22.  Jonathan Edwards, “Of Insects,” in Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

23.  Jonathan Edwards to Paul Dudley, Windsor, October 31, 1723, manuscript at the New-York Historical Society; printed in WJE 6. See also New-York Historical Society, “Jonathan Edwards and the Flying Spiders.”

24.  Edwards, “Of Insects,” WJE 6: “Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider, especially with respect to their sagacity and admirable way of working.”

25.  Edwards, spider letter, October 31, 1723, WJE 6. He concluded that the Creator provides “not only for all the necessities, but also for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects.”

26.  Ibid. Edwards argued that despite destruction by sailing and by birds, the species does not dwindle, evidence of the Creator’s “nicely and mathematically adjusting their plastic nature.”

27.  Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741).

28.  Ibid.: “all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a fallen rock.”

29.  Edwards, spider letter, October 31, 1723, describing “vast multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings” that appeared “tacked to the vault of the heavens.”

30.  On the Milford, Ohio, works along the Little Miami, later damaged by settlement and agriculture, see Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1848); site reconstructions at earthworks. site, “Milford Earthworks.”

31.  UNESCO inscription, September 19, 2023: Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, eight sites in Ohio. National Park Service, “Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.”

32.  Ohio History Connection / hopewellearthworks.org, “Octagon Earthworks,” Newark, Ohio. The octagon encloses approximately 50 acres; alignments correspond to the 18.6-year lunar cycle.

33.  Spoto, “The Clancy Children,” New York Times, September 3, 2026, quoting Patrick Clancy’s trial testimony.

34.  Patrick Clancy public statement, late January 2023, asking people to “forgive my wife as I have.” Bombard, MassLive, January 28, 2023.

35.  WBZ NewsRadio, “Park Opens in Duxbury to Honor Clancy Children,” June 10, 2025. The Heard Foundation, founded by Patrick Clancy, built the playground at Wadsworth Field Park.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Court Case and Contemporary Reporting

Andersen, Travis. “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy’s Murder Case After Jury Deadlocks.” Boston Globe, September 4–5, 2026.

Associated Press. “Mistrial Is Declared in Lindsay Clancy Child Killings Case After Jury Deadlocks.” September 4, 2026.

Bombard, Noah R. “Duxbury Mother Lindsay Clancy’s Husband Says He Forgives Wife, Accused of Killing Their Three Children.” MassLive, January 28, 2023.

Boston Globe. “A Timeline of Events in the Case Against Lindsay Clancy.” February 8, 2023.

CBS Boston. “Lindsay Clancy Murder Case Ends in Mistrial After Her Attorney’s Last-Ditch Attempt to Avoid Jury Deadlock.” September 4, 2026.

CNN. “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy Case After Jury Deadlock.” September 4, 2026.

CNN. “Lindsay Clancy’s Triple-Murder Case Ended in a Mistrial. What Happens Next?” September 4, 2026.

Fortin, Jacey. “Lindsay Clancy’s Murder Trial Ended With a Hung Jury. What Now?” New York Times, September 4, 2026.

Khan, Melina, and Christopher Cann. “Lindsay Clancy Case Ends in Mistrial over Hung Jury.” USA Today, September 4, 2026.

“Killing of the Clancy Children.” Wikipedia. Last modified September 17, 2026.

NBC Boston. “Lindsay Clancy Trial: What Happens If There’s a Hung Jury and Mistrial?” September 2, 2026.

New York Times live file. “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lindsay Clancy Triple-Murder Case.” September 4–5, 2026.

Patkin, Abby. “Duxbury Case: 5 Things We Learned from Lindsay Clancy’s Arraignment.” Boston.com, February 7, 2023.

Slate. “The Lindsay Clancy Case Has Ended in a Mistrial. What Happens Now?” September 4, 2026.

Spoto, Maia. “The Clancy Children: A ‘Girly Girl,’ a ‘Paw Patrol’ Fan and a Happy Baby.” New York Times, September 3, 2026.

WBZ NewsRadio. “Park Opens in Duxbury to Honor Clancy Children.” June 10, 2025.

Jonathan Edwards: Primary Sources

Edwards, Jonathan. “Of Insects.” In Scientific and Philosophical Writings, edited by Wallace E. Anderson. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Edwards, Jonathan. Letter to Paul Dudley, Windsor, October 31, 1723 (“Spider Letter”). Manuscript, New-York Historical Society. Printed in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 6.

Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741. Modern edition: Reiner Smolinski, ed. Electronic Texts in American Studies. University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Vol. 6, Scientific and Philosophical Writings. Edited by Wallace E. Anderson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Jonathan Edwards: Secondary Sources and Study Bible

Everhard, Matthew, ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ. NKJV. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

New-York Historical Society. “Jonathan Edwards and the Flying Spiders.” September 29, 2015.

Philosophy Now. “Jonathan Edwards on Spiders.” Issue 145.

Thomas Nelson Bibles. “The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV.” Product page, 2026.

Yale University, Jonathan Edwards Center. WJE Online, vol. 6.

Ohio Earthworks and Comparative Geometry

City of Milford, Ohio. Public history note on the Route 50 / Greenlawn Cemetery corridor. April 11, 2026.

earthworks. site. “Milford Earthworks.”

Hopewell Earthworks. “Octagon Earthworks.” Newark, Ohio.

“Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.” Wikipedia.

National Geographic. “Inside the Secret World of the Hopewell Mounds—Our Newest World Heritage Site.” November 19, 2023.

National Park Service. “Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.” Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.

Ohio State University. “Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, UNESCO World Heritage Site.”

Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1848.

UNESCO / National Park Service. Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks inscription. September 19, 2023.

Legal Context

Massachusetts General Laws, chapter 265, § 1 (murder).

Massachusetts Tuey-Rodriguez jury instruction on deadlock, as reported in NBC Boston trial coverage, September 2, 2026.

Note: The Butler County grand-jury account is first-person testimony and is not cited to a third-party source.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Christianity as a Scaling Movement: Principalities Behind Flesh and Blood Evil, and Why the Next Great Awakening Must Come From a Relationship with the Bible

Why I Keep Opening This Bible

I cannot say enough about the new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. It landed in August 2026, an NKJV built around the mind of the man I have come to think of as the theologian of American courage. The notes are not decorative. They are sermons, resolutions, doctrinal bone, and the working method of a man who wrote as if ideas had consequences because they do.[1]

I say that as a reader, not as a salesman. Somebody asked me if I work for the publisher because I will not shut up about it. I do not. I want them to make money. Scholars spent years—some of them a couple of decades—compressing Edwards into a book you can carry. That labor has to eat. It has to buy a hamburger. It has to justify itself in a market or it dies in a seminar. Paul would have understood that sentence immediately.

Every time I get a new Bible and read it through a different set of notes, my angle shifts a few degrees. This time the shift was violent. I could not stop thinking what a miracle it is that the crucifixion was even reported, and what a second miracle it is that Christianity became a civilization instead of a rumor. I want to talk about Christianity as a military and commercial endeavor—not instead of a spiritual one, but because the spiritual claim had to survive contact with Rome, with human nature, and with time.

I would say the benefit of Christianity to the human race, and to Western civilization in particular, was magnificent. That is not nostalgia. That is an audit. And the audit keeps returning to one man who began as an enemy.

The Road to Damascus Was a Hostile Takeover

The most important conversion story in history is not a soft altar call. Saul of Tarsus was hunting the church. Then he was its most formidable champion. The turn on the Damascus road is personal, traumatic, and public all at once.[2] I think a lot of people live in that same weather: against the thing, then claimed by the thing, then unable to go back to the person they were.

Paul was not a fisherman. He was a trained Pharisee and a working tradesman, a tentmaker who could pay his own way.[3] That combination is the whole essay in miniature. He had letters and leather. He could argue with philosophers in Athens and stitch a living in Corinth. The original disciples had seen Jesus with their own eyes. Paul had seen the risen Christ in a different register, and he had a skill the others did not: he knew how to take a local fire and turn it into a network.

People like to romanticize the Jerusalem church in Acts, where believers held things in common. I look at that scene and I do not see a manifesto. I see a threatened family taking care of its own. Historians, when they are being honest, generally read it as voluntary generosity inside a persecuted community—not a planned economy, not a party platform, and not a model Paul exported as law.[4] Later ideologies would loot the language. That is what ideologies do. They steal the family table and call it a theory.

The Jerusalem group was not trying to invent socialism. They were trying not to die, and they were trying not to abandon widows. The arrangement did not become the operating system of the Gentile churches. Paul would not have let it. He was too busy building congregations that could stand on their own feet in cities that did not care whether they lived.

Why the Original Apostles Could Not Have Done Paul’s Job

I love the apostles. I do not confuse their calling with Paul’s. They were rooted in Jerusalem, preaching first to their own people. Their courage was the courage of witnesses. Several of them were poor. They put the emphasis on the message and on the willingness to be spent. Rome knew what to do with men like that. It crucified them, beheaded them, scattered them. We remember them because the record survived. Memory is not the same thing as scale.[5]

Paul fought with them. That fact is in the Bible, not in some cynical footnote I invented. He opposed Peter to his face when the Gentile question threatened to split the movement into a Jewish remnant and a half-welcome underclass.[6] Christianity did not lock arms and sing. It argued. It almost broke. The argument was about purity versus reach, table fellowship versus the map of the empire. Paul chose the map.

Without that fight, I do not think you get a world religion. You get a Jewish faction with a crucified Messiah and a short half-life. Rome was full of such groups. We do not know their names because they lost.[7]

John survived. Tradition says they tried to boil him and failed, then parked him on Patmos, where he wrote Revelation.[8] Paul did not survive. The usual account is execution in Rome under Nero, sometime in the mid-sixties.[9] People mix Paul and John the way they mix founders and finishers. Revelation is a vision of the end. Ephesians is a field manual for a people who have to live until the end. I need both. I do not pretend they are the same book.

The Tentmaker Advantage: Financial Independence as Spiritual Nerve

Here is the part church-language usually sands off. Paul could be bold because he was not living off the room. He reserved the right to refuse a paycheck from the very people he served so that no one could say he was selling them a product.[10] That is not pride. That is strategy. A man who can feed himself can say the thing that gets him uninvited.

I have watched too many movements collapse into client relationships. The preacher needs the donor. The donor needs the preacher to bless the donor. Pretty soon nobody will say the costly sentence. The original disciples, as I read them, were often one arrest away from disappearing. Their deaths were holy. They were also, in organizational terms, a warning. Martyrdom proves sincerity. It does not automatically prove succession.

Paul’s independence gave him latitude. He could travel. He could offend. He could plant and leave and write back when the plant started growing weeds. He could walk into a city as a man with a trade rather than as a dependent mystic. I think that is why his version of the faith could cross from synagogue to workshop to household to the imperial road system. He understood customers. I do not mean he cheapened the gospel. I mean he knew that people must be able to receive a thing, carry a thing, and organize their lives around a thing—or the thing remains a speech in an alley.

If you want to know why I keep calling Paul a businessman, that is why. Not because he maximized profit. Because he understood value, timing, distribution, and the difference between a local hero and a transferable institution.

