What a Man Must Believe

Four parts have led to this one. It is worth taking a moment to see the shape of the whole before we finish.

Part I named the two answers to the one question every man must face: is man made in the image of God and fallen, or is man basically good and able to choose good and evil for himself? It traced the second answer back to Rousseau and showed how it spread through Feuerbach, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, and Skinner until it became the default assumption of the entire Western intellectual class.

Part II brought three witnesses — Solzhenitsyn, Frankl, and Peterson — who between them saw the worst of the twentieth century and drew the same conclusion. The line between good and evil is not between nations or classes or parties. It runs through every human heart. A good man is not a harmless man. A good man is a dangerous man who has chosen to hold himself under control.

Part III laid out the record. Fatherlessness. Family collapse. Male drift. Deaths of despair. Boys left behind in every classroom in the country. Not propaganda. Published data, from agencies that do not care which side of the argument a man is on. The numbers do not leave room for the second view to be true.

Part IV introduced the man C.S. Lewis saw coming: the man without a chest. Trained to be clever, never trained to be good. Hollow in the middle. Unable to commit, unable to sacrifice, unable to lead, unable to protect, unable to repent. The exact product of a culture that spent a century telling itself that man is basically good and therefore needs no moral instruction.

And now Part V. What does a man do with all of this?

There is a temptation, when a man reaches the end of a series like this, to file it away. To say: interesting. To say: I will think about it later. To say: this is heavy stuff, and right now I have a job and a mortgage and a kid with a dentist appointment on Tuesday.

That reaction is understandable. It is also the reaction the culture is counting on. Because the culture does not need a man to disagree with any of this. It only needs him to do nothing about it.

Here is the thing that cannot be avoided: a man is already living out one of the two worldviews. Right now. Today. Whether he has ever put it into words or not.

If he treats his wife as a partner in a covenant that he will keep until death, he is living out the first view. If he treats her as a partner in a relationship that he will continue as long as it works for him, he is living out the second.

If he disciplines his son because he believes the boy has a fallen heart that needs shaping, he is living out the first view. If he refuses to discipline his son because he believes the boy is basically good and will find his own way, he is living out the second.

If he goes to church on Sunday because he believes he needs grace he cannot give himself, he is living out the first view. If he skips church because he believes he is fine without it, he is living out the second.

There is no neutral position. There is no third option. Every man alive is already answering the question with his life. The only question is whether he is answering it honestly.

Not six ideas to consider. Six convictions to hold. Each one is drawn from the Christian tradition, each one is confirmed by the record we have examined, and each one is denied by the second view of human nature. A man who holds all six is on solid ground. A man who denies any one of them is standing on something that will eventually give way.

One: I am a man, made in the image of God, and I am fallen.

This is the foundation. Everything else is built on it. A man who knows he bears God's image knows he has worth that cannot be taken from him. A man who knows he is fallen knows he is capable of the very things he condemns in others. He is not surprised by his own sin. He is not shocked by the sins of other men. He is humble without being self-hating, and he is confident without being proud.

Two: I cannot save myself.

This is the sentence that every self-help book in the bookstore denies. Every motivational speaker denies it. Every therapist who says you have everything you need inside you denies it. But a man who has ever actually tried to change himself knows it is true. He knows the resolutions he has broken. He knows the habits he has started and stopped. He knows the gap between who he is and who he wants to be, and he knows that no amount of effort has closed it.

The answer is not more effort. The answer is a savior. This is not a slogan. It is the only thing that has ever actually worked.

Three: My family is a covenant, not a contract.

A contract is an agreement between two parties that can be dissolved when it no longer serves them. A covenant is an agreement before God that binds the parties together for life. A man who treats his marriage as a contract will leave when it becomes hard. A man who treats it as a covenant will not. This is the difference between the two views of human nature, applied to the most important relationship a man will ever have.

Four: My children are a trust, not a project.

A project is something a man completes and moves on from. A trust is something he holds on behalf of another. A man's children are not his to shape into what he wants them to be. They are souls entrusted to him by God, and his job is to raise them in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. He will answer for how he does it. This is not a metaphor. It is the most literal thing in his life.

Five: My work is a calling, not a career.

A career is a ladder a man climbs for his own benefit. A calling is a station in which he serves for the benefit of others. A man who sees his work as a career will always be looking for the next rung, and will never be satisfied. A man who sees it as a calling will do it well, whether anyone notices or not, because he is doing it before God and not before men.

Six: My hope is not in this world.

