The Third Helix

Depending on whom you ask, the concept of the Trinity is either the absolute worst offense that can exist in the sight of God, or it’s God’s all-important self-revelation upon which all existence and life and salvation depend.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about it, to say the least – among Christians, especially, no less – and that confusion adds a lot of fuel to the historically persistent controversy around it.

So, here’s my own humble attempt at resolving some of the confusion.

Monotheists who aren’t Christian (i.e., Jews and Muslims) see the doctrine of the Trinity as a denial of monotheism, the belief that there is only one God. The premise of this piece is that it not only is not a denial of monotheism, but it’s a necessary logical outworking of monotheism. In other words, if monotheism is true, then God must be a Trinity; if God is not a Trinity, then the “God” in view by monotheists isn’t really God at all.

Before I get into that, some background information is in order. If you’re already up to speed on the basics, though, feel free to skip ahead to the section with the subheading “In His Image.”

And if you want a really quick, to-the-point, argument- and background-free explanation of why I think the Trinity is necessary to monotheism, without me “showing my work,” so to speak, skip down to the section with the heading, “God, the Word of God and the Sevenfold Spirit” (but if you do skip ahead and then find my argument inadequate or unpersuasive, I ask you to consider that I “showed my work” in the previous section for a reason, and you have formed your conclusion on the basis of incomplete information).

The Doctrine

The term “Trinity” is shorthand for the Christian doctrine that God is Three-in-One: three distinct Persons who are singular in Being – “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Each Person of the Trinity is distinct from the Others and is equally and fully “God,” yet there is only one God, not a triumvirate of separate “Gods.”

And, according to Trinitarian theology, the Second Person of the Godhead, God the Son, or the Son of God, became human in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth and died for the sins of the world, rose again from the dead and then ascended back to his place at “the right hand of the Father” so that humanity could dwell representatively within the Godhead and, in turn, the Third Person, the Holy Spirit, could descend to dwell within humanity.

This arrangement is the essence of the Christian concept of salvation, hence the all-important, non-negotiable importance of Trinitarian doctrine to Christian orthodoxy. Much more on that later, though.

Historical Objections to the Trinity

As touched upon in the introduction, the other two monotheistic religions have something of a problem with this.

Muslims regard it as shirk – idolatry – which they hold to be the gravest offense anyone could commit before Allah, like ever. According to the Qur’an, Allah is super pissed off about this, hence the repeated emphasis on the “Oneness” of God throughout its pages.

“They have certainly disbelieved who say, ‘Allah is the third of three.’ And there is no god except one God. And if they do not desist from what they are saying, there will surely afflict the disbelievers among them a painful punishment,” reads Surah 5:73 of the Qur’an.

“And they say, ‘The Most Merciful has taken a son.’ You have done an atrocious thing. Would that the heavens be rent thereat and the earth split open and the mountains fall into the sea that they attribute to the Most Merciful a son. And it is not appropriate for the Most Merciful that He should take a son. There is no one in the heavens and earth but that he comes to the Most Merciful as a servant.” (Surah 19:88-93)

So Muslims see the doctrine of the Trinity as an outrage and an unpardonable blasphemy against Allah, hence the characteristic Islamic disdain for western religion and culture.

Although, it’s worth noting that the “Trinity” at which they take such umbrage isn’t exactly the Trinity of historic Christian theology. Based on Surah 5:116 of the Qur’an, Muhammed appeared to have been laboring under the impression that the Trinity consists of the three persons of Allah, Mary and Jesus, as a sort of “family of God”:

“And (beware the Day) when Allah will say, ‘O Jesus, Son of Mary, did you say to the people, “Take me and my mother as deities besides Allah ?”’ He will say, ‘Exalted are You! It was not for me to say that to which I have no right. If I had said it, You would have known it. You know what is within myself, and I do not know what is within Yourself. Indeed, it is You who is Knower of the unseen.’”

As in, rather than “tri-unity” as an internal and eternal characteristic of the Godhead, as historic Christian doctrine holds, it is instead the adding-on of external, created beings to the Godhead, which would be heretical and idolatrous by the Christian and Islamic understandings of monotheism alike.

(Based on Surah 3:33-47, Muhammed also seemed to be laboring under the notion that Mary the mother of Jesus was the same Mary/Miriam mentioned in the Torah, who was the sister of Moses and Aaron and the daughter of Amram and Jochebed, who lived about 1,500 years earlier. But, that’s a discussion for another time. Suffice to say, the Qur’an’s author is a dubious authority on God and on biblical persons and events.)

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Jews also hold the Trinity to be a denial of monotheism, but they’re not laboring under such a blatant misrepresentation of it like we see in Islam. Jews tend to think the doctrine of the Trinity is just a failed attempt by post-apostolic theologians to justify, within a monotheistic framework, the New Testament and its teachings about the deity of Christ. “Failed attempt” because they see it as a fundamental denial of the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4), as well as a denial of the commandment, “You shall have no other gods before/besides Me.”

“If God is One, He can’t be three,” they insist, so the Trinity adds “gods” beside Him, thereby violating the commandment.

Except, the Hebrew word used for “one” is “echad,” which indicates “a united oneness,” as opposed to “yachid,” which indicates “a solitary oneness.”

An example of a “united oneness” would be in Genesis 2:24, where it reads about Adam and Eve that “the two became one (‘echad’) flesh.”

And there’s plenty more within the Hebrew Scriptures that – while not necessarily proving the doctrine of the Trinity in so many words – nonetheless speak to an internal plurality within the Godhead, rendering Jewish objections to the Trinity moot.

There are the “Us”-passages in Genesis (1:26; 3:22), and the specific mention of the “Spirit of God” in Genesis 1:2 as apparently distinct from “God” in the primary sense. And, there are numerous instances in which the Angel of YHWH/the Lord is referred to by God in the third-Person, and the Angel speaks of God in the third-Person, and then the Angel is afforded all of the worship and authority of God Himself (Exodus 23:20-22; Joshua 5:13-15; Zechariah 3, etc.).

So, while the unity of God is certainly insisted upon in the Hebrew Scriptures, there’s also plainly a plurality within that unity, so “unity” doesn’t necessarily mean a strict singularity.

In fact, before the advent of Christianity, the notion of “Two Powers in Heaven” was, if not universally accepted orthodoxy within Judaism, at least was not regarded as heretical, due to passages like these. The Jews’ reasons for rejecting the Trinity are not actually theological or scriptural, as some might claim, but tribal and cultural, owing to their rejection of Christianity.

As in, contrary to popular misconception, they do not reject Christianity because they reject doctrines like the Trinity. It’s the other way around. They reject the Trinity because they reject Christianity. They reject today much of what their pre-Christian ancestors took for granted within Judaism, because of its Christian associations. Just consider their position on the Septuagint today, compared to 2,000 years ago, as just one emblematic example.

A History of Heresies

There are quite a few popular attempts at explanations of the Trinity among Christians, some of which are more helpful than others at conveying the concept.

There’s the Water/States of Matter Analogy: Just as water can be liquid, solid or gas, but remains the same substance, so is God the three Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, while remaining the same Being, according to this analogy.

Except, this is really just another form of the heresy known as “Modalism,” which is erroneous because it denies the separate Personhood of each member of the Trinity. As in, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are actually the same Person, but fulfilling a different role – wearing a different hat, so to speak – according to Modalism. It posits that “the Son” is just Who God is when He’s not being the Father or the Holy Spirit, which doesn’t fit with the Scriptures, since they depict the Father, Son and Spirit relating and referring to one another as distinct Persons (John 17; Romans 8:16 and 34).

Then there’s the Egg Analogy: an egg comprises the three components of a yolk, the white and the shell. This is an expression of yet another heresy – that of Partialism. None of the components of the egg can rightly be understood to be the egg in its fullness, as each Person of the Trinity is fully “God” (Colossians 2:9, 10).

The illustration attributed to St. Patrick – the shamrock, or three-leaf clover, is another version of the same heresy.

Then there’s the Sun Analogy: God the Father is like the Sun, God the Son is like the rays of light that emanate from the Sun, and the Holy Spirit is like the heat created on Earth from the Sun. This is the Arian heresy, which had it that the Son is a created being only similar to God the Father in substance, but not identical (homoiousion instead of homoousion, which is what the Council of Nicaea boiled down to), and not “God” in the full sense.

These have been condemned by various church councils, but some Christians would argue that they’re still useful, at the very least, as “elevator pitches” – quick, concise explanations you could make during the span of an elevator ride, just to get your foot in the door and get someone at least open to the possibility that God could be a Trinity.

I don’t know that I accept that. If they’re heretical versions of the Trinity, it isn’t actually the Trinity you’re getting them to entertain as a possibility, so I don’t know that they’re truly constructive to that end, except maybe to trick someone into considering it, which I don’t think is an advisable tactic.

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A possible exception, though – and my own personal favorite quick illustration of the Trinity – is the Cube Analogy used by C.S. Lewis.

Imagine trying to describe a cube to beings who exist in only two dimensions. They’re familiar with flat shapes like squares and circles and triangles, but since they’ve never experienced reality beyond their two-dimensional frame of reference, they cannot conceive of cubes, spheres, cylinders or pyramids. Try to explain what a cube is, and they’ll only be able to imagine it in terms of six separate squares grouped together somehow, but not as a single, indivisible object.

Likewise, that’s sort of what explaining the tri-unity of the single God is like to beings who live only in three-dimensional time and space, in which every being is only a solitary person.

Now, the Cube Analogy suffers for being another variation on Partialism … if we take it as an illustration of the Trinity, that is. But, I think it’s less an illustration of the Trinity than it is an illustration of the limits of our perception as three-dimensional beings. According to String Theory, there are possibly 10 or 11 spatial dimensions to the universe, while we perceive of only three, and possibly more than the single temporal dimension we experience. And God, by definition, created the universe, so He exists beyond all of the spatial and temporal dimensions that constitute the space-time continuum itself, to say nothing of His transcendence of the limited corner of space-time of which we can perceive.

So, if we can see that two-dimensional beings’ inability to conceive of a cube doesn’t render the concept of a cube impossible or logically nonsensical, so our inability to conceive of three Persons who are one in Being doesn’t render the Trinity impossible.

So, that’s the elevator pitch I prefer, because the heretical aspects of the illustration aren’t the relevant aspects.

That’s just to get my foot in the door, though.

My ultimate goal isn’t just to convey that the Trinity is possible, but that it’s a necessary logical consequence of monotheism itself.

In His Image

In my view, the most compelling piece of evidence for the Trinity is human consciousness.

Or, I should say, the nature of Consciousness itself is our clue, of which human consciousness is our only firsthand example. According to Scripture, though, God modeled human consciousness after His own: “God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them…” (Genesis 1:27)

Whatever else that means (and it means a great deal), self-awareness is included in our being made in the image of God.

Being “made in the image of God” is what it means to be human and distinct from the animals, according to the book of Genesis.

According to evolutionary anthropologists, the defining characteristic that makes us human is our capacity for abstract, symbolic thought and communication, i.e., language. Anthropologists tell us that anatomically modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until about 40-50,000 years ago that we became fully human – “behavioral modernity” is the term for it. The transition from bestial Anatomically Modern Humans to fully evolved Behaviorally Modern Humans happened through what they call the “Great Leap Forward,” by which humans suddenly (relatively speaking) developed the ability for complex language – Man could think in terms of abstract symbols and communicate those symbols through the use of sound.

Ancient Jewish mystics picked up on this long before the advent of modern anthropology, though, just by reading and contemplating the Bible.

“Abracadabra” is an Aramaic phrase believed by some to have been coined by ancient Kabbalists. It means, “As I speak, I create,” and it’s meant to convey the relationship seen in the book of Genesis between speech and creation, as first shown in God’s act of speaking the universe into existence, and second, in His image-bearer’s act in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:19-20): Adam participated in God’s work of creation by naming the animals. He didn’t create ex nihilo as God did, but by naming the animals, he brought another dimension of order to creation – he created the first system of taxonomy, just as we create institutions, art, paradigms of thought and systems of law and science and classification — often, through story and narrative– through our speech and language today. Things like the economy, governments, religions, ideologies, societies and social classes are real things, but they exist entirely as constructs of language and communication – they exist only because we speak them into existence. Our speech is the underlying basis for our ability to build civilizations and technology, which sets us apart as fundamentally different from the animal world.

You Can’t See Your Own Head

Speech is also the underlying basis for self-awareness.

It’s our ability to create by way of abstract symbolic thought that enables us to communicate with others, as well as to communicate and create internally. Just by virtue of being conscious, we create a symbolic concept of the self, and we see the self as a subject in the world, as well as a subject within our own mind. As in, we’re not just aware of the world around us – the sights and sounds and sensations reported to our brain by our sense organs; we’re aware of ourselves as subjects within the world.

Hopefully I won’t scandalize too many Christians (or other monotheists) by this, but the relevance of consciousness to the doctrine of the Trinity first occurred to me a few years ago while I was reading the Hindu Upanishads, a central topic of which is the internal makeup of the human psyche and what Consciousness actually is. The applications to monotheism don’t depend on acceptance of any Hindu-specific belief, though. It just so happens that it was Hindu mystics who were among the first to contemplate the interior dimensions of human consciousness a few millennia ago (or, at least, the first to preserve those contemplations for posterity), and our acknowledgment of the truth of those observations doesn’t depend on acceptance of the overarching belief system.

The Hindu mystics who wrote the Upanishads recognized that our concept of the self is not identical with the actual self, though, and much of their contemplation was devoted to probing the mysteries raised by the disparity.

The Self, or Atman, to put it in Hindu terms, is the Thinker/Speaker. But the thoughts and words that originate with the Thinker are not the Thinker him/herself. So, while the Self is capable of thinking and speaking of the Self, the thoughts the Self has about the Self are not the actual Self, but the Ego, or Jiva, to again put it in Hindu terms

At issue is the ability of the Self to actually think about the Self in true and accurate terms.

“You can’t see your own head,” as summed up by Dr. Ed Wood, my Intro. to World Religion professor in college.

As in, the Self can no more directly perceive the Self than you can see your own head. You can see a reflection of your head in a mirror, or a photograph, but you can’t actually see your own head any more than you can turn your eye back in on itself to look at your own eye. Likewise, the Self can only make inferences about the Self, based on reflection – how the external world relates to the Self as another object in the world, and that’s how the Self becomes a subject in its own world.

This raises questions about what the Ego/Jiva actually represents. Does it truly represent the Self? Because if you try to speak about the Self in any concrete terms, what can you really say about your Self that’s actually about your Self?

And by “Self,” I mean your actual Self.

Your “actual Self” isn’t the physical material of your body. The “Ship of Theseus” paradox shows that you can’t reduce the Self to your body, since none of the cells that constitute your physical form today existed a matter of years ago, and all the cells you have in this moment will be dust in a matter of years while you live on in your body. Yet, your Self existed then, now and will years from now when the constituent parts of your body are entirely replaced with new cells and new materials. So, you can’t point to the body or even your brain and say, “That is the Self.”

And, you can’t point to the pattern in which those cells are arranged and say “That is the Self,” because identical twins have the same genetic pattern, but are distinct Selves.

And anything else you could say about the Self isn’t really about the Self, either. You could talk about where you’ve been, what you’ve done, whom you’ve met and interacted with, work you’ve accomplished, experiences you’ve had, but none of that information is actually about the internal Self – only the external experiences of the Self. All it does is skirt the outer limits of the Self, creating an outline of negative space in which the Self invisibly resides, but we still haven’t said anything about the Self.

And, even if the Self were capable of perceiving of the Self, in order for the Ego to be a true representation of the Self, the Self would have to recreate itself in thought, like a computer simulating a complete model of its own hardware and programming. For that model to be an accurate and complete representation rather than just a comparatively crude, abbreviated symbol of the computer, it would have to include all of that computer’s functionality, which would exceed its computational capacity – a thermodynamic impossibility.

Then, when you add on the Judeo-Christian element of sin and its attending shame, the Self would recoil in horror at its own shortcomings and excesses – its “nakedness” (Genesis 3:7), and the Ego it would create would be an inflated, idealized version of itself shaped by wishful thinking and insecurity.

So, as a necessary corollary to the fact of our consciousness, humans are self-aware, but only just, because our Ego-self is only an indirect caricature and distorted echo of our true Self, inflated by imagined virtues and glossed-over faults.

Which brings us to the subject at hand.

God, the Word of God and the Sevenfold Spirit

According to monotheism, there is an infinite and eternal Supreme Consciousness who is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly holy who created the universe and all life within it: He knows all, is infinitely powerful and is without moral defect and is the Source of our own existence, life and consciousness.

All monotheists – Jews, Christians and Muslims alike – agree on that definition.

And, God is at least as conscious and Self-aware as we are.

I don’t think any Jew or Muslim anywhere would try to argue that God lacks the faculty of self-awareness that defines our own existence as humans. I would expect they would insist upon that point as zealously as anyone – God is alive and conscious and Personal, and to say otherwise would be blasphemy, within both Judaism and Islam.

So if God is Self-aware, as we are, that means He has/is a Self, and He also has an “Ego” – an awareness of Himself as a Self.

And if God is all-knowing, then His omniscience would extend even to Himself. And if God is all-powerful, then His omnipotence would include the ability to perfectly perceive and to think comprehensively and accurately of Himself.

Which means – with none of the aforementioned limitations attending man’s self-awareness – God’s “Ego” would be a perfect and complete representation of God’s Self, lacking no attribute that God Himself possesses: His omniscience, omnipotence, holiness, His infinity and eternity. God’s “Ego” would not be a crude, abstract symbolic representation of God’s Self, as is a human ego, but an absolutely perfect representation of all that God is.

In other words, God’s “Ego” would be God in His own right. Yet, He would be distinct from God, as the Ego is distinct from the Self.

He would not be a creation of God – a creation is external and unnecessary to God, while self-awareness is a necessary fact of God’s existence. For God, to exist is to be self-aware, so – while God’s Self-awareness is contingent on God, He is not a creation of God, but is necessary and eternal to God’s own existence. Rather than God’s creation, He is God’s Son, who is like the Father in every regard, but has His existence from the Father.

Just as man’s ego is conjoined to our faculty of language and speech, so is God’s Self-awareness to His. His Self-perception, then, would be better described, not as His “Ego,” but as His Word. And just as man creates by his speech, so is the Word of God the Agent through Whom God creates.

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Because the Word of God lacks no attribute of the Father, the Word is also Self-aware – He has an “Ego,” a Self-image, just as the Father has a Self-image in the Word.

The Self-image of the Word, however, includes – not just His understanding of Himself but His understanding of Himself in relation to the Father, as well as the Father’s understanding of Himself in relation to the Word.

The Self-image of the Word is the Embodiment in Consciousness of the mutual relationship between the Father and the Word. He is the Living Spirit of the fellowship between the Father and the Word, and He also is God in His own right, lacking no attribute of the Father and the Son.

And, of course, being an absolutely perfect and complete representation of everything that God the Father and God the Word are, the Third Person of the Godhead is also Self-aware, and aware of Himself as a Person in relation to the Father and the Son.

You can see where this is going, right?

The Third Person’s Self-awareness is also Self-aware and lacking nothing that is God, Who is also Self-Aware and lacking nothing, Who is also Self-aware and lacking nothing, etc.