What Ephesians Actually Does

Ephesians is my favorite book in the Bible. It is short enough to carry and large enough to rebuild a mind. Paul does not wander. He frames the whole Christian movement: what God did before the foundation of the world, what Christ did in history, what the church is as a body, how a household should run, and how a believer is supposed to stand when the visible world is not the real battlefield.

The line that will not let me go is Ephesians 6:12. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.[11] I have come to think that verse is one of the most adult sentences ever written. It is what a person says after he has stopped believing that the problem is merely the neighbor’s personality.

Scholars argue over whether Paul meant demons, institutions, cosmic beings, or the spiritual charge inside empires and customs. I think he meant the whole weather system.[12] Names on mailboxes are not nothing. They are not the war. The war is the thing that climbs into names and makes them march.

That is why Ephesians could travel. It is theology you can use in Ephesus, Corinth, a Pennsylvania fort, a civil-war cemetery, or a county Republican breakfast. It tells a church how to live without becoming a cult and how to fight without mistaking people for the enemy. Paul called that arrangement a mystery revealed: Gentiles as fellow heirs, not guests in someone else’s religion.[13] That is scale. That is the business decision at the heart of the New Testament.

Flesh, Blood, and What I See in a Granddaughter

I have a young granddaughter. I watch her learn to walk, grab, flinch, laugh, and decide which faces matter. She is writing relationships into her nervous system that will still be there when she is fifty—parents, uncles, cousins, the strange country of grandparents. That is the human miracle and it is also the trap. We become so fascinated by whose nose she inherited that we forget to ask the older question.

What was she before she was a body? What is the spiritual essence that is using this little frame to enter the world? I do not mean that as a greeting-card. I mean it as politics. Paul called the hidden agents principalities. I have arrived at the same word by the long road of watching people. I am bad at names. People notice. They think I am careless. I am not careless about the thing I think is actually driving the name. Tim, Bob, Bill—fine. I want to know what climbed into Tim.

I do not get very excited about fleshly pursuits. I care about the politics of the powers that wear bodies like coats. That sounds cold until you have watched good people hurt each other while insisting they are only being practical. Paul’s sentence explains the pattern. The pattern is older than the persons.

This is also why the incarnation is not a sentimental Christmas pageant to me. If the real problem were only human manners, God could have sent another list. The Old Testament is not shy about the Spirit of God coming upon men. The scandal is that God himself takes flesh and walks into the mess. I think that is because human beings are not, at bottom, the main antagonist. The forces that use human beings are. Meeting us in the middle of the mess was not a branding exercise. It was an invasion.

When Does a Life Begin If the War Began Earlier?

I will not pretend this next piece is a public-policy white paper. It is the metaphysical question hiding under the abortion argument, and most of the argument never reaches it. The usual fight is: when does the fetus become human enough? Conception, heartbeat, viability, birth, one day before birth. Those are body questions. They matter. They are not the last questions.

Paul’s principalities force a harder timing problem. When does the spiritual being begin its journey in this world? I think the powers are already at work when a man and a woman find themselves wanting to form a union that could produce a child. They are either willing a life into the world or leaning the world toward demolition. Political systems, in my view, are the large, clumsy mirrors of that same contest. We build governments the way we build families: as flesh-and-blood answers to a conflict we can barely see.

If that is true, then a culture that talks only about bodies will keep losing to a culture that understands appetite, despair, and the unseen pressure on the will. I am not asking the county health department to adopt a demonology. I am asking Christians to stop acting as if Ephesians 6:12 were poetry.

What Christianity Gave the West

I said the gift was magnificent. Let me be specific enough to be attacked.

Christianity took a Mediterranean world that exposed unwanted infants, ranked souls by pedigree, and treated crucifixion as interior decorating for highways, and it taught that world that the weak had a claim on the strong. It made the person, not the clan, the unit of moral concern. It made conscience a public fact. It made time itself a story with a judgment at the end, which is another way of saying it made history matter.[14][15]

That moral architecture did not fall out of the sky in 1776. It was preached, copied, argued, and institutionalized for centuries before any Virginian wrote a declaration. Even secular historians who cannot recite the catechism now admit they are living inside the blast radius.[16] You can hate the church and still be using its furniture. Most modern humanitarian language is Christian language with the serial numbers filed off.

I do not say this because I think Christians have always behaved like saints. They have not. I say it because the standard by which we condemn their failures is itself a Christian standard. Rome did not accuse itself of failing the least of these. We do. That habit had to be invented.[17][18]

Jonathan Edwards and the American Nerve

If Paul is how the faith left Palestine, Edwards is one of the reasons it grew a backbone in English-speaking America. He is remembered, lazily, for one terrifying sermon in Enfield in 1741.[19] That sermon is real. It is also a fragment. Edwards was after joy in God, the nature of true affection, the freedom and bondage of the will, and a revival that would not fake itself.[20]

The First Great Awakening gave the colonies a shared moral language before they had a shared government. It taught ordinary people that authority could be wrong, that the soul had business with God that no bishop or parliament could intercept, and that history was not a closed room.[21] Calvin Coolidge, who is not usually cast as a revivalist, said Edwards’s philosophy had prepared the colonists for the Declaration.[22] That is a president talking, not a youth-group brochure.

I do not think America exists in the form I care about without that fire. I also do not think Edwards was sitting in Northampton in the 1740s designing the United States. Influence is a cascade, not a conspiracy. Edwards shapes a climate. The climate shapes men who never met him. The men walk onto battlefields and into conventions carrying instincts they think are simply common sense.[23][24]

His written corpus is enormous. Yale has spent generations editing it. The new study Bible is the first time a lot of ordinary readers will feel that weight without needing a research library card.[25]

Fort Necessity: The Wrong Turn That Organized My Year

My wife and I were trying to get toward Washington. We missed a turn, dropped onto the National Road with a camper that does not enjoy mountain switchbacks, and kept going because turning around had become a theology problem of its own. We pulled into Fort Necessity because the parking lot was large enough for me to get a Mello Yello out of our camper refrigerator.[26]

We were early. It was a midweek afternoon, still cold, almost empty. I went back to the refrigerator for my Mello Yello, which is as close as I get to a sacrament on the road, and we walked the ground. Young Washington was here. He built a sad little circular fort in a meadow and lost. That loss did not make him small. It started the education of the man who would refuse a crown.

I did not hear an audible voice. I am not going to insult the place by inventing one. What I did get was an obsession. The same year I stood at Fort Necessity I stood at Washington’s grave at Mount Vernon and in the room where he slept.

A few months later the Washington film made the circuit and we went. I liked it. But the question it could not answer for me was the one the field had already asked: what made Washington Washington? I think part of the answer is upstream of muskets. It is the Awakening’s idea that a people can be morally addressed as a people—that rebellion against a corrupt center might be obedience to a higher one.[27]

A phone call in the bookstore

While I was in the Fort Necessity bookstore, Nancy Nix called. She and I do local Republican work in Butler County, Ohio. We do not live on the phone. We think in the same direction often enough that when something is jammed, we say so and talk it out. She was dealing with the eternal problem of twenty-five people in a room who will not share a sandbox well together. I was surrounded by Washingtoniana. The juxtaposition was perfect. The early church had the same meeting. Paul had the same meeting. Scale always produces factions. The work is not to pretend otherwise. The work is to keep the factions from killing the thing they claim to love.

Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg, and the Men Who Paid the Invoice

We did Washington properly. We stood outside the White House. That same day we went to Ford’s Theatre. I had already had enough of John Wilkes Booth by the time I looked at the box Lincoln was shot in. I was hungry. I wanted a sandwich and a quieter mind. My wife was right to make us cross the street.[28]

A guide who had noticed we were not ordinary tourists took us through the Petersen House. I sat in that small room a long time. The bed, the chair, the knowledge that a president died a few feet from where tourists now whisper. I found myself wondering what Lincoln’s mind was doing while the body shut down. I cannot know. I think he was thinking about the Union as a moral object. I think the Awakening’s grandchildren were in that room whether anyone said Edwards’s name or not.

Then Gettysburg. We took the RV and gave the battlefield days, not hours. Weather, timing, day one, day two, day three, the cemeteries, the spot of the Address. I have read the military histories.[29] What I could not shake was the interior of the men. What do you tell yourself when you stand up on the third day and move toward a fence line that is trying to erase you? Some of them had Bibles. Some of them had fragments of sermons. Some of them had only the residue of a culture that had already decided the Union was a covenant and slavery a crime against it.[30][31]

A republic capable of spending that much blood to keep a proposition alive did not get that capacity from a seminar on self-esteem. It got it from a long Christian argument about the human person, providence, and judgment. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is what that argument sounds like when it has to bury hundreds of thousands of its own sons.

The Cascade I Keep Seeing

I will put the chain as cleanly as I can, knowing historians will want asterisks and I will give them some.

Without Paul, the Jesus movement remains a Jerusalem story. Without that scaled faith, there is no Christendom to form Europe’s conscience. Without that conscience, the English Protestant world does not produce an Edwards. Without Edwards and the Awakening, the American founding generation does not speak with the moral confidence it actually used—even the ones who were not revivalists. Without that founding, there is no Union for Lincoln to save. Without Lincoln, the American experiment becomes a slave republic with European manners.

That is not a straight line on a chalkboard. It is a watershed. Remove the spring and the towns downstream do not exist in the same form. I think Paul is the spring. I think Edwards is one of the American aqueducts. I think Washington and Lincoln are what the water looks like when it has to put on a uniform.[32][33][34]

People who only memorize the names of apostles miss this. They know who died. They do not know why the death did not end the firm. Paul is the reason the firm had branches.

The Business DNA of the Christian West

Once I saw Paul as a scaler, I started seeing the later fights differently. Mission movements that worked were not only brave. They were organized. They printed. They raised money. They trained. They built schools that outlived the missionaries. They treated the gospel as something that had to arrive in a form a stranger could use.

Only after that practical machinery proved it could create loyalty, literacy, and order did the Roman world—and much later the American world—fully absorb what it could not kill. I do not mean Christianity became a mere business. I mean it survived because it was not allergic to competence.

That is why I get impatient when the same voices that enjoy hospitals, universities, and human-rights talk treat business itself as original sin. The anti-business mood in the modern West is not just an economic opinion. It is often an attack on the very mechanism that let a demanding faith endure: independent people who can move, build, refuse a patron, and take a message across a border without asking a committee for permission.

Paul refused to live off handouts when the handout would have compromised the work. A civilization that sneers at that instinct will not keep the civilization Paul helped make. It will keep the vocabulary for a while. Then it will keep only the complaints.

Imperfect Instruments: Why I Compare a Businessman to Paul

I am going to say the impolite part. A lot of Christians wanted their political deliverance to arrive dressed like a Sunday-school painting. History does not usually staff itself that way. Paul had been a persecutor. He was not the profile the Jerusalem church would have ordered from a catalog.

I look at Donald Trump the same way I look at other blunt instruments in American life. I do not need him to be a systematic theologian. I need to notice what actually happened: a businessman with a public mess behind him enlarged the platform available to people who had been lectured out of public life. Charlie Kirk and a lot of ordinary conservatives could stand in rooms they would not have been invited into. I think that matters. I also think it is possible to be grateful for a door and still wish the doorman had better manners.

Paul did not come in the package people expected. Neither do most of the people who keep a movement from being locked in the sacristy. If your test for usefulness is polish, you will be ruled by people who are good at meetings and bad at history.

