Armageddon Is Not A Battle Plan: What Revelation Actually Says — And Why It Matters Right Now
Header Image: Iran and Israel continued their attacks, killing and wounding civilians. (Image: Reuters)
Something bizarre happened in the White House Oval Office this week. Photographs circulated on social media showing President Donald Trump seated at his desk, surrounded by approximately twenty Christian pastors from across the country, their hands extended towards him in prayer. The image provoked sharply divided reactions: some saw it as a moving expression of faith; others found it deeply unsettling. Whatever one makes of the optics, it arrived at a charged moment.
Days earlier, reports emerged that a military commander had told troops that the current US war with Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan,” and that President Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” These were not fringe internet rumours. They were filed as formal complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) by an anonymous non-commissioned officer acting on behalf of fifteen service members — the majority of whom were themselves Christians. By Tuesday of that week, MRFF had logged more than two hundred similar complaints across fifty military installations, covering every branch of the armed forces.
More than two dozen Democratic members of Congress have since called for a Department of Defense Inspector General investigation, citing what they describe as “glaring Constitutional concerns” and potential violations of DoD regulations on religious neutrality.
The political questions about separation of church and state in the US are for others to address. What I want to do here is something more straightforward: examine what Revelation actually says, because the theology driving these claims does not hold up under scrutiny. And that matters here a lot; not as a partisan point, but as a question of biblical faithfulness.
First, a Word About Context
If you have read my previous article on Revelation some of what follows will be familiar ground. But it bears repeating, because the misunderstanding at the heart of this story is so widespread that it has taken on the feel of settled orthodoxy in many circles.
The Book of Revelation is commonly thought to be written in the late first century ~95 AD, during or around the reign of Emperor Domitian. Though there is internal evidence that it was possibly written during Nero’s reign prior to 70 AD. Both of these emperors were most aggressive proponents of the imperial cult in Rome’s history. Domitian required that he be addressed as “lord and god,” had this title printed on coinage, and expected acts of religious reverence towards the Emperor as a demonstration of political loyalty. To refuse was to invite economic exclusion, marginalisation, and worse.
It is into that precise context that John of Patmos writes. He is not composing a coded forecast of twenty-first century geopolitics. He is writing resistance literature — what scholars call apocalyptic literature — a well-established Jewish and early Christian genre which uses vivid symbolic imagery to pull back the curtain on earthly power and name it for what it truly is. The seven-headed beast of Revelation is Rome. The seven heads are the seven hills of Rome, an identification so widely acknowledged in early church scholarship that it barely requires argument. The mark of the beast, calculated through Hebrew gematria to 666 (or 616 in some early manuscripts), points directly to Nero Caesar (transliterated into Hebrew as נרון קסר, “nrwn qsr”) — the Emperor who became the archetype of anti-Christian persecution due to the levels of evilness he enacted. The second beast, which looks like a lamb but speaks for the dragon, performs signs to deceive, enforces the mark, and compels worship of the first beast (Rev. 13:11–17) functioning, in essence, as what we might today call a propaganda machine: the imperial cult apparatus of priests, temples, public ceremonies, and coins bearing the Emperor’s divine titles. It is later explicitly named the “false prophet” (Rev. 16:13; 19:20). It conquers not by force but by manufactured consent.
Revelation is a theological critique of empire, written to encourage persecuted believers that Rome, for all its apparent invincibility, is not ultimate. Its violence is not divine. Its claims to eternal dominion are a parody of the real thing.
This is the lens through which everything else in the book must be read. When we lose it, we lose the book and its purpose.
There Is No “Battle” of Armageddon
Let us be precise here, because precision matters enormously in this conversation.
The word “Armageddon” appears exactly once in the New Testament, in Revelation 16:16, and is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name har məgīddō (הר מגידו). John writes that the kings of the earth are gathered at Har-Megiddo — the Mount of Megiddo/Armageddon — a site in northern Israel deeply resonant in the Old Testament as a location of decisive conflict (Judg. 5:19; 2 Kgs. 23:29; 2 Chr. 35:22). So much so that by the time of the later prophets, the very name had become a byword for catastrophic loss and lamentation (Zech. 12:11). The imagery is deliberate and powerful. A great confrontation appears to be building. The stage is set.
But here is what many readers entirely miss: no battle is described.
| By AVRAM GRAICER — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
The armies gather. The tension mounts. And then, when we reach Revelation 19 (where the Hollywood version of events would deliver its climactic military clash with big explosions and special FX) something quite different happens. Christ appears as a rider on a white horse. His robe, we are told, is dipped in blood — but it is his own blood, the blood of the cross, not the blood of his enemies. The armies of heaven are ranked behind him. And then the beast and the kings of the earth are defeated not by superior firepower, not by a counter-charge of heavenly soldiers, but by the word that proceeds from Christ’s mouth, described as a sharp sword. This is no arbitrary image. The author of Hebrews uses identical language when he writes that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow” (Heb. 4:12). The sword is the Word — and the Word, as John’s own Gospel makes plain, is Christ himself (John 1:1). The weapon of divine victory is not steel but Truth itself.
There is no prolonged engagement. No exchange of blows. No military drama in any conventional sense. It is over before it can properly be called a battle.
This is not accidental. John is making a clear theological point, one which is entirely consistent with the book’s central vision. Go back to Revelation 5 and you will find it in miniature: John hears of the Lion of Judah — the expected conquering warrior Messiah — but when he turns to look, he sees a Lamb, standing as though slain. The conquering one conquers as the slaughtered Lamb. That paradox is the theological centre of the entire book. Victory does not come through superior violence. It comes through faithful witness, sacrificial love, and the self-giving of the cross.
