Long before modern debates about Santa, paganism, or December 25, Christmas was outlawed, fined, and erased from public life—especially by the Puritans, who saw it as unbiblical and socially dangerous. In this episode, we tell the story of how Christmas nearly disappeared, and how it returned transformed.

From Washington Irving’s nostalgic vision of “Old Christmas” to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, we explore how Christmas was rescued—not by laws or theology, but by imagination, compassion, and moral clarity. This episode reveals why Christmas still matters, why joy keeps returning, and why incarnation refuses to stay abstract.

In the previous episode, we explored how early Christians wrestled with language about God before later creeds settled the terms of the debate. In this follow-up, we return to the sources themselves—especially Tertullian’s Against Praxeas—to clarify what was (and was not) being claimed.

This episode examines the instinctive resistance many ordinary believers had toward emerging theological categories, the difference between doctrinal systems and monotheistic reflexes, and how later orthodoxy was clarified, consolidated, and ultimately enforced. Rather than arguing for modern positions, this conversation presses into the historical complexity that often gets flattened after the fact.

When we look at the second and third centuries, a fascinating pattern emerges: the earliest Christians—“the simple, the unlearned, the majority,” as Tertullian calls them—pushed back strongly against emerging theological innovations that seemed to divide God into multiple divine persons. Though many of the systems of belief did not align with the Oneness doctrine, the instinct was unmistakably monotheistic. Their resistance, especially in Rome, Carthage, and parts of Asia Minor, was so strong that major writers such as Tertullian, Hippolytus, and later Epiphanius felt compelled to address it.

The Bible never builds ladders of worth.
In this episode, we unpack why favor isn’t vertical, honor doesn’t create elites, and how the gospel dismantles celebrity culture from the inside out.

Join in on a 2024 interview with various listeners present, hosted by Dr. Dean Anderson with Preserving the Christian Family. This topic discusses the Threefold Cord of Development and how it can benefit anyone looking to plant a church and/or develop a culture of engagement in the local church.

We begin to do a deep dive into the Bible, and in this episode, we introduce the opening text of the Bible and how it relates to later texts and the Christian life.

In this episode, submission is reoriented toward a biblical pattern of understanding that lifts the idea above fallen premises of domination and subjection. Leadership should flow through submission, not above it or around it.

Listen in on our first theological narrative! This episode, and future ones, bring theological articles directly from the literary front of AlphaTav. This narrated article examines the biblical context of "touch not mine anointed."

In this episode, Pastor Tim Hadden explores the Council of Nicaea not as the triumph of truth, but as the birth of a compromise. When Constantine gathered the bishops of the empire, his goal wasn’t revelation—it was resolution. Between Arian subordination and Sabellian simplicity, the church drafted a creed that aimed for peace more than truth.

In this episode, Pastor Tim Hadden introduces Watchman Nee’s Spiritual Authority and explores how its influence has shaped both healthy and unhealthy approaches to leadership within Pentecostal contexts. He unpacks the spectrum between authoritarian control and passive non-leadership, and begins tracing how Nee’s ideas became foundational—sometimes problematically so—in modern church culture.