There is an infinite progressive proliferation of Divine Persons proceeding from the First and Second Persons of the Godhead. The Father and Son are like two mirrors of Consciousness facing each Other, creating (well, “creating”) an endless repetition of reflections of each Other, and of each Other in relation to the Other. Except, because God is omniscient, omnipotent and infinite, nothing is diminished as the reflections repeat, because these are not, as in the analogy, mere light waves reflecting off a surface and diminishing in energy and focus with each iteration, but God’s Own Mind in His awareness of Himself. Light waves are finite quanta of energy that diminish and diffuse, making each successive reflection a lesser copy of the previous reflection. But, the Supreme Consciousness that is God is infinite and all-powerful. So, every single “reflection” is God in His own right. The two “mirrors” are God the Father and God the Son, and the infinite progression of Divine “reflections” are the Holy Spirit. Except, lacking nothing that is God, the “reflections” are also “mirrors” in their own right.

God is not a singular, solitary Spirit, but a unified infinity of Spirit(s).

We might be inclined to reject this idea as too absurd to entertain, because it seems counter-intuitive. It runs opposite to everything we know by observation about the universe, as it is governed by such restrictions as the laws of conservation and entropy and the like.

The laws of the universe apply only to the universe and all within it, though. God, by definition, transcends the universe, and so is not subject to its laws. They are subject to Him. The very notion of creatio ex nihilo, which is so basic and essential to monotheism itself, also runs contrary to those very laws. How much more should we expect God Himself to as well?

And, is this not exactly what monotheism and the scriptures of every monotheistic religion teach, if only by implication? Is not God, by definition, infinite? And what does it mean – that “God is infinite” – if not what I have described?

This is consistent with the book of Revelation, which speaks of “the Seven Spirits of God,” or “the Sevenfold Spirit of God.” (Revelation 1:4; 3:1; 4:5; 5:6)

Clearly, from those verses, the Holy Spirit is not a singular, solitary spirit, but a plurality of Spirit(s).

And, any student of ancient Hebrew culture can tell you that when the number seven is used, it doesn’t always literally mean “seven” – one less than eight and one more than six. The number seven in Judaism is a divine symbol, hence the seven-branched menorah which symbolizes this monotheistic religion, as well as all the other groupings of seven throughout the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament, like the seven days of creation, the seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost, Yom Kippur in the seventh month of the year, the Jubilee year occurring after seven sabbatical years, etc.

The number seven speaks of perfection and completion, but it can also mean “without measure,” like when God warned of avenging Cain “seven times over” (Genesis 4:15), and then Lamech exaggerated it to “seventy-seven” times over (v. 24). Or when God warned of punishing Israel’s sins “seven times over” (Leviticus 26:18, 21, 24, 28), and when He said Israel’s enemies would “flee in seven directions” (Deuteronomy 28:25). You see this idiom repeated in the New Testament, when Peter asked Jesus how often he should forgive, and Jesus told him, not merely seven times, but 77 times (Matthew 18:21, 22). Clearly, he didn’t mean to cut off forgiveness on that 78^th offense, but that there was no limit. And, that was to reiterate that “forgive seven times” didn’t mean the eighth time was the last straw, but that there was no last straw.

Likewise, the seven letters to the seven churches (Revelation 1:18-3:22) weren’t intended just for those specific seven churches situated in Asia Minor, but were intended for the Church as a whole, for all of history and in all places, of which those particular seven were representative.

In the same way, the phrase “Sevenfold Spirit of God” is representative of the plurality of God’s Spirit in all of His completeness and limitlessness, Who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who are all coequally God.

So, if monotheism is true, then God is, primarily, a Trinity, but the Trinity is, in actuality, an Infinity (or a “Trinfinity”?).

The Word Made Flesh

It’s important to note that this isn’t just a theological abstraction– a philosophical exercise done for merely academic purposes, or to win arguments with Muslims and Jews. The doctrine of the Trinity has profound, life-changing application for every single human being.

While it is important for Christians to be able to answer Muslims and Jews when they object to the Trinity, it’s even more important that we understand the Trinity ourselves and grasp its centrality to our salvation and to our understanding of ourselves as Christians, and as members of the human race.

Christianity has it that the Word of God, the Second Person of the Godhead, entered into history in human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

The prologue of the Gospel of John explains:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind…

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1-4; 11-14)

Let’s consider what that means – that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is the eternal Word of God incarnate in human form.

It’s often taught that, as the Word made flesh, Jesus represents God before humanity (Hebrews 1:1-3), and as “high priest in the order of Melchizadek,” he represents humanity before God (Hebrews 5-9).

And, of course, I agree with all that (who am I to disagree?), but that’s not the extent of it.

As the Word of God, Jesus doesn’t merely represent God to humanity, but he represents God to Himself. Again, He is God the Father’s Self-image – His “Ego-Self.” As God the Father thinks of God the Father, God the Son is what He thinks.
God the Son took on human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Having died for the sins of the world and being raised to life by the Spirit of God, after giving instructions to his disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations” and thereby finalize and spread the Christian religion, Jesus ascended back to the “right hand of the Father” to resume his eternal place within the Godhead.

God is eternal. He created time and space and exists without beginning or end beyond space-time. The distant past when the universe began in the first moments of the Big Bang and the far future when (or “if”?) the universe ends are equally “present” to Him – as present to Him as this very moment. He sees it all at once, as if it’s all happening now, because to Him, it is. With Him “a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.” (2 Peter 3:8; Psalm 90:4)

If Jesus ascended to “the right hand of the Father,” that means there never was a time when there wasn’t a human man born of a mortal human woman in 1^st-century Roman-occupied Judea with nail-scarred hands and feet residing within the Godhead.

And, if he is God the Father’s Self-image, that means God has always and eternally identified as a human being.

I am not saying, “God is a man.”

I am saying, “A man is God.”

As in, humanity is not a necessary, intrinsic property of the Divine Nature. Yet, humanity is a property God has taken upon Himself through the Incarnation and Ascension of the Son of God.

So, while humanity is not a necessary aspect of the Divine Nature, God’s Self-identification with humanity can certainly be seen in His creation of the universe.

And, as a layman who dabbles in popular scientific literature about physics and cosmology from time to time, I find it exhilarating to see even non-believing physicists flirt with this as they try to make sense of the apparent fine-tuning of the universe through the Anthropic Principle and its various iterations, such as the Participatory Anthropic Principle and the Final Anthropic Principle. It’s like they can almost see the face of God staring back at them as they probe the mysteries and origins of the universe, and they can see His intense concern for humanity spelled out in natural law.

But, I digress.

God personally identifies with humanity, because humanity is represented within the Godhead.

“And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,” wrote Paul (Ephesians 2:6).

This has profound implications for the dignity and inherent value of every human being who has ever lived. God identifies with humanity, as a human being, and so He is intensely, personally jealous for every single one of us, not just because He made us, but because He is one of us.

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Just as humanity was raised up to the Godhead in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so also, God in turn descended to dwell within humanity in the Third Person of the Godhead – “the Sevenfold Spirit of God sent forth into all the earth.” (Revelation 5:6)

Every person who belongs to Jesus Christ has no less than God Himself dwelling within us: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Godhead lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ,” wrote Paul (Colossians 2:9-10).

As in, we also participate in the Godhead.

That is not to say that we are members of the Godhead, but we participate, because we have the fullness of God Himself – the Third Person of the Godhead who embodies the fellowship between the Father and the Son – dwelling within us, renewing and transforming us into the likeness of the Son of God.

Of course, this isn’t immediately or always apparent to us – the Spirit of God dwells within the Self, and the Self cannot directly perceive of the Self. “You can’t see your own head,” after all. So, the human Ego-self doesn’t always represent the true reality of the Self, bad or Good.

But, if we trust in Christ and have committed ourselves to him, we participate in the Godhead and are thereby adopted as God’s own offspring.

“The Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by Him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory,” wrote Paul (Romans 8:15-17).

And, this is the entire point of God the Son taking on human form: to transform fallen mortals into gods.

We’ve moved pretty far away from this understanding within popular western Christianity, but this was how the Church fathers understood the gospel in the early centuries of Christianity.

They didn’t teach merely “Jesus died so we could be forgiven our sins and not go to hell.”

Yes, he did, but it hardly ends there.

As several of the early Church fathers wrote, from Irenaeus in the 2^nd century to Athanasius in the 4^th, “The Word became man that men might become gods.”

Indeed, this was the entire purpose for which God created the universe.

Contrary to popular misconception, Christianity is eminently and easily provable by simple logic and straightforward reference to a few basic, minimal and uncontroversial facts of history and reality.

I call this argument the “Prime Radiant,” after the central equation of psychohistory from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, because it’s the centermost tenet from which all else in the system of study radiates, and everything else is a consequence and corollary to this primary truth. If the Prime Radiant is valid, the larger body of thought is thereby generally true, even if all of the extremities don’t hold up equally well. If the Prime Radiant can be falsified, then all else falls with it, regardless of how useful or seemingly true the extremities appear.

And, it also has in common with Asimov’s concept that it is the central organizing principle by which all of human history can be understood.

The Prime Radiant is as follows:

Christianity exists because the disciples publicly proclaimed, “Jesus has risen from the dead and appeared to us.”

And they didn’t claim, “We hope he rose from the dead,” “We feel he rose from the dead,” or “We heard he rose from the dead.” Theirs was a claim to empirical experience (CEE), which is falsifiable, as opposed to a claim to subjective experience, which is not.

And apart from that CEE, there would be no Christianity today of which to speak, because every shred of information we have about Christianity’s origin tells us it came into existence as a consequence of the disciples of Jesus traveling throughout the Roman Empire, building communities around their CEE of having encountered Jesus alive again after his public execution and burial. That thesis and the circumstances resulting from it are corroborated by Roman and Jewish sources, along with the historical evidence within the New Testament itself for an early, formalized creedal statement about the resurrection as a CEE by the apostles.

Further, there is not a single ancient source even dimly suggesting any alternative explanation for Christianity’s origin.

This information, as a historical fact, is as well attested and certain as any fact of history. As such, it is barely even controversial.

In and of itself, it’s not controversial at all among historians and scholars. Controversy only sets in when its inevitable implications come into the discussion.

It absolutely necessarily logically follows that one of these three scenarios must be true of any CEE:        

                    1) The claimant is lying.

                    2) The claimant honestly believes it happened, but is mistaken somehow.

                    3) The claimant is telling the truth about something that actually happened.

Only one of these scenarios can be true, and one of them absolutely must be true. So if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be true.

These implications apply universally, any time anyone anywhere makes any CEE, no matter how extraordinary or unlikely or seemingly impossible that claim is – be it an experience of miracles, aliens, ghosts, garden gnomes, encounters with Bigfoot or what – one of these implications must unavoidably logically follow.

Regarding the resurrection, there is every possible evidence one could ask for that the original Christians sincerely believed what they claimed. They were not lying.

The more acquainted a person is with the evidence – that is, the more familiar one is with the writings of the apostles and their immediate disciples collected in the New Testament and in the works of the Apostolic Fathers, and the more familiar one is with what Roman writers said about the original and early Christians – the more impossible it is to genuinely think they had anything but the most sincere confidence in the truth of what they proclaimed.

Also, if they were lying, they would have had to have conspired beforehand and come to unanimous agreement, not just about the story they would tell, but about what they wanted to get out of it – about their collective motivations and expectations in carrying out their hoax. When they had every reason to expect that the same fate that befell Jesus would come upon them as well, it is inconceivable that they all agreed on a plan to publicly lie about having encountered him risen from the dead, because there is simply nothing they could have gained by this that couldn’t be much more easily obtained by other, less costly, risky, difficult and painful means.

In the past 2,000 years, no plausible scenario has ever been proposed to explain how the original Christians thought they experienced the risen Jesus, but didn’t.

That’s not to say no scenarios have been proposed, but the more you consider them, the less tenable they become: the Mass Hallucination Hypothesis, the Swoon Theory, the Twin Theory, etc.

For someone well enough acquainted with the evidence to eliminate Scenario i., but still inclined to reject the resurrection, any of these might seem plausible at first glance, but they collapse under scrutiny because they defy everything we know from medical science and from straightforward logic: there’s no such thing as “mass hallucination,” there are too many reasons to list for why the Swoon Theory fails, and the Twin Theory is outright laughable, and of all the different scenarios proposed over the millennia, these three are the best skeptics have been able to come up with.

By process of elimination, Scenario iii emerges as the best explanation, and there is no reason to reject it, other than a philosophical predisposition against the existence of God and the supernatural.

….

To summarize the Prime Radiant:

Christianity exists because the disciples publicly taught, as a claim to objective personal experience (CEE), “Jesus has risen from the dead and appeared to us.”

It necessarily logically follows from any CEE that 1.) the claimant is lying, 2) the claimant is honestly mistaken, or 3) the claimant is telling the truth. One of these must be true, but only one of them can be, so if options can be eliminated, the truth is in whatever remains.

The weight of evidence is that the original Christians believed what they claimed, eliminating the first option.

No plausible scenario has ever been proposed to explain how they could have been mistaken, eliminating the second option.

Other than a philosophical predisposition against the existence of God and the supernatural (i.e., atheistic materialism), there is no evidence by which to eliminate the third option.

Therefore, the resurrection happened and Christianity is true.

Common Objections

Obviously, there are nuances to this far beyond what I’ve addressed here, though.

If you know the evidence, this is a compelling argument, but most people don’t know the evidence (which is why it’s imperative that learning the evidence become standard operating procedure in discipleship and evangelism).

Some will try to argue that the apostles didn’t intend for their claim about the resurrection to be taken literally.

Again, learning the evidence is the best vaccination against that idea, but for efficiency’s sake, it’s worth noting that the very same people who reject Christianity because of the supposed ignorance and primitive thinking of its founders will turn around and attribute “progressive” 20^th/21^st-century Postmodernist religious thinking to the original Christians when it suits their argument – which is essentially what the “non-literal resurrection” notion would have been. And there’s a lot you have to ignore to try to claim that the apostles weren’t being literal when they taught about the resurrection. The deaths they risked and suffered were pretty literal, because they expected literal resurrections. Also, “resurrection” as a concept was well established within 1^st-century Jewish thought, and that concept was a literal, bodily resurrection.

…..

More often, though – particularly since the rise of the New Atheism movement – the difficulty comes from there just not being a lot of knowledge of history or of what’s written in the New Testament, much less in the works of the Apostolic Fathers.

Someone always naively argues that they lied “so they’d have something to believe in,” or because “they needed to validate Jesus’ message.”

As Jews, they didn’t have any religious vacuum that needed filling, and they already had a pretty well-established tradition of martyred prophets within Judaism, so they didn’t need Jesus to be resurrected or to be the Messiah for his message to be validated.

It might have taken some massaging to work a crucified prophet into that tradition, given the shame and stigma attached to crucifixion at the time, but it would have taken far less massaging than their message of a crucified and risen Messiah.

…..

The far-and-away most common objection I’ve encountered is simply, “I don’t find that convincing,” or “That’s not very strong evidence.”

Which is, essentially, a shrug and a “nuh-uh.” It’s not a refutation; it’s a lazy dismissal.

This is typical of the New Atheist “Flying Spaghetti Monster”-paradigm, which insists that the entire burden of evidence is on theists, since we’re making a positive claim.

While I agree that theists – and Christians especially – bear a certain burden of evidence for our claims, the atheist still has his or her own burden to meet. “Atheism” isn’t simply “a lack of belief about God or gods.” In the absence of a theistic belief, atheists are still holding out a positive belief about Ultimate Reality – about How the Universe/Reality Really Is. They’re claiming that the universe is a closed system and that absolutely nothing transcends nature and the material universe, which is in no way known with any certainty or presupposed with any rational justification. It’s a philosophical presumption no different than any other philosophical presumption. Insisting that theirs is the default position is just as faith-based and circularly-reasoned as they accuse Christians of being.

As it pertains to the Prime Radiant, a shrug and a blithe dismissal as “not enough evidence” exposes their bluff: when they say things like, “There’s no evidence for God or Christianity,” and then refuse to engage the points raised through the Prime Radiant, it just shows that they’ve never looked for evidence and don’t actually want any evidence. Their position is essentially, “Don’t bother me with the evidence, my mind is made up that there’s no evidence … I like being an atheist, and I don’t want to lose my justification.”

If they reject the resurrection, I turn it around with, “Well, what do you believe?”

Because if they reject the conclusion of the Prime Radiant – unless they’re being willfully ignorant and intellectually dishonest – they must hold some other belief about where its premises lead.

To that, I let them know that the burden is on them to provide an alternative, evidence-supported explanation for all those churches dotting the land, if they don’t accept the initial premise that the apostles claimed to have encountered Jesus alive again after his public execution.

Whatever attempts are made at overturning this point are usually short-lived, unless they veer off into the upside-down land of conspiracy theories like the Jesus Myth Hypothesis (which is easy enough to refute, but that’s a different discussion, and one that’s already been capably explored elsewhere), so I move on to ask how they meet the burden of arguing for options 1 or 2.

They’ll usually pick one of them, or keep their options for both, so I challenge them to make a case for either – not based on their assumptions, imagination or ignorance, but on the actual evidence.

If you can get them to commit to doing that, then you’ve won – nothing you can say, and no amount of knowledge you produce on your own will compare with what they’ll see on their own as they investigate for themselves what happened 2,000 years ago to give rise to Christianity. The more acquainted they become with the evidence, the more obvious and inescapable it is that Jesus, literally and truly, rose from the dead.

There simply is no other conclusion logically possible from the evidence.

By now, the enormous contrast between what we read about the Church in the New Testament and in the early centuries of Christian history and what we see and experience of it in the 21^st century should be shockingly conspicuous.

(By the way, if you haven’t read Part I, you might want to do that first, as none of this will be of any use to you otherwise. And, if you haven’t read the two previous entries about Fideism and the false gospel of Doctrinal Correctness, Part I won’t be of much use to you, either.)

Do we think of ourselves as “the Messiah”?

We have a doctrine we affirm with regard to the Church, and we use the expression “the Body of Christ” to refer to it/ourselves, but is that what we actually experience? Is that what we have in mind on Sunday mornings when we carry out this weekly exercise known as “going to church”?

The Church is indistinguishable from and identical to the Messiah if it is functional as the Church, but is it functional today?

And I want to emphasize that “functionality” is the operative concept here – I’m not talking about a perfect Church full of perfect people. I’m only talking about a Church that’s functional according to the New Testament. The churches in Corinth and Ephesus had some serious problems, but they were still true to the purpose for which they were founded, which was to actively train their members toward Christ-likeness – in their participation in the divine nature.

Does anyone think the Church today is doing that?

I don’t know many people who would seriously or honestly argue that it is, but for the rare few who would, there is plenty of statistical evidence accessible through a five-minute Internet search to conclusively demonstrate that, apart from our sheep’s clothing, we don’t actually live any differently than the wolves. We aren’t known for the agape we show one another or the world, nor for living lives any holier or better than our “lost” neighbors.

Subverted Definitions

We have a doctrine we affirm about what the Church is supposed to be, but as we discussed in my two previous entries, our popular definitions of the terms and concepts we find in the Bible leave much to be desired.

Instead of a trust based on the evidence of God’s past faithfulness, our concept of “faith,” as it relates to how we know things (epistemology), more often than not means blind faith.

Instead of a faith that leads to obedience and total investment in God’s promises and purposes, as it relates to how we’re saved (soteriology), “faith” typically amounts to mere doctrinal correctness, which is set in opposition to works, good deeds and action of any kind.

All of this adds up to a so-called “gospel” that tells us to believe for no reason and to do nothing about it in order to be “saved.”

And by “saved,” we typically mean “going to heaven as a disembodied ‘soul’ when we die instead of hell” – an idea we don’t actually find in the Bible. That’s something that crept into Christianity from Gnosticism and Greco-Roman mythology. If we already have the idea that “going to heaven when we die” is what Christianity is all about, there are plenty of passages that seem to reinforce it, if we don’t look too closely. But we would never get that idea from the Bible itself if we didn’t first import it from elsewhere.