The saints conquer by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. — Revelation 12:11
Notice what is conspicuously absent from that verse above: swords, armies, political power, military campaigns. The model of conquest in Revelation is the cross, not the sword. To read the book as a mandate for armed holy war is not merely a misreading — it inverts the very argument John is making.
Empire Always Claims Divine Sanction
There is a further irony in the current situation that is worth noting, because it goes to the heart of what Revelation is truly about.
In the ancient world, empires routinely justified their military campaigns as divinely ordained. Rome’s great ideological project was the Pax Romana, the “Peace of Rome” — a peace secured through conquest, maintained through intimidation, and enforced through crucifixions lining the roads into subject cities. Rome did not merely claim political authority; it claimed divine authority. The Emperor was lord. The Emperor was god. War was not merely geopolitical strategy; it was sacred duty.
Revelation’s entire argument is a sustained, systematic demolition of exactly that claim.
John depicts Rome as “Babylon” in chapters 17 and 18: drunk on luxury, intoxicated with the blood of the saints, her merchants weeping when she falls — and notably, they weep not for lost lives but for lost profits! It is one of the most piercing critiques of the fusion of military power and economic exploitation in all of ancient literature. And John’s point is that Babylon falls not because Christians take up arms against her, but because her endless cycle of violence is ultimately self-defeating. She collapses under the weight of her own nature.
The contrast John is drawing could not be clearer. Empire thrives on spectacle: parades, armies, displays of force. Revelation stages what looks like the ultimate imperial showdown — and then refuses to narrate it as a conventional war. God does not win by out-killing Rome. God wins because Rome’s power is hollow, and the Word that created all things cannot be overcome by any sword.
A sharp reader will note, of course, that Revelation is not without its graphic imagery — rivers of blood, the great winepress of God’s wrath producing blood “as high as a horse’s bridle” (Rev. 14:20). This deserves a response rather than simply overlooking it. That imagery draws directly on Old Testament prophetic precedent, most notably Isaiah 63:1–6, where God treads the winepress and his garments are stained with the blood of the nations — a passage which functions as a vivid metaphor for the totality of divine judgement, not a literal battle report. Ezekiel 39 employs similarly extreme imagery to the same end. This is how apocalyptic literature works: it uses visceral, overwhelming imagery to convey the finality and completeness of God’s judgement, not to describe the mechanics by which it is carried out. And crucially, John himself holds the tension in plain sight — the robe of the rider is stained with blood before the confrontation even begins (Rev. 19:13). It is the blood of the cross, not of conquest. The imagery is paradoxical by design, because the entire theological argument of the book is paradoxical: the Lion conquers as a slain Lamb. To flatten that paradox into a literal war narrative is to miss the point entirely.
The Cross as the Real Armageddon
There is a further dimension worth considering, and it is one that becomes increasingly persuasive the more you sit with this book and try to read it without preconceived notions. Revelation may not be best understood as a single linear narrative at all, whether past, present or future , but as a series of overlapping visions, each circling the same spiritual realities from a different angle and revealing their deeper significance. Scholars call this recapitulation, and it is central to G.K. Beale’s major commentary on Revelation, arguably the most thorough treatment of the book’s structure in modern scholarship. The clearest example is Revelation 12, where the woman, the dragon, and the child caught up to God’s throne read not as a prediction of future events but as a cosmic retelling of the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection from a heavenly vantage point. This is like a spiritual “behind the scenes” view of what was really happening when Christ was born into a world of imperial power, was apparently defeated by it, and then vindicated by God. The dragon is not defeated at some future Armageddon. He is defeated at the cross, and Revelation 12:10-11 tells us so plainly.
That cosmic victory connects to the detail in Revelation 14:20 — the Victor arriving from outside the city, garments already stained — which echoes Isaiah 63 but also the sin offering of Leviticus 16:27, burned outside the camp. Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem precisely as that offering, which the writer of Hebrews connects in Heb. 13:10-12, and yet that act of apparent defeat was simultaneously the moment of cosmic triumph. Paul explains this plainly in Colossians 2:14–15: Christ disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public spectacle of them — through the cross. The decisive battle was already fought and won on a hill outside Jerusalem, and not in the way anybody expected.
Reading Revelation through that lens, the book operates on three overlapping layers simultaneously. First, the cross and resurrection as the foundational cosmic victory over sin, death, and the powers. Second, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD as the judicial outworking of that victory on the old covenant order — the theme explored at greater length in my article on Revelation in the Second Coming series on my site. Third, the decline and fall of Rome as the historical vindication of the Gospel’s central claim: that Caesar is not Lord, and that the empire which crucified the Son of God would not have the final word. This third layer had, in fact, been anticipated centuries earlier. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the great statue , which represended the successive world empires of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, ends not with a battle but with a stone, cut without human hands, that strikes the statue and becomes a mountain filling the whole earth (Dan. 2:31–45). Jerome, in his Commentary on Daniel, identified that fourth empire as Rome and understood the stone as the Kingdom of Christ expanding through the Church — a reading Eusebius shares in his Church History. R.C. Sproul, in The Last Days According to Jesus, represents the same broad tradition in more accessible modern form. The Church, in other words, is that stone: spreading through the empire not by force of arms but by the quiet, unstoppable advance of the Gospel, dismantling Rome’s claims to ultimate authority by proclaiming the truth about the True God. All three layers are real. All three are present in the text. And none of them require a future literal battle at Megiddo to complete the picture.
When military commanders invoke Revelation to tell service members that a president has been “anointed by Jesus” to trigger Armageddon, they are not giving voice to the theology of Revelation. They are, ironically, recapitulating the very imperial theology Revelation was written to critique: the claim that God’s purposes are advanced through military action, that a political leader carries divine mandate for war, and that violence is the instrument of eschatological fulfilment.
John of Patmos would have recognised that claim immediately. He encountered it every day of his exile on Patmos. He did not endorse it and named it as the voice of the beast.
