PostEverything

(Episode 81)

Description

Brad Edwards cross-posts a conversation recorded for his church after a sermon on Romans 13:1–7 — the passage where Paul tells believers to "be subject to the governing authorities," and one that gets used and misused every political season.

Joining him is returning guest Brad Vaughn — author of Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes, specialist in the Bible's theology of honor and shame, and a former underground-seminary teacher who spent 15 years training pastors in China. Working through real questions texted in by the congregation, they explore church, state, and Christian allegiance with honesty and unusual practicality.

The conversation covers why Romans 13 legitimizes and relativizes the state in a single move; the difference between the church's responsibility for the oppressed and its grasp for power; whether the American Revolution was justified or sinful; how to move from national outrage to human-scale, local love; and why submission to authority is never the same as endorsing it.

A thoughtful, grounded conversation for anyone trying to follow King Jesus faithfully without being absorbed into a political team.

Brad Vaughn's book: Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes. It helps to reread Romans 13:1–7 before listening.

"Faithfulness holds loosely when and how things will be accomplished. Control dictates them." — Brad Vaughn

Resources:

Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes (Brad Vaughn) • Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes (Richards & O'Brien) • Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex / the lesser-magistrate principle • N.T. Wright • Ken Burns, The American Revolution • Billy Graham Center (Wheaton) study on Gen Z and politics • Preston Sprinkle • Romans 12–14; Daniel 1–8; Acts 4:19–20; Luke 20; Colossians 2:15

Keywords:

Romans 13, church and state, Brad Vaughn, honor and shame, submission to authority, Christian politics, political theology, American Revolution, lesser magistrate, responsibility and power, allegiance, render unto Caesar, underground church, Post Everything, Brad Edwards

#PostEverything #Romans13 #ChurchAndState #BradVaughn #HonorAndShame #PoliticalTheology #Bible #ChristianPodcast #Allegiance #FaithAndPolitics #Discipleship

Chapters:

00:00 ⚖️ Responsibility Is Not Power
00:33 🎙️ Welcome to Post Everything
02:00 📖 Meet Brad Vaughn
04:30 🐎 Facing the Firing Squad
05:33 🌏 Fifteen Years in China
07:27 🕳️ Teaching the Underground Church
08:35 🔍 Scripture Gives Us Principles
10:15 🧭 East and West Read Differently
11:28 👑 Authority Derives from God
12:06 🐴 The Theocratic Trojan Horse
13:39 🎭 Selectively Applying the Passage
13:50 🏛️ God Prefers Broken Government
15:14 🤲 The Church Ceded Responsibility
15:56 ⚔️ Is the State God's Servant?
17:17 ❓ Who Counts as Oppressed?
18:29 🌍 Every Decision Has Tradeoffs
19:48 📏 Human-Scale vs. National Scale
20:52 🧳 Do You Know Any Refugees?
22:44 🗳️ Voting Isn't Enough
24:26 ⭐ The Starfish Story
25:54 📿 The Vote as Civil Sacrament
26:36 🙋 American Individualism and Blame
27:33 🔥 Does This Breed Complacency?
28:51 🎯 Faithfulness Versus Control
31:33 👑 Nebuchadnezzar and God's Sovereignty
33:48 🇺🇸 Was the Revolution Sinful?
36:00 📜 Tax Resistance, Not War
37:00 ⚖️ The Lesser Magistrate Principle
38:45 🛤️ Good Results, Sinful Means?
40:41 🗡️ Two God-Ordained Authorities
43:38 ✝️ Jesus and Cruciform Submission
46:34 🔗 Peter and John in Acts 4
48:50 🤝 The Church as Benefactor
50:40 🪙 Render Unto Caesar
51:36 📊 Leaving Church Over Politics
54:54 👓 Reading Romans with Fresh Eyes
57:24 🫱 What It Means to Honor
58:01 🙏 Closing Thoughts

The Ahistoric Age Meets AI: Time, Memory, and Being Human

(Episode 80)

Dr. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker — historian and author of Priests of History — returns to PostEverything to explore what happens when artificial intelligence meets a culture that has already lost its grip on the past.

In her first appearance, she diagnosed "the ahistoric age": a moment that treats history as irrelevant, grows ignorant of it, and reduces it to an ideological weapon. Here, John Houmes and Brad Edwards push the conversation forward into the age of AI. Does AI help us make sense of the past or sever us from it? Does it hand us mastery over knowledge while letting wisdom slip away?

