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.

If this piece helped you, four quick asks:

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And if you are a new Christian reading this who has felt the weight of being platformed too soon — or if you are the friend, pastor, or family member of one — please reach out. I will pray for you, be there for you, and gladly walk side by side with you in your new journey. Hear me one this: this piece names a real and painful pattern, and the last thing I want is for it to land as critique without care.

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.

If this resonated with you:

→ Subscribe if you aren’t already — new pieces drop every Monday, and this is the kind of conversation worth being part of consistently.

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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.

If this resonated with you:

→ Subscribe if you aren’t already — new pieces drop every Monday, and this is the kind of conversation worth being part of consistently.

Subscribe now

→ Share this piece with someone you know who’s been on the receiving end of this — or who you’ve watched do it. The conversation is worth having out loud, and it’s better had in community than in a comment section.

Share

→ 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.

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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.

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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.

It’s arguably the question I hear the most when I talk to people who are either going through a crisis of faith or who have walked away altogether. The atonement, the punishment necessary for the wrong things we’ve done, is in and of itself a messy topic because it stirs up the inference that we’re bad people, and no one really wants to do business with that fact in the first place.

Someone near and dear to me (who will remain anonymous for this piece), who I grew up with and went to church with from elementary school through high school, sat down with me right before we graduated high school, and then we went our separate ways: me to college, him to the military. Towards the end of our junior year, he dropped the bomb that he didn’t really think the church thing was for him. He just didn’t feel it anymore and was going to take a break. No worries, I thought. He’ll come back.

But he didn’t. We sat next to each other in most of our classes, and I would ask him periodically when he would be at Wednesday night services. “Um, I don’t know.” I didn’t think much of it.

But a few months before graduation, he finally had a real conversation with me. “Jacob, I just don’t get it. I can’t get past why a loving God would kill His Son. Why He didn’t just stop the whole sin thing from happening. He can’t be a good God, if He even is real.”

I never did give him a good answer. Not because I didn’t believe one existed, but because the answer I had, which was more procedural and sterile in nature, didn’t seem to reach the place where the question actually lived. That gap between the answer I had and the question he was asking? Last summer, it became the biggest theological controversy on the internet.

In August 2025, John Mark Comer, arguably the most influential Christian voice among Gen Z and younger millennials, posted an Instagram story endorsing Andrew Rillera’s book Lamb of the Free as the “final biblical/exegetical knockout blow” to penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), which is simply “[t]he view of the atonement that holds that Christ in his death bore the just penalty of God for our sins and did so as a substitute for us.”1

If you’re not terminally online in theology circles, it’s hard to overstate how fast that detonated. Within days, Owen Strachan had published a lengthy Substack rebuttal. Denny Burk went after Comer directly on X/Twitter. Derek Rishmawy wrote a more irenic response for The Gospel Coalition. While not my preferred source, Allie Beth Stuckey dedicated a full podcast episode to it (it’s a long one, but I’ve linked it if you really want to watch). I wrote my own piece at the time, and I stand by every word of it.

But here’s what I’ve sat with since: almost every response (including mine) was a legal defense. We defended the courtroom. We cited Isaiah 53 and Romans 3:25. We clarified propitiation. We were technically and categorically right. And we mostly talked past the very people we were trying to reach.

Because this debate didn’t happen in a theological journal. It happened on Instagram Stories. In tweet-length hot takes that reduced 2000 years of atonement theology to a team sport. Pick a side. Repost. Move on. The medium didn’t just carry the conversation; it deformed it. Everything became position and counter-position, and the people who needed the conversation the most — the ones actually wrestling, actually asking — got lost in the crossfire.

And that’s the part that haunts me. The real audience in this debate was never the theologians. It was the 23-year-old who saw Comer’s post while scrolling before bed and thought, “Maybe I was right to be uncomfortable with the cross.” It was my friend from high school — ten years later, a million times over — still carrying the same question and still not finding an answer that lands anywhere deeper than a legal brief.

The surface-level question in this whole controversy is straightforward enough: Is PSA true? And the answer is yes. I believe that with my whole chest, and the biblical witness is clear. But that question — “Is PSA true?” — is not actually the question most people are asking. The question underneath, the one my friend was asking at that lunch table, the one Comer’s audience resonates with, whether they can articulate it or not, is this: Is God violent? And if He is, can I trust Him?

That’s not an exegetical question, but a character question. It’s a question about what kind of God stands behind the cross — and whether that God is someone you’d want to spend eternity with. You cannot answer a character question with a louder legal argument. You can be right about propitiation and still miss the person sitting across from you who needs to know that the God who demanded the penalty is the same God who paid it, and that He did it not because He is violent but because the rupture was that deep and His love was that relentless.

And here’s what I think both sides of this debate are getting wrong — and I include my earlier self in this. Both camps are extracting the cross from the larger story and arguing about an isolated event. Comer and Rillera strip away the legal dimension — the penalty, the wrath, the substitution — and reduce the cross to solidarity and example. The Reformed response strips away everything else — the victory, the reconciliation, the cosmic restoration — and reduces the cross to a courtroom verdict. Both sides are arguing about a single scene as if it were the whole movie. And neither side is asking the most important question: what story does the cross belong to?

Because the cross doesn’t appear in a vacuum. It appears inside a narrative that starts long before Calvary and ends long after it. And when you rip the cross out of that narrative — whether you’re deconstructing it or defending it — you lose the very thing that makes it make sense.

What if the atonement debate doesn’t need louder voices? What if it needs a bigger room?

The Cross Starts in a Garden, Not a Courtroom

Before there was a cross, there was a garden. Before there was wrath, there was abundance. Before there was a debt to pay, there was a world given freely — an act of sheer, unconditioned generosity.

Genesis 1–2 gives us a God who creates not out of need but out of overflow. He doesn’t build a courtroom; He plants a garden. He doesn’t issue a legal code; He gives a vocation. He places humanity in a world of staggering abundance and says: tend this, name this, enjoy this, do this together. The first divine act toward humanity is a gift.

This matters enormously for how we read the cross. If the story of God begins with a legal transaction — with obligation and penalty — then the cross becomes the resolution of a contract dispute. But if the story begins with intimate, generous, relational abundance, then everything that follows, including the cross, must be read inside that frame. The question isn’t whether God’s justice is real. It’s what kind of story God’s justice belongs to.

What Actually Broke

When Adam and Eve eat the fruit in Genesis 3, something ruptures, but the rupture is far more comprehensive than a legal violation. Yes, a command was transgressed. But look at what actually breaks: intimacy with God (they hide), intimacy with each other (they blame), their relationship to creation (the ground is cursed), their vocation (toil replaces cultivation), and their future (death enters the story).

The Fall is not merely guilt before a judge. It is the shattering of an entire relational ecosystem — cosmic, vocational, interpersonal, and spiritual. Guilt is real, and it is part of this. But guilt is one dimension of a multidimensional catastrophe. When we reduce the Fall to a legal problem, we inevitably reduce the cross to a legal solution. And when we do that, we lose the very thing that makes the atonement breathtaking.

“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 from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” — Genesis 3:8–9

Notice: God’s first response to the Fall is not a verdict. It’s a question. It’s pursuit. The judge is searching for the defendant — not to condemn, but to find. This is the heartbeat of the atonement long before Calvary.

The Cross as God Entering the Rupture

Here is where Redemptive Correlation reframes the entire debate.

If the Fall shattered an entire relational ecosystem, then the cross must repair an entire relational ecosystem. Penal substitutionary atonement is not wrong — it is essential. The legal dimension is real because the transgression was real. The penalty is real because the rupture between a holy God and sinful humanity demands a cost that we cannot pay. Christ bore that penalty in our place. This is the clear teaching of Isaiah 53, Romans 3:25, 2 Corinthians 5:21, and 1 Peter 2:24.

But PSA is not the whole cross. It is the legal dimension of a multidimensional act of restoration. The same cross that satisfies divine justice also defeats the powers (Colossians 2:15 — Christus Victor), reconciles enemies to God and each other (Ephesians 2:14–16 — reconciliation), exemplifies the pattern of self-giving love we are called to follow (1 Peter 2:21 — moral influence), and accomplishes the ransom that liberates captives (Mark 10:45).

Herman Bavinck said it well: the work of Christ is so multifaceted that it cannot be captured in a single word or summarized in a single formula. That is not theological weakness. That is theological precision. A multidimensional rupture demands a multidimensional repair.

This is what both sides of the current debate are missing. Comer’s camp reduces the cross to solidarity and example, stripping away the legal dimension that Scripture clearly affirms. The Reformed polemicists reduce the cross to penal substitution, treating every other dimension as secondary decoration. Both are extracting the cross from the story it belongs to. Both are reading one facet of a diamond as though it were the whole stone.

Redemptive Correlation says: go back to Eden. Read the Fall in its full scope. And then let the cross answer everything the Fall broke — not just the legal violation, but the relational rupture, the cosmic disorder, the vocational collapse, and the existential despair.

Where the Story of the Cross Is Heading

The cross is not the end of the story. It is the hinge of the story. And where the story is heading tells us what the cross was ultimately for.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” — Revelation 22:1–2

The end of the biblical story is not an eternal courtroom where the acquitted sit in rows. It is a garden-city where the tree of life reappears, the river flows again, the nations bring their cultural goods in, and God dwells with His people face to face. It is Eden restored, expanded, and consummated.

If that’s where the story ends, then the cross was never merely about canceling a legal debt. It was about opening the road back to the garden. The penalty had to be paid — yes. The powers had to be defeated — yes. The example had to be set — yes. The ransom had to be given — yes. All of it, together, because all of it was broken, together.

This is why penal substitution is central but not sufficient as a standalone framework. The penalty satisfies the justice dimension of the rupture. But God is not merely just. He is the God who planted the garden. And He is making all things new — not all things legally acquitted.

So where does this leave you?

If you’re in the Reformed camp, and you’ve been defending PSA by shouting it louder — stop. Not because you’re wrong about PSA, but because you’ve been defending one facet of the diamond while the person across from you is asking about a different facet. When someone says, “I can’t worship a God who would pour out wrath on His own Son,” they are not asking a legal question. They are asking a character question. And the answer to a character question is not a louder legal argument. It’s a bigger story — one that starts with a generous God planting a garden, and ends with that same God wiping every tear from the eyes of the people He fought to bring home.

If you’re drawn to Comer’s instincts — if the language of wrath and penalty has always felt cold to you — hear this gently: the legal dimension is not an invention of angry Calvinists. It is woven into the fabric of the narrative. Isaiah 53 says He was crushed for our iniquities. Paul says God put Christ forward as a propitiation by His blood. You cannot strip that out without leaving a wound in the text that will not heal. But you can situate it. You can see it as one dimension of a love so comprehensive that it addresses every single thing the Fall destroyed.

Either way, here is the invitation: stop reading the cross in isolation. Read it inside the story. Start in Genesis 1, and let the sweep of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration show you a cross that is bigger, more costly, more beautiful, and more healing than any single theory can contain.

Read one of the atonement passages you’ve been arguing about — Isaiah 53, Romans 3:21–26, Colossians 2:13–15, 1 Peter 2:21–25 — and before you form an opinion, ask: what dimension of the Edenic rupture is this passage addressing? You may find that the text is doing more than you thought.

Imagine a theological conversation about the atonement where Reformed believers didn’t treat PSA as the whole story — and where those questioning PSA didn’t treat it as the enemy. Imagine a church where the cross was preached in its full scope every Easter: the penalty paid, the powers defeated, the pattern set, the captives freed, and the road to the garden reopened. Imagine an Instagram feed where the theology wasn’t team sport, but exploration — where the goal wasn’t winning but wonder.

That’s what happens when you read the cross through Eden. You stop defending your theory and start worshiping a Savior whose work is so vast that no single framework can exhaust it. You stop reducing the most consequential event in human history to a debate point and start letting it reshape everything — how you pray, how you suffer, how you forgive, how you hope.

The goal of Redemptive Correlation was never to settle the atonement debate. It was to give the debate a bigger room to live in. The room is as big as the story of God — from Eden to the New Jerusalem, from a garden to a garden-city, from the first “Where are you?” to the final “Behold, I am making all things new.”

“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” — Romans 11:33

The cross is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery to be inhabited. And it is deep enough to hold all of us.

The hope of articles like this and the few that follow 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 you enjoyed reading this, I’d love for you to do two things:

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And if something in this piece sparked a question or pushed back on something you believe — I want to hear it. Drop it in the comments. That’s what this space is for.

Somewhere along the way, self-discovery became a spiritual practice.

I don’t mean that as a metaphor. I mean it almost literally. We have “sacred texts” — the Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, the DISC profile. We have rituals — the online assessment, the results page, the slow read-through where you find yourself nodding, thinking yes, that’s exactly me. We have communities built around shared types. We have the language, the vocabulary, the inside references. We have the converts who can’t stop talking about what they’ve found.

And we have the ongoing hunger that no single test ever quite satisfies, which leads us to take one after another.

I’ve done most of them. And I’ll be honest: there’s something genuinely illuminating about a well-constructed personality framework. You learn something real. You get language for things you’d felt but couldn’t name. You understand yourself a little better, and sometimes you understand other people a little better too. It’s been a truly helpful tool as a starting point to learning people’s communication styles, motivations, and draining factors both personally and professionally.

But here’s what I’ve noticed. You take the Enneagram, and you feel seen — for a while, until you start working somewhere that that test doesn’t really help you thrive. Then the questions come back. So you take the Myers-Briggs. Same arc, maybe a different environment. Then StrengthsFinder. Then DISC and Working Genius. Then you take enough to start stacking them, building a composite picture that you think will transcend dimensions: I’m a Type 2, ENFJ, High I, Empathy-leading, Adaptable Designer. You’ve assembled a detailed portrait of yourself. You can describe yourself with more precision than any generation before you.

And you still don’t feel settled. You feel almost seen.

That’s not a flaw in the tools. That’s a signal about the project itself.

The Question Underneath the Question

As a recap, since this is the method that I think best tackles the cultural climate in which we find ourselves, here’s what Redemptive Correlation asks us to do: before we let culture hand us an answer, we need to interrogate the question.

Redemptive Correlation is a method of reading culture through Scripture — not the other way around. The typical move is to start with what culture is asking and then look for biblical resources to answer it. That’s correlation — meeting people where they are, speaking their language, addressing their felt needs. It’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Because culture doesn’t just ask questions — it smuggles in assumptions. And if we only answer the question without examining the assumption underneath it, we end up baptizing a framework that Scripture would actually dismantle.

The cultural assumption underneath the identity crisis is this: the self is a source. Identity is something that exists inside you, waiting to be found. The work of your life is excavation — go deep enough, be honest enough, get the right framework, and you’ll finally arrive at the real you.

Scripture doesn’t just answer that question differently. It exposes the question itself as the problem.

I AM WHO I AM

Moses wasn’t having an identity crisis when he stood at the burning bush. His question in Exodus 3:13 isn’t existential — it’s pastoral. “If I go to the Israelites and say ‘The God of your fathers has sent me,’ and they ask what his name is — what do I tell them?”

He’s asking a missional question on behalf of a people who had been living inside a polytheistic world for generations. Every nation had gods. Every god had a name. Names weren’t incidental — they were handles for worship, credentials for authority, identifiers in a crowded spiritual marketplace. Moses needed to know which God he was dealing with.

In the patriarchal era, God had revealed Himself through names that described His actions and attributes — El Shaddai, God Almighty; El Roi, the God who sees; El Elyon, God Most High. These were names about God — windows into what He does, how He acts, who He is toward His people.

But here, something different happens.

“I AM WHO I AM. Tell them: I AM has sent you.”

