The Third Helix

When and how Christianity degenerated into a pagan cargo cult, and the case for Restoration

The word on the street is that Christianity is seeing a revival lately. This is due to a range of factors, like the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk and a general growing disgust for the godless Leftism that has permeated our civilization. Many young people are looking for an alternative to the destructive system of values they’ve inherited from popular culture and our corrupt civil institutions, and they are seeking it in churches.

This will likely come as no surprise to regular readers of The Third Helix, but this so-called “revival” doesn’t give me quite the same unalloyed hope that it does many Christians and conservative commentators.

Calling it a “revival” in the first place seems an exaggeration borne of wishful thinking: Christianity’s decline in the West has very recently slowed somewhat, but that is not growth. That’s just losing with slightly less inertia. We’ve hit some speed bumps on our downward slide, but we have not reversed course.

But even if the “revival” was truly that, I have long argued the case here that Christianity – as we popularly understand and practice it – is not the solution to our problems. It is the problem.

But, there is a glimmer of hope in this momentary resurgence of interest in Christianity. It’s an opportunity for a genuine revival, but only if we reform ourselves first by restoring the true gospel.

If we do not, we have only accelerated our decline.  

I have explained at length elsewhere how our overall narrative and soteriology are contrary to the actual teachings of the Bible, as well as how our commonly accepted epistemology grows out of that false soteriology, leading to an empty and futile pseudo-faith, which leads to a collectively dysfunctional ecclesiology.

All of this naturally invites the question, though, of “Where did it all go wrong? When did the Church lose its way?”

And, behind that question often lurks a very understandable skepticism toward restoration movements.

After all, we’ve seen no shortage of attempted restoration movements over the past few centuries. Some, like the Protestant Reformation, have constituted genuine progress toward restoration – but not nearly as much as Protestants typically suppose, as we will discuss shortly. Others, like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses and the so-called New Apostolic Reformation have been destructive cults that have done more to hasten the decline.

So, I understand the wariness my claims typically provoke. It sounds like wannabe cult-leader stuff. I get it. (But don’t worry – God has graciously withheld from me both the social acumen and the charisma necessary for that particular temptation to present itself.)

But, all of these prior would-be restoration movements have in common that they recognize a genuine need in the Church: there is widespread acknowledgment that something has gone very wrong. There is something vital that we are missing in the Church. We have indeed lost our way. These destructive cults’ entire appeal is that there is a genuine unmet need for Restoration, and they falsely promise to fulfill it.

And until we do find our way again, cults will continue to rise up and proliferate, like weeds choking out the wheat … wheat that is already withering and dying on its own, without any help from cults.

The only legitimate restoration movement was the Protestant Reformation and its pre-printing press precursors, but it ultimately failed because it didn’t go back far enough and so only restored the Church to a more primitive stage of apostasy.

So, we need to go back farther.

(There is also the common objection of, “How can you believe that God would allow His Church to go so far astray?”, but that’s a separate, albeit closely related topic that deserves its own treatment in a follow-up article. Our attention here is on the historical record by which to observe that fall into apostasy. The theological explanation is another question.)

The Trap of the Eternal Recurrence

Prior to Christianity and Judaism, what we now call “paganism” held sway in the world.

Of course, there was no single “-ism” that encompassed all pagan belief, but there were general features that were more or less universal.

In ancient pagan thought, for instance, time was cyclical and eternal.

There was no “personal spirituality” as we conceive of it today. The gods were personified anthropomorphisms of natural forces on whom the seasons and agricultural cycles depended, and they were only “known” to mortals by standing at a distance and observing them through ritual reenactments and mythical retellings about what they understood to be eternal truths within the wheel of time. They believed their gods dwelled literally on earth through their idols in their temples, but their temples functioned merely as microcosms by which to glimpse the larger cosmic reality that was otherwise beyond their reach.  

There were, of course, nuanced variations from culture to culture, but that cyclical nature of time, as they conceived of it, was universal across the pagan world.

For instance, the Babylonian sacred text, the Enuma Elish, provides the liturgy for “Akitu,” the annual new year ritual to enact the storm god Marduk’s defeat of the dragon Tiamat to signify the imposition of divine order over primordial chaos. This wasn’t an event that happened at some point in the historical past – it happened every year by their ritual performance, and it was required to (among other functions) maintain the cosmic order by which the seasonal rain would come that was necessary for agriculture.

On the other side of the world, the Aztecs similarly saw time as a series of repeating cosmic cycles, each of which ends with the destruction of the sun. To keep the sun from going out, the gods had to be fed an endless supply of human sacrifices. If the sacrifices were not offered, that current cycle of time would end, and their world with it.

In Hinduism, all of life is trapped in an endless cycle of life, death and reincarnation called “samsara,” and this occurred within endlessly recurring cycles of time known as the “Yuga cycle.” The state of order within each Yuga cycle degenerated over time, until that order collapsed and a new cycle would begin, but the decay could be slowed by the regular offering of sacrifices.

In Plato’s “Timaeus,” the philosopher described time as “the moving image of eternity.” As in, ultimate reality is timeless and eternal and characterized by unchanging Forms, and time came into existence with the material universe, and those eternal Forms manifest in the material world through time, but there is no beginning within time. Time has a “beginning,” but it is a wheel, which goes on forever – the wheel was created whole in the eternal past, with its cycles predetermined, and it continues eternally.

The common feature of all of these pagan cosmologies of cyclical time was that life for mortals was brief and harsh and, ultimately, meaningless, because nothing ultimately changed. There was change within the cycle, but the cycle itself repeats forever, over and over again, so everything that has ever happened happens again and will continue into the future without end, so ultimately, there is no change. At least, not for the better – they looked back on earlier golden and silver ages of history, but each successive age was a downgrade from previous epochs, with each degenerating from bygone glories (as in Hesiod’s poem, “Theogony,” for instance). The best they could hope for was to maintain the present order for as long they could by currying the favor of the gods by their sacrifices.

In other words, there was no expectation – nor even any conception – of progress or improvement to human life. Hope for the future was a totally alien, unconsidered concept in the pagan mind, because the best of life was already in the distant past and never to be restored – only mournfully remembered through ever-diminishing imitations.

So, there was no meaning to history, no ultimate purpose to human existence, except to live on earth briefly in subordination to the gods, enjoying what pleasures might be found in life and avoiding as best they could the inevitable suffering the gods capriciously dealt out to all mortals, and then to die and escape the endless cycles of time in a gloomy, unchanging afterlife. There was no “Why?” to any of it, because even the gods did nothing but play out the roles suited to their respective natures within the cosmic cycle. The wheel of time just is what it is, and it seldom occurred to anyone that it should or could be otherwise. “Salvation” just meant maintaining a stable status quo.

The God of Progress

In stark contrast – and unique among all the religions in the ancient world – in the Bible, time is linear, with a definite historical beginning, with progress and improvement inherent to our existence and nature: Mankind was made in the image of God, as the crowning conclusion to an ascending process of creation, for the express purpose of being God’s agents through whom to rule that creation – the vehicle through whom God’s very Presence is mediated in the world.

Mankind was bidden to increase: to expand the size and scope and reach of the Human Family that is God’s Representation on earth, ever-increasing, ever-progressing in that objective, ever-improving, ever making God’s Presence in the world greater and more pervasive by advancing divine order throughout the wilderness of creation. (For a more comprehensive treatment of this, see “The Unsubverted Gospel.”)

Man fell from that role and from his place in God’s Presence, but before the ramifications of the fall were even fully declared, a better future was promised, in which the Evil responsible would be crushed and Man would be restored to his proper role and function.

In his fallen state, Man’s proclivity was to consolidate and seek the comfort and seeming security of stagnation, but God, in His love for us, would not allow it. It is Man’s destiny and purpose and highest nature to advance.  

So, the Israelite religious calendar wasn’t concerned with looking up to an out-of-reach cosmos and reflecting upon the patterns of nature and ruminating about archetypes and “timeless truths.” It was the precise opposite: it was about commemorating and reliving those moments from their past when God Himself had broken into time and history to move events forward through His people, by being present and active among them.

The consistent message of the Prophets was that God would do so again, through the Chosen One, to progress human history toward its ultimate goal of Man’s redemption and the eradication of evil.

The Israelite rationale for sacrifice was likewise the precise opposite to that of the pagans. Pagans offered sacrifices to feed the gods so that they would maintain the cosmic order on which mortals depended. Israelites offered sacrifices to expiate their sins so that they could maintain their proximity to God’s Presence and partake of His life and holiness, and having been so empowered, they were to act as God’s agents to advance the divine order on earth. The blessings and purpose of sacrifice flowed in the opposite direction to that of pagan sacrifice: it was for God to give life to mortals, not for mortals to nourish the gods.

When the Messiah came, that philosophy of progress and hopeful advancement of divine order was no longer confined to Israel and the Jewish people, but God Himself – active and present in the world though the Church – carried it forward to the nations. As that Message spread and was integrated deeper and farther into society, human civilization progressed forward, and continues to do so wherever and to whatever extent Christianity holds sway.

(Tom Holland – not the Spider-Man, but the historian – wrote a tremendous book on this, entitled “Dominion.” Holland is an atheist, for some reason, so his survey of history was not conceived as a work of apologetics for Christianity. It just turned out to be so because the facts themselves dictate it.)

The War on Progress

That divinely-driven progress has commenced in opposition to the malevolent spiritual entities who have ruled this world since the Fall. The end-goal of this age of history – the terminus by which we measure that progress – is their defeat, dethronement and death when the nations finally turn away from them to obey the one true God.

This outcome has been decreed by God, and they cannot avert it – they know it to be inevitable. But, they can delay it, and hope to do so as long as possible, and so we are at war. Impeding our progress is how they wage that war, and we can see how they managed to hamstring the Church very early on (I intend to expand on this in the aforementioned follow-up article about the theological reasons for our apostasy).

The signs were subtle, at first, but highly significant, and they grew increasingly less subtle as time went on.

Mile Markers on the Road to Apostasy

One of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament (and it might even predate some books of the New Testament, depending on which scholars you ask) was a manual on church operation called “The Didache,” or “The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles.”

It contains instructions about the Christian way of life and the performance of rituals like baptism and serving the Eucharist, as well as fasting.

Interestingly, there is no explicit command or instruction to fast (except in preparation for baptism) – it is simply taken for granted that Christians, as Christians, would fast as a regular, ongoing practice. The only explicit instruction on fasting is as follows:

“But do not let your fasts coincide with those of the hypocrites. They fast on Monday and Thursday, so you must fast on Wednesday and Friday. Nor should you pray like the hypocrites … ” (Didache 8:1-2)

There is nothing inherently wrong with fasting on Monday and Thursday – at least not that the text indicates. It’s just that “the hypocrites” fasted on those days, and Christians were not to do anything that resembled or could be associated with the hypocrites.

“The hypocrites” being the Jews – fasting on Monday and Thursday was a well-established practice among the Jews by the Second Temple period.

When Christianity began, it was, of course, a sect of Judaism, centered upon the Jewish Messiah having arrived in fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. Jesus was a Jewish rabbi who preached Judaism to Jews in the land of Judea. All of his disciples were Jews, and synagogues throughout the Jewish Diaspora were prioritized in the apostles’ missionary efforts. The first major doctrinal controversy that arose in the Church was over whether Gentiles must be required to convert to Judaism through circumcision as a condition of being included among Jesus’ followers.  

As time went on and Christianity spread to Gentiles, the internal tension between Jewish and non-Jewish identities within the Church grew more rancorous, and the split became more pronounced (and some would argue, final) when the (still overwhelmingly Jewish) Church refused to participate in the Jewish Revolt(s) against the Romans.

It wouldn’t be remotely accurate to call it “anti-Semitism,” because that connotes a one-sided persecution of Jews by a larger, more powerful group of non-Jews. Christians were themselves still a persecuted minority, led by a Jewish core, and the Church wouldn’t have any capacity to persecute anyone for another three centuries. But, there was a mutual hostility between non-Christian Jews and Christians that undeniably lies at the root of the anti-Semitism that persists to this day.

And, the growth trajectory of that mutual hostility can be seen in other early Christian writings, the most conspicuous of which is undoubtedly the Epistle of Barnabas.

Named for Paul’s traveling companion who is mentioned prominently in the Book of Acts, the Epistle was written in the late-1st, possibly early-2nd century.

It was never considered canonical nor even generally accepted as having authentically been written by Barnabas (it most certainly wasn’t), but it was highly respected and influential in the early Church, being referenced quite often by the early Church Fathers. So important was it to Christians in the ancient Church that it was included in Codex Sinaiticus, which includes our earliest complete manuscript of the New Testament, and so is a major cornerstone of all modern translations. Codex Sinaiticus dates to the 4th century and is of such high quality that many scholars believe it was among the 50 copies of the Bible commissioned by Emperor Constantine for use in churches in his new capital city of Constantinople. To produce Codex Sinaiticus, roughly 400 animals would have been required and thousands of hours of skilled labor from parchmenters, binders and scribes (mostly the scribes). In today’s money, it would have come to about $5 to 10 million to produce – enough at the time to purchase a luxury estate, a small fleet of ships, or to fund a legion or two of soldiers for a few years.

So, Codex Sinaiticus was a big deal – an exorbitantly expensive undertaking. That the Epistle of Barnabas was included in it speaks to the level of value and importance the Epistle held for Christians well into the 4th century, along with the influence suggested by the early Church Fathers’ numerous favorable references to it.

Its value among early Christians is rivalled only by the absolute, utter insanity of its premise.

According to the Epistle, the Jews and Israelites were never, at any point, God’s covenant people – they always, from the very beginning, misunderstood the Torah and the Prophets and the Aaronic priesthood, and God never truly dwelled among them in the tabernacle and temple. This was all only figurative, “spiritual” language that the Jews failed to grasp, which awaited the coming of Christ and the founding of the Church before its true meaning finally came to light.  

Just to be absolutely clear: its premise was not that the Jews of Jesus’ time misunderstood the Scriptures and so failed to recognize him as the fulfillment and embodiment of their very genuine identity as God’s covenant people. They are (according to the Epistle) not God’s people who have fallen into apostasy by their rejection of their Messiah, eventually to be restored when they collectively repent, as the Torah and the Prophets and the New Testament writers consistently foretold.

No, the thesis of the Epistle of Barnabas is that they never were God’s people in the first place, and they never will be. They were always alienated from God. He disinherited them in the golden calf incident – contrary to the narrative of Exodus itself – and afterward they were only tolerated placeholders until Christ came, acting as mere custodians of revelation intended for others. The true meaning of all of the Law and Prophets and Writings is that it was the Church, and was only ever the Church, who are God’s chosen people, to the exclusion of the Jews.

They were deceived for their entire history by thinking that circumcision, the temple sacrifices and the dietary laws and all the rest were ever supposed to be taken literally.

Specifically, it claims that Abraham was “deceived by the Evil One” into taking the command for circumcision literally (Barnabas 9:4). But, when he circumcised his 318 men, this was numerologically-coded language, with “18” signifying the first two Greek letters of Jesus’ name, Iota and Eta; and the “300” being the Greek letter Tau, which signified the cross. (The Scriptures were originally written in Hebrew, mind you, not Greek.)

So, circumcision was only ever supposed to be figurative and “spiritual,” never literal, and had the Jews and Israelites properly understood, they would have seen the clear intent and not taken any of it literally.  

And, the dietary laws were likewise figurative, and the Jews (had they not been so led by their flesh, Pseudo-Barnabas argued) should have understood that each prohibition was intended figuratively to mean they should not associate with certain kinds of people who corresponded in type to those animals.

“Moses mentioned the swine for this reason: you must not associate, he means, with such men, men who are like swine. That is, when they are well off, they forget the Lord, but when they are in need, they acknowledge the Lord, just as the swine ignores its owner when it is feeding, but when it is hungry it starts to squeal and falls silent only after being fed again … Furthermore, ‘You shall not eat the hare.’ Why? Do not become, he means, one who corrupts boys, or even resemble such people, because the hare grows another opening every year, and thus has as many orifices at it is years old.” (Barnabas 10:3-11)

And, the writer goes on, with each animal forbidden by the Levitical dietary laws corresponding with some specific set of characteristics of people whom the Israelites were not supposed to associate or emulate. As in, eating bacon, lobster, hyenas and the rest was actually perfectly acceptable to God, the writer argues, because the true meaning was “spiritual.”

There is likewise a “spiritual” reading for every major feature of the Law of Moses, all of it being coded language to establish that it was only ever the Church who are God’s chosen people, and never the Israelites and Jews.

I include these examples to demonstrate the totally ad hoc, special-pleading nature of his arguments, offered to support a thesis that is simply not rationally tenable in light of the Bible. The document reads like it was written by someone who expected to take a multiple-choice test on Christianity and got to see the test answers beforehand and memorized them without any comprehension, only to find out that it was an essay test instead, so he made it up on the fly. It has dim echoes of genuine truths all Christians should believe – the Hebrew Scriptures are indeed ultimately about Jesus as the Messiah. But the way that that is true appears to have been totally unknown to the writer. He’d been indoctrinated into those beliefs, as well as into that deepening attitude of resentment against the Jews as rival claimants to the Church’s identity as God’s true chosen people. But he was totally ignorant about what the Hebrew Scriptures actually taught, and so he let his imagination – conditioned by his Gentile cultural background – fill in the gaps.

Despite its astonishingly glaring shortcomings, the Epistle of Barnabas was embraced and revered by the early Church.

Not every Church Father agreed with every point made in it, and some openly disagreed. And, to be fair, there are a few nuggets of precious truth within the Epistle, such as an affirmation of what we now call “penal substitutionary atonement.” But, I’m confident that anyone well-versed in the Bible who takes the time to read the Epistle of Barnabas for himself will agree that its central thesis is so obviously contrary to the plain teachings of the Bible and its arguments are so poorly reasoned that it should have been entirely disqualifying.

Yet the early Church, for centuries on end, treated it as quasi-Scripture.

The Church Cast Adrift

So, we have the Epistle of Barnabas, along with that early, subtle but significant pressure to dissociate from the Jews in even the most trivial resemblance, documented within the Didache.  These are just two conspicuous exhibits among a prodigious collection of other possible examples that demonstrate a very early and significant shift in Christian thought and attitude.

It was an emphatic rejection of Judaism and any practice, mode of thinking or biblical interpretation that was associated with Jews. The early Church quite consciously and deliberately uprooted Christianity from its native Jewish soil, and this created an interpretive vacuum, and over time, they unconsciously – and I want to stress that this aspect was, by all evidence, unconscious – filled it with other interpretive paradigms.

The damage was not immediate, but the stage was set for a gradual, steady drift into apostasy.

The Church had drawn a very stark, impenetrable line between the categories of “Christianity” and “Judaism,” as they understood them, despite the original Christians’ clear understanding that these are not separate categories at all – different (but still overlapping) ethnic identities, maybe, but not separate belief systems.

As time went on, and Gentiles became more and more predominant within the Church, that line shifted ever farther from original Jewish Christian beliefs, and the category of “Christian” beliefs more and more encompassed ideas from their own native philosophical background in Greco-Roman paganism, Platonism and Gnosticism, while excluding identifiable “Jewish” beliefs. They brought a whole range of assumptions about metaphysics and cosmology and theology, and read the Bible through that lens, finding answers in it to questions that were totally alien to its outlook and purposes.

