Going from Montana to Georgia for a concert might sound like a lot, especially since the tour also stops in Denver and Salt Lake. But we wanted to skip the Ticketmaster headaches, and Atlanta is special to both of us. We each lived there years ago, before we met. I also grew up as a Braves fan, watching games for 30 years and sticking with them through everything. I’d been to Turner Field, but never to Truist Park.

We also got lucky because a Braves staff member we know gave us floor wristbands.

When Noah started the first song, we stood in right field, on the same grass where Acuña plays. You could feel the excitement in the air. I’ll admit, I sang along to almost every word.

Then he played “The View Between Villages.”

That song meant something new to me on my birthday in 2025. I was back in Virginia, the town I left what feels like ages ago. I had just lost my father-in-law, and my in-laws’ house was about 45 minutes from my mom’s, where I spent 20 years growing up. Driving back from lunch on the interstate, the lyrics hit me:

“A minute from home, but I’m so far from it.”

And

“The things that I lost here, the people I knew

They got me surrounded for a mile or two”

Nothing in Hampton Roads would ever be the same again. Not the roads, not those two houses.

During “All My Love,” I noticed something.

This was a worship service. I was part of it, singing the chorus back to the man on stage in a sold-out stadium.

When I stopped singing for a moment and listened to the crowd, I felt grieved that I was complicit, knowing I was part of it. Still, I kept singing, and I loved every second.

The Man Who Keeps Telling Us He’s Ordinary

You’ve probably been somewhere like that, even if you’ve never been to a stadium show. Maybe it was in a gym at a youth conference, a bar at last call when the right song played, or a funeral where the singing took over. There’s a moment when a crowd stops consuming something and starts submitting to it, and you can feel the change before you can explain it.

What makes last week’s concert hard to describe is that the man on stage has spent three years trying to avoid this exact thing.

Kahan started The Busyhead Project in 2023, named after his first album, and it has raised more than $6.6 million for roughly 170 community mental health organizations. In April, he released a documentary on Netflix called Out of Body, and it is not a victory lap — Brian Tallerico’s review at RogerEbert.com called it “not a typical hagiographic music doc.”1 He talks about depression, body dysmorphia, and about a mirror that reports back a man nobody else can see. You can see the guilt as he talks about mining his own family’s worst years for material.

He isn’t trying to make himself a hero. Instead, he’s been honest about how hard it is to be put on a pedestal.

So I can’t write the easy version of this essay. I can’t claim a famous person was exposed as a false prophet, because for three years he’s told us he’s just a guy from Strafford, Vermont, with his own struggles and a good band. He’s said it in interviews, liner notes, and a 95-minute film. He’s been as clear as anyone could be.

We just kept singing.

What stood out even more was that Gigi Perez opened for him that night. Before her set ended, she talked about how Noah’s music helped her through a tough time when she needed something to hold onto. She said his songs got her through dark days and helped her keep going. Now, opening for him felt surreal, and her words touched the audience.

I learned something later that I’m not sure the rest of the crowd knew. Perez grew up in church. Her older sister Celene died in 2020 at age twenty-two, and Perez has said her grief, her faith, and her religion are all mixed together in a way she can’t separate. Her breakout song is about that struggle. It includes a line that made some conservative Christians online ask her to change it, but she refused, saying songwriting isn’t a democracy.

I don’t believe in God, but I believe that you’re my savior

Read it again and notice what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t get rid of the position of a savior. It fills it.

That’s the part I keep thinking about. Everyone at Truist Park would have said they came for a concert. But forty thousand of us stood in the humid air for two hours, arms raised, singing about being unwell to a man who wrote those words because he was unwell. It felt like all that energy was going somewhere.

There’s a scene in Acts where this exact thing happens, and the two men at the center of it tear their clothes trying to stop it.

Two Men Who Tore Their Clothes

Sometime in the late 40s A.D., in a hill town in what’s now south-central Turkey, Paul healed a man who had never walked. The crowd erupted. And because they erupted in Lycaonian, Paul and Barnabas had no idea what was happening.

Luke mentions the language for a reason; if a group was freaking out on you in a foreign language, it’d be a pretty important detail to you. The two men at the center of this religious event couldn’t understand what was happening around them. Because of the local language, plans to honor them as gods went much further before either apostle realized it.2 By the time they figured out what was going on, the priest of Zeus was already at the gates with oxen and garlands.

The Lystrans weren’t being stupid, which is an easy conclusion to reach. Their region carried a story: Zeus and Hermes had passed through once before, disguised, looking for a bed, and the one couple who took them in got a temple out of it while the neighbors who turned them away got a flood.3 Lystra had a cultural memory of a divine visitation that almost everybody missed, and of what happened to the ones who missed it. When archaeologists dug near Lystra in 1926, they found a stone altar dedicated jointly to Zeus and to Hermes.4 The infrastructure was already poured. The crowd wasn’t inventing a category that day, but instead living in one they had already that hadn’t been filled with anything in a long time.

I keep coming back to one way of reading this scene. The Lystrans didn’t lack information. God was revealing himself right in front of them. But they filtered that experience through a way of thinking that couldn’t accept it. Johnson calls this a functional theology.5 Theirs worked perfectly, but it just wasn’t based on anything true.

Paul and Barnabas tear their clothes. In Scripture, that gesture either signals grief, or it signals that you’ve just heard blasphemy. Here, it does both at once. Then they do something stranger than protesting. They run into the crowd, toward the people trying to worship them. “We are people also, just like you,” Paul says (Acts 14:15, CSB).

What Paul and Barnabas say next changes how we see the whole scene. They don’t just refuse the worship; they redirect it. They point to rain from heaven, fruitful seasons, food, and joyful hearts (14:17). God had been showing himself in their weather and meals all along. Paul never says their longing was false. He says it was aimed at the wrong place.

Then, a handful of verses later, the same crowd stones him. Huh?

Luke says outsiders, men from Antioch and Iconium, came and turned the crowd against Paul (14:19). That’s part of the story. But some believe there’s more to it. The Lystrans felt embarrassed, and people who feel foolish often turn angry.6 That’s just a guess, but I think it fits.

Either way, the sequence stands as written. The men who refused to be gods were dragged out of town and left for dead by the same people who had wanted to sacrifice to them, and Paul carried the scars for the rest of his life (2 Cor 11:25; Gal 6:17). Garlands, then stones.

The Other Man

Two chapters earlier, Luke shows us the alternative.

Herod Agrippa puts on his robes, takes his seat, and gives a speech. The crowd shouts that this is the voice of a god and not of a man (Acts 12:22). The historian Josephus supplies the detail that the robes were silver and caught the morning sun.7 Herod says nothing. And then he is struck down, because, Luke tells us, he did not give the glory to God (12:23).

The worms have turned this into a Sunday school horror story, which is a shame, because the Greek may be saying something quieter and even more unsettling. In commenting on this passage, Jame Hamilton notes the phrase can be read as saying Herod died and became food for worms, just like every mortal does, and that the ESV’s connective is a defensible interpretive addition rather than a certainty.8 Either reading works for us. The man a crowd called a god turned out to be just as mortal as everyone else.

Hamilton also flags that the contrast with Lystra is impossible to miss, and he’s right.9 Two men handed divinity, and two answers. Herod accepted it, and it killed him. Paul and Barnabas refused it, and the crowd tried to kill them. Nobody in this story survives being worshipped.

Reading Truist Park Through Lystra

This is where Redemptive Correlation comes in, and the direction matters more than anything else in this essay. I’m not asking what a sold-out stadium can teach us about worship. I’m asking what Scripture says a sold-out stadium is. Bonhoeffer put it in one sentence: theological thought moves from God to reality, not from reality to God.10 Lystra isn’t just an example I used to explain Monday night. Lystra is the diagnosis. Monday night is the case.

Creation. The capacity that filled Truist Park isn’t a mistake. Humans are made to aim at something. The Lystran instinct to fall down in front of something that healed a man was the right instinct, just running on the wrong information. Worship is built into every person and culture. It’s standard equipment, and it doesn’t turn off when belief does.

Fall. Paul says we traded the truth of God for a lie and worshipped what was made instead of the one who made it (Rom 1:25). The action never changes, but the object does. Last week I wrote about a nation making that swap with a flag. On Monday I did it with a setlist. The Fall gave us a world where people worship each other, which is how a guy from Strafford, Vermont, who made a documentary about his own body dysmorphia, ends up carrying 40,000 people’s need to be saved without ever asking for it.

Redemption. Every rumor in Lystra was really about one thing: gods coming down looking like people. They had the shape and hints of the gospel, but none of its content. Then someone actually came down, and the details matter. Jesus accepts worship because he is God, and he never tore his clothes when someone fell at his feet. What he refused was the crowd’s version of the crown. When they tried to make him king by force, he left (John 6:15). When they finally crowned him, they used thorns. He is the only one who can take in what that stadium was doing and not be crushed by it.

Restoration. At the very end of the Bible, John falls down at an angel’s feet and is told to get up and worship God instead (Rev 22:8–9). John. In the last chapter. Still getting it wrong. Still being corrected. The sorting isn’t finished, and it was never ours to finish. The end of the story is a room louder than any stadium, focused on the one voice that can hold it, and not one person in that room is being overwhelmed by the singing.

Name Your Room

You weren’t in right field on Monday. But you can name your room.

Not the obvious one. You already know to be wary of stadiums. I’m asking about the voice you’ve quietly given the final word: the podcast that got you through your hardest year, the author whose books you’d defend faster than your own pastor, the counselor who said the one thing that changed you, the man on the platform in your own church on Sunday morning.

The test isn’t whether you worship them, because nobody would say yes to that. The real test is what you feel when someone criticizes them. If the critique hits you before you even think about what you believe, you’ve found the altar. You built it. You know exactly where it is.

And you’re on the receiving end of this too. Someone has quietly put more on you than you can handle: a kid, a younger believer, someone in your small group who thinks you have it all figured out. You know they’ve done it, but you’ve never corrected them. Herod didn’t correct anyone either.

Read the charge against him again. He didn’t claim to be divine. He just accepted it in silence, and Luke says he didn’t give God the glory. His sin wasn’t what he said. It was the silence where he should have spoken up.

The correction, when it comes, isn’t about looking down on the venue. Paul never told the Lystrans their hunger was embarrassing. Instead, he told them it was aimed in the wrong direction, and then he pointed to rain, harvests, and full stomachs—the evidence that had been in front of them all along. You can do that. It’s slower than just giving an opinion, and it costs a lot more.

And it will make you look like Paul did: a grown man tearing his own clothes in public while everyone else is just having a good time.

That’s what made me pause in right field. I didn’t want to ruin the night. I’d waited months for that show, and I wasn’t going to be the guy who turned to his wife in the middle of “All My Love” and said, do you hear what this is.

So I sang. I loved it. And I didn’t say a word.

You’ll find yourself in a moment like that before the month is over. You’ll feel it. The only question is whether you’ll say something out loud, or do what I did.

What We’re Practicing On

Nothing was wrong with Truist Park.

Forty thousand people stood in the heat on a Monday night and gave something their full attention. They sang about depression, divorce, and small towns without hesitation, and they did it next to strangers. They knew every word. They wept in front of people they’d never met. That’s not a culture that forgot how to worship, but one that never stopped, doing it beautifully, for a man who has been saying for three years that he can’t carry it.

The Lystrans were half right. Something worth falling down for really had shown up. They just couldn’t tell the messenger from the message, and Paul cared enough to tear his clothes over it.

So the church’s job in a moment like this isn’t to look down on stadiums. We’d only be looking down on ourselves; I have the ticket stub. Our job is to be the room where all of that energy is aimed in the right direction, and where the aiming doesn’t harm anyone in it.

That’s what the singing was for. Not performance, not preference, not the thing we argue about at members’ meetings. A congregation with its whole self lifted up, focused on the only one who can take it all in and not be crushed. We have what every stadium is reaching for. We’re often bored by it.

John got it wrong in the last chapter of the Bible, and he’d seen everything. He fell at the angel’s feet and was told to get up. Even at the end, the aim needs correcting. It always will, until it finally doesn’t.

There’s a room coming that will be louder than Truist Park. Nobody in it will be sold anything. Nobody on the receiving end will buckle.11 And everyone there will have spent a lifetime practicing on smaller stages—some not so well, some in right field with their arms up and their aim off by just the width of a man.

What are you practicing on?

This is the fifth entry in Functional Gospels, a series on the salvation stories our culture actually runs on—the ones people live by, whether or not they’d ever call them that. Previous entries: The Da Vinci Code, Brené Brown, Matthew McConaughey, A God Who Asks Nothing.

This piece was written using Redemptive Correlation, the method behind most of what’s here. It works in four steps: listen to the cultural question on its own terms, find the longing underneath it, reframe it under Scripture’s story from creation to restoration, and respond with something you can actually live. The order matters. Culture asks; Scripture answers. If you reverse that, you get a stadium.

If this one connected with you, the most helpful thing you can do is send it to one person. Not share it widely. Send it to the specific person you thought of while reading.

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My favorite teacher, who was also the baseball coach, led the club and had done so for years. He knew I was a Christian and that I had gone off to college for ministry, and he was one of my biggest cheerleaders. So whenever I came home, I’d give him a shout and see if he had space on the calendar. More often than not, he’d bump the teacher who was supposed to speak so that I could instead. He trusted me and trusted in me. That trust is why this story matters.

One week, as I was prepping, he told me the athletes needed a timely message. Work ethic and hustle were slipping across the spring programs, and he thought the best place to spark some change was with the believers on the teams. He even picked the passage: Colossians 3:23–24. The words had stayed with him: whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. When I asked why this verse, he believed it was stronger than 1 Corinthians 10:31 and wanted these students to think more seriously about how they competed.

If I’m honest, I had some doubts. I was still new to studying the Bible in depth, but I at least knew enough of the context to feel some pause. Paul wrote those words to slaves whose work brought them no reward on earth.1 He was telling them their real Master was not the person they served each day. What I knew was that the main point of the passage is that your value does not depend on whether people notice your effort, because your inheritance is grace, not wages. It’s about resting from the need for human approval and letting that fuel your work.

I understood that, but I still bent and molded the message.

I shaped my talk around integrity: always doing the right thing and working hard because it’s the right thing to do. That sounds good, and it’s even true. But it’s not what the passage actually says. I made it say that because it fit the occasion.

Like any school club meeting, it was 7 A.M. on a Friday, and the room was still asleep. The students probably didn’t hear much since they were thinking about the weekend, or just wanting to go back to bed. But if I put myself in their shoes, I think they felt like they were being lectured instead of encouraged.

I didn’t think twice about it until years later, when I read more and studied more, realizing I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. If I could talk to younger me, I’d say this: the Bible already teaches ethics. Integrity runs through all of it. There was a better and more winsome way to say what needed to be said. I didn’t need to contort the text into something it shouldn’t have been. I just needed to trust that Scripture already had what I was looking for.

I didn’t trust it, so I changed its meaning.

The Water We Swim In

This was my small mistake. But here’s the harder truth: it wasn’t just a one-time slip. It’s part of the environment we live in.

All of us come to the Bible hoping it will say what we want. We show up with our minds already made up: maybe about a belief, a complaint, a political issue, or a fear. Then we search for a verse to back it up. This, at its basest level, is what we’d call eisegesis: reading meaning into the text.

At first glance, it doesn’t seem dishonest. It feels like we’re just finding support. Our efforts can even feel like faithfulness or interpretation, especially since we’re usually aiming for something good. Work ethic is good. Life is good. Country is good. That’s why it’s so hard to notice when we do this: we’re rarely twisting Scripture toward something bad. We’re just aiming for something true, but not the truth the text was actually saying.

This goes far beyond a 7 A.M. meeting. Consider the biggest twist in American life, one so old we hardly notice it anymore: the belief that the United States is, in some important way, God’s nation. Our pastors quote 2 Chronicles 7:14 and make it mean that we’re the “people” God was telling Solomon about. We like the sound of it, so we own it and claim it.

Jon Meacham calls this idea the American gospel.2 He sees it as a good thing—a faith that, in his words, “shapes the life of the nation without strangling it,” a balanced middle ground between extremes.3 He means it as a compliment. And in some ways, he’s describing something real, even beautiful: a country where belief is part of public life, but no single church controls the state. But notice what this god is expected to do. He blesses, founds, watches over, and supports the nation. All positive, all joy, and all sunshine & rainbows. What he never does—in civil religion, at July 4th services, or with the flag by the pulpit—is judge the nation, call it to repent, or ask it to give up its own interests. This is a god with no cross, but really just Providence wrapped in Old Glory.

If this were a game of cards, then that’s the poker face breaking. It’s not just that people talk about God in public life. That in and of itself can be good. The real sign is when the god being talked about never asks for anything the group doesn’t already want.

Russell Moore, who frankly lost his denominational career for declining to bend the knee to the political powerhouse taking over his and my spiritual homeland, names the mechanism plainly: civil religions are “a kind of Great Commission in reverse, in which the nations seek to make disciples of themselves, using the authority of Jesus to baptize their national identity.4 The Great Commission runs one direction. This civil one runs the other.

And this doesn’t just happen in public life. It shows up in how we interpret the Bible. A passage about a mother’s faith turns into a case for a political cause. A psalm about God’s people becomes a slogan about America. A verse meant to comfort the powerless is used to push teenagers to work harder. The way I twisted Scripture in that classroom and the way a nation twists its founding story are really the same mistake, just on different levels: reading the Bible through what we already want, instead of letting the Bible shape what we want.

And if that feels like a familiar line that comes up in what you read from me, good. What I’ve done with Redemptive Correlation, the spine that keeps my words and thoughts upright, fights this urge. It’s the opposite of what Scripture is meant to do.

Here’s what should make all of us uncomfortable, no matter our politics (because both sides do this). The right uses Scripture to bless the nation. The left uses it to try to cleanse the nation. One side wants a God who supports the country; the other wants a country without God. But underneath it all, both want the same thing: the authority of something higher, without the Lord who actually gives commands. Both want a god who agrees with their views. Neither wants the God who says you shall have no other gods before me—and that includes the nation.

So before we talk about what the Bible really says, we need to admit what we hoped to find in it. You can’t read Scripture honestly until you recognize the prejudice you brought with you.

I brought my own agenda into that baseball coach’s classroom. But are you willing to ask yourself: what did you bring with you to church last Sunday?

Reading the Nation Through Scripture

So let’s do what eisegesis, the act of making the Bible say something we want it to, never does. Let’s look at our nation through the lens of Scripture, instead of trying to fit Scripture into our nation’s story.

We must begin where the Bible begins, or else we’ll get ourselves confused. People are made in God’s image—not to create meaning, but to reflect it. We are meant to be mirrors, catching God’s light and sharing it with the world. Image-bearers don’t create glory; they carry it. So from the start, worship has a direction: it goes from God, through us, into the world. If you get that direction right, everything else falls into place. If you reverse it, things fall apart.

But what happens in the Fall messes that up profoundly. Fast forward to Moses when he’s receiving the Ten Commandments, and this is exactly what happens at the foot of the mountain when the leader is gone.

The people get anxious. God seems far away, the future feels uncertain, and they want a god they can see—one that goes where they want and does what they need, matching their fears. So they make one. Here’s the detail many miss: they don’t call it a new god. Aaron makes the calf and says, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD”—using God’s own name. The people look at the gold they shaped and say, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” They give credit for the real rescue—the actual exodus, done by the real God—to an idol they made themselves.5

That isn’t atheism. It’s something worse. It’s taking the true God and reshaping him into something the group prefers. Not a rival to Yahweh, but Yahweh changed to fit their wishes—a god who simply follows where they already wanted to go.

Scripture is clear about what happens when people do this. You become what you worship. If you bow to a god you made, you slowly become like it—stubborn, hard-hearted, unable to see or hear.6 A god that never challenges you creates people who can’t change. The golden calf doesn’t just break the first commandment; it reverses the deepest part of creation. Instead of reflecting God into the world, people start getting their identity from something they made. That’s how every civil religion works: a god made from the group’s own resources, credited with their own story, worshiped until they can’t tell the difference between God and themselves.

Now put that false god next to the real God, and see how quickly it falls apart.

Paul writes to the people in Philippi—a Roman colony where citizens believed Caesar was lord—and gives them a different message.7 He says the true God, “being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant … and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8).

Compare that to the golden calf, and the difference is clear. The idol is a god people grab, shape, control, and use to serve themselves. The living God does the opposite: he never stops being God, but he chooses not to grasp power and instead gives himself away.8 Civil religion is about taking. The gospel is about giving.

And here’s what the American gospel cannot digest: the true God did not bless the empire. In fact, the empire killed him — executed as a state criminal, by the death no Roman citizen could suffer. A civil religion can salute a god who founds nations. It has no idea what to do with a God the nation executed. The cross doesn’t underwrite the empire. It judges it — and then, unbelievably, offers it grace.

That’s the god with no cross, revealed. He was never the God of the Bible. He was just the golden calf, painted in red, white, and blue.

If this is what the idols say, and force us to believe when we worship them instead of the true God, what then is the case when we move forward in the true God’s kingdom, one that’s upside down and inverted away and against this earthly one?

This kingdom is not a Christian nation. It’s something bigger and stranger than any country. John describes the end of the story as a crowd “from every nation, tribe, people and language,” standing before the throne (Rev. 7:9). No flags to use to claim any ground, no party lines to draw, and every earthly loyalty gone in the light of the Lamb. This is the blessed nation the psalmist meant: not a piece of land, but a people—the covenant people, now gathered from every country, a chosen race and a holy nation with no border except the throne.9 The coming kingdom doesn’t baptize America and rubber stamp its advances. It puts all nations of all persuasions in perspective and gathers what it saves from each one.

Look at what happens to these people. Those who worshiped the calf became like it—stubborn, blind, and deaf as the metal they bowed to. Those who are redeemed also become like the one they worship: their robes are washed in the blood of the Lamb, they are led to living water, and God wipes away every tear. You become what you worship, but grace can reverse the process. If you worship a god shaped like your nation, your faith will match your nation’s desires. If you worship the Lamb who was slain, you are slowly and steadily changed into something no nation can explain—a people who can truly repent, who hold their country loosely, and whose hope was never tied to an election.

This means a Christian’s deepest identity is not with any birth certificate, passport, voting card, or bumper sticker. We are strangers and travelers here just passing through. We’re people who love their country like you love a good Airbnb on a long trip: thankful for the shelter, but we know it’s not home. That kind of citizenship is what finally separates a believer from the tribe. You can’t belong completely to a nation and completely to the Lamb. One of them has to be just a rest area for a bathroom break along the way.

So the story of the golden calf leaves us with one important question: what are you becoming?

The Tell

So here’s the real test. It’s not “are you a Christian nationalist?” We can dodge that question all day long and kick that powder keg down the road. Don’t believe me? Go find Joel Webbon and Doug Wilson.

The real test is quieter and more personal, one that exposes our real state only after we answer.

When you hear a sermon that matches your politics, and it feels like worship, that feeling is the sign.

When a sermon just confirms what you already believed, and you leave feeling comfortable instead of challenged, pay attention to that comfort. Scripture, when read honestly, does bring comfort—but it also pushes back. It tells you things you didn’t expect. If God’s word never challenges you, never costs you anything, never says what your group would reject, you might not be hearing God. You might be listening to a familiar voice and calling it the Lord.

I wish I could say I’ve moved past this, but I haven’t. I still find myself reading the news with my Bible open, looking for a verse to support the point I already want to make. That tendency never fully goes away. But you can learn to notice it—that small feeling of discomfort, the warning before you go too far—and stop. You can choose not to shape the gold before it becomes an idol.

The real question isn’t which group is right. It’s whether you would still follow Scripture if it led you away from your group. Because if you read honestly, it will do that at some point.

That’s the invitation, and it’s actually better news than it might seem.

Because the God who cannot be twisted is also the God who never lets go. He judges the nation, but not to leave it behind. He judges it like he judged the golden calf: destroying what’s fake so we can worship the real thing again. The same word that calls you out of your group is the word that gives you a better home: a people with no borders, gathered from every nation, so that no nation can claim them.

That’s the kingdom worth belonging to. Not America made holy, and not America rejected. If we’re honest, that would just be lame. Lacking. Boring. The best kingdom is a countless crowd from every nation and language, standing before the throne, worshiping the one Lord no empire could control, and no cross could defeat.

So we hold our country loosely. We’re thankful for the shelter, but always moving toward our true home. We read the Bible as people who would rather be corrected and admonished by God than comforted by something we invented.

That in and of itself is the real practice. Come to Scripture ready to be changed. Pre-decide that you need to be corrected by the God-breathed words on the page. Let it shape you before you try to use it for your own moment. And when it leads you away from the group you started with, follow it.

It’s leading somewhere bigger and better, and it always was.

This piece was written using Redemptive Correlation, the method behind most of what runs here. It works in four movements: listen to the cultural question on its own terms, distill the longing underneath it, reframe it under Scripture's arc from creation to restoration, and respond with something you can actually live. The order matters. Culture asks; Scripture answers. Reverse that, and you get what this article is about.

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I also remember not saying a word about the thing I was actually fighting. Not in that room. Not in any room. I was too scared to admit failure and be thought of as one.

So I built a system instead. I memorized verses, prayed harder, and would even stand up and leave the room when I felt temptation coming. When my system worked, I felt like a Christian. When it didn’t, which was most weeks, I was left with one question. I asked it alone, in the dark, again and again:

If I struggle this much, am I even saved?

It took me another decade to understand this. The book was right. Jerry Bridges wasn’t pushing willpower; he was writing about grace, about the Spirit doing what I couldn’t. But at fifteen, I was ashamed, and when you’re that age and ashamed, you don’t want grace. You want a technique. So I read a book about grace and turned it into a method, because the method was something I could control.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after seeing it happen to others: this is how orthodox theology can create kids who think it’s all about earning their way. It doesn’t happen because they’re taught the wrong things. It happens because they’re taught the right things at an age when shame drowns out every word about grace and only lets them hear the parts about striving.

Bridges wrote a book insisting that the Spirit does what we cannot. I read a manual. Same pages. Different book entirely.

Nobody in that living room did anything wrong. That’s what makes it hard to talk about. No bad doctrine to point at, no false teacher, no obvious failure. Just a room full of teenagers reading a good book about grace while at least one of us silently converted it into a performance review.

I was in my living room in Nashville, mid-twenties, still failing, when I read Matt Chandler on recovering redemption. What finally cracked it open wasn’t a better technique. It was the idea that what I was fighting had roots — that the behavior was fruit of something older and deeper than my Tuesday-night resolve, and no amount of walking out of the room was ever going to reach it.

You had a room too.

