We believe that the next great renewal of Christianity requires active, dedicated participation of the laity. It requires believers who are willing to do the hard work of worldview renewal—taking every thought captive, renewing the foundations of what we believe, and applying the Lordship of Christ to every aspect of our lives.
Biblical truth remains constant, while the Church’s understanding and application of that truth develops. Throughout history, the Church has navigated the tension between holding fast to eternal truth and engaging an ever-changing world. Periodically, this demanded a substantial renewal of the Christian worldview; at other times, it required institutional reform.
Renewal in history
If we look at the arc of Church history, a rhythm of renewal emerges—great inflection points where the faith was systematized and expanded to meet the challenges of the age.
By the fifth century, the foundational doctrines of the Trinity and Christology had been articulated in the great creeds, as the Church defended and systematized biblical teaching in conversation with the intellectual world of antiquity. Early Christian thinkers critically engaged with Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism, adopting useful concepts where they aided the articulation of Christian truth while rejecting or reshaping ideas incompatible with biblical revelation. This helped equip Christianity with a rigorous intellectual vocabulary for addressing the philosophical challenges of the age.
Roughly 400 years later, the Carolingian Renaissance brought another renewal. While the early Church had clarified doctrine, the Carolingian era focused on education, literacy, governance, and the cultivation of a distinctly Christian culture. It helped translate theological vision into a new social reality, laying foundations that would shape medieval Christendom for centuries.
Then, around 1200 AD, another major intellectual renewal gathered momentum. The recovery of Aristotle and other ancient texts exposed Western Christianity to a more systematic engagement with the observable world. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics critically appropriated aspects of Aristotelian thought within a Christian framework, placing greater emphasis on reason, causation, classification, and the study of nature. Although this synthesis was neither complete nor without error, it helped foster an intellectual environment in which investigation of the natural world could flourish—an important development in the long emergence of empirical science.
Later, the Protestant Reformation helped expose and correct a number of abuses within the medieval Church, while also challenging Catholic doctrines that reformers believed were inconsistent with Scripture.
The early Church clarified doctrine. The Carolingian Renaissance strengthened Christian culture and institutions. The scholastics refined the intellectual framework of the faith. The Reformation corrected abuses and sought to align Christian doctrine more closely with Scripture. Each renewal preserved continuity with the past while addressing the challenges of its own age.
Renewal in our generation
The same task confronts Christians today. We need not fear new discoveries, new questions, or new information. Instead, we must evaluate them through the lens of Scripture, retaining what is true, rejecting what is false, and integrating what is valuable into a renewed and distinctly biblical understanding of reality. Today, we are overdue for another great renewal.
Over the last four centuries, and accelerating rapidly post-Darwin, humanity has experienced an explosion of information and a radical shift in the prevailing worldview. For too long, the Christian response to this shift has been largely defensive—either retreating into a privatized faith or making small, reactive course corrections while ceding the intellectual and cultural high ground.
We believe several contemporary movements indicate a broader process has begun. We are witnessing the early stages of a large-scale, comprehensive renewal that draws from both the Old and New Testaments. Movements like Creationism and Christian Reconstructionism are examples of Christians attempting to rebuild a comprehensive biblical worldview. These should not be mistaken for reactionary subcultures; they are trinitarian creedal movements asking fundamental questions about what we believe and how those beliefs apply to all of reality. They are looking to renew the foundations and expand the scope of the Christian worldview, demonstrating that the Bible speaks authoritatively to origins, biology, economics, law, and history just as clearly as it does to the soul.
This is the essential task of our era. Just as earlier Christians critically engaged with the intellectual inheritance of their age—retaining what was true, correcting what was incomplete, and rejecting what conflicted with revelation—the modern Church must comprehensively engage with the enormous expansion of knowledge over the last four centuries and bring it within a distinctly biblical framework. We must move beyond piecemeal responses to individual questions and develop a cohesive, systematic worldview grounded in the whole counsel of Scripture.
Rechristianize.com exists to contribute to this process. We believe that this next great renewal will not be handed down solely from the academy or the pulpit; it requires active, dedicated participation of the laity. It requires believers who are willing to do the hard work of worldview renewal—taking every thought captive, renewing the foundations of what we believe, and applying the Lordship of Christ to every aspect of our lives.
Welcome to renewal. Welcome to Rechristianize.