Virtually all Christians today take for granted the idea of “salvation” consisting of going away to heaven in death as a disembodied “soul” or “spirit.” As I have explained at length in other articles, these ideas are nowhere to be found in the pages of Scripture, Old or New Testament. But they were commonplace in those aforementioned pagan religions and philosophical systems.

And we can trace how the Church gradually transformed from its original Jewish Messianic substance into, well … a pagan bastardization.

The Great Reversal

There are clues that this creeping pagan bastardization began in New Testament times.

In his first letter to the Church in Corinth, Paul rebukes them harshly for their denial of the resurrection. In affirming the truth of the resurrection against their error, Paul wrote, “Do not be misled: Bad company corrupts good character. Come back to your senses as you ought, and stop sinning; for there are some who are ignorant of God – I say this to your shame.” (v. 33-34)

He didn’t mention specifically what beliefs they held as the alternative hope of the gospel, but since substance dualism and spiritual translation to an otherworldly afterlife was the default belief in pagan religion, I would argue that as the leading contender. But, at the very least, by insisting that, without the resurrection, Christians have no hope at all, by implication he eliminated any notion of any alternative paradigm of salvation, such as disembodied souls going to heaven in death.  

Justin Martyr, on the other hand, writing just about exactly 100 years later, was more explicit in his denunciations than Paul, when the (presumably same) error asserted itself in his time: “If you have fallen in with some who are called Christians … who say there is no resurrection of the dead, but that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven – do not imagine that they are Christians.” (Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 80)

This was the first documented explicit mention of this belief we now take for granted, and it was a condemnation. As in, there were professing Christians at the time who spoke of salvation in those terms, and they were unequivocally rejected as false Christians because of it.

But, some of Justin Martyr’s other remarks (in chapter 5 of his Dialogue) indicate that he himself embraced the substance dualism that would eventually be included in the standard “Christian” set of beliefs.

(And, to be accurate, the Book of Enoch, significant among other examples, demonstrates that Second Temple Judaism had begun to absorb Hellenistic metaphysics about the afterlife and the “soul,” so the drift technically began much earlier than the Jewish/Christian split. But, these ideas are nonetheless absent from the actual Scriptures, and the post-split Christian Church was most emphatically not, over time, drawing their hermeneutical cues from Second Temple Jewish literature.)

Many other Church Fathers besides Justin Martyr made remarks about the soul surviving the death of the body and retaining conscious experiences in some sense, but the full-throated proclamation of this, and of heaven as the destination of the disembodied souls of the righteous, did not begin until Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century.

Origen is typically described as a “Christian Platonist” – rarely, if ever, a “Platonist Christian,” notably – precisely for his deliberate articulation of Christian doctrines according to Platonic metaphysical categories. His general approach to the Bible was to “spiritualize” it, treating it predominantly as allegory and symbolism to reframe the gospel according to Platonist terms.

“Salvation,” then, according to this view, consisted of the soul ascending beyond time and material reality to be united to God in death.

Tertullian, technically, was the first to speak of this explicitly, but it was Origen who systemized it by infusing Christian doctrine with Platonic metaphysics and normalizing it, so that after him, this became the commonly-held idea of what “salvation” meant among Christians.

Notably, Origen was heavily criticized during his lifetime for these and other offenses against accepted Christian beliefs, and then condemned as a heretic by later generations for taking his “spiritualization” and allegorizing of Scripture too far in various respects, but never for his teaching about souls ascending to heaven in death as the primary meaning of “salvation.”

No, after Origen, this became standard, and it was eventually institutionalized by Augustine in his “City of God,” among other works, so that “going to heaven” became and remained the standard “Christian” hope ever since.

The Other Side of the Reversal

In sharp contrast, we see the basic, standard belief of original Jewish Christianity follow the precise opposite trajectory to the “going to heaven as a disembodied soul”-paradigm.

Every Church Father from the earliest periods of Christianity who spoke on eschatology took for granted what we today would call “Premillennialism”: the belief that Jesus will return in order to reign visibly on earth. Their view was virtually identical to the Jewish concept of the Messiah that existed prior to Christianity and that they generally still hold today: the promised king from the line of David who would establish God’s kingdom on earth, centered upon Mount Zion in Jerusalem, ruling over the nations.

This was clearly the central hope of the New Testament writers, and the driving motivation for all of their work: “Therefore, gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed,” wrote the apostle (1 Peter 1:13).

To point out what should be obvious, but too often isn’t: all of their hope was to be set on a future historical event, not on their individual trajectory in the afterlife.  

He repeats this idea five more times in his epistle, as do the other writers in numerous other passages throughout the New Testament, and the early Church Fathers clearly understood the substance of that hope to be Christ’s visible reign on earth and their own bodily resurrection and glorification to rule alongside him.

Papias of Hierapolis, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius – all of these among other early Christian leaders affirmed Premillennialism. No early Church Father prior to Origen ever disavowed or disparaged it, and every single one who spoke on eschatology at all affirmed it. What we call “Premillennialism” today simply was Christianity. Christ’s resurrection from the dead was understood to be a preview of the Eschaton, and the Messiah’s reign on earth was the central feature of the Eschaton.   

As the Church drifted ever farther from its Jewish roots, the result was that what had previously been the central hope of Christianity held out by its earliest leaders – the Millennial Reign of the Messiah – became the object of ridicule and embarrassment to its later exemplars.

Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria, Jerome, Eusebius of Caesarea, Augustine and others staked out what would become the standard position taken for granted among all Christians everywhere when they denounced Premillennialism (“Chiliasm,” in their terminology, from the Greek word “chilioi,” meaning “a thousand”). They called it a “Jewish fable” and condemned it as “carnal.”

Notably, Eusebius of Caesarea preserves for us some valuable quotations from Papias of Hierapolis about the authorship of the Gospels, but makes a special point to denounce Papias as a person “of very small intelligence” because of his Premillennialism.

 They embraced what is now called “Amillennialism” by “spiritualizing” all of those passages about the Messiah’s reign on earth to mean the current age of history, the Church Age, based on their settled insistence that the Church is the True Israel.

So, the early Church – beginning very early on, but in gradual stages over centuries – abandoned the actual salvation for which Jesus died in favor of a pagan counterfeit.

We Must Break the Wheel

The swapping-out of Millennialism for “going to heaven” as the central “Christian” hope is the most conspicuous and so easily identifiable example of the Church’s early and lasting apostasy, but it’s far from the only feature of our collective confusion and error.

Institutionally, Christians have never explicitly swapped out the broader cosmological framing of biblical linear-progressive time in favor of pagan cyclical time, as we did with the aforementioned paradigms of salvation. But, the effect is the same as if we had. The Church now functions exactly as if we had.

We’ve lapsed into the same prison of fatalism from which the gospel was supposed to liberate humanity.

Origen, Augustine and the rest of the Church Fathers who normalized and institutionalized the aforementioned errors never explicitly denied or denounced the resurrection from the dead nor the Second Coming, and so we still have these as doctrinal boxes that we check off.

But, we treat them as afterthoughts – footnotes to the main emphasis of our “gospel.” The topic of eschatology – End Times, the progression of history toward its divine telos – is commonly treated as secondary, at best, and all too often as a divisive topic to be avoided by responsible, unity-minded Christians, because it’s “not a salvation issue.” And, of course, by “not a salvation issue,” what is meant is that “Error on this topic will not prevent a person from going to heaven. It doesn’t matter what a person believes about these trivial details – don’t ‘major in the minors.’ What matters is holding the correct doctrines necessary to be admitted into heaven when you die.”

Except … the entire message of the Bible throughout is Eschatology, and there is not a single word spoken about the afterlife.  

That expectation of Christ’s return and the Church’s role in working toward it to bring it about is repeatedly held out in the New Testament as the entire motivating hope of the Christian life.

By shifting the focus of attention to individual “salvation” to a “spiritual” existence outside of time and history and material reality, there never needed to be an explicit embrace of pagan cosmology and renunciation of biblical linear time for us to fall into the same error as if we had.

We just sort of … forgot about it. We lost the plot somewhere along the way and just never missed it enough to think to look for it.

So, we just don’t think of the Church in terms of being God’s very Presence on earth – His vehicle for the advancement of divine order in the world to drive the progress of human civilization toward His purposes.

Instead, the role of the Church is much more akin to those pagan religious practices described earlier. The Church serves largely as passive and inert cultural furniture, to meet the “spiritual” needs of individuals by punctuating the seasons of their lives by providing a venue for them to hold wedding ceremonies, to “baptize” their babies, eulogize their dead, and learn about “the good life” among like-minded people of similar socio-economic status, and to get some life-coaching about how to regulate their moods and maintain the status quo until their time to leave this world.

Meanwhile, the concept of “progress” has been hijacked and counterfeited by our enemies to mean the precise opposite of what it should.

So, the Church, as we know it, is essentially a pagan cargo cult: outwardly, it imitates what we see in the Bible, but without understanding its substance.

The Unsubverted Gospel, part 3 of 3

What does “the Church as a forge for saints” actually look like, in practical terms?

What does it mean for the Church to mentor people in their “participation in the Divine Nature”?

(Note to reader: This article is significantly longer than usual, which is saying something, I realize. It’s not supposed to be read in one sitting and it has been divided into subsections that can function as stand-alone essays on their respective Progressive Quality of the Divine Nature. Taken as a whole, this article is intended to provide a practical guide to discipleship in keeping with the objective of the gospel as explained in the two previous installments.)

Step 0: Pre-Baptism Initiation

First, they must be properly initiated.

Peter’s exhortation was that we “must make every effort to add to (our) faith” those qualities of the Divine Nature.

So, everything is for nothing if we don’t begin on a solid foundation of genuine and informed faith. Without that foundation, our Christianity is just a cultural costume, a tribal identification, beneath which we are essentially no different than non-Christians.

As discussed more thoroughly in other articles of this blog, faith is not an epistemology – it is not a means of knowledge alternative to reason and evidence. It is a relationship orientation. It is personal trust and confidence in a Person. So, according to the Bible, we do not believe in God and Christ and the resurrection because we have faith. Rather, we have faith in God because we believe the resurrection happened. As in, the resurrection and the truth of God’s existence are matters of rational, objective fact rooted in evidence and reason, and faith is our response to those facts, once established. The resurrection is the basis for faith, not the object of faith.

They must be taught why Christianity is both true and merits their voluntary undertaking of baptism, and all that it signifies: Namely, death – death to the world, to one’s own mortal nature, to any and all competing loyalties and demands, in order to live to God. Being lowered in death with Christ is the necessary prerequisite to being resurrected to eternal life in him.

This is not an empty ritual or a mere symbolic initiation rite into a human institution. To submit to baptism should be an enactment of what the person is committing to undergo in practical terms: “I am giving up my life, such as it is, and identifying with Christ in his death, in order to be raised to a new life of absolute devotion to him and to his cause and kingdom.”

That is the level of commitment required to “make every effort to add to our faith” those qualities of the Divine Nature, and so we must ensure that commitment is genuine and well considered before baptism, lest we empty it of its meaning and make it into a lie (as is so typically the case). So, they must be made to understand that Christianity is true and merits such single-minded lifelong commitment.

This cannot be done through indoctrination. This can be faked by indoctrination, but for true understanding to inform genuine faith, the hard work of education is the only way, not indoctrination.

In other words, new Christians should be initiated with a basic course in apologetics.

This is exactly what Peter himself modeled for us in the epistle under study. After his exhortation to participate in the Divine Nature and thereby escape the corruption of the world, and his promise of the rewards of doing so and the dangers of failure, he went on:

“So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have …

“For we did not follow cleverly invented stories when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty …”

As in, all of his exhortations to avail themselves of the promises of God, to strive to add to their faith, were predicated on the historical fact of the glorified Christ whom Peter had personally witnessed.

That must be our foundation as well.

Our initiatory course in apologetics should be centered upon the case for the resurrection, but ideally should include as a build-up to that the basics of natural theology/classical apologetics.

According to Scripture, the knowledge of God is more fundamental and universal than Scripture itself. As in, Paul thought God’s existence and nature should be knowable to everyone from creation, and this was the consistent teaching of the Scripture from centuries before Paul.

So, if the Bible is true, God’s existence should be made evident from creation, independent of revelation, and then revelation (the resurrection, specifically) ratifies that evidence.  

 There are four basic arguments from classical apologetics that I always rely upon to demonstrate this. In so doing, this will give new Christians greater confidence in the truth of God’s existence and intervention, as well as in His practical relevance to daily life, which will reinforce their confidence in the Bible as well.

Those arguments are:

• The Cosmological Argument
• The Teleological Argument
• The Moral Argument
• The Argument from Consciousness 

Then, of course, the focus should be on the case for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which will include discussion of the Gospels and other New Testament writings as valid historical sources (which, again, I explain more comprehensively elsewhere that this was the epistemological framework modeled by the early Church).

A brand-new Christian doesn’t necessarily have to be an expert in apologetics and be able to teach a class on it as a condition of being initiated into membership in the Church. But he or she should be able to at least pass an oral exam by demonstrating basic competence with these five arguments before being baptized. To be clear – the point is absolutely not for them to showcase their intellectual ability or expertise in apologetics or philosophy. It’s great if they do, but that’s not the point of the exercise. It is to demonstrate first and foremost that their faith is genuine and is the result of believing in the literal, objective truth of the gospel, and is not the result of indoctrination, superstition or suspension of disbelief motivated by a need for social belonging in the church. The point is to make sure their faith is real and they are sincerely committed to the demands of discipleship. The point is to make sure it is truly Jesus Christ whom they seek to follow, not a religion or a theological system or a social fad or a clique of Christian peers.  

This will not only give them a sure footing in knowing why Christianity is true, but also establishes a foundation in basic theology as a practical discipline, which will be built upon in their later discipleship.

I’ve known far too many lifelong churchgoers who lack this basic understanding and whose conception of God and Jesus and of Christianity in general is largely unchanged from what they received in childhood, because so many churches just don’t place any value or emphasis on discipleship and spiritual growth and intellectual rigor, and especially not on apologetics. If it’s not a so-called “salvation issue” (i.e., directly related to getting them into heaven by way of indoctrination), it’s treated as optional, at best — and some are even hostile to apologetics and the rest as incompatible with “faith,” as they understand it. So, if ever these people are confronted with an exhortation to “make every effort to add their faith” those qualities of the Divine Nature, they not only lack the necessary commitment, but can’t even see the value and relevance of doing so within the paradigm of “salvation” they were taught.

Along with apologetics as a prerequisite for baptism, the initiate should be taught the basics of Christian doctrine as well, “laying a foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptism, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment,” and then tested on this knowledge. Again, this isn’t for mastery, but just for basic competence.

Step 0.5: ‘Always Two There Are: A Master and an Apprentice’

Upon completing baptism, the new Christian should be paired with a competent and mature senior Christian of the same sex to serve as a one-on-one mentor, under the supervision of the church’s leadership.

(And for the love of everything good and holy, please stop calling such a person a “discipler” or the act of mentoring people “discipling.” That’s the equivalent of calling a schoolteacher a “studenter” who “students” her class. No, she teaches them, because she is a teacher. Teachers teach. “Studenting” is not a word, and neither is “discipling,” and we sound like unserious tourists when we say things like that. Students are taught, and disciples are mentored.)

The mentor’s task will be to guide and instruct the initiate in the process laid out by the apostle Peter of adding to his faith those Seven Progressive Qualities of the Divine Nature: “You must make every effort to add to your faith:

• Arete; and to arete,
• Knowledge; and to knowledge,
• Self-mastery; and to self-mastery,
• Perseverance; and to perseverance,
• Godliness; and to godliness,
• Brotherly affection; and to brotherly affection,
• Agape (Love).”

It’s worth reiterating again that Peter’s prescription for our participation in the Divine Nature is the obverse of escaping the corruption of the world caused by appetites: to do one is to do the other – the more we participate in the Divine Nature, the farther removed we are from the corruption of the world. And, the only way to escape the corruption of the world is by participating in the Divine Nature. There is no other means of escape.

While there is some specific attention given to avoiding sin in the New Testament, the far more prevalent emphasis is on what we pursue than on what we avoid. As in, we cannot avoid sin by putting our focus on those particular sins to which we are inclined. That just amplifies our temptation. Just like if you want to break an addiction, you don’t just grit your teeth and white-knuckle it indefinitely while you deny yourself the cigarettes, alcohol or sugar that you cannot stop thinking about. That only delays an inevitable relapse. You must replace it with something positive, like exercise or some other constructive project in which to invest yourself, knowing that falling back into those bad habits will undo your investment.

Likewise, we avoid sin by focusing on the positive attributes that we want to pursue – we’re not trying to avoid angering God by denying ourselves the sins in which we are tempted to indulge. We’re not thinking about sin at all, nor about wrath. Rather, we are thinking about the grace of God and zealously embracing the Gift by striving to upgrade ourselves according to the promises we’ve been given and the New Nature we have inherited from our Father.

It helps to think of it like a video game (if you’re into that kind of thing), but with actual stakes and real-life benefits, in which we grow in XP and improve our stats and skills for greater power within the world, to better master the game. In the same way, we cultivate the skills and attributes of God Himself within ourselves and each other, each building upon the previous attribute, and over time, we grow in wisdom and strength and power, and eventually that growth overflows to others around us, and we thereby transform the world.

The role of the mentor is to aid in that endeavor. He (or she) is a servant to the disciple, whose task is to empower and build up and equip the disciple to become greater in strength and wisdom and godly qualities.

As in, it isn’t to control or impose discipline upon the disciple, nor turn the disciple into a dependent upon the mentor nor upon the institution of the church. It is the precise opposite and antithesis of the pattern characterized by a cult: It is to empower the disciple to grow into independence and maturity, so that he can go on to mentor others, and thereby advance the kingdom of God on earth. The objective of the mentor is to make himself superfluous.

Step 1: Arete

The very first quality Peter instructed to add to our faith is “Arete.” The word is typically translated “goodness” or “virtue” or “excellence,” but these all fall woefully short of the full meaning of the Greek term. It includes those qualities, but can hardly be limited to any one or even all of them.

The word’s first appearance in Peter’s epistle is in verse 3: “His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and Arete.”

So, it is first introduced by Peter as a quality of God Himself, hence our striving for it in our participation in His Nature. Like all of the others that follow, we already have that quality within us, but in seed form, as a potentiality, if we have God’s Spirit dwelling within us; and so we cultivate it in ourselves as a matter of trusting Him and claiming His promise.

In Greek culture, Arete was a technical term that was the object of the Greek Paideia, the training and education program of an ideal member of Greek society. It is the etymological root for the word “aristocracy,” meaning “rule by the best.”

The term includes the quality of moral excellence, but it encompasses also an “excellence” tied to function and fulfillment of purpose: the arete of a horse is different than the arete of a human, and the arete of a woman is different than the arete of a man, and the arete of a warrior is different still from the arete of a craftsman or a politician or a builder or an artist. Each is to pursue arete through the perfection of their particular vocation and function in society.

It also included optimization of the body and the mind through athletic and academic excellence, physical discipline and philosophical training and the pursuit of knowledge and self-improvement in general.  

For us as Christians, our arete in the moral sense and our arete in the sense of function/fulfillment of purpose are not identical, but they are closely related and overlap significantly. As God’s holy people in whom His Holy Spirit dwells, His virtue and moral excellence is to be our own. But also, as God’s image-bearers, our very purpose is to implement the divine order in creation. Our arete is in resuming the mission of Adam in the Garden of being the Presence of God in the world and the agents and embodiment of the divine order.