The Danger of Weaponising Prophecy
I want to be fair here. The dispensationalist tradition — which is the theological stream largely responsible for the modern “Battle of Armageddon” framework, popularised in countless books and most recently in the Left Behind series — is a serious theological tradition held by sincere Christians. I disagree with its conclusions, and I have argued elsewhere in my writings why I think the preterist and historicist readings of Revelation are more exegetically sound. But the people within that tradition are not, for the most part, advocating for military adventurism (though they probably expect it some day).
The problem arises when eschatological frameworks are detached from their theological grounding and pressed into service as justification for geopolitical action. When that happens — when a commander tells troops that their deployment is part of God’s prophetic plan, that a specific political leader has been anointed to trigger the end times — the theology has stopped being theology. It has become something considerably more dangerous: a sacred narrative that insulates decision-making from normal moral scrutiny, and which asks young men and women to die not merely for their country, but for a cosmic script they cannot question.
History offers us no shortage of examples of where that leads. Revelation, rightly read, should make us deeply suspicious of exactly such claims — because that is what it was written to do.
What Revelation’s Ending Actually Says
One more thing is worth noting, because it is so often overlooked in these discussions.
The final word of Revelation is not war. It is not even judgement.
It is renewal.
In Revelation 21, John sees a new heaven and a new earth. The New Jerusalem descends — and I have written at greater length elsewhere about why this city is best understood as the Church, the bride of Christ, the community of the redeemed rather than a literal rebuilt city. God’s throne, which was in heaven in chapter 4, is now on earth. He dwells with his people. He wipes away every tear. And the nations — note this carefully — bring their glory into the light of God. Not their weapons. Not their military might. Their glory.
The eschatological vision of Revelation is not a world consumed by the fire of the last battle. It is a world healed, gathered, renewed. The city has no need of sun or moon because the glory of God illuminates it. The tree of life bears fruit for the healing of the nations.
That is the vision John offers to battered, persecuted believers in the first century. And it is the vision the Church should hold before it today — not as a naïve dismissal of the reality of evil and conflict, but as a strong insistence that the last word belongs to God, and God’s last word is not war.
To Conclude
Augustine, writing as the Roman Empire was itself beginning to fragment, offered a caution that has never quite lost its relevance:
“Obviously, then it is a waste of effort for us to attempt counting the precise number of years which this world has yet to go, since we know from the mouth of Truth that it is none of our business.” — Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 18:53
He was speaking about date-setting, but the principle extends further. It is not our business to engineer the end times. It is not our business to identify a political leader as the one anointed to trigger Armageddon. It is certainly not our business to tell soldiers that their lives are being risked in the service of a prophetic script.
What Revelation actually calls the Church to is far more demanding and far less dramatic: faithful witness in the face of empire, sacrificial love that mirrors the slain Lamb, and the refusal to worship power wherever it presents itself — whether in ancient Rome or in any modern equivalent.
The empire gathers for battle. The Lamb reigns without fighting. The battle was already won on the cross.
That is the critique. And it has never been more timely.
Sources
- Donald Trump spotted in bizarre mass Oval Office prayer after pondering mortality — AOL
- Commanders Accused of Framing Iran War as Biblical Mandate, Jesus’ ‘Return’ | Military.com
- Troops being told to prepare for ‘Armageddon’ in Iran
- Dan Scavino on X: “Happening Now in the Oval Office at the @WhiteHouse. God Bless the USA! 🙏❤️🇺🇸🦅 https://t.co/Ebi7DnAnhK" / X
- CHURCH FATHERS: City of God, Book XVIII (St. Augustine)
- G.K. Beale, Revelation: A Shorter Commentary
- What does Revelation 14:20 mean by “blood flowed as high as the horses’ bridles”?
- The Coming of Jesus: Introduction | The Sacred Faith: Timeless Truths for Modern Minds
- St. Jerome, Commentary on Daniel (1958) pp. 15–157
- R. C. Sproul — The Last Days According to Jesus
- Who is the New Jerusalem? | The Sacred Faith: Timeless Truths for Modern Minds
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There’s been a lot of fuss on the internet lately about this new statue that the UN has erected outside their headquarters on the Visitor’s Plaza. I’ve seen screenshots of the original tweet shared on Facebook and other social media platforms, as well as copious articles flooding my newsfeed, all suggesting the same thing: this is the beast from Daniel 7. This of course carries with it the implication that it is also a fulfilment of that prophecy and therefore we should expect something more to happen soon, like “the antichrist” to rise up and consume the world. Or something along those lines. I don’t follow the Dispensational “end times” view anymore, so I try not to get my eschatology from newspaper headlines (or tweets). In nearly all of the other articles I’ve seen on the topic, no one is actually engaging with the Scriptures, but are quoting random tweets and Facebook posts as though that’s where we should derive our exegesis and conclusions. A guardian for international peace and security sits on the Visitor's Plaza outside #UN Headquarters. The guardian is a fusion of jaguar and eagle and donated by the Government of Oaxaca, Mexico @MexOnu. It is created by artists Jacobo and Maria Angeles.UN Photo/Manuel Elías pic.twitter.com/q8SSsQhz1L — United Nations Photo (@UN_Photo) November 9, 2021 If you can’t see the tweet above, the official UN Twitter account said: A guardian for international peace and security sits on the Visitor’s Plaza outside #UN Headquarters. The guardian is a fusion of jaguar and eagle and donated by the Government of Oaxaca, Mexico @MexOnu It is created by artists Jacobo and Maria Angeles. So with that said, let’s have a look at some of the claims and then compare with what Scripture actually says, rather than a bunch of tweets by people losing their minds. Three passages of Scripture are being thrown about: Daniel 7:2–4, Revelation 13:2, and 1 Thessalonians 5:2–3. But do these verses speak to this new statue? Daniel 7:2–4I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. Then, as I watched, its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a human being; and a human mind was given to it. Alright, Daniel does say the first beast “was like a lion and had eagles’ wings”, which I will admit, is pretty similar to the statue (except that it’s not a lion). I don’t know if Daniel would have been familiar with Jaguars which is why people are pointing out the phrase, “like a lion” due to the similarities of the animals. But these details are really besides the point. The first, and most obvious point to me when I first saw this was that the “beasts” in Daniel 7 (all four of them) are representative of nations and kings. The visions Daniel has are about future kingdoms and their leaders. You only need to read the rest of the chapter to see this, as the angel with Daniel gives the interpretation to him! See below: Daniel 7:16–17I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter: “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. Disney Pixar’s “Coco” film poster (2017) Unless the statue outside the UN is actually a living person who rules a nation… trying to tie it to Daniel 7 is more than a stretch. It’s just nonsensical. The second point which came to my mind too, and anyone else who has seen the Disney film “Coco”, is that these Jaguar-Eagle beast things are part of Mexican culture and mythology (and were warrior classes of the Aztecs). It’s not a unique design the UN came up with, demonically inspired to fulfil prophecy. No, the statue is an “Alebrije” created b...