The Hebrew behind this — ehyeh asher ehyeh — is built on the verb hayah, to be. Scholars have debated its precise meaning for centuries. Some read it as sovereign freedom: I will be whoever I will be — no one and nothing can limit or define me. Others read it as an ontological declaration, almost thunderous in its simplicity: I am — I really, actually, fully am. Either way, the point converges: God is naming Himself from the inside out. He is not defined by anything external to Himself. He is self-existent. Unborrowed. The only being in the universe whose identity is not derived from anything else.

He simply is — and everything else exists because He does.

That’s not a description of one attribute among many. That’s the architecture of reality. As Jay Sklar observes, God “is in a way that other gods are not, and he is while other gods are not.” There is one self-existent being. Everyone and everything else is, in the most fundamental sense, derivative.

And then God ties this name to His people — “This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation” (v. 15). As Sklar puts it, “If he had autographed the tablets with the Ten Commandments, he would have signed ‘Yahweh.’ He is not some nameless power. He is a divine person who acts sovereignly on his people’s behalf.“ He signed His name. And He signed it to a covenant.

This is also why Jesus’s use of the same name is so explosive. When He tells the Pharisees in John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am,” He isn’t making a grammatical error. He is reaching back to the burning bush and claiming the name for Himself. The Greek ego eimi — I am — is the same declaration Moses heard in the desert. The Jews understood exactly what He was saying, which is why they immediately picked up stones. Jesus wasn’t offering a new theology of identity. He was revealing that the I AM of Exodus had taken on flesh — and that everything true about who God is, and therefore who we are, is now fully disclosed in Him.

You Are a Derivative — and That’s the Good News

Now here’s where Redemptive Correlation does its work.

Before we get to application, we need to sit with one more observation. Kevin Vanhoozer notes that the name YHWH demonstrates that God is “a ‘who,’ not simply a ‘what.’” That matters enormously for our question about identity. Because if God is a who — a personal, self-existent being — then identity is first and foremost a relational category, not an internal one. You don’t find yourself by going deeper into yourself. You find yourself by being rightly related to the One who is.

Culture starts with the self and asks: who am I? Scripture doesn’t just answer that question — it reframes the entire project. Because once you understand that God is the only self-existent being, the self-discovery project doesn’t just get supplemented. It gets exposed. The assumption that identity is something you find inside yourself only makes sense if you are your own origin. But you’re not. None of us are.

You are a creature. And rightly understood, that is the most liberating thing anyone has ever called you.

To be a creature means you have a Creator. To have a Creator means your identity precedes your awareness of it — precedes your personality tests, your therapy sessions, your most honest moments of self-reflection. You were named before you named yourself. Made in the image of the God who said I AM, which means your identity flows from Him, was declared by Him, and is secured in Him in a way that no framework, however accurate, can touch.

The self-discovery project rests on a premise that sounds humble — I’m just trying to understand myself — but is quietly the opposite. It positions the self as the source. Scripture positions the self as a response — a reflection, a derivative, an image-bearer. That’s not a demotion. That’s freedom from the burden of being your own foundation.

You don’t have to construct yourself. You were already made.

The Rest That Comes From Receiving

So what do we do with this?

We don’t throw away the tools. Self-knowledge has genuine value. And these assessments were designed with purpose to unlock some insights about who God created us to be. But we stop asking it to do what it was never designed to do, which is tell us who we fundamentally are and whether we ultimately matter.

We trade the question who am I? for whose am I? — and we let the answer to the second one do what the first one never could.

The burning bush didn’t hand Moses a personality profile. It gave him a God. A God who is, so completely and self-sufficiently that everything else — including Moses, including us — derives its existence and identity from Him. And that was the only thing Moses needed to know who he was and where he was going.

Identity isn’t something you find at the bottom of yourself. It’s something you receive from the God who is — the I AM — who made you, named you, and has not changed His mind.

Before You Close This Tab

Here’s the posture shift: stop asking who am I and start asking whose am I. That’s not a semantic game — it’s a reorientation of the entire project. You are not the starting point. You never were. And the sooner you stop trying to be your own origin, the sooner you can rest in the identity that was given to you before you had any say in the matter.

Here’s the concrete anchor: this week, when the self-doubt creeps in — when you feel undefined, unsettled, uncertain of whether you matter — don’t reach for the enneagram. Reach for Exodus 3. Read it slowly. Let the I AM be bigger than your questions.

If this reframing is hitting something real for you, two things would mean a lot:

Share this with someone who’s tired of searching. You probably know exactly who needs to read it. Send it to them.

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Subscribe if you haven’t. Every week at Theologetics, we do this same work — taking the real questions of our cultural moment and letting Scripture reframe them from the ground up. That’s Redemptive Correlation in practice, and there’s a lot more where this came from.

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And if something in this piece sparked a question or pushed back on something you believe — I want to hear it. Drop it in the comments. That’s what this space is for.

Most of us carry a vague sense that something is wrong. Not just with the world in general, but with the world as we experience it — the relentless pull toward distraction, the exhaustion of trying to do good in a world that seems to reward the opposite, the quiet suspicion that we are caught up in something bigger than ourselves but can’t quite name it.

Joel Muddamalle, PhD wants to help you name it.

The Unseen Battle: Spiritual Warfare, the Three Rebellions, and Christ’s Victory Over Dark Powers is one of the more important books I’ve read in the past year — not because it says things no one has ever said, but because it says things most believers desperately need to hear, and says them in a way that actually lands. Muddamalle, who serves as director of theology at Proverbs 31 Ministries and was a student of the late Dr. Michael Heiser, has written something that sits in a rare category: genuinely scholarly and genuinely readable. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds.

In full transparency, Muddamalle is by far my biggest theological influence. I first learned about him through the Blurry Creatures podcast and was excited to listen each time he was a guest. Knowing he was a student of Heiser’s and knowing he had a theological leaning I resonated with more than most in the space where his research hits, I do my best to model the way I approach the messier and more complex topics after his methods: with a humble heart, an open hand, and a hungry mind.

I had to read this book twice — once as a theologian and once as a person sitting in the mess of ordinary life. Both readings were worth it. This review is written from the second posture. If you want the full academic treatment, I hope to share my professional book review after it’s published in the journal to which I’ve submitted, if that’s something you’re after and interested in. What I want to do here is tell you why this book matters for the way you actually live.

What Is the Divine Council Worldview?

Before we get into the themes, you need a concept. Muddamalle builds his entire argument on what scholars call the Divine Council Worldview — and if that phrase makes you nervous, stay with me, because this isn’t as strange as it sounds. In all honesty, you probably already are familiar with it, because I’ve spoken with so many people about the concept who I never would’ve imagined would’ve affirmed it.

The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, describes a heavenly court. Psalm 82 opens with God standing in the “divine council,” rendering judgment among the “gods.” Job 1 depicts a scene where “the sons of God” present themselves before Yahweh. Daniel 10 references a cosmic being called “the prince of Persia” who resisted the angel sent to Daniel for twenty-one days. Deuteronomy 32:8 describes Yahweh dividing the nations and assigning them to lesser divine beings, while keeping Israel as his own inheritance.

Most of us were never taught what to do with these passages, so we quietly skipped over them. Muddamalle doesn’t let you do that. He argues — compellingly — that these texts aren’t embarrassing relics of ancient mythology that snuck into your Bible. They’re load-bearing walls. Strip them out, and the architecture of the whole story collapses.

The Divine Council Worldview simply means this: God, as King, rules over a cosmic household that includes both human and supernatural members. The Bible’s drama — from Genesis to Revelation — is the story of what happens when members of that household rebel, and what God does to put it right. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The “weird” passages stop being weird and start being windows.

Three Themes Worth Your Time

1. The Three Rebellions Are the Backstory to Everything

Muddamalle organizes the Old Testament around three cosmic rebellions, and this is where the book earns its keep.

The first rebellion is Eden. The nachash — the serpent of Genesis 3 — wasn’t just a talking snake. Muddamalle, following Heiser, identifies this figure as a divine throne guardian who used his access to distort truth and entice humanity toward autonomy from God. The fall wasn’t just Adam and Eve eating fruit. It was a cosmic coup attempt.

The second rebellion comes in Genesis 6, where “the sons of God” — supernatural divine beings — transgressed their boundaries by intermingling with human women, producing the Nephilim and spreading corruption that eventually required a flood to address. This is strange territory for most Western Christians, but Muddamalle handles it carefully and anchors it in Second Temple Jewish readings of the text that would have been well-known to the New Testament authors.

The third rebellion is Babel — and this one reframes your entire Old Testament. When God scatters the nations in Genesis 11, Muddamalle connects this to Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where those nations are “allotted” to lesser divine beings to administer. These beings subsequently accept worship as the “gods of the nations” and become the cosmic powers behind the empires and idolatries of the ancient world. This is why the Old Testament is so relentlessly concerned with idolatry — it isn’t merely bad religion, it’s defection to an enemy power.

Understanding these three rebellions doesn’t just answer background questions. It tells you what the Bible is fundamentally about: a cosmic conflict over who will claim the human household, and a God who refuses to abandon his children to the enemy.

2. The Prize Has Always Been People

This is where the book becomes personally arresting rather than academically interesting.

Muddamalle is clear throughout: the unseen battle is not primarily about territory, political power, or religious institutions. It is about people. Every rebellion — in Eden, in the days of Noah, at Babel — had humanity at its center. The enemy’s aim, in each case, was to corrupt, enslave, or scatter the human family that God loves.

This reframes spiritual warfare in a way that is both sobering and stabilizing. You are not a bystander to some abstract cosmic struggle. You are the prize. Which means the spiritual pressure you feel in your life — the pull toward cynicism, the weight of shame, the exhaustion of trying to live faithfully in a world that rewards the opposite — isn’t random. There’s a reason the enemy works so hard at discouragement and division. He knows what’s at stake.

But there’s a flip side. If you are the prize, then God’s pursuit of you is not incidental either. The whole of redemptive history — the call of Abraham, the Exodus, the prophets, the Incarnation — is God relentlessly moving to reclaim what the enemy has tried to steal. You are not caught in the crossfire. You are the point.

3. The Church Is a Weapon, Not a Refuge

This might be the most countercultural idea in the book, and it’s one I keep thinking about.

Muddamalle argues that when Paul says the church makes known the “manifold wisdom of God” to “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10), he means it literally. The multiethnic unity of the church — Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, male and female — is a visible demonstration to the defeated cosmic powers that their authority is broken. The church doesn’t just talk about the victory of Christ. The church is the announcement of it.

This reframes what you’re doing on Sunday morning. When the church gathers across lines of ethnicity, class, and background and refuses to fracture, it is participating in the cosmic reclamation of the nations that began at Pentecost and will culminate at the return of Christ. Spiritual warfare, then, is not primarily about seeking out demons. It’s about maintaining unity, resisting idolatry, and proclaiming the gospel — because those acts declare to the powers that their time is up.

What This Book Does Well

Muddamalle’s greatest gift here is accessibility without cheapness. He takes passages most believers skip and makes them livable—not by dumbing them down, but by showing how they fit into the larger story. By the time you finish, the Old Testament feels less like a collection of disconnected episodes and more like a coherent narrative building toward a single climax.

He also resists the twin errors that plague most books on spiritual warfare. He won’t let you be obsessed with demons (one error), and he won’t let you pretend they don’t exist (the other). C.S. Lewis put both dangers in the mouth of Screwtape, and Muddamalle navigates them with a steady hand. The result is a spirituality that is honest about the unseen world without being controlled by it.

Where It Could Go Deeper

Two honest observations. First, readers already familiar with Heiser’s The Unseen Realm will find significant overlap in the foundational material. Muddamalle is transparent about his dependence on his mentor — the dedication alone makes clear this is a labor of love, not just scholarship — but those coming from Heiser’s work will spend the first half on familiar ground before finding the book’s distinctives.

Second, and this is a minor thing: the book’s pastoral application is strongest at the end, which means you have to work through substantial biblical-theological groundwork to get there. That’s not a flaw exactly—the groundwork is necessary—but readers looking for immediately practical guidance on spiritual warfare may feel the payoff comes late.

Why You Should Read This

Here’s the honest case: most of us are losing a battle we don’t fully understand. We feel the weight of it — the spiritual fatigue, the cultural pressure to abandon faith, the sense that something malevolent is organized against ordinary human flourishing — but we lack a framework for understanding what we’re up against.

Muddamalle gives you that framework. And more importantly, he grounds it in the story of a God who saw what the enemy was doing, and entered the battle himself.

The cross isn’t just forgiveness. It’s victory. The resurrection isn’t just resuscitation. It’s the decisive moment where the powers were stripped, disarmed, and publicly defeated. You live in the aftermath of that victory — which means you don’t fight for victory, you fight from it.

If you want a book that makes your Bible bigger, your enemy less mysterious, and your calling as a member of Christ’s church more urgent and more beautiful — read The Unseen Battle. Keep it close.

Before You Go

If this kind of thinking is useful to you — theology that takes the whole Bible seriously and tries to make it livable — that’s exactly what Theologetics is for. Every week, I’m working to make big things small and muddy things clear, because I believe the church deserves rigorous theology that actually serves ordinary life.

If you’re not subscribed yet, it’s free to join.

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And if you found this review worth your time, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who would benefit — a pastor, a small group leader, a friend who’s been asking hard questions about spiritual warfare, or anyone who’s ever felt like they’re losing a battle they don’t fully understand.

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And if you pick up The Unseen Battle, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think. Drop a comment below or reply to this email. Good theology is better in conversation.

We had one guy who didn’t always agree with us.

During those years, the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement was in full swing. Calvinism versus Arminianism dominated every late-night conversation. But here’s what I noticed about this friend: he never actually let the text shape his theology. Instead, he let his feelings about exclusion and punishment drive the interpretation. He couldn’t accept that God might choose some and pass over others. So rather than wrestling with what Scripture actually said, he worked backward — reshaping the text to fit his emotional comfort.

At the time, I thought he was the outlier.

Years later, I realized he was just doing openly what all of us do quietly.

The Gap Nobody Talks About

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the American church has more theological resources than any generation in history — more commentaries, more podcasts, more seminary access, more study Bibles — and yet we are not being noticeably transformed by any of it.

We have orthodoxy. We can articulate the doctrines. Many of us could pass a systematic theology exam. But our lives look functionally identical to the culture around us — the same anxieties about money, the same reflexive tribalism, the same addiction to comfort, the same quiet compromises we’d rather not name. We have right belief without right practice. Orthodoxy without orthopraxy.

James saw this coming: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like” (James 1:22–24).

We look into the mirror of Scripture constantly. We write about what we see there. We argue about the mirror’s frame and its proper angle. Then we walk away unchanged.

Why?

Because somewhere along the way, we learned to use theology as a shield against transformation rather than a means of it. We spend more time debating and defending theological positions than we do actually being shaped by them. And often — more often than we’d like to admit — we’re not even defending what Scripture says. We’re defending what we’ve already decided we want it to say.

Same Method, Different Directions

The examples cross every tribal line. Take churches, for example.

On one side, progressive churches have spent the last two decades reinterpreting Scripture’s sexual ethics. They begin with a cultural conviction — that affirming LGBTQ+ identity is morally necessary — and then work backward through the text. They reframe what Paul meant in Romans 1. They contextualize Leviticus as an irrelevant cultural artifact. They find theological language to justify what the surrounding culture has already decided is true. The text gets bent to fit the conclusion.

On the other side, conservative churches have baptized nationalism. They begin with a cultural conviction — that national strength, sovereignty, and greatness are ultimate goods — and then work backward through the text. They quote 2 Chronicles 7:14 as if it were addressed to America. They ignore the prophetic warnings about trusting in chariots and horses (Ps. 20:7), about the nations being “a drop from a bucket” before the Lord (Isa. 40:15). They use theology to sanctify what culture has already decided is true. The text gets bent to fit the conclusion.