Maybe it wasn’t a student pastor’s living room. Maybe it was a small group, a men’s retreat, a Bible study where everyone shared prayer requests for someone else and nobody said the true thing. But you know the room. You know what it costs to sit in it holding something you can’t put down and won’t put out loud.

And you know what we do in those rooms. We ask for a method. Give me the plan, the accountability app, the reading schedule, the thing I can do on Tuesday that will make Wednesday different. Because a method is dignified. A method means I’m working on it. Confession means I’m losing.

The church didn’t invent this. We just baptized it.

I thought I’d left this behind in high school, that it was something high school kids do. Then I watched a man win an Academy Award and preach it to forty million people.

They took it as gospel. So did I.

McConaughey’s speech is beautiful, and that’s what makes it risky. He thanks God first and truly means it. He talks about gratitude as if he knows it saved him. Then he shares who he’s chasing: himself, ten years in the future. He says that at thirty-five, he realized he’ll never catch up to that man, and that’s the point. The hero always stays ahead, so you keep running.

Forty million people heard that and felt encouraged.

I heard my fifteen-year-old self building a system.

We were made to become

Start with what’s true in the chase, because something is.

God did not make us finished. Adam was placed in a garden with work to do — cultivate it, keep it, name what was in it. The first man was given a trajectory, not a terminus. There was somewhere to go.

So the instinct McConaughey describes isn’t a lie. The restlessness, the feeling that you’re not yet who you should be, the urge to become someone further along than the person doing the dishes right now—that’s part of how we’re made. It’s not a flaw. It’s part of our design.

That’s exactly why the counterfeit is convincing. Counterfeits aren’t made from nothing. They start with something true, just twisted.

Then the destination moved

Here’s what Genesis 3 does to the chase. The serpent’s offer was not become nothing. It was become like God — on your own terms, by your own reach, on your own timeline. The temptation was never to stop becoming. It was to become without reference to the One who made becoming possible.

Kenneth Mathews puts his finger on the sales technique: the serpent spoke only about what she would gain and said nothing about what she would lose.1 That’s the whole pitch. Not a lie exactly — her eyes really were opened, she really did come to know good and evil, exactly as promised. He just never mentioned the invoice.

And what she got was not what the brochure said. Mathews again: they became like God in one way, and what they achieved was isolation and fear.

Isolation.

Read that word and then go back to a fifteen-year-old on a living room floor, holding something he will not say out loud in any room, for years.

The serpent’s offer always delivers. That’s what makes it so hard to argue with. You do become someone. You just become someone alone.

What changed after the fall wasn’t our desire to grow, but what we aim for. The self becomes both the runner and the finish line. And if the finish line moves at your pace, it isn’t really a finish line. It’s just a treadmill that looks appealing.

McConaughey said it himself, more honestly than most preachers: his hero is always ten years away, and he’ll never catch him. He called this freedom. Think about that. A man stands on the world’s biggest stage, holding the highest honor in his field, and says the thing he’s chasing can’t be caught—and that this is good news.

That isn’t freedom. It’s like Sisyphus, just with a Texas accent.

And it is precisely what I built at fifteen, with a verse list and a plan. The system was designed so that arrival was structurally impossible. Every failure proved I needed more system. Every success proved the system worked and had to be maintained. There was no exit. If I struggle this much, am I even saved? is the only question that framework can generate, and it has no answer inside the framework.

The hero already came, and he came from behind

Romans 8:29 says God predestined those he knew ahead of time to be shaped into the image of his Son. Look at the grammar. God is the subject of every verb in the list: foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified. You aren’t the one doing the shaping. You’re the one being shaped.

And notice what you’re being conformed to. The language reaches back to Genesis 1:27, humanity made in the image of God. We fall short of that glory, so we only arrive at what we were made to be when we’re conformed to the One who is himself the true image.2

Which means McConaughey is not wrong to chase. He’s chasing the right thing at the wrong image. The self ten years out is not the image you were made for. It never was. It’s just the only one visible from inside the treadmill.

This is what Chandler showed me in a Nashville living room, and it’s why a better method was never going to save me. The gospel isn’t about keeping on until things get better. The gospel is that the light was red for good, and Someone else stopped for me.

And the question I asked in the dark for years—if I struggle this much, am I even saved?—turns out to be about belonging, not performance. John says the Father poured out his love on us and called us his children. Gary Burge points out that this is an act of legitimation: a father names a child and makes a permanent claim on that child’s identity. That claim isn’t in the child’s hands.3

Which is the whole point. If my sonship depended on my Tuesday, I’d have lost it a thousand times by Wednesday.

The chase ends in a face

McConaughey’s arc has no ending, and he knows it. Ten years out, forever. The story can’t resolve, because the hero is the one telling it.

Scripture ends differently. When he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. Not because we caught him. Because he showed up. And the seeing is what does the work — we are changed by the sight of him the way a mirror doesn’t strain to reflect.

That’s the difference between a treadmill and a road. A road has a destination, and the destination has a face.

So here’s what I want to ask you, and I want you to answer it before you close this tab.

What’s your system?

Not your theology. Your system. The thing you actually reach for at 11 P.M. when the old pull comes back. The app, the streak, the reading plan, the rule you made for yourself in January that you’ve broken and remade four times since. Name it.

I’m not going to tell you to stop. Some of those are wise. Get the app. Leave the room. Bridges was right about the disciplines, and so is anyone who tells you to build guardrails.

But notice what happens in your chest when the system breaks. That’s the tell. If the failure sends you looking for a better system, you’re still chasing. If the failure sends you to a Father who already named you, you’ve been rescued from something that was never going to save you anyway.

The difference isn’t in the effort. Both people are trying. The difference is what the effort is for — whether you’re working to secure a verdict or working because the verdict came in.

And if you’re the one who left — who sat in a room like mine, did the plan, kept failing, and finally decided the whole thing was a con — I understand why. I’d only ask you to consider that you might not have walked away from Christianity. You might have walked away from a technique with Christian vocabulary stapled to it. Those aren’t the same, and only one of them ever claimed it could hold you.

We are not going to catch him.

Not the hero ten years out, and not the version of ourselves we keep promising the people who love us. That race was rigged from the start, and the mercy of the gospel is that it tells us so out loud instead of letting us run until our knees give.

What we get instead is both stranger and better. We have a Father who names us before we do anything, a Brother who already finished the race, and a Spirit who works in us in ways no reading plan ever could. We get to stop striving and start becoming, not because we finally found the right method, but because the outcome was decided before we ever sat down on that living room floor.

Keep livin’ is a decent slogan for a man who hasn’t been caught yet.

We have.

If this named something for you, share it. Somebody in your small group built the same system I did and hasn't said so out loud yet.

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The Chase We Called Sanctification is part of Functional Gospels, a series on the counterfeit gospels we’ve handed the culture and the culture has handed back. Brené Brown and The Da Vinci Code are already up. Next week: Jon Meacham, public religion, and the Christian nation debate.

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I keep seeing the same post.

It’s a Bible-believing Christian I know and respect. Sound doctrine. Real faith. And there, in their feed, is a graphic — soft background, clean font — with some version of the same message. You are enough. You were made for this. You have everything you need inside you. Sometimes there’s a verse underneath. Usually it’s Philippians 4:13. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

And I want to be generous about it. I do. I think they mean because I have Christ, I am enough. That’s the Christian version, right? The baptized one.

Except that’s not what Philippians 4:13 says. Paul wrote that line from a prison cell, in a paragraph about learning to be content whether he’s full or hungry, whether he has plenty or nothing at all (Phil 4:11–13). The “all things” he can do through Christ include surviving with nothing. It’s a verse about being emptied and held anyway. We turned it into a verse about being full.1 We took a text about sufficiency in Christ when you have nothing and made it a slogan about the sufficiency you already carry.

I noticed it in other people first. That’s always how it goes.

Then I caught it in myself.

For a while now I’ve been trying to step into more at my church — to use what I think I’m actually good at, to offer it, to be trusted with it. Good desire. But watch what I did with it. I turned the ask into a campaign. I built the case. I “Jesus-ed up” the conversation — laced it with the right language, the right posture — and underneath the language was a pitch. Here’s what I bring. Here’s what I can do. Look at the gifts.

And one day it landed on me with a weight I didn’t expect: I was advocating for what I do. I had quietly made my usefulness the argument for my acceptance. I wanted to be wanted for the goods. And the whole time I’d have told you — I’d have believed — that my worth was in Christ.

That’s the thing about this particular lie. You can hold it with a straight doctrinal face. You can believe the gospel on paper and still be running on you are enough underneath. I was. That’s why I can spot it. I’m not writing this from above it. I’m writing it from inside it.

We Hired a Therapist to Pastor Our Shame

Here’s what I want to say carefully, because it’s the actual argument of this piece: Brené Brown didn’t do this to the church. The church did this to itself, and hired her to make it feel holy.

Let me be fair to her first, because the method demands it and because it’s true. Brené Brown is one of the most perceptive diagnosticians of shame writing in English. Her research named something real — that shame operates in secret, that it tells you you are unworthy of connection and then makes you hide the very thing that needs to be brought into the light. She’s right that performance cultures are crushing people. She’s right that vulnerability is not weakness. She’s right that we were made to belong. A lot of pastors could stand to read her on the mechanics of shame, because she pays attention where we’ve often waved our hands.

And she’s right about something the church has been terrible at naming: some shame isn’t yours to carry. There is a shame that gets heaped on people — by parents, by systems, by churches — that they had no hand in earning.2 That shame is real, it’s crushing, and telling people to repent of it is pastoral malpractice. Brené sees those people. She goes to them. Credit where it’s due.

I’m not here to relitigate her scholarship. I want to be honest about my own limits: I’m not engaging with her full corpus end-to-end. I’m engaging the version of her that the church absorbed — the framework as it now functions in our Bible studies, small groups, graphics, and feeds. That’s a fair target, because that version is doing real theological work in real Christian lives, and most of the people running on it never chose it on purpose. They inherited it. So did I.

And here’s how it got in.

The church had a shame problem it wasn’t pastoring. We’re good at guilt — we have whole vocabularies for guilt, whole altar calls for guilt. But shame, the deep conviction that you specifically are unacceptable, the thing that keeps people out of the pew and out of the light? We mostly left that on the floor. We told people to try harder, serve more, get their quiet times in order. We ran a quiet performance religion and called it discipleship. So when someone finally spoke to the wound — spoke to it with warmth, with research, with permission to stop performing — of course it landed. Of course it spread. It spread because it was answering a question we refused to answer.

We didn’t get colonized by a foreign gospel. We created a vacuum, and something true-enough rushed in to fill it. That’s the conspiracy we wanted to be true: that the cure for our exhaustion was permission to stop trying, and that permission was the same thing as grace.

It isn’t. And the difference is the whole ballgame.

You Weren’t Made to Be Enough

Start where the Bible starts, because the sequence is the entire argument.

You were not made to be enough. You were made for glory — made in the image of God, made to reflect and enjoy a weight of worth that was never generated from inside you in the first place (Gen 1:26–27). This matters more than it looks. “You are enough” locates your sufficiency in you. Genesis locates it in the God whose image you bear. The first is a closed loop. The second is a gift. From the very first page, the biblical human is not self-sufficient by design — she is derivative by design, glorious because she is held. Being told “you already have everything you need inside you” is not encouraging. It’s a demotion. It hands you back to yourself and calls it good news.

The Guilt Came First

Then read Genesis 3 slowly, because everyone rushes it. They eat. Their eyes open. And the first thing they feel is exactly what Brené’s framework is built to treat: they’re naked, they’re exposed, they hide (Gen 3:7–8). Shame. Right there. So far the frameworks agree.

But watch the sequence, because this is where the two gospels split and never rejoin. The shame is second. The guilt is first. They didn’t feel unworthy and then hide — they disobeyed, and the hiding came after. Before the disobedience there was no shame at all; it was the sin that changed how they saw themselves.3 The exposure they felt was not a false message about their worth. It was a true response to an actual rupture — not false guilt imposed from outside, but true guilt arising from a violated conscience.4 The shame was a symptom. The guilt was the disease.

And here’s the distinction the absorbed framework can’t make. There are two kinds of shame, not one. There’s shame we ought not to feel — the shame heaped on us for things that were never dishonoring to God, or never ours to carry. And there’s shame we ought to feel — the shame that comes from having actually had a hand in dishonoring God.5 Brené is a master of the first kind. She has almost nothing to say about the second, because her framework has no category for a wrong you actually committed against a holy God. Which means it can comfort the falsely ashamed and completely miss the truly guilty — and most of us are both.

This is the thing the church stopped saying: sometimes the bad feeling is telling the truth. Sometimes you feel exposed because you are exposed. And if you treat all shame as misplaced — if you tell every guilty person “you are enough, you’ve just believed a lie about yourself” — you will comfort them without ever curing them. You’ll talk them out of the symptom, leaving the disease running.

That’s the comfort we mistook for the cure. We took the ache of real guilt and reclassified it as a self-esteem problem, because a self-esteem problem is one we can fix with encouragement, and guilt is a problem only a cross can touch.

The Thing You’re Actually Hiding From

Here’s what the cross does that no amount of vulnerability can. Vulnerability brings you into the open in front of other people — and that’s good, that’s a genuine creational good. But the thing you’re most hiding from was never other people. It was God. Adam didn’t sew fig leaves for Eve. They both hid from the LORD among the trees (Gen 3:8). The primal exposure is vertical.

And the gospel meets you exactly there. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5:8). Sit in the offense of that sentence, because the whole difference lives in it. It does not say you were enough. It says the opposite: you were still a sinner — not misunderstood, not merely wounded, not sitting on untapped inner sufficiency — a sinner, and loved anyway, and covered at a cost you could not pay.

This is the hinge on which the whole Reformation turned, and it’s worth being precise. The gospel doesn’t declare you were fine all along. It declares that God, without any merit of yours, of pure grace, credits to you the perfect righteousness of Christ — as if you had never sinned, as if you had yourself accomplished all the obedience Christ accomplished for you.6 Not a righteousness you generate. A righteousness imputed — reckoned to your account from outside, belonging properly to someone else.7 Justification is not God making you righteous by degrees; it is God declaring you righteous on the basis of Christ, a verdict handed down over people who are still, in themselves, ungodly.8

That is why it’s the more durable comfort by an infinite margin. “You are enough” works right up until the moment you fail in a way you can’t reframe — until the grief lands, or the sin is real, or the diagnosis comes, or you stand at the graveside and self-acceptance has precisely nothing to say. An alien righteousness — one that doesn’t depend on your performance because it was never yours to perform — is the only thing that still stands there when you have run completely out of enough.9 It doesn’t need you to be sufficient. It needs Christ to be, and he is.

Wholehearted Living Ends Where You End

And then the piece the absorbed framework structurally cannot offer, because it has no eschatology: this all goes somewhere. Brené can offer you wholehearted living — a better way to be present, right now, this side of the grave. It’s not nothing. But it ends where you end. The gospel offers resurrection — a day when death itself is swallowed up, when the last enemy is destroyed, when what was sown perishable is raised imperishable (1 Cor 15:54–57). A day when shame is not managed but abolished, when the exposed are clothed for good, when the hiding is over because there is nothing left to hide from and no one left to hide from. Wholehearted living is a coping strategy for the exile. Resurrection is the road home.

“I Am Enough” or “I Am Covered”?

So let me ask you what I had to ask myself.

What are you actually running on? Not what you’d write on the doctrinal statement. Underneath. When you reach for reassurance, is it “I am enough” — or is it “I am covered”? Those are not the same sentence, and the difference will find you on the day the enough runs out.

Maybe you’ve been living on the graphic version because your church handed you performance religion and Brené handed you rest, and rest felt more like Jesus than anything you got from us. I understand that. That grief is legitimate, and part of it is on people like me. But hear it plainly: the permission to stop performing is not the gospel. It’s a good thing the gospel produces — and if you take the fruit without the root, it will not hold you when you need it most.

And if you’re like me — if you’ve been quietly building the case for yourself, campaigning to be wanted for what you bring, “Jesus-ing up” a pitch for your own usefulness — then you already know how tiring it is to be your own argument. Lay the pitch down. You were accepted before you were useful. You’ll still be accepted when you’re not.

Take the shame to the cross. Not to the mirror. The mirror can only tell you you’re fine. The cross tells you you’re not — and that you’re His.

The Counterfeit That Almost Works

The church has a better word than you are enough. We’ve just been too tired, or too ashamed of our own performance religion, to say it out loud. So we outsourced the pastoring of shame to someone kinder than we’d been, and we baptized her framework, and we told ourselves it was the same thing as grace.

It was close. That’s what made it dangerous. The counterfeit that works is never the one that looks nothing like the real thing — it’s the one that looks almost exactly like it, that gives you most of the comfort while quietly removing the cross.

Here’s the better word. You are not enough. You were never going to be. And the God who knows the full weight of that — every hidden thing, every real guilt, every place you’ve been sure you were unacceptable — looked at you there and did not offer you a slogan. He offered you a Son. He covered what you were actually hiding. He is bringing you to a day when the hiding ends for good.

That’s not the comfort we wanted. It’s better. It’s the one that’s actually a cure.

Functional Gospels is a series on the counterfeit gospels operating in the cultural water — the ones we absorb without noticing, dressed in language close enough to the real thing that we never stop to check. This is #2. If you missed it, #1 was The Conspiracy We Want To Be True.

Next in the series: the gospel according to a man who professes Christ and preaches contemplative virtue without ever naming sin.

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A few years ago, I was visiting my grandmother and the rest of my dad’s family when my uncle started in with the “did you know” questions.

He’d been watching the History Channel. Ancient Aliens. The Bible. How we’ve been told something that isn’t exactly true. He wasn’t asking me — he was announcing. A man who’d spent his whole life in the orbit of church, repeating a cable documentary like it was a deposition.

So I pushed back. Asked him if he’d fact-checked any of it. After all, this is my lane.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t defend it, didn’t argue. He just moved on to the next thing, like the question hadn’t happened.

And that’s when it landed on me: the morsels of doubt — the “new” information — mattered more to him than where he came from.

It still happens every Christmas and Easter. The same faded documentaries, the same rotation of scholars, arriving on schedule in the exact weeks the church tells its story — a counter-liturgy on basic cable, explaining what we supposedly weren’t told.

Maybe you don’t have that uncle. But you grew up in the same living room.

If you were raised anywhere near church in the last twenty-five years, the counter-story was part of the furniture. The specials about lost gospels. The experts explaining what Constantine “really” did. The endless whisper that the version you got in Sunday school was the edited-for-television cut.

Then, in 2003, somebody bottled the whisper. The Da Vinci Code sold 80 million copies not because Dan Brown discovered anything, but because he gave the appetite a plot. You probably had forgotten about that book and its accompanying movie, but it was recently on TV, and I ended up tuning it to see how it had aged. A murdered curator, a suppressed bloodline, and a fictional historian named Sir Leigh Teabing delivering the speech that would outlive the book: the church chose your Bible for you, and hid the rest. Spoiler alert: it aged like milk.

I’ve stood in that crossfire myself. Back when I recorded YouTube videos, I couldn’t post anything without the comments turning into a sparring match — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant voices relitigating the canon under videos that weren’t about the canon. Brothers in Christ, sowing more confusion about the Bible’s origins than any book of fiction ever managed.

Here’s what should stop you: the book faded. The speech didn’t. Scroll long enough today, and you’ll find Teabing’s monologue running everywhere with the serial numbers filed off — canon-debate threads, “what Nicaea really decided” videos, whole conversion journeys built on the promise of a suppressed, older, realer Christianity. Even serious scholarship can feed it, every time a non-canonical book gets more spotlight than the sixty-six.

Nobody’s quoting the novel. They’re quoting the hunger it fed. A whole generation didn’t argue its way out of faith — it got offered a better story, one with a secret in it.

And underneath every version of it, the same aching question: what if the real thing has been kept from me?

The Hunger Came First

Before the diagnosis, a concession: the hunger The Da Vinci Code fed is real, and it is not stupid.

Ecclesiastes says God “has put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end” (Eccl. 3:11 CSB). The Hebrew word is ha’olam — built on a root that means “hidden.” What God set in the human heart is, quite literally, an appetite for the concealed. Read that slowly. We were built hungry for what’s behind the curtain — and built without the capacity to satisfy that hunger on our own. The gap isn’t a design flaw. It’s a homing signal.

This is where Redemptive Correlation goes to work. The method doesn’t start by correcting the cultural moment; it starts by taking the moment’s question seriously, then walking it back through Scripture’s own story — Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration — until we can see what the hunger was for before it got hijacked. Culture doesn’t get to diagnose itself. But it does get a real hearing.

So hear it: eighty million people bought a novel because it whispered the official story isn’t the whole story. They weren’t wrong to want the whole story. Wanting the whole story is the most human thing about them.

The Serpent’s Bestseller

Here’s what should unsettle us: the conspiracy thriller wasn’t invented in 2003. It was invented in Genesis 3, and the serpent wrote it.

Look at the structure of his pitch. First, seed doubt about the official account: “Did God really say...?” (Gen. 3:1). Then, name the cover-up: “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5). An institution guarding secret knowledge. An authority that benefits from your ignorance. A forbidden act that promises enlightenment on the other side.

Every element is there. The suppressed truth. The self-interested gatekeeper. The initiation that separates the awakened from the sheep. Dan Brown didn’t invent this plot. He inherited it — and so did every documentary, subreddit, and late-night rabbit hole promising to show you what they don’t want you to see.

And here’s the tell. Within a year of publication, the book’s central claims were rubble. The Priory of Sion was a documented 1950s hoax — its inventor had confessed decades before Brown wrote. And the historical case was dismantled by, of all people, Bart Ehrman — the agnostic scholar who has spent his career arguing against orthodox Christianity.1 When your debunker is the man least motivated to defend the church, the debunking sticks. It stuck. And it didn’t matter. The claims collapsed and the appeal didn’t, because the appeal was never resting on the claims. It was resting on the hunger. You cannot fact-check an appetite.

That’s the disorder underneath the phenomenon. Conspiracy thinking isn’t primarily an information problem. It’s a trust wound. It’s what eternity-in-the-heart looks like after it has decided the Father is hiding something.

The Mystery That Went Public

Now the turn — and it’s sharper than we usually preach it.

Paul does not respond to the hunger for hidden truth by denying there’s a mystery. He doubles down on the word. The gospel, he says, is “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints” (Col. 1:26 CSB). There was a secret. There was something the ages didn’t know. Every instinct that told you there’s more going on than meets the eye — Paul says that instinct was right.

Then he says the thing no conspiracy can survive. Catch the verb: God wanted to make it known (Col. 1:27). The Greek says God willed the disclosure — nobody pried this secret loose, nobody leaked it, nobody decoded it against His wishes. Every conspiracy imagines a god who hoards. The actual God was the one pushing for disclosure. Grammar tells the same story: ages of hiddenness described in one long-standing state, ended by a single, decisive unveiling.

His task, Paul says elsewhere, was to shed light on this mystery hidden for ages (Eph. 3:9) — light being the operative image, because light is the one thing you cannot ration to an inner circle. And the disclosure matched the image. Christ was crucified in a public square during a governor’s term you can date. When Paul stood trial, he reached for the stock Greek insult aimed at secret-society philosophy — teaching whispered to initiates in a corner, away from public life — and threw it out on purpose: “this was not done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). No hidden bloodline. No suppressed gospel in a vault. The most audacious claim in history was published on a hill, in daylight, with witnesses.

And the content of the declassified mystery? Not a technique. Not a code. A person: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). The secret at the center of everything turns out not to be information you master but a presence that masters you.

When the Withholding Ends

But Paul is honest about where we still stand. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12 CSB). His word for that dim seeing is ainigma — we see, literally, “in a riddle.” Paul concedes the enigma. He just refuses to let it end there.

That’s the admission the conspiracy mindset can’t make and the promise it can’t offer. Yes, you see dimly. Yes, there is more you don’t know. The Christian story never pretends otherwise. But the trajectory is not toward a bigger file of secrets. It’s toward a face.

That’s what every rabbit hole is actually digging for. Not one more document. Not the final decrypted layer. The end of the withholding — a reality where nothing is hidden because nothing needs to be, where you are fully known and finally shown. Restoration isn’t the ultimate reveal. It’s the ultimate presence.

The conspiracy we want true is the one where someone powerful has been keeping the real story from us. The gospel says something stranger: Someone powerful has been telling us the real story since a garden, and we’ve been the ones hiding.

Where Are You Scratching the Itch?

So here’s my question for you — and unlike my uncle, I’d love an answer.

Where are you scratching the itch?

Because you have it. You were built with it. And if you’re not feeding it on the open mystery, you’re feeding it somewhere. Maybe it’s the algorithm serving you “what the church doesn’t want you to know.” Maybe it’s the quiet suspicion that the Christians who seem most alive are the ones with something extra — a hidden book, an older liturgy, a secret key. Maybe it’s just the low hum that Sunday’s version is the beginner’s version, and the real thing is behind another door.

Next time the whisper comes — the documentary, the thread, the “did you know” — don’t fact-check it first. Ask a better question: what appetite is this feeding? Then take that appetite where it was always meant to go. Open the text you already own. Read it like it’s what Paul says it is: the mystery of the ages, declassified, addressed to you. The strangest truth in this whole story is that the deepest thing God ever hid, He hid in plain sight — and most of us walk past it looking for a locked door.

You don’t need clearance. You need an open Bible and the nerve to believe you’re holding the secret.

The People Telling the Story

And this is where we get to be different — not smarter than the conspiracy-hungry world, just better fed.

The church was never meant to be a vault. Paul says the mystery goes public through us — ordinary people in ordinary rooms, handling the open secret out loud. Every time we teach the text plainly, answer the hard question without flinching, and refuse to gatekeep what God declassified, we starve the counter-liturgy of its power.

We are not the people guarding the real story. We’re the people telling it.

And one day the riddle ends. Not with a final document, but with a face. Until then, we hold the secret the way it was given to us — wide open.

This is the first piece in Functional Gospels, a series about the stories that replaced the gospel for a generation — not arguments that defeated it, but narratives that displaced it. Next up: Brené Brown, and the gospel of self-acceptance.

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That’s the honest version. I had a stack of work from seminary — the major papers, the exegetical pieces, the stuff I’d poured months into — and a Substack seemed like the place to put them where someone other than a professor might read them. So that’s what it was at first. A repository. I published finished things.

Somewhere in a seminary class, I’d gotten this idea about blending head and heart — that the doctrine I was learning wasn’t supposed to just sit in my notes, that it was supposed to land somewhere in a life. I didn’t realize I would enjoy apologetics as much as I enjoyed theology, yet there I was devouring works that made me want to shape the message of our faith into something more than a pastoral message or a good blog article. But I’ll be honest: I didn’t do it well at first. The conviction was there. The execution wasn’t.