We are to pursue arete in that general moral and functional sense by studying the Bible, and the Law in particular, to train ourselves in righteousness by learning to love what God loves and to hate what God hates. We also pursue this in prayer by actively seeking this growth and internal transformation from God – by asking for it directly, and by confessing and repenting of our failures and sins, and by actively looking for opportunities to be God’s agents in the world and in the lives of the people around us.

And, of course, God made us with physical bodies – as physical beings. Physical training has value for Christians no less than it did for ancient Greeks, and all the more so because our bodies are God’s temple, and so there is no reason that arete in this sense shouldn’t include physical discipline and the pursuit of athletic excellence, barring any medical conditions that would preclude it.

That’s Arete in the general sense of the term, but there is also a more specific Arete that applies only to Christians, and to each individual Christian uniquely.

In Ephesians 4, the passage I cited at length in Part 2 of this series in which Paul outlines the basic structure and purpose of the Church, he also said:

“Now to each one of us grace has been given according to the measure of the gift of Christ. This is why it says: ‘When He ascended on high, He led captives away, and gave gifts to men …”

To each one of us, grace has been given, in the form of gifts given by Christ, Paul said.

I take this to mean that if you are a Christian – if the Spirit of Christ dwells in you, you have been given some spiritual gift or another. Possibly many gifts, but at the very least, one.

The purpose of that gift, Paul went on to explain a few verses later, is to serve and help build up the Church.

It is your job to find out what that is. It is your mentor’s job, and that of the church leadership to whom he reports, to help you find out what that is. And, the pursuit of Arete in the general sense should lead to the discovery of that arete in the specific and individual sense.

And, again – everyone who is a genuine Christian, who is truly saved by the indwelling of the Spirit of God – has been given such a spiritual gift, according to what we’ve read from Paul.

And you will know your gift by its fulfillment of three somewhat obvious criteria: 1) It’s something you are good at; 2) it’s something you enjoy doing (i.e., it’s a gift, not a burden or an affliction); and 3) it’s something that brings genuine edifying value to the Church.

Every single Christian who is a Christian has something of value to contribute to the Church, and something the Church would be poorer for not having. It’s not necessarily something flashy and exciting on its face, but only a very few gifts of any practical value are. And that gift is included in the grace Jesus Christ gives to us in salvation.

I don’t want to belabor this too much more, but it’s worth putting as fine a point on this as possible: if you don’t know what your gift is and your church isn’t actively helping you to discover and utilize it, your church is failing you. It is not doing its God-assigned job. It is negligent. And, you are failing your church if you do not bring this to their attention and give them an opportunity to repent of it.

“You must make every effort to add to your faith Arete,” Peter said, and finding and using your spiritual gift is a vital component of that. The Church needs you to get in the game.  

Step 2: Knowledge

“And to arete, knowledge …”

This one is pretty straightforward. The Greek word here is “gnosis,” which just means “knowledge.” There’s no nuance to it or technical meaning that gets lost in translation from Greek to English.

In contrast, there is another word also translated “knowledge” that figures prominently in Peter’s epistle – “epignosis.” The prefix “epi-“ is an intensifier, meaning “at” or “upon,” which modifies the root “gnosis” to mean a personal, firsthand experiential knowledge – deeper and more intimate than mere head-knowledge. That’s the word in verse 3: “His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through our epignosis of Him who called us by His own glory and arete.” It’s also the word used in 2 Peter 2:20, which reads, “If they have escaped the corruption of the world through the epignosis of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.”

But, the “knowledge” Peter exhorts us to add to our arete and our faith is just the regular “gnosis” that means “knowledge” in the unspecified general sense.

Peter wants us to study.

Pursuing knowledge is a lifelong undertaking, and there is simply too much to know to ever expect to know everything so, obviously, we need to focus our efforts.

Knowledge of the Bible is our starting point. First and foremost, we need to read it in its entirety, from beginning to end, and then after that, we need to read it some more, and then when we’re done, keep going, because we’re never actually done.

To study the Bible is to grow in love for the Bible and all that it reveals, but I realize that not everyone takes to it immediately, and doing so can seem like a chore. But if you make yourself do it – out of faith that it will eventually pay off, I promise, it will gradually and eventually stop seeming like a chore. You’ll find it to be a wellspring of life and joy and power, the heights and depths of which you will never reach.

So, pursue knowledge of the Bible – of its contents and teachings. But also, pursue knowledge about the Bible – its composition and authorship and origins, its manuscript sources, its languages and translation history, its cultural and historical context, etc.

Doing this is immensely rewarding for its own sake, but it will also awaken curiosity about other topics – of history and philosophy and other religions (not to practice, but to understand as part of the cultural context out of which the Bible emerged), science and social issues and all of the countless other topics that the Bible touches upon.

The Bible is an inexhaustible source of knowledge, but it’s also a catalyst for intellectual curiosity and growth. It’s like a gymnasium for the mind that will make you stronger and wiser and more knowledgeable about subjects well beyond the Christian religion, and it is a gift of immeasurable worth for helping to awaken and cultivate the Divine Nature within.

And, a good mentor will guide you through the Bible to help you understand it, and will help you see what it’s teaching on its own terms, without imposing his own dogmas and biases upon it – i.e., he will educate you, not indoctrinate you.

Step 3: Self-Mastery

“And to knowledge, self-mastery …”

The Greek word is “egkratia,” and it is often translated “self-control,” but I would argue that this wildly understates the meaning of the word. It’s from the roots “en-” meaning “in” and “kratos,” meaning “dominion” or “rule.” It’s the same root used for different forms of government or rulership – democracy, aristocracy, autocracy, theocracy, etc. In this term, it is that same rulership, but applied within – it means to have dominion over oneself, a “selfocracy,” so to speak.  

This goes back to a major theme of Part 2, which explored the nature of our corruption being that we are dominated by our appetites and animal natures.

Participation in the Divine Nature means mastering our appetites and impulses and animal instincts and being rulers of ourselves. That is at the heart of what it means to be “governed by the Spirit” and “not governed by the flesh.”  

This is, of course, a deeply sensitive topic, but it’s one that must be broached: As we all know, our civilization suffers from an obesity epidemic, and Christians are as much entangled in that as anybody.

There is an obvious and visible problem of physical obesity, but I would contend that this is only a symptom of a deeper problem of mental and spiritual obesity.

Yes – the physical obesity problem has its own contributing factors in the form of the abundance of options for cheap, fast, metabolically-destructive and highly-addictive “food,” coupled with the ease of life and convenience of sedentary lifestyles.

But, all of that is part of an overall and more pervasive culture of mental and spiritual obesity that provides moral cover and encouragement to the physical aspect of the problem.  

We are mentally obese in that we are overfed by information and social narratives and stories bombarding us from the screens and devices we are addicted to staring at for hours on end every day. We have immediate, unrestricted access to more knowledge than any other generation in human history, but we are more ignorant and thoughtless and devoid of wisdom than any previous generation as well. We have a constant stream of amusement and TV shows and “news” broadcasts telling us what to think, and all too many people who are strident in expressing those preprogrammed thoughts as their own, but it is a rare person who actually thinks for himself and can articulate those thoughts without falling back on canned slogans and sound bites. Yes, I am talking about the woke Left and the stereotypical feral, cliché-shouting “activists” and the prostitutes masquerading as journalists and pundits who agitate them and pull their strings. But I’m not only talking about them.

We are spiritually obese in that we have no shortage of churches and professing Christians, but the content they’re getting from the pulpit is so much superficial garbage that is masquerading as the word of God. “Jesus” is a very popular and widely-cited mascot for a lot of different belief systems and social causes that go under the label “Christianity,” but I believe I’ve already addressed all that at length in Part 1, that it would be redundant to belabor the point again here.  

Both mentally and spiritually, we have an abundance of consumption, but very little lean mass of functional and practical use. It is mostly fat and we are being smothered under the weight of it.  

Our abundance of options and ease of access have cultivated a widespread culture of laziness and self-indulgence and entitlement to stay this way, and so the physical obesity is just a visible manifestation of what we’re doing to ourselves mentally and spiritually.

There’s no reason to expect nonbelievers who are dead to God and enslaved to their fallen natures to resist the pressures of their appetites and of the widespread availability of cheap, unhealthy food and the lure of a sedentary lifestyle. Nor to resist the lure of morally imbecilic socio-political narratives that embolden them to virtue signal and try to lord it over their perceived political enemies. Nor the lure of being addicted to their screens and filling their heads with so much empty stimulation and noise while they outsource their thinking to “influencers” and TV personalities.

But as the sons and daughters of God who bear His Spirit and Nature within ourselves, we should be ashamed of ourselves if we do not heed the apostle’s exhortation to self-mastery.

And, indeed, we haven’t. His exhortation doesn’t even register with us. It’s not on our minds at all and is no part of our common “Christian” culture.

Not only must this change, but the Church itself should be the answer to this growing civilizational sickness.

We must make every effort to add to our faith self-mastery.

The aforementioned qualities of Arete and Knowledge should include becoming better educated about the world and integrating the gospel into our social and political philosophies, but we still must train ourselves to resist being controlled by the political and social narratives that are programming us into becoming the tools of other people’s agendas and active enemies to the divine order.

If any of us do suffer from screen addiction, we need to discipline ourselves to only use our screens at certain predetermined times (if at all). The mentor should be like an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor in this and other regards – an accountability partner.  

Also, and even more fundamentally and importantly, we must master our appetites and our physical impulses.

Practice regular fasting. It trains the will and robs our appetites of their power over us, and teaches us not to take feelings and physical impulses as guides to reality and behavior. It teaches us to uncouple our behavior from our feelings. Early Christians fasted two days a week, as a matter of standard custom. We would do well to adopt the same practice today.

Also, we should all adopt a regular exercise regimen. Churches should include organized exercise sessions as a normal part of ministry, just as vital as regular Bible study and prayer gatherings. If they have the budget to build a gym, awesome. But there’s no real need for that. Bodyweight calisthenics, stretching and yoga (stripped of all the Hinduism, of course), running, martial arts training and plenty of other options require no equipment at all – just an open space on a flat surface will do.

A good mentor will learn the right mix of patience and compassion and accountability in the disciple’s pursuit of self-mastery: how much of a brutal and demanding drill instructor to be, versus how much of an encouraging and gentle fitness trainer to be, and when to switch it up.  

We should not actively police church members’ weight and excommunicate people for obesity. At least, not without great reluctance and as an absolute final resort in the face of willful unrepentance. But we cannot treat obesity and other symptoms of a lack of self-control as if they are normal and expected and irrelevant to our faithfulness to Christ – as if they are any less sinful and contrary to the divine order than any other sin. Considering the aforementioned conflict between appetite and Spirit, these issues are at the heart of the gospel.

The Church should be at the forefront of addressing this societal plague. As long as we are not, and are as much a victim of it as everyone else, that exposes the lie of our profession of faith.

We must make every effort to add to our faith self-mastery. It’s not an option or a suggestion. To treat it as such is apostasy.

Step 4: Perseverance

“To self-mastery, perseverance …”

The Greek is “hypomone,” and it is sometimes translated “endurance,” “patience” or “steadfastness.” It’s from the roots “hypo,” meaning “under” and “meno,” meaning “to remain.”

“Meno” is the same Greek word from John 15, when Jesus said:

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain (meno) in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”

To point out the obvious – Jesus was quite emphatic in exhorting his disciples to remain in him. He drove the point home quite explicitly and repetitively.

“Mone” is the noun form of the verb “meno,” and means a dwelling place – a place where one remains. “Hypomone” is that quality of remaining despite opposition and adversity. It isn’t mere consistency over time, but consistency in the face of challenge and hardship – consistency when you don’t feel like it and want to quit and all the voices within you and outside of you are telling you your faith is misplaced and it isn’t worth the price and the struggle, and you’re starting to see their point, but you remain nonetheless.

And, we absolutely will meet such opposition to remaining in him. We are surrounded by it, actually.

And sometimes that opposition will come under a flag of Christian fellowship and piety and godly virtue.

The fifth point of Calvinism – the “P” in the acronym TULIP – is “Perseverance of the Saints,” otherwise known as “Eternal Security” by proponents and “Once Saved, Always Saved” by detractors. The doctrine is that everyone who is truly born again will inexorably and inevitably persevere to the end, having been predetermined by God to do so. Anyone who does not persevere to the end was never truly born again/saved to begin with, they say.

This is obviously and preposterously false on its face.

And, I would like to preface what follows with a caveat that, while I recognize the fact that this is a highly controversial topic among Christians, that controversy has everything to do with our widespread confusion and denominational groupthink and institutional indoctrination and absolutely nothing to do with any ambiguity within the text itself. I don’t even recognize this as a legitimate topic of debate among honest, biblically-literate Christians, because the Bible is abundantly and undeniably clear on this topic. There are innumerable explicit passages that plainly warn against the loss of salvation, while there are absolutely none that explicitly teach “Once Saved, Always Saved.” Every single passage that supposedly teaches that requires some elaborate chain of inferences from beyond the text in order to coax out that interpretation, but never just says in so many words that genuine salvation cannot be lost. And then, those dubiously-interpreted passages are set up as primary and then used as a justification to gloss over and ignore those passages that are explicit in their warnings. And, people go along with it because it coddles their wishful thinking and their weak faith, and congregations that teach this will socially reward and affirm conformity and ostracize dissenters (I have experienced this firsthand by getting excommunicated over this very issue).

Consequently, many do not persevere in the faith, because OS;AS inoculates them against any conviction that they would ever need to, having been assured by their trusted authorities that God Himself will ease their passage through any faith-threatening adversity they might encounter, so they fold when that adversity arrives. (Or, their faith is so shallow and ineffectual that they never encounter any opposition to it, because they live no differently than the world.)

If perseverance is inevitable by dint of having been born again, why would Peter have written to such people that they “must make every effort to add to your faith … perseverance”? If it was already guaranteed, why would any effort be needed at all? Or, for that matter, any instruction? If Peter thought that to be born again automatically meant “guaranteed by God Himself to persevere to the end,” why even bring it up? It can’t be argued that he was writing to people whose salvation was in question, because his entire line of instruction was predicated on them having been imbued with the Divine Nature in which they could participate, “therefore you must make every effort …”, he said.

By that same reasoning, why would Jesus implore his own disciples to remain in him if that was already predetermined? Quite obviously, he was not making any promise to them that he or the Father would ensure the outcome and sovereignly preclude their falling away. The burden was plainly on them to remain, hence Jesus’ promise of rewards if they do and destruction if they don’t: he wanted to motivate them, because this was clearly something that required their attention and intention and effort. And it cannot be argued that “if they fell away, they were never really a part of the vine to begin with.” You cannot “remain” where you have never been.

God does, however, ensure our perseverance, in a way: hypomone is already included in the very qualities we inherit from Him as His children. That does not preclude our need to make every effort to cultivate it. It is for this very reason, Peter said, that we must spare no effort. If we do not persevere, it will not be because God failed to give us everything needed to do so. It will be because we failed to make that effort.

Now, Calvinists are partly correct in the many passages they cite that speak of God sustaining us, that He will continue the good work He began in us, etc. It isn’t as if I’m arguing that God abandons us and leaves us to our own devices as soon as we’re born again.

But, every single one of those promises Calvinists cite are conditional, and they always ignore the conditions and even insist that there are none, and in so doing totally nullify exhortations like those of Peter and Jesus.

That condition is faith. As the entire epistle to the Hebrews amply demonstrates throughout, having faith today is not, in itself, any guarantee that we will have faith tomorrow. We must be on our guard against complacency, drifting away, being enticed away to idols and apostasy and false systems of justification. It absolutely can happen, and it does happen.

And, we see this in the very epistle under study. In the opening chapter, Peter wrote that it is “through our knowledge (epignosis) of Him” that we “participate in the Divine Nature and escape the corruption of the world.”

In the next chapter, he wrote, “If they have escaped the corruption of the world through knowledge (epignosis) of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them.”

Calvinists always fall back on the canard that “they were never really saved to begin with, and their knowledge of Jesus Christ was only superficial and insincere.”

The text does not leave that option open to us. It wasn’t the general and unspecified word “gnosis” that Peter used, but “epignosis” – the firsthand, intimate and experiential kind of knowledge of which he spoke in chapter 1, which is the basis for participation in the Divine Nature. And, participate in the Divine Nature they did, as evidenced by their having escaped the corruption of the world by that knowledge. To escape the corruption of the world is to participate in the Divine Nature, and vice versa. The idea that anyone even could escape the corruption of the world in any other way is a heresy in itself.

These were born-again Christians, imbued with the Spirit of God, who fell away and were damned for it. If it could happen to them, it can happen to you and me and every other Christian. And the more lightly we take this warning, the more vulnerable we are.

Anyone who says otherwise is starting with their theology first, and then lawyering the text to accommodate it. They are not getting that from the text. “Perseverance of the Saints” is a lie straight from the mouth of the Devil to exploit wishful thinking and weak faith and to give people a license to gloss over and ignore the urgency and stakes of Peter’s instruction.

The late uber-Calvinist R.C. Sproul, in his book “The Work of Christ,” wrote:

“We have a doctrine called the perseverance of the saints. I do not like that name for it; while saints do persevere, it is not because they have the power of perseverance within themselves. If it were left to me to persevere in my Christian walk, I would fall and stumble in a moment. The One who really perseveres is God. He perseveres with His children and thereby preserves them. One of the chief ways in which God preserves His people is through the priestly intercession of Jesus.”

Clearly, nobody told the apostle Peter any of that, because he thought we do have that power within us. Either he’s wrong or Sproul is, because Peter clearly thought we have that power within ourselves, precisely because of the grace of God.

I suspect that Sproul’s dislike of the phrasing was because, on some level, he recognized the inherent contradictory absurdity of exhorting us to strive for something that is impossible for us, yet already predetermined. He didn’t like the word “perseverance,” as such, and so he qualified it to mean something else entirely, so that “perseverance” just means “God does it all for you by carrying you and expecting nothing of you, because you are a helpless wretch, and you will never be anything but a helpless wretch.”

In that regard, he missed the entire point of the gospel, which is for God to put His Nature in us, not to coddle us as His perpetual helpless infants or puppets, but so that we can grow up and learn to walk on our own two feet.

The greatest impediment to Christian perseverance today, I would argue, is perverse nonsense like “Once Saved, Always Saved.”

Once we dispense with that and take Peter’s instruction seriously and understand our own responsibility to persevere and remain in him, it isn’t difficult to understand what that means. The perseverance itself might be difficult at times, but it’s easy to understand what it means.

It means holding on to our faith – faith as defined in Step 0.

In his “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis wrote:

“Now Faith … is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.”

How do you “train the habit of Faith”?

Build a strong foundation in the first place. In those times when Christianity does seem unlikely – based on your mood, the weather, the day you’re having, something you ate – return to the anchor of your faith. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is that anchor, which God has given to the entire world as our proof. Think of the person of Jesus Christ himself.

Also, think of your own experiences of answered prayer and interventions by God. Contemplate the conviction you had at first that led to your baptism.