What a Second Great Awakening Would Actually Look Like

I do not think the next awakening arrives as a White House program. Administrations can restrain harm and they can appoint judges. They cannot regenerate a people. That work starts in churches, kitchens, Bibles, and arguments that last longer than a news cycle.

When I drive around my community on Sundays I see a lot of churches. Many of them are doing honest work. Many of them are reciting names. They know the apostles. They know the outline. They do not always know the politics inside the outline—the fight between purity and scale, martyrdom and mission, the local table and the empire of cities. That is why I am having this conversation in public. Surface catechism will not hold a civilization that is being talked out of itself.

A modern awakening would look, in practice, like people recovering nerve. Not vibe. Nerve. The willingness to tell the truth about good and evil without outsourcing the definitions to whatever academic fashion is currently eating its own young. It would look like families that treat children as souls rather than lifestyle accessories. It would look like churches that can stand a businessman in the pulpit without calling him unclean and can stand a poor man in the pulpit without calling him a mascot. It would look like gratitude for the West instead of a permanent apology for having won.

Edwards hoped God would walk with a people through the battlefields of ordinary life. I want that sentence back in circulation. Not as décor. As an operating assumption.

Why I Will Keep Talking to AI About This

A lot of people who read me despise artificial intelligence. Some of them despise Elon Musk on principle. They think any conversation like this is a rehearsal for a comic-book villain. I understand the fear. Tools this sharp can cut the wrong direction.

I also think it is cowardice to let the fear own the tool. We built machines that can hold a line of argument, retrieve a library, and stay in the fight when a human conversation partner gets tired. Used stupidly, that becomes a substitute for thought. Used properly, it becomes a way to do what Paul did with letters: send a structured argument into places the sender cannot physically be.

This is not a prophecy of Ultron. That is a man using a new press. The first Great Awakening had Whitefield’s lungs and a rising print culture.

A second one will have churches, Bibles, and whatever honest instruments we refuse to surrender to people who hate the civilization that made the instruments.[35]

I am not asking anyone to worship a model. I am asking them to notice that reference, memory, and argument are part of spiritual warfare too. If the principalities are real, they are not frightened by our refusal to use a library because the library is now silicon.

Know Where You Are

I watched, not long ago, the easy public habit of praising every sacred book as if they were interchangeable courtesy items. Respect, as a civic manner, is one thing. Amnesia is another. I have read the Qur’an more than once. I can say, without theatrics, that it has never done to my mind what Edwards does, and it has never done what Ephesians does. That is not a foreign-policy program. It is a reader’s report.

A nation that cannot tell the difference between the sources of its own law and the sources of someone else’s empire is a nation preparing to be edited. I will not help with the editing. The point of the progressive pressure I have spent years writing against is not manners. It is unmaking. If you want to unmake a people, you first convince them that the faith which built their hospitals, their conscience, and their suspicion of kings was always a crime scene.

I think that project is the current face of the old war. Flesh and blood will carry it. Flesh and blood are not the origin of it.

What I Want the Reader to Do

If you only remember one practical sentence, remember this: start with Paul if you want to know how the faith survived, and start with Edwards if you want to know how it learned to speak American.

Buy the book if you can. Read Ephesians slowly, out loud, as if it were written to a congregation that might split next week—because that is the situation it was written for. Then read Edwards on affections and ask whether your religion is an appetite or a performance. Then walk some actual ground. Necessity. Vernon. Gettysburg. The cheap seats at Ford’s Theatre. History gets into the legs in a way it does not get into a feed.

Notes

The numbered references in the text correspond to the sources below and to the bibliography. Biblical citations follow common English versification; quotations from Ephesians use the New King James Version to stay with the Edwards study edition.

[1] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Notes drawn from Edwards’s corpus; essays on his life, theology, spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening; Edwards’s Resolutions; introduction to the Miscellanies system.

[2] Acts 9:1–19; Galatians 1:11–24; Acts 22:3–21; Acts 26:12–18.

[3] Acts 18:3. The Greek is skēnopoioi, traditionally “tentmakers.” See Kenneth Berding, “Was Paul a Tentmaker? Part 1,” The Good Book Blog, Biola University, October 18, 2021.

[4] Acts 2:44–47; Acts 4:32–37. Compare the later famine collection in Acts 11:27–30. Historians generally read the Jerusalem sharing as voluntary generosity inside a threatened community, not a standing political economy.

[5] Acts 4:13.

[6] Galatians 2:11–14; Acts 15:1–35.

[7] Josephus, The Jewish War; Tacitus and Suetonius on successive unrest under Rome.

[8] Revelation 1:9. The boiling-oil tradition is in Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics 36.

[9] 1 Clement 5; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.25. Traditional date: Rome, under Nero, c. A.D. 64–67.

[10] 1 Corinthians 9:6–18; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; 2 Thessalonians 3:7–8; Philippians 4:14–18.

[11] Ephesians 6:12, NKJV.

[12] Clinton E. Arnold, Powers of Darkness (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992); Walter Wink, Naming the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); Hendrik Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, trans. John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977).

[13] Ephesians 2:11–22; 3:1–13.

[14] Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016); Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

[15] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

[16] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

[17] Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

[18] Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932).

[19] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.

[20] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); Freedom of the Will (1754).

[21] Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

[22] Calvin Coolidge, Address on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.

[23] George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[24] Edwards died March 22, 1758, weeks after becoming president of the College of New Jersey. The responsible historical claim is cultural inheritance, not a pocket sermon in every haversack.

[25] The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale University Press; digital corpus at the Jonathan Edwards Center, http://edwards.yale.edu.

[26] National Park Service, Fort Necessity National Battlefield. Battle of July 3, 1754.

[27] Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Mount Vernon, Virginia.

[28] Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site and Petersen House, Washington, D.C. Lincoln died April 15, 1865, at 7:22 a.m.

[29] Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York: Knopf, 2013).

[30] Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863; Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.

[31] Lincoln, Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860; presidential fasting and thanksgiving proclamations, 1861–1865.

[32] George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[33] N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013); F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).

[34] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).

[35] Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).

[36] Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Scripture and primary Christian sources

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Sermon, Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Digital edition: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. http://edwards.yale.edu.

The Apostolic Fathers. 1 Clement. Late first century.

Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History.

Tertullian. Prescription Against Heretics.

Paul, the early church, and the powers

Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992.

Berding, Kenneth. “Was Paul a Tentmaker?” Parts 1–2. The Good Book Blog. Biola University, 2021.

Berkhof, Hendrik. Christ and the Powers. Translated by John Howard Yoder. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977.

Bruce, F. F. Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

Dunn, James D. G. The New Perspective on Paul. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.

Hurtado, Larry W. Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016.

Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.

Christianity and Western civilization

Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 3rd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925.

Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. London: John Lane, 1908.

Dawson, Christopher. The Making of Europe. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932.

Holland, Tom. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. New York: Basic Books, 2019.

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943.

Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942.

Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Edwards, the Awakening, and American political religion

Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

Sweeney, Douglas A. “Jonathan Edwards: Legacy.” Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835–1840.

Founding, Union, and the ground I walked

Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Coolidge, Calvin. Address on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.

Guelzo, Allen C. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. New York: Knopf, 2013.

Lincoln, Abraham. Cooper Union Address. February 27, 1860.

Lincoln, Abraham. Gettysburg Address. November 19, 1863.

Lincoln, Abraham. Second Inaugural Address. March 4, 1865.

National Park Service. Fort Necessity National Battlefield. Farmington, PA.

National Park Service. Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. Washington, D.C.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon, VA.

Classical and Roman context

Josephus. The Jewish War.

Tacitus. Annals.

Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars.

The author’s related work

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Why America’s First Pastoral Philosopher Still Holds the Foundation for Law and Order

These are my favorite kind of days. The best days. No matter how tough it is out there, no matter how rough the problems of life get, sometimes you just have a good day, and this is one of them. I had the grandkids all day. We have been running back and forth at Kings Island, parched in the heat, and we are going to finish the evening at the waterpark. In the middle of all that, a box arrived. I took a minute to sit down with it. I opened it the way I open every book that matters to me. I smelled the pages.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is the wisdom and context of history sitting in my hand. I love the Bible for that reason. I love having so much history in one place. I love study Bibles because they explore the thing you can actually build a civilization on. I have carried one of those Bibles everywhere for years. I will not retire it. I will still read large portions of it every day. But I was ready to add to it, and I was ready to give the old one a rest. The first few pages of the worn one have a crease I cannot get out. That crease has bothered me. The new one does not have wrinkled pages. It just came out of the box.

I saw the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review in the late-summer, early-fall edition. I fell in love with the idea immediately. When I hear the name Jonathan Edwards, I think of the father of the founding fathers. Thomas Nelson released the edition on August 18, 2026, after years of work under general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard. I picked the brown Leathersoft with thumb indexes. I was close to the black genuine leather. I wanted brown. I wanted the indexes. I am a sucker for thumb indexes. That had been my only real gripe with the Bible I have carried for years. They made this one with them. Brilliant.

A Good Day Is Not an Accident

I have said it before and I will say it again: a good day is not the absence of problems. A good day is the presence of a standard that can survive the problems. The world is full of people pinballing off each other. They do not share a common point of reference. They argue government, law, family, and history as if those things were invented last Tuesday. They were not. The argument over what kind of government we are supposed to have was largely settled in the long runway from the 1740s through the 1770s. The First Great Awakening was not a side show. It was a Christian surge into the New World that formed the conscience of a people who would soon have to decide whether they were subjects or citizens.

I wanted something that would push my mind into the right frame for the complicated issues in front of us. Two years into President Trump’s second term, the question is no longer whether the old order can be broken. The question is what we build with the pieces. Biblical scholarship is a very good place to start. Not as decoration. As infrastructure.

Who Jonathan Edwards Actually Was

Jonathan Edwards was born October 5, 1703, and died March 22, 1758. He was a Congregationalist pastor, philosopher, and theologian, widely regarded as America’s most original philosophical theologian. He oversaw early revivals in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1733–35. He preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741. That sermon is the one everybody remembers. It is not the whole man.

Edwards was not a mascot for rage. He was a man obsessed with joy in God. “The enjoyment of [God] is…the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That line sits on the new study Bible for a reason. His Religious Affections, his Resolutions, his Miscellanies, and his massive unpublished notebooks were an attempt to think with total seriousness about Scripture, beauty, virtue, and the public order. He became the third president of the College of New Jersey—Princeton—after the death of his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr. He served only weeks. He died after a smallpox inoculation. Short tenure. Long shadow.

Princeton was a child of the Great Awakening. When Harvard and Yale resisted the revivals, New Lights built new colleges. The first presidents of Princeton stood in that stream. John Witherspoon, later president of the same college, signed the Declaration of Independence. The line from Edwards to Witherspoon to the Revolutionary generation is not a slogan. It is institutional history.

Calvin Coolidge, speaking on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration, put it as plainly as any American president ever has: “No one can escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology… had aroused the thought and prepared the colonists for this great event.”  I consider Calvin Coolidge to be one of America’s greatest presidents.  

I call Edwards a founding father because America would not have the moral vocabulary it used to become America without men like him. Ben Franklin admired George Whitefield, the great itinerant of the same awakening. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Adams inherited a public that had already been trained to take sin, covenant, virtue, and judgment seriously. You do not get a Bill of Rights out of thin air. You get it from a people who already believed that law has a source above the king.