The conversation moves through how AI is quietly reshaping our very experience of time; the day Sarah asked AI to retrieve real manuscript photographs and it fabricated them instead; how the eighteenth-century idea of "useful knowledge" once ranked whole civilizations and returns now in the age of algorithms; the connection between the drive to master knowledge and the oldest temptation in Genesis; why a large language model can never produce the idiosyncratic spark of genuine beauty; and how the church's ancient, embodied practices offer a hopeful counter-formation — anchoring us in a larger story in an anxious age.

A rich, wide-ranging conversation for anyone trying to stay human, and hopeful, in the age of AI.

Sarah's book: Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. Her next book — an invitation to the Christian story — is in progress.

"When there is no larger story, you have no meaning and no purpose. These are counterfeit stories, because they don't have an end."

— Dr. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Resources:

Priests of History (Sarah Irving-Stonebraker) • Sarah's forthcoming book, an invitation to the Christian story • The Reason for Church (Brad Edwards) • The Drama of Discipleship with Dr. Greg Perry (previous episode) • Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Lord Kames — Scottish Enlightenment "useful knowledge" • Francis Bacon — "the improvement of mankind's estate" • Robert Boyle — "priests of nature" • Max Weber • George Santayana • Antonín Dvořák — New World Symphony • James K. A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time • Tristan Harris / Center for Humane Technology, Your Undivided Attention • Pope Leo's encyclical on AI • Dallas Willard / Eugene Peterson — "a long obedience in the same direction" • transhumanism; metamodernism

AI, artificial intelligence, ahistoric age, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Priests of History, history, useful knowledge, epistemology, time, spiritual formation, counterformation, church, liturgy, wisdom, beauty, technology and faith, Christianity and AI, discipleship, Post Everything

#PostEverything #AI #AhistoricAge #SarahIrvingStonebraker #PriestsOfHistory #History #Faith #SpiritualFormation #Church #Wisdom #ChristianPodcast #Technology #Discipleship

CHAPTERS

00:00 ⏳ Time as Meaningless Moments
01:21 👋 Meet Dr. Irving-Stonebraker
02:50 🤖 When AI Meets Ahistoricism
05:25 ⌛ AI Alters Our Time
08:59 🪞 The Digital Pool of Narcissists
10:57 💬 No Real Relationship
12:00 📚 The Biggest Epistemic Shift
13:56 🏺 Can We Still Know the Past?
15:53 📜 AI Faked the Manuscripts
17:27 🎬 Midway and Missing Context
19:09 ⚠️ Rewriting History at Scale
21:53 🕳️ The Collapse of Trust
23:36 🕰️ Counterfeit Stories, No End
25:43 🧭 Useful Knowledge Explained
31:51 🍎 Mastery and the Fall
38:52 🎨 Beauty, Kitsch, and Creativity
44:01 ⛪ The Pagan DNA of AI
46:08 🌱 Givenness and Counterformation
50:18 🕯️ Two Stories Entwined
54:01 ✨ Finding Hope in Small Things
57:09 📖 Sarah's Next Book
58:12 🪶 Priests Who Steward Stories
1:02:52 💭 John and Brad Reflect

1:07:28 ⏱️ Stewarding Time and Attention

1:12:51 🧍 What Will Humans Become?

The Drama of Discipleship: Re-Narrating Our Lives in God's Story

Episode 79

Dr. Greg Perry—New Testament scholar, President of Thirdmill Seminary, and author of The Drama of Discipleship—joins John Houmes fresh off a teaching tour across Asia. Their conversation moves from what the global church is actually asking (and how different it is from the West) to a fresh vision of discipleship: not a curriculum to master, but a drama to perform together inside God's story.

Greg unpacks the six "episodes" of the biblical story—Creation, Rebellion, Israel, Jesus, Church, New Creation—and the practices that flow from them. The conversation covers integral mission and the holding together of word and deed, the church as an embassy of Christ's kingdom in a host culture, the improv principle of "no blocking" as a posture toward our neighbors, the difference between fieldwork and heartwork, and why the small stories on offer from consumerism and politics can't bear the weight of a human life.

A rich, hopeful conversation for pastors, ministry leaders, and anyone longing to live inside a bigger story.

Greg's book: The Drama of Discipleship. His next book, Grace with Skin On: What Deacons Do (with Chris Sicks), releases Fall 2026.