Pray. Pray, and then pray. God Himself is our Source for life and the One in Whom our faith is rooted. “Perseverance” means continuing to trust Him, and prayer is our direct line to Him. We have His promise that the line is always open to Him, and that (as R.C. Sproul rightly pointed out) Jesus himself is always interceding for us. It will, at times, seem like none of this is true. Trust Him anyway, and pray.

Seek the support of fellow believers whose faith you respect and whose wisdom you trust.

Also, a good mentor will train you in all of this and other ways to persevere.

Step 5: Eusebeia

“And to perseverance, godliness …”

The Greek word here is “Eusebeia,” from “eu,” meaning “well” or “good,” and “sebomai,” meaning “to worship.” It is sometimes translated “piety.”

As is often the case, the English translation doesn’t quite communicate the full sense of the word. Or, at least, the connotations we typically attach to “godliness” or “piety” don’t necessarily capture the meaning of “eusebeia.” Those terms make me think of Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” bit from Saturday Night Live, and the kinds of people he satirized by it: Paul spoke to his disciple Timothy about the corrupt people in the last days who will be characterized by “having an appearance of godliness (eusebeia), but denying its power.”  

So, there is power in genuine eusebeia. Many will adopt an affectation of godliness, but it lacks that power, and they don’t even understand that anything is missing, because they lack genuine godliness. 

“Eusebeia” means to worship what should be worshiped, to correctly revere what is worthy of reverence. It’s about rightly relating to God and the things of God with appropriate awe for the numinous quality of God’s Presence. It is the Fear of God, simply put.  

Many commentators point out the distinction between “eusebeia” and the word more typically translated as “religion” in the New Testament – “threskeia.”

“Threskeia” speaks of any kind of religion or ceremonial observance, of God or of any other gods, without regard for the correctness or righteousness of it.

“Eusebeia,” on the other hand, speaks of rightly-placed worship and awe and respect for holiness.

Once again, the best way to cultivate this quality is to study the Bible. Particularly, the Torah and the instructions for worship. Pay close attention to how faithful people related to God, and what instructions God Himself gave for how to properly worship Him. What kinds of acts and behaviors provoked His wrath and punishment? What pleased Him?

The ultimate example, in my opinion, of this quality of Eusebeia – of the right way for a godly mortal to relate to the Holy One, the Most High God, and the outcome of that right relationship – would be Moses after spending time in God’s Presence. Being in the Presence of Holiness transformed Moses to make him holy. God’s glory radiated from his face after he left God’s Presence.  

And that is exactly the kind of transformation we’re talking about.

In order to make every effort to add to our faith eusebeia, we should do what Moses did: Spend time in the Presence of God. Pray. Approach Him on His terms, with appropriate reverence and awe. Honor Him as holy in our conduct toward Him, and toward others.

Step 6: Philadelphia

“To godliness, brotherly affection …”

The Greek word here is “Philadelphia,” from “philos,” meaning “friend” and “philia,” which is the affection between friends, and “adelphos,” meaning “brother,” hence, “brotherly love” or “brotherly affection.”

This is the love we have for our fellow Christians, because they are our fellows.

There are four words for “love” in Greek:

• “Storge,” which is the love of family,
• “Eros,” which is sexual/romantic love,
• “Agape,” which we’re not talking about just yet, and
• “Philia.”

“Philadelphia,” then, is a sort of “adoptive brotherly affection.” It’s not “storge,” because that’s the natural love between actual, blood-related brothers and other relatives. “Philadelphia” is more of a “found family”-kind of love: you love one another because of what you have in common.

Specifically, as Christians, we love one another because we recognize that the love of God, the love from God, that we depend on as our very lives and identities and purpose for existence – it is the same love God has for other Christians. To honor His love for us entails that we honor His love in them. To love them is to love ourselves. We have the same Father, the same King we willingly follow and worship, the same cause, the same purpose. We share a tribe and identity, the same values and hopes, and the same enemies. That makes us brothers and sisters. That makes us family on a level far deeper and more profound and lasting than what we have with our biological families.

And, this should be the primary basis for our fellowship, if it is to be actual Christian fellowship.

To clarify: There is nothing wrong with a bunch of Christians with a shared love of golf going to the golf course together and golfing.

But if it’s their love of golf that is the primary basis for their mutual affection and fellowship, that’s not actually Christian fellowship and doesn’t qualify as the brotherly love we are instructed to cultivate as Christians. The fact that they all happen to be Christians is entirely incidental to their friendship. The basis for their friendship is golf, not Christ.

Which, again – that isn’t to say there is anything wrong with a bunch of Christians bonding over their shared hobbies, because that might provide the occasion for the bond to deepen and actually grow into genuine Christian fellowship.

But, I just want to caution against the kind of superficiality I often see in which a bunch of Christians within a congregation form a clique around their shared interests and so hang out together and call it “fellowship” with the connotation that it is “Christian” fellowship and they’re doing something the Bible tells them to do, when it has nothing to do with whatever faith they have in common, and neither Christ nor the Bible are ever discussed, and the direction of conversation might even run quite contrary to anything appropriate to genuine “Christian fellowship,” which – for our purposes, is worse than no fellowship at all in that it normalizes non-Christian behaviors among Christians, undermining their faithfulness and sanctification, and ultimately serves to trivialize the Christian faith they supposedly have in common, and to normalize such trivialization of what is most sacred, causing our “salt to lose its saltiness,” so to speak. (And, this is why Eusebeia appears first in the chain of Divine Qualities, as a prerequisite to Philadelphia.)  

Sadly, the Church is so divided today and the “Christianity” we have in common is so shallow and vacuous that genuine Christian fellowship is a precious rarity. In my experience, getting a bunch of Christians together and opening the Bible or discussing theology or other related topics just as often leads to rancor and hostility as it does to brotherly affection, with the exception of when those Christians are all the products of the same indoctrination. 

This is largely because, in keeping with the thesis of this article, the Church just doesn’t do what the Church is supposed to be doing.

However, I expect this will change dramatically if we implemented the practices I’ve proposed here, like pairing mentors with disciples to train them in their participation in the Divine Nature. Part of that process would be to facilitate genuine Christian fellowship to cultivate that brotherly affection.

Step 7: Agape

“And to brotherly affection, love …”

And now we come to the Main Event – the ultimate goal of all of our faith and effort and discipleship. As Paul beautifully explained in 1 Corinthians 13, love is the completion and perfection of everything else that is the Christian life – the telos of the gospel and of God’s plan for history. All of the Scriptures and miracles and spiritual gifts and everything else have been for this ultimate purpose, and without love, all of it is for nothing. The world will have been remade when its inhabitants are exemplified by love for God and by God’s love in them for one another. That is the ultimate objective of our transformation and it is what will transform our fallen world into a paradise.

The Greek word here for “love” is “Agape.”

Prior to and outside of the New Testament, the word was used somewhat rarely, and it just meant “affection” or “preference” in a general, non-specific sense. It has taken on its commonly-held meaning of “the highest form of love” and “divine, ‘selfless’ and ‘unconditional’ love” (and please note the quotation marks) entirely because of its usage in the New Testament. The biblical writers imbued the word with new meaning by their application of it to God.  

“Agape” is the love God has for the world that is such that He gave His only Son to save us.

And it’s not just the love that God has, but it is the love that God is.

“God is Agape,” the apostle wrote.

Agape is God’s very Nature. It is the defining attribute of His character.

Because “Agape” didn’t have that meaning until Christians defined it as such centuries later, the word wasn’t used that way in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Its use in the Septuagint is consistent with its use in broader Greek society at the time in that it didn’t have any special theological meaning. So, the term from the Old Testament to which “Agape” (in the Christian sense) is most often compared is the Hebrew “Chesed,” which is often translated “lovingkindness,” “steadfast love,” “unfailing love,” or “loving devotion” – it is hardly ever rendered simply as “love” or “kindness” or any other simple term, but is typically a compound phrase to make it a superlative of love. It is the term used for God’s covenant loyalty to His people, and it was the quality of God often invoked by David in the Psalms in his most rapturous praise or most desperate pleas for help and mercy. In fact, God’s promise to David was that He would never withdraw His chesed from his descendants as He had from King Saul, and this promise was the foundation of God’s guarantee of the coming of the Messiah, the king who would restore the fallen dynasty of David.

And as followers of that Messiah and those in whom his Spirit dwells, that promise extends to us: God will never take His chesed from us, His agape, as long as we keep our faith in Him.

It is important to emphasize that Agape’s status as “the highest form of love” does not mean that it is like any of the other loves, just in greater measure. Agape is not different merely in degree from those loves, but is different in kind.

Those other loves are rooted in mutual need or benefit or commonality of interest. Chimps and wolves and rats have storge and eros for one another. Criminal gang members and terrorists and cell mates bear philia for one another. These are all earthly, mortal loves rooted in our glands and appetites and instincts and the social and emotional needs of those who exhibit them.

Agape transcends all of that. It is a love rooted in God’s own Nature. God loves us because of Who He is, and we love God because He first loved us.  

As the defining attribute of God’s character and the ultimate objective of Christian discipleship, “Agape” is perhaps the most vitally important concept to get right. Unfortunately, though, it is probably – next to “faith” – the least well understood and most widely disputed topic within Christianity.

I actually struggled quite a bit with this section, because there are so many widespread and deeply-entrenched misconceptions about God’s love and what it means, that addressing all of them and providing a comprehensive definition of Agape soon grew into an epic behemoth of an article in itself, far beyond the scope of this article.

I’ve addressed some of that in another article (under the subheading “The Knowledge of Good and Evil”), but ultimately, a lengthy explanation of what Agape is will not, in itself, enable anyone to add to their faith Agape. “The world doesn’t need another sermon on love,” someone once said.

In his “Summa Theologica,” Thomas Aquinas defined love as “to will the good of the other,” and emphasized that Agape is a love not rooted in emotion, but in the act of the will.

I disagree with that, and I believe that, by now, I’ve demonstrated that the Scripture disagrees with that. Of course, he isn’t wrong in that it goes deeper than mere emotion and it certainly entails the exercise of the will, but it goes much deeper even than that. It is rooted in our deepest nature, as the daughters and sons of God, because it is rooted in His Nature.

Apart from that, no one can love – in the sense that we mean by “Agape” – by a mere exercise of the will. It is impossible to love on command.

It’s true that Jesus said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

But that has to be taken in context – in the immediate context, and in the context of the rest of his teachings.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reiterated the applicability of the Law, but made it even more demanding than it already was: If you are merely angry at your brother, you are liable for murder. If you look at a woman lustfully, you have committed adultery with her in your heart. If you need oaths to certify your word, you are a liar by default. And he said that if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, because it is better to enter life maimed or crippled than to have your whole body cast into eternal destruction.

The point of his sermon was not to give a set of instructions for how to behave in order to be righteous. The point was to drive home that we cannot be righteous. We cannot merely exert our will – even if we had the strongest will in the world – to make ourselves righteous under the law.

And we can no more obey Jesus’ command to “love one another” by an exertion of the will than we can obey the Law of Moses on those same terms. We might already love them — in the sense of philia or storge — for who they are, in which case, we hardly need to be commanded to do so. But if we don’t, a command to do so cannot move us to true obedience, no matter how hard we try, any more than we can white-knuckle our way through to compliance with the Law of Moses. The point of the command (at least, in the moment) was the same as that of the Sermon on the Mount.

The point was that it isn’t our right eye nor our right hand that causes us to sin. It is our heart that causes us to sin, and so … it is our hearts that we must cut from ourselves and cast away.

The good news is that God gives us a new heart through the Holy Spirit, which is the very promise to which Jesus was leading up when he gave his new command – Jesus knew they were incapable of keeping his command, as they were in that moment.

But, receiving the Spirit doesn’t immediately make us capable. This is why Peter exhorted us to make every effort to add to our faith those qualities of the Divine Nature, and there is a reason Peter didn’t lead with, “Make every effort to add to your faith Agape.”

We have to build to it. We have to grow up into it by cultivating all of the lesser qualities of the Divine Nature. But in doing so, the Divine Nature in us grows, and by that Nature, we become capable of loving God and one another and, even, our enemies, because it is God’s own Agape within us that animates us. We will understand in a way that surpasses mere intellectual comprehension that every single human being is made in His image, and He is jealous for them, and so we will be jealous for them, and in that jealousy and compassion, we will become His agents in saving them.

Step ∞

“If you possess these qualities and continue to grow in them, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Peter continued.

So, plainly, this is training that never actually ends. You won’t just add to your faith arete or knowledge or any of the rest as a one-time, completed task, and then move on. It is a lifelong process.

We can – and should – reach a level of maturity in which a mentor is no longer necessary nor advantageous, at which point, we should graduate to becoming the mentor ourselves, but we will never stop growing in each of these qualities. But, as we grow, we will overflow with new life – with new effectiveness and productivity from our knowledge of Jesus Christ.

And, I would venture to say that it’s an eternity-long process. I suspect that we will always be growing and learning and getting stronger and wiser and more and more like our Father, because however great we become, we will always be finite, albeit immortal and glorious as His sons and daughters.  

On this side of Christ’s return, though, the alternative to that continued growth is to be ineffective and fruitless, which is no idle warning, as we have already discussed, and as Peter alluded, “But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins. Therefore, my brothers, make every effort to confirm your call and election. For if you do these, you will never stumble, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Indeed, and quite sadly, the Church of full of such ineffective, fruitless and blind people who have either forgotten that they have been cleansed of their past sins, or they never understood what that meant in the first place.

But if we, as the Church, would just believe what Peter wrote and take it seriously by implementing his instructions, God will be faithful to His promises and He will meet us in our efforts. We will see His kingdom on earth.

The Unsubverted Gospel, part 2 of 3

To recap part 1: The gospel is absolutely not that we go to heaven when we die.

The true gospel is that heaven comes here to abolish death entirely, and actually is already here, through those who follow and worship heaven’s King and exhibit his Nature.

While those two formulations might sound similar on some superficial level, they are diametric opposites, and our collective delusion and preoccupation with the former keeps us blind and negligent of the latter, which has crippled the Church.

Contrary to popular misconception, the Church is neither a “hospital for sinners” nor a “museum” for pious statues, but is a forge for saints: It is a foundry of divine life in which New Men are born and shaped from the fire of God’s Spirit, empowered and trained to act as God’s instruments and agents to implement divine order in the world. It is a portal through which the kingdom of God advances into the world for its gradual and eventual salvation.

But we don’t see that in practice because, well … we do not practice it, because we don’t believe and understand the gospel in anything resembling those terms.

The gospel, according to Scripture, is “salvation by grace through faith, not by the works of the law.”

That, as stated and properly understood, is the very power of God to save the world.

Except, we have an Enemy who has deceived us by whispering persistently, “Has God really said … ?” He has subverted and twisted every single term in that formulation, and the result is a so-called “gospel” that not only has no power, but actively emasculates and enervates us and teaches us to treat feckless passivity and mindless conformity as godly virtues. So, the Church is rendered effeminate and impotent and poses no threat to the Prince of this World and the spiritual forces of darkness in the heavenly realms who deceive and defile the nations.

When I speak of the Church’s function to be a “forge for saints,” I am often, quite naturally, asked to explain what that looks like in practical, concrete terms, and to explain what the Church should be doing in service to that mission, instead of what it’s doing now. Once the distinction registers between the common “pie in the sky when we die”-version of Christianity and the actual biblical gospel, however, I feel like answering that question becomes an exercise in pointing out the obvious, because the Scripture actually speaks for itself quite plainly once we identify and set aside our confirmation biases and read it on its own terms. Also, the specific manner in which the Enemy has perverted our terminology – and the correct understanding of that terminology – becomes clear as well.

Defining ‘Salvation’: A War Between Natures

“His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence; through these, He has given us His very great and precious promises, so that through them, you may participate in the Divine Nature and escape the corruption of the world caused by appetites.” (2 Peter 1:3-4)

We already have everything we need for both life and godliness.

We have it by our knowledge of God, who has called us by His own glory and excellence.

It is through these – His glory and excellence – that He has given us His very great and precious promises.

It is because of His promises that we can 1) escape the corruption of the world and 2) participate in the Divine Nature.

That, in summary, is the whole of the gospel.

Now, the popular reading is that, because He “has given us everything,” nothing is left for us to do: We need merely believe, and if we hold the correct beliefs with sufficient sincerity, we are promised entrance into heaven and escape from hell when we die – our doctrinal correctness constitutes a fire-insurance policy to ensure a trouble-free afterlife.

That is clearly not what is in view here.

Rather, because God has promised that, through faith in Jesus Christ, we have God’s own Nature within us – if we believe that, we know we can participate in His Nature and escape the corruption of the world. We can claim that promise and so undergo that transformation.  

These are obverse ways of describing the same action: to participate in the Divine Nature is to escape the world’s corruption, and vice versa.

Many translations render it as “the corruption of the world caused by lust” or “… evil desires” or “ … sinful desires.”

These translations are highly misleading and reflect – I would contend – a bit of doctrinal projection on the parts of the translators, owing largely, I suspect, to our popular preoccupation with getting into heaven after a life of avoiding (or being forgiven of) obvious evil.

The Greek term is “epithumia.”

In Plato’s “The Republic,” he lays out his view of the human soul/psyche, which comprises three parts: the nous, or reason; thumos, or passion; and epithumos, the appetite. The prefix “epi-“ in Greek is an intensifier, meaning “at” or “upon,” which, applied to the root “thumos” means this is passion that is hard-wired into us, i.e., our base instincts and appetites.

I couldn’t say that Peter had Plato’s “Republic” specifically in mind when he wrote that, nor if Peter ever even heard of Plato, but his letter – like the rest of the New Testament and other early Christian writings – was in Koine Greek, and the Greek language of the 1st century, like the common language of any civilization at any point in history, was absolutely undoubtedly a reflection of Greek culture and the collective understanding of such terms, and Plato was inarguably one of the most influential contributors to that culture. So, it is entirely appropriate to consider his definitions of terms, along with other technical terms in wide use at the time, to understand their intended meaning in the Bible.  

“Epithumia,” then, being the plural of “appetite,” would be morally neutral, as can be seen by its use in other contexts in the New Testament: “Jesus said to them, ‘I have eagerly desired (Greek: epithymesa,the verb form of epithumos) to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.’” (Luke 22:15)

There is nothing intrinsically evil or sinful about being hungry and wanting food or having fight-or-flight instincts nor, even, with sexual desire, per se. And, the word simply doesn’t lend itself to the idea that sexual desire (the typical connotation of “lust”) is the sole or even primary source of corruption in the world. So, those common translations miss the point of the text entirely, which is that it is not our obviously wicked, evil and sinful desires that corrupt the world, but our basic bodily drives, allowed to master us, that do so. They become sinful when we are dominated by them, and being dominated by them is our default setting in our fallen state.

This is consistent with the rest of the Bible and its framing of the problem of the human condition. When Man was cursed for eating the forbidden fruit, God told him, “Cursed is the ground because of you … dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

This wasn’t merely a condemnation to mortality and eventual death, but a relegation to his animal nature.

In Genesis 1, the wild animals created on the Sixth Day were all “living souls” (Hebrew “chay nephesh”) that had emerged from the earth. When Man was made, it reads that “God formed Man (‘adam’) from the dust of the earth (‘adamah’) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a chay nephesh.”

In calling attention to the recurring use of “chay nephesh,” I don’t want to camp out on that and distract from the main point. I just want to get the common misconception out of the way that “Humans are different from animals because we have souls and they don’t.” No, humans are “souls,” and so are animals. That’s what makes us the same as animals, according to the Bible, not what makes us different.