The Great Awakening Was a Political Event

People treat revival as private emotion. That is a modern mistake. The Awakening taught ordinary men and women that a regenerated beggar stood before God on the same ground as an unholy prince. In a hierarchical empire, that idea is dynamite. It does not automatically produce 1776. It does produce a population that can hear “all men are created equal” without laughing.

The Awakening also split churches, founded colleges, and trained a habit of examining authority rather than merely inheriting it. That habit can go wrong. It can become mere rebellion. Edwards himself was no enthusiast for unfettered liberty as an end in itself. He wanted ordered affections under God. That is exactly why he is useful now. A country that has spent years dissolving every standard needs the man who refused to separate joy from holiness and holiness from public life.

I have been telling people that the squabbles of the present require a basic foundation. Study of that foundation got settled, in outline, by the 1750s and was tested in the 1770s. If we will not return to it, we will keep inventing new religions of the self and calling them law.

What This Study Bible Actually Contains

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is an NKJV edition from Thomas Nelson: Comfort Print, red letter, center-column references, concordance, maps, translator notes, two-color printing. The distinctive load is Edwards himself. Study notes drawn from his work. Articles on doctrinal topics. Full-page essays on his theology, his life, his spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening. His Resolutions. An introduction to his Miscellanies note-taking system, with space to build your own. The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center remains the great online companion. If you are doing real scholarship, you can move from the page in your hand to the archive.

I like that. I like any book that tries to achieve superior intellect. The Bible, at its most basic essence, is the attempt to put the human mind in contact with the source of order. A study Bible is not a substitute for the text. It is scaffolding. Edwards is unusually good scaffolding because he will not let you treat Scripture as therapy. God, in Edwards, is not a life coach. God is holy. God is beautiful. God is uncompromising. If we follow in those footsteps, the same seriousness can look ruthless to a soft age. That is not a reason to flatten God into niceness. That is a reason to think.

I looked at the maps, the color, the paper, the print, the way the notes sit on the page. I judge Bibles the way I judge tools. Binding, glue, opacity, ribbon, indexes, whether the thing will survive being carried. Thomas Nelson still backs many of these editions with a lifetime guarantee against manufacturing defects. Companies that talk that way are running a different business model than the disposable world. I respect that.

I almost bought the black leather. I bought the brown because I like brown and because this one has the thumb indexes. I will likely still read the old study Bible. I will not carry the creased one everywhere anymore. This one takes that job.

The Smell of a New Book Is Not Trivial

I take publishers seriously when they do their job. The best smell in the book world is still new-Bible smell: paper, ink, glue, cloth, leather. I told my wife, half joking and half not, that if she wants me to keep loving her forever she should find a perfume that smells like a new book. The grandkids laugh at me because I keep putting my face in the pages. Fine. Let them laugh. There are very few things in life better than a well-made book that is trying to make you smarter than you were yesterday.

My old Bible still smells good to me. It has been everywhere. Full-color pages, notes from good scholars, a companion through work I am proud of. It also has the wounds of use. That is honorable. It is also honest to say when a tool has earned a rest. I can straighten pages and put it on the shelf without pretending I have outgrown it. I have not. I have added a second pillar.

Law and Order Begins With a Book on the Desk

People have told me they like that I keep a Bible on the desk in my office. Everybody walking by can see it. I did the same thing when I served as foreman of a grand jury in Butler County. I was not trying to be ostentatious. I was stating the premise. We were there for order. We were swearing to tell the truth. The values that created this civilization are not shameful. You do not apologize for them. You do not mumble that every tradition is equal so that no tradition can judge anything.

I put the Bible on the desk and I swore people in. That book represented a common standard. We can disagree about a thousand things after that. We cannot pretend there is no standard.

When I look back on a long life—good family, good kids, good grandchildren, good work in business—I still say that those weeks as grand jury foreman were among the most rewarding things I have ever done. I wish I could do that job every day. They paid something like twenty-four dollars a day. The whole stint put maybe four hundred dollars in my pocket. I spent every dime of it on Ohio law books, the kind of volumes lawyers keep on their shelves. I needed to explain the law to the other people in the room. Twelve other citizens. Evidence. A vote. Whether a person goes further into the machine of the state. That is serious work. I loved it. For a few weeks I was, in a manner of speaking, the top cop in Butler County, and I treated the job that way.

I have been thinking about cases that break your heart and then break your confidence in a jury’s ability to follow the law. A mother walks away from the death of her own children and the process cannot arrive at the destination the facts required. I will not relitigate a verdict in this space. I will say what the experience taught me. Law is not a mood. Law is a discipline. If the people in the room do not share a moral language, the statutes become a maze. The Bible is not a statute book. It is the source of the moral language that made statute books possible in the West.

Jonathan Edwards belongs on that desk because he is part of the formula that formed the legal society of the early republic. The attempt in our time has been to undermine that formation completely. Our job is to keep the undermining from succeeding. One way to do that is to return to the starting point and read it again, slowly, with notes from a man who actually thought.

God Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Seminar

I need to be clear about something I said in the moment and will not sand down. God is not a slogan for “can’t we all just get along.” God, as Scripture presents Him, is often ruthless and uncompromising. If we claim to follow, we do not get to edit that into suburban kindness and call it discipleship. The intellectual task is to understand what holiness requires in public life without turning the church into a mob and without turning the state into a church.

Edwards is helpful there. He is a pastoral philosopher. He will not let affection float free of doctrine, and he will not let doctrine float free of the glory of God. That combination is what a movement needs after it wins elections. Winning is not the same as governing. Governing requires a metaphysics. If your metaphysics is “the self is sovereign,” you will get the last twenty years on repeat. If your metaphysics is that there is a law above the ruler and a Judge above the law, you have a chance.

I have been saying that we need a common point of reference. This Bible can be that for people who are even half willing. You do not have to become a professional Edwards scholar. You have to read, mark, compare, and refuse the cheap alternatives.

The Politics of Heaven in the Age of Disclosure

We are living in what I have been calling the age of disclosure. Hidden things are coming up. Political things, institutional things, spiritual things. If you do not understand the politics of heaven, you will misread the politics of earth. Heaven is not a fog of niceness. Heaven is a court. There is a throne. There is law. There is judgment. There is mercy that costs something. Edwards never forgot that. A great deal of modern religion did.

The founding generation argued about church and state. They did not argue that the state could invent morality out of committee. They assumed a created order. They assumed sin. They assumed that republics die when character dies. That is not nostalgia. That is the operating system.

I want my grandchildren to see a Bible on the desk and know what it means when I walk into a room. It means I stand for law and order, and that law and order have a foundation that did not begin in a press release. I am not closing my life. I am opening a new chapter with a better tool for the same fight.

Why I Am Telling You to Get This One

If you need a first serious study Bible, this is a strong candidate. If you already have one you love, as I do, this is the right second. The scholarship is serious. The production is handsome. The price is not insane. The leather edition runs more. I paid for the version I would actually use—the one I will thumb through in the car, on the desk, and at the table.

I would like to shut the rest of life off and only read it. I will read a lot of it. It will become the Bible I carry. There is plenty here to work with. I think it is a key to launching a new stretch of work in my own life, and I think it can serve the same purpose for anyone who is tired of arguing with no floor under the argument.

Go get it. Put it where people can see it. Swear to the truth. Then go do the hard parts—family, work, citizenship, the long patience of building a civilization instead of commenting on its collapse.

I took the kids back to the waterpark and we had a great day.  While I waited on them I sat in a chair and read through this new Bible and it turned out to be one of the best days I have had in a while. I am going to smell the pages again many more times. There are very few things in life better than that. If you want the longer map of how I think about work, conflict, and Western order, read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. If you want the foundation under that map, start with Scripture and a guide who already walked the ground we keep pretending is new.

Notes

1.  Thomas Nelson released The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV) on August 18, 2026, with Dr. Matthew Everhard as general editor. Editions include hardcover, brown Leathersoft (including thumb-indexed), and black genuine leather. See publisher listings and trade bibliographic records for ISBNs 9781400339532 (hardcover), 9781400339556 (brown Leathersoft, thumb indexed), and 9781400339600 (black genuine leather).

2.  Edwards’s dates, Northampton revivals, the Enfield sermon of July 8, 1741, and his brief presidency of the College of New Jersey are standard in the biographical literature. See George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003).

3.  Edwards died after smallpox inoculation in March 1758, weeks into the Princeton presidency. Marsden and the Yale Jonathan Edwards Center treat the episode in detail.

4.  Coolidge’s sesquicentennial remarks on Edwards and the Declaration are printed in Calvin Coolidge, The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses. The quotation is discussed in Gordon Arnold, “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought,” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.

5.  On Princeton’s revivalist origins and the New Light college movement, see Thomas Breidenthal, “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019, and George M. Marsden’s work on evangelical higher education.

6.  John Witherspoon, sixth president of the College of New Jersey, signed the Declaration of Independence and served in the Continental Congress. The Edwards–Burr–Witherspoon succession is a matter of college history, not metaphor.

7.  George Whitefield’s relationship with Benjamin Franklin is documented in Franklin’s Autobiography and in the standard Whitefield biographies. Admiration is not the same as conversion; it is evidence of the Awakening’s public weight.

8.  Edwards’s line on the enjoyment of God as the only satisfying happiness is used by Thomas Nelson as the editorial keynote of the 2026 study Bible.

9.  The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center (edwards.yale.edu) hosts the Works of Jonathan Edwards and remains the primary digital archive corresponding to the print notes.

10.  Thomas Nelson’s published lifetime guarantee covers manufacturing defects, not ordinary wear. See Thomas Nelson Bibles customer-service and Premier Collection guarantee pages.

11.  The First Great Awakening’s role in colonial egalitarianism, church conflict, and revolutionary political culture is argued, with different emphases, by Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (1966); Mark Noll, America’s God (2002); and Michael Novak’s essays on the “two wings” of the American eagle.

12.  Butler County, Ohio, grand juries operate under Ohio law. Compensation for jurors has historically been modest; the figures given here are from my own service and recollection, not a claim about current statutory rates.

13.  Biblical Archaeology Review is the flagship magazine of the Biblical Archaeology Society. I first noticed the Edwards Bible as a paid advertisement in a late-summer / early-fall issue.

14.  Edwards owned enslaved people. That fact belongs in any honest account. It does not erase his intellectual role in American theology; it does forbid hagiography. See Marsden and the Yale Center’s documentary record.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary Edwards

•  Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. The Life of David Brainerd. 1749.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. Ethical Writings. Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8. Yale University Press.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. The Miscellanies. Works of Jonathan Edwards, multiple volumes. Yale University Press.

•  Edwards, Jonathan. Resolutions. Various editions; also included in the 2026 study Bible.

•  The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press. Digital companion: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, https://edwards.yale.edu.

The 2026 Study Bible

•  Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Biography and Intellectual History

•  Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.

•  McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford University Press, 2012.

•  Murray, Iain H. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Banner of Truth, 1987.

•  Gura, Philip F. Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. Hill and Wang, 2005.

•  Sweeney, Douglas A. Edwards the Exegete. Oxford University Press, 2016.

