There is something simultaneously admirable and insufficient about Karen Kilby’s recent essay in Plough Quarterly, “It’s Not All Good, Man.” Published in the spring 2026 issue, the piece wrestles honestly with a reality that many theologians have preferred to aestheticize, rationalize, or deny: the Christian church in the Western world is shrinking, and that decline carries genuine loss. Kilby writes as a lay Catholic theologian operating out of Durham University, and her pastoral instincts are largely sound. She is right to reject what she calls the “Saul Goodman” approach — the theological move that reframes institutional collapse as spiritual purification and tells us, in effect, that everything is secretly fine. She is equally right to push back against the assumption that some surgical theological correction — blame Schleiermacher, blame Duns Scotus, blame modernity — will reverse the tide if we just think hard enough.
Her conclusion lands in a kind of Julianic trust: not that all is well now, but that all shall be well — a posture of mourning held alongside hope, of honest grief that neither assigns blame compulsively nor retreats into denial.
That is a commendable place to land. But for all its genuine insight, Kilby’s framework is missing something fundamental, something that the New Testament does not leave ambiguous: the decline of religious interest in the last days is not primarily a sociological puzzle or an institutional management failure. It is a prophesied condition. And until we reckon with what the New Testament actually says about the spiritual character of the last days, we will continue to diagnose the problem at the wrong level.
The Limits of Theological Diagnosis from Below
Kilby identifies two broad strategies that theologians typically employ when confronting church decline. The first is diagnosis and cure — tracing the intellectual error back to a pivotal moment (Schleiermacher, Kant, Scotus, take your pick) and proposing a retrieval or reform accordingly. The second is reframing — arguing that what looks like loss is actually purification, that the end of Constantinian entanglement is something to welcome rather than mourn.
Both approaches share a common deficiency: they operate from below. They analyze the problem through the lens of history, sociology, institutional theory, and intellectual genealogy. What they do not do — what Kilby’s essay, for all its virtues, does not do — is turn squarely to the prophetic witness of the New Testament and ask whether what we are watching was not merely foreseeable, but explicitly foreseen.
This is not an obscure point. It sits plainly on the surface of the New Testament text. The writers of the first century, working under apostolic authority and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, were not confused about what the final era of human history would look like spiritually. They described it with striking precision — and their description maps onto our current moment with an accuracy that should give any serious reader pause.
2 Timothy 3 and the Portrait of the Last Days
The apostle Paul’s second letter to Timothy contains what may be the most compact and devastating prophetic portrait in the entire New Testament. In the third chapter, Paul warns his protégé: “Understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.” What follows is not vague apocalyptic poetry. It is a clinical inventory of moral and spiritual conditions — nineteen distinct characteristics of the people who will populate the last era of history.
The list includes people who are lovers of themselves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, those who consider nothing sacred, the unloving, the unforgiving, slanderers, those with no self-control, the unusually cruel, those with no interest in what is good, betrayers, the reckless, the puffed up with pride, and lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.
Let’s take a closer look at the list from Tower View Baptist Church: Attitudes Toward the End Times (& what the Bible says) How should we react to what the Bible says?
WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT ATTITUDES OF PEOPLE IN THE LAST DAYS?
2 Timothy 3:2-9 lists at least 25:1. People will be lovers of themselves (2 Timothy 3:2).
2. People will be covetous (2 Timothy 3:2).
3. People will be boasters (2 Timothy 3:2).
4. People will be proud (2 Timothy 3:2).
5. People will be blasphemers (2 Timothy 3:2).
6. People will be disobedient to parents (2 Timothy 3:2).
7. People will be unthankful (2 Timothy 3:2).
8. People will consider nothing as sacred (2 Timothy 3:2).
9. People will be unloving (2 Timothy 3:3).
10. People will be unforgiving (2 Timothy 3:3).
11. People will slander others (2 Timothy 3:3).
12. People will have no self-control (2 Timothy 3:3).
13. People will be unusually cruel (2 Timothy 3:3).
14. People will have no interest in what is good (2 Timothy 3:3).
15. People will betray friends (2 Timothy 3:4).
16. People will be reckless (2 Timothy 3:4).
17. People will be puffed up with pride (2 Timothy 3:4).
18. People will be lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God (2 Timothy 3:4).
19. People will have a form of godliness but deny God (2 Timothy 3:5).
20. People will take advantage of women, weakened by sin (2 Timothy 3:6).
21. People will always been learning but not coming to knowledge of truth (2 Timothy 3:7).
22. People will resist the truth (2 Timothy 3:8).
23. People will have corrupt minds (2 Timothy 3:8).
24. People will have a fake faith from a depraved mind (2 Timothy 3:8).
25. People will not progress in fake faith and fail miserably (2 Timothy 3:9).
The list culminates in a phrase of almost surgical precision: people will have “a form of godliness but deny its power.” Read that again slowly. This is not a description of atheists. It is not a portrait of secular materialists who have abandoned religious vocabulary entirely. It is a portrait of people who maintain the outward apparatus of religion — the language, the cultural identification, perhaps even the church attendance — while something essential has been gutted from the center. The power is gone. What remains is the form.