When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians so they wouldn’t “grieve like the rest of men who have no hope” over those who had died, he didn’t assure them that their dead were “in a better place now.” No, the hope was resurrection – those who were “asleep” would awaken to life when Christ returns and raises them bodily, as he had been raised. (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18)

It wasn’t about “dying and going to heaven” – it was about heaven coming here to earth. It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your Name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”

That’s what the Church is: the advance force of God’s invasion.

Our job is to transform this world into heaven, and it begins with ourselves individually and collectively as the Church, but continues by transforming society from within – not by taking control of the government and imposing so-called “Christian” laws or by electing “Christian leaders,” but by educating and persuading the world about the rightness of God’s ways and Christ’s teachings, largely by modeling it first in ourselves. The transformation happens from the bottom up, not from the top down.

It isn’t about passively waiting to die so we can go to heaven; it’s about resurrection, and according to Paul (Philippians 3:10-14), resurrection is something to strive for by working out our salvation with fear and trembling through our participation in the divine nature.

In order to participate in the world to come, we have to believe in it – now, which means investing in it. And it’s not a burden to invest in it: if we genuinely believe God raised Jesus from the dead in glory and immortality and promises the same to us, investing in it – investing in him – should be our highest joy… if we genuinely believe that.

So, why is there such an enormous contrast between the original Church and what we experience of it today? Why is it that – despite reading exhortation after exhortation in the New Testament urging us to action, warning us against complacency, instructing us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” and to spare no effort in striving toward the goal to which Christ has called us heavenward…

Why is it that we’re constantly hearing the opposite message from the pulpit?

There was an energy and urgency toward that effort that characterized the original Church, which leaps forcibly off the pages of the New Testament, yet all of our modern systematic theologies and Sunday-morning sermons seem to be geared to blunting and reversing that energy.

Passages like those I just referenced are acknowledged, except never without a “but…” attached. They’re always mentioned with various caveats and qualifiers that collectively say, “Well, sure – if you really, really believe, you’ll respond with good deeds… but you don’t have to. None of that is necessary to salvation. As long as the feelings are sincere, effort is optional.”

The Perennial Question of Fallen Man

So how did we get here?

The answer can be found in human psychology, basic economics and the Protestant Reformation Deformation, along with other instructive periods of history … (And no — before anyone asks in the comments, I’m not Catholic.)

People tend to follow the path of least resistance, and they tend to want the most value for the least cost: if we can get two of something for the price of one, or a bigger house for the price of a smaller one, a full-time salary for the effort of part-time work, etc., we will. That only makes sense and we’d be foolish to do otherwise when the opportunity arises.

It makes plenty of sense when we’re talking about commerce and economics, but it’s a deplorable way to conduct ourselves in interpersonal relationships.

If you love someone, you want to give the best of yourself, and you’ll want the same from them. A man who does the least expected to love and honor his wife – who does no more than snatch a rose from the neighbors’ garden as a token gesture on their anniversary so he can go back to fishing or watching football, satisfied he’s done his duty – isn’t a very good husband, to say the least. A friend who only sees you when they need something or who’s only around when the weather’s fair and nothing better comes up, is no friend at all.

When a “good enough for government work”-mentality characterizes a marriage or friendship, divorce and estrangement are inevitable, because giving the least you can for someone’s loyalty and affection isn’t love or friendship – it’s exploitation.

“It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship” is a common refrain among churchgoers, yet this mentality is precisely the attitude we bring to our religion:

“What’s the least I have to do to placate God – to get Him off my back, so I can get to the stuff I’m really interested in without having to worry about what’s going to happen to me when I die?”

That’s the underlying question behind much of our popular approach to religion.

That was the real question the rich young man had in mind when he asked Jesus, “Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Matthew 19:16)

He wasn’t really interested in God or in what Jesus really had to offer – he just wanted to be able to enjoy the pleasures of this world afforded him by his wealth, free of concern about the next, which is why he went away grieving when Jesus told him to give all that up.

That was the mentality behind the religious leaders’ question about justification for divorce (Matthew 19:3). They weren’t interested in pursuing God’s original, perfect intention for marriage or His wisdom for Jewish family life – they wanted to know what they could get away with without being disqualified from the favored status they believed they had with God.

That was the mentality at work within the Reformation Deformation-era Catholic Church. Salvation (or the empty promise of it, at least) was literally sold: a certain quantity of money could get you released from purgatory, supposedly, and the price fluctuated according to the Church’s cash-flow needs at any given time, and it had absolutely nothing to do with getting anybody any closer to God.

Of course, it wasn’t packaged in such crass terms. Exploitation rarely is. No, giving “alms” (as they euphemistically called it) was a sign of deep contrition over sin, they said, for which the Church, in its great mercy and generosity toward weak sinners, granted the indulgence of early release from punishment in the afterlife. Packaged in such lofty, pious rhetoric, it sounded perfectly reasonable and appropriate, especially when it came from such trusted exemplars of virtue and godliness as the Roman Catholic priesthood. And it sold, because giving money is a less resistant path than repentance and personal growth.

Maxims of Modern Minimalist McChristianity

Sadly, this pattern hasn’t changed in 500 years, and the religious free market has met the ever-present demand for cut-rate fire insurance.

The Protestant Reformation was about rescuing Christianity from the legalism, empty ritual and priestcraft that characterized the Roman Catholic Church, and Reformed theologians developed what are known as the “Five Solae” as correctives against those abuses:

–Sola Fide (Faith Alone)

–Sola Gratia (Grace Alone)

–Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone)

–Sola Christus (Christ alone)

–Sola Deo Gloria (Glory to God Alone)

The Five Solae made a lot of sense within the context of the religious battles of 500 years ago. They make less sense now – at least, in the sense that we commonly understand and teach them.

When they’re used to answer that perennial question of fallen man, “What’s the least I have to do to get into heaven?” they become no different and no better than the “salvation-for-sale” extortion racket they were devised to correct.

We’ve already discussed Sola Fide at length, and how it’s been perverted by our erroneous definition of “faith.” We are justified by faith alone, but not by what passes for faith today.

We’ve likewise corrupted Sola Gratia.

“We didn’t do anything to earn our salvation, so there’s nothing we can do to add to it” is a common refrain. Our concept of “grace” has it that if anything whatsoever is required on our part, then “it isn’t really grace at all,” but heretical “works-based salvation.”

Of course, this defies common sense, common decency, and the Scriptures.

In the Parable of the Wedding Banquet, it was by grace alone that the king brought in all the wedding guests, but they still had to abide by his terms in being there, lest they be thrown out.

It was by God’s grace alone that the rains came in season to water their crops, enabling them to feed themselves and their livestock (Acts 14:17). It wasn’t dismissed as “not grace at all” because they were required to sow and harvest and tend to their livestock in order to benefit from it. That they had the strength to work in the first place was also considered “by grace alone” (Deuteronomy 8:17-18).

Sola Gratia is true in that it is only by God’s grace that we can be saved. But the New Testament writers clearly didn’t think that because Christ’s work was “by grace alone,” nothing else would be required of them, and they would have been appalled at our reasoning today.

Contrasted against the papacy and the Catholic notion of the pope speaking ex cathedra, the maxim of Sola Scriptura was a necessary corrective, declaring that it is the Scriptures, rather than the Roman Catholic Church, where divine authority and instruction reside.

It’s ironic, then, that if you ask your typical American evangelical Protestant why it is that they accept the Bible as authoritative, rather than the pope or the Qur’an or the Bhagavad-Gita or the Sutras, he is very likely to tell you that it’s because it’s what he’s been told in church all his life (see the previous entry on Fideism for a more comprehensive discussion of this, though)…

But, the notion of Sola Scriptura (at least, as it’s commonly understood today) represents a false dichotomy.

There is no material difference between Church and Scripture – the New Testament is canonical precisely because its constituent writings were produced by and represent the thoughts, teachings and example of the original Church.

Much of the New Testament was written by the apostle Paul, but even as he gave us some of its most important components in the form of his letters, those writings were only a consolation in lieu of a personal visit. He thought being there in person would have been of more value than sending a letter, but since circumstances prevented that, he offered the next best thing (Romans 1:8-15 and 1 Thessalonians 2:17-19).

Contrary to what many within the Church today suppose, Paul was not a means to an end – the “end” being the production of holy writ. It’s the other way around: the holy writ is a means to get us nearer to the person of Paul, who is himself an avenue to getting us closer to the One who handpicked Paul as his personal representative.

The point is that the Scriptures must be embodied in us, because they represent the ideas and example embodied in the writers, in order to be of value. Otherwise, they’re just ink on paper – of no more significance or importance than a phonebook.

The dichotomy set up by Sola Scriptura is the equivalent of comparing the importance of blueprints against the building itself. Obviously, the blueprints are only important insofar as they’re used to construct and maintain the building, and without the building, blueprints only offer the idea of a building, with none of the shelter and function of an actual structure.

Likewise, separating Scripture from Church gives us only an abstract concept of Christianity, with no concrete reality.

Which brings us to the next Sola…

Considering the sacerdotalism of 16^th-century Roman Catholicism – the idea of a class of professional Christians known as “priests” who intervene with God on behalf of the larger body of believers, with the so-called “Vicar (substitute) of Christ” (the pope) as their head – it needed to be reasserted that Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man, hence the maxim of Sola Christus.

Yet, it should be glaringly obvious by now that there remains a great deal still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his Body, the Church, and that Sola Christus is a tragic error if it’s taken to divorce the Church and the individual believer from the work of Christ in the world.

And, in fact, it has. Christ is the only mediator, but as the Church, we are Christ. If we don’t mediate between God and the world, it will not be done.

Lastly, after centuries of appropriating pagan deities and rebranding them as “saints” as a marketing tactic (read about the origins of Santa Claus, for example, if you don’t know what I’m talking about), the Roman Catholic Church bore more resemblance to the polytheistic religions of ancient Rome than to the Church founded by the apostles, so Sola Deo Gloria was a necessary corrective to restore essential monotheism – to bring the focus back to God and His glory.

Yet, the Reformers Deformers might have overcorrected – or we overcorrected in our understanding of Sola Deo Gloria – and ignored one of the central promises of God.

The word “glory” (Greek doxa) shows up 125 times in the New Testament. Most often, as expected, it refers to the glory of God and of Christ. But in more than one-in-five instances, it refers to the “glory” that will come to us, Christ’s followers – his brothers and sisters who, as heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, will share in his glory.

We’ve largely ignored that promise, though, and in so doing, we’ve neglected a central, essential aspect of God’s promise of salvation and His plan for the Church, “which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

In summary, our popular understanding of the Five Solae excludes much of what constitutes biblical ecclesiology, because it’s our common tendency to interpret everything through the filter of what I’ve called “the perennial question of fallen man.”

By identifying five elements and drawing a box around them, saying, “This and only this,” and declaring anything more as heretical, and then defining each element in the most restrictive, reductive manner possible, we’ve created a minimalist, fast-food version of Christianity – one shaped by market forces to demand as little as possible from the religious consumer.

In our popular understanding, Sola Fide and Sola Gratia mean all we have to do is believe and God does the rest. What we believe is determined – and with no rational justification whatsoever – by Sola Scriptura, and Sola Christus and Sola Deo Gloria mean we take no part, take no credit, and therefore, take no responsibility.

In other words, we relegate human beings to mere passive objects in God’s supposed plan of salvation.

Gepetto, or the Blue Fairy?

And this doesn’t present a particularly glorifying depiction of God.

As passive objects, we’re just puppets controlled by strings. Except, the God we see in the Bible isn’t like Gepetto at all. God creates life – not a crude facsimile of it. He created humans in His own image, to be active agents of history and of His plan.

The pattern we see in Scripture is that God never acts in history without doing so through human agency.

He created Adam to participate with Him in the work of creation, in a fashion, by naming the animals, and by filling the earth and subduing it.

It was certainly within God’s power to preserve animal life through the flood, yet He delegated that role to Noah.

It was within His power to reintroduce monotheism among the nations – He could have done it by way of angels, through signs, through a loud, booming voice from the sky. Yet, He anointed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be the bearers of that message.

Likewise, He could have simply appeared outside of Egypt as a pillar of fire and announced the exodus of the Israelites directly and prevented Pharaoh from interfering. But He sent Moses to act on His behalf. Then Joshua, the Judges, the Kings, the Prophets, and finally, when His plan called for work impossible for any fallen mortal, He actually became a human being Himself, and then put His Nature into people to act on His behalf, giving us power on Earth and in Heaven.

Man severed the relationship with God. Unless God compromises His justice and becomes less than holy, it must therefore be man who restores the relationship and repairs the damage. Man corrupted the earth; it must be man who renews and restores it. And if we don’t do it, it won’t be done.

Of course, this runs directly contrary to accepted orthodoxy, which teaches that God does it all, and we do nothing, because we’re helpless – too sinful and fallen and corrupt for our works to amount to anything.

Yes, Paul said as much – because of the sin living in us, the good we want to do we cannot do, but the evil we don’t want to do we keep on doing.

Clearly, though, that’s not all he said. No one should ever read – and especially shouldn’t quote – Romans 7 without also including Romans 8: “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man,” he continued.

“You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you… And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of His Spirit who lives in you,” Paul also said.

Prior to salvation, we are helpless. We’re nothing but puppets moved by the strings of animal instinct and appetite.

After salvation, we’re sons and daughters of God – we are immortal, all-powerful, bearing the very Nature of God within us, which means we’re to do the things God Himself would do in our place, loving what He loves, hating what He hates,

That means we are the Messiah.

Rehabilitating Our Delinquent Messiah

Of course, all of this sounds impossible. But if we’re only doing what’s possible, aren’t we just faking our faith? If you’re not attempting the impossible, you don’t really have faith in the all-powerful, living God who raises the dead.

It was such faith that prompted Jesus to tell Peter, “On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it.”

Gates, of course, were common features of walled cities back then. The illustration was of hell as a fortress, and the church breaking down its gates to conquer the city within.

In other words, we are meant to wage an aggressive war against the forces of darkness in this world.

That’s supposed to be the Church’s role: we exist to oppose the evil in the world and undo its damage.

We see a lot of that damage in the various social ills besetting our civilization, but the real problems are from human nature – not knowing right from wrong and not having the moral character to apply that knowledge in the first place.

“My people perish from lack of knowledge,” said the prophet (Hosea 4:6).

And as we look to our own country, leftists typically blame social evils like crime on external factors like poverty, and then blame poverty on rich people, thinking the answer is for the government to confiscate and redistribute wealth.

There are myriad erroneous assumptions about economics and about the proper role of government behind that mentality, but what concerns us is here is the erroneous assumption about human nature – that it’s basically good, and if we just had the right people in charge, the right system in place, and the right laws and government programs in effect, all would be well.

In reality, though, our increasing poverty, and all of the resultant social ills that come with it, come from increasing sin – sexual sin in particular.

An unpopular but glaringly obvious fact is that there is a clear link between out-of-wedlock births and poverty, and where the former increases, so does the latter.

And, out-of-wedlock births are on the rise, and will soon be the majority of births in many places in the western world. And that means poverty is on the rise and our way of life is going to decline… unless we do something about it.

And it falls to the Church to do that something, because no amount of government intervention can (or should) change people’s sexual behavior.

The Church’s role is not just to teach Christian sexual morality, though. It’s already doing that, and it’s not working, even (especially, actually) among self-identified Christians.

No, its role is to give people the New Life that enables them to live by that morality.

The symptoms of poverty have to be treated now, but ultimately, government handouts won’t help, nor, even, will Christian charitable efforts. What people need is to “escape the corruption of the world” caused by theirs and others’ appetites by participating in the divine nature.

Similarly, gun control laws will not stop or even curb violence and school shootings – at least, not without paying for it in other forms of violence. A transformation of human nature will.

Every single social problem we have can be traced back to our fallen nature and the Church’s failure to address it, and these problems threaten to overwhelm us.

If the Church were functional, though, not only could we save ourselves from the corruption threatening to overtake us, but we – the community of believers within the richest, most prosperous and powerful nation the world has ever seen – could pool our considerable resources and completely eliminate poverty in this country and beyond.

The engine for all of that is discipleship – mentoring people in their participation in the divine nature.

But discipleship – in the true, New Testament sense – requires absolute, unreserved commitment. And it’s a tough sell – impossible, really—getting people to make that level of commitment. At least, it’s impossible without some compelling, powerful reason.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is a compelling, powerful reason, except … the Church doesn’t actually teach people why it’s true. They’re asked to suspend disbelief about it as a token of admission into church membership, in order to get their social needs met, and then told that as long as they’ve rendered that token, nothing else will ever be required of them to be “saved.”

Instead of “salvation by grace through faith, not by the works of the law,” so-called “faith” is reduced to just another kind of law – a law of doctrinal orthodoxy.

So, we don’t grow into Christ-likeness. We don’t know how. There are untold treasures of knowledge left to us by those who have gone before – Anthony the Great, the Desert Fathers, John of the Cross and countless other teachers in the ways of kenosis and theosis and of arête and agape. But, American evangelicals tend to dismiss this priceless body of knowledge as nothing but pre-Reformation Deformation “works’-based heresy,” because we don’t even understand why we need it, because we’re content to merely play “Christian,” complacent in our supposed doctrinal orthodoxy as long as we’re getting our social needs met at church. Our minds are set, not on the things of God, but on the things of man, because our god is our stomach and our attentions are on earthly things.

…..

Unless… we’re not content.

And, in fact, I don’t think we are, and that’s why people are leaving the Church in droves, many of whom are, unfortunately, turning aside to New Atheism with a vengeance.

For those who are still going to church, but feel the same sickening sense I felt for so many long years that Something Is Terribly Wrong, something is off, something just doesn’t smell right – pay close attention the next time you go to church.

Listen to the sermon and ask yourself, “Is this really the word of God? Is this conducive to the true purpose of the Church? Is this pertinent to the things of God, or merely the things of man? Is this to help me participate in the divine nature, or just my appetites?”

Ask yourself, and pray about it.

If you don’t like the answer, what will you do about it?

Will you keep living a lie?

Or will you risk not getting your social needs met by leaving the broad path for the narrow?

Will you try to “save your life” and thereby lose it? Or will you lose your life for his sake, and thereby find it?

If enough of us decide we’re finished tolerating a dead church, a phony Christianity and a false messiah – if we decide we won’t play “Christian” anymore – we can turn it all around. We have that power within us.

I know that Christ longs for his Bride to turn back to him – he’s pining for us to be faithful to him, so that we can be “one flesh,” one Body again.

What’s more, consider how in the 1^st century, the vast network of Roman roads and the travel protections afforded by the Roman military provided the perfect circumstances for the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the western world. Now, consider what we could accomplish today, through the World Wide Web, if we turn back to him.

“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.”

If we turn back to him, we can remake the world. We can have God’s Kingdom on Earth, within our lifetimes.

When you think of the word “messiah,” what comes to mind?

Most people have a basic sense of the concept. Our culture provides plenty of examples, since messiahs are among the most oft-used character types in all of fiction, so there’s no shortage of literature and movies about them: “Star Wars,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter,” “Avatar,” “Terminator,” almost any given Keanu Reeves movie, and countless others most of us could name off the top of our head.

A messiah is someone chosen, guided, anointed by a higher power to lead, to save, to be an agent of transformation and renewal, an avenger of evil and redeemer from oppression, the “Hero With a Thousand Faces” – the original superhero, actually – and a liminal figure to usher in a new age. He’s foretold in prophecy and destined to embody some legendary archetype. His own are apt to reject him, though the world itself hangs in the balance, desperate for him to rise to his preordained role.

But let’s put a pin in that for a minute and come back to it later.

