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Published by Mid-America Reformed Seminary
Join the faculty of Mid-America Reformed Seminary as they discuss everything from theology to cultural issues from a Reformed perspective. *The opinions presented in each episode are those of the individual speaker and do not necessarily represent the views of the Seminary.*
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Every biblical counselor assumes their approach comes straight from Scripture alone, but what if the underlying architecture came from an apologist rather than a counselor? In this third episode of our MarsCast series on biblical counseling, Dr. Jared Poulton joins Jared and Dr. Alan Strange to reveal the hidden intellectual DNA of the biblical counseling movement: how Cornelius Van Til's presuppositional apologetics (covenantal knowledge, the antithesis, the rejection of "brute facts") became the theological scaffolding Jay Adams built his entire system on. But it's not a simple story of inheritance. Dr. Strange raises a pointed challenge about what gets lost when the antithesis is applied to counseling without its necessary counterweight, common grace, right down to what that means for how Christians assess the insights of secular psychology. If you've ever wondered why biblical counselors are so skeptical of Freud, CBT, or trauma therapy, this episode traces that instinct straight back to its source. Find Dr. Poulton's book here .
He was a pastor with a PhD in speech, no formal training in counseling, and a class he never wanted to teach, so how did Jay Adams end up rewriting the rules for how the church cares for hurting people? In this second episode, Dr. Jared Poulton returns with Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Alan Strange to tell the origin story behind the man behind biblical counseling: a reluctant professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, an emotional pastoral encounter he never forgot, and the unlikely chain of events that turned a scrapped lecture into a movement. Dr. Poulton also unpacks the three surprising influences that shaped his thinking, and why, even decades later, biblical counselors are still wrestling with what he got right and where he needs correcting.
What happens when the church stops trusting herself to help her own people—and hands the job to the therapist's couch instead? In the 1970s, one pastor's book sold a quarter of a million copies by daring to say pastors and elders were still competent to counsel their flocks from Scripture alone. In this first episode of a four-part series, Dr. Jared Poulton joins Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Alan Strange to trace how the biblical counseling movement was born out of a head-on collision between the rise of secular psychology and the church's calling to shepherd souls—and why the "alphabet soup" of counseling organizations it spawned still shapes what pastors, elders, and even your church library look like today. Whether you've never heard the term "nouthetic counseling" or you've read every Paul Tripp book on the shelf, this episode will change how you see the counsel happening in your own congregation. Next episode: the man behind it all. Learn more about the Institute of Reformed Biblical Counseling . Find Dr. Poulton's new book here .
For much of the 20th century, many academic theologians operated on the assumption that Calvin's successors (Beza, the Westminster Divines, the scholastic tradition) had in some ways betrayed him and traded a warm, Christ-centered theology for cold, rationalistic system-building. Then Richard Muller spent decades in the primary sources and found the picture was substantially wrong. In this final episode of What Did Calvin Actually Say? , Jared sits down with Dr. Cornelis Venema to untangle one of Reformed theology's most consequential scholarly debates and to ask what it means to stand at the end of a tradition rather than cherry-picking a moment from it.
Every faction in today's church-and-state wars has a Calvin: the Christian nationalist Calvin, the two-kingdoms Calvin, the theonomist Calvin. But what if they're all working with a myth? The real Calvin was a French immigrant with no voting rights, frequently at odds with Geneva's city council, and ultimately exiled from the city. In this episode, host Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Venema cut through the legends surrounding Geneva to recover Calvin's political theology, and what it might (and might not) have to say to a church that is tearing itself apart over politics.
In 1553, Michael Servetus was executed in Geneva, and John Calvin approved. It's the charge that haunts every defense of Calvinism, and also the story that gets reduced to a tweet and weaponized in every online argument about it. But what actually happened? In this episode of MarsCast, host Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Cornelis Venema resist the easy verdicts, neither whitewashing nor weaponizing, and work through the historical, theological, and political complexity of one of the Reformation's most contested moments.