"All the little stories on offer—consumerist, political, about physical beauty—they cannot bear the weight of being an image-bearer of God." — Dr. Greg Perry

The Drama of Discipleship (Greg Perry) • Grace with Skin On: What Deacons Do (Perry & Sicks, Fall 2026) • Third Millennium Ministries / Thirdmill Seminary • Adoniram Judson • The Lausanne Movement / integral mission • Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be • Dorothy Sayers • Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God • Trevin Wax, The Thrill of Orthodoxy & Eschatological Discipleship • René Girard • Aaron Renn ("negative world") • Covenant Theological Seminary • New City Fellowship, St. Louis

discipleship, Greg Perry, The Drama of Discipleship, spiritual formation, evangelism, integral mission, global church, missions, Thirdmill, gospel, re-narration, meaning crisis, church as embassy, reconciliation, worship, witness, shalom, Christian discipleship, Post Everything

#PostEverything #Discipleship #GregPerry #DramaOfDiscipleship #SpiritualFormation #IntegralMission #GlobalChurch #Evangelism #Thirdmill #ChristianPodcast #Missions #Discipleship #Worship #Reconciliation

CHAPTERS

00:00 🎭 Witnesses, Not Mere Messengers
01:21 👋 Meet Dr. Greg Perry
02:51 🌏 The Asia Tour Begins
04:27 🏙️ Singapore's Affluent Pressures
07:30 🙏 Myanmar's Extraordinary Prayer
09:59 💰 Rich, Poor, and Mission
10:46 ✋ Gospel Show and Tell
12:06 📖 Reading Luke 4 Whole
14:06 🏛️ The Church as Embassy
18:31 🔄 Power and the Powerless
20:02 ❓ Our American Blind Spots
21:30 🎬 Why Discipleship Needs Drama
24:17 🎟️ Six Episodes, Not Chapters
30:36 🍂 Naming Our Broken Places
32:22 🚫 Unpacking "No Blocking"
34:30 🎹 The Pianist and Girl
36:00 🌮 From Strip Club to Tacos
37:13 👂 Evangelism as Listening
39:51 🌱 Fieldwork and Heartwork
43:42 🪐 Liturgy Pulls Life's Orbit
45:09 📚 Stories Too Small
49:05 🛂 Immigration and the Embassy
52:12 ✨ Celebrating Little Restorations
56:18 📕 Greg's Next Book
58:09 💭 John's Closing Reflections

New Atheism & the Returning Ride w/ Justin Brierley:
Faith's Surprising Rebirth
Episode 78

Summary:

Justin Brierley spent nearly two decades hosting debates between the world's leading atheists and Christians on his show Unbelievable?. In that time he watched New Atheism rise, peak, and collapse—and then witnessed something he calls "the surprising rebirth of belief in God."

In this episode of Post Everything, Brad Edwards and John Houmes talk with Justin about the renewed openness to Christianity across the West, why young men in particular are exploring faith, and what the withdrawn Quiet Revival Report does (and doesn't) tell us. Justin unpacks the difference between revival and rebirth, the limits of cultural Christianity, the rise of "lapsed atheists," the gamification of faith through apps, and why the dehumanizing effects of AI make embodied Christian community more vital than ever.

A thoughtful, hopeful conversation for pastors, church leaders, and anyone trying to read the cultural moment we're living in.

Quotes:

"If all you're aiming for is Christian culture, sadly you won't even get that. You'll get a sub-biblical, idolatrous version of it… you can't have the effects without the source."

"Cultures only get changed when human hearts get changed—and that happens through Christ, ultimately."

Resources Mentioned:

Unbelievable?; The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (book & podcast); Uncommon Ground — all by Justin Brierley • Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion • the Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett) • Tom Holland, Dominion • Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach" • Douglas Murray • N.T. Wright • Rowan Williams • Jordan & Tammy Peterson • Bible Society's Quiet Revival Report; YouGov • Freya India, "The Commodification of Christianity" (GIRLS Substack) • Hallow, Glorify, YouVersion • Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Niall Ferguson • James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity • John Vervaeke • Mark Sayers, Rebuilders ("When the Fringe Becomes the Center") • Chris Martin, Terms of Service • The Gospel Coalition, Making Sense of Us • Brad Edwards, The Reason for Church

Key words:

New Atheism, surprising rebirth of belief in God, Justin Brierley, Unbelievable podcast, Christianity, apologetics, cultural apologetics, Gen Z faith, young men Christianity, Quiet Revival, cultural Christianity, meaning crisis, secularism, Tom Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, post-Christian culture, AI and faith, embodied community, church leadership, discipleship, revival, Post Everything