Luke J. Wilson | 21st September 2020 | Eschatology
Most people have some idea about what the rapture is – or do they? Generally there is an idea or concept of a form of escapism from the world when Jesus returns, which happens pre, mid or post tribulation and in some connection to the millenium. Now, if you understood any of those terms, you are most likely on, or aware of, the Dispensationalism side of things. There’s a lot of doctrine all bundled together in “end times” beliefs, and a fair bit of speculation around “the rapture” with its timing and logistics etc. which makes the whole thing a but murky, but nonetheless, it’s pretty much taken for granted as a staple belief within the Evangelical world. But has this always been so, and does it have any biblical basis? In short: sort of. What is The Rapture? This is the primary verse where the doctrine finds its footing: …then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. — 1 Thessalonians 4:17 On the face of it, that is a pretty obscure (and short) text, yet so much has been written on and speculated about around this event. I’m not going to cover every aspect of rapture doctrine here, but rather want to just highlight the context of this verse and its parallels in Paul’s other letters, as this seems to get lost under centuries of doctrinal baggage, which, incidentally, also the leads to the next point to look at: is the rapture biblical? The origin of The Rapture The word “rapture” itself comes from the Latin word rapere, which means: “to seize” or “to abduct”. It is a translation from the Greek word that is rendered as “caught up” (ἁρπάζω / harpázō) in our English Bibles today. For many, asking if this belief is biblical is a non-starter because it is assumed so based on 1 Thess. 4 so obviously it is. But this is a presupposition, reading the modern ideas of what “the rapture” means into the text. The modern idea being that Jesus comes back briefly (and maybe secretly), whooses all the Christians into the sky and takes them to heaven, away from all the troubles on the earth, before coming back later to do a proper “second coming”. John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century theologian, is often credited with creating this premillennial rapture doctrine, followed closely by C.I. Scofield who wrote a best-selling annotated Bible which promoted Darby’s rapture views in its footnote commentary. This particular Bible became wildly popular across America in the early 1900s and ended up solidifying the futurist dispensational viewpoint for generations to come within Evangelicalism. Despite the popularity of Scofield’s Bible, what it (and Darby) taught was a novel idea which had not been seen nor heard of before in the previous 1800 years of Church History, yet many Christians accepted it without hesitation, likely due to it being part of the exposition alongside the Scripture they were reading, and therefore a seeming authority. I realise there is somewhat of an irony here in that I’m acting similarly like an authority telling you that this belief is wrong whereas Scofield was writing as though it were accurate, but in an even more ironic twist, just a handful of verses later, the same letter to the Thessalonians says to “test everything; hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). This is what I would invite you to do: don’t just take my word for it, test everything and see if what I say is accurate. The context of The Rapture So what is the context of these verses, if not about being whisked away into the sky with Jesus? A couple of things, but one slightly more obvious than the other, though still overlooked by people, I’ve noticed; the other requires knowing some more about the ancient Greco-Roman culture of the time. Firstly, we only need go back a few verses to see what Paul is writing about here: he begins the passage in verse 13 by sayi...