This is not a description of people outside the church. It is a description of what happens inside it — and by extension, what happens to a culture long shaped by Christian assumptions when those assumptions are retained as social convention while their animating core is evacuated. Nominal Christianity is the precise condition Paul foresaw, and nominal Christianity at scale produces exactly the statistical decline that sociologists and hand-wringing ecclesiastical administrators now scramble to explain.
Kilby is correct that the loss is real. But the explanation is not primarily that we chose the wrong theological trajectory in the nineteenth century, or that Constantinian entanglement corrupted the witness of the church. The explanation is that the Holy Spirit, through the apostle Paul, told us this was coming.
The Noah Paradigm and the Banality of the Last Days
One of the more striking features of New Testament eschatology is the insistence that the last days will not be characterized primarily by dramatic catastrophe, but by something far more mundane: normalcy. Jesus, in the Olivet Discourse, reaches back to the days of Noah to make the point: “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”
What is remarkable about this passage is what it does not say. It does not say the antediluvian world was characterized by unprecedented depravity visible to everyone. It says they were eating, drinking, marrying — ordinary life, proceeding at its ordinary pace. The catastrophe was not that they were doing something unusual. The catastrophe was that they were doing the usual things in complete spiritual obliviousness, with no awareness of what was bearing down on them.
This is the eschatological condition of secular Western culture in the early twenty-first century. People are not dramatically, consciously rejecting God in most cases. They are simply not thinking about God at all. The categories have become foreign. The questions have become irrelevant. Church decline is not primarily the result of a decisive, engaged rejection of the gospel. It is the result of a collective drift into spiritual indifference so complete that the framework for even asking religious questions has dissolved.
This is the condition Jesus described. It should not surprise us. What should concern us is that the church has spent decades treating this condition as primarily a marketing problem — a failure of communication, relevance, or institutional appeal — rather than what the New Testament plainly calls it: the fulfillment of apostolic prophecy.
The Apostasy of Matthew 24 and the Cold Charity of the Last Days
Jesus is even more direct in Matthew 24. In verses 10 through 12, he describes a sequence that has particular relevance to the current moment of institutional Christian life: “And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.”
Three movements are described here in close succession, and they are not unrelated. First, apostasy — a mass falling away from genuine faith. Second, the proliferation of false prophets. Third, and most tellingly, the cooling of love as a direct result of the increase in lawlessness.
Kilby notes, from her research into contemplative women’s religious communities, that genuine spiritual loss accompanies institutional decline — that what disappears when parishes close is not merely organizational infrastructure, but actual human formation, actual encounter with the gospel, actual reshaping of inner lives. She is describing, in pastoral terms, exactly what Jesus called the cooling of love. When the community of genuine faith contracts, the ambient temperature of charity in the surrounding culture drops with it. The church is, in ways that secular sociology has difficulty measuring, the organ that generates the moral and relational warmth of a civilization. When the organ atrophies, the warmth dissipates. We are watching this in real time.
The connection to lawlessness is also worth pressing. The New Testament does not envision the cooling of love as an isolated religious statistic. It is correlated with the increase of lawlessness — the breakdown of the moral order, the dissolution of the structures that hold the human community together. We do not need to manufacture evidence for this correlation. Any person willing to spend five minutes with the day’s headlines will find it staring back at them: violent crime normalized in urban centers, institutional corruption treated as unremarkable, the family unit dismantled by design, political discourse reduced to mutual contempt, and a cultural consensus that the only binding obligation a person carries is to themselves. Jesus was not describing a distant apocalyptic scenario requiring exotic fulfillment. He was describing the ambient moral atmosphere of a civilization that has systematically expelled the Author of love from its public life — and is now reaping, in plain sight, the relational and civic consequences of that expulsion.
Jude’s Scoffers and the Epistemology of Unbelief
The epistle of Jude offers one more piece of the apostolic portrait: “In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.” The word translated “scoffers” in Greek is empaiktai — those who mock, who hold religious claims in contempt not because they have carefully refuted them, but because they find them inherently risible. This is not the scepticism of the honest inquirer. It is the contempt of the person who has already decided, based on appetite and cultural fashion, that religious commitment is beneath them.
