About
Lyman Epp
A Reformed Baptist layman writing on Scripture, the Christian life, and the political order.
Who I am
A layman, not a scholar
I am not a pastor or a theologian. I have no degrees in biblical studies and no institutional credentials to put on a cover page. What I have is a Bible, a Reformed Baptist church, a men’s Bible study, and the conviction that the questions being pressed hardest on the church right now deserve a real answer from the text — not a hedge, not a pivot toward sensitivity, and not a redefinition of the question until it becomes something easier to answer.
That conviction is what produced these books.
How I write
Scalpel-only edits, no doctrinal softening
The chapters in the What Scripture Says series began as essays. Some grew out of sermons. Some were provoked by arguments I encountered — not because the arguments were right, but because I could not yet explain precisely why they were wrong. Some grew from lessons in men’s Bible study, where questions came up that deserved more than a discussion-ending generalization.
I wrote them to think. That means the books are not the product of a theological system applied to a list of topics. They are the record of someone who went back to Scripture, tested what he believed, and in some cases had to revise beliefs he had held for years. That kind of reckoning is not pleasant, but it is good. What you are left with afterward is sturdier in foundation.
A belief is not an identity. The reader who has confidently held a position for decades has the most reason to bring it carefully back to the text, not the least. Defensiveness is not faithfulness.
Where I stand
Reformed Baptist conviction. Constitutional, biblical conservatism.
Theologically I hold to the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith and write from within that tradition. The doctrinal commitments visible in the books — Reformed soteriology, credobaptism, complementarian order, a high view of biblical authority — are not concessions to a market segment. They are conclusions I am willing to defend from the text and to revise from the text, if the text requires it.
Politically I write as a constitutional conservative who believes the American founding assumed limited government, fixed human nature, and ordered liberty under God. How the Left Lost Its Grip on Reality is the application of those convictions to the present cultural moment.