Luke J. Wilson | 27th July 2026 | Archaeology
In early July 2026, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced something pretty amazing: an entire Byzantine-era city, buried beneath the sands of the Dakhla Oasis, had been uncovered almost intact! Streets, homes, bread ovens, a fortress, and at its heart, a fourth-century basilica church. That might not seem very exciting on first glance. But this find deserves a closer look, because it puts flesh on something we usually only encounter in the abstract: what it actually looked like when Christianity took root, house by house, in an ordinary town far from the centres of imperial power. What Was Found The excavation, carried out by an Egyptian mission under the Supreme Council of Antiquities at the Ain El-Sabil site in the New Valley Governorate, roughly 185 miles west of Luxor, has been underway for several seasons. According to Hisham El Leithy, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the settlement was laid out on a deliberate grid — north-south thoroughfares crossed by east-west streets, forming open squares and public spaces. This wasn’t a huddle of huts; it was a planned town. At the centre of that plan stood a basilica church dating to the mid-fourth century AD, overlooking one of the main streets. Around it, archaeologists found the remains of two watchtowers, a heavily fortified structure with thick defensive walls, and houses with spacious reception halls and vaulted roofs — complete with bread ovens, kitchens, and grinding stones for processing grain. Everyday life, preserved almost exactly as it was left. Two houses stand out that have been identified. One belonged to a man named Tisous,* identified as a church deacon, dating to the second half of the fourth century. The other belonged to a man named Tabibos. Over a thousand years later and we know the name of who owned a house and a home-church; I always find it fascinating! Archaeologists believe Tabibos’s house, which dates to the early fourth century, functioned as a house church before the basilica was ever built. A collection of coins bearing Byzantine emperors, Christian symbols and Latin inscriptions was uncovered during the excavation. (Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities via Facebook; Dea Picture Library/De Agostini via Getty Images) There’s also a documentary find that’s easy to skim past but genuinely significant: nearly 200 ostraca — broken pieces of pottery and limestone used as everyday writing material — inscribed in Coptic and Greek. Diaa Zahran, head of the Islamic, Coptic and Jewish Antiquities Sector, described them as recording sales transactions, correspondence, and other mundane details of daily life. Things we rarely get a glimpse into as the mundane rarely makes history. Alongside these, the mission recovered a substantial haul of bronze coins bearing Byzantine emperors and Christian symbols, plus gold coins from the reign of Constantius II (337–361 AD) — coinage that anchors the site’s prosperity firmly within the fourth century. Before the Basilica: The House Church at Ain El-Sabil What makes Tabibos’s house the most theologically interesting part of this discovery is timing. If it predates the basilica and dates to the early fourth century, it sits right at — or just before — the pivot point of Roman-Egyptian Christian history: the years surrounding Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 AD, when Christianity moved from a persecuted minority faith to a tolerated, and increasingly favoured, one. A time of transition between a house church and a purpose-built basilica when the threat of persecution no longer loomed over the Church. We know from Paul’s letters that the earliest churches met in homes — Romans 16:5 greets “the church in [Prisca and Aquila’s] house,” and similar greetings appear in 1 Corinthians 16:19 and Colossians 4:15. If we were to imagine how a letter from Paul to this house church might...
Luke J. Wilson | 22nd November 2025 | Persecution
Every now and then something happens in this country that feels small on the surface but carries a deeper spiritual weight beneath it. In this case it comes from a Labour council just outside of London when in March of this year, Rushmoor Borough Council attempted to criminalise Christian street preaching. The injunction has thankfully been paused (for now) as Christians rallied, prayed, and pushed back. But the implications of what nearly happened, and could still happen, should give all of us pause. Because once one council tries something like this, others start paying attention. A precedent has been set — not necessarily in law, but in what could be. Someone, somewhere, will look at Rushmoor’s attempt and think, perhaps this is the way to make Christianity quiet again. The Quiet Re-emergence of Old Hostilities We tend to imagine persecution as something ancient or foreign. Lions, arenas, emperors, gulags, terror attacks in far off countries. And sure, we here in the UK are not shedding literal blood for the Gospel, but that doesn’t mean persecution has vanished. It has simply changed shape. Instead of swords and prisons, we face restrictions and injunctions. Instead of mobs dragging believers through the streets, councils draft documents that treat prayer, worship, and evangelism as public threats. The methods have changed, but the intent remains strangely familiar: to push the Gospel to the margins, to confine it to the private sphere, and to make public displays of faith something suspicious, weird, and even harmful. If Rushmoor’s injunction had gone through, it would have made praying with someone in town square, even holding out a leaflet, something punishable by fines or prison time. No blood shed, but freedom restricted and removed. No martyrdom, but the same coercive pressure to be silent. Succumb to Caesar (the local council) or face death (prison/fines etc). History Teaches Us Something the Councils Have Forgotten Whenever authorities have attempted to stifle Christianity, something remarkable has happened: the Church has not faded away, but grown. Opposition has never extinguished faith; instead, it has refined it, purified it, strengthened it. Tertullian famously wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” And while no one in Britain today is being asked to spill blood for Christ, the principle still holds. Pressure produces depth. Threats produce courage. Restrictions produce creativity. This is where real faith takes hold and grows! When believers are told to stop preaching, they remember why they preach. When prayer is threatened, prayer increases. When the gospel is pushed out of the public square, Christians step back into it with clarity and resolve. It’s ironic, really. When the world tries to silence the Church, it ends up drawing attention to the very message it wants to suppress. The Real Danger: Not the Injunction Itself, But What Comes Next The paused injunction in Rushmoor is not the end of the story. If anything, it is the prologue. Because we are now entering a season where councils and governments — pressured by secular expectations and political anxieties — may test the boundaries of religious freedom in ways that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. Once you try to criminalise prayer in public, the next attempt becomes easier. And we’ve already seen examples of this with the so-called “buffer zones” around abortion clinics. Once preaching is labelled “hateful,” more restrictions feel reasonable. A few street preachers have already been arrested this year already. Once a council decides that worship and prayer is “distressing”, others will wonder if they should follow suit. This is how liberties are lost: not in a single moment, but through a drip-feed of small decisions that gradually reshape what is considered normal. That is why Christians cannot afford to shrug this off as a local issue. It is a signpost...