Same method. Different directions.

And here’s what should haunt us: both sides are convinced they’re letting Scripture speak. Both sides think they’re being faithful. Both sides have PhDs, commentaries, and hermeneutical arguments to support their readings.

The problem isn’t intelligence. The problem is direction.

Why We All Do This

The deeper pattern emerges when you stop asking which side is doing this and start asking why we all do it.

The answer is simpler and more uncomfortable than we’d like: we want God and His commands to conform to our cultural moment. We want theology to validate what we’ve already decided. We want Scripture to bless the life we’re already living.

Think about your own life for a moment — not the hot-button culture war issues, but the ordinary ones. What convictions do you hold most fiercely about money? About success? About comfort? About security?

Now ask honestly: Did you arrive at those convictions by letting Scripture shape you? Or did you absorb them from your culture, your family, your class — and then find the theological language to justify them afterward?

Most of us, if we’re being honest, did the latter.

We debate predestination when what we’re really defending is our need for control. We argue about church authority when what we’re really protecting is our autonomy. We construct elaborate biblical defenses of wealth accumulation while Jesus’ words sit in the Gospel of Luke like a live grenade: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation” (Luke 6:24).

We think we’re defending Scripture. We’re actually defending ourselves.

Let me pause here. To put it plainly, what follows is a little more theologically dense. It’s also a lot more than I usually write in general. I want you to keep reading, because it was this research that sparked the whole concept of redemptive correlation.

However, I realize this may not be for every reader. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s okay. Scroll down to the heading, “The Reversal,” and you can pick up on the train of thought without missing a beat.

Tillich’s Shadow

There’s a theological name for this pattern, and understanding it will help you see the mechanism at work — and where it leads.

Paul Tillich, the twentieth-century German-American theologian, gave us the most rigorous and consequential version of this error. Near the end of his life, he described his life’s work this way:

My whole theological work has been directed to the interpretation of religious symbols in such a way that the secular man — and we are all secular — can understand and be moved by them.1

Read that carefully. It is not a statement about defending the faith or proclaiming the gospel. It is a statement of apologetic translation: the guiding criterion for Tillich’s entire theological output was the comprehension of the secular man. The question was always in the driver’s seat. This confession makes explicit what his formal methodology only implies.

The Method of Correlation

Tillich called his approach the “method of correlation.” Its stated purpose was to “unite message and situation” — to correlate “the questions implied in the situation with the answers implied in the message … human existence and divine manifestation.”2 On the surface, this sounds eminently reasonable. The theologian meets people where they are. He speaks to real human concerns. He doesn’t preach into the void.

He described the method in practice this way: “it makes an analysis of the human situation out of which the existential questions arise, and it demonstrates that the symbols used in the Christian message are the answers to these questions.” His central illustration: humans experience what he called the “anxiety of nonbeing” — the existential dread of finitude, of death, of the threat that life might be meaningless. And “God,” in Tillich’s framework, is the answer: “the infinite power of being which resists the threat of nonbeing,” what he calls “the ground of being” or “being-itself.” The cultural question (anxiety about nonbeing) shapes the theological answer (God as ground of being).3

Tillich was explicit about the formal structure of this dependency: “In respect to content the Christian answers are dependent on the revelatory events in which they appear; in respect to form they are dependent on the structure of the questions which they answer.”4 Content from revelation, form from the question. He believed this distinction would protect the gospel’s integrity while making it intelligible.

That distinction does not hold. And Tillich’s own body of work — across two decades and three volumes of Systematic Theology — is the proof. There are three problems with the method, each more serious than the last.

1. The Form/Content Distinction Collapses in Practice

Tillich’s categories — “ground of being,” “ultimate concern,” “New Being” — are not biblical concepts translated for a modern audience. They are drawn directly from Heidegger and existentialist philosophy, imported wholesale into Christian theology. Tillich acknowledged the framework openly: the analysis of human existence is done “in terms which today are called ‘existential’ … the immediate experience of one’s own existing reveals something of the nature of existence generally.”5 The questions — finitude, anxiety, nonbeing — didn’t arise from Scripture. They arrived pre-formed from a philosophical tradition.

The critic Robert Olson puts the principle plainly: for Tillich, “the question must precede the answer and determine its form.”6 Not merely influence. Not merely shape the presentation. Determine the form. And when the questions come pre-formed from a philosophical tradition, the answers get bent to fit them, even when the theologian insists the content stays pure.

The consequences are concrete. When Tillich applies the method to the doctrine of God, this is what the questions produce:

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.7

This is not a translation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into modern idiom. The question — “what is the ontological ground that overcomes the threat of nonbeing?” — has produced a God who cannot be said to “exist” in any meaningful sense because existence, for Tillich, is a category of finitude. The question has not merely shaped the form. It has reshaped the content.

When pressed on whether this God is personal, Tillich produced what Olson correctly identifies as a paradox that satisfies neither reason nor religious experience: “Personal God does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal and that he carries within himself the ontological power of personality. He is not a person, but he is not less than personal.”8

Tillich himself seems to have understood where this leads. He reportedly said that he did not pray to being itself, the ground of being — he only meditated on it.9 That is the pastoral endpoint of a method that redesigns God to fit the question of ontological anxiety: a God you can contemplate but cannot address. A presence you can feel but cannot name.

2. The Method Forfeits Scripture’s Power to Interrogate the Questions Themselves

This is the part most readers miss. The Bible doesn’t only answer the questions we bring to it. Sometimes it tells us we’re asking the wrong thing entirely — and that the question itself reveals a disordered heart. Jesus does this constantly. “Which is the greatest commandment?” He answers, then adds a question none of them asked. “Who is my neighbor?” He tells a story that dissolves the questioner’s self-justification before offering any answer. “Are only a few people going to be saved?” He redirects to the urgency of personal repentance.

Scripture doesn’t always meet us where we are. Sometimes it relocates us. But when the cultural question controls the agenda, theology is only permitted to answer — never to interrogate. The method is structurally incapable of producing the kind of reversal that genuine encounter with the living God actually produces.

3. The Method Cannot Sustain the Scandal of the Gospel

If theology’s task is to demonstrate that Christian symbols are “the answers to these questions,” you will inevitably sand off whatever is strange or offensive about those answers. Watch how this plays out systematically in Tillich’s treatment of the historical particulars of the faith.

Begin with the fall. For Tillich, the Genesis account is not a historical event but “not an event in time and space but the transhistorical quality of all events in time and space” — a symbol for the universal human predicament.10 This is not an incidental hermeneutical decision. It is what the existentialist question requires. If the question is “what is the structure of estrangement in human existence?” then the fall must be a description of that structure, not an event that introduced it.

Continue with the resurrection. Rather than defending bodily resurrection as a historical event, Tillich treats resurrection as one of several “christological symbols” that must be “understood as symbols,” insisting they “lose their meaning if taken literally.” What the disciples called the resurrection of Christ was, for Tillich, an encounter with “the New Being” — a category drawn not from biblical eschatology but from his existentialist ontology.11 The resurrection becomes a transformative experience of new existential possibility. The question has determined what kind of answer is permissible.

Then arrive at the most unsettling destination: the person of Jesus. For Tillich, the name and historical details of Jesus’ life are theologically dispensable. He stated this directly: “Participation, not historical argument, guarantees the reality of the event upon which Christianity is based. It guarantees a personal life in which the New Being has conquered the old being. But it does not guarantee his name to be Jesus of Nazareth.”12

He went further. Any Christianity that clings to the historical Jesus as the center is, in Tillich’s words, not merely incomplete but a “perversion”: “A Christianity which does not assert that Jesus of Nazareth is sacrificed to Jesus as the Christ is just one more religion among many others. It has no justifiable claim to finality.”13

This is the logic of the method carried to its conclusion. The existentialist question requires a universal, abstract principle of essentialization — a “New Being” that can overcome estrangement in general. A particular man from Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, resurrected on the third day, whose name you call on for salvation — that man is an obstacle to the universality the question demands. So the name dissolves. The history dissolves. What remains is the principle.

The Terminal Destination

By 1952, in The Courage to Be, Tillich was confronting what he called the defining anxiety of the twentieth century: not the fear of death, but the anxiety of meaninglessness — the sense, post-Nietzsche, that God is gone and with him every framework for significance. What does the method of correlation produce when confronted with that question?

This: “The faith which creates the courage to take [meaninglessness] into itself has no special content. It is simply faith, undirected, absolute. It is undefinable, since everything defined is dissolved by doubt and meaninglessness … The content of absolute faith is the ‘God above God.’”14

The endpoint is faith with “no special content.” Tillich describes absolute faith — the final form of authentic religious existence in his system — as existing “without the safety of words and concepts … without a name, a church, a cult, a theology.”15

Without a name. Without a church. Without a theology.

This is not a movement toward greater transcendence. This is what happens when a method that begins by asking “how can the secular man understand?” follows its own logic faithfully to the end. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God who raised Jesus from the dead, whose name you can call on, to whom you can pray — has been dissolved by the question that was supposed to make him intelligible.

Tillich himself closes The Courage to Be with the sentence that most honestly captures what the method produces: “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”16

The God who appears when God has disappeared. The question generates the God. The anxiety of doubt is doing the theological work. This is not a Christian answer to an existential question. It is an existential answer wearing Christian vocabulary. And it is the terminal destination of any method that lets the cultural question set the terms.

We do the same thing — less elegantly, but just as thoroughly — every time we start with what our cultural moment already values and search Scripture for support. We’re not running Tillich’s full philosophical program. But we are running his logic. The question is in the driver’s seat. The answer conforms. And when the question comes from the culture rather than from God, the God who answers will always look remarkably like what the culture already wanted.

The Reversal

Last week, I introduced what I’ve been calling Redemptive Correlation — a four-step method (Listen, Distill, Reframe, Respond) for meeting the hard questions of life and culture with the full weight of Scripture’s story. I showed you how it works with the question of online church.

But here’s what I want you to see this week: Redemptive Correlation isn’t just an apologetics tool for answering other people’s questions. It’s a self-diagnostic tool for uncovering where you’ve been doing Tillich’s method on yourself without realizing it.

The core reversal is this: Tillich reads Scripture through culture. Redemptive Correlation reads culture through Scripture.

Tillich asks: “What is the world asking? Let’s find a Christian answer.”

Redemptive Correlation asks: “What does God’s story reveal about reality? Now let’s look at our lives through that lens.”

When you apply that reversal to other people’s questions — as I did last week with the online church example — it produces winsomeness and pastoral depth. But when you apply it to yourself — to the assumptions and desires you’ve never thought to question — it produces something even more important.

It produces repentance.

Turning the Method Inward

Let me show you what I mean with an example that hits closer to home than the culture war issues: money.

Most Christians I know — myself included — have a functional theology of money that was shaped far more by American culture than by Scripture. We believe in financial security. We admire wealth. We plan for retirement. We measure success partly by income. And if you pressed us, we’d find the verses to justify all of it: “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance” (Prov. 21:5). “If anyone does not provide for his relatives... he has denied the faith” (1 Tim. 5:8). God “richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17).

There. Biblical. Settled.

But watch what happens when we stop using Tillich’s method — starting with our cultural question (”How can I be financially secure and honor God?”) — and use Redemptive Correlation instead.

Listen. What’s the question behind the question? The surface question is about stewardship and responsibility. But listen to the ache underneath: What are we actually afraid of? What does our financial anxiety reveal about where our trust is placed? When you listen carefully, the real question isn’t “How should I manage money?” It’s “How do I protect myself from a world that feels scarce and threatening?” That’s not a stewardship question. That’s a worship question.

Distill. What’s theologically at stake? This is not merely a question about financial ethics. It’s a crisis of anthropology and soteriology. It asks: Are we self-sustaining beings who must secure our own futures, or are we creatures dependent on a Provider? It asks: Has Christ’s redemption actually freed us from the anxiety of provision, or have we quietly decided that part of the gospel is decorative? The doctrine being distorted is providence — and behind that, the sufficiency of God Himself.

Reframe. Place it inside the story.

• Creation: God provided abundantly and placed humans in a garden of plenty. Work was good. Provision was a gift. There was no anxiety because there was no scarcity in God’s economy.

• Fall: Scarcity entered through rebellion. And with it came hoarding, anxiety, the desire to store up “many goods” for ourselves (Luke 12:19), and the deep-seated terror that we won’t have enough — that God won’t come through. The fall didn’t just distort our morality. It distorted our relationship to provision itself. We became people who trust barns more than God.

• Redemption: Jesus directly confronted this distortion — not gently. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,” He said, “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:19–21). He told a rich young ruler to sell everything (Mark 10:21). He pronounced woe on the rich (Luke 6:24). He said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom (Matt. 19:24). The early church — reading Jesus correctly — responded by holding goods in common (Acts 2:44–45). And Paul told Timothy to “charge the rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God” (1 Tim. 6:17). Notice: the same verse we used to justify enjoyment of wealth, in its full context, is actually a warning against trusting it.

• Restoration: In the new creation, provision is total, scarcity is abolished, and the nations bring their glory into the city of God (Rev. 21:24–26). Kingdom economy is generosity without limit, which means our current economy of anxiety and accumulation is not just imperfect; it is fundamentally flawed. It’s passing away.

Respond. Here’s the truth that is both accurate and, I think, beautiful: You don’t need to be afraid. Your anxiety about money is not a problem to be solved with better budgeting — it’s a symptom of the fall that Christ is calling you to repent of. Your instinct to accumulate is not necessarily wisdom — it may be the very thing Jesus warned would keep you from the kingdom. But the God who clothed Adam and Eve after their rebellion, who fed Israel in the wilderness, who said “consider the lilies” — that God has not changed. The invitation isn’t to be reckless. It’s to be free. Free from the tyranny of needing to secure your own future, because your future is already secured by someone better than your 401(k).

That’s the difference. Tillich’s method, starting with our cultural question about financial security, gives us a theology of stewardship that lets us keep living exactly as we were. Redemptive Correlation, starting with God’s story, gives us a diagnosis — and then a gospel invitation to live differently.

One confirms. The other converts.

Why This Matters for All of Us

Here’s the hard part, and I need to say it directly: this applies to everyone reading this, including me.

Not just progressives. Not just conservatives. Not just the obviously compromised. All of us have places where we’ve bent Scripture to fit our lives instead of bending our lives to fit Scripture.

The pastor who can articulate the doctrines of grace with precision but whose life is driven by ambition and platform-building — he has orthodoxy without orthopraxy. The charismatic worship leader who sings about surrender every Sunday but won’t surrender her financial comfort — she has orthodoxy without orthopraxy. The seminary student who can parse Greek verbs but hasn’t let the Sermon on the Mount disrupt his actual life in a single concrete way — he has orthodoxy without orthopraxy.

All of us are doing what my dorm mate did. Just with different vocabulary and different blind spots.

Paul warned the Corinthians about exactly this: “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2). You can have the theology perfect and still be nothing — because the theology was never meant to be an end in itself. It was meant to form you into the image of Christ.

An Invitation, Not an Indictment

I want to be careful here, because I know how this can land. It can feel like I’m saying your theology doesn’t matter or that everyone is equally wrong. That’s not what I’m saying.

Theology matters immensely. Getting the text right matters. Orthodoxy is not the enemy of orthopraxy — it’s the foundation of it. The demons believe orthodox theology, and they shudder (James 2:19). The Pharisees had the most rigorous doctrinal precision in Israel, and Jesus reserved His harshest words for them. Right doctrine was never the finish line. It was always the starting block.

