Offensive Christianity

My Forward

What’s this, you say? Another book about biblical masculinity?

I get the skepticism. I co-wrote one a few years back. That’s how I ended up with this gig. I wasn’t the first to enter the fray, and Chase won’t be the last. There will be more. There should be more. No generation gets to coast on the study and sweat of the last one. And if they try, they lose everything.

John Murray saw this long before our crisis hit. He wrote:

When any generation is content to rely upon its own theological heritage and refuses to explore for itself the riches of divine revelation, then declension is already under way and heterodoxy will be the lot of the succeeding generation. The powers of darkness are never idle and in combating error each generation must fight its own battle in exposing and correcting the same… A theology that does not build on the past ignores our debt to history and naively overlooks the fact that the present is conditioned by history. A theology that relies on the past evades the demands of the present.

He might as well have been speaking directly to us.

But here’s the catch: most American evangelicals didn’t even have a real theological heritage to rely upon in the first place. They weren’t handed creeds or catechisms or a library of thick, spine-forming books. They grew up in churches where the “library” was Jesus Calling, a women’s devotional with a flower on the cover, a Max Lucado paperback, and maybe a prophecy chart folded in the back of someone’s study Bible. That’s not a heritage. That’s the spiritual equivalent of surviving on marshmallows.

The only Christians in America who had an actual inheritance, creeds, catechisms, confessions, shelves of Puritan paperbacks, and Banner of Truth reprints were the Reformed churches. And even there, something went wrong. They had the materials. They had the doctrinal clarity. They had the theological treasury. But many of them failed to hand down the practices, instincts, and formation that once animated those truths. In too many cases, they passed down books without backbone, orthodoxy without obedience, and confessions without culture.

So the broader evangelical world was starved for lack of substance, while the Reformed world often died from lack of application. And now this current generation is standing in the middle of the mess: a generation with little real theology to inherit, and even less embodied practice to imitate.

That’s the context Murray’s warning lands in.

We are living in exactly what he described: a moment where Christians either had no heritage, or had a heritage they never learned to use. And because of that, we inherited a world collapsing under its own softness. The problem isn’t that the past generations didn’t produce theological riches. They did. The problem is that modern Christians, both evangelical and Reformed, stopped exploring those riches for themselves. We either didn’t receive anything at all, or we received it like museum pieces: admired, dusted, quoted, and ignored.

So, as Murray warned, the decline set in quietly. And now it’s everywhere.

Men are confused. Homes are unstable. Churches are anxious and increasingly feminized. Institutions that once formed men into something solid now produce men who feel fragile, guilty for being male, and disconnected from their own bodies. This decline isn’t mysterious. It is the predictable outcome of a Christianity that preaches redemption while blushing at creation, especially the creation of man as man.

Evangelical churches responded to this collapse by turning to sentimentality. They borrowed the language of therapy, trimmed sermons to avoid offense, and reshaped men’s ministry around emotional vulnerability instead of responsibility. The result is a generation discipled to be harmless, compliant, expressive, and spiritually inert. No wonder young men look outside the church for strength. If the only message they hear inside is “be nice, be safe, be soft,” they’ll find someone who demands more of them.

This is precisely the failure Murray warned about: leaning on the past or, in the case of evangelicals, having no past to lean on at all, instead of doing the hard work of rediscovering Scripture for themselves and facing the present with courage.

And that’s what Chase does in this book.

He rejects the low-expectation Christianity that hollowed out the modern church. He refuses to act like men are disembodied spirits floating through life. He refuses to treat biological realities as irrelevant to discipleship. And he refuses to ignore the cultural forces actively unmaking our sons.

Instead, Davis does what every generation must do if they hope to hand anything down: he takes Scripture in one hand and history in the other, and he presses both into the bodies, souls, and responsibilities of real men living right now.

He isn’t inventing a new theology of masculinity. He’s recovering and applying the old one, the one our fathers once took for granted because they lived it. He understands what our forebears understood: theology is meant to shape men, not sedate them. Doctrine is meant to produce courage, not provide excuses for passivity. And the glory God built into men isn’t recovered by coddling them or treating their instincts like liabilities.

Men need a faith that trains the hands for war and the heart for sacrifice. Something that asks enough of them to actually change their lives.

That’s the heart of Offensive Christianity: a call to reclaim the manhood the Bible actually commands, not the sanitized version our age prefers.

Some readers will flinch at this. At the language of aggression, dominion, discipline, and embodied responsibility. But that reaction says far more about us than it does about Scripture. The Bible never blushes to command men to rule, build, guard, fight, and lead. Only modern Christians apologize for the very things God requires. And the people who apologize tend to fall into two groups: those who clutch an inherited past without ever building anything on it, and those who never had a past to clutch in the first place.

This is why Chase Davis’s work matters. He isn’t reinventing masculinity, baptizing the latest online fad, or chasing a moment. He’s doing the slow, honest work Murray insisted every generation must do: taking the riches of the past, opening the Scriptures anew, and applying them to a generation that has never actually seen strong, obedient manhood lived out with conviction. He refuses to dodge the hard parts. He refuses to drift into the sentimental fog. And in doing so, he becomes a needed voice, someone willing to carry the theological weight others set down.

This book ends the evasion. It speaks plainly about what God requires of men.

It isn’t brutal for shock value. It’s brutal the way steel is brutal, because softness can’t bear weight, and men were made to bear weight. It’s brutal the way repentance is brutal, because sin must be carved out, not comforted. It’s brutal the way Christ is brutal, because His love drives Him to confront where we would rather be coddled. True love refuses passivity, and passivity always hates being confronted.

And Lord willing, this work won’t stop with us. Each generation must rediscover the faith for themselves, must enter Scripture with hungry minds and obedient hearts, but Chase is at least laying down a map. He’s marking the landmarks, the old paths, the dangers, the cliffs. He cannot walk the way for our sons, nor should he. But he is making sure they don’t start the journey blind.

Our generation needs this clarity. And the next generation will pay dearly if we refuse to rediscover it, embody it, and hand it down with strength instead of sentimentality.

The present makes demands that inherited theology cannot answer on its own. But the Scriptures can. And this book is one man’s refusal to duck those demands. Chase Davis has stepped into the gap, taken the Scriptures seriously, and held them up without embarrassment. Any man who reads this book with integrity will feel exactly what Murray intended: the weight God has placed on men, and the call to carry it like someone who belongs to a King.

Purchase your copy from Amazon here (don’t forget to leave a review) or directly from the publisher here.