Then I ran out of papers.

I’d shared all the major work, and suddenly I was writing without a finished thing to lean on. Winging it. I started recording videos on YouTube alongside the writing, and it began to feel more like the beginnings of a money grab and brand building maneuver than really putting something together that would benefit everyone involved. Looking back, I can see what was happening that I couldn’t see then: I was reaching for something I didn’t have the language for yet. The head-and-heart idea was still pulling at me. I just couldn’t deliver on it.

The click came at my last job.

I travelled almost every other week to talk with pastors and cast vision for a unified effort to share the gospel with their city, and to equip their people to participate in that work. I talked about Jesus’ high priestly prayer and the well-worn stump speech points our organization had used for over 60 years. These pastors were on board, and they knew they couldn’t do it without their congregations getting on board too. However, the same language I used with them couldn’t be the same language we used when we talked to the school teachers, plumbers, bankers, and business owners in their churches.

And somewhere in watching that, it landed on me: there had to be a way I could do the same thing with what I was doing. Those pastors were taking the deep things and putting them in the hands of people in the pew. That was the whole point. That was what I’d been circling since that seminary classroom.

Those everyday believers the pastors were equipping are the same people who long for more than just existing in their faith. I saw myself in them. We were asking the same two questions: so what? now what?

So what? Now what?

If you’ve spent any time in church, you know those questions. Maybe you’ve never said them out loud. Maybe you’ve felt them in the pause after a sermon you agreed with completely and walked out of unchanged. You believe the right things. You could pass the doctrine test. And still, somewhere underneath, there’s a question you’re almost embarrassed to ask: is this it?

But that question isn’t a sign your faith is weak. It’s a sign your faith is looking for something the church hasn’t always known how to give it.

We have no shortage of doctrine. Walk into most churches, and you’ll find people who can tell you what they believe about Scripture, about the cross, about the Trinity — and they’re not wrong. We’ve gotten good at orthodoxy. What we haven’t gotten good at is the bridge: the practice of taking what we believe and bringing it to bear on the questions an actual life actually asks. The teacher’s question. The plumber’s question. The banker’s question. Yours.

That’s the gap. Not a gap in what we believe — a gap in the discipline of living inside it, out loud, in front of a watching world that’s asking us harder questions than our stump speeches were built to answer.

And the strange thing is, most of us have been working in that gap for years without a name for it. Reaching for it. Circling it. Doing the work before we had a word for it.

Walk into Athens with Paul and watch what he doesn’t do.

He doesn’t torch the place. He’s provoked — Luke says his spirit was being provoked within him as he saw the city full of idols (Acts 17:16) — but provocation doesn’t become a tirade. Neither does he go quiet and accommodating, soft-pedaling the offense of the gospel to win a hearing. He does something harder than either. He looks. He walks the city, reads its altars, and finds the one inscribed To an Unknown God (17:23). Then he stands up in the Areopagus and says: that One you’ve been groping after in the dark — let me tell you his name.

That’s the whole posture in a single scene. Paul listens to Athens on Athens’s terms. He distills the longing underneath the idols — a city so hungry for the divine it builds altars to gods it can’t even name. And he reframes that longing under the true God, quoting their own poets back to them, not to flatter but to redirect. In him we live and move and have our being(17:28). He takes what Athens reached for and shows them Who was standing behind the reaching the whole time.

This is Redemptive Correlation before it had a name. Listen, distill, reframe, respond — read the culture through Scripture, not Scripture through the culture. I’m not the first to notice Paul doing this. A whole stream of thinkers has been circling the Areopagus lately, and they’ll tell you plainly that the practice is old even where the label is new — that what looks like a recent move “finds precedent,” as one recent volume on the subject puts it, “in significant apologists within the Christian tradition.”1 The instinct has always been there. What it’s lacked is a name and a discipline to hold it.

Tillich developed a method that ran in the opposite direction, letting the culture set the questions Scripture had to answer on the culture’s terms. Paul reverses the vector. He lets Athens ask, but he doesn’t let Athens decide. The altar names the hunger; only the gospel names the God.

But here’s what Acts 17 gives you and doesn’t give you. It gives you the posture — a way of standing before a culture without either burning it down or bowing to it. What it doesn’t give you is a way to keep standing there. The Areopagus is a moment. A discipline is a life.

For that, go to Paul's older writing to a younger man, he’s handing something to.

Pay close attention to your life and your teaching; persevere in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers (1 Timothy 4:16).

Read that slowly, because it refuses the split we keep trying to make. Life and teaching. Orthopraxy and orthodoxy. Paul doesn’t let Timothy choose. He doesn’t say guard the doctrine and the living will sort itself out, and he doesn’t say live well and the doctrine is negotiable. He fuses them and tells Timothy to persevere in the fusion — present tense, ongoing, a practice you stay in, not a position you take once.

Kevin Vanhoozer spent a whole book refusing that same split, arguing that doctrine — far from the dusty thing we’ve made it — is “the stuff of life” itself, the script we’re meant to live and not just shelve.2 He’s right. And it’s worth saying that a systematician of his weight needed four hundred pages to land what Paul hands Timothy in a single verse: the teaching and the life were never two things.

That’s the word the church keeps losing. Not doctrine — we have doctrine. Not technique — we have apologetic technique, debate scripts, a hundred ways to win an argument with an atheist. What we keep losing is the discipline: the sustained, named practice of holding life and teaching together and bringing both to bear on the questions the culture is actually asking.

Run it through the arc and watch it hold. In creation, life and doctrine were never two things — to know God truly was to live rightly before him; the knowing and the living were one motion. The fall split them, and we’ve been paying for the split ever since: orthodoxy that doesn’t touch the ground, orthopraxy unmoored from truth. Redemption is God refusing to leave the two apart — the Word made flesh, doctrine that walked and ate and bled, truth you could touch. And restoration is where Paul’s “save both yourself and your hearers” is pointing: a day when knowing and living are seamless again, when no one has to be reminded to watch their life and their teaching because the two will finally be one thing.

A method gets you through the Areopagus. A discipline gets you through the Christian life. Redemptive Correlation is the method.

And here I want to be careful, because what I’m describing has cousins. There’s a rich conversation happening right now under the banner of “cultural apologetics” — making the faith plausible, beautiful, and desirable to a watching world — and I’ve learned from it. But that work aims mostly outward, at the skeptic at the city gate. What I’m after runs the other direction too: inward, at the believer in the pew who already affirms the creed and still can’t feel the floor under it. Not just commending the faith to outsiders. Forming it in insiders.

The discipline I’m describing — theological apologetics, the practice of holding doctrine and life together and reading the culture through the gospel — needs a name too.

I’ve been calling it Theologetics for two years. I’m only now telling you it was a discipline the whole time.

So let me talk to you — the one still sitting with so what, now what.

I want you to hear that your question is not a problem to be solved. It’s a calling to be answered. The ache you feel when the doctrine doesn’t reach the ground isn’t your faith failing. It’s your faith refusing to settle for less than what it was made for. You were never meant to just hold the truth. You were meant to live inside it — to bring it to the desk, the job site, the dinner table, the friend deconstructing everything you still hold.

That’s not a job for pastors and scholars. The plumber doing this in his shop is doing theology. The teacher doing it in her classroom is doing theology. You, doing it wherever you actually are, are doing the thing this whole discipline exists to name and train and sharpen.

So stop waiting to be qualified. You already have the doctrine. What you’ve been missing is the discipline — and the discipline can be learned. That’s what this is. That’s what it’s always been.

Here’s what I’m building, and here’s how you can be part of it.

Theologetics is becoming more than a place I post. It’s becoming the work itself — the sustained practice of holding life and teaching together and reading the culture through the gospel, done out loud, every week, where you can watch it and learn it and do it yourself. The founding member tier is how that work gets resourced and how you get the most of it: an additional long-form piece every month, the full Phase 2 archive organized so you can actually use it, and a permanent seat at $5 a month or $50 a year, locked for as long as you stay.

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I’m not asking you to support a brand. I spent a season tempted to build one of those, and I walked away from it on purpose. I’m asking you to join a discipline — to put your money where your so what is, and help build the thing you’ve been circling all along.

Picture the city Paul walked around in.

Altars everywhere, to gods with no names — a whole culture aching toward something it couldn’t quite say. That city is still here. It’s the one outside your window, the one your coworkers live in, the one you and I were aching in not long ago. Full of people building altars to unnamed things, asking so what and now what into a silence they assume is all there is.

We have the Name. That’s the thing. We’re not standing in the Areopagus empty-handed, hoping to win an argument. We’re standing there knowing the One the altars were always reaching for — and the only question left is whether we’ll learn to say so, in a language the teacher and the plumber and the deconstructing friend can actually hear.

That’s the discipline. That’s the work. And it’s not finished in any of us — Paul told Timothy to persevere, present tense, because the day it’s fully formed in us isn’t a day we reach by ourselves or arrive at this side of restoration. We’re being made into people whose lives and teaching are finally one and the same. We’re not there. We’re on the way.

So come build it with me. Not because I’ve got it figured out — you’ve read far enough to know I don’t. But because the gap is real, and the work is good, and the city is still full of altars.

Let’s go learn to name the God behind them.

If this named something you’ve been circling too — the gap between what you believe and how you live it — then subscribe and stay. This is the work, every week.

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And if someone came to mind while you read — the believer who can pass the doctrine test and still feels the floor missing — send this to them. That’s how this grows: not by going viral, but by going to the right person.

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He was my accountability partner — a churchy way of saying the friend I’d asked to ask me the hard questions, the structure I’d built specifically to fight what I was doing. He asked. And I looked at him and lied. I told him I was fine. I’d done the one thing I’d asked him to help guard me against the week before, and I said nothing, and I let him pray for me, and three days later I stood up and preached on wisdom from Proverbs.

I want you to sit in that with me, because I’ve spent a lot of years not sitting in it.

I was leading a ministry. Building it, actually — pouring real hours into discipling people in the Christian life. And by every visible measure, it was working. There was fruit. People were growing. From the outside, and honestly from most of the inside, I looked like a young man on fire for God.

I was living contrary to Scripture in multiple streams and feeding a private habit I hid from everyone. Two lives, running at the same time, inches apart. I’d prepare a lesson on holiness with the previous night still on me. I’d teach people to walk in step with the Spirit and mean it, genuinely mean it, and then go kill nothing in myself the moment the lights went down.

Here’s the part I understand now that I couldn’t see then. I wasn’t a man with no spiritual life. That would almost be easier to explain. I had an enormous spiritual life. I felt real conviction when I sinned — sharp, hot, sincere. I sought God’s forgiveness, and I genuinely gloried in it; the relief was real, the gratitude was real. And then I soared in the pleasure of the sin again the next weekend, and felt the conviction again, and sought the forgiveness again, and round it went.

I called that repentance. It wasn’t. It was rehearsed repentance — the full liturgy of being sorry, performed on a loop, with one thing missing from the middle of it. I never actually killed anything. I confessed the sin, thanked God for covering it, and left it exactly where it was, alive and waiting for me to pick it back up again. I had a functional spiritual amnesia — except it wasn’t that I forgot. It’s that I’d built a cycle where forgetting was the point. Feel it, confess it, move on, repeat.

It ended the way those things end. I was found out. I resigned, and I dressed the resignation in a respectable reason, and the respectable reason was a lie too — the last lie on top of all the others.

You can see the sins well enough, but the sins aren’t the confession. This is the confession: I was doing more Christianity in that season than I have in almost any season since. I just wasn’t putting anything to death. And it turns out you can do an astonishing amount of the first while doing none of the second — and call the whole thing a calling.

I don’t think I’m the only one. I think there are people reading this who haven’t actually killed anything in years, and who would never know it, because the activity is so loud you can’t hear the silence underneath it.

My version of this was loud and obvious. Yours is probably quieter. That’s what makes it more dangerous.

Because most of us aren’t living a double life with a dramatic secret. Most of us are just busy. Busy being Christians, even. We go to church. We serve. We read the plan, we know the words, we’d pass any doctrine quiz you put in front of us. By every visible measure, the faith is working.

And underneath all that motion, a question almost no one asks: when is the last time I actually put something to death?

Not “when did I last feel bad about a sin?” We do that constantly. I mean: when did I last take a specific corruption in myself — name it, drag it into the light, and go to war with it until it died? When did I last lose something I wanted to keep? For a lot of us, the honest answer is a number of years we’d rather not say out loud, if ever. We’ve just treated Jesus as fire insurance instead of life-changing. We’ve been active the whole time. We just haven’t been killing.

And it’s not because we’re sinless. It’s because our sins got respectable. The sharp tongue we call honesty and even embrace as our God-given personality. The ability to be offended we hold onto because we tell ourselves that without it, we’d be a doormat. The self-pity we’ve nursed so long that it feels like personality. The envy we’ve rebranded as ambition. We’ve made a quiet peace with all of it and say, “Oh well.” We’re not at war with these things. We’re cohabiting with them and making them our pet sins.

What we do instead of killing is feel. We feel convicted — genuinely, sometimes intensely. We confess. We feel the relief of grace. And we mistake that whole emotional circuit for repentance, when it’s really just the feeling of repentance running on a loop with nothing dying at the center of it. We’ve been sorry a thousand times. We’ve changed almost none of it.

And we are being told, from every direction, that this is fine. That the things we should be killing are actually the truest parts of us. That peace with ourselves is the goal, and war with ourselves is the sickness. The whole spirit of the age is built to talk us out of the one verb the Christian life can’t live without.

This is where all of it has been heading. Not a new question — the same one, asked for the last time, with nowhere left to hide from it.

It’s easy to nod at all this as a description of the lukewarm church out there somewhere.

It’s harder to ask the question straight: what have I actually put to death lately? And to sit in the silence if the answer is nothing.

There’s a sentence in Paul that the modern church has quietly stopped being able to hear. Not because it’s obscure — because it’s violent.

“If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom 8:13).

Put to death. That’s the verb. Not manage, not balance, not integrate, not make peace with. Kill. And Paul stakes everything on it: the clause before says that if you live according to the flesh, “you will die” — and he doesn’t mean you’ll feel distant from God. He means death in its fullest, most final sense.1 The commentators who handle this verse carefully refuse to soften it, because Paul refuses to. This isn’t advanced discipleship for the especially serious. It’s the difference between life and death, stated as a command.2

The Puritan John Owen built an entire book on this one verse, and gave us the line that has never been improved on: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”3 There’s no neutral third option, no holding pattern, no maintenance mode. Sin is not a static thing you contain; it’s a living thing that is either dying at your hand or growing at your expense. The Christian life, on this account, has a verb at its center, and that verb is kill.

A verb needs an object

Here’s the thing about a command to put something to death: it only makes sense if there’s something there to die.

“Put to death the deeds of the body.” Mortify what is earthly in you (Col 3:5). The grammar requires an object — a real corruption, a genuine self-in-rebellion that has to be dragged out and executed. The whole vocabulary of the New Testament Christian life assumes it. Put off the old self. Crucify the flesh. Deny yourself. Every one of those verbs reaches for an object, and the object is always the same: a version of you that has to die so a truer one can live.

And this — slowly, over years, without anyone deciding it on purpose — is exactly what we have lost.

Walk back through what this series has watched come apart. We started with judgment — the conviction that sin earns condemnation — and we watched the church quietly retire it, until sin carries no weight and there’s nothing to be saved from. Then we watched the authority of Scripture get relativized, until the texts that name sin no longer bind, and there’s no fixed word left to call anything sin at all. Then we watched the self get sacralized — you are your desires, express them, honor them — until the inner life isn’t a battlefield but a sanctuary, every want a piece of the authentic you.

Now stand back and see what all three have done together, because this is where they were always heading. Remove judgment, and there’s no penalty that makes sin worth killing. Remove Scripture’s authority, and there’s no standard by which to know what to kill. Sacralize the self, and there’s nothing you would dare to kill, because the thing the New Testament calls “the flesh” has been renamed “who I really am.” Strip out all three, and you haven’t made the Christian life gentler. You’ve removed its object. You’ve left the verb — put to death — with nothing left to put to death.

That’s the quiet catastrophe underneath the whole project, and it’s why this series has been one argument and not four. It was never really about any single doctrine. It was about sanctification all along — because when you relativize judgment and Scripture and the self, the thing that actually dies is mortification itself. You’re left with a Christianity that has every feature except the one verb that made it transformative. Activity without killing. Worship without dying. A faith you can practice with enormous energy, as I did, while putting nothing to death — because there’s nothing left you’re willing to call dead.

Killing is only half

But here’s where Scripture refuses to let mortification curdle into something grim, and it’s the half that even the church that still preaches “put sin to death” most often forgets.

You are not only killing. You are being made alive.

The old tradition had two words for the one motion: mortification and vivification. The putting to death and the making alive. They aren’t two separate projects — a season of killing followed by a season of living — but two faces of a single turn, the way exhaling and inhaling are one breath. Paul’s own language insists on it. The same passage that says “put to death” also says “put on the new self, which is being renewed after the image of its creator” (Col 3:9–10).4 You strip off the grave-clothes, and you put on the clean garment. The killing is never the point. It’s the clearing of ground so something can grow.

This is why Paul can hold together two things that look contradictory — that you have already died with Christ, and that you must still, daily, put sin to death. The commentators call it the indicative and the imperative: be what you are.5 You are already, by God’s act, a new creation. Now — by the Spirit, never by raw willpower, never by gritted teeth — become in practice what you already are by grace.6 Mortification without that grace is just moralism, the exhausting religion of self-improvement. But grace without mortification isn’t grace at all; it’s the verb-less Christianity we’ve been tracing all month — the one I lived — the one that lets sin sit alive and unbothered while you call yourself forgiven.

What you’re killing toward

And here is the thing that makes the killing bearable — that makes it, finally, hope and not horror.

You are not putting sin to death so you can be a slightly better person. You are putting it to death because of where this is all going. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s the destination. Not improvement — likeness. You will see Christ, and the seeing will finish the work, and you will be like Him.7

And John adds the line that turns the whole grim arithmetic of mortification into something with light in it: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). The killing is driven by the hope.8 You don’t put sin to death out of fear or duty or self-hatred. You put it to death because you’ve seen where you’re headed — a face you will one day look full in — and you cannot carry the old corruption into that presence, and more than that, you don’t want to. The hope does the purifying. Without it, John says, life is empty. With it, every act of mortification is one more thing you set down because your hands are getting ready to hold something better.

So here is the whole method of this newsletter, landed on its final question. The culture says: become who you are. Find the self inside you and express it without apology. Scripture says something stranger and harder and infinitely more hopeful: die, and be made alive into who He is making you. The self you’re chasing isn’t behind you, waiting to be excavated and honored. It’s ahead of you, in the face of Christ, waiting to be revealed — and the only road there runs through a daily death.

Name what you’re killing

So I’m going to ask you the question the whole series has been walking toward, and I want you to actually answer it, not let it slide past.

What are you killing right now?

Not what do you feel bad about. Not what would you confess if pressed. What sin, specifically, are you at war with this week — named, hunted, actively dying at your hand? If you can answer that cleanly, then thank God and keep your blade sharp. But if you went quiet just now — if you scrolled back through the last month, the last year, and couldn’t find a single thing you’ve genuinely put to death — then I’m not writing this to shame you. I’m writing it because I lived in that silence for years and called it a ministry, and someone should have grabbed me by the collar.

So let me grab yours. Here’s what to do, and it’s painfully simple.

Pick one. Not all of them — you’ll do nothing if you try to do everything. One. The pet sin from a few paragraphs ago that you felt the heat on when I named it. The tongue, the offense you nurse, the self-pity, the envy, the thing you’ve been calling your personality. Pick the one you’d least like to give up, because that’s the one with its hooks deepest in you. That reluctance you feel — not that one — is the sin defending its own life. Listen to it. It’s telling you where to aim.

Then go to war with it. Specifically, concretely, this week. Name it out loud to one person who’ll ask you about it again — a real accountability you don’t lie to, which I know something about. Cut off whatever feeds it. When it rises, refuse it, and when you fail, get up the same hour and refuse it again. This isn’t a feeling. Feelings you already have in abundance; feelings are the loop you’ve been mistaking for repentance. This is an act, repeated, against something that wants to stay alive.

But hear the one thing that keeps this from being a self-improvement project — because if you miss it, you’ll just exhaust yourself building a better you and call it sanctification. You do not kill sin by raw willpower. Paul is explicit: it’s “by the Spirit“ you put the deeds of the body to death. The power isn’t yours, but the act is still required of you. Not “let go and let God,” as though you were a passenger. Not “grit your teeth and fix yourself,” as though you were alone. Both are counterfeits. The truth is stranger: you fight with everything you have, and the strength you fight with isn’t yours. You say a daily yes to a killing that God is doing in you and through you and will not do without you.

So stop waiting to feel sanctified. Stop running the loop — the conviction, the relief, the nothing-changes. Pick the sin you’re most fond of, and by the Spirit, start killing it today. Not because God will love you more when it’s dead. Because He already loves you, and He refuses to leave you cohabiting with the thing that’s killing you.

I told you at the start that my version of this was loud and obvious. I didn’t tell you how it ends.

It ends here — with me writing this. Restored. Years past the resignation and the lies and the cycle I couldn’t break on my own. I am not the man who lied to his accountability partner on a Thursday. That man, by the grace of God and a great deal of slow, unglamorous killing, is dead. I had to put him to death, over and over, for longer than I wanted to — and I didn’t do it alone, and I didn’t do it by feeling sorry. I did it by the Spirit, the same Spirit who would not let me stay in the grave I’d dug.

That’s the part the loop could never give me. The loop kept me feeling forgiven while leaving me exactly where I was. What actually saved me wasn’t softer than mortification. It was mortification — the real thing, the daily death — and on the other side of it, a life I could not have manufactured and did not deserve. The killing was never the end. It was the door.

Because here is what we are killing toward, and it’s the only thing that makes any of this bearable. “We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s the destination. Not a tidier version of yourself. Not a respectable Christian who finally got the pet sins under control. Likeness to Christ — the actual face of God, seen at last, and the seeing finishing the work that every small death began. And the hope of that face is not passive: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself” (1 John 3:3). The hope does the killing. You put the old self to death because you’ve glimpsed where you’re going, and you will not carry the corpse into that light.

This is where the whole series has been heading, all four weeks of it. We watched the church lay down judgment, and Scripture’s authority, and the very idea of a self that needs saving — and I told you those losses would converge somewhere. They converge here. Strip out everything that makes sin worth killing, and you don’t get a lighter, kinder faith. You get a faith with no verb, no war, no death — and therefore no resurrection, because resurrection is only ever on the far side of a grave. A Christianity that has nothing left to put to death has nothing left to be raised.

So this is the question the whole month was always going to end on. Not what do you believe — you believe plenty. Not how do you feel — you feel constantly. The question is: what are you putting to death, and who are you becoming as it dies?

The culture says become who you are. Scripture says something better, and harder, and truer than anything the age is selling: die, and be made alive into who He is making you. The self worth having was never behind you, waiting to be expressed. It’s ahead of you, in the face of Christ, waiting to be revealed.

Be killing sin. It was always the way home.

And I’ll see you there — both of us unrecognizable, both of us finally ourselves.

This closes the June series — four weeks on what the church loses, one doctrine at a time, when it trades hard truth for an easier peace: judgment, the authority of Scripture, the self that needs saving, and now the daily death that was supposed to change us. Thank you for walking the whole arc. If you came in partway, the four read best in order.

A note, because I told you a hard story, and I don’t want you to mishear the ending. I’m restored, not finished. The man who lied on a Thursday is dead, but staying dead is daily work — I still put things to death now, and some of them have my own name on them, as the last few weeks here have made plain. If you saw yourself anywhere in this series, you’re not too far gone, and you’re not behind. You’re just being invited, like I was, into the one work that actually changes anything. It’s slower than you’d like. It’s also the only thing that’s real.

→ If this series meant something to you, send the whole arc to one person. Not the timeline — one person you’ve watched get quieter in their faith, or louder in their activity with less and less underneath it. These four pieces were written for exactly that person, and they were written to be handed over, not broadcast.

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→ If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.

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→ And one more thing, because the timing matters. Next Monday I’m writing something different — not an essay, a letter. About what this newsletter has become over the last year, who it turned out to be for, and something new I’m opening on July 7 for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly piece can. If these four weeks were worth your time, that letter is the one to read. I’ll see you there.

“Nothing Left to Raise” is the fourth and final piece of the June arc.

The series in order: [1 — judgment] · [2 — Scripture] · [3 — the self] · [4 — this one].

A fifth question — where all of this is finally going — comes after the launch.

At a stoplight. In the middle of dinner. With one hand on the door and the leash in the other, the dogs already pulling toward the night. In the middle of a meeting, phone in my lap, eyes down like I’m taking notes.

I tell myself it’s diligence. It isn’t. I’m checking the views. And what I’m really checking — though it took me a long time to say this plainly — is whether I’m any good.

Here’s how the math works in me. A good number is a hit. There’s no other word for it; it lands in the body like one, a clean little jolt of yes, it’s working, you’re working. A bad number isn’t information. It’s a verdict. A flat Monday doesn’t tell me the post underperformed. It tells me I don’t actually know what I’m doing — that the whole thing is a costume, and the numbers are the part of the day that knows it.

I can hide this well. I can go a whole evening without saying a word about it, present at the table, asking about your day. But it’s running the whole time, underneath — a quiet meter reading more, less, more, less.

A few months ago, a theologian I deeply respect — a man whose work I’d buy on sight — reshared something I’d written about his book. Put it on his Insta story. A screenshot with a markup circling something I wrote and some positive comments, which meant he’d actually read it.

I want to tell you it was gratifying. That’s too small a word. It was a hit of a drug. It lasted the rest of the day. I texted the friends who love his work. I read the screenshot again. And then — this is the part I keep wanting to leave out — I started wondering how to get him to do it again. The high had a half-life. By the next morning, it had burned off, and I was back at the meter. More, less.

I’ve called this a lot of generous names. Stewardship. Wanting the message to reach people and equip the everyday believer. Diligence about the work God’s given me.

Here’s where this gets real, and where it hurts. I debated whether to keep this paragraph while I edited, let alone write it. Someone asked me once whether I’d keep doing this if it never worked — if the platform never came, if I stayed where I am forever, unquoted, unbooked, unknown. The first thing that went through my mind wasn’t yes, of course, the work is worth it. It was: then what’s the point?

Which told me what the point had been all along. The point was never really just the teaching. It was showing off how much I know.