This is the conviction that holds all the others together. A man who hopes for a perfect world, and who believes such a world can be built by politics or education or technology, will be disappointed by every election and every reform. A man who knows that this world is not his home will do good work in it without expecting it to save him. He will vote. He will serve. He will fight for what is right. But he will not be destroyed when the world fails him, because he never put his hope in it in the first place.

Beliefs are easy. Tuesdays are hard. Here is what these six convictions look like in the ordinary days of an ordinary man's life.

• When he comes home from work, he puts the phone away before he walks in the door. He has decided that his family will have his attention and not just his presence.
• When his wife says something that cuts him, he does not respond in kind. He has decided that the covenant is more important than the moment.
• When his son lies to him about something small, he addresses it. He knows that a small lie becomes a large habit if it is left alone.
• When he is tempted to look at something he should not, he turns away. He knows the difference between a passing temptation and a decision, and he decides not to.
• When his friends are talking about someone who is not present, he does not join in. He knows what gossip does, and he will not be part of it even when it would be easy and funny.
• When he fails — and he will fail — he does not excuse himself. He names the failure, he repents, and he gets back up. He does not wait until he feels better to do what is right.
• When the culture tells him that his faith is embarrassing, he does not hide it. He does not shove it in anyone's face either. He simply lives as though it is true, because he believes it is.

This is not glamorous. It is not heroic in the way movies are heroic. It is the ordinary, daily, unnoticed work of a man who has decided to be a man. And it is the only thing that has ever changed the world.

Some men will read this series and know exactly what they have lost. They will not need to be told what a father is, because they grew up without one. They will not need to be told what a covenant is, because they watched one break. They will not need to be told what a chest is, because they have spent their whole lives feeling the hole where one should be.

To that man: what has been lost can be rebuilt. Not overnight. Not perfectly. But it can be rebuilt.

It is rebuilt the same way a wall is rebuilt after a fire. One stone at a time. Slowly. With callouses. With setbacks. With a plan that assumes it will take years and a determination that does not quit when it does.

The first stone is simple. Find one older man who knows God, and ask him to spend time with you. Not to mentor you in a formal way. Just to be in your life. To have coffee with you. To ask you questions you do not want to answer. To tell you the truth when you are lying to yourself.

The second stone is to find a church that will not water down scripture. Not a church that is perfect. There are none. But a church that believes the Bible is true, that preaches repentance and grace together, and that takes men seriously enough to expect something of them.

The third stone is to begin the daily work of building the chest. Read scripture. Pray. Fast. Train the body. Take on burdens. Confess sin. Do the small, unglamorous things that produce the strength of a man.

There is no shortcut. There is no program that will do this for you. But there is a way. And the way is walked by men who started exactly where you are, alone and uncertain, and who refused to stay there.

There are two paths and every man is on one of them right now.

The first path begins with the belief that man is basically good. It ends in the man without a chest: comfortable, bored, endlessly entertained, and completely alone. He has been told for his whole life that he is fine. He believes it, mostly. He is not fine.

The second path begins with the belief that man is made in the image of God and is fallen, and that he cannot save himself. It ends in a man who has rebuilt the chest inside him. He is tired. He is often stretched. He carries burdens that would break a lesser man. And yet he is surrounded by people who love him and who will miss him when he is gone. He has been told all his life that he is not enough. He knows it is true. And he knows it does not matter, because his hope was never in himself.

The paths do not diverge at a single moment. They diverge over thousands of small choices, made quietly, in the ordinary hours of an ordinary life. Every man is already on one of them. The only question is whether he will look at his own path honestly and decide whether it is the one he actually wants to walk.

This series was written because a man who understands human nature can no longer be lied to. About himself. About his family. About his culture. About his God.

He will still make mistakes. He will still sin. He will still fail the people he loves. But he will know what he is doing when he does it, and he will know where to go to be forgiven. He will not spend his life blaming anyone else for the man he has become. He will take responsibility, because responsibility is what a man does.

The choice between the two views is not a choice a man makes once. It is a choice he makes every day. Every morning he wakes up, he decides again whether he will live as a man who believes he is basically good and needs nothing outside himself, or as a man who believes he is fallen and needs a savior.

Make the right choice today. Make it again tomorrow. That is all that is asked of any man. Not perfection. Just faithfulness, one day at a time, for as long as he has.

• Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning (1946; revised 1959, 1984).
• Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity (1952).
• Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man (1943).
• Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory (1949).
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago (1973–1975).
• Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life (2018).
• Prager, Dennis. Think a Second Time (1995).
• Prager, Dennis. The Rational Bible series (2018–present).
• Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship (1937).
• Augustine. Confessions (c. 400 AD).
• Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.