Luke J. Wilson | 29th January 2025 | Easter
Pope Francis has recently expressed the Catholic Church’s willingness to accept a unified date for Easter, a move aimed at fostering greater Christian unity, particularly with the Orthodox Church. This long-standing issue arises from the different calendars used by Western and Eastern Christian traditions — the Gregorian and Julian calendars — leading to discrepancies in Easter celebrations. Talks between Catholic and Orthodox leaders have intensified, hoping a common date could be agreed upon. However, this raises important questions for Protestant denominations regarding whether they would adopt the unified date or risk falling out of alignment with these historic branches of Christianity. Celebrating the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity recently, Pope Francis noted that this year the Easter date coincides with the West’s Gregorian calendar and the East’s Julian calendar. The Pope said, “I renew my appeal that this coincidence may serve as an appeal to all Christians to take a decisive step forward toward unity around a common date for Easter.” “The Catholic Church is open to accepting the date that everyone wants: a date of unity” — Pope Francis The recent discussions between the Catholic and Orthodox churches regarding the unification of the Easter celebration date have some significant implications for Protestant denominations and as an Anglican, the wider Anglican Communion. Historically, the disparity in Easter dates has been a visible manifestation of Christian disunity, and efforts to establish a common date have been ongoing. Previous Attempts In 2016, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby expressed support for a fixed date for Easter, engaging in dialogues with leaders from various Christian traditions, including Pope Francis and Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew. He emphasised the importance of unity in celebrating the resurrection of Christ and hoped for an agreement within a decade, or at least before he retired. Recently uncovered scandals forced him to retire earlier than planned, so that dream isn’t happening for him anymore. A long time ago here in the UK, an act of Parliament was passed in 1928 which allowed for Easter Sunday to be fixed on the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. But this Act has never been activated and so Easter has remained a variable date, determined by the moon’s cycle. From an Anglican perspective, aligning the date of Easter with Catholic and Orthodox churches would be a significant ecumenical step, reflecting a commitment to Christian unity. The Anglican Communion, known for its via media (middle way) approach, often seeks to bridge differences between traditions. Therefore, it is plausible that the Anglican Church would support and adopt a unified Easter date, should an agreement be reached between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. I would at least expect the leadership to discuss it at Synod, and personally, I hope it would be accepted as a step towards global unity on our most important and significant celebration: the resurrection of Christ! For other Protestant denominations though, reactions may vary. Some may view the unification of the Easter date as a positive move towards greater Christian unity and choose to follow suit. Others, valuing their own traditions and independence (or anti-Catholic bias), might prefer to maintain their current practices as a variable date. The impact on Protestant denominations largely depends on their theological perspectives and openness to ecumenical initiatives. Ancient Controversies Before the Council of Nicaea in 325, different Christian communities celebrated Easter on different dates; the council decided that for the unity of the Christian community and its witness, Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This is known as the Quartodeciman (lit. Fourteenth) controversy. It’s called this due to the issue being over w...
Luke J. Wilson | 06th January 2025 | Archaeology
The discovery of an 1,800-year-old silver amulet in Frankfurt, Germany, has captured the attention of archaeologists and theologians alike. Known as the “Frankfurt Silver Inscription,” this artefact is the earliest known evidence of Christianity north of the Alps and serves as a great insight to early Christian theology and liturgical practice. Its early date (230–270 AD) sets it apart from previously known artefacts, which are at least 50 years younger. While there are historical references to Christian communities in Gaul and Upper Germania during the late 2nd century, reliable material evidence of Christian life in the northern Alpine regions generally only dates to the 4th century. This amulet offers new insights into the life and faith of early believers, revealing their theology, liturgical practices, and adaptation of existing traditions. 1. Invoking St. Titus: A Connection to Apostolic Roots One of the most remarkable features of the inscription is its invocation of St. Titus, a disciple and confidant of the Apostle Paul. This early reference highlights the theological importance of Apostolic authority and continuity. Titus, known for his leadership within the early church, symbolises the rootedness of Christian faith in the teachings and mission of the Apostles. In this context, the invocation of a saint also invites a deeper exploration of the “cult of saints,” a term scholars use to describe the veneration of saints within Christian tradition. The cult of saints became a significant aspect of Christian worship in the 4th and 5th centuries, with practices such as the commemoration of martyrs, the dedication of churches to saints, and the belief in their intercessory power. The earliest documented evidence of this practice, including the veneration of relics and the dedication of feast days, often centres on martyrs who bore witness to their faith during times of persecution. However, the invocation of St. Titus in the “Frankfurt Silver Inscription” predates these later developments by over a century, suggesting that the practice of seeking the intercession or spiritual protection of saints may have roots earlier than traditionally believed. This discovery contrasts with historical accounts that identify the late 3rd and early 4th centuries as the period when such practices began to gain prominence within the wider Christian community. As such, the amulet not only sheds light on early Christian devotion but also challenges prevailing assumptions about the origins and development of saintly veneration. Icon of Saint Titus 2. The Trisagion: Early Liturgical Development The phrase “Holy, holy, holy!” — known as the Trisagion — appears prominently in the inscription, marking one of the earliest recorded uses of this liturgical formulation in a Christian context. Though widely recognised in the 4th century, its presence here challenges traditional assumptions about the timeline of liturgical development. This suggests that elements of Christian worship, likely adapted from Jewish practices, were formalised earlier than previously thought. 3. Paul’s Christ Hymn: Scripture as the Foundation of Worship The inscription includes an almost verbatim quotation from Philippians 2:10–11: “At the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” This demonstrates the early integration of Pauline theology into Christian liturgy and devotion. The explicit use of Holy Scripture highlights the centrality of Christ’s lordship in early Christian belief, even before the formal canonisation of the New Testament. 4. A Sacred Object for Protection and Proclamation The amulet, containing sacred text, was likely carried as a personal object of devotion and spiritual protection. Such items underscore the blend of Christian faith with ancient traditions of carrying protective talismans. This use of...