I’m a trained theologian writing a series about the ways we mistake our desires for our selves. And I’ve spent five months feeding a desire I dressed up as a calling, refreshing a page between tasks to find out if I’m worth anything yet.

I don’t think I’m the only one. I think most of us have a want we’ve quietly started calling who we are.

I don’t think my version of this is rare. I think it’s just mine — the particular shape of a thing everyone’s carrying.

Because we all do it. We take something we want, or something we feel, or something we’ve always been like, and at some point it stops being a thing about us and becomes the thing we are. The want graduates into an identity. And once it’s an identity, it’s protected. You don’t question an identity. You defend it.

We say it casually, all the time. That’s just who I am. I’m a blunt person — it’s just how I’m wired. I have a temper, always have. I’m an anxious person; I’m this type on this personality test; I’m just not built for that. We say it like we’re describing our eye color. And what we’re actually doing, underneath the shrug, is moving a sin out of the category of things-to-be-fought and into the category of things-to-be-accepted. We’re not confessing. We’re incorporating.

Or it’s a desire. A thing we want so badly that wanting it has become part of who we understand ourselves to be — so that if you questioned the want, it wouldn’t feel like a question about a desire. It would feel like a question about us. That’s the tell. When someone gets near the thing, and you jerk like they hit a reflex with a mallet — that’s not a preference they brushed up against. That’s a high place.

And we live in a moment that has made this instinct into a philosophy, even a psychology. The deepest wisdom of our age, repeated everywhere until it sounds like oxygen, is this: the truest thing about you is what you most deeply desire, and the bravest thing you can do is live it out without apology. Find it. Honor it. Become it. You already know how completely the water we swim in is made of this.

It’s easy to nod along at that as a cultural diagnosis — to see how other people have built their whole selves on a feeling.

It’s easy right up until you look at the want you’ve been protecting. The one you’d bristle to have questioned. The one you’ve quietly started calling who you are.

Start where the Bible starts, because the Bible answers the identity question before we’ve finished asking it — and it answers in a direction we’d never choose.

When God makes the human, He does something He does nowhere else in the creation account. Every other act is a word spoken outward — let there be, let the earth bring forth. Here, and only here, there’s deliberation first: “Let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26). The human is the one creature preceded by a divine huddle, the pinnacle act, the only one God pauses over.1 And the thing that makes a human a human — the image — is not produced by the human. It’s conferred. You are an image-bearer before you’ve done a single thing, wanted a single thing, chosen a single thing. The identity is bestowed, not achieved, and it’s bestowed before you’re old enough to have an opinion about it.

Here’s the detail almost everyone misses, and it’s the hinge of the whole question. Genesis never tells us what the image is. It doesn’t locate the image in your reason, your will, your relationships, or your desires. The text is conspicuously silent on the contents; it moves straight from the bestowal to the consequence — you will represent God, you will rule as His.2 That silence is doing theological work. Scripture refuses to let you find your identity in any attribute you possess, because the moment the image is located in a trait, that trait becomes the thing you must perform, protect, and prove. The Bible won’t give you that. It says: you are God’s, made by God, for God, and the definition stays in His hands. Your selfhood is a gift held by Someone else.

This is the exact opposite of the air we breathe. The modern self is not conferred; it’s expressed. You are, we’re told, whatever is truest and deepest and most insistent inside you — and the highest moral act is to excavate that inner thing and live it out without compromise. Identity is desire, surfaced and honored. To question the desire is to attack the self.

Scripture has a name for that move. It isn’t “authenticity.” It’s older and darker, and it sits at the very center of the fall.

The exchange

Paul tells the story of how humanity went wrong, and he tells it as a story about worship — and underneath worship, about identity. People knew God, Paul says, and “did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom 1:21). What happened next is the engine of the whole human predicament: they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (Rom 1:23). The word exchange is load-bearing. The fall is a swap — trading the weight and splendor of God for something smaller you can hold and control.3

Don’t file this under ancient history, carved idols and pagan temples. Paul’s anatomy of idolatry applies to our moment exactly: his words apply as much to people who have made money, sex, or fame their gods as to anyone who ever bowed to wood and stone.4 Idolatry isn’t a phase humanity outgrew. It’s the permanent human reflex of taking some piece of creation and putting it where God goes. And Paul gives the reflex its sharpest definition one verse later: idolatry is “worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25).5

Now hold that definition next to the modern self, and watch what it exposes. You are your desires is not a neutral theory of identity. It’s creature-worship turned inward. It takes a piece of creation — your own wants, your own felt intensities — and installs them in the Creator’s chair. The most natural spirituality of our age, the one that calls itself liberation, is the oldest sin in Scripture wearing new clothes: the creature, enthroned, demanding the worship that was never its to receive.

And here’s the part Paul insists on that we’d rather not hear. After the exchange comes the handing over. Three times in this passage God “gives them up” — and the first time, He gives them up “in the lusts of their hearts” (Rom 1:24).6 Read the order carefully, because the order is everything. The disordered desire is not the root. It’s the consequence. The runaway wants come second, after the worship has already been misplaced. Which means you cannot fix a disordered self by managing its desires one at a time. The desires are downstream. The problem was never first in what you wanted — it was in what you worshiped, and the wanting followed the worship over the cliff.

That’s why the modern project of self-actualization can never deliver what it promises. It treats the symptom as the cure. It says the way to become yourself is to honor the desires — when the desires are precisely the flood you were handed over to when the worship went wrong. You cannot drink your way out of a thirst that worship created. The creature in the Creator’s chair is a tyrant that can’t be satisfied, only fed — and the feeding has a half-life.

The self you do not invent

So if the self isn’t expressed, how is it recovered? Scripture’s answer is as concrete as a change of clothes.

Paul tells the Colossians they have “put off the old self with its practices” and “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col 3:9–10). Two things in that sentence undo the entire expressivist program. First, the verbs: you put off and put on. The new self isn’t excavated from within; it’s received from without and worn — the way you’d strip off a filthy garment and dress in a clean one.7 You don’t dig down to the true you. You put on a true you that was given to you. Second — impossible to miss — the new self is renewed “after the image of its creator,” a deliberate reach back to Genesis 1:27.8 The arc closes. What was conferred in creation and defaced in the fall is restored in Christ — and restored as gift again, not as achievement.

This is the whole shape of it, and it runs exactly counter to the age. In Creation, your identity is bestowed — image-bearer before you wanted anything. In the Fall, you exchange the worship of God for the worship of the creature, and your desires are handed the throne your worship vacated. In Redemption, that old self isn’t coached or optimized; it’s crucified — “our old self was crucified with him” — and a new self is given, a new creation in which “the old has passed away” entirely, a completed act and not a renovation.9 In Restoration, that new self is brought home to the image it started with, “renewed after the image of its creator,” now in the face of Christ, the last Adam.10

Notice the vector, because it’s the whole method of Theologetics. This is Redemptive Correlation: the culture reads the self through desire — whatever you most deeply want, that’s who you are, and the work of life is to express it. Redemptive Correlation runs the other way. It reads desire through the self God made and is remaking. It doesn’t ask your wants to tell you who you are. It asks who God made you to be, and puts your wants under that — some to be honored, some to be crucified, none allowed to sit in the chair that belongs to God alone.

The modern world hands you a mirror and calls it a self. Scripture hands you an image you didn’t make, marred by a worship you misplaced, restored by a Christ you didn’t invent — and calls that the self, the only one that was ever really yours.

So name yours.

Not the desire you’d happily admit to. The protected one. The want you’ve folded so far into your sense of self that questioning it feels less like a question and more like a threat. You found it a few minutes ago, when you bristled. Go back to it.

Then do the thing almost no one does with it: stop asking whether the desire is good or bad.

That’s the wrong question, and it’s the one that keeps you stuck — because most of these wants aren’t even sins on their face. Mine wasn’t. Wanting people to be helped by your teaching isn’t a sin. Wanting your marriage to thrive, your work to matter, your name to mean something — none of that is wrong in itself. So you run the audit on the desire, find it basically wholesome, and conclude there’s nothing to deal with. And the whole time you’ve been auditing the wrong thing.

Because Paul already told you the desire isn’t the root. It’s the runoff. The disordered want is what you got handed over to once the worship went wrong upstream. So the question is never “is this desire acceptable?” The question is: what am I worshiping that this desire is serving? What did I put in God’s chair, such that this particular want now has the run of the place?

Run it on yourself. When the number is good, and you feel like a self, and when the number is flat, and you feel like a fraud — what god is being fed and starved by those swings? When the recognition comes, and it’s a drug, and when it’s withheld, and you’re nothing — who’s on the throne that your whole mood rises and falls with? Find that, and you’ve found the actual idol. The desire was just its priest.

Here’s the part that will cost you, because it cost me. You cannot simply moderate a desire that’s serving a false god. You can’t manage your way to freedom — that’s just tending the idol more carefully. The desire that sits on a misplaced worship has to die, and when it dies it will feel like you are dying. That’s not a sign you’ve gone too far. It’s the sign you found the right thing. Paul said it with no cushion at all: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). The old self doesn’t get optimized. It gets crucified. And the terror you feel at that — if this goes, what’s left of me? — is the most honest thing about you, because it’s the moment you discover how much of your “self” was an idol wearing your name.

But read the rest of what Paul said, because he doesn’t leave you in the grave: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The self that comes out the other side isn’t a diminished you. It’s the first real one — the one that was always yours underneath the idol, received back as a gift instead of clutched as an achievement.

So stop managing the want. Find the worship under it. And let the thing on the throne be put to death, so the One who belongs there can finally have the seat — and give you back a self you never had to manufacture.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve stopped checking.

I checked the day I drafted this. I’ll probably check Monday, when this one goes out — at a stoplight, in the middle of something, with that same quiet meter running underneath. I’m not writing from the far side of this. I’m writing from inside it, with the page open in another tab.

But something has moved, even if the habit hasn’t. I’ve stopped calling the refresh me. I’ve stopped letting the number deliver a verdict it was never qualified to give. When the meter swings now, I can — sometimes, not always — catch it and name it: that’s the idol asking to be fed, and it is not my self, and it does not get to say whether I’m worth anything. The want is still there. It’s just no longer wearing my name.

That’s the difference the gospel actually makes here, and it’s less than you’d want and more than you’d think. It doesn’t hand you a self you finally got right. It hands you a self you didn’t have to get right at all — conferred in a garden before you’d earned a thing, defaced by every throne you built for something smaller, and given back to you in Christ, renewed after the image of the One who made it. You put it on like clean clothes over a body you couldn’t wash yourself.

We spend our lives mistaking our wants for our selves, defending the high places, refreshing the page to find out if we’re anything yet. And the whole time, the answer was never going to come from the thing on the throne. It was settled in the workshop where we were made, by a God who looked at an image that had done nothing yet and called it His.

You are not the sum of what you want. You never were.

You are what He made — and what He is, even now, remaking.

So go find the want you’ve been calling yourself. And hand back the throne.

This is the third piece in a June series on what it costs the church to relativize a hard truth, one doctrine at a time. We've looked at what happens when we lose judgment, and when we lose the authority to be told anything we didn't already believe. This week: what happens when we lose the ability to say what a person even is. One more to come.

If this named something true in you, send it to one person — the one whose “that’s just who I am” you’ve worried about, or the one you suspect is white-knuckling a want they’ve started calling themselves. This isn’t a piece for the timeline. It’s a piece for one quiet conversation.

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If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe, and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.

Subscribe now

And if you’ve been here a while: something is coming in July for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly essay can. I’ll say more at the end of the month. For now, just know the weekly will always be free — whatever gets built around it.

—

Next Monday closes the series: what happens when we lose the one thing that was supposed to change us — the slow, unglamorous work of being made new, and what's left of the Christian life without it. If you're catching up, the series reads best in order; start with the first.

I don’t say that the way you might expect — with heat, with a clenched jaw, with a story I’m itching to tell. I say it flatly, the way you’d report the weather. Because the truth is, I don’t think about him at all. I’ve gotten very good at not thinking about him. When someone brings his name up, I feel the irritation rise before anyone finishes the sentence, and I change the subject, and I go back to not thinking about him. That’s the whole of my relationship with him now. A practiced, deliberate forgetting.

I’ll spare you the full ledger, because the ledger isn’t the point.

You’ll have to forgive me for keeping the details at this high level moving forward. For many reasons, I’m intentionally being vague, because if I went into any further detail, then anyone with familiarity would instantly be transported into their place in this story.

The short version: years of addiction, and the theft that always rides shotgun with it. He stole from his family. He stole from strangers. He came, more than once, to my own door, for my own things. There was prison, and there was a long stretch of it. And there was the part of me — the honest part — that was relieved he was somewhere he couldn’t reach us. I had never resonated with the saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” more.

Then he got out, and within a breath, he’d taken something that wasn’t his, wrecked it, and wrecked himself in the process. He lives now in such a way where he won’t recover from it. He can’t fully see what he did. He can’t fully see much of anything.

And here’s the thing I have to tell you, because the whole article falls apart if I don’t.

That should have softened me. A man who can no longer grasp his own wreckage is a man you pity, not one you guard against. But it didn’t soften me. It gave me a better exit. He can’t even understand it now, I tell myself, so what would forgiveness even accomplish? I found, in his brokenness, one more reason to keep not thinking about him.

I know the text. I’ve taught the text. Peter comes to Jesus and asks how many times he has to forgive his brother — seven? — and he isn’t really asking a question. He’s asking for the cap, the number that lets him stop. Jesus takes the cap off. Then He tells a story about a man forgiven a debt he could never have repaid, who walks straight out the door and grabs a man who owes him pocket change by the throat (Matt 18:21–35).

I have always known which man I am in that parable. I just found a way to read myself out of it.

Here is my exit, and watch how respectable it is. I tell myself that when I repented, I meant it — and I don’t think he ever did. I’ve quietly appointed myself the judge of whether his sorrow was real, ruled that it wasn’t, and that ruling is what lets me off the hook. The servant in the parable owed a real debt. That’s the part I skip past. His debt wasn’t fake. It didn’t matter. The man forgiven everything had no standing to start weighing what he was owed — and neither, it turns out, do I.

I’m a trained theologian. I can spot this move in everyone else. I can watch someone take a verse that costs them too much, find the reading that quietly excuses them, and name exactly what they did. And I have a verse I’ve been doing it to for years.

I don’t think I’m the only one.

I don’t think my exit is unusual. I think it’s the most human thing about me.

Everyone reading this has a person. And underneath the person, everyone has a verse — a line of Scripture that would cost too much if it actually applied, so we’ve quietly arranged for it not to. We don’t tear the page out. We’re more sophisticated than that. We develop a reading. A context. A distinction fine enough that the text stays in the Bible but loses its grip on us.

We tell ourselves we don’t make enough to give much. The verse about generosity is for people with real margin, not for us, not right now. Maybe one day.

We decide the Great Commission was written for city people. All that talk of going and telling belongs to crowded places full of strangers; out here, where everyone already knows everyone, it doesn’t quite fit. The Great Commission, we’ve concluded, has a zip code.

And we’re living in a moment that has turned this instinct into a public project. There’s a loud, ongoing argument in the church right now over which of Scripture’s hard texts still bind us and which were written for a world we’ve since outgrown. You already know the argument I mean.

It’s very easy — I find it easy — to watch that argument from the stands and shake my head at how plainly someone is reading their way out of a verse that costs them something.

It’s easy, right up until you remember the person you don’t think about. And the verse you filed under surely not him.

Paul tells Timothy something that sounds, at first, like a throwaway line of encouragement. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16). We tend to read it as a verse about the Bible’s reliability. It’s more than that. Paul’s word for “all” is pasa — the whole of it. Not the parts that have aged well. Not the parts that flatter us. The whole. He isn’t handing Timothy a Bible with a tiered table of contents, some texts load-bearing and some decorative. He’s handing him a single book that binds all the way through.

Hold that next to what he says one verse earlier. The sacred writings, Paul says, are “able to make you wise for salvation” (2 Tim 3:15). The function of Scripture is not to confirm what you already want. It’s to make you wise, which assumes you weren’t wise to begin with, that the text knows something you don’t, that it’s going to tell you things you didn’t bring to it. A book that only ever agreed with you couldn’t make you wise. It could only make you confident.

So here is the real question underneath every conversation about a hard text. Not “what does this passage mean?” That’s the question we say out loud. The question we’re actually asking is, “Who decides whether this passage still has a claim on me?”

The move underneath the move

Watch how the relativizing of a costly text actually works, because the mechanics matter more than any single verse.

It almost never begins with “the Bible is wrong.” That move is too obvious; nobody who loves Scripture would make it. It begins with distance. The writers couldn’t have known what we know now. They were addressing their world, their categories, their limited frame — and our world is different, our knowledge fuller, our categories more humane. The text, on this account, isn’t wrong. It’s simply addressed to someone else. Binding then. Timebound now.

It’s a careful move, and it isn’t stupid. There’s a real and necessary discipline of distinguishing what transfers across covenants from what doesn’t. We don’t stone adulterers; we don’t keep kosher; we don’t sacrifice pigeons. The hard work of reading Scripture has always included asking how a text binds, not merely that it does. No serious reader denies this.

But notice what the relativizing move smuggles in. It dresses a whether question in the clothes of a how question. It isn’t asking, in good faith, “how does this text bind a Christian today?” It has already decided the answer is “it doesn’t,” and it’s reverse-engineering a hermeneutic that produces that verdict. And the tell — the thing that gives it away every time — is which texts get reclassified as timebound.

They’re always the costly ones.

No one builds an elaborate cultural-distance argument to get out of “love your neighbor.” No one discovers that “be quick to forgive” was addressed to a context we’ve happily outgrown. The hermeneutic of distance is applied with remarkable precision to the very texts that ask of us something we’d rather not give, and it leaves untouched the texts that comfort us. A reading method that only ever frees you from your own discomfort isn’t a reading method. It’s a mirror with verses around the edge.

Where it goes

The reason this is worth an article, not just a footnote, is that the move doesn’t stay where you first used it.

A hermeneutic is a habit, not a one-time exception. Once you’ve taught yourself that a text that presses on you can be reclassified as time-bound, you haven’t resolved one hard passage. You’ve installed a mechanism. And the mechanism doesn’t check what it’s dissolving. It’ll run on the divorce texts when your marriage gets hard. It’ll run on the money texts when generosity gets expensive. It’ll run on “love your enemies” when you finally have an enemy worth hating. You built it to get past one verse. It will happily get you past all of them.

This is the real cost, and it’s why centering the argument on any single issue misses the point. The cost is not one doctrine. It’s the principle that lets you keep all the others. You haven’t lost an argument about one chapter. You’ve quietly relocated final authority — moved it out of the text and into yourself, into your own sense of what’s humane and livable and current. And a Scripture that can’t tell you anything you didn’t already believe has stopped being able to make you wise. It can only make you confident in what you walked in with.

Reading the culture through Scripture

Here’s where I want to name what’s actually happening, because it’s the whole method of this newsletter.

The relativizing move is itself a hermeneutic — a way of reading. And the instinct of the moment is to evaluate Scripture through that hermeneutic: to ask whether the Bible’s hard texts survive the bar contemporary moral intuition has set. Redemptive Correlation runs the other direction. It doesn’t bring Scripture down to be judged at the bar of the cultural moment. It brings the cultural moment up for judgment at the bar of Scripture. The question isn’t whether the Bible passes our test. It’s what our test reveals about us when we hold it up to the Bible.

And Scripture has a story for exactly this. Run it through the arc.

In Creation, the Word isn’t a problem to be managed; it’s the thing that makes a world. God speaks, and there is light. The first lie in the garden isn’t “God does not exist.” It’s “Did God actually say?” (Gen 3:1) — a hermeneutical question, the first one ever asked, an invitation to put the Word on trial and let the creature decide which part still applied. The serpent didn’t deny the command. He relativized it. He opened the distance between the speaker and the hearer and let Eve fill the gap with her own judgment. The oldest sin in the world is reading God’s word, looking for the exemption.

In the Fall, that instinct hardens into reflex. We don’t generally reject the Word outright. We edit it. We keep the parts that fund the life we already wanted and quietly retire the parts that would cost us. Every one of us runs a canon-within-the-canon — a personal lectionary of verses we live by and verses we’ve decided were for someone else. The relativizing hermeneutic isn’t a strange new heresy. It’s the most ordinary sin in Scripture, performed with footnotes.

In Redemption, we meet the one man who refused to do it.

Hand Jesus a hermeneutical question designed to get someone off the hook, and watch what He does. The Pharisees come to Him about divorce — “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (Matt 19:3). It’s a how does this text bind question, asked in bad faith, fishing for the loosest available reading.1 And His first move isn’t to answer it but to indict the way they’re reading. “Have you not read,” He says — the same formula He uses every time He means to tell His interrogators they’ve studied the Scriptures and still missed them (Matt 12:3, 5; 21:16, 42; 22:31).2 The accusation buried in the question is precise: you’ve been reading the law looking for the rule that lets you escape, when you should have been reading it for the purpose of God.3

Then He shows them how. He goes behind Moses, all the way to the beginning: “He who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matt 19:4–5), quoting the creation account as the first principle that the later legislation never overturned. When they push back — “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce?” (Matt 19:7) — He draws the distinction that is the whole hinge of the passage. There are two texts in front of them, and the difference between them is not that one is God’s word and the other merely human. Both are Scripture. The difference is purpose. Genesis states God’s positive design; Deuteronomy is a concession — divine condescension to human hardness, legislation for a world where the design has already been broken.4 “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matt 19:8).

Slow down on that distinction, because it’s the exact opposite of the move we’ve been tracing. The relativizing hermeneutic demotes a costly text — files it under time-bound, addressed-to-someone-else, no-longer-binding. Jesus demotes nothing. He honors every word as God’s and orders the texts by their purpose, letting the first principle govern the later concession.5 The relativizing move says the hard text has aged out. Jesus says you’ve read the texts in the wrong order — you started from the concession and never asked what was true from the beginning. One reading lightens the load by subtracting from Scripture. The other refuses to subtract anything and gets heavier: Jesus tightens precisely where He was invited to loosen.

And this reaches far past divorce. The will of God is found not in the legal provision that manages a situation already gone wrong, but in the most fundamental statement available of what God intended.6 Handed a chance to relativize a costly command, Jesus grounds the harder reading in Creation and won’t move. The serpent opened the distance and let the creature fill the gap. The Son closes the distance and puts the creature back under the Word. These aren’t subtle variations. They run in opposite directions.

So the weight of it is this: to adopt the relativizing hermeneutic is not, in the end, to disagree with Paul about one chapter. It’s to read Scripture in the manner Christ Himself refused to read it.

In Restoration, the Word that judges us now is the Word that will one day be vindicated entirely — “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Matt 24:35). Every text we tried to age out, every command we filed under timebound, every Did God actually say we whispered to get free of a verse that cost us — all of it stands, and stands as kindness, because the God who spoke it is more trustworthy than the self we were protecting from it. The Word doesn’t bind us to a cage. It binds us to a Person we can trust with the parts of us we were trying to keep.

So let me ask you the question I’ve been avoiding asking myself.

What’s your verse?

Not the doctrine you’d defend in an argument. Not the thing you’d say if someone tested whether you really believe the Bible. I mean the line of Scripture you have quietly arranged not to obey — the one you’ve surrounded with enough context and nuance that it can sit in your Bible without ever reaching your life. You have one. I’ve shown you mine.

Go find it. Not the comfortable verses you’ve under-applied out of laziness — those are real, but they’re not what I mean. I mean the one you’ve worked on. The one you built a reading for. The one where, if you’re honest, the interpretive labor was suspiciously well-aimed at the conclusion that costs you the least.

Here’s the test, and it’s the same one the whole argument runs on. Look at the texts you’ve decided don’t quite apply to you. Are they ever the cheap ones? Has the verse you reasoned your way out of ever — even once — been a verse that would’ve made your life easier to obey? Or are they always, every time, the costly ones?

Because if every text you’ve reclassified happens to be one that asked something of you, then you haven’t been interpreting. You’ve been negotiating. And you’ve been negotiating with a Book whose entire usefulness, Paul told Timothy, depends on its freedom to tell you what you did not already want to hear.

I’m not saying every hard feeling about a hard text is faithlessness. Some texts are genuinely difficult, and wrestling honestly with how a passage binds is the oldest and most honorable work of reading Scripture. That wrestling isn’t the problem.

The problem is the wrestling that has already decided who wins.

And the cost of winning that match is higher than the one verse you win it over. Every time you teach yourself that a costly text can be managed, you strengthen the muscle that manages the next one. You’re not resolving a difficulty. You’re training a reflex — and the reflex doesn’t stay where you left it. It’ll be there, fully formed, the next time obedience gets expensive. You’ll have taught yourself, in advance, how to get free.

So don’t ask whether your reading is clever. Mine was clever. Ask whether it’s aimed. Ask what it costs you. And ask who, exactly, ended up with the final say — the Word, or you.

I told you I wouldn’t tie this up, and I won’t. I still don’t think about him. As I write this, the verse and I are still at an impasse, and I’m the one refusing to move.

But I’ve stopped pretending the impasse is the Bible’s fault.

That’s the only honesty I can offer you, and I think it’s the honesty the whole thing turns on. A Word we can’t edit isn’t a cage. It only feels like one from inside the negotiation. Step back far enough, and you can see what it actually is: the one fixed thing in a life where everything else — our own judgment, what we find livable and humane and current — keeps shifting under us. A Bible that only ever told us what we already believed could keep us company. It could never make us wise. It certainly couldn’t save us, because salvation, by definition, is being rescued from where we already were.

The Word stands because the One who spoke it is more trustworthy than the self we keep trying to protect from it. That’s the promise underneath the hard texts and the easy ones alike — that heaven and earth will pass away before His words do, and that the parts of Scripture we most want to age out are held there, unmoving, by a God who can be trusted with the parts of us we were trying to keep out of His reach.

I don’t have my impasse resolved. Maybe you don’t either. But I’d rather sit at a hard text I can’t yet obey than win an argument against it — because the text isn’t my opponent. It’s the voice of the only One who has ever told me the truth about myself and stayed anyway.

So go find your verse. Don’t negotiate with it.

Sit down across from it, and let it do to you what it was breathed out to do.

This is the second piece in a June series on what it actually costs the church to relativize a hard text — one doctrine at a time, through the lens of Redemptive Correlation. The first looked at what happens when we lose judgment. This one is about what happens when we lose the authority to be told anything we didn't already believe. More to come.

A note: since I made you sit with something unresolved, I meant it. As of this morning, the impasse in my own story is still an impasse, and I'm still the one refusing to move. I didn't write this from the far side of having figured it out. I wrote it from inside the negotiation, hoping that naming the move out loud might be the first thing that loosens my grip on it. If you're somewhere similar, you're in good and ordinary company. That's not comfort. It's just true.