What I’m inviting you into is not a different set of doctrines but a different direction of engagement with the text. And it’s the same direction I’ve been building this entire project around.

Instead of coming to Scripture asking, “How does this support what I already believe?” — come asking, “Where does this story confront what I’ve been too comfortable to question?”

Instead of reading the Bible as a resource for your cultural battles, read it as a narrative that has its own battles to wage — including battles against the idols you didn’t know you were carrying.

That’s what Redemptive Correlation does when you turn it inward. It doesn’t just help you answer other people’s hard questions. It helps you face your own. And when you face them honestly — when you stop defending yourself long enough to let the story diagnose you — something shifts. You stop performing orthodoxy and start inhabiting it. Right belief starts producing right practice. The mirror of James 1 stops being a glance and starts being a gaze.

Where We Go from Here

This is what I’m building with Theologetics, and what I’m writing toward in Reading the World Through Eden. Not a system for winning arguments. A method for being transformed by the story of God — and then helping others find their place in it.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll keep doing what I did last week and what I did today: taking the questions your coworkers, kids, neighbors, and your own restless heart are asking, and walking them through Listen, Distill, Reframe, Respond. Sometimes the method will face outward, toward the culture. Sometimes — like today — it will face inward, toward us.

But it starts here. With honesty about where we’ve been doing Tillich’s work without knowing it. With the willingness to let Scripture read us instead of the other way around.

Sit with that. Not as a guilt exercise — guilt alone doesn’t transform anyone — but as the beginning of something better. Because when you let the text read you, it doesn’t just expose you. It heals you. It shows you where you are in the story — fallen, yes, but not abandoned. Broken, yes, but not beyond the reach of the God who has been restoring broken things since Eden.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

That invitation is still open. But you have to put down the shield first.

Three things you can do right now:

1. Subscribe. I publish weekly. Each piece takes one real question — the kind people are actually losing sleep over — and walks it through Redemptive Correlation. If you’re tired of theology that informs but doesn’t transform, this is what I’m building. Hit subscribe below, and you won’t miss what’s next.

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2. Start from the beginning. If this is your first time here, last week’s post introduces the full Redemptive Correlation method — the four steps, the logic behind them, and a complete worked example. Read that first, and today’s piece will land even harder.

3. Share this with one person. Not to win a debate — to start a conversation. Think of the friend who has all the right theology but still feels stuck. The parent who doesn’t know how to answer their teenager’s questions. The person who left the church because nobody took their doubts seriously. Send them this and say: “This helped me. I think it might help you, too.” That’s it. That’s enough.

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A friend going through a divorce asks where God is. A coworker asks why Christians seem so angry about politics. A cousin says she left the church because nobody could answer her questions. And every time, I watch good, faithful people either retreat into clichés or just go silent.

Unfortunately, this is sadly the product of the state of the modern American church. The church has two default modes for engaging culture — fight it or copy it. On one side of the pendulum, we become culture warriors, seeking to isolate and insulate away from the “evils” of society. Parents take their kids out of public schools on principle. Nothing but the Christian alternative.

And on the other side of the pendulum, we make seeker-sensitive accommodators. Everyone’s allowed, included, celebrated, and promoted. What the world around us says is okay is what dictates the moral, aesthetic, and organizational makeup of the church.

Neither one works. Culture warriors close their doors and ranks and become extremely conservative, both theologically and socially. Seeker-sensitives rarely take a stance on anything and become liberal, theologically and socially.

We need a third way.

Redemptive Correlation: A Better Method To Use

Here’s the simplest way I can describe what I’ve been building.

Life is messy, and it’s often hard to figure out how to make sense of it all. What I’ve done with Redemptive correlation is provide a blueprint to disentangle the clutter and give a better way through which to view the hard things we have to handle. It takes the gospel and asks you to view everything through it, yet not making light of what we look at. We first listen to what’s really being asked, not just the basic question. We name what’s really at stake theologically, then place it inside Scripture’s story (creation, fall, redemption, restoration), often called “the gospel in the air”, where it finally makes sense. Ultimately, it points towards heartfelt, genuine worship filled with awe-stricken wonder at who God really is.

Enter the redemptive correlation method. It’s a four-step, memorable, and portable way to meet anyone anywhere anytime with anything.

• Listen: Hear the question behind the question. When someone asks about identity, meaning, suffering, or church, the surface question is rarely the real question. We’re not listening to formulate a rebuttal. We’re listening for the ache beneath the words, so we can bring the right word to the right wound.

• Distill: Name what’s theologically at stake. Move from the cultural vocabulary to the theological vocabulary. Every cultural question has a corresponding doctrine being distorted — whether it’s anthropology, ecclesiology, justice, or vocation. The discipline is precision without reductionism: naming what’s at stake without flattening the person standing in front of you.

• Reframe: Place it inside Scripture’s story: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. You don’t have to be a bible scholar to know how to do this; you just need to know the Gospel and be willing to learn. This fourfold narrative is a diagnostic tool, not a checklist. Different questions have different gravitational centers in the story. And sometimes Scripture refuses to answer the question as posed. Instead, it reframes the question entirely before giving an answer.

• Respond: Offer truth that is not only accurate but beautiful. We don’t scold people for asking hard questions; we invite them into a better story. The goal isn’t winning an argument but reawakening wonder by showing people that the God of Scripture is already speaking into the very questions they can’t stop asking.

The Method In Action

Here’s how this plays out, in real time with one of the many real questions we face today:

“Why do I need to go to church when I can watch it online? Isn’t it just about the message?”

Since the introduction of live-streaming into the digital landscape, churches have adapted to employ timely means to share an timeless message, which is a great thing. However, when 2020 happened and everything about life shifted from solely embodied to optionally present, church followed suit out of necessity. You could go to as many church services as you want just by scrolling your Facebook news feed or YouTube home page.

As life in the post-social-distancing world has returned to some kind of normal, it also has seemed normal that the way we do church hasn’t returned back to an in-person-first model, which comes with its own problems (I do plan on writing on this in the near future, so I’ll leave this point alone).

Using redemptive correlation, we can biblically, faithfully, and winsomely address the issue without capitulating to the culture narrative.

Step 1: Listen

Hear the Question Behind the Question

We start by listening to the cultural mood. The shift to digital life isn’t just about laziness; it’s about a new definition of existence. We are listening to the “logic of convenience” that runs counter to the “logic of incarnation.”

• The Surface Question: “Why drive 20 minutes when the livestream is high-quality?”

• The Ache: The desire for a “frictionless existence.” Digital life allows us to edit out the awkwardness of other people. It offers connection without the “messy, inconvenient, and sanctifying” reality of being physically present.

• The Cultural Liturgy: We are being formed by a medium that values “content over covenant.” The screen teaches us that we can be observers of a community without being subject to it.

Step 2: Distill

Name What’s Theologically at Stake

Now we switch to the theological diagnostic. We must name the categories being distorted. This isn’t just a preference issue; it is an anthropological and ecclesiological crisis.

• Anthropology (Body vs. Soul): The digital argument assumes we are essentially “brains on sticks” — that as long as our minds receive the information (the sermon), we have worshipped. This is a modern form of Gnosticism, treating the body as incidental to spiritual life.

• Ecclesiology (Event vs. People): It redefines church as a “content provider” rather than a “covenantal community.” If church is just content, Spotify is better. But if church is a people, pixels cannot carry the weight of that identity.

• The Core Distortion: We are exchanging holiness (which requires friction) for efficiency (which requires distance).

Step 3: Reframe

Place it Inside the Story

We map this tension onto the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to see the full picture.

• Creation (Embodiment is Good): God didn’t create a cloud server; He created a garden. He made us from dust and breath. Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the day. Presence was the original design for flourishing.

• Fall (Hiding and Disconnection): Sin introduced the impulse to hide — to cover ourselves and avoid being truly seen. Digital anonymity is often just a high-tech fig leaf. It allows us to curate a projected self rather than exposing our true self to the gaze of others.

• Redemption (The Incarnation): This is the pivot. When God moved to save us, He didn’t send a broadcast; He sent a Body. The Incarnation is the ultimate argument against “virtual” religion. Jesus did not save from a distance; He came, dwelt, and touched. He ate with sinners, touched lepers, and washed feet. You cannot wash feet over Zoom.

• Restoration (The Gathered City): The end of the story isn’t a disembodied heaven but a physical city (Revelation 21). We will see Him face to face, not through a glass darkly. The gathered church today is a dress rehearsal for that physical, eternal reality.

Step 4: Respond

Truth That Is Beautiful

We don’t scold them for watching YouTube; we invite them to something better.

• The Invitation: “You were made for more than pixels. You were made for presence.”

• The Beauty: Digital content can inform you, but only presence can transform you. There is a beauty in the “slow, formative tension” of sitting in a row or pew next to someone you didn’t choose, hearing a baby cry, and singing in a room of imperfect voices. This is where the mask comes off.

• The Holy Resistance: In an age of endless connectivity but deep loneliness, the gathered church is a “holy resistance.” It is a declaration that real life happens in 3D. We invite you back not to a meeting, but to a body — where you are known, held, and loved in a way a screen can never offer.

The Invitation

This is what I’ve been building. And I’m just getting started.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to be doing exactly what you just watched — taking the questions your coworkers, kids, neighbors, and your own restless heart are asking, and walking them through this method. Not to win arguments. Not to hand you talking points. But to show you that Scripture is already speaking into the very things keeping people up at night.

I’m also developing this into a book. Reading the World Through Eden (what I’m tentatively calling it) will be a field guide for ordinary believers who want to think theologically about the world they actually live in — without needing a seminary degree to do it. Every article here is a chapter in that larger project.

So here’s my invitation: subscribe, pull up a chair, and come along.

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Not because you need more content. You have plenty of that. But because the questions aren’t going away. Your friend going through that divorce is still going to ask where God is. Your cousin who left the church is still waiting for someone to take her questions seriously. The coworker who thinks Christians only know how to be angry hasn’t stopped watching.

You don’t need more clichés. You need a method. And you need to see, over and over, that the God of Scripture is not threatened by hard questions — He’s been answering them since Eden.

The goal of all of this isn’t winning.

It’s wonder.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! — Romans 11:33

If that’s what you’re after, you’re in the right place.

If you’re one of the 34 people who subscribed to Theologetics over the last year, you might have noticed. Or maybe you didn’t; I wouldn’t blame you. The internet is noisy, and one more silent voice in the theological corner of Substack isn’t exactly headline news.

But I noticed. And if I’m honest, the silence has been eating at me.

Not because I don’t have things to say. I have a draft folder full of half-written essays on ecclesiology, cultural commentary begging to be filtered through Scripture, and reflections on texts I can’t stop thinking about. The problem isn’t a lack of content. The problem is that I’m exhausted.

I’m a trained theologian working in church relations—spending my days recruiting churches for evangelistic festivals. It pays the bills, but if I’m honest, I’m struggling. My MTS sits in a drawer. My published articles in Themelios and Journal of Theological Studies gather digital dust. Every day, I’m using skills I have (talking to people, building relationships, problem-solving) for work that doesn’t align with what I’m actually called to do.

And that calling? It’s the thing I can’t shake, no matter how tired I am.

The Calling I Can’t Shake

I‘ve known what I’m supposed to do for a long time.

Not in some mystical, burning-bush kind of way, but in the quieter, more persistent way that callings often work—a steady pull toward something you can’t quite articulate but also can’t ignore. It started in high school when I couldn’t stop reading theology books. Continued through college when I changed my major to biblical and theological studies. Grew stronger through my MTS program when I realized I didn’t just want to know theology—I wanted to give it away.

The calling is this: preach, write, teach, and travel.

Perhaps not settle into one pulpit for thirty years (though I respect those who do). Nor build an academic career publishing articles for scholars (though that’s important too). Instead, serve the church in various contexts through itinerant teaching, guest preaching, writing for believers seeking theological depth, teaching adjunct classes, and eventually speaking at conferences and retreats. Go wherever needed to help believers think deeply about Scripture and live faithfully.

The problem is, I’m not doing that right now.

I’m doing sales. Church relations, technically, but let’s be honest—it’s sales. And while there’s nothing wrong with this as a vocation, it’s not my vocation. Every day I spend recruiting churches to participate in evangelistic festivals is a day I’m not preaching, writing, teaching, or serving the church in the ways I’m actually equipped and called to do.

It’s like being a classically trained violinist working at a call center. The job is fine. It pays. But it’s not what your hands were made for.

I’m tired. Spiritually tired. The kind of tired that comes from spending your energy on work that doesn’t align with your calling. And yet, the calling hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s gotten louder. More insistent. Less patient with my excuses about debt, timing, and waiting for the “right opportunity.”

So here I am, writing again. Not because I’ve figured it all out or because the circumstances have magically aligned. But because I can’t not write. I can’t keep ignoring what I know I’m supposed to be doing with my life.

That’s the calling I can’t shake. And it’s why, even after a month of silence, I’m back.

What I Want This To Be

So let me tell you what I’m actually trying to build here. I started Theologetics with a simple conviction: make big things small, and muddy things clear.

Theology is often presented as either inaccessibly academic (reserved for those with degrees and a taste for footnotes) or watered down to the point of uselessness (bumper sticker spirituality that says everything and nothing). I don’t want to do either.

I want to write theology that bridges the gap between the academy and the church. Theology rooted in serious biblical and historical work, yet accessible to anyone without a seminary degree. Theology that equips believers to think deeply, live faithfully, and reclaim wonder in a world that’s increasingly disenchanted.

Because here’s the thing: the Bible isn’t boring. The gospel isn’t boring. The doctrines that have shaped Christian faith for two thousand years aren’t boring. If they feel that way, it’s because we’ve either made them inaccessible or we’ve stripped them of their power by reducing them to propositions we affirm but don’t actually live.

I care deeply about orthodoxy and right belief. But orthodoxy without orthopraxy—right practice—is hollow. It’s the kind of faith James warns against: all talk, no walk (James 2:14-26). My goal with Theologetics is to help believers connect what they believe with how they live. To show that theology isn’t just for the classroom or the ivory tower; it’s for Monday mornings, difficult conversations, life decisions, and the mundane rhythms of daily faithfulness.

How I’m Trying To Do It

I write in what I call “mixed voices.” Sometimes I’m academic—drilling down into a text, interacting with scholarship, building arguments with footnotes. Other times I’m pastoral—storytelling, application-focused, speaking directly to the heart. I don’t want to pick one lane. Both are necessary.

One week I might walk you through the Greek syntax of John 1:1-18 to show why the prologue matters for how we read the whole Gospel. The next week I might tell you about a conversation with a struggling believer and what it taught me about grace. Both are theology. Both serve the church. The church needs scholars who can handle the text carefully, and it needs pastors who can make that scholarship breathe with life.

I’m also developing a theological method I call redemptive correlation. It’s a twist on Paul Tillich’s method of correlation, but with a crucial difference: instead of interpreting Scripture through culture, I want to interpret culture through Scripture. I want to read the world—movies, social media, political movements, our anxieties and hopes—through the lens of the biblical story. Not to baptize everything we see, but to discern what’s true, good, and beautiful, and what’s distorted, destructive, or empty.

I’ll unpack that method more in future essays (it deserves its own deep dive), but the heart of it is this: Scripture is the light by which we see everything else, not the other way around. In an age where it’s tempting to make the Bible bend to our cultural moment, I want to do the opposite: let Scripture interrogate, challenge, and redeem how we see the world.

The Invitation

So why am I writing this now, after a month of silence?

Because I need to own what I’m building. I need to stop apologizing for the fact that I have 34 subscribers instead of 3,500. I need to stop waiting for the “right time” when I’m not exhausted from my day job. I need to stop hiding behind the fear that no one cares.

