Out of the Question Podcast

Are We Treating Sin Like a Symptom?

Job's three friends were eloquent, well-intentioned, and theologically active — and God was angry with every word they spoke. Their error was not ignorance of true facts but the misuse of true facts: they assembled correct observations into false conclusions, diagnosed their sufferer through a theology too small to contain the real God, and offered comfort that the text calls worthless. Job named them physicians of no value. This episode begins there and asks whether the same diagnosis applies to the counselors — personal, ecclesiastical, and civil — that surround us today. Chalcedon Vice President Martin Selbrede joins host Andrea Schwartz to discuss his essay "Physicians of No Value," published in the May 2026 Chalcedon Foundation newsletter. The conversation moves from the personal dynamics of biblical counsel to the sweeping failure of civil and economic institutions to diagnose and treat man's actual condition. The error in both cases is identical: defining man's problems as metaphysical rather than moral. When the root cause is misidentified as structural, racial, political, or systemic rather than as sin, every proposed remedy worsens the patient. Price controls, psychological reductionism, the doctrine of selective depravity — these are all band-aids on compound fractures. R.J. Rushdoony stands in this episode as the model of what a physician of value looks like: one who correctly identifies sin as the diagnosis, traces it to its moral root, and prescribes the return to God's law as the only course of treatment with any historical precedent of success. For those weary of watching institutions and churches reach for the wrong remedies, this conversation names the problem at the level where it actually lives.

Is Christ's Ascencion a Neglected Doctrine?

The Ascension of Christ is observed on the church calendar forty days after Easter, yet for most evangelicals it passes with barely a mention. What does it mean that the risen Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father — and why does it matter whether we believe he rules from there now or only after some future return? This episode, recorded on Ascension Day 2026, takes up a doctrine that has been quietly evacuated of its meaning in much of modern Christianity, leaving behind an impoverished understanding of Christ's authority, the church's mission, and the future of the world. Host Andrea Schwartz and Pastor Charles Roberts argue that the neglect of the Ascension is not an innocent oversight. When Christ declared "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," he was not describing a future state — he was announcing a present fact. The Ascension is the installment of the King: his session at the Father's right hand is active, continuous, and comprehensive. The eschatology of defeat so common in popular evangelicalism — the expectation that the church should shrink rather than advance, that things must get worse before a rescue — is directly traceable to a loss of this doctrine and its implications. For those who understand Christian Reconstruction, the Ascension is the theological foundation of everything: there are no crown rights to proclaim, no Great Commission to obey, no civilization to build — without a reigning King. This episode calls Christians to recover what earlier generations knew: that Christ ascended not to escape the world but to rule it, and that his church has been commissioned to make that rule visible in every area of life.

Should We Follow the Dietary Laws?

Christians routinely declare that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable—until they crack open Leviticus. In Episode 387 of Out of the Question, Andrea Schwartz and Charles Roberts ask the question most believers quietly skip: Should we follow the dietary laws? Their answer may surprise you. The dietary laws were never quietly abolished by the New Testament; they have simply been quietly ignored by a church that prizes comfort over the demands of obedience. Drawing on a biblical-law framework rooted in Christian Reconstruction, Andrea and Charles examine why the Levitical dietary distinctions were given, what they accomplish in the life of the believer, and what it means theologically to dismiss entire sections of God's word as obsolete. If you believe Scripture speaks to all of life, this episode is a disciplined call to honest engagement with one of the most avoided topics in Christian practice.

Can One Book Turn Your Life Upside Down? (guest Perry Coughlan)

Perry Coughlin didn't set out to become a Christian Reconstructionist. He was being trained as a Wesleyan Arminian minister when a single book reoriented everything — and the questions it raised were too large to ignore from a pulpit. In this conversation with Andrea Schwartz, Perry traces his theological journey across five decades: the grip of sovereign grace, the abiding validity of God's law, the founding of a Christian school as a kingdom enterprise, and the humbling work of heart surgery and covenant faithfulness in marriage. Application, Perry insists, is not optional. It is the fruit of grace. Tags: Christian Reconstruction, Theonomy, Biblical Law, Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, Sovereign Grace, Kingdom of God, Postmillennialism, Christian Education, Covenant Living, Reformed Theology, Chalcedon 3. Facebook Post A Wesleyan Arminian seminary student picks up Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law — and steps out of the pulpit because the questions are suddenly too large to ignore. Perry Coughlin has spent five decades working out what it means to take every word of God seriously: in his marriage, in the Christian school he built as a business, in the years of heart surgery and hospital beds, and in the daily discipline of putting off the old man and putting on the new. This is not a theoretical conversation. It's what reconstruction looks like when it comes home.

Why Do So Many Fall for Scientology?

L. Ron Hubbard reportedly told a science fiction conference that the surest way to make a million dollars was to start a religion. In 1954, he did exactly that. In this episode, Andrea Schwartz tells her own story of being recruited into Scientology as a nineteen-year-old, spending a decade selling its lies to others, and the providential path God used to bring her out. She unpacks what the cult actually teaches about man, sin, and salvation, why intelligent people are its prime target, and how the absence of biblical foundations leaves any soul vulnerable to deception. A sober warning and a testimony to the sufficiency of Christ. Listen now. KEYWORDS/TAGS Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, cults, Christian testimony, Andrea Schwartz, Chalcedon, Reformed faith, false religion, deception, dianetics, biblical worldview, conversion testimony