If this resonated, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to one person — not to the crowd, to one person you suspect has a verse of their own. This piece isn’t built to go viral. It’s built to be handed across a table.

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If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe, and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.

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And if you’ve been reading a while: something is coming on July 7 for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly essay can. I’ll say more at the end of the month. For now, just know the weekly will always be free — whatever else gets built around it.

I don’t find it wise to read only books you agree with. There is caution in these words: you need to be secure and steadfast, convinced in your beliefs to the point where you can engage with opposing viewpoints without your world coming crashing down. Please be careful not to pursue such an endeavor, in any realm, unless you’re mature enough to exercise discernment.

The book I review in the words that follow, as you’ll see, is one I don’t agree with. And it’s one that I believe any orthodox, bible-believing Christian shouldn’t agree with either. You cannot read Scripture and come to the same conclusion that Brian Recker reaches, point-blank. However, when books like this gain the same kind of traction as this does, it tells us that our culture is either asking the same question or reaching for a deeper one.

A Story Told in Shares

Social media has a way of infiltrating and shaping a story without us realizing it. That story gets told through what we share, reshare, and like.

That’s what happened with someone who changed the way I did and thought about theology as I started on this journey to where I am today. He was the kind of ministry leader who set the standard for everyone around him. Spent over a decade shaping what student ministry looked like, probably for most of you. I watched him, learned from him, and believed — the way you believe things when you’re young and impressionable, and someone seems to have it figured out — that this is what faithfulness looks like.

That was a long time ago.

A few months back, I noticed him sharing content from Brian Recker. Not once. Repeatedly. Approvingly. The kind of sharing that says, “This person is saying what I believe now.”

I didn’t pick up Hell Bent because someone recommended it to me. I picked it up because I couldn’t avoid it. Recker’s content was what I was seeing my generation eat up and gravitate towards. I needed to understand what had happened — what arguments were landing, what emotional registers were working, what was pulling people I once trusted out of orthodoxy and into something else entirely. I’m a theologian. But I’m also a pastor at heart. And pastors don’t get the luxury of ignoring books that are discipling their people.

So I read it. And I want to tell you what I found.

The Vacuum We Created

Here’s what most evangelicals won’t admit out loud: we believe in hell, but we can’t explain it well.

Not because the doctrine is incoherent. But because most of us were never taught to hold the weight of it without either weaponizing it or quietly minimizing it. The default options are the fire-and-brimstone caricature you’re embarrassed by and the polite avoidance you’ve settled into because it’s easier. Neither is honest. And neither helps the person sitting across from you with real, aching questions.

When someone like Brian Recker comes along and names the emotional damage that bad hell-teaching has caused, it lands. Because the damage is real. The guilt cycles are real. The people spiritually formed more by fear than by love — they’re real. I’ve sat across from them.

The longing underneath Hell Bent isn’t for a world without justice. It’s for a God whose justice makes sense. People don’t want to erase hell. They want to understand it inside a story that actually holds together. And the church — too often — has not given them that story.

That’s not Recker’s fault. That’s ours.

But here’s the thing: diagnosing a problem correctly does not guarantee the right prescription. And this is where Hell Bent falls apart.

The Imagination Problem Behind the Hell Problem

Before we get to the book, I want to name the deeper issue — because it’s what made the book possible.

The church doesn’t have a doctrine problem on hell. It has an imagination problem. We’ve failed to teach the doctrine inside the full arc of the biblical story — Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration — and that failure has created a vacuum. Progressive theology fills that vacuum with sentimentality. And sentimentality feels like compassion until you follow it to where it leads.

What the person leaving over hell actually needs is not a revised doctrine. They need a bigger story — one where God’s judgment makes sense because sin is genuinely catastrophic, where the cross makes sense because the cost was genuinely real, and where Restoration makes sense because what is being restored is worth saving. They need the whole arc, not just the emotionally manageable parts.

Recker’s answer is to amputate the parts that hurt. What he doesn’t understand is that you can’t have Restoration without Fall, and you can’t have Redemption without the Fall’s consequences being real. When you remove hell, you don’t get a kinder gospel. You get a smaller one. A story where nothing is ultimately at stake is not good news — it’s a lullaby. And the people walking out of evangelical churches are not looking for a lullaby. They’re looking for a story big enough to be true.

That’s what the church hasn’t given them. That’s what books like this exploit.

What Hell Bent Actually Argues

Brian Recker is a former evangelical pastor with eight years in ministry before deconstruction. He now identifies as Christian but not evangelical. Hell Bent is published by TarcherPerigee, a secular Penguin Random House imprint, not a Christian publisher. That is not incidental. The editorial lens and the intended audience are shaped by it.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One, “A Spirituality of Hell,” argues that the doctrine of hell corrupts Christian spirituality, producing what Recker describes as “guilt, shame, judgment, alienation, condemnation, othering, superiority, and paternalism.”1 Part Two, “Deconstructing Hell,” argues that eternal conscious torment lacks biblical support, that Gehenna is not what evangelicals say it is, and that the scriptural trajectory moves toward universal reconciliation. Part Three, “A Spirituality of Love,” reimagines Christianity without hell — the kingdom as a this-world project, the cross as solidarity rather than substitution, radical inclusion as the gospel’s heart.

The animating conviction beneath all three: hell is the load-bearing wall of toxic evangelicalism. Remove it, and you can rebuild Christianity around love.

None of this is new. Readers with longer memories will recognize the architecture immediately: Hell Bent is, in essential structure, a generational repackaging of Rob Bell’s Love Wins (2011). The same kolasis-as-correction argument. The same “all in all” universalism. The same trajectory hermeneutic that reads judgment as always moving toward restoration. The same cross-as-solidarity framing that quietly displaces penal substitution. Bell ran this play for Gen Xers, whom the culture war church had burned. Recker runs it for Millennials and Gen Z who’ve been burned by everything that came after. The target audience has shifted. The playbook hasn’t.

The one meaningful difference: Bell at least attempted to argue from within evangelical bounds, however unsuccessfully. Recker doesn’t bother. He explicitly abandons biblical inerrancy mid-book,2 which means his exegetical case isn’t really exegesis — it’s autobiography in biblical dress. Bell tried to win the argument. Recker has already decided the argument doesn’t matter.

What He Gets Right

Credit where it’s due — and I mean it.

Recker is right that fear-based spirituality is real and damaging. His accounts of guilt cycles, weaponized evangelism, and families fractured in the name of hell are not fabricated. Many believers have been spiritually formed more by threat than by grace. The church needs to own this.

He’s right that we’ve often taught hell badly. When the doctrine is reduced to a conversion tool, it becomes something it was never meant to be. The problem isn’t that hell is taught — it’s that it’s taught without the full weight of God’s character behind it.

And his stories of spiritual abuse in the name of saving people from hell are not outliers. They are, in many contexts, a predictable fruit of a truncated theology.

But naming the wound correctly doesn’t mean the surgery is right. And Recker’s surgery amputates the wrong thing.

Where the Exegesis Collapses

Because Recker is running Bell’s play, the existing responses to Bell function as responses to Recker. The defense already knows this snap count. When Denny Burk demonstrates that kolasis never means “correction” anywhere in the New Testament or related literature,3 he is answering both men simultaneously. When Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle show that aionios cannot be read two different ways in the same sentence of Matthew 25:46,4 they are closing the door that Recker walks through fourteen years later, as though no one noticed. The exegetical arguments Recker presents as fresh are arguments that have already been answered. He’s not reopening a closed question. He’s reintroducing a debunked one to an audience that wasn’t there for the first round.

The core methodological problem is this: Recker’s hermeneutic is experiential. He moves from personal discomfort to theological conclusion without doing the interpretive work in between. When the text says something he finds emotionally intolerable, he reinterprets it until it doesn’t. This is not honest reading — it is theological wish-fulfillment. Three specific passages make this visible.

Matthew 25:46 — the aionios parallel. Recker, following Bell, treats kolasis as “correction” rather than “punishment,” importing a remedial sense that would make hell a temporary purging rather than a final retributive judgment.5 But kolasis carries no such meaning in the New Testament. The verb form kolazō appears twice (Acts 4:21; 2 Pet 2:9), and both uses clearly and unambiguously denote punishment. More decisive is the structure of the verse itself. In Matthew 25:46, aionios modifies both “life” (zōē) and “punishment” (kolasis) in the same sentence. Chan and Sprinkle put it plainly: because the life in the age to come will never end, the parallel demands that the punishment in that age will never end as well.6 You cannot take the adjective in opposite directions within a single verse. Recker never reckons with this.

The “all” texts. Recker cites Romans 5:18, 1 Corinthians 15:22, Colossians 1:19–20, and 1 John 2:2 as proof texts for universal reconciliation.7 But “all” in Paul is consistently qualified by context. Romans 5:17 — the immediately preceding verse — limits those who receive righteousness to those who “receive the abundance of grace.” “In Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22) refers to those who are in Christ, a phrase that carries covenantal weight Paul never uses loosely. And Colossians 1:21–23 conditions the cosmic reconciliation of verses 19–20 on perseverance in faith — the paragraph Recker cites ends with a conditional clause he never quotes. His universalism requires ignoring the immediate context of every passage he invokes.

Revelation 22:17 and the “open gates.” Recker argues that the Spirit’s invitation at the end of Revelation — “Come. Let the one who desires take the water of life without price” — is extended post-judgment to the wicked, implying no judgment is truly final.8 But this misreads both the genre and the sequence. The invitation is the Spirit’s ongoing call within the narrative, addressed to the reader, not a post-mortem offer extended to those in the lake of fire. Reading it as a second-chance passage requires imposing a meaning on apocalyptic imagery that the text itself does not sustain and that directly contradicts the explicit finality of Revelation 20:11–15 and 2 Thessalonians 1:9.

The deeper irony is this: Recker accuses evangelicals of reading the Bible through the lens of hell. But he reads the Bible through the lens of his own deconstruction. He has traded one hermeneutical distortion for another. The questions he’s asking are legitimate. The reading he does to answer them is not.

The serious engagement with these questions — Chan and Sprinkle’s Erasing Hell, Dane Ortlund’s Is Hell Real?, and Four Views on Hell from the Counterpoints series — models what honest wrestling looks like. These scholars disagree on significant points. But they share one commitment Recker doesn’t: let the text say what it says, even when it’s hard. Ortlund frames the challenge at the outset: “The thought of never-ending torment for the impenitent goes against our immediate natural instincts — instincts reinforced in broader culture by notions of the basic goodness of humanity and misunderstandings of the nature of God.”9 The instinct is understandable. Recker indulges it. The alternative is to do the harder work of holding the doctrine inside the full character of God, which is exactly what Recker’s method cannot do.

The Story That’s Actually Big Enough

Here, the church keeps losing this argument, not because the argument is bad, but because it keeps showing up unprepared for a play it’s already seen. And Recker knows it. He’s published by a secular imprint precisely because he’s not trying to have that conversation. He’s writing past the church, to the people who’ve already half-left — to an audience that wasn’t there for the Bell debate and has no reason to know the responses exist.

The only long answer to that is to give people the full story.

Creation. God made the world good and made humans as image-bearers with genuine moral agency. Freedom is not freedom if consequences are fictional.

Fall. Sin is not a minor infraction against an arbitrary rule. It is the rejection of the source of life itself. Hell is not divine cruelty — it is the natural terminus of refusing the only source of flourishing in the universe. C. S. Lewis was right: the doors of hell are locked from the inside.

Redemption. The cross is God’s answer to hell — not by erasing it but by absorbing its cost. This is not, as Recker implies, a theory of divine violence.10 It is the claim that God loved the world enough to bear the judgment himself. That is the most radical love imaginable — not a God who pretends consequences don’t exist, but a God who takes them on himself.

Restoration. The story ends not with hell but with the New Jerusalem — a world where death, mourning, and pain are gone (Rev 21:4). But the New Jerusalem presupposes the final judgment of Revelation 20. You do not get Restoration without Redemption, and you do not get Redemption without the Fall being real and its consequences being real.

Recker wants Restoration without Fall. He wants love without justice. He wants a story where everyone is included, and nothing is at stake. But a story where nothing is at stake is not a story — it’s a lullaby. And you cannot have a rescue if there is nothing to be rescued from.

What You Should Do with This

If you’re reading this because Recker’s argument is attractive to you, I understand it. The questions are real. The pain behind them is real. But you deserve better answers than this. You deserve answers that take Scripture as seriously as they take your suffering. Not answers that flatten the hard parts until the story feels kinder.

Read Chan and Sprinkle. Read Ortlund. Sit with Four Views on Hell and watch scholars who actually disagree with each other model what serious engagement looks like. Let the Bible be difficult. Don’t settle for a theology that only tells you what you want to hear.

And if you’ve been in the pew for years but this topic makes you uncomfortable — not because you’ve wrestled with it but because you’ve never had to — hear this gently: the vacuum that books like this fill, the church helped create it. Not because the doctrine is wrong. Because we haven’t learned to carry it with both hands. Justice in one. Love in the other. Not as contradictions. As the same God, seen whole.

Do the work. Learn the doctrine. When the person across from you asks the question you’ve been avoiding, be someone who has already sat with it.

The Church We Could Be

Imagine churches that could teach the doctrine of hell without weaponizing it. Communities that held the weight of eternal judgment and eternal love in the same breath, and refused to let go of either one. Where the person in the back row with questions that are keeping them up at night found not a dismissal or a guilt trip, but a community that had already done the hard work, that could say: We’ve sat with this too. Here’s what we found. And here’s why it’s not the end of the story.

That is the church the Reckers of the world are looking for and not finding. And until we become that church, we will keep losing people — not to better theology, but to thinner theology that feels kinder.

The answer to bad teaching about hell is not no teaching about hell. It’s better teaching. Teaching that starts with the character of God, moves through the weight of sin, holds the full cost of the cross, and ends in a Restoration so comprehensive that the judgment is not the last word — just the necessary one before the first word of everything new.

That story is true. It’s also harder to tell than Recker’s version. But it’s the one people are actually hungry for. They’ve been given so little of it for so long, they’ve started looking elsewhere.

We gave them that hunger. We can also feed it.

This piece applies the Redemptive Correlation method to evaluate Recker’s argument — not just asking what the Bible says about hell, but whether his theology can hold the full weight of the biblical story. That framework is the spine behind everything I write at Theologetics. It’s explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

If this review helped you think more clearly about a hard question:

→ Share it with someone wrestling with the same one. The people in your life who are half-out-the-door over hell deserve better answers than Recker gives them. You might be the one who puts those answers in front of them.

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I want to tell you the rest of the story.

What I described last week happened in my adult life — not in childhood, not in some formative wound I’ve been carrying for decades. This was recent, but not the church I currently attend. Where we attend now is one I would consider a model for healthy operation, where we’re known and operates as described later on.

This church in question, though, hurt us. It took awhile for both of us to forgive them, to come to a place where we could tell this story objectively and without bitterness. This was a church my wife and I attended together, as adults who knew what we were looking for, who showed up ready to contribute, who gave it a real shot.

And we never knew who was actually in charge. As a matter of fact, I don’t think anyone really did.

There was a group of lay leaders designated to guide the church — that much I eventually pieced together. A select few who made the financial decisions, who set the operational policies, who functioned as the board of directors of the 501(c)3 to satisfy tax regulations. But no one would tell me their names. I asked. More than once. The answer was always some version of that’s not really information we share, or, you don’t really need to worry about that. Even so much as trust me, you don’t want to be part of that, when asking directly about joining. A governing body with no faces. Authority with no accountability. Power that existed, apparently, to protect the organization from the people inside it, especially since the congregants ended up having no say in how the church moved or functioned.

The pastoral staff ran everything else. And I use “pastoral” loosely, because at this church, everyone on staff in leadership carried the title — regardless of whether they preached, taught, or shepherded. It was a title that meant you work here. Which really means it meant nothing at all.

What I observed was what the staff actually did was produce Sunday, and it was of really high quality, too. Two services, every week, executed with precision. The meetings during the week were about Sunday. The energy during the week revolved around Sunday. Sunday was the product, and the product was good. The music was tight. The lights were right. The sermon was polished.

And, looking back, I could have gotten the same spiritual nutrition from a daily devotional or from YouTube-hopping like I mentioned I did in 2018.

When I published last week’s piece, someone left a comment that stopped me. A friend who’s been with me quite literally all my life, across all stages. He wrote — and I’m paraphrasing with his permission — that the way American churches hire shepherds who don’t know their sheep had been sitting with them for a while. That the sheer scale of the modern church, the number of people employed by it, the distance it creates between leader and congregation, felt like something worth naming out loud.

He’s right. And he put his finger on exactly what I experienced.

Like I mentioned, I’m no longer at that church, for deeper wounds and more personal reasons I’m not sure I’m ready to get into or share just yet; in due course, I will, as I know my story isn’t as unique as I once thought it was. I run into people from there occasionally — attenders who still call that church theirs — and half of them think I’m still there. The ones who don’t, they act like I’m someone they used to know in passing. The staff, on the rare occasion I cross paths with them, have treated me like a stranger.

Which, to be fair, after putting some time and distance between us, is what they made me feel like I was.

I was never a member of the body. I was a member of the audience, or free labor at best. And the difference between those two things is the entire argument of what follows.

I don’t think my experience is singular.

You might not have encountered a council or committee. But I’d be willing to bet you’ve felt the weight of what I’m describing — the low-grade loneliness that doesn’t make sense in a room full of Christians. The Sunday morning routine that’s full and somehow empty at the same time. The sense that you could quietly disappear and the machine would keep running.

Maybe you’ve been in a church for years and still feel like a stranger. Maybe you gave it everything — your time, your service, your money, your hope — and walked away with the creeping suspicion that none of it registered. That you were a body in a seat, not a member of a body.

Or maybe you’re still there. Still showing up. Still hoping the feeling will eventually go away.

What I want you to hear is that the ache you’re carrying isn’t a you problem. It’s not a faith problem. It’s not even a church problem, exactly.

It’s a structure problem. And it has a name.

To find that name, we of course have to look at the biblical story. And that’s exactly what Redemptive Correlation does — it doesn’t borrow from culture to interpret Scripture, it brings Scripture to bear on the cultural moment. The loneliness you’ve been carrying, the structure that failed to see you, the ache that doesn’t have a name yet — the Bible doesn’t just acknowledge those things. It diagnoses them. And the diagnosis is older than you think.

Because this time, unlike many of the writings I’ve shared previously, which start in Eden, the story actually begins in the wilderness.

Take a number, it’ll be a while

Moses is sitting from morning to evening, hearing every legal dispute in Israel. One case at a time. The line doesn’t end. His father-in-law Jethro watches this for exactly one day before he says something that should have been obvious to everyone: “What you are doing is not good” (Exod. 18:17 CSB).1

Not wrong. Not evil. Just — not good. Unsustainable. And the reason is simple: Moses is trying to shepherd an entire nation by himself.

Jethro’s solution isn’t to find a better Moses. It’s to put qualified men close enough to the people to actually see them. “Able men from all the people, God-fearing, trustworthy, and hating dishonest profit” (Exod. 18:21 CSB). Give them responsibility. Let them handle what they can. Bring the hard cases up to you. The burden gets distributed. The people get found.

That principle didn’t die in the wilderness.

Character over credits

Paul writes a letter to a young pastor named Timothy and gives him a list of qualifications for elders — episkopos in Greek, meaning overseer or bishop. Read the list slowly, because what’s on it will surprise you.

It says nothing about vision. Nothing about organizational skill, platform, or communication ability. What it says is: “above reproach, the husband of one wife, self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable” — and that he must be “well thought of by outsiders” (1 Tim. 3:2, 7 CSB).2

These are not organizational qualifications but relational ones. Education, training, and experience matter, but only as much as they’re cultivating what already exists. They assume a community close enough that a man’s character — his marriage, his household, his reputation with his neighbors — is visible to the people he leads. As one ecclesiologist notes in his study of these pastoral epistles, pastor, elder, and bishop all refer to the same office — the terms are used interchangeably — and the role is defined not by title but by the observable character of the man who holds it.3

You cannot be hospitable anonymously. You cannot be well-regarded by outsiders from behind a title no one can name.

The episkopos is defined by being known.

To serve and direct

Then there’s the deacon. The office doesn’t exist because the early church needed an org chart. It exists because someone noticed that the Hellenistic widows, the Greek-speaking Jews who were in Jerusalem post-Pentecost when no one wanted to leave what was going on, weren’t being fed. They were being overlooked. Falling through the cracks.

So the apostles appointed men “of good reputation, full of the Spirit and wisdom” specifically to make sure that couldn’t keep happening — that the most invisible members of the body had someone whose job was to see them (Acts 6:3 CSB).4

My former professor, whose systematic theology course first prompted me to research this question formally, put it precisely: the elder serves by leading; the deacon leads by serving. They’re not redundant. One provides direction. The other catches what direction alone always misses.

Lost in translation

And then there’s Paul’s image in 1 Corinthians 12 — the one that cuts deepest. “The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Cor. 12:22 CSB). The whole architecture of the body metaphor is organized around the most invisible person in the room, not the most prominent one.

Here’s what all of this adds up to.

The biblical offices aren’t decorative. They’re not historical artifacts that the modern church has wisely updated for scale and synergized. They’re a deliberate structure for a community where everyone is accountable to someone, everyone is known by someone, and no one disappears unnoticed. When a church replaces that structure with a policy board nobody can name and a staff optimized for Sunday production, it doesn’t just lose terminology. In my own published research on this question, I concluded that policy-based governance has effectively "made the church a corporation rather than a body of believers.”5

It loses the mechanism by which people get seen.

When you stop using biblical titles as they were meant to be used, you erase the biblical job descriptions God wrote. The congregation no longer knows what to expect from their leaders because the categories that would define those expectations are gone. Pastor becomes a word that means you work here, or merely that you’re a department head. And a word that means everything ends up meaning nothing.

The corporate model doesn’t fail because the people inside it are bad. Most of them aren’t. It fails because it was designed for a different purpose. A board of directors exists to protect and grow an organization. The elder and deacon structure exists to know and keep its people.

You cannot optimize for both. The structures produce different outcomes because they were built for different ends.

Jethro saw it in the wilderness. Paul encoded it in the church. The question is whether we built something they’d recognize.

So let me ask you something directly.

Does anyone in your church have shepherding you as their actual job?

Not programming you. Not producing content for or entertaining you. Not organizing events you attend or services you consume. I mean — is there a person in your church’s structure whose role includes knowing whether you’re okay, noticing when you’re gone, showing up before you have to announce that something is wrong?

It might be your senior pastor. In smaller churches, it often is. But in most churches it won’t be — and it doesn’t have to be. I would go so far as to say that a senior pastor’s job isn’t to personally shepherd every person under his care, but to make shepherding structurally unavoidable at every level beneath him. The other pastors he hires, the deacons he appoints, the small group infrastructure he builds — these are all shepherding decisions, not programming or HR decisions. A senior pastor who understands his role doesn’t try to know everyone’s name. He builds a structure where someone always does.

That’s what vertical integration looks like in a healthy church. The senior pastor sets the culture. The fellow elders, or associates, carry it into their ministries. The deacons catch what the associates miss. The structure itself does the shepherding work — not because everyone is a superhuman, but because the roles were designed for exactly this.

Here’s the diagnostic question. It’s not about your senior pastor. It’s not even about your associate.

It’s about the structure.

When you were struggling — really struggling, not just having a hard week — did the church find out because someone in the structure noticed? Or did it find out because you told someone? And if you quietly stopped showing up, would the structure catch that? Or would the services keep running, the giving keep coming in, the meetings keep meeting — while you disappeared without a sound?

How you answer the former shows you how well you’ve let yourself be known. Sometimes we do have to tell people it’s been a week from the depths. Are you choosing to tell people those details? And are you embracing proximity to people so that someone can pick up on when you are struggling?

If the answer to the latter is that you’d disappear without a sound, that’s not a personnel problem. That’s a structural one. It doesn’t matter how gifted the people inside that structure are. A building with no load-bearing walls collapses regardless of how good the furniture looks.

The biblical offices exist precisely to be the load-bearing walls. Elders who shepherd. Deacons who notice. A structure that sees people not because the right individual happened to show up, but because seeing people is baked into how the whole thing was built.

You’re allowed to want that. You’re allowed to name it when it’s missing.

And if you’re a pastor reading this: the structure you build is a shepherding decision, whether you think of it that way or not.

We are not the first people to feel this.

The Hellenistic widows in Acts 6 were also being overlooked. Not maliciously. Not because anyone decided they didn’t matter. The structure just wasn’t built to see them — and so it didn’t. The apostles’ response wasn’t a sermon about community. It was a structural adjustment. They appointed men whose explicit job was to make sure no one disappeared unnoticed.

That’s always been the answer. Not better intentions. Better structures.

The church that sees people is not a fantasy. It’s not a return to some golden era that never existed. It’s the church the New Testament actually describes — elders known by their communities, deacons catching what the elders miss, a body organized around the indispensability of its weakest members.

We don’t have to accept less than that. We’re allowed to want it, name it, and build toward it — together.

The church was supposed to be the place where no one disappears.

It still can be. It still should be. And it must be something we advocate for so that we can make our churches feel more like a community than a corporation.

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My mom has been a member of Liberty Baptist Church since 1960. My parents adopted me at birth, and my brought me there every Sunday while my dad worked nights. She taught first-grade choir on Wednesday evenings and coordinated Sunday school, which meant I was there every time the doors opened. I didn’t choose the church. The church was just the water I swam in.

In fifth grade, I prayed the prayer, as all my friends did. Empty words. I knew it when I said them.

My dad died the following year. I was in sixth grade, just entering the rebellious years, and his death tipped me from nominal to hostile. I wasn’t an atheist — I believed God existed. I just hated him for what he’d allowed. My mom kept bringing me anyway, through more than a year of active rebellion, every Sunday, every Wednesday, because that’s who she was.

Towards the end of seventh grade, the church held a revival. I wanted nothing to do with it. I was in the overflow room with my friends, looking for any reason not to pay attention. Then something started happening to my friends. They wanted to respond. They wanted to go into the main auditorium. They wanted me to come with them.

I went begrudgingly. And in the hallway between the two rooms — not at the altar, not during the sermon, in a hallway — God got me. It was like an invitation I suddenly understood was addressed to me. I surrendered. For real, this time.

The church was the place where God found me.

I spent the next seventeen years giving the church everything I had. I began leading worship in 2008, moved into student ministry and production, and pursued staff roles. I earned a bachelor’s in biblical and theological studies in 2016. I left vocational ministry in 2018 — not because the calling left, but because something else did. I kept studying anyway. Last year, I finished a master’s degree in theological studies with a 4.0 and published my first two peer-reviewed articles.