*****

Switching gears for a moment, what comes to mind when you think of the word “church”?

If you’re like many you probably think of a building of some kind: a chapel or a cathedral or a modern, stadium-sized megachurch replete with a coffee shop and a bookstore. A one-stop shop for weddings, funerals, baby dedications, seasonal holiday observances – a piece of cultural furniture for believers and nonbelievers alike.

You might also think of early-morning rock concerts, or little old ladies singing hymns off-key. Restless kids fidgeting in pews. And sermons – some inspiring, some insipid, few with much lasting impact.

You might also think of schisms, sex scandals, swindling televangelists, celebrity preachers exposed and disgraced for some hypocrisy or another, and fanatical cultists foaming at the mouth as they picket military funerals or pass around the cyanide-laden Kool-Aid.

The word “church” likely conjures up a wide range of connotations, some good, some bad, but mostly in the middle, I suspect, because decades of repeating the weekly Sunday-morning routine have reduced the word to a synonym for the banal and the mundane, at least for many.

But what if I told you that all of those connotations we attach to the word “messiah” should apply just as much to the word “church”?

‘You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High’

The Church, we are told, is the “Body of Christ” – God’s temple, His presence on Earth.

According to the Bible, God is present in the world through the Messiah, and the Messiah is present in the world through his Church.

“Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there am I with them,” Jesus said (Matthew 18:20).

Paul understood the Church, the gathering of Jesus’ followers on Earth, to be Christ’s hands and feet – the vessel through whom he continues the work he began 2,000 years ago, exercising gifts and powers bestowed through the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 4:1-16).

In fact, Jesus – the One who walked on water, gave sight to the blind, and raised the dead back to life – told his disciples they would do greater things, even, than he did (John 14:12-14).

And we can see how the Church lived up to its messianic role in the early days of Christian history:

“And now the Lord says – He who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to Him and gather Israel to Himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord and my God has been my strength – He says: ‘It is too small a thing for you to be My servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that My salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’”

This is an oracle by the prophet Isaiah (49:5-6) about the promised Anointed One: that the God of Jacob would, through the Messiah, become also the God of the Gentiles – the non-Jewish nations of the world, bringing salvation to the far-flung corners of the earth.

And now, in fact, “monotheism” is generally synonymous worldwide with worship of the God of Israel, precisely because Christianity – within a single generation – grew from a small sect from a backwater province of the Roman Empire into a major world religion, and is today the largest religion in the world.

Yet, Jesus never personally stepped foot outside of Israel during his earthly ministry. It was a prophecy about the Messiah, and the Messiah fulfilled it because the Church, as “the Body of Christ,” is in essence identical to Christ himself.

In short, we are the Messiah.

And that’s the entire point of the Christian plan of salvation:

“Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. I have become its 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.” (Colossians 1:24-27)

Being a “Christian” doesn’t just mean we believe in Christ or follow Christ – it means, in a very real sense, we become Christ. We mature into his likeness, because the Divine Life that was in him now animates and motivates and grows within us.

As the apostle Peter wrote:

“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 (Greek arête). 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 appetite (Greek epithumia).” (2 Peter 1:3-4)

That, in a nutshell, is What Salvation Is: our participation in the very Nature of God. Throughout the New Testament (as well as the Old, albeit less explicitly), we read about God’s own Nature descending to dwell within the believer in the Person of the Holy Spirit, remaking him or her from within, and it is this indwelling and regeneration by the Spirit of God that constitutes “salvation.”

This was accomplished, we read, by the Second Person of the Godhead becoming incarnate as a human mortal in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, so that he could die for the sins of all humanity. Having made atonement, God raised him to life again. After appearing to his disciples over a period of 40 days to instruct and prepare them to continue his work, he ascended back to God, resuming his place within the Godhead “at the right hand of the Father.”

Paul understood the significance of the ascension to mean that, through the person of Jesus, the human race itself was now represented within the Godhead – man now dwells within God:

“And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:6-7)

It is because our sins no longer separate us from God that humanity is now represented within the Godhead and, in turn, a Member of the Godhead has also descended to dwell within humanity, and it is the Holy Spirit’s dwelling within us that renews us, transforming us from fallen, bestial creatures into the sons and daughters of God Himself.

By being “born again,” we actually participate in the Trinity as adopted members of the Godhead. As Ireneaus of Lyons and Athanasius of Alexandria after him wrote: “The Word became Man that men might become gods.”

We are not “gods” in the sense that we are worshiped or become infinite, eternal spirits ruling over our own universes one day (as the Mormons heretically teach) – we’re “gods” in the sense meant by Jesus when he quoted the Psalms, which referred to those to whom the revelation was given as “gods.” (John 10:34-36; Psalm 82:6)

That’s how God saves the world: not by sending a Messiah, but by sending a multitude of messiahs. Jesus is Messiah Prime, and we are proxy messiahs individually, but collectively are indistinguishable from and identical to Christ himself – he is the Head and we are the Body.

As Paul summarized:

“For in Christ all the fullness of the Godhead lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off in the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.” (Colossians 2:10-12)

Messiahs In Training

We read also in the New Testament that merely receiving the New Nature isn’t the finish line. That’s just the starting pistol.

What we receive is the Christ-Nature in seed form (1 Peter 1:23; Luke 8:4-8; 11-15). It falls to us to cultivate it, and there is an ongoing process to doing so.

After Peter spoke of our “participation in the divine nature,” he went on to exhort Christians, “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith excellence/virtue (Greek arête); and to arête, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection (Greek philadelphia, “brotherly love”); and to philadelphia, love (Greek agape). 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.” (2 Peter 1:6-8, which should be considered alongside John 15:1-10)

Faith is the sole condition of all of God’s promises: trusting His promises is the requisite of claiming them, and it’s through His promises that we “participate in the divine nature,” which consists of “making every effort” to add to our faith all the qualities consistent with His nature, the ultimate of which is the quality rendered in Greek as agape, which is the definitive characteristic by which disciples of Jesus Christ are distinguished (John 13:35).

Agape is typically translated into English simply as “love,” which is unfortunate because we tend to oversimplify it to the point of being misleading when we take it as just “love” and look no further.

“Love” can mean a wide range of things in English: “I love hot dogs!” “I love God!” “I love The Who!” “I love ‘The Walking Dead’!” It’s the same word there, but it means different things in different contexts, which leaves it wide open to a range of different and contradictory interpretations when it comes to its definition as the ultimate goal of Christian spirituality.

In Greek, there are four words we typically translate as “love,” and knowing what they are makes a tremendous difference in what various passages of Scripture actually mean. Eros, of course, being sexual and romantic love; Storge is familial love; Philos is affection, as between friends; while Agape, in the sense often used in Scripture to describe the love between God and His people, is the ultimate and highest form of love.

It’s the word used in John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world…” – and elsewhere in the New Testament and the Septuagint where God’s love for humanity is in view. It’s different from the other loves in that it isn’t based on the object of love – on what he or she or it can do for the one bearing the love. It isn’t like eros and storge, which are loves experienced and expressed by animals and humans alike, which spring from natural instincts and appetites and psychosocial need. Rather, it’s based on the nature of the one bearing the love.

In other words, God doesn’t agapeo us because we’re so lovable and we fill a hole in His life or because He is biologically-programmed to affection toward us; God loves us because He is love – it’s a love that emanates from His own Nature rather than a love that responds to ours.

In John 21:15-19 – the passage that records Jesus’ reinstatement of Peter after his three denials on the night of his arrest – we miss the real conversation when we read only the English translation. As we read it, Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him, Peter answers in the affirmative three times, but for some reason, Peter is especially hurt by Jesus’ third inquiry, and that’s that.

In the original Greek, referencing Peter’s earlier insistence that he, and he alone, loved Jesus more than all the other disciples (John 13:36-38; Matthew 26:33; Luke 22:33), Jesus asks Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you truly agapeo me more than these?”

“Yes Lord, you know that I phileo you,” Peter answers, downgrading his previous declaration of absolute devotion to mere affection.

Jesus repeats the question. Peter repeats the answer.

Then Jesus asks him, “Simon, do you phileo me?” – questioning even his affection, hence Peter’s emotional injury.

This is important because Peter himself later distinguishes between the two in his epistle, where he lists philadelphia as a lesser quality on the way to agape. Philadelphia isn’t uniquely Christian, nor are the other loves of eros and storge – street gangs, fraternities, wolves, howler monkeys, fans of the same football team, and innumerable other subcultures and animal species all display eros, storge and philos, simply as a matter of being alive and needing others of their kind to survive and thrive. There isn’t anything necessarily spiritual or transcendent about those loves. They’re merely the product of glands, stomachs and loneliness, not enlightenment or spiritual quickening.

Agape requires a new nature, though, which entails an ongoing process of transformation into Christ-likeness, which is why there are several other passages in the New Testament with similar exhortations calling us to strive, to work (Philippians 2:12), to spare no effort, lest we “believe in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:2), because that transformation into the divine nature isn’t just important to salvation – it is salvation.

We are initiated into the process through faith, and our maturation continues from that starting point by making every effort to add to our faith other qualities consistent with the divine nature, beginning with arête, which was a quality attributed to God Himself (2 Peter 1:3), as well as a broadly-nuanced concept in Greek culture: the word means “excellence” and “moral virtue” and it was the ultimate goal of a classic Greek education and a recurring preoccupation within Greek philosophy.

As Christians, in our effort to cultivate the divine nature within ourselves, we are to spare no effort in the pursuit of arête, along with all of the other qualities mentioned, which lead toward the attainment of agape, which ultimately culminates in our resurrection from the dead when Jesus returns.

And this is the gist of much of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.

The famous “love” passage is chapter 13, which follows chapter 11, where he began by speaking about “the Body of Christ” in a different, albeit related sense by instructing them about the Lord’s Supper, which led into instruction about the proper use of spiritual gifts within the Church (chapter 12), all of which culminated in Paul showing them the “still more excellent way” of agape, because that was the purpose of everything that came before. Having put everything into perspective, he offers some final instructions about speaking in tongues and engaging in orderly worship before instructing them about the ultimate goal of it all: resurrection from the dead.

“Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain,” he concluded (1 Corinthians 15:58).

As he wrote elsewhere:

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the         resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:10-14)

All of this, of course, is a difficult, demanding process, and it’s nothing anyone can undertake alone.

This is why the Church exists.

In fact, if it’s not facilitating this process by initiating and mentoring people in that personal transformation into Christ-likeness, there is no reason for the Church to exist.

Consider the following from Paul:

“The gifts (Christ) gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” (Ephesians 4:11-16)

I don’t think most churchgoers actually know what the gospel is.

At the risk of sounding like an uppity, presumptuous layman blinded by the Dunning-Kruger effect (yes – I know how this looks), I’m pretty well convinced that the majority of preachers don’t actually know what it is, either.

And, of course, not knowing what the gospel is constitutes a major problem for American Christians and anyone we influence, hence my urgent contention that we have collectively strayed into apostasy.

The Mystery Kept Hidden

Of course, there’s no shortage of people who know the right words to say – everyone can quote the gospel, as Paul presented it in 1 Corinthians 15, in terms of Christ’s death and resurrection, and we insist that the saved and the unsaved are plainly identifiable as those who either affirm or deny those terms.

But that clearly wasn’t the gospel preached by Jesus himself at a time when he actively concealed his identity as the Christ (Luke 9:18-21), nor was it the gospel preached by his disciples (Luke 9:1-6), who couldn’t bring themselves to accept that he was going to die, much less announce it in a preaching tour (Luke 9:44-45).

And, we are told by the writer of Hebrews regarding the Israelites led by Moses: “We also have had the gospel preached to us, just as they did.” (4:1, 2)

Yet, the particulars Paul laid out as “the gospel” were a “mystery kept hidden for ages and generations,” not revealed until the 1^st century (Colossians 1:25-27; Ephesians 3:9; Romans 16:25-27). Prior to that time of revelation and fulfillment, they were mysteries the prophets themselves struggled to apprehend and into which “even angels longed to look” (1 Peter 1:10-12).

According to Paul and Peter, only God Himself knew about Christ’s death and resurrection and its implications and effects – neither the prophets and patriarchs, nor the angels and demons knew about it, until it actually happened.

Yet, we are told that “the gospel” was preached by Jesus and his disciples for years prior, and it was known also to Moses and the Israelites and, presumably, innumerable others who lived and died in the millennia leading up to the year 30 A.D.

Personally, I’ve rarely seen this apparent contradiction addressed from the pulpit, and when it is, it’s never a satisfactory explanation – one that didn’t introduce still greater contradictions and needless complications and hermeneutical gymnastics.

Typically, one of two preposterous scenarios are proposed to account for this: 1) Ancient people, going back to Adam and Eve, actually did believe and worship on much the same terms as modern evangelicals, but were somehow led astray by “legalism” in the time prior to Jesus – contrary to the plain teachings of the New Testament; or 2) the ancient Israelites were somehow saved to eternal life through some provision of the Law of Moses – those sacrifices of bulls and goats actually did save them, also contrary to the plain teachings of the New Testament.

And I don’t base my conviction that the American church has missed the gospel solely on its failure to address this apparent dilemma. I think this is only symptomatic of the fact that the church is working from the wrong paradigm of what the gospel actually is.

The dilemma resolves itself, however, when we read it within the right paradigm of what the gospel actually is:

Christ’s death and resurrection are the how of the gospel.

They’re not the what of it.

His death and resurrection are how the gospel was accomplished, but are not, in themselves, the gospel.

No, the what of the gospel is salvation by grace through faith.

Of course, that’s no big shock to anyone, and it might be a bit of a let-down after my big, audacious opening, because everyone already knows that.

The confusion comes when we start defining each of the operative terms in that phrase — we attach baggage to those terms never intended by the original biblical writers.

As I expound on that, though, consider replacing that exact phrasing with this baggage-free paraphrase: “Salvation by love, through persuasion, not coercion.”

Good News for Serial Killers, Bad News for Gandhi

As previously discussed, our definition of “faith” is often set in contrast to reason with regard to our epistemology, resulting in the self-lobotomizing error of Fideism, which masquerades as belief in Christ, all the while inoculating people against it.

Where our popular soteriology (our study of how we’re saved) is concerned, “faith” is typically set in opposition to works: in contrast to the notion of being justified by what we do, this concept of salvation says we’re justified by what we believe.

According to this understanding of the gospel, “faith” is defined as Doctrinal Correctness: if you believe X, Y and Z about God and Jesus, you’re “saved,” which is defined as “going to heaven when you die instead of hell.” You might get bonus points if you do good works, but God’s grace (as this “gospel” defines it) is such that you can safely live as you please and sin with impunity and presume upon His forgiveness, so long as you believe correctly. You might even live your entire life on earth as a serial murderer and child rapist, ignoring all appeals from your conscience and laughing from afar at the things of God, but then affirm the correct doctrines in the moments before your execution by “accepting Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior” and, according to this “gospel,” you’ll be assured a trouble-free afterlife, spared God’s punishment for all the evil you committed on earth.

On the other hand, if you never affirm X, Y and Z, it doesn’t matter how much good you do or what circumstances prevented you signing off on the required doctrinal checklist – you are going to hell, and no amount of good deeds or honorable character qualities will save you.

This is “the gospel” we celebrate and proclaim as the glorious expression of God’s grace and love for humanity.

Everyone doesn’t necessarily preach it precisely on those exact terms, and some offer various caveats, conditions and qualifiers to mitigate the galling vapidity of it all, and some might offer different values for what the X, Y and Z of minimal doctrinal affirmation are, but that’s the essence of “Christianity” as it is popularly understood, particularly among evangelicals: what you do doesn’t matter, only what you believe.

And this is why we have a church culture that admits actual debate over whether someone has to “accept Jesus as Lord” in order to be saved, or if it’s enough to just “accept Jesus as Savior” (take a minute and google “lordship debate” if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

The Killing Letter

Now, it’s true that Paul often set faith in contrast to works in his choice of wording, which has been used to support the phony “gospel” under discussion, as well as to suggest a contradiction between Paul and James’ respective teachings (“Just faith? Or faith and works?” –James 2:14-26).

Context is everything, though, and when we pay attention to it, there is no contradiction. When Paul spoke of “works,” clearly he just meant it as shorthand for “works of the law.” (See Ephesians 2, Romans 3 and Galatians 3, among a slew of other passages.)

And that makes a world of difference for our definition of “faith.”

“The law,” of course, refers to the Law of Moses – the requirements of the covenant God made with Israel. The Law of Moses was their national constitution: the basis for Israel’s government, with God Himself at its head.

A law, when you get right down to it, is nothing more than a threat to kill those who are subject to it for non-compliance.

Now, I tend to get a lot of resistance when I point this out to people. I find that many people, even conservative-leaning Christians, tend to have a relatively favorable view of government (not necessarily individual office holders, but “government” as a concept), and many even take it for granted that government programs are the answer to most problems in the world. When you see the government as a benevolent caretaker, the idea that everything about it revolves around its potential to kill can be grating to your sensibilities (especially when the people with the most favorable view of government also tend, ironically, to be most opposed to the death penalty).

But, everything in the New Testament – the entire Bible, actually (along with the study of civics, history, law, government, etc.) – hinges on this point, so it’s worth taking the time to drive home, even at the risk of belaboring what might, to some, be an obvious point in an already lengthy discourse.

The underlying principle all governments have in common in whatever form they take – the defining quality that makes it a “government,” be it a Bronze Age theocracy, an imperial autocracy, a liberal democracy or anything in-between – is violence, or the threat thereof, and nothing else.

Yes, governments generally do more than just execute people: they provide various services and infrastructure and administer less severe punishments, and they offer incentives for behaviors desired but not compulsory, like getting married or “going green.” But, none of those sticks and carrots would be possible without first establishing their monopoly on force – on violence. They have to levy taxes to be able to do all that (since governments produce nothing by themselves), and we don’t pay taxes because we want to – we do it because they’ve got all those people with guns. That’s why we pull over when the flashing lights appear in our rear-view mirror, and that’s why we obey court summons and pay fines or submit to detainment – because we know those people with guns will come after us if we don’t. No, they won’t shoot us on the spot if we don’t immediately comply (hopefully), but if we resist and keep resisting, the situation will escalate and our death is the inevitable result if we don’t comply at some point.

Government is the sword, and nothing else. Take the sword away and everything else we call “government” goes, too.

That’s why the apostle Paul said “the letter (of the law) kills” and called the Covenant of Moses “the ministry of death” (2 Corinthians 3:6-7).

And he wasn’t saying any of that as if it’s a bad thing – Paul was a fan of the law. He just understood what it is and what its limitations are.

Law isn’t bad, people are. That’s why we need laws. If it were something people could be counted on to do on our own, there’d be no need to threaten us into compliance: the fact that we need to be told, under pain of death, to obey things like “Don’t murder” and “Don’t steal” is a pretty good indication of our fallen nature.

And in the case of Israel’s national religious life, faithful worship of the God of Abraham wasn’t something they could be counted upon to do on their own. In order to create the society and culture within which the Messiah could emerge, within which his work and teachings could be understood, observance of God’s requirements had to be compulsory.

But, according to the Law and the Prophets themselves (Jeremiah 31:31-34), that was never intended to be the final state of affairs.

Because what good is compulsory worship? It means nothing to God if it doesn’t mean everything to us.

If it’s just because there’s a carrot in it for you if you do it and a stick at your back if you don’t, it’s not really worship. Genuine worship doesn’t need to be enticed or coerced. To know and trust God is to know He is worthy of worship and adoration, and rendering it is its own reward.