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Guest Author | 31st July 2026 | Prayer
Guest Post By Fiach OBroin-Molloy My own roots lie in the Catholic tradition, but my workbench has brought me into contact with Christians whose devotional lives differ from mine. I make Catholic rosaries, Anglican prayer beads and other forms of devotional beads by hand. That work has not taught me that distinctions between traditions do not matter. It has taught me that, beneath those distinctions, many of us know the same difficulty: we want to pray, but our attention is restless. I have travelled, lived and worked in a number of countries, from parts of Africa to countries further east. Again and again, I encountered beads or knotted cords held, counted or carried in prayer. The words, beliefs and purposes were not the same, and I would not flatten them into one vague spirituality. What stayed with me was the recurring human instinct to give devotion rhythm and weight—to let the body help the mind and heart remain present. For a Christian, however, that instinct is gathered into a particular faith—the faith confessed in the creeds. Our prayer is addressed to the God made known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is shaped by Scripture and centred on Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, crucified and risen. Prayer beads do not broaden that confession into something less definite. At their best, they help us stay with it. A faith that takes flesh seriously Christian prayer is never only an activity of the mind. We speak and sing. We stand, kneel and bow. We fold our hands, make the sign of the cross, and receive bread and wine. The Christian faith does not ask us to escape being embodied creatures. At its centre is the astonishing declaration that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). Material things are not God, but they can serve our attention to God. That is the modest place in which I understand prayer beads. They do not create faith, improve the words of Scripture or make prayer more sincere. They simply give the hands something quiet to do while the heart and mind try to remain present. As a maker, I think about weight, texture, spacing and movement. A bead should pass naturally beneath the thumb. The cord or chain should be strong enough to be returned to repeatedly. A good set of prayer beads should not continually demand admiration for itself. Its purpose is to become quiet in the hand. Over time, beads polish, wood darkens and metal takes on the small marks of use. I rarely know the prayers that have been said with something I have made, but sometimes its wear tells me that it has been held often. That is a different kind of beauty from newness: not decoration, but evidence of return. What the hands bring to Scripture Lectio Divina invites us to read Scripture slowly and receptively. Luke J. Wilson has written much more fully about its four movements—reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation—and I would not try to redefine that teaching here. What interests me as a maker is the point at which a reader’s hand might support that attention. Most of us have become highly practised at moving quickly through words. We skim messages, headlines and pages, often looking for the next piece of information before we have received the one in front of us. Sacred reading asks something different. It asks us to stay. A bead introduces a small resistance to speed. It marks a pause and gives us somewhere to return when the mind has already hurried ahead. The Anglican prayer beads I make contain a cross, an invitatory bead, four cruciform beads and four groups of seven, often called weeks. I know that structure first through the work of my hands, not because I would presume to tell Anglicans how they ought to pray. What strikes me about it is its spaciousness: there are landmarks, passages and repeated opportunities to return to the cross. One possible practice would be to choose a short passage from the Gospels. At the cross, the reader might remember that Christ is the centre of the reading. ...
Luke J. Wilson | 29th July 2026 | Faith & Reason
��Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18:38) What is “truth”? A question famously asked by Pilate to Jesus during his trial. Ironically, Pilate was speaking to the embodiment of Truth itself. John 14:6Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’ Here’s a little ‘riddle’ to think about while you read this; see if you agree or not: “all truth is fact, but not all facts are truth”. I’ll explain it at the end if you’re confused. Jesus is the ultimate Truth, but in a world and society that is becoming increasingly more relative, how do we test the truth and know what’s real or not? Especially with the sudden rise of AI video and photos getting more and more realistic, that old adage “the camera never lies” is completely false now. This makes sifting and filtering facts from fiction on social media all the more difficult. Memes and images are shared stating claims bluntly and authoritatively as truth, which people just assume are accurate and then share it hundreds of thousands of times. Truth has been replaced by opinion masquerading as truth. “Your truth”, “my truth”, “their truth”. But we can’t just blindly accept everything we see and are told. We must use our brains, check the sources and use our reasoning. God gave us intellect and reasoning to be used. In Isaiah 1:18, God invites us to come and reason together with him. We don’t follow a blind faith, we’re never asked to believe “just because”. The Old Testament is full of times when the historical examples of God’s actions are used as an anchor and reason for faith, and the same is true in the New Testament where we have the Gospels as eyewitness accounts, rooted in history. Paul writes to say that 500 people saw the risen Christ and that many are still alive so you can go and verify it for yourself and that he is passing on what he received from trusted people. The resurrection itself is grounded in it being a real event that if shown otherwise would make our faith “futile” and that we would be people to be most pitied. 1 Corinthians 15:17“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” So with this in mind about our faith being grounded, all the more we should aim to do the same in other aspects of our lives. “Do your own research” is a common mantra online, but that in itself isn’t just Googling something and taking the first result that pops up. Especially now as most search engines give an AI overview first, which is just a compilation of the top results, not anything verified or fact-checked. And top results don’t always mean best results, or even accurate results. It typically just means the best keyworded and SEO-optimised result, which could be anything. To properly research, you must know which are trusted sources, reputable websites as well as looking up people who are experts and authorities in their fields. Now this doesn’t always mean they are right but at least you’ll be better informed to make up your own mind and make decisions based on well-researched information, rather than the first blog you find online, or the most viewed YouTube video with someone yelling “facts” at you. Doing your own research means doing the leg-work in tracing down sources and footnotes and citations to see who said what and where it originated to ensure its faithful and trustworthy, and used in context. The answer and example of the riddle The “Black Swan Problem” Strictly speaking, it highlights the difference between observed facts and absolute truth: The “Fact” (at the time): For thousands of years, every recorded, verified observation of a swan in Europe was white. As far as European zoologists were concerned, “all swans are white” was a well-documented, empirically backed fact. The Truth: Millions of black swans were happily swimming around in Western Australia. The truth was always that black swan...