The church didn’t get less of me after the wound. It got more.

Which is why what happened next cut so deep.

No matter how hard I strove to be part of the body, the body rejected me.

That’s the only way I know to say it. I showed up. I served. I contributed when asked and when not asked. I consulted, I forgave, I passed over things I had every right to name. Every time I put myself out there — every open door, every application, every moment I extended something of myself — I was stonewalled. The organ-rejection metaphor is the most accurate I have. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a single moment. It was a slow biological process. The body simply would not receive me.

I cannot recall a single time anyone on staff made me feel genuinely loved and cared for.

It took me a long time to say that without softening it. Not most of the time. Not especially in hard seasons. Every single time. The place that was supposed to be the body of Christ — the one institution on earth whose entire reason for existing is that people belong to it — made me feel like I didn’t belong.

That wound didn’t make me an atheist. It made me something possibly harder to recover from: a believer who stopped expecting the church to be what Jesus said it was.

You probably know the shape of that story, even if the details are different.

Maybe yours was the pastor who didn’t have time for you unless you were giving. Maybe it was the small group that welcomed you warmly and then gradually stopped texting back. Maybe it was the committee that made the decision before the meeting, and you sat there watching the conversation perform itself. Maybe it was something sharper — a real betrayal, a real injustice, a moment when the person who was supposed to represent Christ chose power over faithfulness and nobody said a word.

The fastest-growing religious demographic in America right now isn’t the “nones.” It’s the dechurched — people who believe something, maybe a lot of things, but have decided that organized Christianity costs more than it gives. Researchers estimate somewhere between 40 and 65 million Americans who once attended church no longer do. Most of them didn’t leave because of intellectual objections. They left because the body rejected them.

What’s interesting — and what I think we miss when we frame the dechurched crisis as primarily a doctrinal or cultural problem — is that most of these people are not angry at God. They’re angry at us. They wanted what the church was supposed to offer. They didn’t get it. And after a certain number of rejections, they stopped trying.

The question underneath all of that isn’t why did those churches fail? The question is: what was the church supposed to be in the first place? Because if we don’t know what it was designed to be, we have no framework for diagnosing what went wrong, and no vision for what we’re trying to rebuild.

That’s what I want to do here. Not relitigate the wound — yours or mine. But go back far enough to find out what the church God had in mind actually looks like, so we can name the gap honestly, and live toward something better.

What the church was meant to be

This is where Redemptive Correlation does its necessary work — not by accommodating the cultural wound to make theology more palatable, but by bringing the cultural wound under Scripture’s gaze and asking: what does the story say?

The method moves through four acts. Creation establishes what the thing was designed for. Fall diagnoses what went wrong. Redemption names what Christ has done about it. Restoration points toward where it’s all heading. Applied to the church, the arc is devastating in the most clarifying way possible.

The church was designed as a body, not a building.

Paul’s most sustained image for the church in 1 Corinthians isn’t an institution or an organization. It’s a body. “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12, CSB). He spends three chapters in the middle of that letter developing what this means, and the argument is more radical than most of our ecclesiology has room for.

In Paul’s vision, the foot cannot say it doesn’t belong because it isn’t a hand (1 Cor. 12:15). The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you” (v. 21). And in the most surprising move of the entire passage, Paul says the members of the body that seem weaker are actually indispensable, and the parts we think are less honorable are the ones we clothe with greater honor (vv. 22–23). The logic is inverted. The body functions not by elevating the visible parts, but by protecting and dignifying the ones nobody sees.

The church was designed so that “there would be no division in the body, but that the members would have the same concern for each other” (v. 25). The Greek word there is μέριμνα — anxious care. The same word Jesus uses in Matthew 6 about worry. The church’s structural DNA was supposed to produce mutual anxious care — members preoccupied with each other’s flourishing, not their own.

Before the Fall, this was the logic of the garden: every part of creation oriented toward the other, the strong serving the vulnerable, abundance flowing outward rather than hoarding inward. Paul’s body metaphor isn’t a metaphor about management. It’s a metaphor about the way things were meant to work before they broke.

The body began to consume itself.

But Paul’s body metaphor in 1 Corinthians isn’t describing a healthy church. It’s prescribing health to a sick one. The Corinthian congregation was marked by factions and favoritism, by status games and spiritual one-upmanship, by the wealthy eating their fill at the Lord’s Table while the poor went hungry (1 Cor. 11:21). The body was devouring itself from within.

The pastoral epistles tell the same story from a different angle. Paul writes to Timothy in Ephesus about elders who must be “not a lover of money, not quarrelsome” — because the church at Ephesus had elders who were (1 Tim. 3:3, CSB). He warns about those who “suppose that godliness is a means of gain” (1 Tim. 6:5). He tells Titus to appoint elders “not arrogant, not quick-tempered, not a drunkard, not violent, not greedy for money” — which means every one of those qualities was showing up in leaders somewhere (Titus 1:7, CSB).

The Fall didn’t leave the church untouched. It entered the body and replicated the same distortions it produced everywhere else: the love of power, the protection of status, the silencing of inconvenient people. The body that was supposed to be marked by anxious care for its weaker members became a place where the weaker members got pushed out.

Your wound — and mine — is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of the Fall working itself out inside the one institution that was supposed to be pushing back.

Christ gave himself for a people, not an organization.

Here is where the Gospel does something that no institutional reform can do.

In Ephesians 5, Paul calls Christ the head of the church and names what his headship actually looked like: “Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor” (Eph. 5:25–27, ESV). The head gave himself up for the body. Not to manage it. Not to use it. To sanctify it.

And in the Gospels, Jesus is relentlessly specific about who he came for. He eats with tax collectors. He touches lepers. He lets the woman with the alabaster jar wash his feet and doesn’t stop her, even when everyone at the table is embarrassed. In Mark 10, the disciples try to send away the children who are being brought to Jesus for blessing, and Jesus is indignant (Mark 10:14, CSB). The ones the institution wanted to turn away were the ones the head moved toward.

The church Jesus died for is not the polished version. It’s the one with the messy people in it. The head of the church has a demonstrated preference for exactly the kind of person the body keeps rejecting.

The church will become what it was always supposed to be.

Revelation 21 gives us the telos — the city of God, the new Jerusalem, the Bride made ready for the Lamb. And what’s striking about that image is that it is corporate. The final destination is not a collection of isolated souls with God — it is a city, a body, a community of people who have been made whole together.

The wounds that made you stop expecting the church to be what it was supposed to be are real. But they are not the last word. The head of the church is still sanctifying it. He has not abandoned the project. The body is still being healed — slowly, imperfectly, at great cost — toward the day when the bride is presented without spot or wrinkle.

That is not a reason to minimize the wound. It is a reason to hold onto the vision even when the institution fails to embody it.

The wound you’re carrying from the church is legitimate. I’m not here to talk you out of it, and I’m not going to tell you that healing means going back to the place that hurt you.

But here’s what I want to press on: there’s a difference between being done with a congregation and being done with the church. One is sometimes wisdom. The other is letting the Fall have the final word.

If you’re sitting outside right now — watching from a distance, attending somewhere with one foot out the door, or not attending anywhere at all — I want to ask you the question underneath the wound: what did you actually want from the church before it hurt you? Because the answer to that question is probably closer to what the church was supposed to be than anything it actually became. The longing is not a liability. It’s a compass.

You wanted to belong. You wanted to be known. You wanted a community that was preoccupied — Paul’s word is anxiously concerned — with your flourishing. You wanted the body to work the way bodies are supposed to work: with the stronger parts protecting the weaker ones, with no one told they don’t belong because they don’t look like the visible parts.

That longing is not naïve. It’s Edenic. It’s the design you were made to inhabit.

The church in your city will not be the new Jerusalem. Every local congregation is a broken approximation of a perfect thing. But the approximation matters. The attempt matters. The community of imperfect people trying to enact the body metaphor together — failing, repenting, trying again — is still the primary place where the Restoration presses into the present.

Don’t let the failure of a particular body convince you that the body itself was a bad idea. That’s not cynicism. That’s letting the wound do the theology for you.

Imagine a church culture that took Paul seriously — not as a distant first-century ideal but as a live diagnostic. Imagine congregations that actually asked: Are we treating our weaker members as indispensable? Are we clothing the less-visible parts with greater honor? Is the anxious care flowing in the right direction?

Imagine the person in the back row — the one who’s been hurt before, who showed up again anyway, who is one more dismissal away from leaving for good — finding in this congregation something they’d stopped expecting: a body that noticed them, moved toward them, made room for them at the weight-bearing level, not just the welcome desk.

That is not a utopian vision. That is an ecclesiological one. It is what the church was designed to be before the Fall got inside it. And it is what the head of the church is still, patiently, inexorably, healing it toward.

The wound is real. The design is realer.

We are not done with the church because the church is not done with us. The same Christ who died for a spotless bride is the one who keeps showing up for the spotted one. We can do the same — not because the institution deserves our loyalty, but because the vision does.

The church God had in mind is still the church we’re trying to become.

If you’re processing a church wound — or helping someone else through one — share this piece with them. Sometimes the most pastoral thing we can do is name the gap honestly and point toward the design together.

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Got a reaction — agreement, pushback, your own story? I read every reply. I’d love for you to respond with a comment and tell me where you landed.

I had issues reconciling my preoccupation with these things and my faith, especially growing up in the church at a time when no one liked to talk about the things that might go bump in the night. How could ghosts and God coexist? It was a non-starter for most of the years I was learning to study Scripture seriously. I came close to deciding the whole topic was just our minds reaching for an explanation of religion that wasn’t really there.

Then came Michael Heiser. And I think that name says all I need to say, both because of how much weight his work carries and for what follows in this article. I wrestled deeply to reconcile what the spiritual realm really was in tandem with the other theological convictions I held. Along with Heiser, the guys from Blurry Creatures cropped up and took over my podcast feed. I devoured their content, and still do. I couldn’t ignore that much had been buried — even demythologized — by the people who shaped most of modern theology.

I felt like I had a pretty settled notion and balance of the push and pull of the unseen realm: some things I knew for sure, some things I could acknowledge, and some things I just couldn’t. And I was okay with that. Bigfoot, mothman, and other cryptids are just fun to talk about, but aliens are something I often shy away from. Demons are real, I nerd out about the Nephilim, and I have the passages down pat that everyone who presses in on the topic cites.

And then this happened last week.

We had all been anticipating it, but something actually dropped. Disclosure. A website. UFOs. Files (and not the ones we really wanted). Aliens. And not just the government, but pastors and influencers touting all sorts of primary or secondary information about meeting on the subject of disclosure and how it could rock the Church.

And it occurred to me, somewhere between the third forwarded video and the second flinching pastor, that I was not the only one trying to figure out what to do with all of this.

You’re not the only one.

If you’ve spent any time on Christian Twitter, in church group chats, or on the back row of a small group this past week, you’ve watched the same two reactions play out on a loop. On one side, pastors flinching — it’s lies, it’s demons, it’s not worth your time, why are you even watching this stuff. On the other side, believers drifting — into Joe Rogan clips, into long YouTube rabbit holes, into Telegram channels run by men who claim to know what your pastor refuses to say.

Two reactions. One underlying problem.

C.S. Lewis named it eighty years ago, in the preface to The Screwtape Letters: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”1 Lewis was writing about wartime Britain. He could have been writing about your group chat last Tuesday.

The flinch is the first error. The drift is the second. Lewis’s twin errors are playing out in real time, on the same news cycle, often inside the same congregation. Underneath both is the same shrunken cosmos — Bibles we’ve flattened for so long that when something doesn’t fit the flat version, debunk or demonize is all we have left.

Buried in the war.gov release is a 2023 case file from the western United States. A woman with deep professional experience around military aircraft and drones reported seeing an oval metallic object hovering above a treeline. Multiple corroborating witnesses across two cars. Credible, specific, official. And then this line, in the Pentagon write-up:

“Several of her co-workers subsequently made fun of her due to her report.”

The file also notes she would not have reported the object had she seen it alone.

It’s hard to read that paragraph without thinking of the believer in the pew. The one who finally worked up the courage to bring a question they’d been carrying for months — about the nephilim, or the divine council, or what they’d watched on a podcast — and got back the same shape of response that woman got from her co-workers. A look. A laugh. A change of subject. A small but unmistakable signal that the question itself was the embarrassment.

She wouldn’t have reported it alone. The believer wouldn’t have asked alone. Both wounds have the same shape — a community that can no longer hold the weight of what it has actually seen.

The disclosure moment is not, in the end, about UFOs. It is about a culture searching for transcendence with a flattened cosmology — and a church that flattened its own cosmology first, and now has nothing better to offer.

The world we forgot we lived in

Here is the strange thing about reading Genesis 1 like a modern person: nothing in it surprises us anymore.

A spirit hovering over chaotic waters. A God who speaks worlds into being. A garden where the divine and the human meet. A talking serpent. A plural verb in the mouth of the Creator — let us make man in our image — like there were others in the room.

We’ve read those pages so many times, we’ve stopped noticing what they assume. Not a sterile universe with one God and one species, but a household with two families. A heavenly host that already existed when humanity was made. A meeting place — Eden — where the seen and the unseen lived together without friction.

Joel Muddamalle puts it this way in The Unseen Battle: “Eden was the place where God enjoyed the presence of both his human and supernatural family, all dwelling together.”2 Eden is not the start of a private relationship between God and humans. It is the introduction of a new family member into a household that was already full.

That’s the worldview the biblical writers had when they sat down to write. It’s not the worldview most of us have when we sit down to read. And the gap between those two is the reason a Pentagon press release can throw an entire generation of believers into a crisis their pastors don’t know how to address.

The Bible we made, and the Bible we received

This is where Redemptive Correlation does its work — not by bringing Scripture down to fit the cultural moment, but by bringing the cultural moment up under Scripture’s gaze. The disclosure files do not get to set the terms of the conversation. Genesis 1 does. Deuteronomy 32 does. Colossians 2 does.

What we are watching this week is not a crisis of theology. It is a crisis of cosmology.

Heiser named the problem this way: “Today’s Christian processes [life] by a mixture of creedal statements and modern rationalism.”3 We affirm the supernatural in the creed and then live as if it never breaches the wall between Sunday and Monday. Heiser called this the desupernaturalization of Scripture, and he meant it as an indictment.

We did not lose the supernatural worldview to liberal theology. We lost it to ourselves. We flattened the Bible because the flat version was easier to defend, easier to teach, and easier to live with. We kept the resurrection because we had to. We quietly retired everything else.

The result is a church that can recite the creed but cannot read its own Bible. When something appears in the world that doesn’t fit the flattened cosmology — an unmarked craft, a corroborated sighting, a 1948 intelligence memo describing phenomena “perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking”4 — the flinch and the drift are the only moves we know.

Three rebellions, not one

To recover the cosmology, we need to recover the story. Genesis does not give us one fall. It gives us three.

Most of us learned a single rebellion: Adam and Eve, the serpent, the fruit. The fall happened. Sin entered. End of cosmological action — on to soteriology. But Second Temple Jewish readers — the people whose worldview the apostles inherited — read Genesis as a sequence of three rebellions, each one extending the damage further into both the earthly and heavenly families of God.5

The first is the one we know. In Genesis 3, the nachash — translated as serpent but carrying the connotations of a divine throne guardian, a shining one — deceives the woman, and the human family rebels against the head of the household. Eden is closed. The earthly family is exiled.

The second is the one most modern Christians skip. Genesis 6 opens with four verses we have learned to read past — sons of God, daughters of men, Nephilim, the heroes of old, men of renown. The earliest Christian writers — Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen — read this as a second rebellion, this time in the heavenly family.6 Members of the divine council crossed boundaries they were not given, and the unholy union spread evil so far that the flood became the only response.

The third is the one almost no one connects. Genesis 11 — Babel — is usually taught as a story about pride and language. But Deuteronomy 32:8–9 is the commentary track:

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance and divided the human race, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob, his own inheritance. (CSB)

When humanity rebelled at Babel, God did not simply scatter them. He disinherited them. He handed the nations over to the sons of God and kept Israel for himself. The world was carved up between Yahweh and a constellation of lesser elohim who were given stewardship over the nations and almost immediately abused it.

Three rebellions. Three failures. Three judgments. And one running thread: the cosmos has been contested from the beginning, in both of God’s families.

This is the biblical story underneath every passage about principalities and powers. It is what Paul is talking about when he says we “do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness” (Eph. 6:12 ESV, emphasis mine). He is not being metaphorical. He is naming the disinherited gods of Deuteronomy 32 and saying they are still active.

Wherever you land on what is hovering above military airspace in 2026, the Bible has not been quiet on the question. Scripture describes a cosmos with categories of non-human intelligences operating in the created order, opposed to God’s purposes and contested by Christ. We just weren’t checking the Bible for them.

What the world calls “aliens”

Here is the part that surprised me when I read it.

In The Unseen Battle — published this past January, three months before the war.gov portal went live — Muddamalle includes a sidebar titled “Are There Aliens in This World?” It’s one of the most direct treatments of the question I’ve read in a popular-level theology book. And it landed in print before the moment we are now living through.

His answer:

I believe that what the world calls “aliens,” the Bible refers to as “spiritual beings” who reside in the “unseen realm.” At times, the unseen realm breaks through into the physical realm, and in those instances we may see glimpses of spiritual beings. What the mind can’t comprehend, we’ve labeled as aliens.7

He then walks the reader through 2 Kings 6 — Elisha at Dothan, surrounded by an enemy army, with a terrified servant who couldn’t see what Elisha saw. Elisha prays: “Lord, please open his eyes and let him see.” The servant suddenly sees the mountain “covered with horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (emphasis added).

Muddamalle’s pivot lands hard:

Imagine what someone in the twenty-first century would say about this situation. They might call this an “alien encounter” when in reality they had a peek into the spiritual realm described in the Bible.8

The category is not new. The phenomena are not new. The framework has been in our Bibles the whole time. What’s new is how completely we forgot we had it.

This is not a claim that every reported phenomenon is angelic — Muddamalle is careful to reject the ancient alien view that treats Scripture as one source among many about extraterrestrial visitors. The point is narrower and more disruptive: the Bible’s cosmos is already populated. You do not need to pick between the materialist’s “must be aliens from another planet” and the panicked Christian’s “must all be demons.” Scripture has been offering a third option since Genesis 1 — and that third option is the worldview the apostles assumed.

Christ over all of it

If the story stopped at three rebellions and a contested cosmos, the disclosure moment would be a reason for fear. It does not stop there.

Paul writes to a young church planted in the shadow of the Temple of Artemis — the most magnificent house of a rebel elohim in the ancient world — and says this:

He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly; he triumphed over them in him. (Col 2:14–15 CSB)

Stripped. Disarmed. Disgraced publicly. Triumphed over.

This is the cosmic logic of the cross. Whatever is contested in the heavens — whatever rebel powers were given the nations at Babel — has already been defeated. Not subdued, not negotiated with, not appeased. Defeated. The crown of every disinherited elohim has been removed and placed at the feet of Jesus.

The household is being regathered. The nations are being reclaimed. The multiethnic church — the gospel arriving in every tongue at Pentecost, reversing Babel — is the visible evidence of an invisible victory.9 The unseen battle is not a battle to win. It is a battle that has been won. Our work is to live like it.

What restoration is for

The Bible does not end with souls evacuating a doomed cosmos. It ends with a cosmos restored. Heaven and earth reunited. A garden city descending. The dwelling of God with humanity, again — only this time forever (Rev. 21:1—4). All that is contested in the unseen realm is being brought under Christ’s feet, not sealed off from his rule. The cosmos belongs to him. The disinherited nations are being re-inherited. The household is being put back together.

This is the frame the disclosure moment fits inside. Not a panic. Not a vindication. A reminder that the Lord of a much larger world has already triumphed over everything in it.

You do not have to know what UFOs are to know what your Bible says about the cosmos you live in.

You do not have to choose between the people laughing at the woman in the September 2023 file and the people building cosmologies from Joe Rogan clips. Both have already chosen for you, and both are choosing too small.

What Scripture invites you into is something stranger than either: a worldview where the cosmos is full, the household is contested, the powers are real, and the King has already won.

If you’ve been the believer whose pastor flinched — who brought a question and got it’s just lies or it’s all demons and walked away with less than you came in with — hear this: your question was not the problem. The frame you were handed was. You weren’t asking too much. You were asking with a cosmology two sizes smaller than the one your Bible actually teaches. The recovery isn’t speculation. It’s reading your own book carefully.

If you’ve been the believer drifting toward the conspiracy corners — pulled in by podcasts that promise to take the weird parts of the Bible seriously when no one in your church will — hear this too: your hunger was right. The flatness was real. But the answer is not to trade one shrunken frame for another that’s just as flat in a different direction. The Bible isn’t a code to crack. It’s a story to inhabit. And the story is bigger, stranger, and more orderly than any conspiracy will ever offer.

The work is the same either way. Open the Bible. Read it like the people who wrote it. Let Genesis 1 be as wild as it was meant to be. Let Deuteronomy 32 say what it says. Let Colossians 2 do what it claims. The cosmos God made is full, the Christ who rules it is sovereign, and the household you’ve been adopted into is bigger than you knew.

You can hold the question without panic. Christ is already holding the cosmos.

The disclosure files will keep coming. The flinch will keep happening if we let it.

But we have an older and stranger book than the one our discomfort taught us to read. We have a cosmos with two families and one King. We have a Christ who has stripped, disarmed, and disgraced the powers — and a Spirit who is regathering the household one tongue, one tribe, one rebel-claimed corner at a time.

Whatever is in the unseen realm, Jesus is Lord of it.

Whatever the next tranche of files contains, our Bible has not changed.

Whatever the church forgot to teach us, the text is still there for the recovering.

The Bible was never flat. We made it flat. And the work in front of us — for the curious believer, the bristling pastor, the dechurched friend who quietly believes more than they would admit at a dinner party — is the same.

Open the book. Read it again. Let the cosmos be as full as it was always meant to be.

The light has already won.

This piece is part of the Reading ___ Through Eden series — applying Redemptive Correlation to cultural questions through Scripture’s four-act arc.

If this piece resonated, two pieces from the archive sit alongside it: The Vicarious Life walks the same Eden-shaped framework through atonement, and Why Content Can’t Replace Covenant addresses the same flatness problem from the ecclesiology side.

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Not Day 50, when the podcasts started booking him. Not Day 95, when Isabel Brown called him the most effective evangelizer on the internet. Day 1. The first video, posted from somewhere in Vermont, showed a man who had spent a decade as Nicole sitting in front of a camera and saying that something had happened to him in the woods that he could not describe in any language other than Jesus.

I was in his corner. I rooted for him. I shared the videos. I sent them to friends. I told them, more than once, watch this — this is what God does.

I was skeptical, too. I want to be honest about that, because the skepticism is part of what indicts me. The growth speed bothered me. The constant filming bothered me. The way certain pieces of his old life never quite got laid down bothered me. The visible appetite for the spotlight bothered me most of all.

But I told myself a story about it. We live in a world of social media, I said. This is the medium through which young men are reachable. The constant filming isn’t exposure — it’s accountability. The viewers aren’t an audience — they’re a congregation. The platform isn’t a danger — it’s a discipleship tool.

I told myself that story for ten months. And I told it loudly enough to drown out the older, slower voice in the back of my head — the one that kept whispering Paul’s word into the noise.

Neóphytos.

The story I told myself wasn’t only about Neeza Powers. It was about us.

Something has gone wrong with the way the church meets new Christians online, and we are watching it unfold in real time.

Ten months ago, Neeza Powers was a viral phenomenon. Day 1 of being a Christian. Day 13. Day 50. First time at church, first men’s Bible study, first read-through of the Sermon on the Mount. Hundreds of millions of views. A clothing company with his sister. A partnership with the Hallow App. A Daily Wire interview where Isabel Brown called him the most effective evangelizer on the internet.

Last week, he showed up to Mass dressed as a woman. Posted a confession. Deleted it. Reposted defiantly. He’s getting married. He’s retransitioning. The OCIA confirmation (the Catholic version of baptism and membership class, which I didn’t know before watching his content) he was working toward will not happen — at least not the way it was being filmed.

Three months before that, a TikTok investigator demonstrated that almost every detail of his testimony — the puberty blockers at sixteen, the decade as Nicole, the iCarly childhood — was fabricated. He transitioned at twenty-nine. He’s nearly a decade older than he claimed. The platform that built him kept building.

His tradition is not mine, and that is not what this piece is about.

A real person is at the center of this. A real soul. Ryan Miller, who platformed him first and is now doing the hard public work of telling the truth about it, said it well: this is not about tearing someone down. It is, however, about telling the truth.

And the truth is this: Paul saw it coming.

What Paul Knew About New Christians

Paul wrote a letter to a young pastor named Timothy and gave him a list of qualifications for elders. Most of them are character traits. One of them is a clock.

“He must not be a recent convert,” Paul writes, “or he might become conceited and incur the same condemnation as the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6).

The word translated as recent convert is neóphytos. Literally, newly planted. It is the language of horticulture — a sapling, the kind of plant whose root system has not yet reached deep enough to hold it through a storm. Paul did not invent the word. Greek farmers already had it. He picked it up because it said something about new Christians that no theological vocabulary said quite as well.

The danger Paul names is not moral failure. It is typhōtheis — to be wrapped in smoke, fogged, puffed up. Not pride as a character flaw a person wrestles with. Pride as an atmospheric distortion around someone whose root system isn’t ready for the weight being placed on top of it. The new convert may be sincere. May be gifted. May, in many ways, be right. The problem is not the person. It’s the position.

Paul wrote this to govern who got to lead a local church in Ephesus. The category translates cleanly to our moment. The pace does not.

We have built a machine that takes the newest, rawest, most viral testimonies the church can find and grants them — overnight — the cultural authority Paul reserved for elders. We hand new believers podcast tours, partnerships, clothing company deals, and book deals before their own pastors have figured out their last names. Then we are surprised when the smoke comes.

This is what neóphytos was meant to prevent. And we have built an entire content economy that structurally cannot honor it.

What Apollos Got That Neeza Didn’t

There is a positive case in Acts that almost no one talks about anymore.

A man named Apollos shows up in Ephesus. Luke describes him in a string of compliments any algorithm would recognize: eloquent. Mighty in the Scriptures. Fervent in spirit. Teaching accurately the things concerning Jesus (Acts 18:24–25). By every metric the Christian internet measures, Apollos is a star.

And he is theologically incomplete. He knew only the baptism of John. He has the gospel half-built. The cross is missing.

What happens next is the line the church has forgotten how to read.