Likewise, obeying all of the other applicable aspects of the law is also its own reward, because those laws are a reflection of His character and values. If you have faith (in the genuine, biblical sense), you don’t do it because you’re afraid God will get you if you don’t. You do it because you love and trust Him and want to see His will done on earth as it is in heaven – you know He doesn’t give commandments just to ruin our good time or make life more difficult, but to benefit us and make our lives as fulfilling and dignified as possible.

And, in fact, genuine faith means doing it even when – especially when the situation is reversed: when the reward for faithfulness is a cross.

So, “salvation by grace through faith, not by the works of the law” doesn’t exclude works. There have to be works. The only question is why you’re performing them.

There’s obedience under law, which justifies and saves no one, and then there’s what Paul called “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5 and 16:26), which does.

The two resemble each other outwardly, because they both entail works, so it’s easy to mistake one for the other if you only look at the surface, but the differences between them are as great as the differences between marriage and prostitution.

The two resemble each other because they include the same acts, but one is the perversion and counterfeit of the other. The acts are done for their own sake within marriage, as an expression of mutual love. The wedding night isn’t a payment rendered in exchange for the courtship, it’s the consummation of the courtship. In prostitution, the rewards offered are unrelated to the act itself and the two parties are only exploiting each other for personal gratification, and treating something sacred as a mere commodity. So, we rightly condemn it as a perversion and mockery of everything beautiful and good about marriage.

The Life-Giving Word

Salvation by grace through faith – the eternal gospel – has always been implied, and there have always been people who have understood it.

That man is accountable to God for our wickedness, and that God is good and loves man and has the power and wisdom to provide a way to eternal life, despite our corruption has always been knowable to mankind, even though the specifics were not.

It was implied in the Old Testament writings, but it is also written into creation itself, we are told (Psalm 19; Romans 1:18-20; Romans 10:18), and in the human conscience (Romans 2:14-15).

Those who heed the message of creation and conscience, Paul said, can seek God and find Him, because He is not far from anyone (Acts 17:23-28).

Unfortunately, we are too often led astray by our own corruption and by the lies we tell each other, so the message goes unheeded, if we find it at all.

That’s why God had to reveal Himself in history by setting one nation apart from the rest and putting them under the supervision of His law – so that what could be inferred from creation, and what was implied in the Old Testament, would eventually be made explicit and clear through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Before, people always had reason to put their faith in God and to trust in His grace, and from that, to believe death wouldn’t have the final word over life – that God would, somehow, make a way.

The patriarchs and the people of Israel and Judah had even more reason to put their faith in Him, because of the way He intervened and revealed Himself to them through their prophets.

But now, because Christ’s death and resurrection are a matter of historical fact, the entire world has a much stronger basis by which to put our faith in Him.

“Through (Christ) you trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God,” wrote Peter (1 Peter 1:21).

“For God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice through the man he has appointed; he has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead,” said Paul (Acts 17:31).

To reiterate my point from my last entry (because it can’t be overstated): that’s why apologetics is so all-important. Faith is a gift from God, provided through the historical fact of the resurrection. But it provides no faith if it isn’t made known (Romans 10:14-15), and the terms by which we present it make a world of difference.

According to previously referenced passages of Scripture, people don’t necessarily need to know about Christ’s death and resurrection in order to have faith and be saved, but they’re in an infinitely better position to respond in faith if they do know about it.

Mother of Prostitutes

By now, there are likely howls of outrage over my last statement.

“People don’t have to know about Jesus’ death and resurrection to be saved?! That’s heresy!”

No, they don’t, and no it’s not.

Unless we’re to believe everyone who lived and died prior to the year 30 A.D. was automatically doomed, they didn’t have to. There was no portion in the Law of Moses that even mentioned a provision for eternal life (it was about earthly rewards and punishments), and Paul made it clear that people have always been saved by grace through faith, long before anyone could have known about Christ’s death and resurrection.

We’re in an infinitely better position to have faith than they were because we do know about his death and resurrection, but “faith” isn’t the same as knowing about his death and resurrection. Faith is a response to the evidence of God’s grace, and Christ’s death and resurrection are the greatest demonstration of His grace, but they are not the only demonstration.

But we’re so wrapped up in this idea that “faith” amounts to “doctrinal orthodoxy” that not only do we miss a lot of these obvious implications in Scripture, but we’re openly hostile to them.

That’s because we’ve turned “faith” into just another law by which to justify ourselves; instead of a law of works and ritual like the Jewish law, ours is a law of doctrine: “If you meet the minimal requirements of believing X, Y and Z about God and Jesus, you’ll be given eternal life in exchange.”

And skeptics rightly object to the idea that God would care so much about what people believe over what they actually do. They recognize the quality of prostitution in that idea: an exchange of benefits with no relation to each other, with something sacred exchanged as a commodity.

Now, it’s true that Jesus often used the language of reward and punishment, but that was typically directed to people who thought they were justified under the law. More often, though, he spoke in terms of wise and foolish investment: “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,” he said (Matthew 13:44-46).

“And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.” (Matthew 19:29)

And there is no more clear expression of faith than investment. In fact, that’s the only real expression there is for faith: regardless of what you say you believe, where you invest your hope is where you believe you’ll reap the greatest benefit, “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” he said (Matthew 6:19-21).

So when Jesus said to believe in him for eternal life, he didn’t mean, “Affirm a doctrine about me in exchange for heaven.” He meant, “Invest in me – in my teachings, in my cause, and you’ll be a part of it when it comes to fruition. Invest elsewhere, and you’ll only benefit as far as that investment can offer a return.”

We can see by God’s raising him from the dead that Jesus is the best investment.

If you don’t invest yourself in Jesus, you’ve believed in vain (1 Corinthians 5:2). And, in fact, the Scripture has some dire warnings for people who know about Jesus, but invest elsewhere (Hebrews 10:26).

The Church exists for the sole purpose of guiding people in that investment. In fact, that investment consists of participating in the life of the Church.

Or, it would be, if the Church was preaching the true gospel and fulfilling its true purpose according to that gospel.

As it is, we have a broken, self-destructive epistemology, which leads to a false view of how salvation is accomplished, and so we have a Church with no sense of its true purpose and calling (ecclesiology), which I will address in what follows.

I thought about entitling this “The Upside-Down Tripod of Faith,” but that just doesn’t have the same hook or punching power.

I didn’t pick this title just for its click-bait appeal, though. I sincerely believe we are apostate. “Christianity” as we commonly know it in the United States (and elsewhere in western society) is a perverse, hollow caricature of the Christianity taught by Jesus and the apostles.

I almost want to say it would be unrecognizable to them, but that isn’t quite true. They were all too familiar with the assumptions, attitudes and practices of which popular American religion is now comprised, because (as we’ll discuss in what follows) they’re the same forces they fought in their own time.

Of course, telling people they’re living a lie and are invested in a false version of Christianity is a pretty tough sell, and it’s not likely to make me very popular. I get that, and I’ve prepared myself for all the rocks that are about to be hurled my way (and I’ve developed pretty thick skin from all the rocks that have already been lobbed at me).

And it’s difficult for most people to see, I realize. By all appearances, our beliefs are “Scripture-based,” and there are a great many clever arguments (“But the church is a hospital for sinners!”) for why most of the statistics we could look at – divorce rates, teen pregnancy and STD-infection rates, abortions, domestic violence, debt, poverty, addiction, etc. – demonstrate that Christians, in general, don’t really live any differently or better or holier than our “lost” neighbors.

However, I think the nature and extent of our apostasy – as well as our path to repentance and restoration – can be clearly illuminated in terms of three main categories:

1) Epistemology (how we know things).

2) Soteriology (how we’re saved).

3) Ecclesiology (how we understand the role and function of the Church).

These three areas together encompass the entire life of the Christian religion, and each informs and is informed by the other two.

They’re a tripod, and our concept of “faith” is the hub at which the three legs intersect and support each other, and everything we call “Christianity” rests atop that hub, supported by the three legs.

If our concept of “faith” is faulty, the tripod collapses and our understanding and practice of Christianity falls with it.

And, in fact, that’s precisely how we’ve strayed into apostasy, and correcting it is how we turn back and become a functional, faithful and effective Church.

Stop Lobotomizing the Church

The Church has effectively lobotomized itself through Fideism.

Worse than that, even – through Fideism, the Church actively prevents people from placing their faith in Jesus Christ. Christians are sabotaging their own cause and working directly against the purposes of God through Fideism.

Fideism, for those unfamiliar, is an epistemological approach that contrasts faith with reason as a path to knowledge.

If we’re “saved by grace through faith,” reason doesn’t factor, according to Fideism.

This is in contrast to Evidentialism, which is an epistemological approach that says a belief or conclusion is only valid if it’s supported by sufficient reason and evidence.

Because Fideism holds sway in most of the Church, Evidentialism is often eschewed as something antagonistic to faith and loyalty to God. And, even, credulity about the miraculous and supernatural is often held up as a virtue where Fideism holds sway, because “blessed are those who believe without seeing.”

“Just believe,” says Fideism, because “faith is the evidence of things unseen.”

Ask a fideist Christian why he believes God exists, why he believes the Bible, why he believes Jesus is the Son of God and rose from the dead, he’s likely to say something like, “…because it’s what I’ve put my faith in.”

But that’s not an answer, obviously. That’s just a restatement of the question.

But, he has plenty of scripture verses he can reference to reinforce his Fideism as the more biblical epistemology over Evidentialism.

He didn’t get his Fideism from the Bible, though. Like every other popular error presently rotting the Church from the inside, he got it somewhere else and projected it onto the Bible. To put it in seminary-speak: he did eisegesis, not exegesis.

The Bible actually knows nothing of Fideism. At least, not as a virtue to be taught and encouraged.

When we use the word “faith” in every other regard besides religion – when we tell another person, “I have faith in you,” it does not mean, “Here’s a blank check guaranteeing my credulity.” It doesn’t mean blind faith.

No, it means, “I trust you – I believe you’ll do what you promise, you can accomplish what you say you can, and you won’t disappoint or betray me.”

And, we tend not to trust strangers – not to the extent that we trust a best friend or a faithful spouse, because we base our faith in people on the evidence of our prior experience with them. Unless we’re fools, we put our faith in people who have proven themselves, who have shown themselves worthy of our faith.

And, in fact, that’s exactly how the Bible uses the word as well.

When it reads “Abram believed the Lord and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15), let’s not forget that Abram had seen God. God had spoken to him, appeared to him, and directly intervened to help Abraham on multiple occasions. Abraham had faith, but it wasn’t blind faith.

The same is true for Moses and the Israelites. When they were condemned to wander the wilderness for 40 years in punishment for their faithlessness, it wasn’t God’s existence they questioned. His existence and power were beyond dispute at that point. It was His character and intentions they distrusted. (Deuteronomy 1:26-36)

And that’s the pattern throughout both testaments of the Bible: when the Israelites were expected to trust God to uphold His side of the covenant, when they were expected to trust that He would fulfill His promise to send the Messiah, that faith was not a blind suspension of disbelief despite all evidence to the contrary; it was a faith based on the evidence of what God had done before.

And that’s the sense meant by the writer of Hebrews when he wrote “faith is the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11).

All of the “things unseen” referenced in the passage pertained to promises for the future (except for creation, which no one was around to witness or document). It wasn’t a blind faith – it was based on what God had done in the past, as reported by the “great cloud of witnesses” (12:1). That verse is often interpreted out of context to mean a cloud of departed spirits watching the individual believer, but that’s upside-down and backwards. The “great cloud of witnesses” to whom the writer referred were the litany of biblical heroes referenced in the “faith hall of fame” immediately preceding that verse, who were bearing witness to the reader about God’s faithfulness. They were “surrounded” by those witnesses because they were steeped in Jewish culture and raised on those stories.

The writer of Hebrews was not holding up what we would call a Fideist approach to belief in God. He described what we would call an Evidentialist approach to Israel’s history, which was the evidence on which their faith in God was based.

When Jesus told Thomas “Because you have seen me you have believed; blessed are those who believe without seeing” (John 20:29), that was only after Jesus explicitly told them he would rise from the dead, and that was only after Thomas had personally observed Jesus giving sight to the blind and raising the dead himself.

It wasn’t credulity and blind, unqualified acceptance of unsupported extraordinary claims that Jesus wanted from Thomas. He wanted him to trust him. And he’d proven himself worthy of that trust with what should have been overwhelming evidence.

In other words, faith is a relationship claim, not a knowledge claim. There might be some knowledge claims that are corollaries to the relationship claim – just as we have outside of religion when someone we trust tells us something we might not otherwise be inclined to believe. But, primarily, faith is not a knowledge claim, but a relationship claim.

….

And the apostles were perfectly consistent with that Evidentialist epistemology when they preached the gospel. They never asked for blind faith or suspension of disbelief. They argued, they proved, they persuaded:

“Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.” (Acts 9:22)

“As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead.” (Acts 17:2, 3)

“So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.” (Acts 17:17)

“Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.” (Acts 18:4)

“(Paul) went into the synagogue and reasoned with the Jews.” (Acts 18:19)

“He vigorously refuted the Jews in public debate, proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.” (Acts 18:28)

“Paul entered the synagogue and spoke boldly there for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God.” (Acts 19:8)

The central feature of their message – the lynchpin for all of it – was the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

They never asked anyone to believe the resurrection because they had faith. They asked people to have faith because they believed the resurrection: the resurrection was never offered as an article of faith; the resurrection was the source of faith.

“For God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice through the man he has appointed; he has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:31)

“Through (Christ) you trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.” (1 Peter 1:21)

…..

In contrast to the original Church, today’s Church sees apologetics as an add-on. Apologetics and evangelism were one and the same for the apostles and the early Church fathers, but for us, it’s entirely optional. And, within our Fideistic paradigm of belief, I’ve too often seen it discouraged as an unhealthy distraction: “You can’t argue people into the kingdom of heaven,” they say.

Except, nobody told the apostles that, and Paul insisted on argument (in the sense of debate, not quarreling) as central to the function of the Church: the Church is at war with the forces of darkness for the soul of humanity, and argument and ideas are the weapons we use to bring people from darkness to light (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

So, to say, “Christians shouldn’t argue with unbelievers” is to say, “Christians should lay down their arms and abandon the war.” Consequently, today’s Church has been asleep on the front lines of that war, and an enemy that encounters virtually no resistance has overrun our position, and now our temple lies in ruins.

….

The Christian life – the genuine Christian life – requires absolute, unreserved commitment. Theoretically, we all know that – we’ve all read the passages about the all-or-nothing nature of discipleship. But we don’t really see that in practice.

Largely, that’s because we have an entire nation of “believers” who don’t actually believe.

How could they?

They’re rarely if ever taught why Christianity is true. And however earnest and well intentioned a person is, nobody can actually believe something they don’t, well… believe. We have plenty of people who believe that they believe, but what they’re calling “belief” just isn’t. It’s wishful thinking. It’s suspension of disbelief. It’s superstition. But it’s not belief. And affirmation of belief is not the same thing as belief, because (as we’ll discuss in the next two installments) there are plenty of inducements within the Church to affirm beliefs other than being persuaded of the truth of those beliefs.

Without good reasons rooted in strong evidence, it’s simply impossible to believe something so far beyond our normal, natural experience as the resurrection. The reasons and evidence are there, but much of the Church neglects the learning and teaching of those reasons, and even inoculates many against learning them because we prefer the easy path of indoctrination to the hard work of education, which doesn’t lead to the absolute, unreserved commitment needed to follow Jesus.

We have to crucify our Fideism. We have to denounce it and condemn it and eradicate it wherever we find it and make Evidentialism the epistemology of Christianity again. In so doing, we’ll restore apologetics to its rightful central place in our message, and the Church will be filled with believers again.

….

That’s not to say I think I’m the lone believer in a sea of apostates and phonies. There are other believers out there, too, and there is a growing emphasis on apologetics within the Church today.

It’s not growing fast enough, though, and it still seems to be relegated to the status of an “edifying hobby” instead of an essential, central feature of our message.

Even those of us who embrace it are just as much apostates as anyone else, though, because… What are we to do with all of this unreserved commitment arising from true belief?

What outlet do we even have for it within today’s collectively apostate Church?

To answer that, we need the other two legs of the tripod restored, which we’ll discuss in the next two installments.

I think I might have figured out UFOs.

I’m not offering this with any degree of dogmatism or certainty. It’s just a hypothesis. So if you like it, enjoy. If you don’t, ignore it.

My hypothesis is based on three main pillars of observation.

First pillar: You know all these stories going around about sightings of flying saucers and UFOs, and people getting abducted by aliens and probed and stuff…?  Of course you do. Well, I happen to think there are too many of them, with too many common details, and from too many isolated pockets of humanity to just dismiss them out of hand. I think there’s something happening. I think there’s something to those stories. Am I saying I believe all of them without reservation or qualification? No. But I think there’s something happening to give rise to them. I don’t know what, exactly, these people are experiencing, or if the experiences are exactly as they report them, but I think there’s something going on. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there’s a helluva lot of smoke out there where these reportings are concerned…

Second pillar: most physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists agree that if intelligent life emerged here on planet Earth, there’s a high probability that it emerged somewhere else too, given the sheer vastness and complexity of the universe. However, given the vast distances between stars and the comparative rarity and isolation of the kinds of stars and planets that could support life, it’s so astronomically unlikely that one intelligent species could find a habitable world other than their own as to be practically impossible, to say nothing of actually traveling there. And, given Einstein’s maxim that nothing can travel faster than light, and considering that the nearest solar system to us is hundreds of light years away, it would take more time than the Earth has even been in existence for another intelligent life form to travel to us, even if they knew where to look for us in the first place. So, in short, I don’t think it’s remotely possible that extraterrestrial beings could ever visit our planet.

Third pillar: it’s been 66 million years since the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. In that time, one of the surviving species– a small, squirrely lemur-like rodent creature called a “pleisiadapis” evolved into other species of mammals, then primates, and then us– humans, the only confirmed species of intelligent life in the universe. More than twice that amount of time elapsed between the appearance of the first dinosaurs and their extinction 66 million years ago, though. There is no positive evidence for this, mind you, but for all we know, we are not the first intelligent life form to have emerged on Earth, because there was plenty of time for it to have happened in the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. For all we know, intelligence evolved alongside the dinosaurs, but not along mammalian or primate lines, but along some other taxonomical branch– maybe reptilian or insectoid or any number of other forms of animal life that existed then. And, for all we know, this intelligent life had a civilization as prolific and as technologically and culturally advanced as our own, but all traces of it were eradicated by the extinction event.

So, my hypothesis is that these little green men in flying saucers we keep hearing about aren’t aliens from outer space. They’re earthlings who survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Maybe they saw the asteroid coming and evacuated the planet until the dust settled. Maybe they hid in the depths of the ocean, living within their flying saucer/submarines. Maybe they have subterranean lunar and/or Martian colonies. Who knows?

But, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that an advanced civilization existed on Earth prior to the end of the Cretaceous period, and this civilization would have the means to survive the extinction event that wiped out the vast majority of life on Earth. And, in my view, along with numerous more qualified commentators, it isn’t possible for extraterrestrial beings to visit us. It also strains credulity to believe hundreds of otherwise intelligent, rational people would simply fabricate identical stories of flying saucers and personal encounters with the strange, seemingly otherworldly beings inhabiting and operating them. So, my conclusion is that these beings are an ancient species of earthlings that have kept themselves mostly hidden from us, for purposes of their own.

Again, I’m not dogmatic about the conclusion. I’m pretty well convinced of the three points of observation on which the conclusion is based, but there are other rational conclusions that could also be drawn from them.I’m just throwing this out there, though, so that when the flying saucers land on the White House lawn and the little green men introduce themselves, I want people to know that I called it first.