•  Nichols, Stephen J. Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought. P&R, 2001.

Great Awakening, Princeton, and the Revolution

•  Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford University Press, 2002.

•  Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1966.

•  McDermott, Gerald R. One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Penn State University Press, 1992.

•  Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. Yale University Press, 2007.

•  Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford University Press, 1994.

•  Stohlman, Martha Lou Lemmon. John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot. Westminster, 1976.

•  Coolidge, Calvin. The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses.

•  Arnold, Gordon. “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought.” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.

•  Breidenthal, Thomas. “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019.

Scripture, Law, and Western Order

•  Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Harvard University Press, 1983.

•  Witte, John, Jr. The Reformation of Rights. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

•  Novak, Michael. On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. Encounter, 2002.

•  Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England.

•  The Declaration of Independence; the Constitution of the United States; the Bill of Rights.

Related Hoffman

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice.

•  Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior, https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.

Periodicals and Tools•  Biblical Archaeology Review. Biblical Archaeology 

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

The Day the Past Arrives in the Mail: Why Biblical Archaeology Review Is My Favorite Thing in the World. 

It is always a special day whenever one of these comes in the mail.

I have been saying that for most of a lifetime, and I have not found a reason to take it back. I have been reading Biblical Archaeology Review since I was a kid in the 1970s.[1] The magazine was new then. Hershel Shanks had just pried a door open between the trench and the kitchen table, and a generation of ordinary readers suddenly had access to the same arguments the professors were having in Jerusalem, Amman, and Cambridge.[2] I am still on that list. The issue still arrives every few months. And when it does, I have a ritual. I block the calendar. I throw the noise out of the room. I turn the phone face down. I let the house go quiet, and I go through the thing article by wonderful article until the night is gone.

If I milk it—and I usually do—I stay up while everyone else has gone to bed. Two o’clock in the morning, a glass of water, the window dark, the mind finally unhurried. I never get tired of it. They do such a good job on this magazine that I can disagree with half of what I am reading and still close the cover grateful. That is a rarer virtue than most publications admit.

A Rough Day, a Small Face, and Japanese Dumplings from Costco

Today was a rough day. There were problems stacked on problems, the kind of list that makes a person keep working because stopping would only let the list talk louder. I was at it when my wife went to the mailbox. She saw the mailman go down the road. She came back in with that smaller face she wears when she is carrying a gift she already knows will land, and she pulled the issue out of the stack as if she had found a holiday hiding in ordinary paper.

She knows the ritual. She has known it for years. Shut everything down. Give him the hours. Let him disappear into the Bronze Age and come back when he is done. She also knows the other half of the ceremony, which is not in any style guide and would not impress a tenure committee: Japanese dumplings from Costco. They are our favorite meal in the world. I put my work away. We ate. Then I came back to the magazine and started turning pages again.

I can tell you, without much fear of contradiction from anyone who has lived a long marriage, that there is not much better in the world than those two things arriving on the same evening. Life is already wonderful. The dumplings do not create the wonder. They just have the good manners to show up when the past does.

That is not a small thing. A culture is what it chooses to interrupt itself for. Some houses interrupt themselves for a game. Some interrupt themselves for a crisis. In this house we interrupt ourselves for a quarterly argument with the dirt of the ancient Near East, served with dumplings. I will defend that liturgy against any number of more fashionable ones.

I Do Not Read This Magazine Because I Agree with It

I do a lot of coverage on alternative history. The people who write Biblical Archaeology Review are, by and large, the academics who write the official history. In a seminar room, we would probably disagree on most of the load-bearing claims. Over coffee, one on one, we would discover we have more in common than the professional costumes suggest. We both love the ground. We both hate a lazy sentence. We both know it takes years to get one good layer out of a tell and only minutes for a man in an armchair to declare the layer silly.

I do not want to disparage their work. It takes a special kind of patience to spend a salary’s worth of afternoons on ancient Mediterranean studies, to draw a wall, to weigh a sherd, to argue about a burn layer until the argument itself becomes a kind of craft. Thank God people go out and dig. I love them for it. What they hand a general reader is the compressed labor of thousands of hours. That bandwidth is the gift. I can sit with their results at two in the morning and ask what the weight of the discovery actually does to the historical narrative.

The gift is not the same thing as a verdict. I come out of aerospace, which is a culture that slings a thousand things at the wall at the same time and then forces smart people to defend their assumptions out loud. You get them in a room. You make them spell the claim. When they stumble—because the evidence is not quite obtained enough, not quite clear enough—you put a mark next to that line and you keep going. A 5-Why breakdown is just the civilian name for the same habit.[3] You are trying to get to the bottom. You often end with more questions than you started with. That is not failure. That is the work confessing that the universe is larger than the first memo.

So I read BAR the way I used to sit in those rooms. I take the facts they sweat for. I refuse to inherit the spellings they cannot finish. Conviction, if it is worth anything, has to be able to look a trench report in the eye and still ask the next why.

What These Pages Teach Better Than Almost Anything

If you want a working grasp of the land of Canaan, of Israel, of the First Temple and the Second, this magazine is still one of the best public teachers in the English language. It will not give you a Sunday-school flannelgraph. It will give you walls, seals, bullae, burnt rooms, inscription fights, and the slow humiliation of theories that looked inevitable in 1986. That is how you learn a period well enough to ask an intelligent question about what is not on the page.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the obvious example. Once you have sat with what those caves actually held—the textual habits, the calendar arguments, the purity rules, the war language—you can hear Second Temple Judaism thinking out loud.[4] You stop treating “what people believed” as a slogan. You start treating it as an artifact. Belief leaves residue. So does politics. So does fear. A society is whatever it bothers to bury, copy, smash, or hide in a jar.

That is also why I read this magazine as a student of business and politics, not only as a student of Scripture. If you are trying to build a company culture, you are already in the archaeology business. You are asking what a group worships when no one is watching, what it will pay for, what it will kill a project to protect, and what story it tells itself about why the last city fell. Civilizations rise for reasons. They decline for reasons. The reasons are never only economic and never only theological. They are psychological, liturgical, and military at the same time.[5] The Bronze Age did not end because a professor needed a chapter title. It ended because systems that looked permanent discovered they were not.

I like politics. I like business. I like understanding how cultures work so I can apply the lesson before the lesson applies itself to me. You cannot do that on vibes. You do it by watching how a people handled copper, kingship, covenant, and collapse when the outcome was still in doubt.

The Questions the Trench Reports Keep Leaving Off the Table

Here is where I stop being a grateful subscriber and start being the guy from aerospace with a marker in his hand.

Everybody who reads widely in this field knows the argument about Bronze Age copper and long-distance trade. I have said for years that North American copper belongs in that conversation. The Old Copper Culture of the Great Lakes was not a footnote. The people working the Keweenaw and Isle Royale were among the earliest miners and metalsmiths on the planet.[6] Mainstream archaeology is prepared to praise that fact and then change the subject when the next question arrives: where did all that copper go, and what does the timing do to the usual map of Bronze Age supply? I know the consensus answer. The consensus answer is that European and Near Eastern copper is accounted for by Old World mines, and that a transatlantic trade remains unproven.[7] Fair enough. Unproven is not the same as unaskable. In a review room, “we have not found the shipwreck yet” is a status report. It is not a gag order.

The same habit shows up closer to home. When I talk about stone monuments in northern Michigan—dolmens, capstones, arrangements that look like cousins of the chambers you can walk through in the British Isles and across Atlantic Europe—the geological reflex is always waiting. Displacement. Glaciers. The ice did it.[8] Ice did a great many things. Ice does not get a monopoly on every balanced stone in the Upper Midwest. We already know that people in the Great Lakes arranged rock on purpose. Under Lake Huron, on the old Alpena-Amberley Ridge, there are drive lanes and hunting blinds nine thousand years old. That is not a glacier having a hobby. That is a culture thinking in stone.[9] If a people can build that under what is now water, I am not required to call every terrestrial chamber an accident of meltwater.

I am not asking BAR to become a magazine of North American diffusionism. I am asking the older question the magazine itself taught me to ask: if you know a period well, you are obligated to notice the silence around it. Why this map and not the larger one? Why this set of ancestors and not the ones standing in the next drainage? Absence from a journal is not the same thing as absence from the world. Spilled milk can disappear from the fossil record. That does not mean the glass was never full.

Canaan, Yahweh, and the Politics That Did Not Stay in the Ground

Once you have a good grip on what the excavators actually know about Canaan and the highlands of Israel, you can ask the question the field sometimes treats as bad manners: what kind of culture was already there when the Hebrew Bible says Yahweh told a people to go in?[10] I do not treat that command as a campfire exaggeration and I do not treat it as a modern war-crimes pamphlet. I treat it as politics in the older sense—the ordering of a people under a claim about who runs the unseen world.

The Bible is not embarrassed by a populated heaven. Psalm 82 puts God on his feet in a council of gods and tells them they are going to die like men. Deuteronomy 32, in the reading preserved by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, says the nations were parceled out according to the number of the sons of God, while Yahweh kept Israel as his own portion.[11] That is not a children’s story. That is a jurisdictional map. Babel is the administrative crisis that precedes the map. The conquest traditions are what the map looks like when it reaches the ground. You do not have to like the theology to see the structure. You only have to stop flattening the text until it resembles a modern committee.

This is the argument of the book I have been writing, The Politics of Heaven. Blood, loyalty, and throne-claims do not stay in one register. They move between temples, palaces, and the beings the temples were built to negotiate with. If that sounds speculative from the cheap seats, I would only note that the Bible itself is less shy about the subject than many of its professional interpreters.[12]

Eve, the Fruit, and a Remark I Have Not Been Able to Shake

Most of my readers do not leave public comments. They send texts. They send emails. They would rather be known by a sentence than by a handle. One of them said something I have been turning over ever since: Eve was the original Ayn Rand.

It is a mischievous line, and it is sharper than it first sounds. Rand was an atheist who treated knowledge as security. Eve reaches for the fruit she was told not to eat because the fruit promises the knowledge of good and evil—which is to say, it promises a kind of coverage. If I can see the whole field, I will not be surprised. If I cannot be surprised, I might not need to trust. The serpent’s pitch is not “become wicked.” The serpent’s pitch is “become independently briefed.” That is a political offer. It is also a religious one. The two are not different departments in Genesis.

There is good and evil. That part is not subtle. There is also the other tree, the one that did not get eaten, the one that has to do with eternal life. We were built for a purpose and we fell out of the purpose. Ever since, there has been a disorder in the world that would prefer the purpose stay fallen. The snakes are still in the catalog. They still talk. They still offer fruit at the expense of every Adam who thought he could manage the garden by intelligence alone.

I am not above a joke when I say that Jesus was crucified in the middle of that argument. I am thinking of Job, and of Satan telling the court that loyalty is only loyalty until the invoice arrives.[13] I am thinking of the wilderness, with the kingdoms of the world placed on a ridgeline and the offer to jump, to seize, to save himself. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” is what it sounds like when a man refuses the offer and pays the price the offer was designed to avoid. If Eve reached for knowledge as security, the cross is the opposite transaction: knowledge of the worst thing, accepted without the security.

That is not a footnote to archaeology. It is the reason archaeology of the biblical world still matters to a person who also thinks about elections, companies, and the way a culture decides what it is allowed to notice. The past is not a museum. It is a set of unfinished negotiations.