MarsCast is back, and we're returning from our July hiatus with an episode worth the wait. Everyone's got a Calvin quote ready to fire, but whose Calvin are they quoting? The Calvinist Calvin? The internet-meme Calvin? The cold, predestination-obsessed villain who invented a God without compassion? Dr. Cornelis Venema, President Emeritus at Mid-America Reformed Seminary and one of the most careful Calvin scholars working today, joins host Jared Luttjeboer to launch a four-part series that strips away the caricatures and returns to the sources. Before you can know what Calvin said, you have to reckon with how badly we've misread him. Dr. Venema is exactly the right person to help us do that.
What happens when Christians forget that grace, not merit, is the foundation of election? In this concluding conversation with Dr. Alan Strange, we move from theology to public life and explore how the doctrine of election dismantles pride, reshapes political engagement, and calls believers to a posture of humility. As debates over nationalism, identity, and power continue to intensify, Dr. Strange argues that the church's greatest need is not political triumph but faithful Christian witness rooted in the unchanging love of God. And as the series closes, and before MarsCast takes a brief summer hiatus, returning in August 2026, we lift our eyes beyond every earthly nation to the coming kingdom that puts all politics in its proper perspective.
Israel wasn't chosen because it was great. God said so himself. In this episode of MarsCast, Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Alan Strange open Deuteronomy 7 and discuss how divine election has never been about merit, national greatness, or cultural superiority. So what does that mean for Christians today who are tempted to baptize political power with the language of chosenness? The answer, Dr. Strange argues, isn't disengagement, but the harder road of humble engagement, where the Beatitudes, not a political platform, shape how believers enter the public square.
A short clip. A blunt question. And apparently, more than a few people had thoughts about it. When Dr. Alan Strange asked his evening class whether anyone really believes some nations or ethnic groups are superior to others, the clip made the rounds, and the comment sections lit up. In this episode of MarsCast, we slow the moment down as Dr. Strange walks through what Paul was actually doing at the Areopagus, why the gospel "relativizes" natural kinship without dismissing it, and why the impulse to rank peoples by blood runs straight into the unity of the human race that Scripture plainly teaches. The church has spoken on this before. The question is whether she'll speak clearly now.
Paul didn't write Romans because he had a lot to say; he wrote it because he needed a church ready to send him to Spain. That single missionary ambition is what holds the most theologically dense letter in the New Testament together, and it exposes one of the deepest fault lines in the church today: the split between doctrinal seriousness and genuine concern for the lost. In this final conversation, Dr. Marcus Mininger presses the question neither side wants to answer — what goes wrong when missionaries bypass careful theology, and what does it say about a confessionally rigorous church that has quietly stopped caring about the unreached? Romans, it turns out, is a rebuke to both. The greatest missionary of the apostolic church was also one of its most significant theologians. That was not a coincidence then. It should not be a coincidence now.
Why is Romans so long? Paul wasn't writing a theology textbook; he was trying to recruit a missionary partner, and the Roman church wasn't ready. In this episode, host Jared Luttjeboer sits down with Dr. Marcus Mininger to unpack the three concrete obstacles standing between Paul and an effective mission to Spain: a church that had only heard caricatures of his gospel, a Jewish-Gentile rift threatening to fracture the very community he needed, and a culture so saturated in status competition that grace itself was foreign to it. Romans isn't long despite being a missionary letter. It's long because of it.
Everyone knows Romans for justification by faith, but what if that's only part of the story? In this episode, host Jared Luttjeboer sits down with Dr. Marcus Mininger to explore the provocative thesis that Paul's letter to the Romans is, at its core, a missionary fundraising document aimed at getting the Roman church to bankroll a mission to Spain. Drawing on nearly a decade of renewed scholarly attention to Romans as an actual letter, Dr. Mininger unpacks a stunning structural pattern — nine interlocking parallels bracketing the entire epistle — that Paul himself engineered to guide how the letter should be read. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. This is part one of three.