By the fact that the very name “Adam” is derived from “adamah,” meaning “from the dust of the earth,” the text is emphatically enunciating Man’s identification with the earth, in common with the animals, in juxtaposition with his divine nature from having been made in God’s image and having been brought to life by the breath of God. Adam is a hybrid being, both animal and divine, made of the stuff of the earth and of God’s own breath/lifeforce.

So, when God told him, “Cursed is the ground because of you … for dust (the ground) you are, and to dust you will return,” that meant, “By betraying Me and renouncing My Nature within you, you are reduced to your animal nature, and so you will live like an animal and suffer the fate of animals.”

Being relegated to the level of an animal, humanity’s corruption is in being ruled by our animal appetites. When the Bible speaks of our “sinful nature” that we inherited from Adam, it isn’t that some new quality of “corruption” entered in when Man left the Garden, nor even when he ate the fruit. The corruption is from having been made to be God’s image-bearer and endowed with the nature and faculties thereof, but then stripped of our connection to God and relegated to our bestial nature – a nature that is appropriate and morally unobjectionable for animals, but is obscene for and beneath the dignity of Man. 

This is why the imagery of “beasts” is so often employed to describe the enemies of God’s people, and of the Antichrist in particular. In Peter’s letter, he describes false teachers and other bad influences as “unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like animals they too will perish.” Paul likewise characterized phony believers and enemies of the Church as those whose “god is their stomach.”

“Salvation,” then, means being restored to the original Divine Nature – we are made spiritually alive as God’s own children, and so we have that Higher Nature to draw upon and thereby overcome the bestial nature that corrupts us.

On our own, we are “dead in sin,” meaning, we lack the life of God within us, and so we have only our fallen, animalistic nature to draw upon, which our human faculties of reason and self-awareness can only mitigate and manage through laws and government and societal constraints, but never truly overcome.

Being reborn as the children of God, however, now we can live by the Spirit and be immortal instead of living by the flesh and being doomed to reap only death.

Defining “Faith” and “Grace”: A Quest Worth Pursuing

The all-too-common institutional understanding of this salvation is that, because it is all by God’s grace and not by works, that means there is nothing for us to actually do – just believe, and await God’s grace on the other side of our funerals.

The Adversary has convinced us that the “faith” that is the condition and prerequisite of regeneration just means “holding the correct doctrines affirmatively in our minds,” or, even – “uncritical acceptance of whatever conventions are handed to us by our particular religious institution.”

But, no – “faith” in the sense intended by the biblical writers just means “faith” in the same sense as in any other context outside of religion:

It means investing where we believe we’ll reap the best return.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.,” Jesus said.

Likewise, when Peter wrote that God “has given us everything needed … to participate in the Divine Nature,” it was not to assure Christians that they could relax and coast on the promise that God had already done everything for them.

Rather, the apostle wrote, “For this very reason, you must make every effort to add to your faith Arete (typically translated “excellence,” or “virtue” or “goodness,” but is best left untranslated for reasons to be explained), and to Arete knowledge, to knowledge self-mastery, to self-mastery perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly affection and to brotherly affection love.”

Clearly, he wasn’t talking about “faith” to mean passive belief in a set of doctrines as our ticket to heaven. “Faith” means believing God’s promise that He has given us His own Nature, and if we believe that – first, we understand what an unspeakable, incomprehensible Gift that is.

History, legend and fiction are rife with stories of adventurers going on dangerous and arduous quests for great mystical or scientific artifacts that will bestow immortality or enlightenment or otherwise answer life’s greatest questions or challenges – the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Fountain of Youth, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Spear of Destiny, the Library of Alexandria, the Monolith, the Kwisatz Haderach, etc.

In these stories (a few of them actual historical accounts), men risked untold blood and treasure in pursuit of such a Prize because they believed all their sacrifice and struggle would pay off, somehow, by achieving immortality (literal or figurative), enlightenment, divine favor or some great knowledge that would be the Answer to life.

In the word of God, we are promised infinitely more than that. Everything we could hope to obtain by finding the Holy Grail or any of those other MacGuffins is already promised to us, if we have faith. 

“I have become (the Church’s) servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness – the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory,” Paul wrote to the believers in Colossae. 

The gospel is that, for those of us who put our faith in God through him, the Messiah – “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” Paul said – dwells within each of us individually, and even more so collectively.

If we put our faith in God through Christ, we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, and that means we are destined for immortality, enlightenment and the universe itself.

“All things are yours, whether the world or life or (victory over) death or the present or the future – all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God,” Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth.

If all of those aforementioned relics and artifacts and MacGuffins actually existed in real life and were everything they are reputed to be within their respective legends or narratives, and if a person managed to amass all of them, the benefits still would not begin to compare to what we are already promised by God through faith in Jesus Christ.

So, first, Peter wrote what he did to convey the immense, unfathomable greatness of God’s grace toward us. He didn’t elaborate or belabor the point as I have because his audience already understood what that meant – having “the Divine Nature” within you already said it all. For us, though, it isn’t so obvious, because 2,000 years of familiarity has bred a level of contempt or, at least, indifference, which is compounded by our collective misconception about what “salvation” actually means.  

But he wrote that also to reiterate that the transformation does not happen of itself. God doesn’t just do it all for us – acting upon us as passive objects, in exchange for us merely holding the correct doctrines. The entire point of the gospel is to restore us to our original design as God’s active agents in the world. He sent the Messiah to redeem us to by turning all of us into messiahs, in effect: “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” Paul said.

We have the life of God and all that it entails within us, but in seed form. The Christian life is a matter of cultivating it, which is why Peter said, “Therefore, you must make every effort to add to your faith” those qualities of the Divine Nature that he listed.

And this is consistent with plenty of other passages in the New Testament in which believers are likewise exhorted to strive, to press forward, to labor, to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

These exhortations are made to individual believers, of course, but it’s on the understanding that the Church itself exists for the purpose of mentoring us in this – the entire mission of the Church is tied up in that single pursuit: in “making disciples,” which only begins with winning converts, but just as essentially entails training those converts in their participation in the Divine Nature:

“So Christ himself gave that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of ministry, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

“Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of … Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Ephesians 4:11-16)

Of course, we have no shortage of institutional machinery in routine operation within the Church that purports to be doing this, and we declare this to be so as a matter of doctrine, but … Does anybody really buy that?

That aforementioned familiarity has bred so much casual indifference and low expectations that we gloss passages like this over and think of it all in terms of vague abstraction, so we don’t read a passage like this and then compare it against the complete disarray and immaturity and doctrinal (and functional) confusion that characterizes modern Christendom.

The messages we consistently get from the pulpit convince us that when Peter wrote, “Therefore, you must make every effort to add to your faith” those qualities of the Divine Nature, we take “you must” to mean, “It is totally optional, if you want to score bonus points with God, if you want to make a token effort to be a good person.”

Which likewise numbs us to the rest of the passage, in which Peter lays out both incentives and warnings regarding his exhortation:  

“For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For anyone who lacks these things is nearsighted and blind and has forgotten the cleansing of past sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more eager to confirm your call and election, for if you do this, you will never fall. For in this way, entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be richly provided for you.”

Being unfruitful and unproductive in our knowledge of Jesus Christ is a serious danger, we read elsewhere. Salvation can be – and all too often is – lost, we read in this very epistle only a few paragraphs later. It can be lost by willful, defiant, unrepentant sin, but is far more often lost by complacency and neglect.

Our entire mainstream, popular Church is characterized by such complacency and neglect, though, and that’s why we don’t see passages like Ephesians 4 and 2 Peter 1 lived out practically.

With that background established, we can return to the original question that elicited this series of articles: What does “the Church as a forge for saints” actually look like, in practical terms?

What does it mean for the Church to mentor people in their “participation in the Divine Nature”?

To find out, keep reading here.

Whenever I decry the popular lie of mainstream pseudo-Christianity – this idea that we believe in Jesus in order to go to heaven as disembodied spirits or “souls” when we die – I typically meet with one of two basic responses:

1. Shock and outrage and scandal – quite understandably – because they cling to the belief I am attacking as the very essence of Christianity itself, or
2. Bored indifference, or even annoyance.

I’ve devoted plenty of space in this blog to addressing the former response, since it is by far the most common, but lately I’ve been increasingly confronted by the much more alarming nature of the latter.

I’ve been told that, by making such an issue out of it, I am preoccupied with “theological trivia.”

As in, these people agree with me on the facts – they agree that the Bible actually knows nothing of humans going to heaven in death as disembodied spirits, despite the virtually universal misconception that it does.

They agree with me, but they think it’s … just not a big deal.

Despite their typically much greater hostility to me and my message, I am far more sympathetic to the former category of people, because they at least somewhat understand the implications of what I’m saying and take it seriously enough to acknowledge that it matters.

The depth of error at work in the latter category is so profound and far-reaching that it’s difficult to know where to even to begin to address it. The words of the prophet Jeremiah (6:14) echo as I consider it: “They treat the wound of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace … ”  

The distinction is not minor and the wound to the Church this error represents is not trivial. It is crippling and fatal. Fortunately, we serve a God who raises the dead, so our affliction is reversible. But, the Church indeed lies effectively dead until we treat this grievous wound.

The gospel has nothing to do with going to heaven – as disembodied souls or spirits or in any other sense. It is, rather, about heaven coming here, to earth. It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer we’ve all been reciting all along: “ … Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” 

That might seem like a minor distinction – a bit of “theological trivia” – but only by the barest, most superficial, surface-level reading.

These two ideas are antithetical. They represent two entirely opposed, mutually-exclusive conceptions of salvation.

Which is to say that they represent two entirely opposed visions of Who God is and what His purposes are, the mission of Jesus Christ and, by extension, that of the Church. In short, these are two very different paradigms of life itself – of existence and reality, two mutually-opposed religions entirely.

And if we, the Church, could get a hold of that difference and wrap our minds around how starkly and profoundly different these two visions are, it would be nothing short of revolutionary.

Genesis, Again

Every other religion in the world that preceded or existed alongside early Christianity had that idea of going away in death to some otherworldly afterlife as a disembodied spirit. Death was just accepted as a normal part of life and being enlightened and spiritually mature a matter of coming to terms with it. Life (and death) is just the way that it is – it has always been this way, and it always will be, and it is simply the destiny of man to appear ever-so-briefly on earth in corporeal form and then shed that form in death as his disembodied consciousness translates into another world, to remain for all eternity. This world is basically just a ghost factory to populate the afterlife and the life of man is just a vanishingly brief prelude to that disembodied existence.

In contrast, the Bible treats death as a hated, bitter enemy. Humans were never supposed to die in the first place, and we were certainly never meant to placidly embrace death and call it “enlightenment” to do so. Death is a curse and an indignity and a separation from God, and the sin that leads to it a disgusting, defiling poison.

Mankind was made for this world, and this world for mankind, and the salvation offered through Jesus Christ is in the form of physical, bodily resurrection from the dead to eternal life here, on this very earth, renewed and restored.

That is the consistent message found throughout the Bible, as the apostle Peter told the Israelites in the early days of the Church:

“This is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer. Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah, who has been appointed for you – that is, Jesus. Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.” (Acts 3:18-21)

So, Heaven is not our destination, and it is only a temporary detour for Jesus himself, until he returns to this world.

When Jesus spoke of his future revelation as the Son of Man who would rule from a throne of glory, he likewise characterized that event as “the renewal of all things,” and those “all things” to be renewed were plainly understood to be in and of this world, not another (Matthew 19:27-30).

So, what does that mean – that he will “renew all things”?

What, exactly, is being “restored”?

Terms like “restoration” and “renewal” indicate a return to what was: a reestablishment of an earlier, ideal and pristine set of conditions.

In the opening chapters of the Bible, God is depicted – not just creating the world, but setting it up as His temple: As the renowned Old Testament scholar John Walton explains in his “Lost World of Genesis One,” the language of the Seventh Day – of God “resting” at the conclusion of His work of ordering the world – is found throughout the Bible and in the ancient Near East as characteristic of temple function: the temple is God’s dwelling place on earth, where He rests and His Presence resides among His people. The motif of God’s “rest” on the Seventh Day is repeated when He settled upon the Ark of the Covenant within the tabernacle in Exodus 40, and when He dwelled within Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings 8, and this language recurs throughout the Bible, and in the Psalms in particular, whenever God’s dwelling in the temple is discussed. 

In the ancient world, a “temple” was understood to be a microcosm of the world, and the idol in the temple represented that deity ruling over the world.

In Genesis 1, the “idol” God installs in the temple of creation to represent His rule over it … is Man.

That’s what it means that Mankind is “made in God’s image.” The earthly image of a deity is, by definition, an idol, and so when ancient audiences read Genesis 1, they would have immediately understood it to mean that Mankind is the very Face of God within creation. God’s dwelling within and rule over this world was to be through us – not for us or with us or alongside us or even over us, but through us: look for God’s Presence within creation, and Man is whom you find, according to the opening chapter of the Bible.

(And, as an aside, this is one of the reasons idolatry is so hatefully condemned: primarily, because it is unworthy of God Himself, but also because it is so far beneath the dignity of Man.)

God’s rule of creation through Man would consist of Man fulfilling God’s command to “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over … every living creature.” In fact, the text reads that God made Man in His Image so that he would rule.

If we take that understanding of “Man as God’s ‘idol’ in the ‘temple’ of creation” in Genesis 1 and continue reading, Genesis 2 can be understood as a more focused elaboration on the concept: After forming him from the dust of the earth and breathing into his nostrils “the breath of life” to make him “a living soul,” God then took the Man and placed him in the Garden to work it.

And how does Man “work” the Garden?

First, note that in Genesis 1, God creates by speaking order into the world: “’Let there be …,’ He said, ‘… and it was.” Then, He makes Man in His image and sets him in authority over the earth, and then in Genesis 2, He brings all the animals to the Man to see what he will name them. As in, Man continued God’s work by speaking another dimension of order into creation by naming the animals. Just as God created and ordered the world through language, Man would extend divine order into creation through the power of language.

(There are implications to this “creation through language” concept for our current culture wars over transgenderism and other Postmodern philosophical quarrels within our media-saturated, increasingly computer-simulated civilization, which I’ve touched upon in an earlier article, but might bear further exploration in a future article.)

The implication is that the Garden, being set apart from the rest of creation, was the original temple, in a more primary and local sense, through which God dwelled with Man – it is the archetype after which the tabernacle and the Jewish temple would later be modeled, and that Mount Hermon and the Tower of Babel and other places of pagan worship would be attempts to counterfeit.

Man’s mission to be fruitful and increase in number to fill the earth and subdue it meant cultivating the Garden as he multiplied, with his children expanding the Garden as humanity grew in numbers, gradually transforming the untamed, chaotic wilderness of creation, generation by generation, into a paradise filled with the glory and presence of God, by their exponentially-increasing promulgation of divine order. 

(And, knowing what we now know about the unfathomable vastness of the universe and the endless array of worlds within it, it seems that this mission was never intended to be confined to this tiny blue dot on which we presently find ourselves, but that might be a topic best left for another article as well.)

Of course, we know what happened next: paradise was lost through the fall of Man and humanity was rendered mortal and the image of God in us corrupted; we were relegated back to the dust from which we were taken, just like the rest of the animals, and then our power of language was fractured and confused at the Tower of Babel, lest our divine power of speech lead to even greater corruption. Humanity was given over to the rule of lesser “gods,” to advance a “divine order” in opposition to the true God. 

In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently referred to as “the New Adam” or “the Second Adam,” because he is the first of a new order of humanity. In Jesus’ own person, God and humanity are reconciled, both natures coexisting within one Man, and it is that very human-divine Nature which Jesus gives to us through his death and resurrection and ascension, beginning on the Day of Pentecost when the glory cloud of God’s Presence descended upon the Church as the New Temple.

Because humanity was supposed to be the source of divine order in the world, but it was through humanity that corruption and sin entered instead, God’s absolute justice and His immutable resolve to implement His design for Man both demand that it must also be through humanity that the world is renewed and divine order restored: Because of our corruption, we are incapable of doing it on our own, but He cannot do it for us without compromising His justice and His design for us, so He must do it through us.

In Matthew 19:28, when Jesus speaks of “the renewal of all things,” the Greek word is “palingenesia,” from the root “palin,” meaning “again” and “genesis,” meaning “origin” or “birth.”

The same word is used elsewhere in the New Testament to refer to the salvation of individual believers in the form of regeneration through the indwelling of the Spirit of God. The same word is used for both because they are one and the same thing. It’s all the same process: one that begins with our individual regeneration as believers and followers of Jesus Christ and that continues through us – if our salvation is genuine, that is – to the restoration of the world itself.

The word doesn’t literally mean “The book of Genesis, again,” but it could just as well be taken that way, because it is a return to that unfallen, original state described in the opening chapters of Genesis, butperfected and complete (more on this in parts 2 and 3).

The kingdom of God comes to earth, then … through us. “Salvation” is our restoration to that original function of Man in the Garden of actively advancing the divine order throughout creation. Every individual Christian is like a portal through which God’s kingdom comes into the world, and the Church – the collective assembly of believers – is that kingdom.

The kingdom will be consummated and completed at Christ’s return, but it begins here and now, in this world, and its completion will be the perfection of this world.

A Forge for Saints

The Church, then, is the new Garden of Eden.

But just as the Serpent invaded the original Garden to seduce Man into abdicating his dominion of the earth, so have the followers of the New Adam been deceived into abdicating our mission to reclaim the earth.

And, while his methods have grown more subtle and nuanced and insidious over the millennia, his objective remains the same: “Did God really say … ?” he whispers. He subverts language and meaning to make evil appear good and death to seem like salvation and to make Christians believe we are serving Christ when we are actually working against him. 

And he has done such a complete and thorough job of this that Christians can be shown the differences between what is commonly preached and what the Bible actually teaches, and even fully acknowledge those differences, but still be totally blind to their implications and stubbornly opposed to any change to the status quo. They default to their programming and the attitudes and patterns they’ve been conditioned to associate with Christianity and church culture, which they have internalized as their identity and tribal membership. They don’t see the profound and irreconcilable differences because all of the social and psychological incentives pressure them against it, and so they focus solely on the contrived similarities and so frame them as interchangeable and insist that the distinction is purely academic.

“We go to heaven, or heaven comes here … What’s the difference!” they will argue. “The end result is the same, and it’s still something that only happens when we die, that God will do in His own timing. Our job is to just believe.”

Consequently, by all measurable criteria, Christians do not live any differently than non-Christians. Divorce rates, out-of-wedlock birthrates, teen pregnancy rates, sexual abuse, domestic violence, abortion, drug addiction and alcohol abuse – all of these are no better among Christians than they are among non-Christians, and some are even worse in predominantly Christian regions of the country.

Christians will typically try to litigate this away by one of two contradictory arguments:

First, they’ll argue a distinction between nominal “Christians” and sincere, practicing Christians, and point out that the latter demonstrates better outcomes, therefore, Christians are different after all. Which is, of course, a valid distinction, but the same is generally true when you compare committed atheists against the general population. For instance, the divorce rate among atheist couples is also lower than the general population, and by about the same margin as devout Christians, which indicates that any couple who marries on the basis of shared values is less likely to divorce and more likely to be more conscientious in living according to those values, whatever those values happen to be and wherever they are sourced. So, it has nothing to do with the supernatural, regenerative power of God at work within Christians to transform us; it has everything to do with the power of cultural pressure and social conditioning. 