Peace out, homies.

P.S. Nothing I’ve written here is in any conflict whatsoever with the Book of Genesis. See my last two posts for details.

UPDATE: It has since occurred to me that if they had the means to survive the extinction event, they would have likely had the means to prevent it in the first place, assuming it was an asteroid, as is commonly believed. But, that’s not necessarily the case, since our actual knowledge of how to avert asteroid strikes is limited to Michael Bay movies. For all we know, it’s a lot harder than Bruce Willis makes it look.

I went to church this morning. It was the first time in a long time because, well…

Well, I don’t really want to get into that.

Or, I do, but getting into that is the broader purpose of this blog, and the “because” should be obvious enough soon enough if it’s not already from other entries.

Anyway, I’d made up my mind not to be critical or judgy, but to just go, take in what I could, benefit from what I could, see if I could find a place for myself there, and remember that none of these people should care what I think of their church service, because nobody needs to clear it with me before they play a worship song or preach a sermon. Clearly.

That, and being critical and disapproving is just plain exhausting.

I find that when I do it, it’s because—as a follower of Jesus Christ, I feel somewhat responsible for how he’s represented, for the work done in his Name, for the messages spoken in his Name, the causes undertaken in his Name, etc. As a Christian, the things said, done, condoned or condemned in his Name are, in a sense, being done in my name, and that of anyone and everyone else who identifies with Jesus Christ. I don’t have more claim on the name of Christ than anyone else, but to do have some claim, and I have an obligation to try to set the record straight when he’s being misrepresented.

And, there’s that whole “Great Commission”-thing: as a follower of Christ, I’m commanded to go out and tell people about him, to the effect of making disciples. So, you can’t be a Christian without taking some responsibility for how Christ is known and perceived in the world.

But, it’s not like God is my own personal intellectual property. I have no licensing rights, no authority to go from church-to-church as the Theological Police. Nor do I want to. Like I said—it’s exhausting, and it doesn’t make me very popular when I find myself doing it.

So, I went into this with the best of intentions. Or the laziest of intentions. Whatever. In either case, I didn’t want to be critical. I wanted to be nice and friendly and likeable and be able to sincerely tell the people I met there how much I enjoyed the service and how much I looked forward to coming back and how much I’d love to take them up on their offer for lunch, etc. I really just wanted to rejoin the human race by being a part of a community of like-minded people. I wanted to be part of a church again.

Anyone still reading this has probably gathered by now that my intentions didn’t quite play out…

My sense of alienation started with the worship service, but that’s pretty routine anyway. When I see lyrics projected on the screen about “giving my everything for Your kingdom cause” and about how we’re “set free through the blood of Christ” and how we’re supposed to be “people of selfless faith,” etc., I can’t help but wonder, “Are we all really singing about the same thing?” What does that mean to these people—that we’re set free through the blood of Christ? If you ask some Christians, it means we don’t have to eat kosher or be circumcised anymore… something that never would have applied to us or our predominantly European ancestors anyway. Some will say it means we’re “set free from sin,” but in what sense are we “free from sin”? Some think it just means we can do whatever we want and presume on God’s forgiveness and a trouble-free afterlife… “Is that what everybody’s so excited about this morning?”

But, that’s a tangent. Those are the considerations that come to mind in any worship service at any church I’m visiting for the first (or second, third, or hundredth) time, based on past experience and common observations about denominational differences and doctrinal divisions. The ambiguity makes it hard to take the collective emotion seriously, so I find myself fighting an increasing feeling of silliness about so much enthusiasm attached to so many vague abstractions and potentially misguided theology.

I fully realize how weird, and how cripplingly dysfunctional it is to let myself become so morbidly preoccupied with these considerations during worship service. I mean, the point of doing it together, in a group, is that we’re all on the same page—that it should be fellowship as well as worship, and that only really works if there is a common foundation to our collective enthusiasm, so we can feed off of and reinforce each other in our common faith.

But, there’s only so much I can control, and having some worship and fellowship is better than none at all, so I try to bury all these distractions and just go with it.

Then came the sermon.

The text was the Book of Esther, and the message was about how “God can take something ordinary and use it for something extraordinary” (never mind that Esther would have had to have been extraordinarily hot to get noticed in the first place, and never mind that the preacher apparently thought it was the Persians, not the Babylonians, who carried the Jews into captivity, but that’s just quibbling on my part).

The point to which the sermon led was that the congregation needs to give extraordinarily to pay for the ongoing church building project.

That wasn’t the only point, though. It was just an example to illustrate the general message that, even though you might just be an ordinary (insert occupation here… schoolteacher, construction worker, office drone, corporate manager, etc.), God can still use you for something extraordinary, because that’s what He did with Esther.

A couple of people shouted “Amen, brother!”

Then there was an altar-call, in case anyone had been so moved by the sermon that they wanted to publicly commit or recommit their lives to Jesus.

Now, I don’t dispute that God can use ordinary people or objects to extraordinary effect, or that that’s what He did with Esther.

I also don’t dispute that churches need money for building projects and payrolls and utility bills and other operating expenses, and so people need to tithe, and if there are legitimate but extraordinary expenses, they need to give extraordinarily… if they want those expenses met.

And my point isn’t just to criticize the sermon for not being very good or original.

Because, let’s face it—we’ve all heard this sermon a hundred times. Not exactly this one, but something along those lines: “Look what God did with this loser in biblical times! Even hookers and slaves got to be used by God. Think of what He can do in your life!”

But, again—the quality of the sermon, or lack thereof, is not my point.

As a journalist, I know what it’s like to put something out there for public consumption and criticism, and I know that every article I write isn’t a Pulitzer-prize winning work (to date, none of them have been). Heck, I know a lot of it isn’t even very good by my own meager standards, and so I’m wide-open to criticism.

But, if I didn’t know the difference between writing news and writing my own opinions or speculations, I’d get fired pretty quickly, and rightly so.

Likewise, a school teacher who doesn’t know the difference between educating children and indoctrinating them should not be employed as a teacher.

A police officer who doesn’t know the difference between using force to uphold the law and using force to get his own way should not be employed as a police officer, and should probably be in jail.

In the case of preachers…

As I was sitting in church this morning and wrestling with my reasons for being so put off by this sermon, a certain law from the Old Testament kept coming to mind: there were recurring prohibitions in the Law of Moses against idolatry, but along with them were some peculiar and seemingly arbitrary instructions about the construction of altars.

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell the Israelites this: “You have seen for yourselves that I have spoken to you from heaven: Do not make any gods to be alongside Me; do not make for yourselves gods of silver or gods of gold.

Make an altar of earth for Me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, your sheep and goats and your cattle. Wherever I cause My Name to be honored, I will come to you and bless you. If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it.’”

When they made an altar, it was to be made of, well… it was just supposed to be a pile of dirt, basically. Or, if they wanted something more substantial and sturdy, they could use a pile of rocks, but they weren’t supposed to be anything special—no fancy, hewn rocks, because any use of a tool on the stones would defile them.

That didn’t apply, of course, to the altars in the Temple—the Altar of Incense and the Altar of Burnt Offering. They had horns and were made of precisely-measured wood and decorated with bronze and gold, so they had to use tools for that.

But, they were made according to a strict, God-given pattern by specifically-chosen, Spirit-filled people.

The point was that God didn’t want any kind of human creativity to enter into the equation. He didn’t want to be worshiped on an altar fashioned through human skill or imagination.

Even if it was a particularly gifted human who was completely and genuinely devoted to God, who just wanted to please God by using his or her talents to His glory, it was nonetheless forbidden.

The reason for that, I believe, was that if they were going to worship God, He wanted them to worship God.

If an altar was adorned with man-made artistry, that pattern of artistry would have been associated with the worship of God, then eventually institutionalized as a part of that worship, and it would only be a matter of time before that pattern came to represent God—if only for the group of people who used that style of altar.

But, God can’t be represented by any image or pattern of human design: “You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air…do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the Lord your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.”

The destruction caused by idolatry is twofold: first, and worst of all, it confines “God” within human understanding. He is infinitely more than we can ever imagine Him to be, but we effectively cut ourselves off from Him when we cling to a man-made concept of God instead of God Himself.

Therefore, all theological systems should be merely provisional—they should always be open to revision and growth. A great many churchgoers cling dogmatically to certain doctrinal positions like security blankets, refusing to relinquish them, even in the face of clear, compelling evidence that they’re wrong. They think they’re being faithful to God by doing so, but they’re all too often only being faithful to a particular concept of God, because it’s the one in which they’ve invested their reputations and identity, and on which they’ve settled.

Secondly, it limits us by raising up natural forces and concepts as gods, setting them above ourselves.

For instance, most ancient people in the West and in the Near East worshipped the goddess Ishtar, or Easter (Ashtoreth or Asherah in the Old Testament),  or Aphrodite/Venus as she was known to the Greeks and Romans.

Ishtar was the personification of female sexuality. Worship of her was usually coupled with worship of her consort Baal, the storm god, through temple prostitution.

The thinking behind this system was that when it rained, that was supposedly Baal having sex with Ishtar, the earth-goddess. Baal was worshipped as a means to an end: to bring the rain to water the crops. So, in order to bring this about, Baal and Ishtar had to be aroused by ritual sex acts in their temple.

Now, contrary to a few long-standing Christian traditions, the Bible doesn’t teach that sex is in any way bad. It’s good. God invented it. Our sexuality is a part of our humanity—it’s an aspect of having been created in God’s Image, even.

However, it has to be controlled. Christian or not, for just plain old social and legal reasons, we all have to learn to control our sexual impulses, to some degree. Like all of our other appetites, once mastered, it becomes an indispensable servant. But, it must be mastered.

In fact, mastery of our appetites is an essential aspect of our salvation. Our salvation consists in our “participation in the divine nature” and “escaping the corruption of the world caused by human appetite,” or “epithumia,” as it reads in the original Greek. Salvation amounts to being given the New Nature, but to participate in our New Nature, we have to become greater than our appetites.

When our sexuality is exalted to the status of godhood, though, it becomes the master. The belief system arising out of idolatry tells us that our sexuality is a god to be worshiped and obeyed. Mastering it is out of the question, and appeasing it is a religious obligation, no matter the cost. Sacrifices must be made in service to it.

Archeologists have discovered innumerable artifacts from that religious system in Israel: mass infant graves where the aborted fetuses and murdered newborns of temple prostitutes were disposed of.

Ishtar/Aphrodite worship gave them an outlet to let their sexuality master them, and routine horrors followed.

Or, if a personification of female sexuality didn’t put them in a worshipful mood, there were male prostitutes at the temple of Apollo.

And then there was Mars, the god of war, to whom all sacrifices were justified, by virtue of his divinity.

But, there were also more domestic and mundane gods and goddesses: Hestia, goddess of the hearth and home; Minerva, goddess of learning and of commerce; etc.

All aspects of nature, civilization, and human experience were personified and deified and worshiped. According to this thinking, none of these forces were subject to man, but mankind was subject to them all. They weren’t just institutions that had been set in place by natural forces now understandable through psychology and sociology: they were gods and goddesses. Social structures were set in stone, so to speak, because they had been set in place by the gods. If you were born a slave, it was because the gods wanted it that way, and to oppose the institution of slavery was to oppose the divine order. The status quo was validated and protected as the will of the gods, and anyone who questioned it was likely to be tried and executed as a corrupting influence. And if you had impulses for sex and violence, those could be denied no more than an impulse for music and poetry and justice. These were all gods to be worshiped, and their whims were to be obeyed.

The sin in that was that it made man subject to what God had apportioned to all the nations under heaven. Contrary to a great many ideas entertained by fundamentalist religion, it has always been God’s plan that humanity learn to conquer and control nature. We were meant to walk on the moon, understand natural processes of meteorology and biology, and even split the atom. Idolatrous worship held us back from that, and it took the advent of Christianity put us on that track by inspiring the innovations of God-seeking men like Isaac Newton and Gregor Mendel and others whose devotion to God and understanding of monotheistic cosmology taught them that the universe must be naturally-ordered and subject to intelligent observation and prediction.

It was also sin—again, because it equated natural forces and human appetites with Ultimate Reality, thereby exalting the status quo as the Divine Plan.

In contrast, the prophets and apostles taught that this world is fallen and corrupt, but God has promised to fix it—to redeem and transform it—through the Messiah. Following the Messiah, then, means joining his cause to redeem the world. We don’t just sit back and wait for it, though—we work to bring it about. That’s what the Great Commission is about. That’s what the Church is for. We are God’s instrument and agency for bringing about the Messianic Age.

I’ve written at length in other entries about how to do that, and how what we’re calling “evangelism” and “discipleship” aren’t really, so I won’t rehash all that here, except to say that, at the very least, it means we have to be willing to relinquish the safety of existing institutions and beliefs. “Whoever tries to save his life will lose it, whoever loses his life for my sake will find it,” the Lord said.

So, when I hear a sermon about how “God can take something ordinary and use it for something extraordinary,” with no actual reference to how Esther fit into God’s larger redemptive plan, and no practical instruction for how that applies to us (other than to tithe more), I can’t help but be critical, despite intentions otherwise.

And I’m not being critical because it wasn’t a very good sermon. I’m being critical because it was idolatrous.

If that “extraordinariness” to which he called us was in any way related to the overall message of the gospel, or even a clumsy admonition to seek the face of God, I wouldn’t have been moved to write this. But, it wasn’t. It was nothing but a validation of the status quo: “You’re fine being an ordinary (insert occupation here), because God will use you for something extraordinary. It’s all a part of his plan. You don’t have to do anything differently. Just accept the warm, gooey, sugary sentiment we’re feeding you, and you’ll go to heaven. Oh, and give us money.”

Sure, he made reference to Scripture, but was that really the message of Scripture? Or was that just something he projected onto it to give an appearance of being “scriptural”?

Jesus called people to leave everything to follow him, and said that if we love our families more than we love him, we can’t really follow him.

With that in view… does anyone really think God’s purpose for the Book of Esther was to tell us to be content with our day jobs?

Maybe God wants us to be content in our day jobs, but you can’t really get that from the Book of Esther, and you can get the opposite message from plenty of other passages, if you want to.

The fact is, it didn’t really matter what the Book of Esther actually teaches, because that preacher just wanted to dial-in a sermon that told everyone they were Ok, and that they should feel good about themselves and where they are in life, because that’s where God wants them.

I get that he and the countless other preachers who routinely do the same thing are trying to be “relevant” and all that.  But, the Bible is already relevant, if they’d just let it speak for itself.

Instead, they’re projecting their own ideas onto it and feeding them back to themselves, repackaged in biblical rhetoric. And you can make the Bible say whatever you want when you do that.

But, that reduces the Bible to a fortune cookie, or a daily horoscope. It reduces the gospel to a gooey, sentimental affirmation of the status quo, and it offers a “word of God” completely devoid of God.

Using it that way is the equivalent of worshiping God on an altar of over-decorated stones, and then worshiping our own artistry as God, and then using that worship as a validation of whatever else we want to chisel upon the altar.

That’s why there are a million different little versions of “Christianity” out there who can’t agree on what the Bible actually teaches, apart from a few broad, toothless generalities.

And that, my friends, is why I always feel like such an alien in church, and why I hate going. I just don’t see the point. I feel like I’d be better off getting some fortune cookies, and hanging out in a bar.

In my first entry of this series, I wrote about how our popular notion of “faith” is actually a negation of the true gospel that we’re “saved by grace through faith, not by the works of the law.”

By setting faith in contrast to reason instead of in contrast to law, we empty it of its power: many lifelong churchgoers don’t truly believe the resurrection; they suspend disbelief about it. Instead of a genuine faith in God rooted in the certainty of His existence and of His intervention in history, the mainstream institutional Church teaches an empty, impotent, and subjective fideism.

The result is a “gospel” that falsely offers salvation through law. It’s not a law of ceremony and personal conduct like the Old Testament law, but a law of belief: “if you believe X, Y, and Z about God and Jesus, God will give you salvation in exchange, and you can join our club.”

In fact, everything about Christianity is subverted by our mistaken notion of “faith”: our epistemology (how we believe and know things), our soteriology (how we’re saved), and our ecclesiology (our understanding of the Church and our own place within it) are each and all perverted and undermined.

In the second entry, Consumers in the Market for a Seeker-Friendly God, I wrote about how we got here.

The title was meant to juxtapose against Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The point was to contrast our collective perception of Christianity-as-we-know-it as something divinely-inspired and immutable, to which we are accountable before God, with what it actually is—a man-made adaptation of God’s revelation, shaped by the market force of consumer demand.

Christianity-as-we-know-it is not based, primarily, upon God’s revelation of Himself nor upon the teachings of the Bible, strictly speaking, nor is it shaped, even, by the ideas of popular preachers and teachers. Rather, it’s the product of the demands of religious consumers. It’s not the Christianity God wants, but the “Christianity” we want: collectively, we selectively emphasize some portions of scripture and downplay others according to what we actually want to believe, and shape our concept of God accordingly, and we favor those preachers, churches, and denominations that accommodate our preferences, while we avoid those that do not. The result is a wide selection of made-to-order versions of Christianity in the form of the various and sundry denominations out there to suit different patterns of individual taste.

In my third entry, I Am Not a Pessimist, I wrote about how our popular “gospel” tells us that we can safely put questions of God and the afterlife behind us so we can pursue our own ambitions if we believe the right things. This “gospel” doesn’t produce any meaningful change within us, and so we don’t live any differently than all of the “lost” and godless people around us. And while this sounds pretty bleak, I wouldn’t bother writing about all this if I didn’t think we could change—my message is actually much more optimistic and positive than it might initially seem. In order to do that, though, first we have to know for a fact that Christianity—real Christianity—is actually true, and then we have to generate sufficient consumer demand to transform our institutions so that it’s actually taught and practiced according to the model of the original, apostolic Church.

In the fourth entry, The Lynchpin of Existence, I explain in basic terms how we can know as an objective, verifiable historical fact that the resurrection, and therefore the gospel, is true. In the fifth entry, Defending the Lynchpin, I address and refute most of the popular arguments against the resurrection.

Everything I’ve written thus far, though, can be reviewed and summarized in the following:

“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.”  

These were Jesus’ words to the crowds of enthusiasts who had just followed him across the sea after he’d fed five-thousand of them with a few loaves of bread.

Their collective response to this miracle was seemingly appropriate: they hailed him as “the Prophet who is to come into the world!” and tried to make him king. And they were right, of course—Jesus was, in fact, the rightful King from the line of David and the Prophet foretold by Moses, i.e., the Messiah.

They were right, but they were so completely wrong.

They were right about who he was, but wrong because Who He Was was completely incidental to their interest in him. It didn’t really matter to them that he had been sent by God, or that his words and teachings were the key to immortality and to the salvation of their souls, their families, their country and their way of life.

After all, it was their eventual rejection of Jesus as the Messiah that led, ultimately, to the destruction of their nation at the hands of the Romans forty years later.

Historians might offer competing interpretations of that tragedy, but Jesus called it early on: “As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you…”     

Also, Jewish tradition of the last two-thousand years corroborates that explanation. They don’t make quite the same connection by saying, “God destroyed the nation because we rejected our Messiah,” but they have a yearly day of mourning over their exile and the destruction of the temple, and the Talmud states that “every generation in which the temple is not rebuilt is just as guilty as the generation in which it was destroyed.” In other words, Orthodox Jewish belief has it that when they collectively repent of the sin that characterized that generation in 70 AD, God will reverse His punishment by sending the Messiah to rebuild the temple and usher in the Redemption. The fact that He has yet to do so signals that they remain unworthy and unprepared for the coming of the Messiah.