A husband and wife in the crowd — Priscilla and Aquila, tentmakers, no titles, no microphones — hear him speak. They do not interrupt him. They do not film a stitch. They do not take to social media to expose his theological gaps for the good of the flock. Luke uses one verb: προσελάβοντο (proselábonto). They took him to themselves. They brought him home. Privately. Off-platform. And there, in someone’s living room, they explained to him the way of God more accurately.

Then Apollos goes to Achaia, and Luke tells us he ministered there with greater power.

The private discipleship made the public ministry possible. The platform came after the formation, not before.

This is the pattern the church was built to run. A gifted, sincere, theologically incomplete believer is not muzzled. He is also not handed a microphone. He is taken into a home and walked through what he doesn’t yet know — by people whose names history barely remembers, who never wrote a book, who tentmade for a living and discipled apostles on the side.

Apollos had a Priscilla and Aquila. Neeza Powers had a podcast tour.

That is the whole story, in one sentence. And it is the indictment not of one man, but of the entire infrastructure that platformed him.

Reading the Moment Through Eden

This is where Redemptive Correlation does its work — not bringing Scripture down to fit the cultural moment, but bringing the cultural moment up under Scripture’s gaze. The internet age has its own questions about formation, visibility, and authority. The four-act story of Scripture answers them.

In Creation, image-bearing was always meant to be formed in proximity. Adam was named in a garden, not a feed. Eve was given to him as flesh, not followers. The first humans were known by God face-to-face, and they were known by each other in the same way. Formation was embodied, slow, and local. There was no shortcut to maturity, because there was no need for one.

In the Fall, the serpent’s first promise was visibility without formation: you will be like God, now, no apprenticeship required. Eat the fruit and skip the patience. The whole platform economy is structured around that same offer. Be known before you are formed. Speak before you are shaped. Grow your platform now; figure out the rest later. This is not a new temptation. It is the oldest one, with better lighting.

In Redemption, Christ called twelve men to be with him (Mark 3:14) before he sent them out. Mark gives the order plainly: with-ness, then sent-ness. The Son of God did not skip formation. He spent three years walking, eating, arguing, and sleeping next to twelve men before any of them were trusted with the gospel publicly. If Jesus would not shortcut formation for the men who would write the New Testament, the rest of us are not exempt.

And in the coming Restoration, the telos is not a bigger platform. It is a city in which we know as we are known (1 Cor. 13:12) — face to face, embodied, in communion. Every shortcut to that telos is a counterfeit of it. The viral testimony, the overnight evangelist, the new convert handed a microphone — these are not the Restoration arriving early. They are the Fall’s old promise, dressed in better clothes.

The story Scripture tells about formation has not changed. The internet has just made it easier to ignore.

To the believer who shared the videos

If you reposted a Neeza video — and I did, more than once — you didn’t do something evil. You did something instinctive. You saw a man who looked like he’d been pulled out of the fire, and you wanted to celebrate. That instinct is not the problem. The problem is what we do with it.

The next time a baby Christian goes viral, ask one question before you share: Who is in the room with this person off-camera? Not who’s interviewing them. Not who’s booking them. Who is sitting in their living room asking the questions Priscilla and Aquila asked? If the answer is I don’t know or probably no one — you have your answer about whether to amplify.

This is not gatekeeping, but rather an act of grace. The kindest thing you can do for a sapling is let it root.

To pastors, content creators, and platform-builders

If you are in the business of putting people on stages, microphones, podcasts, or partnerships — Paul’s word for you is neóphytos. Know it. Honor it. Build a question into your booking process: How long has this person been a Christian, and who is shepherding them privately? If the answer is months and no one specifically, the answer to the booking is no.

This will cost you. It will cost you content, revenue, virality, and the dopamine of being first. It will save other people what it cost Neeza Powers.

Ryan Miller, to his great credit, is publicly modeling what taking responsibility looks like. He is not the villain of this story. He may, in fact, be one of the only people in it telling the truth about what went wrong without flinching. That posture — telling the truth, taking responsibility where needed, calling all of us back — is the posture the rest of the Christian internet has refused to adopt. Adopt it.

Here is what we have learned, if we are willing to learn it.

The church is supposed to have living rooms before it has stages. It is supposed to have Priscilla-and-Aquila relationships before it has podcast bookings. It is supposed to honor the difference between a sapling and an oak, even when the sapling is photogenic and the algorithm rewards us for ignoring it.

We are not going to fix the Christian internet. But we can stop being surprised by what it produces. And we can build, in our own churches and homes and discipleship relationships, the patient kind of formation Paul commanded and Acts modeled — the kind that took Apollos from accurate-but-incomplete to mighty in public, but only after a private conversation in a tradesman’s home.

Pray for Neeza Powers. Pray for Ryan Miller. Pray for the people whose names you don’t know, who are about to go viral next.

And ask the Lord: Where, in my church and in my life, am I making room for what the algorithm cannot give?

This piece is part of Reading _____ Through Eden — a thread within Theologetics applying the four-act story of Scripture (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration) to questions of visibility, formation, and authority in the internet age.

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The church Alley and I were attending at the time had female pastors — in title, at least. The function was murkier. And I wanted the research to give me permission to stop worrying about it. I wanted Paul to be doing what a lot of scholars said he was doing: responding to a specific problem in Ephesus, not laying down something permanent. I wanted the text to be situational.

I read everything I could find. The egalitarian case is not a lazy case. Serious scholars make it seriously — Preston Sprinkle’s From Genesis to Junia is probably the most careful and charitable version of it I’ve encountered, and I’ll be reviewing it later this year. I followed every argument as far as it would go.

But Paul’s logic kept doing something I couldn’t account for. He didn’t ground his argument in Ephesian culture. He grounded it in Eden. The language he used wasn’t tied to the Ephesian story — it was tied to the biblical one. Creation. Design. The arc that started in a garden.

I finished that paper more complementarian than when I started. And something I didn’t expect: relieved. Not because I’d won an argument. Because I’d seen something — that God’s design for men and women isn’t a power structure. It’s a purpose structure. Equal in value, diverse in function. Higher than our intentions, and older than our debates.

That’s where this piece starts. Not with a position. With a question I genuinely wanted answered differently.

You’re not the only one who wanted a different answer.

The gender debate has produced two exhausted camps. On one side, people who’ve watched the church weaponize complementarianism — using headship language to cover abuse, silence women, and baptize control as theology. On the other, people who’ve watched progressivism dissolve the category of embodied sex entirely, leaving nothing but individual preference where design used to be. Both sides are reacting to something real. Neither has reached the people who are actually hurting.

Because the people who are actually hurting aren’t primarily asking about roles or pronouns. They’re asking something prior: Does my body mean anything? Does the way I was made — as a man, as a woman, as a creature with a particular kind of flesh — carry any significance? Or is it just a costume I happened to be born in?

That’s not a political question. It’s an anthropological one. And it’s the question the culture is answering loudly, the church is answering poorly, and Scripture has been answering all along — if we’d start reading it from the beginning.

The fault line isn’t where most people think it is. It doesn’t run between egalitarians and complementarians. It runs between everyone who’s building their theology of gender on Genesis 1 and everyone who’s — often without knowing it — building it on Genesis 3.

That’s the distinction this piece is about.

Equal Dignity, Shared Vocation

Genesis 1:27–28 does not say: “God created the man in His image, and gave the woman a supporting role.” It says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Both bear the image. Both receive the blessing. Both are given the mandate: be fruitful, fill the earth, subdue it, exercise dominion.

Genesis 2 adds differentiation without introducing hierarchy of value. The woman is called ezer kenegdo — a helper corresponding to him. The word ezer is used elsewhere in Scripture almost exclusively of God Himself (Psalm 33:20, 70:5, 121:1–2). This is not a term of subordination. It is a term of strength brought alongside. The garden mandate requires both. Neither can fulfill it alone. The design is complementary partnership, not command-and-obey hierarchy.

This is the creational baseline. Before the serpent, before the fruit, before the curse — there is equal image-bearing, shared vocation, and differentiated partnership. Any theology of gender that does not start here is starting in the wrong chapter.

Domination as Curse, Not Design

Genesis 3:16 is the hinge on which the entire gender debate turns — and it is almost universally misread by both sides.

“Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16b, CSB)

This is a description of the curse, not a prescription of the design. Read in context, this verse describes what the Fall introduced into the male-female relationship: a power struggle that was never part of the original architecture. The man’s “rule” here is not a divine mandate for leadership. It is the tragic distortion of what was meant to be partnership.

Here is where both camps get it wrong. When the “biblical masculinity” movement treats male authority as the central organizing principle of gender, they are building their theology on Genesis 3, not Genesis 1. They are calling the curse “design.” They are baptizing the power struggle as God’s intention.

And when the progressive response abandons complementarity altogether — erasing any meaningful differentiation between male and female — they are overcorrecting the curse by dismantling the design. The answer to Genesis 3 is not to pretend Genesis 1 and 2 don’t exist. It is to recover what was lost.

Christ Undoes the Curse

Galatians 3:28 is often drafted into the egalitarian argument as a proof text, but it is doing something more precise than that: “There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is not erasing the categories. He is announcing that in Christ, the curse-driven hierarchies those categories produced are dismantled. The Jew/Greek hostility, the slave/free power differential, the male/female power struggle — these are the fruit of the Fall. The gospel reverses them. Not by making everyone identical, but by restoring the dignity and partnership the Fall distorted.

Ephesians 5 — the passage I spent a semester with — holds both truths in tension. The husband’s headship is defined not by the Fall’s power dynamic but by Christ’s self-giving: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.” (Ephesians 5:25, CSB) This is not domination. It is cruciform leadership — authority expressed through sacrifice, not coercion. The mutual submission of verse 21 doesn’t erase the husband’s role; it defines how that role must be exercised.

The Bride, Not the Hierarchy

The New Jerusalem gives us the final image. Revelation 19 and 21 give us a bride — the whole church, male and female together — united with Christ in the most intimate relational language Scripture can offer. The power struggle of Genesis 3 is over. The design of Genesis 1 is fulfilled. The partnership that sin corrupted is healed.

If this is where the story ends, then any theology of gender that enshrines male dominance as permanent design is telling a story that contradicts the conclusion. And any theology that erases differentiation entirely is telling a story that contradicts the opening. The full narrative — Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration — holds what both sides are grasping at, without the distortions either side introduces.

What This Demands of You

If you’re a young man who came back to church through the masculinity pipeline — welcome. Genuinely. The hunger for purpose, identity, and transcendence that brought you here is real, and it is good. But test the framework that brought you. Is the “biblical manhood” you’ve been taught rooted in Genesis 1 or Genesis 3? Does it look like Christ washing feet or Adam naming and claiming? Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit or the posture of the conqueror?

If you’re a woman who’s walked away — or you’re standing in the doorway wondering whether to stay — hear this: the church that made you feel small was not preaching Genesis 1. It was preaching Genesis 3 and calling it God’s design. That is not the whole story, and it is not the end of the story. The God who made you as ‘ezer’ — the same word used for Himself — did not design you for subjugation. He designed you for partnership in the most consequential work in the universe.

For all of us: read Genesis 1–3 this week. Slowly. And ask yourself: which chapter is my theology of gender actually built on? The answer might surprise you — and it might set you free.

Imagine churches where the return of young men and the departure of young women were treated as the same crisis — because they are. Imagine communities where complementarianism meant genuine partnership rather than soft patriarchy. Imagine theological spaces where men and women could explore what Scripture actually says about gender without the conversation being hijacked by culture warriors on either side.

That’s the Edenic vision. Not egalitarianism that erases design. Not complementarianism that enshrines the curse. Something older and better than both — a partnership that begins in a garden, survives the worst the Fall could do, and ends at a wedding.

That’s what we’re reading toward.

This piece is part of the Reading ____ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of theologically grounded, culturally engaged thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

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Not combatively. Not as a troll. I said I personally hadn’t witnessed what he was describing — that living in Bozeman, Montana, predominantly white and middle class, meant the algorithm hadn’t surfaced it for me. A simple reply. The kind of thing you’d say to someone’s face without thinking twice.

He replied in my DMs. Warm. Agreed with me. Said that’s exactly why he posts about this stuff — cultural awareness. Asked where in Montana. We talked. It felt like a conversation.

Then I saw it. My reply on his Instagram stories. Cropped. My name removed. His caption over it: part of the problem. He had 26,900 followers. I had quite a few less. Somewhere in those 26,900, people were now looking at my words — stripped of context, stripped of my name, stripped of the DM conversation that had just happened — and forming a verdict about a person they’d never meet.

I reached back out and called it what it was. He deflected. Acted like I was misreading the situation.

So I reached out to a mutual friend — someone I trusted, someone who knew him. I explained what happened and how it landed. His first response: I was reading the situation wrong.

That friend was part of the same circle.

I sat with that for a while. Three interactions. Three opportunities to say yeah, that wasn’t right. Three times the circle closed instead. And I kept coming back to the same question: why didn’t he just reply to me? The reply button was right there. We could have talked. I might have learned something. He might have.

Instead, he went to the audience first.

That’s not a hot take. That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s a method. And once you see it — really see it — you start recognizing it everywhere.

What happened to me wasn’t unique. I know that now.

The cropped screenshot, the public caption, the deflection when confronted, the friend who ran the same play — none of it was random. It was a pattern. And once you’ve been on the receiving end of it, you start recognizing the shape of it everywhere.

This week, a public theological debate lit up my feed. A ministry account with a significant platform published a multi-slide carousel arguing against two other Christian voices — sophisticated, theologically framed, historically sourced. The comments filled fast. One of the people being criticized showed up to engage the argument directly, carefully, with evident goodwill. What followed wasn’t dialogue. It was a dismantling. Ad hominem. Condescension. Not a single concession, not a single acknowledgment that the other person had a point worth considering. Just the performance of dominance dressed in theological vocabulary.

I went back and looked at the account’s broader history. Same pattern, over and over. Confident assertion. Dismissal of challenge. No ground given. Ever.

What struck me wasn’t just the conduct. It was the gap. The same account that quotes Augustine on their website — “unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, in all things charity” — couldn’t extend basic charity in a comment section. The mission statement claimed Augustine. The comment section revealed something else entirely.

A person I respect — someone with a front-row seat to the whole situation — said something to me privately I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

They saw it. They just don’t care.

That sentence isn’t cynical commentary on one bad actor. It’s a diagnosis. Because the issue isn’t that these people don’t know how to be corrected. The issue is that correction was never the point. The audience was always the point. And when the audience is always the point, truth-telling stops being alētheuontes — the living, embodied, body-building fidelity Paul describes — and becomes something else entirely. Performance. Dominance. A platform protecting itself from accountability by making accountability look like an attack.

I’ve been in that position. I know what it feels like when the circle closes.

The question underneath all of it isn’t who was right. It’s what got built.

The Way We Fight

There’s a word Paul uses in Ephesians 4 that usually gets translated “speaking the truth in love.” It shows up in verse 15, and the Greek underneath it — alētheuontes — is richer than that translation suggests. Some early manuscripts read it as “doing truth.” Because in the Old Testament, the phrase was used specifically for fidelity between two parties — the kind of truth that shows up not just in what you say but in what you do.1 Paul isn’t offering tone advice. He’s describing what healthy bodies do. They truth each other — in word and in action — and they do it in love.

The context sharpens this. Paul is contrasting this posture with something specific — the cunning schemes of people who exploit immature believers, using theological sophistication not to build up the body but to prey on it (Eph. 4:14).2 Alētheuontes en agapē is the antidote. And the goal of that antidote isn’t winning. It’s oikodomē — the Greek word for construction. Every true word spoken between believers is building material. It either goes into the wall or it doesn’t.

The verb Paul uses for the church’s growth — auxanō — is the same word used in Ephesians 2:21, where the church grows into God’s holy temple.3 The body that truths in love is being built into a dwelling place for the Spirit. That’s not a metaphor for inspiration. That’s the actual goal of the way believers speak to each other.

Which means when truth is deployed as a weapon — when the goal is position rather than construction — it has stopped functioning as Paul intends. The content might be accurate. The theology might be airtight. But if it’s cunning rather than constructive, it has already failed the test the apostle sets.

The second thing. Jesus, in Matthew 18, gives a pattern for what confrontation between believers looks like — and it’s almost universally misread in the digital age.

Go privately first. If that doesn’t work, bring one or two others. If that doesn’t work, bring it before the church. The movement is always private to public — never the reverse. France calls it the principle of minimum exposure: other people are only brought in when the private approach has failed. The goal throughout is pastoral, not judicial. The singular “you” in verses 15–17 is deliberate — one disciple, concerned about another’s spiritual welfare, taking personal responsibility for the relationship.4

Blomberg puts the failure mode plainly: how often personal confrontation is the last stage rather than the first in Christian complaints. It frequently seems as if the whole world knows of someone’s grievance before the person is personally approached.5

That is the entire ecosystem of Christian social media conflict. Broadcast first. Private conversation never. And France’s observation cuts deepest: when the private step is skipped, the method has already answered the question about motive more honestly than the content ever could.6

There is an exception. Doriani notes it: when a public person commits a public sin that touches the gospel itself, public rebuke is fitting. Paul rebuked Peter before everyone in Galatians 2 because Peter’s hypocrisy was public and its implications for the gospel were immediate.7 The exception is real — but narrow. The rule is always to go private first, to seek the person’s restoration before you seek the audience’s approval.

This matters for our witness and for the immature believers Paul is trying to protect. But naming what’s broken is only half the work. And the church has been doing only half the work for a long time.

Now What?

This section has two addresses. Because the challenge looks different depending on where you sit.

If you have a platform:

Let’s be honest about what happened in that comment section this week. A person showed up to engage the argument — carefully, charitably, on the merits. What they received in return wasn’t engagement. It was demolition. Ad hominem. Condescension. Not one concession. Not one acknowledgment that the other person had raised a point worth considering. Just the sustained performance of dominance in theological vocabulary.

That’s not prophetic boldness. That’s pride with a proof text.

So before you post, before you respond, before you screenshot — three questions worth sitting with:

Posture: Is the goal of this content to build up the body of Christ, or to establish your position within it? Paul’s criterion in Ephesians 4 is oikodomē — upbuilding. If the honest answer is that the content is designed to win rather than build, it has already failed the test — regardless of whether the theology is correct.

Method: Did this dispute begin privately? Because Matthew 18 isn’t just a church discipline protocol. It’s a revelation of what public theological conflict is actually for when the private route is bypassed. Broadcast-first engagement serves the platform. The person being addressed is not the real audience. When that’s true, the method has answered the question about motive before a single word of theology is spoken. And your followers can tell — even if they don’t have language for it yet.

Outcome: When this is over, what will have been built? Not argued. Not won. Built — in the person you addressed, in the people watching, in the body of Christ that was supposed to be served by this exchange? If the honest answer is nothing, then the argument functioned as noise. Loud, sophisticated, theologically fluent noise. But noise.

One more thing. If you can’t concede a point, can’t acknowledge validity in a challenge, can’t give ground when ground is warranted — that’s not theological conviction. That’s a closed system. And closed systems don’t build anything. They only protect themselves.

If you don’t have a platform:

The temptation for the rest of us is to perform the debate as spectators — share the takedown, add the comment, signal which side we’re on. Every share of content that wounds without building is a small vote for the method you just watched.

But there’s a more personal question underneath that. Have you been on the receiving end of this? A cropped screenshot. A public caption. A circle that closed when you tried to raise a concern. If you have — you already know what this method costs the person it’s used on. Which means you also know why it matters that someone names it.

Name it. Not to win. Not to perform your own version of the takedown. But because the body of Christ deserves better than this, and someone has to be willing to say so — privately, directly, in the right sequence.

That’s not weakness. That’s the method Paul actually describes.

Imagine a church where theological disagreement was actually dangerous — not because people got canceled for their views, but because the arguments were so good, so honest, so willing to concede what was true in the other position, that you couldn’t dismiss them. Imagine leaders with platforms who went private first, every time, without exception — not because they were weak, but because they understood that the goal was the person, not the audience. Imagine a comment section that looked less like a courtroom and more like a conversation between people who actually believed they were members of the same body.

That’s not a naive vision. That’s Ephesians 4. That’s Matthew 18. That’s what Paul means when he says the whole body builds itself up in love.

The watching world isn’t waiting for the church to win more arguments. It’s waiting to see if we actually believe what we say we believe about each other. Every exchange is evidence. Every comment section is a witness statement.

Make yours count for something.

This piece is part of the ongoing work at Theologetics — culturally engaged theological writing that takes orthodoxy seriously and asks what it actually looks like to live it out. The method behind this work, Redemptive Correlation, is developed fully in my forthcoming book, currently under proposal. If this kind of thinking is what you're looking for, you're in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

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→ Leave a comment or a like — I read everything. Tell me where you landed on this one. Have you been on the receiving end of broadcast-first confrontation? Have you done it yourself and recognized it later? The best theology happens in dialogue, not monologue.

Theology is all fun and games until someone hits you with the question across a lunch table.

If you’ve been reading along, you’ve met this friend before. He’s the one who sat across from me in high school and told me he wasn’t sure about the whole faith thing anymore. The one whose question started this whole series: Why would a loving God need to punish His Son?

I wrote about him in the first piece when we were in the middle of the Comer debate — when everyone was arguing about PSA and the people who actually needed the conversation were getting lost in the crossfire. And I wrote about the need for a bigger room in the second piece — the argument that both sides were ripping the cross out of the story it belongs to. Both pieces named the problem. Neither one walked through the door. This piece does.

I had the right belief when my friend asked his question. I just didn’t have a frame big enough to hold it when it came at me like that — from someone I cared about, in a place where I couldn’t hide behind technical language. What I felt wasn’t doubt. It was unpreparedness.

I spent years after that reading theology books. Better categories, sharper terminology — but here’s the thing about theology books. They hand you the vocabulary without always giving you the understanding underneath it. I could explain penal substitution. I could cite the texts. I still couldn’t answer my friend.

What actually changed things wasn’t a book. It was getting married. It was loving Alley in the specific, costly, irreversible way that marriage actually requires. It was, honestly, getting dogs — which I know sounds ridiculous, but if you have a dog you love, you know exactly what I mean. When you love someone that specifically — when you’ve moved across the country for them, absorbed real costs so they didn’t have to — sacrificial love stops being a theological category and starts being something you recognize from the inside.

That’s when the question my friend asked finally had an answer. Not a louder argument. A bigger story.

And here’s the story.

The Debate That Left Everyone Cold

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about the atonement debate: it didn’t fail because the arguments were wrong. It failed because it answered a question nobody was actually asking.

The people who watched it play out online weren’t sitting there wondering who had the better exegesis of Romans 3:25. They were wondering something prior and more personal: Is God the kind of God I can actually trust?

You can’t answer that with a louder legal argument.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Everything real costs something. Groceries cost money. A paycheck has to be earned. Trust has to be built through relationship — it doesn’t transfer on its own. Nothing of genuine substance is free — and the One who designed that rule didn’t exempt Himself from it.

What the Story Actually Says

The garden before the cross

Before there was a cross, there was a garden.

We have a tendency — understandable, but costly — to open the Bible at the problem and skip the context. We start with sin, guilt, the need for atonement. But Genesis doesn’t open with a courtroom. It opens with a God who plants things. Who speaks and creation answers. Who walks in the cool of the day with the creatures He formed from the ground and breathed into. The first frame Scripture gives us for who God is — before any law, any sacrifice, any doctrine of atonement — is a God who makes, tends, and dwells with what He loves.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)

That’s not the opening line of a legal document. That’s the opening line of a love story.

Hold that. We’ll need it.

What actually broke

Genesis 3 is the most consequential chapter in human history, and most of us read it too fast.

Slow down and follow the sequence. The serpent works methodically — breaking Eve’s trust in what God said, pulling Adam into the distrust, until the two image-bearers made to reflect God’s character into the world are doing something unthinkable. They’re hiding.

“They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” (Genesis 3:8)

Watch what the text shows you. The intimacy with God fractures — they hide. The intimacy with each other fractures — blame-shifting starts immediately, Adam pointing at Eve, Eve pointing at the serpent, nobody willing to stand in the rupture together. The vocation fractures — the ground now resists them, thorns and thistles where there was once abundance. The embodied peace fractures — the nakedness they wore without shame becomes something to cover. Everything that was whole is now broken — comprehensively, at every level, all at once.

And then God speaks. But here’s what stops me every time I read it. He doesn’t open with a verdict. He opens with a question.

“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9)

He already knows. He’s God. The question isn’t informational — it’s relational. Before the judgment comes the search. Before the sentence comes the pursuit. The One they’re hiding from is the One walking toward them, calling out, refusing to let the rupture have the final word.

That tells you something about what kind of God stands behind the cross. And it tells you something about what the cross was going to have to be.

The four words

Romans 5 is one of the most compressed and devastating passages in the New Testament. Paul names the human condition in four words, and they are not accidental.

“For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For rarely will someone die for a just person — though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:6—10)

Helpless. Ungodly. Sinners. Enemies.

These aren’t synonyms. They’re a sequence. Helpless is passive — the rupture was beyond our capacity to repair. Ungodly is a condition — we were oriented away from God at the level of our nature. Sinners is behavioral — we acted on that orientation, consistently, in every direction. Enemies is relational — we weren’t just passive sinners, we were actively opposed to the One still walking toward us.

And then Paul says this: God proves His own love for us.

Proves. Not declares. Not announces. Not suggests. Proves.

Because anything real puts up or shuts up. The cross is the moment when the God who was walking through the garden calling where are you absorbs — fully, finally, irreversibly — the entire cost of a rupture He didn’t cause, on behalf of people who were actively hiding from Him.

The penalty is real. The substitution is real. Christ bearing what we deserved is real and essential and cannot be softened. But it’s not the whole story — because the rupture wasn’t only legal. A comprehensive rupture requires a comprehensive repair.

That’s why Paul can write in Colossians:

“He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly; he triumphed over them in him.” (Colossians 2:14—15)

The legal debt canceled. The powers defeated. Both in the same passage, in the same act, because both dimensions of the rupture demanded repair.

That’s why he can write in 2 Corinthians:

“Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” (2 Corinthians 5:18—19)

The relational fracture that started in the garden — enemies reconciled, the hiding finally over — healed at the same cross where the debt was paid.

That’s why Isaiah could see it coming seven hundred years before it happened:

“We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way; and the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)

The iniquity of us all — every dimension of it — laid on Him.

Substitution sits at the center — it’s the load-bearing beam. But the cross is as comprehensive as the catastrophe it repairs. And the catastrophe, as Genesis 3 shows us, was total.

Where the story ends

Revelation 22 opens with a river and a tree.