The bottom line is that there is not a single objectively-identifiable, meaningful difference in how Christians in general live from how non-Christians live – certainly not to the degree of difference we should expect of people who are imbued with the very Nature of God Himself, compared to everybody else. Whatever differences there are can be much more easily attributed to socio-economic factors.

The second line of argument is that “the Church isn’t a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners.”

As in, Christians aren’t actually supposed to live differently than non-Christians: we’re sinners, too – “Christians aren’t better, just forgiven.” Or so the thinking goes.

Even apart from the glaring heretical error lurking behind it, that bromide just isn’t true on its face. A hospital is where people go to be cured of their affliction. We say our churches are “hospitals,” but what we really mean is that they are hospices for sinners: the Christian life within our churches is really just a holding pattern to offer palliative care as we live out our lives and wait for “salvation” on the other side of death, with no real expectation of change in our condition. That catchphrase keeps the emphasis on our sinful nature as our inescapable default setting, while the supposedly proper context for saints is in a museum, which insinuates that a “saint” is just a stodgy, lifeless, dust-collecting statue to exhibit a dead past and an unrealistic ideal of which we are all doomed to fall short, and so it is futile – or even sinfully arrogant – to try. The slogan has the effect of normalizing failure and treating the spiritual transformation described in Scripture as a quixotic fantasy, and all of this from behind a pious-sounding veneer.

In Scripture, all believers are, by definition, saints: we are “set apart” in Jesus Christ by the fact of bearing God’s Presence within us through the Spirit of God, and if anyone does not have the Spirit, we do not belong to Christ and are not Christians. Christians are referred to as “saints,” i.e., “holy ones,” in virtually every book of the New Testament. We do not become Christians and then aspire to sainthood as an unreachable and futile ideal. Becoming a Christian is to be a saint, definitionally — in fact “saint” and “Christian” are used interchangeably and synonymously in Scripture.

But, the Enemy has persistently whispered, “Has God really said … ?”

Our die-hard presumption of the futility of sainthood is directly related to our delusion about getting into heaven: both are inseparable facets of the same “pie in the sky when we die”-mentality that renders all of God’s promises to be nothing but out-of-reach abstractions with no concrete impact on the real world in which we actually live, which keeps Christians collectively passive and indolent and feckless as we await “salvation” in death.

Consequently, we don’t do any of what the Church is supposed to be doing as God’s agents and avatars for enacting and embodying divine order in the world, which is why we see no practical impact: Christians are just products of culture, nothing more, just like everybody else.

We keep insisting that it’s all for God to do, when salvation itself means restoration to our original destiny as God’s agents through whom He wants to be present and active in the world.

If we lived out the gospel, we’d find that the Church would become neither a hospital for sinners nor a museum for pious statues, but a forge for saints: a wellspring of divine life in which a new order of humanity is birthed from the fire of God’s Spirit and unleashed upon the world to radically transform and save it.

What does a “forge for saints” look like in practical terms?

Honestly, I couldn’t claim to know. I’ve never seen one myself.

But I think history and the Bible gives us enough information that we can envision and recreate it, which I will explore in parts 2 and 3.

This quasi-article emerged from an ongoing conversation we’ve been having on the Mount Hermeneutics podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts – like and subscribe!).

The discussion initially began as an answer to a listener’s question about heaven.

Specifically, we (well, mostly I) frequently observe that this idea taken for granted by Christians – that the “salvation” on offer in the gospel of Jesus Christ consists of going away to a blissful afterlife as a disembodied spirit in death – is nowhere taught in the Bible, but is actually a pagan idea that crept in from Greco-Roman mythology and Gnosticism has nothing whatsoever to do with the biblical worldview (as I have explained at length in other articles on this blog).

So, the question was:

Why do Christians typically believe this, and what do we do with all of those passages in the Bible that are commonly (and erroneously) understood to teach this?

Addressing this question led to another topic:

If not heaven as a disembodied spirit in death, then what is “salvation”? What is the Christian hope? What is the “good news”-aspect of the gospel? What is it that followers of Jesus Christ have to look forward to, if we don’t go to heaven when we die?

This led to a discussion about eschatology, i.e., “End Times,” in which we addressed and debated the four main options for Christian belief in this area: Premillennialism, Postmillennialism, Amillennialism and Preterism.

(For those unfamiliar, these deal with the question of when Jesus will return in relation to the 1,000-year kingdom on earth pictured in Revelation 20. Christians are generally agreed that “1,000 years” is an idiom that just means “a really long time,” and not necessarily a precise period of time comprising exactly ten centuries. Premillenialists believe Jesus will return in order to establish that earthly kingdom and to be present to physically reign as king from Jerusalem. Postmillennialists believe the millennial kingdom is a future golden age achieved by the Church’s success in carrying out the Great Commission, in which Christianity holds sway in the world and all nations willingly obey Jesus as he reigns as king in heaven, and that he will return at the conclusion of that period. Amillennialists believe the millennial kingdom is the Church Age, and that we are in that kingdom now, and that Jesus will return at the conclusion of the present age. Preterists believe that Jesus already returned in some figurative or spiritual sense in the year 70 AD when Jerusalem and the Jewish temple were destroyed by the Romans.)

We didn’t arrive at any consensus about which is the correct position, but I both began and concluded my side of the discussion by the following point:

For the purpose of addressing the question at hand, it doesn’t matter which is correct.

One of them certainly is correct, and it is not, by my lights, terribly difficult to establish which one that is from the plain teachings of the Bible. But – with the exception of (full) Preterism – all three have merit to them. One is more correct than the other two, and the correct answer is important for the broader purposes of the Church, but all three make valid and important points for the life of the Church and the individual Christian, which we would all be better off believing and embracing, and so – for the sake of our discussion, it doesn’t matter which is correct.

What does matter – and what should be the foundation of everything else we could discuss with regard to the Christian life – is that throughout the New Testament, the second coming of Christ is the overriding preoccupation of the early Christians.

Every exhortation made by the apostles and biblical writers, every encouragement to holiness and faithfulness and to overcome temptation, every imploration to stand firm in the face of persecution and martyrdom, every single instruction given – the expected imminent return of Jesus Christ was the impetus each and every time.

Whatever the early Christians’ hope was, it was to be accomplished at the Parousia – the coming, the advent, the manifest presence of Jesus Christ, returned to earth from heaven.

I’m not sure we were in full agreement on that point, but that led to the next question:

What are Christians supposed to be doing until Christ’s return?

That’s where we left the discussion, which we plan to pick up for our next episode.

On Sanctification

To prepare, I went through the New Testament and took note of all the times that appeal was made, looking for 1) every time the expected glorious return of the Messiah was leveraged as motivation, and 2) what in particular was being asked or encouraged on the part of the listener/reader.

It was certainly good preparation for the discussion, but I found the exercise to be quite rewarding for its own sake.

The consistent pattern was that Sanctification is the activity to which Christians were being called in view of Jesus’ imminent return.

Now, I expect that for many people, that answer might be somewhat anticlimactic, if not unsatisfying.

For some, it’s because the term is unfamiliar, while for others, it’s because it’s too familiar. With regard to the latter – there’s a common tendency that afflicts Christians at least as much as anyone else in that, if we have a familiar label for something, or a doctrine about it, we think we understand it, and so we think of it as a box we’ve already checked off, a lesson already learned, and we move on.

But, given the amount of attention the biblical writers gave to this concept, it isn’t something we can afford to be complacent about.

What I found striking as I went through the New Testament was the juxtaposition between how they wrote about Sanctification – and the copious amount of attention it was given, and the way that modern preachers talk about it – if they give it any attention at all.

And, that juxtaposition is all the more striking when we look at how the term is defined in internet searches and other popularly accessible sources:

Google’s AI Overview reads: “Sanctification is a Christian teaching that describes the process of being transformed by God to become holy and fit for a special purpose. The word ‘sanctification’ literally means ‘to set apart for special use or purpose”.”

If you look the term up on Wikipedia, it goes to an article on “Sacredness,” which is entirely too general to be of any use.

“Theosis” is a synonym for sanctification, most commonly used in Eastern Orthodoxy. Plug that into the Wikipedia search, and it offers another synonym and definition:

“Divinization (Christian), the transforming effect of divine grace, the spirit of God, or the atonement of Christ”

These are pretty consistent with the teachings of most churches, in my experience, according to which, sanctification is highly abstract and vaguely defined, largely for the fact that it is passive: it is an “effect of divine grace.” God does it. You – the Christian undergoing this process of transformation – are merely to be acted upon by God. You have no role, except to believe the right things, and God does the rest.

In stark, striking contrast, however, the biblical writers are constantly urging believers to be active in pursuit of this transformation. They were consistently urged to “strive,” to “make every effort,” to “press on toward the goal.” Disciples are consistently warned about the high costs, the risks to life and limb and freedom, the sacrifices to be made in pursuit of this goal, and explicitly warned against complacency and passivity.

But, it’s one thing for me to point this out and for people to agree with me (many do not).

It’s another thing entirely to see it for yourself. Just hearing me make the point doesn’t quite drive home the urgency and importance of the point, and so I’ve collected many of the relevant passages below for your convenience. It’s not a comprehensive collection of all the relevant passages, mind you, but it’s a pretty good representation.

It won’t take long, and it’s worth the effort. As you read through these, think about how these instructions compare to what you’re likely to hear in church.

Does your church teach anything like this – are you urged to make every effort to add to your faith those qualities that are consistent with the divine nature? Do the leaders offer to mentor you and other believers in that pursuit? Are you encouraged and empowered to strive for continually increasing excellence and virtue and knowledge and holiness?

If not, what do they teach? Is it preparing you and others for the return of Jesus Christ?

If the teachings you hear in church are not consistent with what you read in what follows, why not?

The Reading:

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:34-38)

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14)

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20)

Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:6-8)

“Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing what was to come, he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said, “‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”’ (Acts 2:29-35, quoting Psalm 110)

“Now, fellow Israelites, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders. But this is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer. Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets. For Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you must listen to everything he tells you Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from their people.’

“Indeed, beginning with Samuel, all the prophets who have spoken have foretold these days. And you are heirs of the prophets and of the covenant God made with your fathers. He said to Abraham, ‘Through your offspring all peoples on earth will be blessed.’ When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways.” (Acts 3:17-26)

For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God … I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:13,14; 18-25)

“Live according to the flesh” vs “Live by the Spirit”?

 Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your logical worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully. (Romans 12:1-8)

For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:21-28; quoting Psalm 110)

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

“Where, O death, is your victory?

             Where, O death, is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:51-58)

If anyone does not love the Lord, let that person be cursed! Marana Tha! (Come, Lord!) (1 Corinthians 16:22)

(Psalm 110 deserves some attention, since it’s cited so often with regard to Jesus’ enthronement at the right hand of the Father, as well as for its DCW implications.)

“But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I prove that I am a lawbreaker. For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain—if it really was in vain? So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? (Galatians 2:17-3:5)

(Believing, living to God – this is an ongoing pursuit. It is active.)

[Following immediately after his summary of the Church’s mission/use of gifts/offices:]

Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer walk as the gentiles do, in the futility of their minds; they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus, to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts (Greek: epithumia, i.e., appetites, which are morally neutral in and of themselves), and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:17-24)

Ephesians 6:10-20: We are at WAR (DCW); so pray. Prayer = combat.

Philippians 1: Christ is proclaimed.

Philippians 3: Pressing on to the Resurrection as “the Prize.” (Why is circumcision/Judaizing so bad, so detrimental to this goal?)

To them God chose to make known how great among the gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil and strive with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me. (Colossians 1:27-29)

Colossians 2: BAPTISM – What is it?

“He disarmed the rulers and authorities (Divine Council/Psalm 82) and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it. Therefore, do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food or drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the body (that casts it) belongs to Christ. Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, initiatory visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and tendons, grows with a growth that is from God. If with Christ you died to the elemental principles of the world, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence. (vs. 17-23)

But brothers, when we were orphaned by being separated from you for a short time (in person, not in heart), out of our intense longing we made every effort to see you. For we wanted to come to you—certainly I, Paul, did, again and again—but Satan blocked our way. For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus at his Parousia? Is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and joy. (1 Thessalonians 2:17-20)

1 Thessalonians 4: Sanctification (v. 3); Resurrection from the Dead at the Parousia.

Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him. (James 1:12).

(What is the “crown of life”? It’s something promised in the future, and it is *not* “going to heaven” in death.”

Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? (James 2:5)

(This is an allusion to the Beatitudes of Matthew 5 – which is thoroughly eschatological.)

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the Parousia of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the Parousia of the Lord is at hand. (James 5:7-8)

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last (Greek: eschaton) time. In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Peter 1:3-9)

Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. (v. 13)

1 Peter 2: “Grow into your salvation”

 The end (Greek: telos) of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers. (1 Peter 4:7)

Now as an elder myself and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be revealed, I exhort the elders among you to tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it—not for sordid gain but eagerly. Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away. (1 Peter 5:1-4)

ALL of 2 Peter is essentially a reiteration of this basic point: Make every effort at sanctification, because Jesus Christ will return. Peter and the others were eyewitnesses to the glorification of Jesus as the prophesied Messiah, and so we know for sure that the rest of the prophets’ words will come to pass.

2 Peter 1:3-11 – “Therefore make every effort,” etc. Participation in the divine nature/escape the corruption of the world entails *every effort* to add to our faith those qualities of the divine nature.

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.  (1 John 3:1-3)

Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist! Be on your guard, so that you do not lose what we have worked for, but may receive a full reward. Everyone who does not abide in the teaching of Christ, but goes beyond it, does not have God; whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. (2 John 7-9)

(That last passage doesn’t repeat the formula, but it struck me as a good reminder that any teaching that isn’t consistent with that formula is a departure from the true gospel.)

We make frequent mention of the Divine Council worldview on our podcast, and in an early episode, we explained what that is and what it means, but the question still comes up with some regularity from our listeners, so a brief refresher and introduction in easily referenced written form is in order.

The DCW has been widely acknowledged within academia for quite some time, due predominantly to scholarship on 1 Enoch after its discovery among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 (copies of 1 Enoch had been around among a handful of academics and collectors since the late 19th century, but its significance in 1st-century Jewish and Christian thought wasn’t understood), but also because of a growing series of other related and relatively recent (within the past century or so) archeological and textual discoveries.

While it’s been accepted by academics for many decades, it is only in recent years that the DCW has come into the awareness of laypeople within the Church, thanks to the efforts of the late Dr. Michael Heiser and others, and despite some resistance to it by many who refuse to expand upon or depart from their more familiar traditions.

(And by “accepted by academics,” I don’t mean they are necessarily believers in that worldview themselves — meaning, they all regard it to be objectively true. I just mean that they acknowledge it as the worldview held by the biblical writers and the general culture in which they lived.)

The Divine Council is a major preoccupation within the biblical narrative, and so Christians being largely unaware of it for the past 14 centuries has been a considerable blind spot and hindrance to a correct understanding of the Bible, and of the gospel itself, as well as the mission and purpose of the Church, which is one of our reasons for making it the theme of our podcast.

What is the Divine Council Worldview?

Simply put (and as the name indicates), there is a Divine Council – a council of divine beings, i.e., gods – who rule over humanity.

These “gods” are not self-existent, eternal and uncreated beings, as only God Himself is. Rather, they are created beings. Throughout the Scriptures, they are referred to variously as “gods” (note the lowercase “g”) or “sons of God” (“elohim” and “bene Elohim,” respectively, in Hebrew).

Many of the early Church Fathers referred to them simply as “angels” and – depending on the connotations we attach to that term, that isn’t entirely wrong. Except, the fact that they did so was both a symptom and a furtherance of the Church’s collective gradual departure from the Divine Council worldview that correctly framed the narrative of the Bible. “Angel” just means “messenger,” so it’s more of a job description than a classification of being, and while all angels are elohim, not all elohim are messengers, and so referring to them all simply as “angels” obscures their true nature and roles.

Also, the gods are sometimes referred to in Scripture by another job description: that of “Watchers.” In Daniel 4, King Nebuchadnezzar tells of a terrifying dream he had of his imminent future, which was “by decree of the Watchers, by the decision of the Holy Ones, so that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdoms of the world and gives them to anyone He chooses.” (v. 17)

There are other DCW-related passages in Daniel, like his own vision in chapter 7 in which he witnesses a scene in heaven in which “thrones were set in place … the court was seated and the books were opened,” with God Himself in the seat of supreme authority, and this heavenly court pronounced sentence upon human empires and their rulers in preparation for a major turning point in history to be discussed in what follows.

There are several other passages in which prophets envision similar scenes in heaven: God is pictured holding court among these “Watchers” and “sons of God” and decisions are made about the affairs of mortals – not by God on His own, but in conference with the gods. There is the prophet Micaiah’s vision in 1 Kings 22, as well as the opening scene of the Book of Job in which “the Accuser/Prosecutor,” i.e., “Satan,” presents himself among the rest of the sons of God and lodges his complaints against Job.

The Twilight of the Gods

One of the most explicit and dramatic of these Divine Council passages is Psalm 82, which I refer to as the “Ragnarök Psalm.”

In it, God presides over the Council and pronounces judgment upon them for their unjust rule of mortals, decreeing a sentence of death upon them: “I said, ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High,’ but you will die like mere mortals; you will fall like every other ruler.”

So, these gods rule by authority delegated by God, but they are hostile and cruel to humanity and God declares them His enemies and condemns them to die.

This naturally raises several questions:

• Why does God rule through a council of lesser, created gods?
• Why would He allow them to continue at all if they abuse their authority?
• Why would He only sentence them to death and not just carry it out then and there?

There is no place in Scripture where these questions are explicitly answered, because they’re never explicitly asked, because the original ancient audience already understood the narrative in these terms and didn’t need it explained. These themes are elusive to us because we don’t read it within the same worldview they had and we come to the Bible with a different set of questions and concerns, many of which it wasn’t written to address. But, if we can accept what we’ve seen plainly in the Scripture so far about the Divine Council (not everybody does) and build on those basic observations, the answers to these questions are implicit in several key passages.

Why is There a Divine Council?

Some commentators point to Genesis 1:14-19 as the first appearance of the Divine Council in Scripture: on the Fourth Day of creation when God placed the sun, moon and stars in the heavens to “rule over the day and night and to separate light from darkness.” In the ancient world, the gods were identified with the stars and planets and were conceived of as looking down upon mortals, and so this is understood by some to be the first glimpse of the Council.

I have some reservations about that reading. I lean toward the reading that God’s initial appointment of gods as “Watchers” over humanity was the result of the Fall of Man. There wasn’t just one “Fall of Man,” though, but three.

In the earliest chapters of Genesis, Man was given authority as God’s image-bearer to work the sacred space of the Garden of Eden, which was essentially a temple, and his mission was to expand it as he multiplied and filled the earth and subdued it, ruling over the rest of creation and transforming it from an untamed, chaotic wilderness into a sacred paradise in which God dwelled with Man.  

That mission was cut short very early by Man’s expulsion from the Garden for giving in to the temptation of the serpent, who was, on the one hand, one of the wild animals Man had named and been given authority to rule over, but on the other, a divine being (because even ancient, prescientific people understood just as well as we do that snakes don’t talk). The Woman was tempted by this divine being to “become like God” by eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and enticing the Man to do the same, so God condemned them and their descendants to death as they were banished from His Presence and from access to the Tree of Life.