How to Read a Magazine Without Becoming Its Disciple

The method is simple, and I commend it to anyone who is going to spend a night with BAR or with any other serious journal.

First, grant the labor. A published excavation is not a blog post. Treat it that way.

Second, separate the find from the frame. The wall is one fact. The paragraph that tells you what the wall “means for early Israelite state formation” is another fact, and a softer one.

Third, ask the aerospace question: can they spell the assumption without coughing? If the dating depends on a circular pottery sequence, say so. If the absence of evidence is doing the work of a conclusion, say so. If a whole continent has been ruled out because it would rearrange the lecture notes, say so.

Fourth, keep a second ledger for the questions the article makes possible and then declines to ask. Those questions are often the real harvest.

Fifth, take the night. Do not speed-read a civilization. The quiet is part of the instrument. A magazine like this is built for the hours when the house has stopped performing and a reader can finally hear himself think.

Why I Will Keep Subscribing

I can say the things I say about these topics because other people did the unglamorous work first. They published. I sat with what they published. Sometimes I said, that is not good enough. Sometimes I said, that changes the picture. Either way, the picture moved because they went into the ground.[14]

That is how you connect the past to the future without turning either into a costume. You learn a period until you can feel its joints. You watch what a people did when copper was wealth, when a temple was a government, when a scroll was a survival strategy. Then you look at your own shop floor, your own county, your own country, and you ask whether the same joints are moving.

If you have ever read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you already know I do not treat culture as decoration. Culture is the operating system. Archaeology is one of the few disciplines that lets you watch an operating system fail in slow motion and leave the wreckage where a later age can still touch it. That is why this magazine remains, for me, one of the best publications in the world. Not because it is always right. Because it keeps putting first-rate evidence in the hands of people who are willing to stay up with it.

My wife knew what kind of day I was having. She also knew the cure that would not insult the day by pretending it had been easy. She brought in the mail. She made the dumplings. She gave me the hours. It does not get any better than that.

Life is wonderful with or without the dumplings. It is more wonderful when the past arrives on the same plate. 

Notes

The numbered notes in the essay appear as footnotes on each page. The list below is a reading path, not a claim that every title agrees with me. A good bibliography should be a room you can walk around in, not a unanimous chorus.

A Working Bibliography for Further Reading

Biblical Archaeology Review and the Public Craft

Biblical Archaeology Society. Biblical Archaeology Review. Washington, D.C., 1975–present. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/.

Cline, Eric H. “Larger Than Life.” Biblical Archaeology Society, February 8, 2021.

Shanks, Hershel, ed. Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Random House, 1992.

Shanks, Hershel. The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Random House, 1998.

VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.

Collins, John J. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021.

Canaan, Israel, Judah, and the Temples

Mazar, Amihai. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Mazar, Amihai, and Ephraim Stern. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. 2, The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.

Dever, William G. Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017.

Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed. New York: Free Press, 2001.

Finkelstein, Israel. The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013.

Kitchen, K. A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III. A Biblical History of Israel. 2nd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015.

Rainey, Anson F., and R. Steven Notley. The Sacred Bridge: Carta’s Atlas of the Biblical World. 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Carta, 2014.

Stern, Ephraim. Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Ussishkin, David. Biblical Lachish. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2014.

Mazar, Eilat. The Palace of King David. Jerusalem: Shoham, 2009.

Faust, Avraham. The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012.

Killebrew, Ann E. Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.

Levy, Thomas E., ed. Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future. London: Equinox, 2010.

Bronze Age Worlds, Collapse, and Trade

Cline, Eric H. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.

Cline, Eric H. After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Yoffee, Norman, and George L. Cowgill, eds. The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988.

Drews, Robert. The End of the Bronze Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Broodbank, Cyprian. The Making of the Middle Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Kristiansen, Kristian, and Thomas B. Larsson. The Rise of Bronze Age Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Kristiansen, Kristian. “The Rise of Bronze Age Peripheries and the Expansion of International Trade.” In Trade and Civilisation, edited by Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas Lindkvist, and Janken Myrdal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Roberts, Benjamin W., and Christopher P. Thornton, eds. Archaeometallurgy in Global Perspective. New York: Springer, 2014.

Radivojević, Miljana, et al. “The Provenance, Use, and Circulation of Metals in the European Bronze Age.” Journal of Archaeological Research 27 (2019): 331–98.

Muhly, James D. Copper and Tin. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973.

Kassianidou, Vasiliki, and A. Bernard Knapp. “Archaeometallurgy in the Mediterranean.” In The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory, edited by Emma Blake and A. Bernard Knapp. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Great Lakes Copper, Stone, and the North American File

Pompeani, David P., et al. “On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale.” Radiocarbon, 2021.

Wade, Lizzie. “Great Lakes people among first coppersmiths.” Science 371, no. 6536 (2021): 1299.

Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Pleger, Thomas C. “A Brief Introduction to the Old Copper Complex of the Western Great Lakes.” The Wisconsin Archeologist 82 (2001).

O’Shea, John M., and Guy A. Meadows. “A 9,000-year-old caribou hunting structure beneath Lake Huron.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 19 (2014): 6911–15.

Howey, Meghan C. L., et al. “Geospatial modeling approach to monument construction using Michigan from A.D. 1000–1600 as a case study.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 29 (2016).

Griffin, James B. “The Late Prehistory of the Ohio Valley.” In Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1978.

Cunningham, Wilbur M. A Study of the Glacial Kame Culture in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948.

Squier, E. G., and E. H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1848.

Fell, Barry. America B.C. New York: Quadrangle, 1976. Read as a document in the history of a controversy, not as a closed case.

Feder, Kenneth L. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries. 10th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. The standard skeptical counterweight.

Midgley, Magdalena S. The Megaliths of Northern Europe. London: Routledge, 2008.

Divine Council, Genesis, and the Unseen Politics of Scripture

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God.” Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (2001): 52–74.

Heiser, Michael S. “Divine Council.” In Lexham Bible Dictionary, edited by John D. Barry et al. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012.

Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Smith, Mark S. The Early History of God. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

Day, John. Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.

Mullen, E. Theodore, Jr. The Divine Council in Canaanite and Early Hebrew Literature. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980.

Boyd, Gregory A. God at War. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997.

Walton, John H. The Lost World of Genesis One. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009.

Walton, John H. Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018.

Sarna, Nahum M. Understanding Genesis. New York: Schocken, 1966.

Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses. New York: Norton, 2004.

Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Random House, 1995.

Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996.

Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003.

Culture, Business, and Why the Past Still Issues Orders

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Author’s edition.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. New York: Productivity Press, 1988.

Schein, Edgar H. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 5th ed. Hoboken: Wiley, 2017.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001.

Voegelin, Eric. Order and History. 5 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956–1987.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, 1959.

Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Scott, James C. Against the Grain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Jordan, the East Bank, and the Neighbors the Text Will Not Leave Alone

MacDonald, Burton. East of the Jordan: Territories and Sites of the Hebrew Scriptures. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2000.

Bienkowski, Piotr, ed. Early Edom and Moab. Sheffield: J. R. Collis, 1992.

Dearman, J. Andrew, ed. Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989.

Routledge, Bruce. Moab in the Iron Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Herr, Larry G., and Douglas R. Clark. “Madaba Plains Project.” Multiple season reports in Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.

Savage, Stephen H., and Steven E. Falconer. “Spatial and Temporal Trends in Levantine Settlement.” Journal of Archaeological Science, various.

A note on method. I have not required the bibliography to agree with me, and I have not required myself to agree with the bibliography. That is the same rule I bring to Biblical Archaeology Review. Read the people who dug. Read the people who doubt the people who dug. Then keep the night watch and decide which assumptions still refuse to be spelled.

[1] Biblical Archaeology Review (ISSN 0098-9444) has been published by the Biblical Archaeology Society since March 1975. The magazine is presently issued quarterly. See “About Biblical Archaeology Review,” Biblical Archaeology Society, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/magazines/.

[2] Hershel Shanks (1930–2021), a Washington lawyer turned editor, founded the Biblical Archaeology Society in 1974 and launched BAR in March 1975. He remained editor-in-chief until 2018. See Eric H. Cline, “Larger Than Life,” Biblical Archaeology Society, February 8, 2021; and “Setting the BAR,” Biblical Archaeology Society, 2025.

[3] The 5 Whys method is associated with Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System. It is a root-cause drill: ask “why” until the chain of causation is exposed. In aerospace and other high-reliability cultures the same spirit appears as assumption-busting reviews, red teams, and formal failure analysis. See Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System (New York: Productivity Press, 1988).

[4] On the Dead Sea Scrolls as a window into Second Temple belief, see James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); and Hershel Shanks, ed., Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Random House, 1992).

[5] On collapse and regeneration as a comparative problem, see Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); and Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, eds., The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988).

[6] David P. Pompeani et al., “On the Timing of the Old Copper Complex in the Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale,” Radiocarbon (2021); and Lizzie Wade, “Great Lakes people among first coppersmiths,” Science 371, no. 6536 (2021): 1299. Sediment and radiocarbon work now places intensive Great Lakes copper working as early as ca. 9500 years ago, peaking roughly 7000–5000 years ago.

[7] The hypothesis that Lake Superior native copper supplied Bronze Age Europe remains outside the archaeological consensus. Mainstream syntheses locate European copper in Alpine, Iberian, Balkan, Cypriot, and British Isles sources. See Benjamin W. Roberts and Christopher P. Thornton, eds., Archaeometallurgy in Global Perspective (New York: Springer, 2014); and “The Provenance, Use, and Circulation of Metals in the European Bronze Age,” Journal of Archaeological Research 27 (2019). I record the disagreement rather than pretend it does not exist.

[8] On European and Levantine dolmens, see Magdalena S. Midgley, The Megaliths of Northern Europe (London: Routledge, 2008); and James L. Swauger, work on petroforms and stone constructions in the Upper Great Lakes. Geologists commonly classify northern Michigan capstone-and-pedestal arrangements as glacial erratics. I do not find that explanation sufficient for every specimen.

[9] John M. O’Shea and Guy A. Meadows, “A 9,000-year-old caribou hunting structure beneath Lake Huron,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 19 (2014): 6911–15. The Alpena-Amberley Ridge drive lanes are a reminder that stone work in the Great Lakes is not exhausted by the glacial-dumping story.

[10] On the archaeology of Canaan, Israel, and Judah in the Iron Age, standard entry points include Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 B.C.E. (New York: Doubleday, 1990); Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (New York: Free Press, 2001); and William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). I read all three and do not baptize any of them.

[11] Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015); and Heiser, “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God,” Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (2001): 52–74. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint support “sons of God” rather than “sons of Israel” at Deuteronomy 32:8.

[12] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (author’s edition); and Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming). Related essays appear at overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.

[13] Job 1–2; Luke 4:1–13; Matthew 4:1–11. The Accuser’s wager in Job and the wilderness temptations of Jesus are two scenes in the same political drama: a claim on loyalty, tested under pressure, with the kingdoms of the world placed on the table.