What Jude diagnoses is a specific epistemological posture: the scoffer does not examine the evidence and find it wanting. The scoffer follows their own ungodly passions and then reaches for whatever intellectual apparatus is available to justify the pre-committed conclusion. The mechanisms of this in contemporary culture are not difficult to identify. When religious belief is dismissed not because of careful argumentation but because it is associated with social backwardness, intellectual unsophistication, or political inconvenience, we are watching Jude’s scoffers in their natural habitat.
The Tower View Baptist analysis of last-days attitudes makes a related pastoral observation: people will be “always learning but not coming to knowledge of truth” and will “resist the truth” with “corrupt minds.” This is not intellectual failure in the ordinary sense. It is a willed suppression of what the apostle Paul, in Romans 1, calls the truth that is already known and already being held down in unrighteousness. The scoffing is not the beginning of the process. It is the symptom of a deeper refusal that precedes it.
What Kilby’s Framework Cannot Reach
Kilby’s essay is genuinely insightful about the phenomenology of church decline — what it feels like from the inside, how communities should grieve it, what the temptations of both flight and embrace of suffering look like. Her conclusion, drawn from Julian of Norwich, that “all shall be well,” is not Pollyannaism. It is eschatological hope, which is a different thing entirely.
But her framework cannot reach the diagnosis that the New Testament demands, because it remains within the horizon of institutional ecclesiology. She frames decline as analogous to the death of an individual — something that may or may not be anyone’s fault, something to be mourned with appropriate gratitude for what existed. This is pastorally sensitive, but it stops short of the prophetic.
The New Testament does not treat the spiritual conditions of the last days as merely unfortunate. It treats them as signs. And signs, by their nature, point beyond themselves. The appropriate response to a sign is not primarily mourning — though mourning may be part of it — but orientation. You read a sign to know where you are, and knowing where you are determines what you do next.
If the apostolic witness is correct — and those of us who hold to the authority of Scripture have every reason to think it is — then the decline of Western Christianity is not primarily a management crisis, an intellectual crisis, or an institutional crisis. It is an eschatological marker. We are living in the conditions that the New Testament describes as characteristic of the last days, and those conditions include mass indifference to the gospel, the proliferation of counterfeit spiritual options, the cooling of genuine charity, and the emergence of a form of godliness evacuated of power.
The Proper Posture: Eschatological Sobriety, Not Institutional Nostalgia
The Tower View analysis offers a constructive corrective at this point, noting that knowing the times should stir believers toward urgency in mission, maturity in faith, and alertness to the proximity of Christ’s return. This is the posture the New Testament actually calls for: not institutional grief management, not theological triage aimed at reversing demographic trends, but clear-eyed eschatological sobriety that reads the signs accurately and responds with the missionary urgency appropriate to the hour.
The evangelistic implications of this are significant. If what we are witnessing is prophesied apostasy rather than correctable institutional drift, then the response is not primarily ecclesiological reform. It is the intensification of the direct gospel witness — the proclamation of the cross and resurrection to individuals within a culture that has largely abandoned the framework for hearing it institutionally. The doors of the institutional church may be closing. That does not mean the mission has contracted. It may mean it has been forced back to its apostolic form: person to person, bearing witness in a culture that neither expects nor welcomes the message, precisely as the first-century church did.
Kilby is right that it is not all good, man. But the reason it is not all good is more specific than she allows. The New Testament told us this was coming. The question is not how to reverse it. The question is what it means to be faithful within it — and the New Testament has an answer to that question as well.
A Note on Research Methods and Accuracy
This work represents a collaboration between the author’s own theological and historical research, primary source documentation, and the emerging capabilities of artificial intelligence research tools. AI assistance was employed throughout the investigative process—not as a ghostwriter or a substitute for scholarship, but as a rigorous research partner: surfacing sources, cross‑referencing claims, identifying scholarly consensus, and flagging potential errors before they could reach the page.
Every factual claim in this work has been subjected to active verification. Where AI‑generated content was used as a starting point, it was tested against primary sources, peer‑reviewed scholarship, official institutional documentation, and established historical records. Where discrepancies were found—and they were found—corrections were made. The author has made every reasonable effort to ensure that quotations are accurately attributed, historical details are precisely rendered, and theological claims fairly represent the positions they describe or critique.
That said, no work of this scope is immune to error, and the author has no interest in perpetuating inaccuracies in the service of an argument. If you are a reader—whether sympathetic, skeptical, or hostile to the conclusions drawn here—and you identify a factual error, a misattributed source, a misrepresented teaching, or a claim that cannot be substantiated, you are warmly and genuinely invited to say so. Reach out. The goal of this work is not to win a debate but to get the history right. Corrections offered in good faith will be received in the same spirit, and verified corrections will be incorporated into future editions without hesitation.
Truth, after all, has nothing to fear from scrutiny—and neither does this work.