The book of Genesis doesn’t mention the Divine Council per se (unless we count Day Four), but it does mention “the sons of God” in Genesis 6, which recounts the next major rebellion of humanity against God, leading to the Flood.

This episode mirrors the first rebellion in that, in the Garden, it was the Woman who as tempted by the divine being to become like one of them (the ironic deception being that we already were destined for that, if only the Serpent had been denied), while in Genesis 6, it was the divine beings who were tempted by women to become like mortals.

The aforementioned Book of Enoch expands on this episode by recounting that these sons of God descended upon Mount Hermon – a 7,000-foot-tall mountain cluster north of Israel, which was a major landmark and sacred site to ancient people of the region because it was understood to be a midway point between heaven and earth, and so the gods were believed to dwell there. It was the ancient Near Eastern equivalent to Mount Olympus, and the Book of Enoch, in recounting this episode, explains why.

The sons of God are called “Watchers” in 1 Enoch, presumably for their role of watching over humanity – which is the same term used for the gods of the Divine Council in the Book of Daniel. Presumably, God appointed them to the task after Man’s rebellion in the Garden.

In watching humanity, the sons of God were enticed by the beauty of women, and 200 of them descended upon Mount Hermon and – knowing it would be a brazen act of rebellion against God’s order of creation – all agreed to take human women in sexual union, come what may. Their offspring were superhuman demigods and monsters called “Nephilim,” who roamed the earth, menacing and, often, even eating humanity, while humans idolized and admired them for their prowess as warriors. And, the Watchers gave humanity forbidden, occult knowledge of magic and warfare and metallurgy for making weapons, among other technologies, as well as instructing women in the arts of seduction and prolonging youth and beauty for the sake of sexual power, at the cost of their fertility (sound familiar?).

All of this led to the further corruption of humanity, resulting in the Flood. Humanity and the Nephilim were wiped out, save for Noah and his family, and the Watchers were condemned and imprisoned in the Abyss to await final sentence at Judgment Day.

(This is a topic to expand upon in an article of its own, but it’s worth noting the parallels between the Watchers’ imprisonment and that of the Titans of Greek myth being overthrown by the Olympian gods and imprisoned in Tartarus. There are plenty more parallels where that came from between this narrative and pagan mythology worldwide.)

After Noah and his family repopulated the earth and their descendants’ families grew into nations, humanity gathered to undertake the third major rebellion against God, as Genesis 11 reports: they collectively defied God’s reiterated command to “be fruitful and increase in number, multiply on the earth and increase upon it” by gathering to settle in one place, where they attempted to build a tower to heaven. If we likewise consider the Tower of Babel episode within the cultural and historic context of the ancient Near East, their objective was not, as is commonly supposed by modern lay readers, to create a way for humans to get into heaven, but the opposite: to create a sacred space to receive visitors from heaven. The Tower is acknowledged by modern scholars to have been a ziggurat, which was a sort of man-made sacred mountain upon which the gods were believed to descend.

It was an attempt to repeat (pre)history: they wanted the Watchers to return. The very same corruption that moved God to grieve over the wickedness of humanity, and for which He wiped out human civilization, they wanted to reinstate.

In the first two rebellions, humanity was tempted and seduced by divine beings.

In the third, humanity deliberately sought out those divine beings to invite the corruption.

God’s response was to confuse their language and scatter them, but also – to disinherit them. Humanity wanted the favor of the Watchers, so God gave them over to their own devices.

But, He didn’t leave it at that.

As is recounted in the “Song of Moses” of Deuteronomy 32:

“Remember the days of old; consider the years long past; ask your father, and he will inform you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High apportioned the nations, when He divided mankind, He fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God; YHWH’s own portion was His people, Jacob His allotted share.” (vs. 7-9)

God disinherited humanity and gave them over to the rule of the gods whose favor they sought, but then He elected one man to become His own nation and through whom to redeem the rest.

This is the basic worldview that frames the rest of the Bible and that was taken for granted by the Israelites and Jews and the surrounding nations and cultures: each nation had its god and each god had his territory and nation to rule over.

This is why, when Naaman the Syrian resolved to worship only the God of Israel, he requested “as much earth as a pair of mules can carry” so that he could worship God outside of Israel (2 Kings 5:17). To worship the God of Israel, he needed to take a portion of Israel with him.

Also, a couple centuries later when the Assyrians conquered Israel and imported other conquered peoples to replace the Israelites they’d deported, the king of Assyria ordered his men, “Have one of the priests you took captive from Samaria go back to live there and teach the people what the god of the land requires.” (2 Kings 17:27)

(The next paragraph reports that those people brought all their hometown gods with them and worshiped them alongside YHWH, in the depraved manner of those gods’ demands, which is why Samaritans were so maligned and stigmatized even up to the time of Jesus.)

The War in Heaven

I don’t know at what point the events of Psalm 82 occurred – when God decreed the death sentence for the gods of the Divine Council because of their corruption.

But, the implication is that all of the child sacrifice and ritual sex and sodomy and other outrages and depravities entailed within pagan worship were the result of the gods’ influence. Apparently, the sin of the first generation of Watchers was also a temptation succumbed to by their successors, as each god had his own “requirements of worship,” and apparently, some of those requirements resulted in the proliferation of more Nephilim after the Flood, which is why Moses and Joshua and the Israelites up until the time of David had so many giants to slay in their campaign to settle the Promised Land.

And, we know that by the time of Daniel and the Babylonian Exile, there was full-scale war between the gods of the nations and the sons of God loyal to their Father. In Daniel 10, he recounts having received a vision concerning a “great war” that put him into a deep depression, but then a divine being appeared to him who was so immensely powerful and awesome that Daniel was rendered catatonic with terror. This being – this terrifying otherworldly being – said he had tried to reach Daniel when he first had the vision three weeks earlier, but was detained by the apparently even more terrifying and powerful “Prince of Persia,” and only managed to elude him with the aid of the chief prince Michael (i.e., the archangel), who had apparently been put in charge of Israel as a result of God divorcing them as His people and sending them into exile for their apostasies (Ezekiel 10). The angel then lamented that he would soon have to return to the fight, and that “the Prince of Greece” would then enter the fray (the Grecian/Macedonian Empire led by Alexander conquered and overtook the Persian Empire, which was in power at the time of Daniel’s vision).

So, that’s the worldview of the Bible: there is only one true, eternal, transcendent God who created the universe and to Whom worship is due, but there are gods beneath Him who rule the nations. At least, that’s what is established in the Old Testament and where it leaves off.

These gods rule with God’s delegated authority in a Divine Council, but they are not of one mind and purpose, and they are not unanimously good. They are not on God’s side, nor humanity’s. They are evil and hate humanity and revel in our corruption.

This is the state of affairs that explains why the world is the way it is – because it’s what humanity chose.

The Rise of Man

Humanity chose it, but why does God continue to choose it?

Why does God tolerate, not only the existence of evil, but its continued rule over the nations?

That’s another question never explicitly addressed in the Bible, but the answers aren’t hard to infer from what we read of the Divine Council in the New Testament.  

“Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in the cross,” Paul wrote of Christ (Colossians 2:15).

The “powers and authorities,” of course, are the gods of the Divine Council. These are the same beings to whom Paul referred when he wrote to the Ephesians, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (6:12)

By his death on the cross, Jesus not only stripped them of their power, but humiliated and defeated them.

Revelation 12 speaks of the Devil’s defeat in the war in heaven: “For the Accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.”

“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death – that is, the Devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death,” reads Hebrews 2:14-15.

Christ’s death breaks their power because their power is in their accusations against humanity, because their accusations are true: we are guilty and our guilt is what gives them their authority to rule over the nations, because our guilt makes us their hostages. God pronounced a death sentence upon the Watchers for their corruption, but we have the same sentence against us and God would be unjust to carry out that sentence against them but to spare humanity. When the “Twilight of the Gods” occurs, their death will mean the death of all who belong to them.

So, the short answer to why God continues to tolerate the wicked rule of the Divine Council is that He loves humanity too much to destroy us along with them. His justice would be satisfied if He simply destroyed the gods and all of humanity with them, but His love for humanity prevents that. In the cross of Christ, God’s love and His justice are simultaneously satisfied.

Because he himself had no sin but paid the penalty of sin on behalf of all humanity, Jesus conquered the gods and nullified their claim against humanity. It was that triumph over evil that the prophet Daniel saw in his vision after the condemnation of the four beasts:

“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was One like a Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power. All nations and people of every nation worshiped him; his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and his dominion is one that will never end.”  

Through the Messiah, humanity has been elevated above the gods of the Divine Council, as Jesus himself sits in that seat of supreme authority, and so anyone who is in Christ is likewise exalted in status. Our sentence has already been carried out and the gods’ case against us has been rendered moot, and now we who are in Christ are destined for adoption as the new sons of God, as Romans 8 explains.

It could even be argued that Daniel’s vision and the scene described by Asaph in Psalm 82 — of God taking His place in the Divine Council and condemning the gods to death — were both visions of the exact same event: Jesus taking his seat of authority was that death sentence upon the gods: with their hostages freed, their doom is ensured.

But, that sentence has yet to be carried out. Take note again of what Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus: our struggle against the gods is still ongoing. It’s not over. The final outcome of the war in heaven has been decided, but the war rages on, and it’s in the hands of the Church now.

One of the most vital and important lessons that comes out of the Divine Council worldview is that our choices matter: God made us in His own image and gave us authority over creation. The choices we make have real, incalculable stakes, and they are binding. God holds us to them. When humanity chose to enslave ourselves to the will of lesser gods, that choice determined the course of history – not just for humanity, but the entire universe. Our choices cannot simply be undone, and the consequences are costly. It took the death of the Son of God to reckon with that choice.  

Because of his death and resurrection, though, humanity is offered a new choice:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” said Jesus before his ascension. “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

The spiritual forces of darkness in the heavenly realms no longer have their rightful authority, but they still have the nations’ obedience.

It is the Church’s mission to – first and foremost – be God’s kingdom on earth, exhibiting His nature, acting as Christ’s vessel and vehicle on earth, the instrument through whom his Spirit is embodied. In so doing, we advance His kingdom, like Adam was intended to expand the Garden of Eden to transform the untamed wilderness of creation into Paradise. We do that by extending the choice to the nations between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness.

“And this gospel of the kingdom must be preached to all nations, and then the end will come,” said Jesus (Matthew 24:14).

Regarding that victory, Paul wrote, “Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (1 Corinthians 15:24-25)

Contrary to appearances and widespread misconception, the Church, then, is not a mere religious institution or social organization – a setting for weddings and funerals and baby dedications and a place merely for learning values and sermons about “how to be a good person” or “live the good life” or “how to get into heaven.”

Rather, it is a military organization – it is the most important military organization that has ever existed, to fight and win the only War that has ever really mattered, and of which all other wars and conflicts and struggles are only a chapter.

The Church and what we do – the choices we make, what we bind or loose on earth – are how Christ destroys the dominion, authority and power of the Divine Council.

This article is a follow-up to a recent episode of the Mount Hermeneutics podcast in which we tackled the question of “What Did Jesus Teach?”

On the show, we frequently critique and correct what we regard to be the many errors of the mainstream Church, such as the persistent misconception that the objective of Jesus’ teachings is to get us into heaven as disembodied spirits when we die, and that he plainly taught, “I’m God; believe in me in order to get there.”

Our longstanding contrarianism naturally invites questions like, “Well, then, what did he teach?”, hence the subject of our episode.

The Kingdom of God Has Come Near

To prepare for the discussion, I reviewed each of the four Gospels with attention to that specific question.

Jesus’ teachings can be summed up as:

“The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Of course, all of those terms require definition, because modern readers tend to approach the text with the aforementioned confirmation bias that “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” refers to the afterlife.

It’s important to bear in mind that Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, teaching Judaism to Jews, and all of these terms and concepts were already well defined and firmly established within Judaism centuries before Jesus was born.

When Jesus (and John the Baptist before him) spoke of “the kingdom of God,” his listeners would have understood that to mean the concept as it is defined throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, i.e., the Old Testament.

If you open the Psalms at random, you’re likely to land on a passage like Psalm 98, in which the songwriter calls on nature itself to cry out for joy and praise of God, “for He comes to judge the earth; He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity.”

The Psalms were the musical catalogue sung in the temple, and throughout these songs, there is an almost constant view to this expected future in which the God of this one tiny Mediterranean nation called “Israel” will rule visibly on earth as King, with all the Gentile nations abandoning their false gods and basking in the light of His glory, shining from Jerusalem as the capital city of the world. When He assumes His throne, He will recompense the righteous and the wicked, cast down the proud and exalt the meek and humble, fulfill all of His promises to Abraham and vindicate His faithful. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and there will be peace between all nations, and God’s glory will fill the earth as the water covers the seas, and death itself will be defeated.

In some psalms, this future kingdom is the explicit focus, but in others, it’s in the background to provide perspective and hope amid suffering and affliction and national calamity. Sometimes it is pictured as a present reality, with God’s ongoing faithfulness and justice understood as a preview to the age to come – or, at least, the promise of the age to come is a sufficient compensation for the suffering of their time. The concept itself is almost always there, at some level of attention, in most of the Psalms.

We tend to miss most of this, though, because we read the Psalms (and the rest of the Bible) with that aforementioned confirmation bias, so we gloss these passages over as abstractions or as references to some vague, pie-in-the-sky afterlife in another world. But, no – their focus is squarely on this world, when God Himself reigns visibly.

As time went on and the prophets wrote and taught and added to the corpus of Scripture, the revelation of this coming kingdom progressed and the figure of the promised Messiah – God’s Chosen One who would be His agent to bring all this about – came into clearer and clearer focus.

In the second book of 1 Enoch, the “Book of the Parables” (chs. 37-71), many of the various features and elements of the Messiah and his reign that had been revealed in the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings were compiled in one place and synthesized into a composite vision of what the Jewish people collectively understood would be the ultimate fulfillment of all of God’s promises to Israel: the figure envisioned by the prophet Daniel, the “One Like a Son of Man,” would appear at the end of the age, coming in the glory of God on the clouds of heaven, with all of God’s angels at his command, and he would sit on a throne of glory in Jerusalem to judge the nations, raise the dead and rule over a renewed and restored creation.

So, when John the Baptist arrived on the scene, and Jesus after him, declaring, “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand,” this is how the Jewish people to whom they preached would have understood it.

As in, when it reads that Jesus “taught them about the kingdom of God,” he was not introducing them to the concept, and he certainly wasn’t overturning the concept they had in mind in favor of another concept — that of an afterlife in another world as disembodied spirits, which was totally alien to anything found in the Scriptures, but totally consistent with the pagan beliefs constantly condemned in those Scriptures. Everything he taught presupposed the truth of that concept of “the kingdom of God” as they understood it from the Old Testament, and built upon that understanding.

The Messianic Secret

The same is true of all of Jesus’ mentions of “the Son of Man.”  

Before Jesus was born, and as we can see from the aforementioned portions of 1 Enoch, the phrase “Son of Man” simply meant “the Messiah” in the hearing of any 1st-century Jew.

We tend to read the Gospels with the omniscience of hindsight (because we know that he is “Jesus Christ,” i.e., “Jesus the Messiah”) and so we suppose that he was speaking of himself directly in the third person every time he mentioned “the Son of Man,” never stopping to reflect on how bizarre that would have been, regardless of the culture.

For example, consider the episode (Mark 2) when the paralytic was brought to him to be healed and he scandalized the scribes by telling him, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” They accused him of blasphemy, and so he said, “So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.”

He didn’t intend that as, “So that you may know that I have authority to forgive sins …”

The point of his teachings, and of his miracles, was to demonstrate the rule of God on earth. The premise of his healings and miracles was that he was acting on the authority of God and of the Son of Man – an authority he delegated to his disciples, sending them out in pairs, giving them the same “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick” (Luke 9:1-2).

As in, he did not send them out to proclaim, “Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah!” nor even explicitly, “The Messiah is here!”

Rather than declaring himself to be the Son of Man, Jesus actively prevented people from announcing that he was the Messiah.

For instance, in Mark’s Gospel, it reads that when he drove out demons, he silenced them, “because they knew him.” (2:21-22) When his disciples privately acknowledged him as the Son of God at Caesarea Philippi, he “sternly ordered them not to tell anyone he was the Messiah.” (Matthew 16:20)

His message, first and foremost, was that the kingdom of God was at hand. And, he demonstrated that God’s rule was in effect by driving out demons, healing the sick and raising the dead.

“What about you? Who do you say that I am?”

Of course, he never denied that he was the Messiah, nor that he was God incarnate.

He just didn’t lead with that.

The point of his teachings was not to get people to put their faith in him, per se, nor to embrace him as the Messiah.

Rather, he wanted people to put their faith in God, through him.

He knew that the term “Messiah” was so charged, and people brought so many of their own expectations and prejudices to that term that he didn’t want to just say, “I’m the Messiah” and then have people measure him by their naïve and superficial conceptions of what that meant. He wanted people to understand why he was the Messiah, and what it meant that he was. So, he demonstrated it, and invited them to draw their own conclusions.

That’s why, when John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the One who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”, Jesus didn’t simply answer, “Yep. You bet I am.”

Instead, he told them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” (Luke 7:22-23)

Conversely, when he fed the 5,000 with the five loaves and two fish, and they declared him to be the Messiah and tried to make him king, he rejected their accolades: “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” (John 6) They were, of course, correct about him being the rightful King and the promised Prophet, but he wanted them to understand why that was true. It wasn’t because of the free lunches.

Likewise, when the rich young man said to him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life,” when he answered, “Why do you call me ‘good’? No one is good but God alone,” it was not a denial of his divinity (Mark 10:17-18). It was a denial that he was a mere teacher and an invitation for the young man to consider more deeply the goodness he recognized in Jesus and to follow it to its inevitable conclusion.

Sometimes, the secrets of the kingdom of God come in packages we’re inclined to overlook, and I hope you’ll consider that before you’re put off by this apparently dorky illustration, but the best analogy for the Messianic Secret is to think of the Son of Man as Superman, Jesus as Clark Kent, and the Jews as the staffers of the Daily Planet – Lois in particular.

People often ridicule the Clark Kent disguise with remarks like, “What? Are they stupid!? How does a brilliant journalist like Lois Lane miss that Superman is in the cubicle next to her every day at work? Can’t she just look at Clark and see that he’s Superman with glasses on?!”

But that’s the whole point: She doesn’t look at Clark.

She’s too infatuated with Superman to bother looking at Clark. If she ever did actually look at him, and really see him, she’d know immediately who he is, and that the man of her dreams has been in the cubicle right next to her all along. But she won’t. She’s too blinded by her infatuation with Superman to ever look down.  

And Clark is in love with her, too. But he wants to be loved by her as a man, on human terms, for who he really is, and so he can’t pursue her as Superman, because Superman is just a symbol – a public persona he invented so he could use his powers in public and still maintain a personal life. To be with her, he has to divest himself of everything super about himself and come to her on her level, and win her love as a man, not as a superman.