[14] Biblical Archaeology Society All-Access membership presently includes the print magazine, the digital BAS Library (every issue of BAR since 1975, plus Bible Review and Archaeology Odyssey), lecture video, and curated collections. See https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Podcast Episode: Principalities and Powers: What Ephesians 6:12 Means When the Same Spirit Shows itself in different people

Pip: The Overmanwarrior is the rare corner of the internet where a business meeting leads directly to Ephesians, Augustine, and the Book of Enoch — and somehow that is the logical progression.

Mara: Rich Hoffman is doing something specific here: taking Paul’s language about principalities and powers and arguing it describes a political operation, not just a spiritual metaphor. Let’s start with what that actually means in practice.

Principalities and Powers: The War Behind the Room

Pip: The question at the center of this piece is whether evil has a structure — not a mood, not a vibe, but an actual operating method. The Ephesians 6:12 framework is the entry point, and the claim is that it belongs in political analysis, not just Sunday school.

Mara: The post grounds that claim in the Greek. The New Testament word behind “principalities” is archai — rulers, first things, authorities at the head of an order — almost always paired with exousiai, powers, the right to act. And then the post lands on this: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood. This is a political statement, not a religious one.”

Pip: So the sentence Paul wrote to a church in Ephesus is being read as a theory of power — who controls whom, through whom, toward what end. That reframing is doing a lot of work.

Mara: It is. And the post doesn’t stay abstract. The argument moves into personal testimony: two men, unrelated, encountered in separate business settings close together in time, running what reads as the same script. Same language, same pressure, same intent. The image used is a driver getting out of one car and into another — the vehicle changed, the driver did not.

Pip: Which is either a genuinely unsettling pattern recognition or the most theologically sophisticated way anyone has ever described a bad week of meetings.

Mara: The post is careful to flag that this is testimony, not a lab result. What it does argue is that vacant people — those who, as The Politics of Heaven puts it, have hollowed out the self through drink, painkillers, or the erasure of identity — are easier to occupy than people who know their own name. The susceptibility question, not a judgment on any individual.

Mara: The Book of Enoch enters here as more than a footnote. Jude quotes Enoch. Genesis 6 leaves the door open. Timothy Alberino’s work, including his conversation with Glenn Beck on episode 274 of Beck’s podcast, brought the Watchers narrative — hybridizing the human, rewriting the creature — to an audience well outside fringe forums. The post notes that this is no longer a subject easy to exile with a laugh track.

Pip: Augustine makes the case even older. In City of God, Book XV, he reports a molar found at Utica so large it could have been cut into a hundred ordinary teeth. Fifth-century field notes, not a modern osteology paper — but the point is that the tradition of a larger, older world runs through the canon, through Goliath, through Og’s bed, through “also after that” in Genesis 6:4.

Mara: And Job ties it back to the political frame. Job is described here as a courtroom text: Satan presents himself, asks permission to wreck a loyal servant, and the motive is explicitly to prove that worship is a transaction. The post draws the line directly — “Principalities do not need to win a show of hands if they can unmake the image they hate.”

Pip: The closing argument is that silence is a concession. The field isn’t quiet just because the water receded.

Mara: And that the tools — including AI, including this kind of writing — are neutral. The point, as the post puts it, is the heart behind the instrument.

Pip: What stays with me is the Job framing — evil as a long political project of erosion, not a horror-movie event.

Mara: That thread runs through everything here: the war is named so it can be engaged. More from The Overmanwarrior next time.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Principalities and Powers: What Ephesians 6:12 Means When the Same Spirit Shows Up in Two Unrelated People

After the mistrial of Lindsay Clancy today, people are wondering a lot about evil, which I just so happen to spend a lot of time talking about. So let’s set some ground rules here and talk about what makes evil work in the world so that we can prepare ourselves to defeat it. Emphatically! And ruthlessly. Let’s begin. When we see a jury of our peers unable to see right from wrong, we have to understand the strategy of evil to weaken the resolve of jurors, the manipulations of lawyers, and the antics of political persuasion, and ultimately, the power of government. I would suggest, in addition to this text, that you watch this video. It has a lot of different kinds of things in it.

What the Word Actually Means

The New Testament word behind “principalities” is archai, rulers, first things, authorities at the head of an order. It is almost always paired with exousiai, powers, the right to act. In Ephesians 6:12 Paul adds two more phrases: the kosmokratores of this darkness, world-rulers, and the pneumatika of wickedness in the heavenly places. The sentence is built to take the fight off the sidewalk. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.”¹. This is a political statement, not a religious one.  And I will likely spend the next 20 years of my life proving it and defining it for people.  But it’s quite a statement, and a big, major political problem. 

Colossians 1:16 says thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers were created through Christ and for Him. The vocabulary is larger than demons. It can name any organized spiritual authority, loyal or rebel. In the spiritual-warfare conversations most people know, the word has narrowed in scope. Principalities are treated as territorial, as the unseen administration behind nations, systems, and persons. I use the word that way because that is how the encounter presented itself. I do not use it as a slogan. “Satan is working” is a bumper sticker. The question is the work. Against whom. Through whom. Toward what political end.

Our eyes were built for human scale. They miss the microbe and the principality. That is not an argument that the unseen is imaginary. It is an argument that the instrument is limited. I would not take a courtroom’s word that a virus does not exist because the jury cannot see it.

I Met the Same Character in Two Different People

I met a personality recently. I met it in two people, in two different business settings, close enough in time that I could not pretend I was imagining a mood. The bodies were unrelated. The personality was not. Same language. Same pressure. This thing made sure to let me know it was the same “thing” in two different bodies.  It was very specific to me almost with a wink and a nod.  Same intent. Same way of coming at the conversation. If you have ever watched a driver get out of one car and into another and keep the same hands on the wheel, you know the feeling. The vehicle changed. The driver did not.²

I have written in The Politics of Heaven that people who drink hard, who live on painkillers, who hollow out the pronoun I, surrender the vehicle they live in. I do not mean every drinker is possessed. I mean an empty house is easier to occupy than a house with a resident who knows his own name. The two men I am talking about were not sophisticated. They were not formidable on their own. They were vacant enough to be used. Both had the same kind of tattoo on the inner arm, the kind you can cover with a sleeve in a professional room and flash when the Monday-night crowd wants to know you are still one of the rebels at BW3s half drunk by the second quarter of a Monday Night Football game. I do not think the ink is the spirit. I think the ink, in those cases, was a marker of a type: the man who wants the title of an executive and the alibi of a slob, who will fold under peer pressure, who has already practiced not being fully present in his own skin.³

If you have a tattoo on the inside of your arm and you are reading this to see whether I just called you evil, I did not. Sit with the other layer. When the lights are out, what do you rehearse in your head? That is the question I am asking about susceptibility, not about ink.

I have seen the same signature in places that could not have compared notes. A café. A terminal. Tokyo, Paris, Heathrow. A young waitress who has no idea she is being used, who thinks she is only tired and behind on a car payment, and then another person on another continent running the same play against the same target. The temptation is not always lust. Sometimes it is the attempt to get a man to blow up his public life so the rest of his work becomes easy to dismiss. That is a political move. It is not a horror-movie fog. It is an operation.

The Book of Enoch Is No Longer a Basement Subject

Jude quotes Enoch. Genesis 6 leaves the door open rather than closing it. The Book of the Watchers, preserved in 1 Enoch and among the Dead Sea Scrolls, tells the story the short biblical verses assume the reader already knows: two hundred Watchers conspire, descend, take wives from the daughters of men, beget the giants, and teach what heaven had not authorized.⁴ The text is not in most Protestant canons. It is nothing. A book the New Testament can cite is a book a serious reader of the Bible has to account for.

Timothy Alberino has been making that case for years in Birthright and in his commentary on Enoch. In late 2025, he sat down with Glenn Beck on episode 274 of the podcast, and the conversation moved from Genesis 6 to the Watchers to transhumanism in front of an audience that does not live on fringe forums.⁵ Ten years ago, this was a few tens of thousands of people online. I have been in the subject more than twenty years. Millions can now hear the same file. That does not make every inference true. It does mean the subject is no longer easy to exile with a laugh track.

Alberino’s warning about “Nephilim 2.0” is not that a chatbot is a demon. It is that the old pattern—hybridizing the human, seizing Adam’s brief, rewriting the creature so the Cross no longer applies to it—can return as gene editing, machine merger, and the dream of becoming an immortal without God. Fire is not evil. The heart that uses fire to burn a village is. I use AI as a tool on this show. I do not think the tool is the Watcher. I think the Watcher would be happy to have a new kind of empty vessel.

Augustine, Giants, and What the Flood Did Not Wash Away

City of God is one of the books I go back to a lot and I absolutely love it.  I love it so much so that if I wasn’t already married to my wife, I’d marry it!. It takes time. It is worth the time. Augustine is writing as Rome is coming apart and as Christianity is being asked to explain why the city of man is not the City of God. In Book XV he talks about giants. He says sepulchers give up bones of incredible size. He says he himself, with others, saw on the shore at Utica a human molar so large that, cut down to ordinary teeth, it might have made a hundred. He believed it belonged to a giant. He thought the bodies of the ancients were larger, and the giants larger still.⁶

That is a fifth-century report, not a modern osteology paper. I do not need Augustine to have measured a femur correctly to take his witness seriously. He assumed his readers around the Mediterranean already knew the old world had held larger men. Goliath is in the canon. Og’s bed is in the canon. Genesis says the Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after.⁷

I live with the Hopewell and Adena earthworks in my own river valley. I have written about copper culture and the mounds for years. I think we have been timid about what the ground still holds. I also think a spirit does not have to maintain the skeleton of a fifteen-foot body to keep working. A soul is not required to be the size of the corpse. If a soul can be smaller than a cell, then the death of a giant does not retire the intelligence that used the giant. The flood judged a world. I do not believe it vacuumed every rebel power out of the air. If it had, Paul would not have written Ephesians 6 to a church living after Noah, after Abraham, after the Cross.

Job Is the Political Text People Skip

The book of Job is not only a book about suffering. It is a book about a courtroom. Satan presents himself among the sons of God and asks permission to wreck a loyal servant. The motive is political. Prove that worship is a transaction. Prove that the kingdom is only as strong as the hedge. Take that lesson off the page, and you have a method. Harass the person who would otherwise be a problem. Empty the person who can be worn like a coat. Conceal the operation by making the subject sound unhinged, so the Trojan horse never has to come out of the wood in daylight.⁸

That is why I keep using the word political. Democrats in a Republican county do not need a majority on Tuesday if they can spend two years sanding down trust. Principalities do not need to win a show of hands if they can unmake the image they hate. The conspiracy, if you want the old word, is not a committee in a basement. It is the long project of erasing the original: the garden, the image, the Son. The Watchers’ crime in Enoch is not only lust. It is a vote against the arrangement God had made. Two hundred of them decided heaven’s rule was negotiable.

The empty vessel is useful because it does not argue. Legalize the solvents, praise the erasure of the pronoun I, call rootedness oppression, and you have manufactured occupancy. I am not saying every short man who drinks after work is a portal. I am saying, from what I have watched, insecure people who already live outside themselves are cheaper to run than people who wake up intending to be good.

What I Saw, and What I Cannot Photograph

I cannot put the principality on a slide. I can report the pattern. Same speech in two mouths that had no business sharing a script. Same type of compromised body. Same objective: get inside the work, dirty the witness, keep the war from being named. Quantum talk about entanglement is a modern vocabulary for an old claim: that distance and clock time do not bind a spirit the way they bind a truck. I do not pretend that vocabulary is a proof. I am saying the observed thing is older than the vocabulary.