#PostEverything #JustinBrierley #NewAtheism #SurprisingRebirth #Christianity #Apologetics #CulturalApologetics #GenZ #MeaningCrisis #Faith #Church #Discipleship #ChristianPodcast #PostChristian

Chapters:

00:00 🪤 The Cultural Christianity Trap
01:25 👋 Introducing Justin Brierley
03:19 ⚔️ Inside The New Atheism Era
06:00 🔄 A Shift In The Atmosphere
10:17 🌊 The Tide Could Come Back
12:09 📊 The Quiet Revival Report
15:39 ⚠️ The Report Is Withdrawn
19:20 🐣 Rebirth Versus Revival
21:58 🚫 Settling For Christian Culture
23:36 📱 The Commodification Of Faith
26:00 🎮 Gamifying Prayer And Faith
28:21 🤖 AI Prayer Apps
29:45 ⛪ New Faces In Church
32:11 ❓ How The Questions Changed
33:43 🌱 Why Gen Z Is Open
36:10 ✝️ A Conversion Through TikTok
38:01 🥀 Losing The Christian Story
40:27 🤝 Coercion Versus Persuasion
43:03 🚩 The Christian Nationalism Question
45:28 🌾 The Wheat And The Tares
49:09 🌍 Expanding The Good Soil
50:57 🧠 What Holds Thinkers Back
54:48 🙏 Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Conversion
57:08 💭 The Meaning Crisis
59:33 👥 Faith Needs Real Community
1:01:57 📵 The Dehumanizing Pull Of AI
1:04:28 📖 Cultural Apologetics Done Well
1:08:44 🎬 Brad And John Reflect
1:11:08 📡 When The Fringe Becomes Center
1:13:11 🔮 AI And Re-Enchantment
1:17:35 ⚖️ Why Gen Z Chose Justice
1:21:19 🕹️ Counterfeit Institutions
1:23:55 🚸 Formation And The Screen
1:27:46 💡 The Church As Antidote

Brad Edwards sits down with Jay Kim, pastor of Westgate Church in Silicon Valley and author of Analog Church, to discuss the spiritual implications of artificial intelligence—and why church leaders urgently need a response.

Key points:

• The difference between attention economy (social media) and attachment economy (AI)

• Why AI companions create relational attachment in ways social media never could

• How tech workers in Silicon Valley are experiencing spiritual crisis over AI displacement

• Marshall McLuhan's theory: When pushed to extremes, technology inverts on itself

• The spiritual discipline of sober-mindedness in an age of endless stimulation

• Why the church must become "weird" again to counter digital culture

• Practical formation practices to help your congregation think deeply (not just consume)

• How pastors can help disciples navigate vocational uncertainty in tech fields

• The role of curiosity and meandering as countercultural spiritual practices

Themes:

•      Spiritual formation in digital age

•      AI and human relationships

•      Church in Silicon Valley

•      Pastoral leadership in tech cities

•      Technology ethics and faith

Key words:

AI companion, Spiritual formation, Church leadership, Discipleship, Silicon Valley, Artificial intelligence, Technology ethics, Sober-mindedness, Pastoral care, Formation practices, Jay Kim, PostEverything, Digital culture, Embodied community, Tech workers

CHAPTERS:

🎙️ Welcome to Post Everything — 00:00

👋 John Introduces Jay Kim — 01:05

💬 Brad Welcomes Jay — 02:17

📖 Analog Church's Cosmic Irony — 04:00

🏘️ Last In-Person Gathering — 05:00

😷 Pandemic Forces Publishing Decision — 06:15

⛪ Church Growth Model Problem — 10:44

💻 Digital Cannot Replace Embodied — 12:19

📡 Technology Shapes What's Possible — 14:30

🤖 AI Isn't Built, but Grown — 15:26

⚡ Efficiency Over Effortful Growth — 19:05

👁️ The Attention Economy Trap — 21:22

💔 Enter the Attachment Economy — 23:18

🧠 AI Creates Relational Bond — 25:27

❓ Is This Really Human? — 27:12

🚨 Training Your Own Replacement — 29:36

🙏 Lament Before Theological Hope — 33:03

🤔 Curiosity as Vocational Superpower — 35:03

📺 Technology Inverts at Extremes — 39:08

🧠 Brain Losing Cognitive Capacity — 42:44

⛪ The Church Must Be Weird — 53:26

🌐 Silicon Valley Exports Culture Worldwide — 57:28