Dr. Timothy Larsen writes about serious, energetic faith in the places other historians assume the faith cannot really be. A Victorian Christian fantasist. A Westminster canon who quietly set aside biblical authority. And, in his newest and most acclaimed book, seventeen Anglican chaplains who came out of the trenches of World War I as radicals. Tim is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and the 2025 president of the American Society of Church History, and this hour is us moving through three of his books at once. The Fires of Moloch takes its title from H. G. Wells’s line describing Britain sending its sons into the fires of a false god during the Passchendaele Offensive. George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles takes the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish theological turn from the Age of Atonement to the Age of the Incarnation and shows what happens when a rigorously Calvinist minister-turned-fantasy-writer decides doubt is the door in, and therefore the door out, of a mature faith. Every Leaf, Line, and Letter returns to Tim’s PhD supervisor David Bebbington’s famous quadrilateral for defining evangelicalism and asks what it takes to keep that word doing honest work now that polls will code Muslim Trump voters as evangelical. Come for Anglo-Catholic sacramental confession as battle-tested ministry. Stay for the George MacDonald grandmother who burned her son’s violin because he enjoyed music too much.
Highlights from the conversation
Seventeen chaplains, one book, one furnace. The Passchendaele Offensive of 1917 — one of the great, seemingly futile battles of the First World War — was the crucible in which seventeen Anglican military chaplains wrote The Church in the Furnace, the book that would in turn generate Tim’s The Fires of Moloch more than a century later. What united them across churchmanship (Anglo-Catholic, evangelical, liberal, broad) was the shared conviction that Church of England ministry, particularly among the working-class men in their care, had been fatally scripted. The burial service, in particular, did not fit the situation. Every chaplain went off script. The Prayer Book revision movement, the Life and Liberty Movement, the Industrial Christian Fellowship, and Anglican support for the League of Nations all trace back to what these seventeen saw in the trenches.
Woodbine Willie was in on the marketing. Tim’s revisionist take on G. A. Studdert Kennedy, the most famous padre of them all. The legend: the soldiers gave him the nickname because he handed out free Woodbine cigarettes. Tim’s investigation: soldiers gave deflating nicknames when they gave them at all, and there is no first-hand evidence that any soldier coined this one. Studdert Kennedy gave the nickname to himself. A sacrificial pastoral genius who was also perfectly willing to invent his own persona if it made the ministry connect. Tony Campolo’s line applies: if it’s not true, it ought to be.
Neville Talbot and the recovered body. The story Tim tells even at parties. Neville Talbot, from an aristocratic Anglican family whose grandfathers were earls, was a chaplain at the front when his brother Gilbert — a lieutenant, and lieutenants at the front lasted a matter of weeks — was killed in a charge. Neville tried twice to recover his body from the active battlefield, an Iliad-shaped act. He succeeded. He married during the war. His wife died of complications from the birth of their son. He named the son Gilbert, in honor of his brother. His namesake son died at twenty-one in the Second World War. That is a life.
Battle-tested ministry. One of the surprising outcomes of the war for the Church of England: practices that had been fiercely contested a generation earlier — you could get an Anglican priest jailed for hearing confession in the late Victorian period — became broadly accepted after the war because they worked in the trenches. Catholic priests scored big with soldiers by their tenacity with last rites, sacramental confession, and physical saints’ medals that functioned as reassurance-in-hand. Tripp’s insight, which stopped Tim in his tracks: Aragorn’s blessing of the dying Boromir in The Two Towers is a last-rites scene — including the pastoral discipline of never speaking of the betrayal again. Tolkien was processing the same trenches the chaplains were, in his own key.
The door of doubt, and the piety MacDonald left behind. From Boyd Hilton’s argument that British theology shifted around 1850 from the Age of Atonement to the Age of the Incarnation, Tim reads George MacDonald as the pastoral hero of the incarnational turn — the Scottish minister raised in relentlessly stringent Calvinism who found the penal-substitution frame morally unbearable and reoriented around the sanctification of all of creation through the incarnation of Christ. From his novel Lilith: a door in and therefore a door out. Doubt is not the enemy of faith. It is how faith becomes adult. The romantic road — love for nature, for music, for another person — is not competition with the love of God but the road toward it. The grandmother who burned her son’s violin because he enjoyed music too much is the picture of the piety MacDonald was resisting. Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien inherit the reorientation. Lewis calls MacDonald my master.
What Bebbington’s quadrilateral cannot cover. Every Leaf, Line, and Letter returns to Tim’s PhD supervisor David Bebbington’s famous four-point definition of evangelicalism — crucicentrism, conversionism, biblicism, activism. Tim defends it as a way to name what a Korean-language evangelical church in America has in common with an Anglican evangelical in 1740s England and a Nigerian Pentecostal in the 1980s. But he also names the limit: if you start on the ground with people in Arkansas who call themselves evangelical, you are not going to find the love of the cross or the centrality of scripture animating what they are actually doing politically. Polling makes it worse — when the poll defines evangelical by removing non-white respondents on the assumption that race is more determinative than religion, of course the poll produces a monolithic answer. That is called your poll design.Tim’s closing worry, which lands right on Tripp’s own worries about his oldest son heading into a fully algorithmic world: it may be the medium of the in-person weekly gathering, not the message, that is becoming counter-cultural.
About our guest
Dr. Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College, an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 2025 he served as President of the American Society of Church History. He has authored or edited more than twenty books.
Books at the center of this conversation: The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One; George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment ; and Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present.
Join Our Summer 2026 Online Summit with Diana Butler Bass & Tripp Fuller!
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.
Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.
New Class Just Announced - The Christ Empired Couldn’t Keep
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together.
It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.
Join Us at Theology Beer Camp 2026 - Will You Be There?
THEOLOGY BEER CAMP
October 8-10, 2026 - Kansas City, MO
Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craft beer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. Organized by Homebrewed Christianity, this event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities.
NOW ANNOUNCING:
The Theology Beer Camp Pre-Event
We’re excited to share details about our Pre-Event experience. Think of it like a theological pre-game.
Led by Thomas Jay Oord and Jonathan Foster, we’re bringing you a fantastic lineup of scholars, authors, pastors, and practitioners. This workshop-style gathering is a focused deep dive into Open and Relational Theology before the main event begins.
Think of it as:
A relational head start on Beer Camp
A chance to explore ideas in greater depth
An opportunity to meet people and start building connections before the larger gathering begins
Topics include:
God and an evolving universe
Open and relational approaches to ministry
Theology centered on love and relationship
Process thought and contemporary spirituality
Faith, creativity, freedom, and the future
The Pre-Event takes place on October 8 from 9am–4pm and is available as an add-on registration.