Spider-Man: Far From Home put a body-jumping antagonist on a screen because storytellers keep stumbling into the mechanic. I did not get the idea from the movie. I got it from the meeting. Science fiction is often late to the church’s mail.

If you stay in the Bible and refuse this subject, you stay in a censored Bible. The inconvenient pages are the ones that tell you the war did not end when the water receded. We assume God has won at the end of the story, and I believe He does. That is not the same as assuming the field is quiet. Turning the other cheek is a command about revenge. It is not a claim that no one is swinging.

A Tool, a Book, and the Work in Front of Us

I will keep using the tools in front of me, including this one, because a principality is not allergic to electricity, and neither is the other side. The point is the heart. Play God, rewrite the creature, chase deathlessness without the Creator, and you are back in Genesis 6 with better lab equipment. Ask a question, solve a problem, put language on an encounter you would rather not leave in a fog, and you are doing what readers of Scripture have always done with the instruments of their century.

Alberino’s books are on the table. Enoch is on the table. Augustine is on the table. Paul is on the table. The Politics of Heaven is my effort to write the psychology and the politics of that war in one place, because quoting Ephesians 6:12 is not the same as understanding why the enemy wants the city. I will not agree with every explorer on every bone in every mound. I will not pretend I did not recognize the same face in two different, short men with tattoos on the inside of their arms, to conceal who they are. 

Do not give a principality the courtesy of silence just because it would prefer to stay in the shadows.  Hey, I’ve been traveling a lot and thinking about these things on long camping trips while everyone else has been sleeping inside my camper, with the smell of woodsmoke from our campfire dying away into the deep night. I think I understand and can relate to Paul as he wrote Ephesians.  You have to go through some tough stuff, then think in isolation before you can begin to see the tormentors of existence.  And I think it is there that we have to focus on the real war at hand.   I think Paul, and only Paul, could have written the marvelous work of Ephesians and begin to contemplate the efforts of principalities. 

Notes

1.  Greek of Ephesians 6:12: palē, wrestling, not a vague struggle; archas, exousias, kosmokratoras tou skotous toutou, pneumatika tēs ponērias en tois epouraniois. See also Ephesians 1:21; 3:10; Colossians 1:16; 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.

2.  This is testimony, not a lab result. I am describing two business encounters within days of each other and a recognition I have had in other cities. I am not asking a reader to take my word as canon. I am asking a reader of Paul to leave room for the thing Paul said we wrestle.

3.  Inner-arm tattoos as a tell are my field notes from these cases and from a type I have watched for years. They are not a doctrine. Plenty of marked skin belongs to people who are awake in their own lives. The question is occupancy, not decoration.

4.  1 Enoch 6–16, the Book of the Watchers. Jude 14–15 cites Enoch. Genesis 6:1–4 remains the canonical hinge. 1 Enoch fragments are among the Dead Sea Scrolls; the full Ethiopic corpus preserved the book for the Ethiopian Church.

5.  “The RETURN of a Hidden Biblical Alien Race?” Timothy Alberino with Glenn Beck, The Glenn Beck Podcast, Ep. 274, November 2025. Alberino, Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth (2020), and The Book of Enoch, with commentary on the Book of the Watchers.

6.  Augustine, City of God 15.9, the Utica Murmur; 15.23 on angels and the daughters of men. Written in the years after 410. I read him as an early Christian mind defending the faith inside a failing imperial order, not as a modern archaeologist.

7.  Genesis 6:4; Deuteronomy 3:11; 1 Samuel 17. “Also after that” is the phrase that keeps the subject from dying in the Flood chapter.

8.  Job 1–2. The Accuser’s politics are the demand that loyalty be exposed as a deal. Homer’s Trojan Horse is only a later picture of concealment. I use it as an image, not as Scripture.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Scripture and the Powers

The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 6; Deuteronomy 3; 1 Samuel 17; Job 1–2; Daniel 10; Matthew 4; Mark 5; John 12:31; Romans 8:38–39; 1 Corinthians 15:24–26; Ephesians 1:21; 2:2; 3:10; 6:10–20; Colossians 1:16; 2:10, 15; Jude 6, 14–15; Revelation 12.

Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. InterVarsity, 1992.

Arnold, Clinton E. Ephesians: Power and Magic. Baker, 1989.

Caird, G. B. Principalities and Powers. Clarendon, 1956.

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.

O’Brien, Peter T. “Principalities and Powers.” Evangelical Review of Theology 16 (1992).

Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers. Fortress, 1984. Read as a map of the vocabulary even where the theology diverges.

Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Fortress, 2013. For the larger Pauline world in which the powers sit.

Enoch, Watchers, and Second Temple Literature

1 Enoch. Translations by R. H. Charles (1912); George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam (Fortress); and the Alberino / Blurry Creatures edition with commentary on the Book of the Watchers.

2 Enoch and 3 Enoch, in Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Doubleday, 1983–85.

Nickelsburg, George W. E. 1 Enoch 1. Hermeneia. Fortress, 2001.

VanderKam, James C. Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition. Catholic Biblical Association, 1984.

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. 3rd ed. Eerdmans, 2016.

Stuckenbruck, Loren T. The Myth of Rebellious Angels. Mohr Siebeck, 2014.

Boccaccini, Gabriele. Beyond the Essene Hypothesis. Eerdmans, 1998.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. García Martínez and Tigchelaar.

Vermes, Geza. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English.

Augustine and the Early Church

Augustine. The City of God. Especially Books XI–XV. Translations by Marcus Dods; R. W. Dyson; and the Loeb edition.

Augustine. Confessions.

Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Harper, 1978.

Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition, Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1971.

Giants, Genesis 6, and the Old World

Doak, Brian R. The Last of the Rephaim. Brown Judaic Studies, 2012.

Hendel, Ronald. “The Nephilim Were on the Earth.” In The Fall of the Angels, ed. Auffarth and Stuckenbruck. Brill, 2004.

Annus, Amar. “On the Origin of Watchers.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19 (2010).

Homer. Iliad. For the older-and-larger-bodies tradition Augustine also cites through Pliny.

Pliny the Elder. Natural History 7.

Alberino, Beck, and the Present Conversation

Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Usurpation of Adam’s Dominion on Planet Earth. 2020.

Alberino, Timothy. The Book of Enoch. With Blurry Creatures. Commentary on 1 Enoch 1–36.

Beck, Glenn, host. The Glenn Beck Podcast, Ep. 274, “The RETURN of a Hidden Biblical Alien Race?” with Timothy Alberino. November 2025.

Heiser, Michael S. Demons. Lexham, 2020.

Missler, Chuck. Return of the Nephilim. Briefings and notes, Koinonia House.

Spiritual Warfare, Discernment, and the Occupied Life

Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. 1942.

Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. 1945.

Peretti, Frank. This Present Darkness. Crossway, 1986. Fiction that taught a generation the furniture of the subject. Not evidence. Atmosphere.

Nee, Watchman. The Spiritual Man. Christian Fellowship Publishers.

Bounds, E. M. Power Through Prayer and the Satan volumes.

Leahy, Frederick S. Satan Cast Out. Banner of Truth, 1975.

Unger, Merrill F. Biblical Demonology. Scripture Press, 1952.

Politics, Concealment, and the Long War

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.

Ellul, Jacques. The Presence of the Kingdom and The Subversion of Christianity.

O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations. Cambridge, 1996.

Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? Revell, 1976.

Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. University of Chicago Press, 1952. For the old habit of immanentizing what belongs to another city.

Consciousness, Tools, and the Limit of the Eye

Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind. Oxford, 1996. For the hardness of the problem, not for angels.

Penrose, Roger. The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford, 1989.

Polkinghorne, John. Quantum Physics and Theology. Yale, 2007.

Scruton, Roger. The Face of God. Continuum, 2012.

Local Ground and the Older America

Squier and Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. 1848.

Webb, William S., and Charles E. Snow. The Adena People.

Romain, William F. Mysteries of the Hopewell. University of Akron Press, 2000.

Baldwin, John D. Ancient America. 1872. Read with a modern filter and an open map.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Podcast Episode: The New Jonathan Edwards Bible: I appreciate all the kind words

Pip: The Overmanwarrior is the rare corner of the internet where a Bible in an airport carry bag, a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition pin, and a forthcoming space-economy forecast all coexist without anyone blinking.

Mara: Rich Hoffman covers all of it in one sprawling post — the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, the personal library behind it, and what a desk Bible signals to the people who walk past it. Let’s start with the book itself and the argument around it.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: A Weapon Worth Carrying

Pip: The post opens with a direct claim: the Bible is one of the best tools available for fighting what he calls the evil of the current moment — and a new study Bible just arrived that he thinks is worth your attention.

Mara: He sets the scene in Biblical Archaeology Review, a magazine he has received since the 1970s, before landing on the advertisement that prompted the piece. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, published August 18, 2026, from Thomas Nelson, general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard, available in hardcover, Leathersoft, and genuine leather.

Pip: So a magazine subscription that predates most of our listeners’ parents is still doing its job as a discovery engine. That’s a long return on a postal address.

Mara: The recommendation is unambiguous. “I would suggest all my readers get a copy, and to use it so we can have much better discussions in the coming years.”

Pip: The stakes behind that suggestion matter. Edwards is positioned not as a historical curiosity but as a founding-era architect — the argument being that the moral conditions that made the United States possible ran through his pulpit in Northampton during the First Great Awakening.

Mara: Everhard’s edition puts Edwards’s own doctrinal work under the New King James text, adds essays on his life and the Awakening, reprints the Resolutions he wrote as a young man, and explains the note system so a reader can build their own practice. That is the practical pitch: it is a reading method, not just a reference volume.

Pip: Three study Bibles already sit in rotation — the carry Bible with filled margins, the Crossway ESV Archaeology Study Bible given to him by a friend who later gave away his own copy, and a MacArthur Study Bible a retired Army colonel set on the desk on June 12, 2023, and walked out.

Mara: The Edwards volume is described as the first new study Bible in some time that he would consider letting the traveler retire to the shelf. That is a meaningful threshold given how much mileage the carry Bible has.

Pip: Then there is the Museum of the Bible visit on his birthday, a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition pin still in the green bag, and a long passage on the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran — the point being that the world Jesus and John the Baptist walked into already had a language, a priesthood, and a set of arguments about purity and power.

Mara: What ties it together is the desk. Forty or fifty messages arrived in three weeks from people who used to come through his office. The line repeats: they miss the Bible on the desk. Not the speeches. The book. He writes that what they valued “was not a performance of righteousness. It was a reminder that the world was not all bad.”

Pip: That is a quiet observation with a sharp edge — a habit you thought was private turns out to have been load-bearing for a lot of people who never said so while they were standing in the room.

Mara: The closing recommendation is direct: hardcover if it stays on a table, leather if it travels. Read Edwards’s own line from the edition — “the enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied” — then read the maps, then write in the blanks.

Pip: A Bible in a green bag, a space-economy forecast, and forty messages from people who miss a desk object — it is a wide orbit, but it all pulls toward the same center.

Mara: The question underneath all of it is what a habit signals, and who was quietly depending on it. That tension is not going away.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.