Here’s the truth: I’m building an itinerant teaching ministry. I want to preach, write, teach, and serve the church in multiple contexts—not tied to one congregation or one institution, but free to go wherever there’s a need for theological depth paired with pastoral care. This Substack is one piece of that. So is guest preaching when churches invite me. So is adjunct teaching (which I’m pursuing). So is, eventually, speaking at conferences and retreats.

I don’t have it all figured out. I’m in a transition season—trying to get out of a job that’s crushing me, trying to find work that aligns with my calling, trying to build a platform and a reputation while also paying off debt and being a good husband. It’s messy. But I’m done waiting for it to be tidy before I start.

This is me starting.

If you want to follow along on this journey, subscribe. I’m committing to publishing weekly for the next twelve weeks. Some essays will be academic. Some will be pastoral. Some will be raw and vulnerable. But all of them will be aimed at the same goal: helping you think deeply, live faithfully, and reclaim wonder.

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If you know of opportunities to preach, teach, or write, reach out. I’m learning to ask for help, which is harder for me than it should be. But I’m realizing I can’t build this alone.

And if you’re on a similar journey—trying to figure out how to use your gifts for the kingdom while navigating the realities of bills and debt and uncertainty—let’s connect. Comment on posts. Email me. Let’s learn from each other.

Why I Write

The church needs theologians who love her. Not theologians who hide in the academy and critique from a distance, but theologians who are in the trenches—preaching, teaching, counseling, suffering alongside the people of God.

And theologians need the church to keep them honest. To remind them that theology isn’t a game of intellectual gymnastics, but a tool for transformation. To show them that the doctrines they study have names and faces attached—real people trying to follow Jesus in a complicated world.

I want to be both—a scholar and a servant. Someone who can handle the biblical text with care and precision, but who also knows what it’s like to sit across from someone in pain and point them to the hope of the gospel.

That’s why I write.

Because the Bible isn’t boring. The gospel isn’t boring. And the work of making big things small and muddy things clear is worth every ounce of effort, even when I’m tired, even when the audience is small, even when I’m not sure what comes next.

Thanks for being here. Let’s reclaim wonder together.

P.S. If this resonated with you, share it with someone who might need to hear it.

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And if you haven’t subscribed yet, now’s the time. Let’s do this.

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But does this really benefit anyone besides me and my echo chamber?

It’s a question I’ve been pondering as 2025 closes. Do I want to write purely academically and target only a few, or do I want to equip believers of all understanding levels? Should I use this platform for intellectual gymnastics, or am I meant for more?

Thus, on the first day of the New Year, I feel the weight of what’s driven me for so long as a theologian, and something I’ve commented on previously on other social media outlets: make big things small, and muddy things clear.

Arguably, writing on complex issues and accomplishing the latter while stopping short of endeavoring for the former is a waste of studying Scripture. What good is information without clarity and application? While, yes, the Spirit is at work when the Word is explored and can illuminate the believer’s understanding, it is equally as true that someone who labors to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15, my translation) should follow the same Spirit’s leading to present Scripture with as much clarity and exegesis as possible.

Amidst so many rhetorical questions, I promise I do have a main point: our minds in the modern, internet-driven age as Christians should be motivated by the Holy Spirit and driven towards greater imagination.

In long-form writing, it is all too tempting to take the joy and gift of drawing conclusions from readers. I can easily and readily provide the scarlet threads and outlines that handhold you to an end I’ve orchestrated. In preaching as well, pastors and speakers can do the same, cattle-guarding congregations into a single-minded train of thought that takes the mystery out of the message of the Gospel. But, what if both writers and preachers commit to the common goal of providing a mental and spiritual map that doesn’t determine movement like a GPS, but allows parishioners and learners to employ their God-given abilities to use their minds and hearts to encounter His message that’s living and active (Heb. 4:12)?

Essays, lectures, articles, and sermons all have their holy and rightful place in the life of the believer, but so does the brain and its multi-faceted capabilities to draw conclusions, process information, and respond contextually. One passage of Scripture, while its meaning and purpose may remain unchanged, can resonate in different ways on different days. Consider this verse, that has had the deepest impact on me in my journey through ministry:

Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and teaching. (2 Tim. 4:2, CSB)

The first time I read this, I was convicted beyond understanding that the desire to preach was brewing in my heart. I remember surrendering my aspirations for my career to the work of ministry and the Church. It lit a fire under my feet to change my course in high school.

Years later, I remember reading this verse and being convicted once more to examine my “readiness”; by my own admission, my character at this time was unable to withstand the weight of my calling. I was categorically not ready to be an example to those whom I preached. And it showed in my life. Thus, it wrecked me and made me reevaluate how I was living.

In my late 20’s, as I wrestled with the effectiveness of my efforts in a ministry-adjacent position, providing biblically based advice within the financial sphere and counseling clients through hard situations, I found it a comfort to read the charge to offer biblical correction and encouragement, knowing that I was walking in step with biblical wisdom. It helped me take a deep breath.

I hope you see just a small way in which Scripture, through the Spirit’s moving, can impact in many ways at different times. It was through the Word and meditating on it that one verse could serve such a variety of purposes.

This is what I mean by imagination: Spirit-guided, person-grasped, and communally-employed. The Spirit moves, the person accepts and takes hold, and the two partner to apply. The modern, internet-driven age, however, fights against such a movement.

I don’t hate technology. I don’t argue for shunning it. But, I argue for discernment while using it. A responsible use of our digital connectedness is the only way we can foster and encourage healthy growth.

But, the Internet on its own will fight to create conclusions for all of us. Artificial intelligence has moved search engines from being a tool to gather relevant sources through which we can sort based on our needs to synthesizing the front page for us. Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode have done the thinking for us and shrunk our mental energy. And, unfortunately, we think we can apply this approach to our study of Scripture, asking ChatGPT to do the Holy Spirit’s work in interpreting and applying passages.

Therefore, my argument is this: reclaim wonder. Be unsatisfied with anything you read about Scripture if you haven’t prayed first. Trust the illuminating nature of God’s Word over generative AI, Facebook/Instagram/X posts, and search engines.

The Bible isn’t boring. And neither should be the methods you use to understand it.

This thinking has seeped its way into our faith. It’s made “faith” itself, what the author of the biblical letter to the Hebrews defines as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1 ESV), more of an antiquity to put on a shelf to admire rather than a practice that belongs in the here and now. I’ve heard it said more times than I’ve wanted to that a person I’m talking to can’t get on board with the whole God thing because there are too many unknowns, reflecting the infiltration of this pervasive must-know mentality.

But what if faith is more acknowledgement than knowledge? What if it’s supposed to be acceptance of what we don’t and won’t know rather than attaining all that we can know?

Thus, the train of thought for which I hope to argue and demonstrate emerged: when it comes to God, knowing we won’t and can’t know it all is oddly comforting. The theological and spiritual geniuses that came before us figured this out pretty quickly. Call it the prevailing cultural Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, or simply the more localized context in comparison to how globalized we are as a society, but it’s undeniable that the minds of the early church worked from a presupposition akin to accepting our limitations in understanding the Divine.

The Book That Sparked The Thought

Now, I cannot take all of the credit for pressing into the research that follows. Outside of dwelling and spending the past month in the Gospels, I’ve been dwelling heavily in Gavin Ortlund’s works. A prolific author, thinker, and explainer (if that’s even a word), Ortlund first caught my attention not in and of himself, but actually after reading Ray Ortlund, his father. For time while we lived in Nashville, we were mere blocks from Immanuel where Ray pastored, attending for a season before COVID-19 broke out.

While What It Means To Be Protestant was formative in my understanding and grasping of our evangelical heritage (and, at the time of writing this piece, the subject of a forthcoming Journal of Theological Studies review I’ve written), it was his more academic and conceptually denser work, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals, that laid the pavers and trail markers for this journey. The main thesis is that evangelical Christians ought to undertake a “theological retrieval” of the church’s patristic and medieval heritage—not so as to abandon their evangelical identity, but rather to deepen it: by drawing on earlier theological reflection (reasoned from Scripture) they can meet contemporary challenges more faithfully, as one of the church’s greatest resources for navigating her present challenges is her very past. In his words, “A posture of reception and transmission is a basic part of Christian identity, and the church has always drawn from her past to meet the challenges of her present.”1

It’s worth nothing that, as expressed in the thesis, the answer is not converting to Catholicism or Orthodoxy; after all, it’s not a return but a retrieval, pulling forward instead of going backward. Rather, what occurred in the Reformation was more like a family sitting down to argue and work out a disagreement, an effort to confront what went wrong so that we could continue as a family. Ortlund clarifies, “The early Protestants sought nothing other than to pare off novel deviations from catholicity and to return to those mainstream practices and beliefs that can be plausibly related back to apostolic teaching.”2 Yet, we know from hindsight that the intended result was not what occurred.

In the case studies Ortlund conducts on how the patristic and medieval theologians viewed and understood God, his observations regarding both their presuppositions and conclusions brought to a head many theories and ideas swirling around in my mind, particularly in relation to how we formulate an understanding of God in our modern minds.

The Creator/Creation Distinction as a Comfort

One of the most stabilizing insights recovered through theological retrieval is the classical insistence on the Creator/creation distinction. The fathers did not begin with a God who resembled a larger, wiser, slightly more impressive version of ourselves. They began with the God who is other—the One who creates, sustains, names, and orders all reality. This distinction was not a philosophical flourish. It was the bedrock that allowed the early church to confess mystery without collapsing into despair. If God is truly the Creator and we are truly His creatures, then our limits are not threats to faith but signs of our proper place in the cosmos. When Augustine writes of the heart’s restless longing or Gregory of Nazianzus reflects on divine incomprehensibility, they are not panicking at the edges of knowledge. They are acknowledging that the gap between God and creature is good and right and strangely life-giving.

To retrieve this distinction today is to recover the grace of finitude, a gentle counterweight to the restlessness produced by our hyper-connected, hyper-informed age. It should be comforting, not off-putting, to acknowledge that we cannot know God in full. We cannot “figure out” God and still place our faith in Him; if we had all the information, it wouldn’t be faith at that point. What I love most about how Ortlund tackles this subject is by “[imagining] God and creation in terms of a specific author and book, J. R. R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings.”3 Not only because I personally am a Middle Earth nerd, but the analogy as a whole clarifies and rightly sets such a distinction in terms that make sense. His summary statement encompasses the point of the argument: “It is not as though God is simply more real or more important than the world—rather, reality is fully God’s possession, and our contact with it is wholly derivative. God is the great truth, the great Fact that simply is—and we are his story.”4

Divine Simplicity as an Illumination

A second point of illumination emerges in the doctrine of “divine simplicity.” For many modern believers, simplicity sounds abstract—perhaps even irrelevant. Despite having two theology degrees, I hadn’t given much thought to the doctrine in its specific context prior to reading this book. Yet to the patristic and medieval theologians, it was indispensable for worship. If God is not composed of parts, if He is not a bundle of attributes stitched together, then His being is not contingent, fragile, or subject to change. Divine simplicity protects us from imagining God as one more complex entity in the universe. It grounds His faithfulness, His goodness, His beauty, and His love in His very being. Ortlund’s retrieval of these earlier voices reminded me that simplicity is not an exercise in metaphysical gymnastics. It is a safeguard for the gospel. A God who is love in Himself is a God whose love does not wax or wane with the tides of human history. A God who is life in Himself is not exhausted by the world’s sorrow or threatened by the world’s rebellion. To contemplate divine simplicity is to learn again that the God who cannot be fully comprehended can nevertheless be fully trusted. Yet again, Ortlund’s concluding thoughts speak volumes on the doctrine for us today: “Divine simplicity is a difficult doctrine, to be sure. But then would we not expect at the outset difficulties of its kind? Why should God not be different than we expect and other than we can fathom? It would be strange indeed if God were not strange.”5

Now What?

If all of this is true—if the church’s past can steady our present, if our limitations can anchor rather than unsettle us—then the invitation before us is simple: receive. Faith becomes less an achievement of intellectual mastery and more a posture of humble attentiveness. To know that we cannot know everything about God is not an abdication of theological seriousness. It is the beginning of it. The retrieval of earlier voices is not an indulgence in nostalgia. It is a way of remembering that we are not the first generation to wrestle with God, nor will we be the last. The fathers and medieval theologians hand us a way of seeing that is both ancient and fresh—a way that reminds us that mystery is not the enemy of discipleship but one of its essential tutors.

This is the very dynamic that emerges in the Gospels themselves. The Samaritan woman in John 4:39 does not come to Jesus with a complete doctrinal system. She comes with astonishment: “He told me all that I ever did.” The man born blind in John 9:25 does not offer a metaphysical treatise on the divine nature. He simply confesses, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” Their testimony is not grounded in exhaustive comprehension but in the recognition that Jesus Christ confronts, reveals, restores, and calls.

In this way, theological retrieval does not shrink our world; it enlarges it. It frees us from the modern demand to possess exhaustive certainty and invites us into a form of confidence shaped by encounter, worship, and wonder. Perhaps knowing we cannot know everything about God is not a failure of the Christian life. Perhaps it is one of its greatest consolations. The God who exceeds our understanding is the same God who makes Himself known in Christ, and the same God who will one day make all things new. The mystery that humbles us is the mystery that ultimately heals us.

And if that is true, then the path forward is not fear of what we cannot grasp but gratitude for the One who holds us fast, even when our knowledge reaches its end.

My stated reason? I managed our ministry’s social media presence; after all, I was visiting this friend in view of coming on staff at his church, but still had to do my job. The real reason? I was bored, since all we were doing was sitting around and watching ESPN during spring training baseball, where nothing else was really going on in the sports world.

This was really the first instance I can recall of being accused of being “chronically online,” always connected to my phone and doom-scrolling before doom-scrolling was a thing. I rationalized my screen time by saying I had to grow our online presence, knowing that outlets like Facebook and Instagram were still in their relative infancy and needed more organic attention than they do now. I told myself that success lived or died by how fast I responded to comments, questions, and DMs. I made it my mission to try and set the college ministry trend of the emerging digital discipleship we see here and now. When I accepted the call to his church, I even took this approach to our social media strategy and grew our online presence immensely beyond just the website.

Was I an early adopter? Maybe. Was I the driving force behind what we see in modern times of ministries reaching people on their phones before they set foot in a building? Not in the slightest.

But I learned something incredibly valuable, even if in retrospect: people want to know more than they want to trust.

I’ve been online since 2005 at the earliest. Confession time: I lied about my age to join MySpace when I was in 6th grade, and did the same to join Facebook when I was in 8th grade. I learned how to edit HTML code, beat Jetman (which was Flappy Bird before Flappy Bird was a thing), and build a farming empire on FarmTown AND FarmVille all before I learned how to drive. I was steeped in the evolution of what social media was when it was truly social, designed to be a “third place” in a pre-third wave coffee shop world.1 These two main social media sites were where we discovered new music, played games with each other, and talked about things in public that we didn’t discuss in private on AIM.

Then, in 2008 when I joined Twitter, it felt like the mentality shifted slightly: less connection, more influence. You weren’t posting with any other purpose in mind than that get what was in your head out into a digital journal of sorts. It didn’t matter if anyone responded. You wanted to be funny, witty, and clever enough to get people to click the “follow” button.

Ah, the “follow” button. No longer was there a reciprocity that existed where you requested to be someone’s friend; you led while they followed along. The connections were divided into two realms: who you followed, and who followed you. The once-held value of accepting someone’s virtual friendship (as a representation of your embodied connection) moved from a shared value proposition to an individual, one-sided onus. While it may have implicitly mattered if you followed back those who followed you, the social contract had changed to no longer required the same tit-for-tat that accepting a “friend request” did on other social platforms.