“Then he showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city’s main street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations, and there will no longer be any curse.” (Revelation 22:1—3)

No longer any curse.

The tree of life guarded by cherubim after the Fall — access restored and exceeded. The curse on the ground, the vocation, the embodied life — gone. The hiding, the shame, the fracture — healed. The nations themselves — healed by leaves from a tree that death couldn’t hold. Everything Genesis 3 broke is not just repaired here — it’s gloriously, abundantly exceeded.

Every dimension of what Christ absorbed on that Friday was in service of this one ending — a garden-city where the curse is gone and the tree is open and God finally, fully, has His people back.

What to Do With All of This

I want to ask you something direct.

If you’ve been in the debate — defending PSA, getting frustrated at people who can’t see what’s obviously in the passage — when’s the last time the cross actually moved you? Not convinced you. Moved you.

Because here’s the thing about having the right doctrine with the wrong frame: you can win every argument and still leave the person across the table colder than before. Your friend isn’t asking about penal substitution. They’re asking if this God is worth trusting with their life.

The theologians have a word for what we just walked through together. They call it recapitulation — the idea, traced back to Irenaeus in the second century, that Christ retraced Adam’s steps through the whole human story and got right what Adam got catastrophically wrong. Where Adam hid, Christ presented Himself. Where Adam blamed, Christ absorbed. Where Adam’s disobedience unraveled everything, Christ’s obedience — all the way to the cross, all the way to the tomb, all the way to the empty grave — restored it. He didn’t just pay a penalty on our behalf. He lived the life we couldn’t live, died the death we deserved, and walked out the other side so that we could follow Him through.

You don’t need the Latin to feel it. But now you have the word.

Read Romans 5:6-10 again. Slowly. Let the four words land — helpless, ungodly, sinners, enemies — and sit with the fact that God proved His love anyway. Not after you cleaned yourself up. Not after you showed some good faith effort. While you were all four of those things at once. That’s not a doctrine to master. That’s a reality to be undone by.

And if you’ve been on the other side — if the language of wrath and penalty has always felt cold — hear this gently. The legal dimension isn’t the invention of angry theologians. It’s woven into the grain of the universe He designed. Groceries cost money. Trust has to be earned. The most consequential restoration in human history didn’t happen for free. God didn’t wave His hand and call it forgiveness. He absorbed the cost. Fully. In the body of His Son.

Both of you need the bigger story. The cross is big enough to hold every question your friend ever asked across a lunch table — you just have to read it from inside the whole narrative, from the garden where everything broke to the garden-city where everything is finally, permanently healed.

What the Church Could Be

Imagine a church that preached the cross in its full scope — not just the penalty paid, but the pursuit that preceded it. The powers defeated by it. The relational rupture healed through it. The road back to the garden opened because of it.

Imagine theological conversations where the goal wasn’t winning but wonder. Where Romans 5 was read slowly enough that the four words landed before anyone started arguing about them.

Imagine the person who watched the debate online and walked away colder than before — finally finding, in the story read all the way through, the answer that reached the place where the question actually lived.

The cross didn’t just mean love. It meant life.

Death didn’t get the final word. The empty tomb is the proof. The ascension is the confirmation. And Revelation 22 is the destination — a garden-city where the tree of life is open, the curse is gone, and the God who was walking through the garden calling where are you has finally, fully, brought His people home.

That’s what the cross actually accomplishes. Not a transaction. A restoration. The most vicarious act in the history of the universe — on behalf of people who were hiding in the garden.

And He came looking anyway.

This piece is part of the Reading ______ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

The hope of articles like this is to point you and others to a better way to view the world around you. I hope you find them beneficial and inspiring, ultimately pointing you to love Jesus more. If this piece did something for you, I’d love for you to do two things.

→ Share this with someone who’s tired of searching. You probably know exactly who needs to read it — the friend who walked away, the one still arguing on the internet, the one who sat across a lunch table and asked the question nobody could answer. Send it to them.

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I get it. Stay with me anyway.

There’s no fear-mongering here. No shame. What I do want is for you to reconsider where AI actually fits in the ordering of your life — because you’re already using it whether you’ve thought about it or not. Siri. Maps. Autocorrect. The calendar block your work app suggested before you asked. And more recently, tools like ChatGPT and Claude that made the whole thing impossible to ignore.

The question was never really whether to engage with AI. It’s always been what you bring to it first.

Force Multiplier

Here’s a question I’ve been sitting with: what does a force multiplier do when the foundation is zero?

The math is simple. Multiply anything by zero, and you get zero. A force multiplier doesn’t change that equation — it just runs it faster.

I’ve been thinking about technology this way for a while now, and it’s changed how I read the early chapters of Genesis. Not the dramatic moments — the serpent, the flood, the tower. The quieter ones. Cain bringing an offering. Adam and Eve in the garden, reaching for the fruit. What I keep noticing is that the catastrophes aren’t really about the act itself. They’re about the order of things. Someone deploying a capacity — a tool, a gift, an inheritance — before the foundation underneath it is built. Doing something in order to become something, rather than doing something because they already are something.

That inversion is everywhere once you see it. The prodigal son doesn’t just spend money badly. He asks for the inheritance before the relational and formational ground that would make it a catalyst rather than a grenade. He wants the force multiplier to generate the foundation, when the whole architecture of Eden runs the other direction — foundation first, then multiplication.

I’m interested in this because I think it’s the theological category underneath almost every hard question people are asking about technology right now. Not “is AI dangerous?” but something prior to that. Something about what we bring to our tools before we pick them up — and what happens when we bring nothing.

The Tool That Got Ahead

Most of us are living somewhere inside that inversion right now.

According to Barna, 1 in 3 adults trust AI spiritual guidance at roughly the same level as they trust their pastor. Four in 10 practicing Christians say AI has already helped them with prayer, Bible study, or spiritual growth. Only 12% of pastors feel equipped to address it from the pulpit.

We’ve moved fast. Faster, arguably, than we’ve thought.

The content lanes forming around AI in the church tend to go one of two directions: practical (”here’s how I use ChatGPT for my quiet time”) or alarmist (”the algorithm is your new pastor”). Both responses share the same problem — they’re reacting to the technology at the surface level, asking how to use it or whether to fear it, without pressing into the question that sits underneath both.

That deeper question isn’t really about AI. It’s about us. We’ve already outsourced navigation, memory, and social connection to algorithms. We’ve already trained ourselves to receive information without forming relationships around it, to consume theology without covenanting with anyone, to be shaped by what we scroll past in ways we don’t fully account for. AI-assisted spiritual formation isn’t a new development. It’s the logical next step in a pattern that’s been building for twenty years.

And the pattern isn’t primarily a technology problem. It’s an ordering problem.

Here’s what I mean. The question people are functionally asking when they turn to AI for spiritual guidance is: Can formation be primarily informational? If what I need to grow is better data — cleaner commentary, faster synthesis, more accessible theology — then the tool that wins is the one that delivers it fastest. And by that metric, AI wins. It’s not even close.

But that framing assumes formation is fundamentally about information transfer. And Scripture tells a very different story about what formation actually requires — one that begins not in Eden’s content, but in Eden’s order.

Before God gave Adam a command, He gave Adam Himself. Before the commission came the breath, the address, the garden walk. The first mode of formation wasn’t instruction — it was presence. Relation and formation preceding function, every time. The commission always following from a creature who was already grounded in something prior to it.

When the serpent offered Eve the fruit, the temptation wasn’t false information. It was a shortcut. Knowledge without the relational process of receiving it from God — autonomous knowing, grasped rather than given. The apple was information without a relationship. And we’ve been reaching for variations of it ever since.

The AI question isn’t new. It’s the oldest question in the book, running the same equation: what happens when the force multiplier gets deployed before the foundation is built?

What the Garden Was Built For

Presence Before Content

Genesis 2 doesn’t move from Adam’s creation to Adam’s commission. It moves through something slower and more deliberate first.

God forms Adam from the dust and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2:7 CSB). This is the only creature in the entire creation account who receives the divine breath directly — not spoken into existence, but personally animated by contact with the Creator. Before Adam knows anything he is supposed to do, he knows whose he is. The relational constitution precedes everything else.

Then God speaks to him directly: “You may eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:16–17 CSB). This first address isn’t primarily a prohibition — it’s an orientation. Here is who I am. Here is who you are. Here is how life in my world works. God establishes the terms of relationship before He establishes the terms of vocation. The commission of Genesis 1:28 — be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it — follows from a creature who has already been grounded in something prior to it.

The pattern persists throughout Scripture. At Sinai, God doesn’t open with legislation. He opens with identity: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery” (Ex. 20:2 CSB). The law follows from the relationship, not the other way around. Even Deuteronomy, dense with instruction, opens with forty chapters of relational history before Moses calls Israel to obedience. The sequence is never arbitrary in Scripture: who you are to God always precedes what God asks of you.

This is the architecture of formation in Eden and beyond. Content serves formation, but presence is the soil in which formation takes root. God does not upload truth to Adam’s mind. He walks with him in the garden (Gen. 3:8 CSB), and the truth is received in the context of that walking.

An AI can deliver content with stunning accuracy. It cannot be present. It cannot walk with you. It cannot sit in silence when the theology stops making sense and the grief is too heavy for words. It cannot model repentance, because it has never sinned. It cannot model faith, because it has never doubted. These are not software limitations. They are categorical distinctions between a tool and a person — and Eden knew the difference before we had to learn it again.

The Inversion of the Order

The serpent’s move in Genesis 3 is precise. He doesn’t offer Eve false information. He offers her true information through a corrupted channel, framed as a shortcut around the relational process of receiving it from God: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5 CSB).

Notice what Eve does next. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it” (Gen. 3:6 CSB). The seeing comes first, then the desiring, then the taking. She is reaching for knowledge in order to become something rather than receiving knowledge from the God whose likeness she already bears. The force multiplier is deployed in service of constructing an identity rather than expressing one already given. This is the pattern Joel Muddamalle identifies in The Unseen Battle as the recurring grammar of rebellion: see, desire, take — a sequence that originates here and echoes forward through every subsequent rupture in the biblical story.

That echo arrives quickly. By Genesis 4, Cain’s lineage produces Lamech’s sons — credited with metallurgy, music, and livestock husbandry — and the unit closes with Lamech’s sword song, a celebration of technological violence: “I killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me” (Gen. 4:23 CSB). The Second Temple tradition preserved in 1 Enoch develops what the canonical text implies: that certain technological capacities arrived in human history through transgression rather than through God’s patient instructed unfolding — knowledge grasped rather than received, deployed in service of power rather than cultivation. The delimiting principle isn’t the technology itself. It’s the directional orientation. The same metalworking that forges a sword forges a plowshare. What determines which one you’re holding is what you brought to the forge — and whether relation, formation, and commission preceded the making.

When we turn to AI for spiritual guidance not as a supplement but as a replacement for pastoral relationship and communal discernment, we are not just making a pragmatic error. We are reenacting the Edenic inversion — reaching for knowledge outside the embodied, covenantal process through which God has chosen to give it. Paul reads this same pattern in Romans 1, where those who suppress the truth about God become futile in their thinking and exchange the glory of the immortal God for images (Rom. 1:21–23 CSB). The exchange isn’t primarily intellectual. It’s formational. What we attend to shapes us, and what we worship forms us, whether we intend it or not.

Tools for the Garden, Not Replacements for the Gardener

Scripture is not hostile to tools. The tabernacle required craftsmen filled with the Spirit of God — Bezalel and Oholiab — “with wisdom, understanding, and ability in every craft” (Ex. 31:3 CSB). The Psalms were set to music. Letters carried apostolic authority across the ancient world. Tools have always served formation when they remain downstream of the relational and formational ground that gives them direction.

The issue is never the tool. It is the order.

Proverbs 4:23 locates the center of formation not in information received but in a heart guarded: “Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life” (CSB). Formation is not data transfer. It is the slow, covenantal, sometimes inconvenient work of having your loves reordered by a God who insists on proximity, and by the community of people He has given you to be formed alongside. This is why Paul’s vision of maturity in Ephesians 4 is irreducibly embodied and communal. The church grows “when each part is working properly” (Eph. 4:16 CSB) — not when each individual has access to better content, but when the body is functioning as a body. The antidote to theological drift is not better information. It is “speaking the truth in love” within a community “joined and held together” (Eph. 4:15–16 CSB).

AI can assist the garden. It can help a new believer navigate Scripture’s complexity. It can help a pastor research a sermon. It can surface commentary that a small group leader didn’t know existed. These are good uses. They are tool uses. The line is crossed when the tool becomes the gardener — when AI replaces the pastor, the mentor, the friend who holds you accountable, the community that knows your name. That line is crossed not with a dramatic announcement but with a quiet drift: one more week where the AI devotional felt sufficient, one more month where algorithmic curation replaced the slow, costly process of being discipled by imperfect people in a real room.

The Telos Is Presence

The final vision of Scripture is not an information utopia. John sees the holy city descending and hears a loud voice from the throne: “Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God” (Rev. 21:3 CSB). The Greek word for “dwelling” is skēnē — tabernacle, tent, the same word John used when he wrote that the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (John 1:14 CSB). The arc of Scripture runs from the garden where God walked with Adam to the garden-city where He will dwell with His people face to face, with no interface, no mediation, no screen between.

Notably, John tells us there is no temple in the city — “because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22 CSB). Every tool of mediated presence that structured God’s relationship with His people throughout redemptive history — tabernacle, temple, priesthood, sacrifice — finds its completion and its end in the direct, unmediated presence of God with His people. The pattern that began in Eden reaches its telos here: relation restored fully, formation complete, the commission fulfilled in a people who bear the image of the one they have finally seen face to face.

This is the pattern the whole book of Scripture is tracing, and it has a structure: relation precedes formation, formation precedes commission, and technology has always been the force multiplier at the end of that chain — not the source of any of it. When the order holds, tools serve flourishing. When it inverts, you get Lamech’s sword song.

The individual version of this story is the prodigal son — a young man who extracted the force multiplier from the relational and formational ground that gave it meaning, ran the equation on a zero foundation, and ended up in a far country until he came to himself and returned to the father who reinstated him to the beginning of the process rather than the end of it. The communal version is King Josiah — a covenant people who had drifted so gradually from the ordering of Eden that the reordering instrument had been buried inside the institution itself, until one king tore his garments, sought outside accountability, and then went through the disordered house room by room until something faithful remained.

Both stories end not with the destruction of the tool but with the restoration of the order. The plow is still in the field. The inheritance can still be stewarded. The question in every generation, including this one, is simply whether the foundation comes before the multiplication.

If that is where the story ends, then every tool we build and adopt along the way must be evaluated by a single criterion: does it move people toward presence or away from it? Does it cultivate the embodied, covenantal, face-to-face life that the new Jerusalem perfects — or does it offer a photograph of Eden in place of the dirt?

The garden needs gardeners. The new Jerusalem needs citizens who have learned to dwell with one another, because the city’s defining feature is that God dwells with them.

The Diagnostic

If AI has become a meaningful part of your spiritual routine, ask yourself a diagnostic question rooted in the ordering logic of Eden rather than in a rule about technology: what came first?

Did the relationship, the formation, the communal accountability come before this tool entered your spiritual life? Is AI catalyzing something that’s already grounded — your engagement with Scripture, your conversation with a pastor, your accountability to people who know your name — or is it functioning as the foundation itself, generating the sense of formation without the prior conditions that make formation real?

There is nothing wrong with asking an AI to help you understand Romans 9. There is something deeply wrong with trusting an AI to be your shepherd. A simple test: could the source you consult for spiritual guidance rebuke you? Could it weep with you? Could it confess its own sin to you? If the answer is no, then what you have is a reference tool, not a spiritual authority. Treat it accordingly.

This week, take one question you would normally bring to an AI and bring it to a person instead. A pastor. A mentor. A trusted friend. Notice the difference. The answer might be slower, messier, and less polished. But it will come from an image-bearer — and that changes everything.

Gardeners, Not Algorithms

Imagine a church culture that understood technology not primarily as a threat to manage or a resource to optimize, but as a force multiplier — one that faithfully accelerates whatever we bring to it. Imagine communities that took the ordering logic of Eden seriously enough to ask, before adopting any tool: do we have the relational ground, the formational depth, and the vocational clarity to make this a catalyst rather than a substitute?

That’s the Edenic vision for technology. Every tool in the garden was given for cultivation, not for autonomy. The hoe doesn’t replace the gardener. The plow doesn’t replace the farmer. And the AI doesn’t replace the pastor, the community, or the God who insists on walking with His people face to face.

Build tools for the garden. But never forget: the garden needs gardeners.

This piece is part of the Reading ______ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

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Most of us know someone living it. Some of us have lived it ourselves.

When the Screen Felt Safer

I spent the better part of ten years dedicating my life to the local church. From volunteering and working in it vocationally, to literally majoring and minoring in it in college, I believed in the mission, vision, and primacy of the local church being the hope of the world.

That wasn’t a bumper sticker for me. I had organized my actual life around it. I’d logged the hours — Sunday school classrooms, elder meetings, student ministry on Wednesday nights, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a church running. Bill Hybels said it first, but I meant it personally: there is nothing like the local church when it’s working right.

And then 2018 happened.

I was a student ministry associate pastor at the time, and I was renting a room from the HR and payroll coordinator at our church — who happened to be the executive pastor’s daughter. It was a handshake deal. She wanted me to mentor her son, be a kind of big brother to him. I was just trying to save money and be close to the work I loved. When I didn’t meet expectations she’d never actually said out loud, things deteriorated fast. The personal bled into the professional. My hours got cut. My pay got docked, slowly, until I could see exactly where it was heading. I quit before the number hit zero.

The wound wasn’t theological. That’s the part I had to sit with. I still believed everything I’d always believed about the church. The doctrine was intact. But the people who were supposed to represent the body had hurt me through it, and so I did what most people do when the church injures them: I moved to the couch.

For a stretch, I hopped between churches on Facebook on Sunday mornings. Put a different congregation on the TV each week. I watched sermons from churches I’d never step foot in, in cities I’d never visit, from pastors who had no idea I existed. And I’ll be honest with you — it felt good to be anonymous. The screen couldn’t betray me. Nobody there knew what had happened or had a stake in my life. I could receive the content and give nothing back, and that felt, for a moment, like freedom.

But something was missing from the start. I couldn’t have named it right away, but it was there — a low-grade awareness that I was watching faith happen instead of living it.

What brought me back wasn’t an argument. It was people. Getting back into faith-adjacent work, being around people who made me want to be better. And then Alley and me finding a church together in Bozeman — sitting together, knowing people, being known by people. Having skin in the game. Having a spiritual family and a personal stake in other people’s lives. The other half of our faith getting lived out in public, not just processed in private.

That’s what I’d been missing on the couch. And here’s the tension I’ve never fully resolved: I now run a digital theology platform. I believe formation happens through embodied community, and I’m writing this to you on a screen. I’m not going to pretend I’ve got that perfectly sorted. But I’ve sat with the question long enough that I think I know what’s actually at stake in it.

Consuming Without Covenanting

You’re probably not that different from me.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely someone who cares about theology — maybe more than most people in your life. You’ve got a podcast queue, a Substack inbox, maybe a few Instagram accounts you follow that actually make you think. You know the difference between N.T. Wright and John Piper. You’ve formed opinions. You’ve been shaped, at least in part, by content.

And there’s a real question underneath all of that: Is this enough? Does the content do the thing?

It’s not a small question. According to Barna’s 2025 State of the Church research, even the most faithful young churchgoers — the Gen Z Christians leading what researchers are calling a post-pandemic attendance resurgence — are present at their local church an average of 1.9 times per month. That’s the highest frequency of any adult generation right now, and it’s still fewer than half the Sundays in a year. Among all churchgoing adults, Barna found an average of 1.6 times per month — roughly two out of every five weekends. Barna’s VP of Research noted that this helps explain the frustration pastors feel trying to build momentum: the congregation they preach to on any given Sunday is substantially different from the one that showed up two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the theological content pipeline runs every single day. And a growing class of influencer theologians — figures with no institutional ties, no congregational accountability, no one who knows their name or their sin — are shaping doctrinal formation among young believers at a scale that outpaces most pastors’ reach. Barna has also documented what they call “worship shifting“: 52% of practicing Christian Millennials say they regularly replace in-person church with digital options at least half the time. Not supplement. Replace.

The appeal makes complete sense. Digital theology has no potluck drama. It has no elder board conflict. It doesn’t ask anything of you except your attention, and in exchange it gives you access to the best theological minds in the world at no social cost. You can learn Bavinck’s doctrine of God on your commute. You can follow a Reformed theologian with 200,000 followers who has thought more carefully about the atonement than your local pastor has. The access is genuinely remarkable, and the quality is often genuinely high.

But here’s what I want you to sit with: the question was never whether the content is good. The question is whether content alone can do what the church was designed to do.

That’s the surface question — “do I need the institutional church, or just good theology?” But the root question goes deeper than the institution. What you’re really asking is this: Can I belong without being known? Can I be formed without being present?

That’s not a scheduling question. That’s an anthropological one.

What we’re experiencing isn’t primarily a church attendance problem. It’s a disembodiment crisis. The digital age has given us an unprecedented ability to learn theology without submitting to community, to receive teaching without accountability, to consume without covenanting. And we have discovered — quietly, without ever fully deciding it — that we prefer the frictionless version. We’ve learned to receive the benefits of Christian formation while opting out of the conditions that actually produce it.

The fig leaves are just higher resolution now.

The question Redemptive Correlation forces us to ask isn’t “is the church worth attending?” It’s “what kind of creature are you, and what does that creature actually need?” Because the answer to that question changes everything about how you evaluate what digital content can and cannot do for you.

The Garden Was Never a Lecture Hall

Creation: God’s First Gift Was a Place and a People

God’s first act after creating humanity was not to deliver a sermon. It was to place them. He planted a garden, set them in it, gave them each other, and gave them a shared vocation: tend this, keep this, be fruitful, fill this. The first context for spiritual formation was not content delivery — it was co-located, embodied, vocational community.

Eden was not a lecture hall. It was a garden with dirt under the fingernails. God walked with them in the cool of the day — present, physical, near. The pattern is set from the very beginning: knowing God happens in a place, with a people, through shared work. This is the original design for what we now call “church.”

Fall: What Isolation Actually Is

The first consequence of sin in Genesis 3 is hiding. Before the curse, before the exile, before the pain in childbirth or the thorns in the ground — Adam and Eve hide. From God. From each other. The Fall introduces autonomy disguised as freedom. They cover themselves. They blame each other. They are driven from the place God prepared for them.

This is not incidental detail. It is the architecture of the problem. Sin doesn’t just create guilt; it creates isolation. It severs the placed, embodied, communal life God designed. And every substitute we build — including digital community that offers theological stimulation without covenantal vulnerability — echoes the fig leaves of Genesis 3. It covers the problem without solving it.

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves.” — Genesis 3:7–8

Redemption: The Gathered Body as Restoration in Progress

When God begins rebuilding what the Fall destroyed, He does not send a curriculum. He calls a people. Abraham is not given a book; he is given a family and a land. Israel is not given a podcast series; they are given a tabernacle, a priesthood, feasts they must attend bodily, and a land they must cultivate together.

And when Christ comes, He does not upload content. He calls twelve men to walk with Him, eat with Him, fail in front of Him, and be restored by Him. The church that forms after Pentecost is described in irreducibly embodied terms: they broke bread together, shared possessions, met daily in the temple courts, ate together in their homes (Acts 2:42–47). Luke could not have been clearer: this is a placed, physical, covenantal community.

Paul’s ecclesiology reinforces this. The body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 is not decorative. It is structural: you cannot be a hand without being connected to a body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” A Christian formed exclusively by digital content is like an organ receiving nutrients through an IV drip — technically nourished, but disconnected from the body it was designed to serve.

This does not mean digital theology is bad. It means it is incomplete. A sermon clip that convicts you on Tuesday is a gift. But without a community that knows your name, sees your sin, bears your burden, and holds you accountable through the mess of real life, that conviction has nowhere to go.

Restoration: The New Jerusalem Is Not a Livestream

Revelation 21–22 describes the telos of God’s redemptive work as a city. Not a cloud. Not a library. Not a content platform. A city — the most concentrated form of embodied human community imaginable. The nations bring their glory into it. God dwells among His people, face to face. The tree of life stands in the middle of it, accessible to all.

If this is where the story ends — in a placed, physical, communal dwelling of God with humanity — then the church is not an institution we attend. It is the imperfect, in-progress preview of God’s final design. To opt out of embodied church in favor of digital theology is to choose content about the garden over life in the garden. It is to prefer a photograph of Eden to the dirt.

Gardeners, Not Spectators

If you’re reading this on your phone while skipping church for the third week in a row — this is not a guilt trip. Guilt doesn’t produce covenant. But it is an honest question: what is forming you? The algorithm that feeds you content calibrated to your preferences? Or a community of imperfect people who know your name, disagree with you sometimes, and show up when your life falls apart?

The church is inconvenient by design. It is supposed to be. You cannot love your neighbor in the abstract. You cannot practice forgiveness with people who never offend you. You cannot learn patience from a comment section. The friction of embodied community is not a bug — it is the mechanism by which God forms you into the image of Christ.

This week, do something that digital theology cannot do: sit across from another believer — not a screen, a person — and confess something real. Share a meal. Pray out loud, awkwardly, with someone who can see your face. Let yourself be known. That is the garden. That is where formation happens. That is what no content platform, including this one, can replace.

WE (Closing)

Imagine churches that didn’t compete with digital theology but completed it — communities where the sermon clip that convicted you on Tuesday became the small group conversation that changed you on Wednesday. Imagine a generation of Christians who consumed theological content ravenously AND showed up to their local church faithfully — not because they had to, but because they understood that a garden needs gardeners, not spectators.

That’s the vision of Redemptive Correlation applied to ecclesiology. The church is not an institution in decline. It is the preview of the garden-city, and it has always been messy, always been imperfect, always been the place where God insists on forming His people through the inconvenience of proximity. The digital tools we build — including Theologetics, including every sermon clip and theological carousel — are seeds. But seeds need soil. And the soil is the local church, with all its dirt and all its life.

We are building toward a New Jerusalem. You cannot livestream your way there. You have to walk in together.

This piece is part of the Reading ______ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

If this resonated with you:

→ Subscribe if you aren’t already — new pieces drop weekly, and the conversation here is worth being part of.

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→ Share this piece with someone you know who’s in the couch season. Not to shame them — but because sometimes the right words from the right person at the right time are what pulls someone back toward embodied community. That’s how this works.

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→ Leave a comment or a like — I read everything. Tell me where you landed on this one, where you pushed back, or what your own “couch season” looked like. The best theology happens in dialogue, not monologue.