The hardest person for an elder to pastor is himself. In this final episode of our series on pastoral leadership, Dr. J. Mark Beach doesn't let elders off the hook. He looks at the unchecked bad habits of the heart, the hidden sins that hollow out a shepherd's credibility, and the gap between what they confront in others and what they tolerate in themselves. He's candid about what that costs a man over time, and what it costs the people under his care who need a shepherd with skin in the game, not a functionary with a clean conscience. The gospel that elders administer to broken people is the same gospel they desperately need. God, Beach reminds us, shoots straight with crooked arrows. But first you have to admit you're bent.
Some elders think the job is the meeting. They show up, they vote, and then they adjourn. Dr. J. Mark Beach disagrees. In this episode of MarsCast, Beach unpacks why the real work of eldership happens in coffee shops, hospital rooms, and living rooms, not the consistory room, and why elders who get the polity right but miss the gospel are practicing something other than Christianity. Drawing on Jesus' parable of the two lost sons, he makes a searching case that many elders are more elder brother than they'd like to admit, and what repentance from that looks like in pastoral practice.
What happens when a church treats its pastor like a contractor who's hired to perform, expected to comply, and fired when inconvenient? In this episode, Jared Luttjeboer sits down with Dr. J. Mark Beach to expose the "hired help" mentality quietly shaping too many Reformed congregations. They contrast the transactional model of pastoral ministry — where the pastor answers to the people writing his paycheck — with a transformational model rooted in covenantal calling, prophetic faithfulness, and the lordship of Christ. It's a distinction that exposes not just how a church treats its pastor, but how seriously it takes the Word of God.
What if the way your church thinks about pastoral leadership is quietly undermining it? In this first episode of a four-part series, host Jared Luttjeboer sits down with Dr. J. Mark Beach to examine what Scripture actually demands of a pastor: not a facilitator, not a talking head, not a carefully managed voice on the periphery, but a shepherd who leads. Drawing on Peter's jarring confrontation in Acts 5 and the distinction between shepherding and cowboying, Dr. Beach makes the case that sidelining the pastor means sidelining the very person trained to help the church. If you've ever wondered why so many congregations feel rudderless, this conversation is where to start.
What does it actually look like for a church to move toward women with the good news of Jesus without swinging left into egalitarianism or right into a cold, avoidant piety? In this final conversation with Dr. Andrew Compton, the theory ends, and the hard work begins. From rethinking the reflexive male avoidance of women in the name of purity, to the provocative question of whether church leaders are actually listening to the women in their congregations, Dr. Compton offers strategies that will comfort some and unsettle others, all grounded in the belief that if Jesus valued women in their womanhood, His church must too.
Critics call the Bible misogynistic. Some point to the Gnostic Gospels as the "real" feminist Jesus. But Dr. Andrew Compton argues that the canonical Jesus, the actual Jesus, treated women in ways so countercultural that Christianity attracted more women than men across the Roman Empire. In this episode of MarsCast, we examine what the Gospels reveal about Jesus' heart for women: how he taught them, healed them, protected them, and elevated them as moral exemplars, and what a troubling passage in Deuteronomy tells us about God's posture toward women all along. Plus, Dr. Compton exposes the twin errors pulling churches in opposite directions: a leftward drift into intersectional categories and a rightward retreat into a "biblical womanhood" that looks suspiciously like suburban North American culture with a Proverbs 31 verse attached.
Millions of women were promised that liberation would bring fulfillment, so why are so many of them exhausted, angry, and searching for something more? In this first episode of a three-part series, host Jared Luttjeboer sits down with Dr. Andrew Compton, professor of Old Testament at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, to trace the arc of feminist ideology from the Industrial Revolution through today's intersectional moment, and to ask a question the culture rarely entertains: what if feminism itself is the source of women's disappointment? This isn't a conversation about women's ordination or culture-war point-scoring, but a pastoral and historical reckoning with what women have been told will make them happy, and why it hasn't.
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