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We know that secularism hasn’t delivered us from evil. Because we’re still traumatized in the West by what the Second World War drew out of us, what that war revealed in us. Eighty years later, we have yet to heal.

So I wrote in the conclusion to our new book The Gospel After Christendom. The West is broken. Traumatized by knowing the evils we could commit. Traumatized by knowing what evils could be committed against us and the ones we love. Convinced Christ offers no consolation, weakly trying to reassure ourselves that Hitler belongs to the past, yet broken by the weight of the world, knowing our lighthouse has gone out. It’s dark and cold, and no one’s home.

I wrote these words in reflection after reading Richard Flanagan’s bestselling book The Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize. We keep telling horror stories from the Second World War in a vain attempt at understanding what our ancestors suffered, what they endured. We’re seeking absolution for what our ancestors did, from the evil we fear they passed down to us.

All the while we ponder, It couldn’t happen again . . . could it?

Add another search for understanding and absolution in the new Norwegian film Quisling: The Final Days (streaming on Amazon Prime). It’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Unspeakable evil, loss of faith, sin and repentance—it’s all on display in the story of Norwegian dictator Vidkun Quisling during his 1945 arrest, trial, and execution, viewed from the perspective of his reluctant chaplain.

What these filmmakers did, building toward the final confrontations between the deposed dictator and chaplain Peder Olsen, deserves wide acclaim. I’ve never before seen such drama in confession and communion, with thought-provoking tension and twists. Norwegian filmmakers have produced several of the best takes on the Second World War.

Add this film to the canon of art trying to absolve the guilt we can’t shake in the West. Narvik (streaming on Netflix) explores how war often forces a choice between defending your country and protecting your family. Number 24 (also streaming on Netflix) features an aged Norwegian resistance fighter sharing his harrowing tale in a present-day school assembly. He faces persistent questions from a young woman who won’t accept the veteran’s version of the story, where collateral damage included executing Norwegians collaborating with the Nazis. Eventually we learn she lost an older relative during the war in unexplained circumstances (which we see on film).

Quisling: The Final Days uses the infamous dictator as a foil for Olsen’s own wrestling with the decisions he made during the war to protect his family. Olsen begins by challenging the defiant Quisling to identify himself in Jesus’s parable of the Pharisee and tax collector from Luke 18. If Quisling could take responsibility for his atrocities, if he would seek absolution from God through this Lutheran minister, then Norway could begin to heal from its civil war, neighbor pitted against neighbor by Nazi rule. But Quisling, descended himself from generations of Lutheran pastors, proves to be a harder case than Olsen expects. He knows the Bible, too, maybe even better than Olsen does. He wants to know where Olsen sees himself in the parable.

As Quisling creeps closer to the firing squad, we wonder, will he take the Lord’s Supper and throw himself on the mercy of Christ? Or will he die proclaiming his innocence, his insistence that he only ever acted out of love for Norway? Can Olsen redeem himself and stabilize his shaky faith by rescuing Quisling from hell and save his country’s conscience at the same time? Or will his faith in God fail yet again in the face of an impossible task?

You’ll have to watch yourself to find out (in case you’re not already familiar with Norwegian history). I’d love to know what you think. Why do we keep telling ourselves these stories from the Second World War? What are we hoping will help us reignite that lighthouse so we can finally find our way back home?

COMING NEXT WEEK: I reveal my annual list of top 10 theology stories from the past year.

COLLIN HANSEN

Editor in Chief

Why We Should Recover Cultural Apologetics

Collin Hansen • Chris Watkin • Joshua Chatraw

For many, apologetics is associated with arguments over rational, philosophical proofs. It’s a matter of the head instead of the heart, a debate over facts instead of feelings. And it’s reserved for the people in your church who really seem to enjoy fighting.

But no matter what kind of apologetics you practice, you’re arguing according to a certain set of rules, in a particular language, attuned to what you expect to resonate in your time and place. In other words, it’s always cultural, never purely timeless. And it’s never purely rational.

We need to recover apologetics as a matter of the heart and hands as well as the head. We need to recover apologetics as a project for the whole church and not just for those who enjoy arguing. What we call cultural apologetics isn’t a new academic discipline. It’s a means to reconnect the church to the best biblical and historical resources for presenting and defending the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3).

That’s the vision behind our new book, The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics, which I edited for Zondervan Reflective and The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. I was joined on Gospelbound by two of the contributors, both fellows for The Keller Center. Josh Chatraw is the Billy Graham chair for evangelism and cultural engagement at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. Christopher Watkin, associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. We recorded this episode at Beeson in front of a lively and engaged audience.

Thank you to Southwestern Journal of Theology for recognizing our book as the best in 2025 for the category of worldview and apologetics. We’re also grateful to Christianity Today for making our book a finalist in their 2025 awards for apologetics and evangelism, and for Rooted awarding us an honorable mention in their category for teaching the Bible to youth.

Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World

Graham Tomlin

You may know Blaise Pascal for inventing the calculator in the 17th century and setting the stage for modern computing. You may know him for setting up the first urban bus system. Or maybe you’re aware that he pioneered probability theory, that he proved the existence of vacuums, that he created the hydraulic press and syringe, or that he performed the first test of atmospheric pressure with altitude adjustment.

If you knew all that, you knew better than I did. And you knew that Pascal has a strong claim as the pre-eminent figure in the Enlightenment, the great leap forward in Western science and philosophy, allegedly at the expense of Christianity. He is, as biographer Graham Tomlin argues in his new book, the man who made the modern world.

Except, Tomlin reminds us, Pascal became one of the greatest Christian apologists in history. He devoted the waning years of his tragically abbreviated life to pleading with others to share in his passionate encounter with the risen Savior, Jesus Christ.

For all Pascal achieved, it’s still easy to overlook him. He’s a scientist who turned out to be an apologist. He’s a Catholic who sometimes sounded like fellow Frenchman John Calvin, because they both owed so much to Augustine. Pascal doesn’t belong exclusively to these groups that don’t often get along today, who haven’t often gotten along since Pascal’s day.

I first encountered Pascal’s Pensées as a college freshman in a religion course. But I lacked the context 25 years ago to understand Pascal’s achievements and ongoing relevance for his apologetic arguments. Tomlin closed that gap in a book I couldn’t put down, as the pages overflowed with passion and insight. I couldn’t help but teach my family the same evening about Pascal’s argument for the existence of God from the fact of his hiddenness. All of a sudden Scripture and experience and apologetics locked into a place, like Pascal had furnished the missing piece in a frustrating puzzle.

Pascal is often remembered for his wager, which Tomlin explains (contra Voltaire’s misunderstanding) wasn’t an evangelistic argument. “He just wanted to bring them to the point of realizing that it was the passions, not their reason, that were holding them back from belief,” Tomlin writes, “and to make them ready to take steps to find true belief by diminishing those passions by acting as if they believed.” Indeed, as Pascal taught us, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

Few can claim to match let alone surpass Pascal’s scientific achievements. And after Augustine, Pascal might be the most influential cultural apologist in history. Following his lead, we’re still trying to “make religion attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.” The man whose “night of fire” in 1654 was filled with “joy, joy, joy, tears of joy” as he encountered Christ continues to inspire our own pursuit of Jesus, as we invite others to follow the only path to eternal life. Because, as Pascal reminded us, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”