And before I get accused of racism or anti-Semitism, let me reiterate that that’s not my interpretation of the Fall of Jerusalem, nor even that of any particular Christian denomination, to my knowledge. That’s what Judaism teaches. And I don’t point any of this out to gloat over the suffering of the Jews, or even as an apologetic for Christianity (although it does work as an apologetic for Christianity). I mention it because there’s a lesson here that applies to us—to Christians.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“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,” Jesus said. 

They could see plainly enough that he was the Messiah—that he had been sent by God, spoke for God, and was their rightful King.

And they were happy to proclaim him as such and to install him as their ruler, but it wasn’t because they were interested in God or Truth or spiritual enlightenment or even in Jesus himself.

They liked that free bread.

And Jesus didn’t begrudge them their free food. It was his idea in the first place. He knew they needed to eat and was happy to provide.

Feeding them mere bread wasn’t his ultimate purpose, though. He’d come to feed them new life. The bread was just to get their attention.

They lost interest, though, when he began to explain their real need: “Oh, yeah? If you’re the Messiah, prove it,” they said, despite having been convinced just the day before that they should overthrow the government to make Jesus king, precisely because they recognized him as the One foretold.

They didn’t like his terms, of course, because as far as they were concerned, they didn’t need any stinkin’ “new life.” They were already in good with God, so worldwide supremacy and a trouble-free afterlife were already in the bag. After all, didn’t they already have the right beliefs, the right religion, and the right pedigree? In fact, they’d even pegged Jesus as the right Messiah already.

Accepting Jesus on his own terms would have meant admitting their need, though, which would mean giving up their previously held sense of security and righteousness and cultural superiority. Their very identity as Jews was supposed to guarantee their security and good-standing before God. After all, hadn’t God promised them as much? Wasn’t that what it meant to be Jewish? Wasn’t that the essential difference between them and everybody else? The Messiah was supposed to affirm them in these things, not undermine them, they thought.

So they turned on him, and many of his disciples, even, abandoned him.  

As Christians, whenever we cover this passage in Bible studies or sermons, we typically identify with Peter and the rest of the Twelve who stuck around after the disgruntled crowds left. After all, we’re Christians, right? By definition, we’re the disciples who have stuck around to follow Jesus… aren’t we? And isn’t that the point of the passage? That there are these two camps of people: the camp for the good guys—the people who believe in Jesus, and the other camp for the bad guys—the Pharisees and Sadducees and other non-believers who eventually had Jesus arrested and crucified.

After all, it’s right there in the passage: “‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the One He has sent.’”

That’s us, right? We’re the people who believe in Jesus, and then there’s everybody else who doesn’t.

Except… they believed in Jesus, too. They’d just followed him across the Sea of Galilee because they knew he was the Messiah and wanted him to be their king… Any one of them would have answered an altar call, based on what they believed about Jesus at that point.

That changed, though, after he said, “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.”

My last few entries have been about how “the signs” speak loudly and clearly to the fact that Jesus is the Messiah, because his resurrection from the dead is a proven…or, at least, provable fact of history. Scripturally, it’s not offered as an article of faith or as a superstition to be blindly believed, but as something knowable and verifiable, by information available to anyone and everyone—especially now, in the Age of the Internet, when virtually all human knowledge is instantly accessible to any given person at any given time.

The relevant facts are readily available, yet they’re in short supply among rank-and-file churchgoers. Most Christians will proudly and adamantly declare their belief in Jesus, but when you ask them why they believe, most won’t be able to tell you. Or, if they do, they’ll appeal to their personal feelings or their preferences. Their answer will be almost anything but a rational appeal to evidence.

That’s not entirely their fault, though. Most local churches don’t bother to teach people why Christianity is actually true—it’s just assumed up front that everybody is already on board, because “faith” is a magical feeling God bestows upon the chosen, and it’s out of our hands… or so we’re taught.

A few years ago, I found my curiosity piqued when the pastor of the church I attended at the time announced during the morning service that a few people had asked him to teach them “how to share their faith,” so he would be teaching a brief class on how to do that later that afternoon. His instruction consisted solely of leading us through a tract—the kind sidewalk preachers hand out, on the “four spiritual laws,” so we’d be prepared to do the same, should an opportunity ever present itself to share the material with a non-believer. A few people spoke up at various points in the pastor’s presentation with questions of “What if the person asks such-and-such…?”—usually having to do with some common intellectual objection or another. His counsel for such an eventuality was to ignore or deflect the question and stick to the material in the tract, because the person who asks such questions “is just trying to distract you,” he said.

The assumption behind that approach is that if a person hears “the gospel” enough times, eventually the Holy Spirit will miracle them into believing—apart from, or even despite their faculties of reason, so you’ve just got to expose them to it as often as you can… which just so happens to be a basic method of brainwashing employed by any cult. There is no attempt at apologetics or appeals made to reason and evidence, because people are saved “by faith” (please see The Foundation, part 1 if you’re puzzled about why that’s in quotation marks).

It also assumes that there is no such thing as an honest intellectual objection to Christianity—that people who raise objections and ask difficult questions are just making excuses to justify their sin, so it’s a waste of attention and effort to answer them. It presumes that—whatever else they say—their questions are insincere and their unbelief is willful and deliberate. The assumption beneath that assumption (which no one would come out and say in so many words, because it would conflict with other deeply-held dogmas) is that those who do believe without asking difficult questions or vetting the belief through reason, do so out of some kind of virtue unique to those possessing “faith” and lacking in those without it. So, in essence, the pastor’s instruction was to answer such questions with a subtle implication of guilt… which also happens to be a basic component of any brainwashing program.

Now, the law of averages dictates that eventually, if we apply this method persistently to as many people as we can, as often as we can, somebody somewhere at some point will become a Christian as a result. That miniscule sample of positive outcomes will then be trumpeted to validate the method and the belief behind it—that God saves people by invisible and mysterious means beyond the purview of human reason and with no relation to our own competence or faithfulness to present the gospel in reasonable, convincing terms (call it an “evangelical rain dance”). The vast majority of the time, though—and as a former non-Christian, I speak from experience—the effect is not spiritual conversion, but to make the person on the receiving end feel something like a stormtrooper we’re trying to sneak some droids past, and something like Dorothy being told to “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!”   

A few years earlier at another church, I was chatting with one of the high school kids who had just left his Sunday school class before the main service, and I was pleasantly surprised, momentarily, when I asked him what the class was about, and he answered “apologetics.”

“Oh, cool! What kind of apologetics did they teach?” I asked, wondering if it was about prophecy fulfillment, the historicity of the New Testament, evidence for the resurrection, or what…

My heart sank when he answered, “They just showed us how to find stuff in the Bible to support what we believe.”

There were so many different things I wanted to say to that, including the question of why they were putting the cart in front of the horse by telling them first what to believe, and then finding justification for it after the fact.

Instead, I opted for: “So… what if you’re talking to someone who doesn’t believe the Bible? What then?”  

“They have to already believe the Bible, I guess,” he answered.

“And what do you think the odds are that you’ll be in a conversation with somebody who believes the Bible but isn’t already a Christian?”

“Well, there are Catholics and other people who belong to the wrong denominations…” he shrugged.

In other words, you have to already be a Christian in some sense to benefit from this approach to “apologetics,” but there’s just no talking to you if you’re not already sold on the Bible.

I didn’t press him on it, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to explain why he accepted the Bible as The Authority, as opposed to the Qur’an or the Iliad and the Odyssey, or any other literature revered elsewhere as holy writ.

I don’t want to sound like I’m coming down too hard on him or on others like him, though, because none of that was his fault, because he was never taught why it’s true. Like most Christians, he was socialized to accept it—“on faith,” and unqualified compliance would have been expected as a matter of course within his family, peer group, and community. The fact that it was the Bible instead of the Qur’an or the Bhagavad-Gita or the Book of Mormon is entirely an accident of birth, and had he been born elsewhere he would attach all the same feelings and reverence and authority to any one of those books instead of the Bible.

The truth of the Bible is entirely incidental to our preference for it.

And, as I’ve explained at length in previous entries, this is completely upside-down and backwards from how Christianity originally spread, when every institution and every social and religious convention in the world at the time stood opposed to it.

Of course, there is obviously a certain subjective quality to faith, but as the apostles explained, we’re not supposed to believe the resurrection because we have faith (or, as is commonly the case, because we have a series of preferences and opinions inculcated through lifelong cultural conditioning, which we mistake for “faith”). We’re supposed to have faith because we believe the resurrection. We don’t believe the resurrection by faith, because the resurrection is an objective fact. Faith is the appropriate response to that fact, once the fact is established. The apostles appealed to people’s faith when they exhorted them to live by the truth that they knew, but they spread that truth by appealing first to reason and evidence. The resurrection is not the subject of faith, but its source.

(And if you’re not on board with this, then I ask you to read The Foundation, part 4: The Lynchpin of Existence and read from there…)

We prefer Christianity and the Bible, then—not because we saw the signs that testify to its truth, but because we ate the loaves and had our fill, so to speak.

The Bible, Christianity, the Church, our concept of God, and the figure of Jesus Christ… they fulfill a wide gamut of social, cultural, and psychological functions, completely apart from and unrelated to any higher spiritual Reality.

Christianity functions as a tribal banner for us to rally under: it’s a cultural security blanket, basically, which tells us who we are and what kind of a group we belong to, and it tells us who else belongs or doesn’t belong in our group. It’s a context for socialization and enculturation. Most large churches, for instance, have singles’ groups, youth groups, married-couple groups, and other categories in which to file ourselves so that we can socialize with like-minded people with similar interests, and to develop social support networks among people who share our values, outlooks, and life experiences.

And, it offers a political banner to rally under: a collective voice to shape our larger society so that our national laws, customs, social standards, and ethical norms validate and accommodate us, but suppress, marginalize, or exclude any influences or interests that don’t conform to our way of life. Ostensibly, we don’t do this for ourselves, of course… we do it for God.

The Church also provides a ritual order to our lives in the form of baby dedications/infant baptisms, weddings, funerals, annual holidays, weekly services, etc. And, of course, non-Christians also get married, have babies, die and have funerals, and even celebrate all of the same holidays Christians do, but the same events take on a kind of sacred patina when we mark them within the context of our religion. But, even with that sacred patina to add that extra sparkle to the mile-markers of our lives, our marriages aren’t any stronger and our kids aren’t any less likely to meet with personal disaster than non-Christian children, as the observable facts demonstrate (see my About section and The Foundation, part 3: I Am Not a Pessimist).

Our concept of God, even, serves a completely natural, earthly function much of the time. For many people, “God” is little or nothing more than their imaginary friend. And I don’t say that to try to be funny or to belittle my fellow Christians’ spiritual lives (although, unfortunately, I recognize that someone will probably feel belittled and ridiculed, but that’s not my intention, for what it’s worth). I say it because it’s true: imaginary friends, as we know, are a very real psychological phenomenon, and they seem quite vivid and real to the people who have them, and are sometimes indistinguishable from actual people. But, they exist solely in the mind of the person, and solely for the purpose of helping that person manage their own perceptions and anxieties and to reconcile internal conflicts. Likewise, the “God” to whom many people pray is nothing more than a psychological construct that has no more connection to the God of Jesus Christ than an imaginary friend has with living, breathing people. The “God” to whom they pray is nothing but a deified projection of their own affections, fears, preferences, prejudices, and cultural conventions, and that’s why many apparently devout and sincere Christians are often able to say, do, and pray for horrible, indefensible things with the full, enthusiastic approval of their consciences. (By the way, my “‘God’-as-Imaginary Friend”-charge is nothing new or unique. The prophets called people on the same shenanigans centuries ago.)     

Finally, Jesus is rarely, if ever, our “Lord and Savior” in any practical sense when we gather for our potlucks, hiking trips, and Superbowl watch-parties. The term we use for such outings is “fellowship,” but our identification as fellow Christians is really incidental to that fellowship, for the most part. Rather, it’s our common interest in football, the outdoors, scrapbooking, or whatever else we’re into that makes us fellows; and other Christians with pious zeal equal to our own, but who don’t share those interests, would be completely out of place in our gatherings. In that regard, then, Jesus isn’t Lord and Savior—he’s just our mascot, and for our purposes, any other mascot would serve just as well… except that we want to imbue our socializing with that sacred patina which makes our culture so much better than others.  

For the most part, though, I think we’d all agree that there’s nothing wrong with having and meeting these needs. There is nothing inherently wrong with Christians watching the Superbowl together or sharing other common interests. We need our social support networks. We need culture and identity and social validation. It’s no more sinful to fulfill these needs than it was sinful for people to eat the free bread Jesus gave them.

But, like the people who hailed Jesus as the Messiah simply because he fed them, Christians will readily affirm the truth of Christianity because it effectively meets all of these needs—because, as far as they can tell, Christianity works.

Except, it hardly needs to be true for it to meet those needs, any more than Mormonism or Islam or Wicca need to be true to meet their devotees’ social, cultural, and psychological needs. And so it’s no wonder that we don’t bother to teach anybody why it’s true.

And, while having and meeting those needs isn’t inherently wrong, isn’t it the very definition of “sin” to put lesser needs ahead of greater needs? Sin, after all, is rarely overtly malevolent. More often, it’s a matter of misplaced priority.

Sex, for example, in and of itself, isn’t wrong. It’s moral and good. Our species would die out if we stopped doing it. But, sex at the expense of human dignity or marital fidelity or love is an abomination leading to exploitation, poverty, and suffering. Feasting and celebrating are, in themselves, right and good, but doing so in the midst of starving, needy people is evil. The scripture tells us that God gave alcohol to “gladden the heart of man,” but it’s a sinful abuse of His gift to drink to excess at the expense of our families, livelihoods, or ability to function. 

Likewise, the needs currently met by cultural Christianity are legitimate needs… except that we’re meeting them at the expense of what Jesus really came to give us.

“But that’s how we get people’s attention and bring them to the love of Jesus, just like he did when he fed the five-thousand,” someone will object.

Except we’re not.

You know that whole “city on a hill”/“light of the world”/“salt of the earth”-thing we find in scripture to describe Jesus’ followers?

What all that translates to mean is that we’re not supposed to be like the rest of humanity. The world is covered in darkness, we read, but we’re the light. We’re supposed to live by a better, higher standard. There is supposed to be a profound and conspicuous change for the better in our outward behavior when we become Christians. We’re not supposed to live like mere men.  

It’s not something we do in exchange for eternal life, though; and it doesn’t happen because we’re so profoundly grateful for eternal life that we’re suddenly willing to grit our teeth and muster the moral willpower to be better people.

No—the change in behavior is our eternal life. The “eternal life” we’re given is God’s own Life. The internal transformation works itself out in our external behavior because, as God’s children, our behavior no longer arises only from our fallen, sinful nature, but from His Nature as well (hence the “third helix” of the title of this blog).

That’s how the whole “Body of Christ”-thing is supposed to work. Paul summed up the “mystery of the gospel” as simply “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” because with Christ’s Life within us, we are, for all intents and purposes, the Messiah. We are God’s temple, His very Presence on earth, and as such, we are, collectively, His active Agent for saving the rest of humanity. Jesus’ ministry of saving the world by advancing God’s kingdom on earth didn’t end with his death, resurrection, and ascension, but continued with the apostles, then with the Church Fathers and their followers, and eventually with us.

That’s what Jesus meant when he said, instead of coming to him for “food that spoils” (i.e., the gratification of earthly needs), we are to “eat his flesh” and “drink his blood.” The same way we transform our food into the material of our flesh, we are to integrate his Life into ourselves, and that’s how we transform into the likeness of Christ.

By now, if you’re a regular churchgoer reading this, your eyes might be starting to glaze over, because you’ve already heard all this. All of this stuff gets plenty of honorable mention on Sunday mornings and on Christian radio, so it might sound like I’m affirming or regurgitating everything you’ve heard before.

We talk about all this stuff regularly enough, but there is no evidence whatsoever that any of it is actually happening. As I’ve discussed at length previously, all of the observable facts testify to the sad reality that we don’t actually live our lives any differently than non-Christians. Sure, there are plenty of cosmetic and cultural differences to suggest, at first glance, that there is a change, but in the ways that actually count—when it comes to the spiritual health of our families, the strength of our marriages, and the depth of our love for our fellow man, or any other measurement of our actual behavior—there is no discernible difference whatsoever. Our reasons for believing in our religion are no different than the rest of the world’s reasons for holding to their respective religions, and the outcome of our religion is also no different or better than theirs.  

If a tree is to be judged by its fruit, then our tree isn’t any better than our unbelieving neighbors,’ because the only fruit we bear differently is found in our excuses: “Christians Aren’t Perfect, Just Forgiven…” reads a popular slogan merchandisers like to print on t-shirts and bumper stickers. Not that sinless perfection is a realistic goal (nor is that even the point), but we all know we’re not supposed to be “just forgiven.” Or we should all know. Everything we read about the Christian life in the New Testament tells us that our faith is supposed to make us better people, but it’s painfully obvious that we’re not.

The reason for that, if it isn’t obvious by now, is that the “gospel” we commonly preach has no real power to save or transform. Its only power is illusory and destructive. It’s nothing but a Jedi mind trick to justify and preserve the status quo in which our earthly psychological, social, and cultural needs are met while our real need—our spiritual need for rebirth and transformation—is not. The popular “gospel” is illusory because it’s simply not true, but it’s destructive because it doesn’t just not save: it stands in the way of salvation.  

The “gospel” we commonly preach has it that simply by believing (rendering intellectual assent to a doctrinal position), a person is justified and saved to eternal life… and that’s all there is to it. If you believe in Jesus, you are made right with God and need not concern yourself beyond that, because the transformation we read about in scripture will happen automatically, if you have the right beliefs. Our “gospel” has it that holding the correct doctrine of spiritual rebirth is one and the same thing as undergoing the reality of spiritual rebirth.

This “gospel” effectively reduces the entire teaching of scripture to the doctrine of the Atonement, to the practical exclusion of all else: because Jesus died for our sins, we’re thereby Justified, and there’s nothing more to it. All we need do is believe. If you believe in the Atonement—really, really believe, the rest will take care of itself.

This “gospel” is repeated over and over and over again in virtually every sermon and worship song we hear throughout our lives. It’s taken for granted in every popular Christian book and in all of our conversation and ministry efforts. All of our social pressure is directed to impressing this upon each other and upon the world.

Consequently, it’s all we’re capable of seeing, and we’re blind to anything else: Jesus died for you. Just believe that, because all else is extraneous detail. Don’t do anything else. All else is “works-based salvation” and therefore a denial of God’s grace.

So when we read the Bible on our own, we’re conditioned to project that “gospel” into it and then feed it back to ourselves, thereby reinforcing our conviction that we believe it because it’s what the Bible teaches.  

What the Scripture actually teaches, though, is that the Atonement—while absolute in importance—is not all-encompassing. The Atonement is but one facet of a larger economy of salvation, which means that simply believing Christ died for us, in and of itself, avails us nothing. We must identify with him in his death. In a sense, we have to die with Christ in order to join him in his resurrection, by integrating his Risen Life into ourselves. We must deny ourselves, take up our cross daily to be crucified with him and follow him in death, and only then can we follow him in resurrection.

The technical theological terms for these two aspects of salvation—our death and life in Christ—are kenosis and theosis, respectively.

The former comes from Philippians 2:7 and is the word used for Christ’s act of “self-emptying” when he set aside his divine prerogative and submitted to death. We identify with him in his death, Paul wrote, when we undertake our own self-emptying by “putting to death” the behaviors and attitudes of our sinful nature. This is the yin-aspect to the yang of theosis, which is the term used to describe our maturation in the Divine Nature (not to be confused with apotheosis, which is the term for the ancient belief that pharaohs, emperors, and heroes of renown ascended to godhood in death).  