Arguably, this one-sided interaction trickled down into Instagram, Vine, TikTok, Threads, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. In effect, it said to others, “I can observe without committing. I can be present without being complicit.” It removed the inherent accountability that existed in social media’s earliest days of identifying a first-level connection with someone and transferring it to a second-level association that could be terminated as easily as it was initiated.

While this may feel like a departure from my typical look, tone, and feel of more theological, academic, and formal writing, I assure you that my aim remains intact to educate, teach, and call you to something deeper and better than the status quo. Using the most current data available for the largest subset of the population (Gen Z), we live in a world where our young people are arguably never offline, as “more than half of Gen Z (53%) admit they often feel bad about the amount of time they spend,” according to Barna.2 It is in this vein that a pastoral, theological moment needs to exist, as what social media once was is not how social media is anymore. The anonymity that current algorithmic layouts affords infiltrates the way we approach spirituality more than we would’ve hoped it would.

Scripture does not forbid anonymity categorically. However, it consistently binds God’s people into covenantal visibility: identity, speech, community, and presence are all meant to be known, accountable, and oriented toward truth. In this sense, digital anonymity is not simply a technological feature but a spiritual formation mechanism that can subtly deform Christian habits of speaking and belonging. The biblical alternative is not hyper-exposure but faithful presence: being known, truthful, and responsible in all spheres of communication.

This instinct—preferring information over vulnerability—now shapes much of our digital formation. We have been discipled to believe that access is safer than trust and that visibility should be demanded but never offered. Scripture cuts against this impulse with remarkable clarity. Three passages, in particular, reveal how deeply this desire to ‘know without trusting’ disrupts the very shape of Christian life.

Christian Speech Is Covenantally Accountable

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. (Ephesians 4:25 ESV)

Paul’s exhortation to “put away falsehood” and “speak the truth… for we are members one of another” establishes a profoundly countercultural understanding of communication. Speech, for Paul, is not an autonomous act but a covenantal one. The truth-teller is never a detached observer but a participant in a shared life. This means Christian communication cannot be separated from Christian identity; words must arise from a life that is visible, accountable, and knit to others in Christ. Digital anonymity, however, encourages a fundamentally different posture. It allows individuals to speak without being known, to influence without being implicated, and to access others’ lives without offering their own in return. In this way, anonymity directly challenges the covenantal structure Paul assumes, where speech is an extension of belonging rather than a performance disconnected from the self.

The implication is clear: our impulse to know more than we want to trust manifests first in our speech. We desire the freedom to comment, critique, observe, and opine without the vulnerability of recognition. Yet Paul insists that truthful speech is only possible when identity is not shielded but shared. To be “members one of another” is to accept that Christian speech always carries relational weight; what we say cannot be detached from who we are. This is where the theological arc begins—trust precedes knowledge, belonging precedes communication, and visibility precedes truthfulness. By locating speech within covenantal identity, Paul dismantles the idea that we can know or speak rightly while avoiding the risk of being known. The desire for informational distance is not merely a digital phenomenon but a spiritual distortion that Scripture aims to heal.

Christian Witness Is Meant to Be Public

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 5:14–16)

When Jesus declares that His disciples are “a city set on a hill,” He is not appealing to a desire for public influence but naming the unavoidable visibility of faithful life. The image is architectural: cities are built to be seen. Their presence is irreducibly public, not because they seek attention but because their existence cannot be hidden. Christian witness, therefore, is rooted not in performance but in integrity. It invites others to see the coherence between belief and practice. Anonymity, by contrast, invites the opposite. It allows one to observe without participating, to consume without contributing, and to know without trusting. It cultivates a mode of presence that is fundamentally invisible, excused from the demands of integrity. Jesus’s metaphor disrupts this instinct by insisting that discipleship is lived in ways that can be recognized, tested, and, when necessary, held to account.

If Paul shows that truthful speech requires belonging, Jesus shows that authentic witness requires visibility. The desire to know more than we want to trust becomes, at this stage, a desire to see without being seen. Digital platforms encourage this asymmetry; they reward spectatorship and cultivate distance between identity and presence. Yet Jesus’s teaching insists that Christian witness is inherently recognizable, a light that cannot be concealed without denying its purpose. If discipleship is visible, then trust is not optional. Presence, not observation, is the substance of the Christian life. Thus the move from Paul to Jesus deepens the critique: it is not only that hidden identities distort speech but that hidden lives distort witness. The call is not to hyper-exposure but to integrity. It’s a call to a life that can bear the weight of being known.

Christian Fellowship Requires Walking in the Light

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. (1 John 1:5–7)

John’s vision of “walking in the light” reveals the relational atmosphere in which Christian fellowship is meant to flourish. Light, in Johannine theology, is not merely moral purity but relational transparency. It exposes what is hidden, not to shame but to enable communion. To walk in the light is to refuse the safety of concealment and to enter the vulnerability of mutual recognition. Digital anonymity encourages a form of shadowed living—present but obscured, connected but unaccountable. It allows individuals to participate in community without ever risking genuine fellowship. This is the culminating expression of the impulse you described: the desire to know without trusting, to access without offering, to gather information without granting intimacy. John will not allow this posture to coexist with Christian fellowship. Darkness, for him, is any refusal to be known.

If Paul grounded Christian speech in belonging, and Jesus grounded Christian witness in visibility, John grounds Christian fellowship in relational honesty. Fellowship, he argues, emerges not from shared interests or mere proximity but from a shared willingness to be exposed to one another in the light of God’s truth. The anonymity that shapes contemporary digital life forms us toward the opposite reality. It trains us to remain guarded, curated, and insulated, fostering an illusion of connection without the substance of communion. Walking in the light requires the surrender of that illusion. It requires trust. It requires a willingness to be known, corrected, encouraged, and loved. John’s text completes the argument: Christian community is sustained not by the accumulation of knowledge but by the presence of trust, and without trust, even the most connected people remain relationally unseen.

The Call to Trust Again

The path forward begins with honesty about our formation.

We have been shaped by systems that reward observation over participation, commentary over communion, and curated personas over embodied presence. The question before us is whether we will continue along that trajectory or submit ourselves to the deeper, slower work of trust.

Every digital environment disciples us; none of them are neutral. Yet the Christian life is never built on mere access to information. It is nurtured in visibility, honesty, accountability, and sacrificial presence. The way forward is to resist the habit of anonymous consumption and to enter relationships where our lives can be seen and our words can be tested. The alternative is to inhabit the shadows—connected but unknown, informed but untransformed.

This is the part of the conversation where Scripture refuses to let us settle for half-measures. Paul invites us into covenantal speech, Jesus calls us into visible witness, and John ushers us into relational honesty. Together they confront the cultural liturgy of “knowing without trusting” and invite us into the counter-liturgy of being known as an act of discipleship.

The first small step is intentional presence: choosing spaces where we are not anonymous, choosing conversations where accountability exists, and choosing community where our lives are not curated but shared. These choices shape our hearts far more than our algorithms ever will.

Becoming a People Who Walk in the Light

To step back from the arc of this reflection is to see a simple but searching truth: the Christian life cannot be sustained by the posture that social media normalizes. We were not made to hover at the edge of relationships, absorbing information without offering ourselves. We were not created to be spectators. We were made for covenantal belonging, visible witness, and relational honesty—three realities that only emerge where trust is stronger than curiosity. The invitation of the New Testament is not to become experts in information, but participants in communion. It is not to gather perspectives, but to become a people whose lives reflect the character of God to one another.

The hope is not that we abandon the digital world altogether, but that we inhabit it differently. Faithful presence in a digital age requires something profoundly countercultural: a willingness to be known. If people want to know more than they want to trust, we’re called to trust as the pathway to true knowledge. In Christ, the God who knows us fully also welcomes us fully, and this becomes the pattern we extend to one another. The church is meant to be a community where anonymity gives way to authenticity, where hiddenness gives way to light, and where information gives way to communion. In a world discipled toward distance, we are called to walk together in the light.

Thus, I close with this story, which I hope illustrates the point which I’m trying to make. Years later, in my current context almost 10 years after and states away from where this post began, I found myself sitting in a coffee shop not far from my apartment. The place had become something of a weekday refuge—half office, half sanctuary. That afternoon, I watched a college student slip into the booth across from me. Headphones in, hood up, laptop open, his whole world narrowed to a glowing screen. A few minutes later, a friend of his walked in. He waved, smiled, and asked if he could sit. He nodded without looking up.

For the next hour, I watched them occupy the same space without ever meeting each other’s eyes. They exchanged links, memes, and short bursts of commentary about people they followed online. They knew astonishing amounts about strangers—where they vacationed, what they believed, who they dated—but almost nothing about the person sitting twenty-four inches away. When his friend stood to leave, be finally paused her scrolling long enough to tell him goodbye. It came out hesitant, almost apologetic, as if speech required a vulnerability she wasn’t sure she wanted to give.

I remember thinking: this is exactly what the digital age has taught us to do—inhabit proximity without presence, gather information without extending trust, live beside each other without ever truly knowing or being known. The tragedy wasn’t that they were on their phones. It was that they had learned to settle for adjacency when what they both longed for was connection. It was a living picture of this formation that’s preceded, the subtle drift from fellowship toward observation, from community toward commentary.

As I packed up my things to leave, I wondered how much of my own life mirrored theirs. How often had I chosen the safety of the screen over the risk of conversation? How often had I let the desire to know replace the call to trust?

In that moment, the Scriptures I had been studying came back with clarity. Paul’s summons to speak truth as members of one another. Jesus’s insistence that a city on a hill cannot be hidden. John’s call to walk in the light as He is in the light. All three converged into a gentle but unignorable reminder: we were made for more than adjacency. We were made for communion.

So, I implore you: where can you influence, lead, and counteract towards the example we see in Paul, John, and Jesus? Where can you pull others out of simple, quiet anonymity into embodied, collective living?

The big idea of the Christian faith, woven from Genesis to Revelation, is this: You can’t understand Jesus without his people, and you can’t live the Christian life without his church. To attempt this separation is to embark on a spiritual journey that is profoundly unbiblical and ultimately unsustainable. It is to ignore one of the most foundational promises Jesus ever made.

Standing on the precipice of his journey to the cross, Jesus turned to his disciples and made a stunning declaration about the future. He wasn’t promising a best-selling book, a powerful political movement, or a philosophy that would change the world. He promised something far more personal and enduring. He looked at Peter and said, “upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

Let the weight of those words sink in. The Church is not a human invention, an organizational afterthought, or a club for the pious. It is Christ’s own personal, unstoppable, and eternal building project. He is the architect and the master builder. The Church is His church. Its survival is not contingent on our clever programs or charismatic leaders, but on His divine promise. The powers of hell itself cannot overcome it. To give up on the church is, in a very real sense, to bet against Jesus.

So what is this institution that Christ is so committed to building? The New Testament offers a rich tapestry of metaphors, but one of the most powerful and practical is to see the local church as heaven’s embassy on earth. An embassy is an outpost of a kingdom in a foreign land. It is a visible, earthly expression of a king’s reign, representing his authority, serving as a community for his citizens, and acting as the operational hub from which the king’s mission is carried out in a foreign land. This is the church: a colony of heaven in a fallen world, a gathering of sojourners and strangers who represent their true King.

Therefore, before we can properly address our legitimate frustrations with the church, we must first re-anchor ourselves in the theological necessity of the church. We must see it not as we wish it were, or even as it often is, but as God declares it to be.

The Indispensable Connection: Why You Can’t Understand Jesus Without His Church

Before we can appreciate what the Church does, we must first understand what the Church is. Much of our modern disillusionment stems from a definition of “church” that is shallow, unbiblical, or shaped more by sociological analysis than by Scripture. We see it as a weekly event, a non-profit organization, or a collection of flawed individuals, and we rightly find it wanting. But God’s Word defines the Church not by its function but by its very being—its ontology. The church does what it does because the church is what it is. And what it is, is profoundly and inextricably linked to the person and work of the Triune God.

The Bible uses several key metaphors to define the nature of the church, each revealing a different facet of its divine identity.

The People of God

This is the foundational identity marker, stretching back into the Old Testament. The Church is the continuation and fulfillment of God’s covenant relationship with humanity, which began with Israel and has now, through Christ, expanded to include people from every nation (1 Peter 2:9-10). To be a Christian is to be chosen by God the Father before the foundation of the world and brought into His family (Ephesians 1:3-5). We are not a random collection of individuals who happen to believe the same things; we are a people constituted by God’s electing grace, “beloved of God, called to be saints” (Romans 1:7).

The Temple of the Holy Spirit

The Old Testament temple was the specific place where God’s glorious presence dwelled on earth. In the new covenant, that reality has been transformed. The Church itself is now the temple where God’s presence dwells. Paul asks the Corinthians, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). This dwelling is both individual and collective. We are “living stones” being built into a “spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5), a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Ephesians 2:21-22). To forsake the gathered church is to forsake the very place God has chosen to manifest His special presence on earth.

The Body of Christ

Perhaps the richest and most profound metaphor is that of the Church as the body of Christ. This is more than a sentimental illustration of unity; it is a statement of profound organic connection. In Ephesians, Paul explains that God the Father has put all things under Christ’s feet and “gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22-23). This relationship is twofold.

First, Christ is the Head, exercising sovereign power, giving life and grace, and directing the body’s movements. The church is not a democracy with Jesus as a figurehead; it is a body that receives its life, purpose, and power from its Head. As theologian Gregg Allison puts it, Christ is the source who “pervades all things with his sovereign rule” and gives “grace and strength to his people.”

Second, the church is His Body, the physical manifestation of His presence and the continuation of His ministry in the world. This vital link between Head and body is not just about receiving life, but about distributing it. Because Christ the Head gives life, the members of the body are then empowered and obligated to minister that life to each other. This theological identity is the very foundation for the practical “one another” commands that fill the New Testament. We are called to “bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2) because our Head first bore the ultimate burden for us all.

This deep connection reveals that the church’s very essence is Logocentric—centered on the Word. This refers not only to the written Word, Scripture, but more foundationally to Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word (John 1:14). As Allison notes, our understanding of the church (ecclesiology) can only be developed from our understanding of Christ (Christology). The church’s identity is wholly referred to the being and action of God in Christ.

To separate Jesus from the church, therefore, is a theological impossibility. It is to attempt to separate a head from its body, a king from his people, a cornerstone from his temple. It misunderstands the very identity of both. If Christ is the Head and the church is His body, then you simply cannot have one without the other. This theological reality has massive practical implications for how we live out our faith.

The Indispensable Community: Why You Can’t Live the Christian Life Without His Church

If the Church is theologically inseparable from Christ, it follows that it must be practically inseparable from the Christian life. God has not only saved us from sin but into a people. He has designed our spiritual growth—our discipleship—to happen within the specific context of this community, through means that He Himself has ordained. The Christian life is not a solo journey; it is a corporate pilgrimage.

This corporate reality begins at the moment of conversion. When we are saved, we are not only reconciled to God vertically but also, inseparably, reconciled to God’s people horizontally. One of the Bible’s most precious metaphors for salvation is adoption (Ephesians 1:5). When God adopts us into His family, we don’t just gain a Father; we simultaneously gain a new set of brothers and sisters. As the 9Marks ministry puts it, “Being reconciled to God’s people is distinct from but inseparable from being reconciled to God.” A private, individualistic faith is simply not the one presented in the New Testament.

Once we are part of this family, God provides a “greenhouse” for our growth: the local church. The book of Acts gives us a snapshot of the foundational practices of the early church, which serve as God’s ordained instruments for building up believers: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

The Apostle’s Teaching

The primary means of grace by which God saves and sanctifies His people is the faithful preaching of His Word. This is not simply about transferring information or hearing an inspiring talk. The preaching of Scripture is the divinely appointed method to convict sinners, convert hearts, build up the faithful, and sanctify believers (Hebrews 4:12; 1 Peter 1:23). As Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley explain, when the Word of God is faithfully proclaimed, the voice of God is heard. It is the central act of the gathered church because it is God’s chosen way to create and sustain the faith of His people.