That’s what Jesus did with the Jewish people. He wanted them to acknowledge him as the One they’ve been hoping for, but it has to be him that they acknowledge – God’s holiness and righteousness and goodness in him – rather than their culturally-ingrained prejudices and presuppositions about God and the Messiah. Those who truly knew God, and understood God’s grace on display in Jesus’ teachings and works, recognized God’s character in the person of Jesus, and followed him as the Messiah. Those who sought only the validation of their prejudices and personal ambitions rejected him and killed him when he finally openly announced himself as the Messiah when he entered Jerusalem on a donkey, in keeping with the prophecy of Zechariah 9.

OK, So What Did He Teach … ?

Of course, the actual substance of Jesus’ teachings goes far beyond what I’ve written here, but with that background established and the usual misbegotten tropes about the afterlife out of the way, most of it speaks for itself, without much need for commentary, if we just read it.

There is, however, no shortage of questions that arise, in light of that background we just discussed. For instance:

If the time was fulfilled 2,000 years ago, why isn’t the kingdom of God visible now? Why isn’t Jesus ruling from Jerusalem?

Who’s in the kingdom and who’s out? What’s the criterion?

But, all of these questions and more are answered in the Gospels themselves, and to begin to find the answers, we had to establish those basic ideas about what the conversation was even about.

As we also discussed during the podcast, I went through each of the Gospels and jotted down some basic notes about their content and respective structures to serve as a general (not at all comprehensive) guide to Jesus’ teachings.

The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) were written in the genre of ancient biography and so focus predominantly on Jesus’ public ministry (with some caveats, which I’ll explain). John’s Gospel stands alone because it’s written in a different genre – it’s more in the vein of the Socratic dialogues of Plato, turning the focus from Jesus’ public ministry to some of his one-on-one dialectics with opponents and questioners. But, while the method of delivery is different, John’s Gospel conveys the same essential message as the Synoptics, as we discussed on the show and as I’ll review in what follows.

The Gospel According to Matthew

Matthew’s Gospel is the most teaching-centric of the four. It was written primarily for a Jewish audience, and so it is arranged around five distinct discourses, meant to evoke the Five Books of the Torah.

Also, probably owing to the Jewish convention of avoiding direct mention of “God” in order to avoid violations of the fourth commandment, Matthew is unique among all the biblical writers for his use of the phrase “kingdom of heaven” in place of the phrase “kingdom of God” as it appears in the other Gospels.

The five discourses are as follow:

The Sermon on the Mount

Chapters 5-7 are all about the kingdom of heaven and the role of Torah observance as a criterion for inclusion, and what Torah observance actually looks like. Here, he is speaking primarily to a Jewish audience to communicate true Judaism, and speaks of the Jews themselves as the light of the world, a microcosm and preview of the kingdom to come.

From his explanation of the Law of Moses, by inference we get the concept of justification by faith. Christians often erroneously take Paul’s teachings to be setting faith and obedience in opposition, and this in opposition to Jesus himself, who called for obedience to the Law. This is based on a superficial reading of both men, though.

Paul spoke only about the criterion for justification, setting “the works of the law” in opposition to faith, but spoke also of “the obedience of faith.” “Do we nullify the law by this faith? By no means! Rather, we uphold the law.”

Likewise, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeatedly contrasted obedience to the mere letter of the law in pursuit of social rewards against sincere obedience to the principle and spirit of the law, done out of genuine devotion: those who abstain from adultery but gaze lustfully; those who take the swearing of oaths to mean they are otherwise at liberty to lie; those who stop short of murder but treat people with contempt and anger, showing that they don’t cherish the life or honor God’s image in others. The contrasts continued on that same track: the broad path versus the narrow, false prophets versus true, self-deluded followers and true believers, building on rock or on sand, etc.  

It boils down to why a person obeys – Is it to virtue-signal? To feel entitled to something before God and man? Or is it out of love and trust of the One who gave the commandment, knowing that He did so for our benefit? How does one’s righteousness exceed that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, who were renowned for their strict and meticulous observance of the Torah?

Also, Jesus set forth the Law as an impossible standard no one could truly keep, showing that it was never given as a set of instructions for how to justify ourselves before God by our own righteousness. Rather, it is to reveal our inadequacy and our desperate need for a new nature. How are we to be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect?

The sermon itself doesn’t answer those questions, but provides the setup for them to be answered by the rest of his teachings and, ultimately, by his death, resurrection and ascension, and the descent of the Spirit.

The Missionary/Apostolic Discourse

Chapters 10-12 expound on the premise that “the Son of Man/Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” by his instructions to the disciples to go out and exercise the authority of God over disease, death and demons. He explicitly tells them to go only to Israelites, emphasizing that this is about restoring true Judaism to Jews; yet, this is a war of God’s kingdom against the kingdoms of darkness, and it transcends mere national, ethnic or even family allegiances. Their first loyalty is to the kingdom of heaven, to its King, over and against any competing loyalty to family and tribe and nation.

The Parabolic Discourse

In chapters 13-17, “the secrets of the kingdom of heaven” are encoded in parables for the public, who are blinded by man-made traditions and institutional loyalties, while he explains the meaning to his disciples in private. A recurring theme is Jesus demonstrating his identity as the Son of Man by his miracles, while the religious leaders demand exactly what he’s providing, but failing to see what’s in front of them.

Of particular curiosity to modern readers, given the aforementioned popular misconceptions — none of the “secrets of the kingdom of heaven” have anything to do with any otherworldly afterlife. Jesus is not explaining to them “what heaven will be like.” All of his parables concern what happens here, in this world, as the kingdom advances on earth: the wheat exists alongside the weeds.

The ultimate revelation of the kingdom occurs when, first, his disciples demonstrate that the secrets have penetrated by acknowledging him as the Messiah, and then when their declaration is validated in the transfiguration, when they see the Son of Man come in his kingdom.  

Discourse of the Church

Chapters 18-20 are about how to operate as and within the Church. The Church is the Kingdom of Heaven. His teachings address such questions as: Who belongs in the kingdom? Who doesn’t? On what terms? Who are the greatest and the least in the kingdom?

The Olivet Discourse

Chapters 23-25 are about how the kingdom of heaven will be taken from the Jewish people and given to a people who will bear its fruit. Contrary to popular misconception, this is not, predominantly, about the “end times.” This is about the fall of the Jewish people. Jesus is explicitly contrasting the fall of Jerusalem and the events leading up to it with his advent/Parousia. The point of it is not to tell them how to predict the revelation of the Son of Man before he begins his rule. It’s impossible. It will happen suddenly and without warning, and the whole world will see it. In sharp contrast, the fall of Jerusalem will be presaged by obvious signs. (And, not insignificantly, this happened 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion.)

This completes the circle back to the Sermon on the Mount. There, he called the Jews the light of the world, the salt of the earth. Here, he laments their rejection and loss of light and saltiness.

The Gospel According to Mark

Mark’s Gospel is understood to be Simon Peter’s testimony. Mark, as Peter’s translator/interpreter during his decades as an itinerant missionary, had it memorized from uncounted retellings.

It is more of an aretology – an account of Jesus’ deeds, and so it’s oriented more to action than to expounding upon the content of Jesus’ teachings.

Or, it would be more accurate to say that Jesus’ teachings are conveyed through his actions and miracles, demonstrating against opposition that the kingdom of God is present through him. The main theme of Mark’s Gospel is the “Messianic Secret.” His signs engender faith in some, but hostility in others, depending on the prejudices and expectations and defects of character that they bring to the question.

There is an arc (seen in Matthew’s Gospel as well, but more in focus here) in which he tells parables early in the Gospel as a way of encoding the secrets of the kingdom in the hearing of the public, to be revealed privately to his disciples, when he is still keeping his identity as the Messiah secret. After he announces himself as the Messiah by his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he now tells parables to reveal – that the Jews’ rejection of him as the Messiah means God’s rejection of them as the bearers of His kingdom.

The Gospel According to Luke

Luke’s Gospel includes much of the action of Mark and the teachings in Matthew, but it’s not arranged in any particular way, other than loosely chronologically. His intent is more historiographical than doctrinal or theological, and so he’s more descriptive of circumstances and detail-oriented.

For instance, he expands on Jesus’ declaration that “The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is at hand” by reporting precisely how Jesus announced this – his reading from the scroll of Isaiah and declaring it fulfilled.

The Gospel According to John

This Gospel was written last, and John was reportedly aware of the other Gospels. Clement of Alexandria, in explaining the composition of the Gospels, wrote, “But John, the last of all, seeing that what was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.”

Clement didn’t explain what he meant by “spiritual” as opposed to “corporeal,” but from what I can observe, I infer it to mean that it was more philosophical, more personal. Instead of reporting on Jesus’ public sermons or retelling a birth narrative, John spoke of Jesus’ origin as the preexistent Logos, the Word made flesh.

The same themes and teachings of the Synoptics are found in John’s Gospel, but where these were implied and hinted at in the Synoptics, with Jesus leaving out breadcrumbs for people to follow in order to come to the realization that he is the Messiah, in John’s Gospel, these are stated more explicitly. Jesus himself isn’t necessarily more explicit to his public audiences, but the writer deliberately narrates to bring these ideas to light.  

It is arranged around a series of “signs.”

Conventional wisdom has it that there are seven such signs, but there isn’t unanimous agreement on which signs make up the seven, nor is there anything in the text itself that specifically numbers them at seven. There are six signs that everybody agrees upon, but four other possibilities for what the seventh could be (assuming that’s the count).

Each of them is a “sign” in that it connects Jesus back to the prophecies and types found in the Hebrew Scriptures, and so constituted God the Father’s “testimony” to Jesus as His Son.

The six undisputed signs are as follow:

1) Turning water into wine connects Jesus back to the prophecy of Jacob about the Lion of Judah in Genesis 49.

2) The healing of the official’s son and

3) the healing at the pool both prefigure resurrection – the prophecy of Daniel 12, and represent the Son’s authority over life and death, given by the Father, because he is the Son of Man (also connecting him back to Daniel 7).

4) Feeding the 5,000 with the five loaves and two fish connects Jesus back to the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites, in which they ate manna. The motif of the Israelites’ “grumbling” against God is repeated here as they reject Jesus as the true Bread of Life.

5) He healed the man born blind, validating his claim that he is the Light of the World, spoken during the Festival of Tabernacles, in which the Israelites’ wilderness wandering was commemorated, in which God led them as a pillar of fire. Jesus was illustrating that, what that pillar of fire was to the Israelites, he would be to the world.

6) Raising Lazarus from the dead connected Jesus back to every Old Testament prophecy about the resurrection.

The other four contenders for “signs” are as follow:

1) Cleansing the temple connects Jesus back to the prophecy of Malachi about the messenger of the covenant who would cleanse the temple, as well as to Psalm 69, which is quoted by John. It also begins the overall narrative arc that goes through chapter 2b, chapter 3 and chapter 4 in which Jesus explains how he, and by extension, his followers, are the New Temple in whom God’s Presence would dwell.

Cleansing the temple wasn’t a miracle, though, so it is arguable if it qualifies as a “sign.”

2) Jesus walked on water, which was definitely miraculous, but if this connects him back to the Old Testament in some particular way, I am not aware of how.

3) Jesus’ own resurrection is the sign of all signs – the sign of Jonah, which in the Synoptic Gospels, he declares as the only sign that would be given to the world.

4) The miraculous catch of 153 fish might be a sign. I haven’t been able to verify this, nor have I been able to figure out where other people are supposedly getting this, but some commentators have remarked that there were believed to be 153 Gentile nations in existence at the time, which would be a sign connecting the Church (as the New Temple in whom the Spirit of Christ would dwell) back to Deuteronomy 32:7-9, which reports that the nations were divided according to the number of the sons of God, when God disinherited them at the Tower of Babel and put them under the control of the Watchers/Divine Council, but are now being reclaimed by the Messiah. At any rate, whatever meaning there might be to the count of 153, at the very least, the catch of fish was regarded as miraculous, and signified Peter and his colleagues’ role as “fishers of men.” So, this constitutes a sort of parabolic illustration of the Great Commission.   

There are also seven “I am” statements made by Jesus in John’s Gospel, but they are somewhat self-explanatory

The main thrust of Jesus’ teaching in John’s Gospel is found in that aforementioned discussion of the temple, and how God’s Spirit would dwell within believers, making us the New Temple.

Imagine going to a wedding, and everyone is celebrating and happy and there is a palpable feeling of joy and love in the air at what is about to occur: the joining of two people for the start of a new life together, which will, hopefully, overflow into more new life well into the future. Weddings, of course, are a celebration of life and its perpetuation through family and children, and that’s what you’re all there to celebrate, and the joy of it is contagious. Your heart and the hearts of all around you are full when the music starts to play and you hear the sanctuary doors swing open, and so you turn along with the rest of the guests to watch the bride enter, and …  

She is a corpse.

In every other respect, she has been prepared for the event: her dress, her hair, her makeup and jewelry are all impeccable, along with the decorations and flowers of the venue, and by all appearances, she would be the perfect bride and this the perfect wedding ceremony … but for the fact that she is dead.

To your bewilderment and compounded revulsion, the collective joy of the guests is totally uninterrupted and undiminished. Many even gush effusively over the supposed beauty of this painted cadaver as her beaming father wheels the upright gurney along to proceed down the aisle, while you choke on the heavy perfume that fails to disguise the stench of rotting flesh as she passes. No one other than you is surprised or disturbed in the least, as if this is all expected and normal and precisely in line with what they came to celebrate.

Sounds like a horror movie, right?

Well … this is, without exaggeration, exactly how I feel whenever I go to church.

Church sickens me. I never feel more alone or more distant from God than when I’m standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a packed church on Sunday morning.

Of course, regular churchgoers are always scandalized when I say things like that, and they think I’m just being cynical or too demanding and critical. What do I expect, after all? “Look around you!” they insist. “Can’t you hear the music? Aren’t you impressed by the grandeur of the venue? Can’t you see the flowers? Aren’t the bridesmaids stunning and the groomsmen dashing in their tuxedos? Aren’t you moved by the eloquence of the invocation? He quoted Scripture! Everything can’t be perfect! You must be angry at God. That’s it. What happened to you? Why do you hate weddings so much?”

But I don’t hate weddings and I especially don’t hate God and the Church. Quite the contrary.  

I just happen to be aware that for a wedding to be real, and not a demonic, horror-movie parody of itself, the bride has to be alive, as a minimal requirement, and anything else is an insult to the very concept of weddings, so I am very insistent on that point.

Likewise, for a church to be real, it also must not be a corpse.

The modern, mainstream, market-standard Church has all of the pomp and ceremony and expected trappings, but that which it is supposed to celebrate is absent. It has no life, and so it cannot perpetuate itself, except by continuing with the pomp and ceremony and outward trappings to maintain the illusion of what it purports to represent and celebrate.

The Meaning of ‘Life’

When the Church first began, in the time soon after the Life of God descended to dwell within and regenerate them, the apostles were arrested and imprisoned by the religious authorities, but an angel freed them and instructed, “Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life.”

Some translators render it “ … about this new life,” which isn’t present in the Greek, but it’s a bit of theological editorializing that I can agree with, because it obviously wasn’t “life” in the general sense they were to proclaim. They weren’t doing “life coaching” or talking about “the good life” or anything else that might fall under the broad category of “life” (as you might often hear about in church today). The message was about “life” in the very particular sense of the eternal life Christ died and – most importantly for our purposes here – was raised to give to us.

So, what is this “new life”?

If you ask your garden-variety churchgoer about it, they’re likely to say it’s about going to heaven in ghost-form when we die instead of hell.

Yet, if you read every sermon, debate or doctrinal declaration in the Book of Acts, before and after that event, there isn’t a single mention of dead humans going off to some afterlife as disembodied spirits or souls.

And, for that matter, and as I have explained at length in other articles, this idea is totally absent from the rest of the Bible, except when we bring it with us.

Also, and more importantly, they spoke of it, not merely as some far-off promise to enjoy in an indefinite future (although, that aspect is there), but as a present reality to be lived here, now.

The apostle Peter wrote that God “has given us everything needed for life and godliness.”

We have it, Peter wrote, through God’s promises: He has promised that, if we trust in Him through Jesus Christ, we have the very nature of God within us, and so we can – we must – participate in God’s nature and thereby escape the corruption of the world.

As in, we already have eternal life – it isn’t something we merely wait for. It’s something we are supposed to have now. What happens in the future is the consummation and completion of what we are supposed to have in the present. Here, when we first believe, we receive the seed of that life, and the Christian life is about cultivating it so that it grows and bears fruit and perpetuates itself to others, and thus the kingdom of heaven advances on earth.

Remember to Check Your Bride’s Pulse

Of course, much of this is old hat and most churchgoers would affirm much of this just as I would.

Or, at least, they have a doctrine about the indwelling of the Spirit, and they are fluent with terms like “sanctification” and “regeneration” or maybe even “theosis” as they speak about it.

But, their doctrines do more to inoculate them – to blind them to these teachings as they find them in the Bible, because they gloss them over when they read them, imposing their presuppositions in place of the actual meaning of the text.

That they have a totally different understanding in mind than what the biblical writers intended becomes glaringly obvious when they’re confronted with the surrounding verses.

Cite Peter’s teachings from 2 Peter 1:3-4 about how we participate in the Divine Nature through God’s promises and they’ll nod in agreement.

But then go on to the very next set of verses: “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith excellence; and to excellence, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-mastery; and to self-mastery, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly affection; and to brotherly affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.”

They won’t take that warning as too terribly dire, because the immediate context gives them room to supply their own definitions for those outcomes instead of heeding the far more sobering definitions supplied by the writer, and by Jesus himself.

But if you put the emphasis on that “make every effort”-part, it will become immediately clear that the plain meaning of that passage and all others like it simply does not penetrate.

More times than I can count, I have quoted that passage, without comment – I just recited it, verbatim, as it appears on the page – and the person’s reflexive, immediate response has been to accuse me of promoting “works-based salvation.”

“You can’t do anything to add to your salvation! It’s all God, not you!” they insist.

Their understanding of the New Life is that it is totally passive. It is something God does to you, and once He does it, it’s done, cannot be undone, and you can neither add to nor subtract from it, even if you tried.

And so, when they come across passages like that – passages that exhort believers to “make every effort,” to strive, to discipline themselves, to act, to take any initiative at all, to do anything, as well as any passage with warnings about what will happen if they don’t – the response is always, “Yes, the passage says that, but …” as they follow up with something to blunt the urgency, to lower the stakes, to get themselves off the hook. The common pattern is that where the biblical writers exhorted Christians to exert effort and take active initiative and responsibility, the modern churchgoer lawyers it to justify passivity, taking no responsibility, rejecting any demands that might be placed on them as Christians, and they do so in a way that makes it sound very pious and devout, as if these are all virtues to be cultivated instead of the vice and cowardice and laziness that they actually are.

The entire point of the Church existing in the first place, though, is to actively mentor believers in taking that initiative, according to Paul – to “build up” the body of Christ “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

Nobody connects that passage in Ephesians 4 to 2 Peter 1:3-11 and others like it, because we don’t have that understanding of what Church and Christianity are for. Our “participation in the Divine Nature” by our growth into all these qualities is something that happens of itself, we insist, and so the Church, in our understanding, just doesn’t have a role to perform along the lines of what we read in Ephesians 4.

We gloss these concepts over into vague abstraction and redefine terms to shoehorn them into the vapid, passive and feckless notions of our theological systems.

Consequently, the Church is a demonic parody of itself – a wedding held for a corpse.