Kenosis and theosis are the two different sides to the coin of salvation. They’re not optional to salvation—they’re not part of the “deluxe package” of salvation for super-saints and missionaries and other “professional Christians,” nor are they something we do in exchange for salvation, because they are salvation. If you’re not undergoing kenosis and theosis, then you don’t have “salvation” in any sense taught by Jesus and the apostles.

Our popular “gospel” has it that this process happens automatically, apart from any effort or initiative or attention on our part. It’s popularly taught that once a person is justified by belief, the outcome is guaranteed by God’s grace.

That’s the meaning we typically project upon passages like 2 Peter 1:3,4, which reads: “His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through our knowledge (Greek epignosis) of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence, and 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 that is in the world because of human appetite.”

See? There it is! The “gospel,” as it’s commonly taught dovetails perfectly into the apostle’s teaching that God has already “given us everything needed.” All we need for that life and godliness is to believe, and once we have that belief, life and godliness take care of themselves, completely by God’s grace—by His “very great and precious promises”—so that we can neither add to nor take anything away from that. It’s all God. And if we think otherwise, then we’re just being self-righteous or trying to earn our salvation.

Except, that couldn’t possibly be what Peter actually meant by that passage, because his instruction in the verses immediately following it plainly and unambiguously teach the precise opposite (2 Peter 1:5-9): “For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith excellence, to excellence knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly-kindness, and to brotherly-kindness, 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 if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.”  

For the very reason that God has given us everything needed through His promises so that we can participate in His very Nature, the apostle instructed us to make every effort to add to our faith those qualities consistent with His Nature.

So, yes—it’s absolutely correct that “it’s all God,” because it’s only by His grace in implanting His Nature within us that we can make the effort to which Peter exhorts us. We receive the Divine Nature at the point of Justification and Rebirth, and so we do receive “everything needed for life and godliness,” but we receive it in seed form, just as we do our mortal DNA, and it falls to us to cultivate it and to bring it to fruition just as we do with the genetic potential we inherit from our mortal parents, hence Peter’s counsel to make every effort to do so, and Paul’s innumerable exhortations to discipline and “the divine training.”

That, of course, is why the Church exists… or is supposed to exist: to pass on the Divine Nature through the carrying-out of the Great Commission, and then to cultivate it and bring it to maturity through the administration of the sacraments and by mentoring believers in the spiritual disciplines, training them also to pass it on and to mentor others.  

Yes, we’re saved by grace, through faith, but faith isn’t just belief. Faith is trust, and the extent to which we trust Him—the extent to which our confidence is truly in Him- is the extent to which we do what He says and heed the instructions of His spokesmen and representatives, the apostles and prophets.

In other words, faith means making every effort toward kenosis and theosis, as Peter instructed.

Faith is not a once-for-all, momentary transaction, but something that has to be protected and cultivated and preserved against destructive influences—having genuine faith one day is no guarantee of having it every day hence. It must be maintained. That, in fact, is the entire, essential message of the book of Hebrews.  

Tellingly, when we read the infamous “problem passage” of Hebrews 5:11-6:12, it isn’t any heinous crime of sexual immorality or idolatry that prompts the warning against “falling away” and the potential loss of salvation, but their lazy, superficial piety and their growing complacency. Their lack of interest indicated a deeper degradation of their faith, and so it was their neglect and failure to learn and mature which threatened to endanger them, not any overt sin.

But, virtually every institution of Christianity we know teaches and operates according to a “gospel” which insists that grace precludes effort, and that any such effort would be sinful, even.

It tells us that if we merely believe, we can safely put questions of God and the afterlife behind us while we put Christianity and the Bible to use as vehicles to serve our worldly interests and to meet our earthly needs, and we count ourselves “saved” if our social lives and political opinions have the church’s stamp of approval.

So when we come across passages in the Bible like Peter’s instruction to “make every effort,” we qualify it to the point that it’s utterly meaningless, then downplay it, or just ignore it entirely. We make that effort optional to salvation: we don’t actually have to make that effort, we tell ourselves and each other. That’s just if we want to be effective and productive in our knowledge of Jesus Christ. And being effective and productive are completely optional. Sure, we might wind up nearsighted and blind and forget that we’ve been cleansed from our past sins, but that’s still cool. As long as we really, really believed at some point, we’re still saved, right? The divine hand-stamp that gets us into heaven doesn’t wash-off, does it?

If we continue through Peter’s epistle to the next chapter, we’ll read about those who have “escaped the corruption of the world through their knowledge (again, from the Greek epignosis) of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome,” who are then “worse off at the end than they were at the beginning,” and that “it would have been better for them not to have known (epiginosko) 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.”   

The meaning of this passage (and multiple other passages like it) is plain, unambiguous, and clear, especially when we consider it in light of the opening passage of Peter’s letter: he wrote that it is through knowledge of the One who called us by His own glory and excellence that we receive the promises through which we may participate in the Divine Nature and escape the corruption of the world (theosis and kenosis).

The word for “knowledge” in that first passage is epignosis from “epi-”, meaning “at” or “upon,” which intensifies the “gnosis,” meaning “knowledge.” Some translators render it “true knowledge,” and in virtually every appearance of the word in the New Testament, whenever it’s used with regard to a person’s knowledge of God or of Christ, it explicitly accompanies salvation.

The same word is used for the knowledge by which the people described in the later passage escaped the corruption of the world, only to be entangled in it again and overcome. Peter did not use the basic word gnosis, which could be interpreted as a general, merely academic knowledge of Jesus Christ. He used epignosis, which goes beyond general knowledge to intimate and personal experiential knowledge of God and Christ, which is the knowledge that is eternal life.

But we can’t accept the plain meaning of this passage within the model of salvation offered by our popular “gospel.” So, we lawyer it: we look for wiggle-room to qualify it somehow and to twist the meaning to say that they didn’t really, really know Him, and so “they were never really saved to begin with.” And so we feel safe in our complacency and passivity and in the assurance that we can live however we please and presume upon His forgiveness and look forward to a trouble-free afterlife, and it’s as if Peter and the others never wrote any warnings to Christians at all…  

If that’s the case, though, why would they be worse off than if they had never known (epiginosko) the way of righteousness to begin with? Why would they be worse off at the end than they were at the beginning? If they were never really saved to begin with, then what would they have actually lost? Wouldn’t the potential still remain for them to be saved for real one day?

It doesn’t really matter what arguments we bring to the discussion, though. The innumerable passages that explicitly refute our popular paradigm of salvation are already plain enough without me or anybody else having to spell out their meaning, and if people are willing to resort to the aforementioned cognitive dissonance and hermeneutic gymnastics in the first place, they’ll just keep right on tumbling and contorting when we press them on it…

Consequently, we don’t, collectively, heed the apostles’ exhortations toward discipline and effort. We don’t pursue holiness and participation in the Divine Nature as necessities. And so we don’t undertake the dual processes of kenosis and theosis, and so we don’t undergo the transformation described in scripture that characterized the early Church and should characterize us, and so we don’t actually live any differently than we would if we had never even heard of Jesus Christ, and so we don’t function as the “Body of Christ” to carry-out our God-given mission to save the world.

We have a hollow, dead, and withered husk of Christianity with none of the Life we were promised, because we refuse to accept the actual terms of that promise. Instead, we project our own promises in their place, and if they’re promises God actually made, we strip them of His conditions. As a result, our “evangelism” amounts to nothing but self-serving propaganda, our “discipleship” is nothing but pop-psychology self-help couched in pious rhetoric, and our outreach ministries are all-too-often just another pretense to serve our collective habit of playing “Christian.”

And when we’re confronted by the fruits of this caricature of Christianity that we practice, we take refuge in the security supposedly offered by our “gospel,” expressed in pithy slogans like, “Christians Aren’t Perfect; Just Forgiven…” And we continue to uphold the status quo of popular Christianity because it meets our needs and we don’t want to risk that by rocking the boat.

We are in the exact same state of denial and self-delusion as the people of Judah thousands of years ago. Upon being confronted by the prophet Jeremiah for the fact that they lived no differently than their godless, idol-worshipping neighbors, they resorted to the same hermeneutic gymnastics we do by taking refuge in the security they believed they had in their religion.

So the prophet stood at the gates of the temple and proclaimed, “This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Reform your ways and your deeds, and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say, ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!’”

As we know, they rejected his warning, and God sent the Babylonians to destroy the very temple in which they sought their license to ignore Him.

The same pattern repeated itself in the days of Jesus when they rejected their Messiah in favor of their religion, and the temple and the nation were destroyed yet again, this time by the Romans.

For any Christians reading this, our cultural conditioning is likely to assert itself at this point and we’ll want to make ourselves feel safe by the objection, “But that was the old covenant…!” Under the new covenant (it is commonly taught), God never ever punishes us or gets angry, and we’re guaranteed a free pass: “The gospel of the Lord, the gospel of the Lord, the gospel of the Lord!” we’ll protest.

Yet, the apostle Paul referenced such episodes in his warnings to Christians, and he offered no qualification when he did so: “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, upon whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!” he wrote.

Regarding the people of Israel’s most recent estrangement from God, he wrote, “They were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but be afraid. For if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you either. Consider, therefore, the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided you continue in His kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off.”

Writing to Christians—sincere Christians whose faith was renowned throughout the known world, no less—Paul told them to be afraid.

And so should we be afraid, because we are no different than the crowds of half-hearted enthusiasts who readily acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah… but only because their stomachs told them to, while they were completely oblivious to the needs of the spirit, because their institutions promised that those needs were already met.

Just like them, we stand in danger of losing our “temple,” so to speak.

I don’t know if God plans to send an invading army to raze our megachurches to the ground and scatter our population as He did with the Jews, though. That isn’t to say with any certainty that He won’t, but if that’s His plan, He hasn’t included me in that loop (maybe Pat Robertson knows something I don’t, though…).

But, Christianity has been in steep, steady decline in recent decades, and at the rate we’re going, it’s questionable if it will even exist on this continent within a generation or two.

I think that’s largely because people are catching on to the fact that in its current configuration, Christianity doesn’t offer anything that can’t be found just as easily by joining a bowling league or by looking to sci-fi and fantasy for “spirituality” and identity. People are catching on to the fact that all we’ve been offering, for the most part, is smoke and mirrors and man-made convention, and if that’s the case, any man-made convention will do.  

But—also just like the Israelites and the Jews—we don’t have to lose our place or have our temple destroyed. We can repent. We can be restored.

I hope it’s clear by now, though, that our restoration won’t come just through a few minor tweakages, like teaching better apologetics and chucking “Once Saved, Always Saved”…

Those two steps would bring certain improvements, but the errors that would correct in our present configuration are only symptoms of our deeper problem, which is that our “gospel” offers only “food that spoils,” with little to none of the “food that endures to eternal life.”

Individual tweakages won’t correct that. Instead of waiting for God’s judgment through the destruction of our “temple,” we need to tear it down ourselves so that we can rebuild it from the ground up.

In other words, our entire paradigm of “Christianity” and “religion” needs to be destroyed, overhauled, and reinvented.

And, on some level, we already know this. Or, at least, we know that there is something profoundly wrong with “Christianity” as we know it, as evidenced by the endless supply of new books competing for space on the shelves of the Religion-section of any given retail bookstore, all offering different and conflicting ideas on what’s wrong with American Christianity and how to fix it. The Emergent Church-movement, for all of its faults, is an encouraging testament to the fact that we at least acknowledge that there is a problem.

It seems that we’re constantly praying for, preaching, and writing about our need for revival, yet it never really comes.

And, I don’t expect that it will. At least, not the way we’re going about it. The fact that we expect it to, though, I think, is another symptom of our ailment.

We’re conditioned by our popular “gospel” to believe that whatever it is God intends for us, we should sit back and wait for it, and when it comes, it will come packaged in sermon-form so that we can passively accept it from the security of our pew with the safe assurance of our leaders’ and peers’ approval.

To be fair, though, it isn’t just our “gospel” to blame. It’s our entire way of life. As a nation, we wage war through a television screen, and we bear witness to social upheaval and to the bloody rise and fall of nations from the safety and comfort of our living rooms. Our political activism amounts to clicking on “Like” and “Share” buttons.

I don’t write this in the interest of fault-finding, though (I watch TV news and share FB posts, too). I only write it as a caution against merely agreeing with me (which I would assume you do, to some degree, if you’re still reading), but doing nothing about it.

The revolution for which we hope will not come to us. We can’t expect our pastors and leaders to just wake up and see the light one day as we sit idly in our pews, tacitly supporting them by our silent, compliant acceptance of whatever they happen to offer on Sunday morning.

As the man said, “The revolution will not be televised.” If we want change to happen, we’ll have to get off our asses. We can’t be spectators; we have to get in the game.

“So, how do we do that? What do we do?” would be the logical next set of questions.

To be honest… I wish I knew.

I actually started writing this blog entry weeks ago, and every time I’ve come back to this section, I’ve been at a loss. I’ve actually written, like, six different conclusions to this, but none of them seem adequate. The fact is, apart from spreading awareness about the problem, I don’t know what to do, so I don’t know what, specifically, to advise others to do…

I think I know what it would look like after the revolution happens, though. I couldn’t begin to paint a comprehensive picture of what a healthy and fully-functional 21^st-century version of the Church would look like (and I wouldn’t expect anybody to read all of that at once, anyway), but I think I can provide a glimpse—appropriately enough—through the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

Of course, we have this ritual we call “Communion” or “the Lord’s Supper,” by which we satisfy ourselves that we’ve heeded Jesus’ instruction to “eat his flesh” and “drink his blood.”

I think it bears more resemblance to a pagan ritual of sympathetic magic than it does to anything that would be recognizable to the Christians who originally observed the sacrament, though. 

Sympathetic magic operates on the belief that ceremonial objects bear a mystical correspondence to items, persons, or forces beyond the ritual itself, so that by manipulating the objects within the ritual, a magician thereby manipulates whatever it is the objects are believed to represent. A voodoo doll would be a classic example: if you poke the doll with a needle, it’s supposed to harm the person the doll represents. Another example would be the shrine prostitution practiced by ancient worshipers of Baal and Ashtoreth, but… well, you’ll just have to look that up yourself if you really want to know. Make sure there are no minors near your computer when you do, though.

The doctrine of transubstantiation is essentially a practice of sympathetic magic: by uttering an incantation over the wine and wafers, a priest is believed to be able to call the body and blood of Christ down from heaven to mystically transform the substance of the elements, so that consuming them is literally the same as to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ.

Not every church subscribes to the doctrine of transubstantiation, but the ritual order of the Communion service is basically the same between those that do and those that don’t, and the significance is essentially the same either way: to undergo this ritual, Christians believe, is what it means to obey Christ’s instruction to “eat his flesh” and “drink his blood.”

Personally, I’m ambivalent and conflicted about this. At the moment, I’m straddling the fence between rejecting it outright as a legalistic falsehood that degrades the very concept of Communion, or continuing to practice it as something at least partially good, but just not fully what was intended. I haven’t decided yet. Maybe writing this out will help me crystallize my thoughts on it.  

A couple of months ago I went to lunch with a longtime friend after church, where, incidentally, they did a Communion service. I mean, the Communion service was incidental to our lunch; not that it was entirely incidental to what I’m writing…

While we were eating and we talked about the church service we’d just attended, I mentioned a particular practice of this church to which I take strong exception (it wasn’t their take on Communion, incidentally, but for our purposes, it doesn’t matter what it was).

Now, my friend and I see eye-to-eye on most things, but this wasn’t one of those things. He declared that he “liked” this practice, and believed it to be “good” and “biblical.”

This might be considered rude on my part if it hadn’t been with a longtime friend, but I disputed the practice in question because I thought it neither justifiable in scripture, nor anything less than destructive to the purpose of the correct practice that should be observed in its place.

To that, my friend merely shrugged and answered, “And you are welcome to think that…”

That was the end of our discussion on the matter. After a brief, uncomfortable pause, we went on to banter about girls or superhero movies or some other trivia, but the matter of our doctrinal difference was not revisited.

He’d made it clear that it wasn’t open for discussion, and that he cared neither for my thoughts on why it was wrong, nor for any questions I had about why he thought it right. He liked it, wanted to believe in it, and that was all there was to it. End of discussion.

Of course, we’ve all had conversations like that, so I’m sure none of that sounds like a big deal, so you might be wondering why I’d bother telling you about it.

Well, it wasn’t that my feelings were hurt… although I am a pretty sensitive, emotionally-attuned guy, so I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little put off by it (I’m the manly sensitive –type, though…). But, that’s not really the point.

The point is that we were two Christians who had just taken Communion service but, in that moment, couldn’t talk about Christianity with each other.

And, that’s problematic, especially when we consider the Communion ritual as it was originally observed.

As it was originally practiced, it was not a massive, impersonal ritual in which strangers lined up for a nibble of cracker and a thimble of grape juice to swallow after a few seconds of private contemplation.

No, it was a full-course fellowship meal. It was Christians sitting down to feast together.

Paul said that it was observed in an “unworthy manner” if there was disunity and selfishness among the people in attendance. A man was to “examine himself” and “recognize the body of the Lord” before partaking.

I don’t think that meant, necessarily, that you have make sure you feel sorry for your sins before you partake. It meant that you recognize the body of the Lord—in the bread and wine, and in the Christians sitting at the table with you. The “body of Christ,” after all, wasn’t only present in the bread, but in the people of the Church, and a person “eats his flesh” and “drinks his blood” by partaking of the fellowship of those who belong to Christ, more so, even, than by the bread and wine. The bread and wine are taken as part of the meal, as reminders that “this is who we are,” “this is why we are here.”

The bread and wine—his body and blood—are to remind us that we are not our own, but belong to each other. None of us has the right to believe what we want, because we are not our own, and if personal preference was our doorway into “Christianity,” then we’re not really practicing Christianity.

The word “heresy,” after all (from the Greek hairesis), literally translates as “that which is chosen” or “that which is preferred.” Heresy and opinion are synonymous. “Heresy” isn’t necessarily “false doctrine,” per se, but the muddling of truth with personal interpretation and opinion. That was what Peter condemned before his warning about falling prey to the entanglements of the world again… which is what happens when we forget that faith means conforming ourselves to God’s truth, not the other way around.

Before our fellow man, yes—we have a legal, social, and cultural right to our own beliefs, and nobody has any right to impose anything upon us. But before God? No, we only have a right to believe what is true—what we can honestly justify before Him, with the faculties He has given us. And, by extension, we have no right before our fellow Christians to believe anything but what is true, because He is present to us through one another.

The resurrection—as a rational, objective, and knowable fact—is the foundation, the touchstone, of everything it means to be “Christian.” It can be shared and communicated because it’s objective, because it happened within concrete reality. It can be justified by reason, in other words.

Faith, then, is what it means to “make every effort,” as Peter said, to integrate the truth of the resurrection into our lives, and that effort is so monumental and consuming that no individual person can undertake it alone. That’s why we have the Lord’s Supper as a way to do that: we come together in fellowship, recognized and reinforced through the bread and wine, to help one another to participate and grow in the New Life, largely by keeping each other honest and accountable.

So, when my friend declared simply that he believed what he believed because he liked it, it was a denial of that process.

And, to be fair, it’s entirely possible that I denied that process somehow by the way that I brought it up. I can be hard to get along with sometimes. I get that.

Whoever’s fault it was, though—there was a barrier between us because of it. Whatever “fellowship” we had after that exchange was not Christian fellowship, because our common belonging to Christ had nothing to do with what followed. Whatever food we ate in that moment wasn’t the Bread of Life offered by our Lord, but merely food that spoils.