Luke J. Wilson | 27th July 2026 | Archaeology
In early July 2026, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced something pretty amazing: an entire Byzantine-era city, buried beneath the sands of the Dakhla Oasis, had been uncovered almost intact! Streets, homes, bread ovens, a fortress, and at its heart, a fourth-century basilica church. That might not seem very exciting on first glance. But this find deserves a closer look, because it puts flesh on something we usually only encounter in the abstract: what it actually looked like when Christianity took root, house by house, in an ordinary town far from the centres of imperial power. What Was Found The excavation, carried out by an Egyptian mission under the Supreme Council of Antiquities at the Ain El-Sabil site in the New Valley Governorate, roughly 185 miles west of Luxor, has been underway for several seasons. According to Hisham El Leithy, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the settlement was laid out on a deliberate grid — north-south thoroughfares crossed by east-west streets, forming open squares and public spaces. This wasn’t a huddle of huts; it was a planned town. At the centre of that plan stood a basilica church dating to the mid-fourth century AD, overlooking one of the main streets. Around it, archaeologists found the remains of two watchtowers, a heavily fortified structure with thick defensive walls, and houses with spacious reception halls and vaulted roofs — complete with bread ovens, kitchens, and grinding stones for processing grain. Everyday life, preserved almost exactly as it was left. Two houses stand out that have been identified. One belonged to a man named Tisous,* identified as a church deacon, dating to the second half of the fourth century. The other belonged to a man named Tabibos. Over a thousand years later and we know the name of who owned a house and a home-church; I always find it fascinating! Archaeologists believe Tabibos’s house, which dates to the early fourth century, functioned as a house church before the basilica was ever built. A collection of coins bearing Byzantine emperors, Christian symbols and Latin inscriptions was uncovered during the excavation. (Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities via Facebook; Dea Picture Library/De Agostini via Getty Images) There’s also a documentary find that’s easy to skim past but genuinely significant: nearly 200 ostraca — broken pieces of pottery and limestone used as everyday writing material — inscribed in Coptic and Greek. Diaa Zahran, head of the Islamic, Coptic and Jewish Antiquities Sector, described them as recording sales transactions, correspondence, and other mundane details of daily life. Things we rarely get a glimpse into as the mundane rarely makes history. Alongside these, the mission recovered a substantial haul of bronze coins bearing Byzantine emperors and Christian symbols, plus gold coins from the reign of Constantius II (337–361 AD) — coinage that anchors the site’s prosperity firmly within the fourth century. Before the Basilica: The House Church at Ain El-Sabil What makes Tabibos’s house the most theologically interesting part of this discovery is timing. If it predates the basilica and dates to the early fourth century, it sits right at — or just before — the pivot point of Roman-Egyptian Christian history: the years surrounding Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 AD, when Christianity moved from a persecuted minority faith to a tolerated, and increasingly favoured, one. A time of transition between a house church and a purpose-built basilica when the threat of persecution no longer loomed over the Church. We know from Paul’s letters that the earliest churches met in homes — Romans 16:5 greets “the church in [Prisca and Aquila’s] house,” and similar greetings appear in 1 Corinthians 16:19 and Colossians 4:15. If we were to imagine how a letter from Paul to this house church might...
Luke J. Wilson | 09th March 2026 | Archaeology
I first came across the Alexamenos graffito back in Bible college in the early 2000s. It was one of those “fun facts” that gets dropped into a church history lecture and sticks with you — the ancient Roman equivalent of someone spray-painting an insult on a wall. I filed it away, thought it was fascinating, and largely forgot about it for two decades. Then, recently, I discovered something about it I had never known. There’s a response to it. Scratched in a different room, in a different hand. So I started digging into this more to verify the information and discovered more historical curiosities surrounding the graffiti than I ever knew existed which contextualises the image so much more than it just being a random insult using a donkey. A Crude Drawing on a Wall Sometime around the late second to early third century AD, someone scratched a picture into the plaster wall of a building on the Palatine Hill in Rome — part of what had once been a paedagogium, a kind of boarding school for imperial page boys. The building was eventually sealed off when the street was walled up to support extensions above it, which is why the graffiti survived at all. It wasn’t rediscovered until 1857. The image is rough, almost childlike. To the left, a young man — clearly a Roman soldier or guard — raises one hand in a gesture of worship. Before him is a cross. And on that cross is a crucified figure with the head of a donkey. Below it, written in Greek: Alexamenos worships his god. It is, in the most literal sense, a mocking cartoon. Someone who knew a Christian named Alexamenos decided to ridicule him for his faith. The message is clear enough: your god is an animal, a criminal, a joke. You’re worshipping a crucified fool. But here’s the thing I discovered: the donkey head wasn’t as random as I always thought it was. It wasn’t some strange personal insult conjured from nowhere. Without knowing the background, it looks bizarre, and possibly random. Why a donkey? Once you understand the cultural context, though, it makes complete sense. The person who drew it was reaching for a well-worn, widely recognised slur — the ancient equivalent of an internet meme that any Roman would have immediately understood. Where the Donkey Slur Came From The story starts not with Christians but with Jews. A first-century Egyptian-Greek writer named Apion (who was no friend of Judaism) spread the claim that inside the Jerusalem Temple, Jews kept a golden donkey’s head as a sacred object of worship which was apparently discovered when Antiochus Epiphanes destroyed the temple in 167 BC. It was a fabrication, and a fairly outrageous one, but it circulated widely enough that the Jewish historian Josephus felt compelled to write an entire refutation of it. His work Against Apion systematically dismantles Apion’s claims, calling the donkey story a shameless invention. But mud sticks, and in the Roman world, where anti-Jewish sentiment was common currency, the slur took on a life of its own. When Christianity began to spread — seen by most Romans as simply a strange Jewish offshoot — the same accusation got recycled and redirected. By the second and third centuries, it was Christians specifically who were being accused of donkey-worship, and the charge had made its way into popular culture. Tertullian, writing around 197–200 AD in his Ad Nationes, Book I.14 and Apology, describes a caricature being paraded around the streets of Carthage: a figure dressed in a toga, one foot holding a book, with donkey’s ears and hooves. It was labelled Onokoitēs by the pagans: “the donkey-begotten” (or literally “he who lies in an ass’s manger” as an insult to Christ). Tertullian writes about it with weary exasperation, sarcasm, and the tone of someone tired of having to address the same ridiculous smear again and again. So the Alexamenos graffito wasn’t an original insult. It was someone deployin...
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