Fellowship (Koinōnia)

This is far more than coffee and donuts after the service. Biblical fellowship is the hard work of living out the dozens of “one another” commands in Scripture: love one another, encourage one another, bear one another’s burdens, admonish one another, serve one another. As Kevin DeYoung notes, “Real fellowship is hard work, because most people are a lot like us—selfish, petty, and proud.” Yet it is in this messy, difficult context of real relationships that God refines our character, exposes our sin, and teaches us to love as Christ loved us.

The Breaking of Bread & The Prayers

God has also instituted tangible, visible rhythms for the church’s life. The ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not mere symbols; they are visible sermons that preach the gospel. In the words of the Reformers, they are outward signs by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us, sustaining the weakness of our faith. Baptism pictures our union with Christ in his death and resurrection, and the Lord’s Supper proclaims his death until he comes, nourishing our souls and sealing God’s promises to us. Likewise, corporate prayer is not just a collection of individual prayers. It is the family of God coming before their Father together, demonstrating their utter dependence on Him and promoting unity. The Puritan David Clarkson captured this distinction beautifully: “the presence of God, which, enjoyed in private, is but a stream, in public becomes a river that makes glad the city of God.” We can sip from the stream of God’s presence alone, but it is only in the gathered church that we can swim in the river.

These God-ordained functions are administered within the local church, making it the irreplaceable context for discipleship. Furthermore, this community is the base of operations for God’s mission in the world. This is where the “embassy” illustration becomes so powerful. An embassy is both the community that sends its ambassadors out with the king’s message and the community that gathers new citizens into the kingdom. The Great Commission to “go and make disciples” was not given to isolated individuals but to the church (Matthew 28:19-20). We are sent out from our local embassy to proclaim the good news, and when people believe, we gather them into that same embassy, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded. Individual mission is always rooted in and accountable to this corporate body.

The Christian life, from conversion to sanctification to mission, is designed to be lived in community. To neglect the local church is to cut oneself off from the very means of grace God has provided for our spiritual health and flourishing.

Answering the Question, “But Isn’t the Church Optional?”

“I love Jesus, but I can’t stand organized religion.” This sentiment often arises from a modern, individualistic view of faith that the Bible simply doesn’t support. Christ did not die to save a collection of isolated individuals who would have a private relationship with him. He died to create a people, a body, a bride. To reject the “organized” aspect of the church is to fall into what theologian Gregg Allison calls a “contractual ecclesiology,” where our involvement is based on personal preference and perceived benefit. But the New Testament presents a covenantal reality: Christ saves individuals a people, reconciling us not only to God but to one another.

“The church is full of hypocrites and broken people.” Yes, it is. And thank God for that. The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. Kevin DeYoung candidly observes that real fellowship is hard because church people are often “selfish, petty, and proud.” But as Jonathan Leeman reminds us, “that’s the body God calls us to.” To expect perfection in the church is to misunderstand its very purpose. The Reformer John Calvin issued a timeless warning: “If we are not willing to admit a church unless it be perfect in every respect, we leave no church at all.” The presence of broken people is not a sign of the church’s failure, but a testament to the grace of the God who is healing it.

“The institutional church has caused so much harm.” This pain is real, and the church must own its failures. The history of the visible church is tragically stained with sin, abuse, and hypocrisy. But this is not a new problem. In the book of Revelation, Jesus addresses seven real, historical churches, and five of them receive sharp rebukes for being compromised, lukewarm, dead, or doctrinally corrupt (Revelation 2-3). Churches have been flawed from the very beginning. It is crucial to distinguish between the failures of the church (the flawed, earthly institution) and the promise of Christ to build and preserve his and universal church—the complete number of the elect throughout all ages—which will ultimately prevail against the gates of hell.

“I can worship God perfectly well in nature or on my own.” Private devotion is a vital part of the Christian life, but it is not a substitute for corporate worship. God has promised a special manifestation of his presence when His people gather together. As Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). While God’s presence can feel like a refreshing stream in our private devotions, the Bible teaches that in the public gathering of his people, that stream becomes a mighty river.

Conclusion: Re-engaging with the Flawed but Beautiful Bride of Christ

We have seen that the Church is not an optional accessory to the Christian faith. It is theologically essential for understanding who Jesus is—He is the Head, and the Church is His body; He is the cornerstone, and the Church is His temple; He is the King, and the Church is His people. And it is practically essential for living the Christian life—it is the God-ordained context for conversion, growth, fellowship, discipleship, and mission.

Still, the objection remains: the church is messy, broken, and imperfect. This is undeniably true. But the church’s imperfections do not nullify its divine institution any more than a child’s misbehavior nullifies their status as a son or daughter. The New Testament’s most intimate metaphor for the church is that of Christ’s Bride (Ephesians 5:25-27). This image is breathtaking in its implications.

Christ loves his Bride. He “gave himself up for her.” And right now, he is actively at work “to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” This language describes a process, not a current state of perfection. He is sanctifying her. He knows she has stains and wrinkles, and He is patiently, lovingly washing and ironing them out. To abandon the Church because she is imperfect is to abandon Christ’s beloved, the very project to which He has dedicated Himself until the day He returns.

Committing to a local church, then, is not primarily a duty to be fulfilled, but a vital pathway to a richer relationship with Jesus himself. It is an act of loving the One whom Christ loves. Our call is not to find a perfect church, but to invest ourselves in a local, flawed, beautiful expression of Christ’s body. It is to joyfully contribute our gifts, our prayers, and our presence to the health and mission of the very Bride whom Christ is perfecting for himself. In loving and serving his church, we draw nearer to the heart of the Jesus we claim to love.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 ESV)

A single Greek word, λόγος (logos), opens John’s Gospel with a thunderclap. I remember the first time I slowed down enough in the Greek text to realize just how loaded this word is. We read “Word” in English and think maybe of vocabulary or speech. But in Greek, logos is a word freighted with centuries of meaning, both in philosophy and in Scripture.

Most of the time, when we read John 1:1, we don’t necessarily think of it in a context beyond our own learned presuppositions. We only really consider it in the orthodox interpretation, but we don’t feel the weight of how important such a little word is.

Let me remind you of two key things I addressed in the first article of this series: we must understand that the English we read in our Bibles, physical or digital, is not the original form in which the Scriptures we have were written. The text we have today originated in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic; were translated into Latin (the Vulgate), or Greek first if the source was Hebrew (the Septuagint); and has had its meaning debated over the years before arriving in one of the various translations from which we can choose to read.

Thus, understanding what the original language in all its semantics and semiotics is crucial. Yet, you don’t have to go to seminary, get a Bible degree, or become a linguistics expert in order to understand what you’re reading. This is my aim and hope in this and following articles where I unpack contested Greek words in well-known verses so that you and I both can have a better grasp on the Biblical text.

So let’s walk through John 1:1 and its key word carefully.

What Does λόγος Mean in Greek?

John 1:1 begins, Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, “In the beginning was the Word.” The phrase Ἐν ἀρχῇ deliberately recalls Genesis 1:1. John situates the Word on the Creator’s side of the Creator–creature distinction. The verb ἦν is the imperfect of “to be.” It indicates ongoing reality, not a point of origin. When the beginning began, the Word already was. As D. A. Carson and Leon Morris both stress, John is not describing a creaturely start. He is narrating eternal existence. The subject ὁ λόγος is marked by the article to identify this Word as the subject under discussion, which prevents us from hearing “a word” among other words. John is not introducing a category. He is introducing someone.

The next clause reads, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, “and the Word was with God.” The preposition πρὸς can denote movement toward, or a face-to-face relation. Many commentators hear in it the nuance of personal communion. Andreas Köstenberger and Herman Ridderbos note that the phrase maintains a real distinction. The Word is not the Father, yet is oriented toward the Father in eternal fellowship. John then writes, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, “and the Word was God.” Here θεός appears without the article. This anarthrous predicate does not make the noun indefinite. It gives it a qualitative force. John speaks of what the Word is by nature. As Morris and Carson explain, the word order places θεός first for emphasis. John avoids saying “the Word was the God,” which would collapse the persons, yet he boldly says “the Word was God,” which ascribes full deity to the Word. In one verse John holds together personal distinction and divine identity. The Gospel begins within the horizon that the church later calls the Trinity.

Verse 2 repeats the point for clarity. “He was in the beginning with God.” Verse 3 then assigns universal creative agency to the Word. “All things came into being through him, and apart from him not one thing came into being that has come into being.” The repeated verb ἐγένετο, “came to be,” marks the creaturely realm. The Word is never said to “come to be.” He simply “was.” Ridderbos highlights the pastoral precision of the double negative in verse 3. No exception exists. If all that began to exist did so through the Word, then the Word did not begin to exist. John 1:14 completes the turn. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The verb ἐγένετο now appears of the Word. The eternal Word who always was, now becomes what he had not been, flesh, which is real human life in its frailty and time. The verb “dwelt” is σκηνόω, which evokes Israel’s tabernacle where God’s glory resided in the midst of the people. Carson and N. T. Wright both argue that John is declaring the fulfillment of temple hopes. The presence of God is now located personally in Jesus. Exegesis therefore yields doctrine. The Word is eternal, with God, and is God. The Word is the agent of creation. The Word becomes flesh. The grammar drives the confession.

So, a Greek reader of John’s Gospel would hear logos and think: “Ah, yes, the deepest truth of the universe, the rational order behind everything.” John grabs that resonance. But then he does something radical with it.

What Does λόγος Mean in Scripture?

For the Jewish reader, logos didn’t point first to philosophy but to the living Word of God. To hear λόγος as John intends, we must listen to two background choirs that sing at once. The first choir is Greek philosophy. Heraclitus used logos to name the rational principle that orders a world in flux. The Stoics spoke of logos as an immanent rationality or fiery reason that pervades the cosmos and gives it coherence. A Greek audience would hear ultimacy in the term. Yet in these systems the logos is typically impersonal. It functions like a cosmic law. John answers the legitimate hunger for order and meaning, but he refuses an impersonal answer. He speaks the language of his age, then he surprises the age with the claim that the logos is personal, relational, and incarnate.

The second choir is Israel’s Scripture and Second Temple Judaism. From the first page of the Bible, God creates and governs by speaking. “And God said” frames Genesis 1. Psalm 33:6 confesses that by the word of the Lord the heavens were made. Isaiah 55:11 promises that God’s word accomplishes what he purposes. Wisdom literature deepens this portrait. Proverbs 8 personifies Wisdom as present with God before creation and rejoicing in his works. This is not yet the Nicene doctrine of the Son, but it trains readers to hear personal dimensions in God’s self-disclosure. The Aramaic Targums sometimes substitute Memra, “Word,” for the divine name in order to speak reverently of God’s action in the world. One reads that the Memra of the Lord led the people. Raymond Brown and Richard Bauckham point out that this habit taught Jewish ears to hear “Word” as a way of talking about the living God at work. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, also spreads a vocabulary in which God’s word and wisdom are active, powerful, and faithful.

A further voice is Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish thinker who used logos to describe God’s mediation to the world and the instrument of creation. Philo offers categories and vocabulary. Yet he does not identify the logos as a distinct person who shares the divine identity, and he does not ground devotion in the history of Jesus. Larry Hurtado’s work on early Christian worship and Bauckham’s argument about divine identity sharpen the contrast. John uses language that both Greeks and Jews know, then he identifies the logos as Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen, worthy of the worship that belongs to the one God of Israel.

Hermeneutically, John’s move is not a compromise between Athens and Jerusalem. It is a fulfillment that reorients both. The Scriptural theme of God’s effective word, the Wisdom tradition’s portrait of pre-creation companionship, the Targumic reverence for Memra, and philosophy’s question about order and meaning, all converge. John gathers these threads, then ties them to the person of the Son. He does not dilute any source. He reveals their end.

Think Genesis 1: “And God said…” and the world came to be. Psalm 33:6: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made.” Isaiah 55:11: God’s word always accomplishes its purpose.

By the first century, Jewish interpreters had begun to speak of God’s “Word” and “Wisdom” almost as if they had a distinct existence. Proverbs 8 personifies Wisdom as present with God before creation. The Aramaic Targums even used Memra (“Word”) as a reverent substitute for God’s own name: “The Word of the Lord led the people” (Exod. 19:17, Targum).

So, a Jewish reader would hear logos and think: “Yes, God’s powerful Word, His action in creation and revelation.”

Parsing the Word

Here’s where the Greek syntax helps us. In John 1:1, the phrase is Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. Let’s parse it:

• Ἐν ἀρχῇ – “In the beginning.” Echo of Genesis 1:1.

• ἦν – imperfect tense, “was,” describing continuous existence. The Word already was.

• ὁ λόγος – nominative subject, “the Logos.” Not abstract, not vague—definite.

John could have chosen other words for “word” (ῥῆμα is common for spoken sayings). But logos allows him to hold together reason and speech, thought and action, the principle and the Person.

What John Is—and Isn’t—Saying

Some teachers will claim John is just borrowing Greek philosophy wholesale, or that he is simply rephrasing Jewish wisdom traditions. Both miss the point.

From the beginning, Christians heard in John 1:1 a confession about the eternal Son. Justin Martyr speaks of the Logos as the one through whom God created all things, distinct from the Father yet divine. Irenaeus uses John’s opening to defend the unity of the Creator and Redeemer against Gnostic schemes. Origen develops the language of the Son’s eternal generation, which seeks to say that there was never a time when the Father was without the Word. The Arian controversy forced the church to sharpen these convictions. Arius claimed that the Son was the first and greatest creature. Athanasius replied with John 1:3. If all things that came to be, came to be through the Word, then the Word did not come to be. The Word is not a creature. At Nicaea the bishops confessed that the Son is homoousios with the Father, of one essence, language that guards what John’s grammar already requires. The creed is not an alien imposition on Scripture. It is a protective fence built from Scripture to prevent distortions.

A second stream of debate concerns translation and grammar. Some have tried to render θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος as “the Word was a god,” as if the anarthrous predicate must be indefinite. Greek syntax does not support this. The absence of the article before a predicate noun often signals qualitative force, particularly when the predicate precedes the verb. Carson and Morris both show that John’s construction says what the Word is by nature. It does not demote the Word to a lower grade of divinity. At the same time, John avoids turning the Word into the Father by using the article in πρὸς τὸν θεόν. The result is a balanced confession. The Word is personally distinct. The Word is fully God.

A third stream of debate concerns sources. Some have said that John simply baptizes Greek philosophy or imitates Philo. Others insist he repeats Jewish Wisdom language without remainder. The best reading recognizes overlap in vocabulary and imagery, then pays attention to John’s decisive identifications. The Word is not a principle or a metaphor. The Word becomes flesh and is named Jesus. The earliest Christian devotion, as Hurtado documents, already included prayer and praise directed to Jesus within the worship of the one God. Bauckham’s argument that the New Testament includes Jesus in the unique divine identity explains why this devotion makes sense. John 1:1 stands at the head of that inclusion. The later creeds teach the church to keep saying what John said, clearly and consistently, in every generation.

John isn’t parroting Stoics or repeating Proverbs. He’s cutting against both. For the Greeks, the divine was detached, serene, untouched by human struggle. John says: the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). For the Jews, the Word was God’s action, but not God Himself in person. John says: the Logos was God.

His grammar is tight: καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

• πρὸς τὸν θεόν – “with God,” showing relationship, not distance.

• θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος – “the Word was God.” Notice: θεὸς comes first, for emphasis.

John isn’t blending Jewish and Greek thought. He’s using their language to say something brand new: the ultimate Word, the ordering reason, the creative speech—it’s all embodied in Jesus.

Why This Matters

If John had simply said “Jesus is wise,” no one would argue. If he had said “God spoke through Jesus,” it would fit Jewish categories. If he had said “Jesus is divine principle,” it would resonate with Greeks.

But John insists: Jesus is the eternal Logos, with God from the beginning, Himself God, through whom all things were made. Not principle but person. Not detached but incarnate. And because logos also means “word spoken,” this hits home: Jesus is God speaking to us. The Word is not mute. The Word speaks, lives, calls.

So what do we do with this?

1. It anchors our faith in Christ’s divinity. John 1:1 leaves no room for Jesus as “just a teacher.” He is the Logos made flesh.

2. It reminds us God is not silent. The Word became flesh, and the Word still speaks through Scripture. To follow Jesus is to hear and keep his word (John 8:31; 14:23).

3. It calls us into relationship, not abstraction. Life isn’t about aligning with a principle but knowing a Person.

These doctrinal implications shape the church’s life. In worship, we adore the Word who is with God and is God, not a sage whose sayings can be trimmed to fit our preferences. In preaching, we open Scripture so that people hear Christ speak, not merely moral advice or spiritual uplift. In discipleship, we train people to abide in the Word’s teaching and to keep his commands as the fruit of that abiding. In mission, we do not spread a principle or a lifestyle. We bear witness to a person who made all things, who forgives sins, and who is present by the Spirit with his people. The deepest questions posed by philosophy and the deepest hopes nurtured by Scripture find their resolution here. The rational order behind the world is not less than order, but it is infinitely more. He is the Son whom the Father loves, the one through whom all things exist, the one who became flesh for us and for our salvation.

Conclusion: The Word That Speaks

Parsing logos in John 1:1 shows us the precision of Scripture. John didn’t choose the word lightly. He knew its philosophical weight and its biblical resonance. But his meaning is his own: the Logos is not detached principle or poetic personification. The Logos is Jesus Christ—God with us, the Word that speaks life and truth, the Word that was God from the beginning and remains God today.

Return, then, to the first sentence. “In the beginning was the Word.” The imperfect tense tells you that the Word simply was, eternally. The preposition tells you that he was with God in personal communion. The anarthrous predicate tells you that what God is, the Word is. Verse 3 tells you that all that came to be did so through him. Verse 14 tells you that he became flesh and pitched his tent among us. The Old Testament tells you that God’s word creates and accomplishes his purpose. The early church tells you that this Word is the Son, of one essence with the Father, worthy of worship. Put the pieces together and you have the Gospel’s heartbeat. The Word is eternal. The Word is personal. The Word is God. The Word became flesh. That Word still speaks through Scripture, and that Word summons the church to trust, adore, and follow.

But, the New Testament. I spent the majority of academic career and beyond in this portion of Scripture. It’s home. And, as a result, it’s something I’ve often read through hastily to get the broad brush strokes rather than the finer details, seeking to understand the descriptive narrative arc above the prescriptive moments that Jesus had with His disciples and the religious leaders. Yet, it’s in these high-definition instances where the Holy Spirit allows the Word to read us just as much as we read it.

I came upon this easily overlooked passage in Luke 4:16-30 this week that struck me square in the chest:

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth. And they said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” And he said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘“Physician, heal yourself.” What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” And he said, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away. (emphasis added)

“Physician, heal yourself.” A phrase that many will breeze over, especially in pastoral roles, either taking it to mean they have to do it themselves or that they’re hopeless. It’s this that got the gears turning, and in truth, there’s a lot to unpack here from just a few simple words.

The Nazarene Scene In Context

When Jesus returned to Nazareth—the dusty hillside village where He had grown up—He stood in the synagogue on the Sabbath, unrolled the scroll of Isaiah, and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind” (Luke 4:18-19). Then He sat down and said the most audacious sentence any local boy could utter: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The congregation marveled, at first. But their astonishment soon turned sour. They knew Him—knew His mother, His father, His siblings, His carpentry apprenticeship. Familiarity bred not faith but skepticism. “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they muttered (v. 22). Beneath their admiration was a subtle demand: if He was indeed God’s anointed one, He should prove it, and He should begin by performing in Nazareth what He had done in Capernaum. The subtext was clear: If you claim to be a healer, heal yourself—start with your own.

Jesus, reading their hearts, made their thought audible. “Surely you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’ Do here in your hometown what we have heard you did in Capernaum.” (v. 23). The statement bristles with irony. The very people who most needed healing are those who, in their pride, demand a performance that will confirm their special status. Their unbelief cloaks itself in civic loyalty; their skepticism masquerades as prudence.

The Ancient Proverb and Its Irony

Luke labels Jesus’ words a parabolē, a term broad enough to include proverb, allegory, or metaphor. As Robert Stein notes, the saying had wide circulation in both Greco-Roman and Jewish literature: Euripides sneered at the “physician for others but himself teeming with sores,” while Genesis Rabbah preserves the jab, “Physician, physician, heal thine own limp.”1 Across cultures, the phrase exposed hypocrisy—those who prescribe cures they refuse to take.

But in Nazareth the proverb takes on a deeper, almost tragic edge. It is not simply hypocrisy that Jesus exposes but entitlement. Thomas Schreiner observes that the townspeople wanted Jesus to replicate His miracles locally—to make Nazareth His center of operations as a sign of loyalty.2 Thabiti Anyabwile captures the heart of their reaction: “They want Him to put Nazareth first and minister there. They want Him to prove Himself by working miracles and putting Israel first. It’s the response of pride and unbelief. It’s self-importance and entitlement.”3 The proverb, then, does not only critique hypocrisy; it unmasks the deeper sin of presumption—demanding that God privilege our context, our people, our expectations.

Jesus refuses the demand and compounds the offense. He follows the proverb with another: “No prophet is acceptable in his hometown.” Then He cites Elijah and Elisha, two prophets who brought healing and provision not to Israel but to Gentiles—the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian. The implication could not have been clearer: God’s mercy often runs where it is least expected, bypassing those who presume to deserve it most. Nazareth’s parochial pride becomes a parable of Israel’s broader unbelief, and, by extension, of humanity’s tendency to domesticate grace. The proverb “Physician, heal yourself” thus serves as a mirror—reflecting back the community’s blindness and anticipating the broader rejection of the Messiah.

From Nazareth to Calvary

Luke’s positioning of this episode is deliberate, not chronological. The Nazareth incident functions as a theological overture, encapsulating the themes of revelation, rejection, and reversal that will unfold across the Gospel. Here, at the very outset of Jesus’ ministry, we glimpse the pattern of divine mission: the prophet without honor, the healer refused by those who think themselves healthy.

And Luke ensures that the echo of this proverb will be heard again at Golgotha. When the religious leaders jeer at the crucified Christ—“He saved others; let Him save Himself if He is God’s Messiah!” (Luke 23:35)—they unknowingly reprise the same proverb. Once more, unbelief demands proof through self-preservation. Once more, the crowd insists that the Physician prove His power by healing Himself. But now, the irony is complete: by refusing to heal Himself, the Great Physician heals the world.

The cross subverts the proverb’s logic. What human wisdom demands—self-validation, self-salvation—Christ overturns through self-giving love. The One who could have descended from the cross chooses instead to remain, bearing the wounds that will become our cure. Isaiah’s prophecy finds its final fulfillment: “He was pierced for our transgressions… and by His wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5). In that moment, the proverb meant as a taunt becomes the foundation of redemption. The Physician does not need to heal Himself; He chooses to be broken so that others may be made whole.

The Proverb Turned Inward: Theology of Integrity

If Christ alone stands beyond the proverb’s accusation, His followers—especially those called to spiritual leadership—stand continually beneath its searching light. For while Jesus needed no self-healing, His ministers do. Every pastor, teacher, or shepherd is both healer and patient, both preacher and penitent.

The biblical mandate for self-examination pervades Scripture. Jesus’ own teaching in the Sermon on the Mount parallels the proverb’s wisdom: “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matt. 7:5). The image of the hypocritical ophthalmologist—attempting delicate surgery with a beam protruding from his own eye—would have provoked laughter if it weren’t so uncomfortably true. The humor carries a serious point: moral blindness invalidates spiritual ministry. One must see clearly before one can guide another.

Paul’s words to Timothy extend the same principle to pastoral vocation: “Keep watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim. 4:16). The grammar of salvation here is sobering. The pastor’s perseverance in holiness and truth is not optional; it is integral to the salvation of both shepherd and flock. Likewise, Paul’s rebuke to the moralistic teacher in Romans 2 cuts to the heart: “You who teach others, do you not teach yourself?” Hypocrisy, in Scripture, is not merely bad optics—it is blasphemy. “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you” (Rom. 2:24). When spiritual leaders preach holiness but neglect it in private, they become anti-signs of the gospel they proclaim.

From a theological standpoint, the proverb presses us to acknowledge the enduring presence of sin even in the regenerate heart. Leaders are not exempt from the fall’s contagion; indeed, their visibility often magnifies their vulnerability. Pride, ambition, and isolation—sins that hide behind spiritual language—are occupational hazards of ministry. Thus, the command to “heal yourself” is not a summons to self-sufficiency but to continual repentance, the daily reapplication of the gospel’s balm. In Reformation language, the life of a believer—and supremely of a leader—is vita semper reformanda, a life always being reformed by the Word and Spirit of God.

Sanctification, then, is the long obedience of healing. It is not the leader’s achievement but his posture: open-handed dependence on the Great Physician who alone can mend the inner life. As Paul reminds the Philippians, we “work out” our salvation precisely because God is “at work in [us]” (Phil. 2:12-13). To “heal yourself” in biblical terms means to cooperate with grace, to yield one’s life again and again to divine surgery.

Healing and Credibility: The Ecclesial Dimension

The health of a church is rarely greater than the holiness of its leaders. The proverb therefore carries ecclesiological weight. Pastoral failure does not occur in a vacuum; it radiates outward, wounding the body of Christ and giving occasion for the world’s derision. Each generation proves this painfully anew. Whether in ancient Israel’s corrupt priesthood or in contemporary scandals, hypocrisy among leaders corrodes the credibility of the gospel.

Yet when leaders embody integrity—when they model confession, humility, and repentance—the church itself becomes a living apologetic. As John Owen warned, “A minister may fill his pews and his programs, but what he is on his knees before Almighty God, that he is and no more.” A congregation will instinctively imitate its shepherd. Holiness at the pulpit begets holiness in the pews; duplicity begets cynicism. The proverb, “Physician, heal yourself,” therefore functions as a call to communal health: the personal sanctification of leaders serves the spiritual immunity of the church.

Pastoral Practices of Healing

How, then, does the contemporary minister heed this ancient call? The remedy is neither novel nor glamorous. It is the slow, ordinary work of grace—habits that keep the soul supple before God.

The first practice is self-examination, the discipline of placing one’s life under divine scrutiny. Psalm 139 becomes a daily prayer: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts.” Honest confession is preventive medicine; hidden sin festers.

Second, accountability. Every David needs a Nathan. Leaders who isolate themselves soon become unaccountable physicians diagnosing everyone but themselves. Genuine friendships and elder relationships are God’s design to keep ministers human.

Third, rest and renewal. Even the Son of God withdrew to desolate places to pray. Exhaustion is a moral risk. A depleted pastor is a vulnerable pastor. Sabbath rhythms are not indulgences; they are spiritual triage.

Fourth, servant-leadership. Foot-washing, whether literal or metaphorical, recalibrates the soul. Leaders who occasionally return to unseen, humble service inoculate themselves against the disease of status.

Finally, transparency. Strategic honesty—admitting weakness without exhibitionism—models a gospel-shaped humility. The shepherd who says, “This passage convicted me first,” is not less authoritative but more believable.

These practices are not moralistic self-improvement but means of grace. They keep the minister tethered to the healing Christ, ensuring that his authority flows from authenticity, not image.

The Gospel That Heals the Healer

Ultimately, the proverb that once mocked the Messiah becomes the pastor’s prayer. For none of us can truly heal ourselves. We are, at best, wounded healers ministering under the care of the Great Physician. To “heal yourself” in gospel terms means to bring yourself continually under Christ’s healing hand—to confess, repent, and receive anew the mercy that restores.

Jesus’ refusal to save Himself at Calvary was not weakness but victory. In that paradox lies the secret of Christian ministry: power through humility, healing through woundedness, leadership through servanthood. The physician who daily returns to the cross for healing becomes a conduit of that same healing to others.

In the end, “Physician, heal yourself” is not a cynical taunt but a sacred summons. It calls every leader to integrity, every teacher to humility, every shepherd to repentance. The credibility of our message depends upon the coherence of our lives. We cannot preach grace persuasively if we refuse to live as those who need it desperately.

By His wounds we are healed—and by His grace, we can become healers who practice what we preach.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20 ESV)

Recently, I came across an Instagram Reel with a concept I hadn’t heard before. I know my Greek, have read through commentaries ad nauseam, and traced interpretations across church history, but this one was new to me. Here’s the transcript of the video:

I heard this from a pastor and a while back he told me that the Great Commission, “go and make disciples of all nations,” is more closely translated to “in your going, make disciples of all nations.” Basically, like as you live your life, as you live in whatever context God put you in, make disciples, tell people about his love, talk to people about Jesus, share about what Jesus done in your life.

That to me is the coolest concept because a lot of us aren’t called to go somewhere else, you know, a lot of us are just called to the life that we’re leading right now. So encouraging to me because like John Mark Comer says instead of saying, “What would Jesus do,” think of, “What would Jesus do if He were me?” Cause you know I’m not a first-century Jewish rabbi. I am a mom of two in Northern California.

What did God intend for my life and who did God intend for me to share about Jesus with? Isn’t that so profound to me? It makes me feel emotional every time I think about it or talk about it because it makes like the people who are checking me out at the grocery store, the mom that I pass by on my walk that I go on every day, like so precious because like those are the people that God has called me to share about his love with, you know? It’s literally your neighbors.

I also feel like it’s just an invitation like you don’t have to be weird about it. As it happens, as God puts opportunities in your path, doesn’t have to be unnatural, you know? Just an invitation into like a very natural rhythm. As you live your life, make disciples of all nations.

It brought up the question, “Why haven’t I heard this before? Did I miss that section in my New Testament work?”

Before we proceed, let me offer this caution: don’t get your theology from social media. If you take everything you hear from your feeds at face value, you will have a severely malformed and arguably heretical understanding of your faith. It’s in the pattern of the Berean Christians in Acts 17:11 that I share this transcript and the following thoughts: “[T]hey received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.”

Additionally, we must understand that the English we read in our Bibles, physical or digital, is not the original form in which the Scriptures we have were written. The text we have today originated in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic; were translated into Latin (the Vulgate), or Greek first if the source was Hebrew (the Septuagint); and has had its meaning debated over the years before arriving in one of the various translations from which we can choose to read.

Thus, understanding what the original language in all its semantics and semiotics is crucial. Yet, you don’t have to go to seminary, get a Bible degree, or become a linguistics expert in order to understand what you’re reading. This is my aim and hope in this and following articles where I unpack contested Greek words in well-known verses so that you and I both can have a better grasp on the Biblical text.

What Does πορευθέντες Really Mean?

In Matthew 28:19—the famous “Great Commission”—Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” The little word often translated as “go” is the Greek πορευθέντες (pronounced po-rew-THEN-tes). The reel in question explains this word as and argues for it meaning “in your going,” as if the command is simply “while you go about your normal life, make disciples.” That sounds convenient, but it isn’t actually what the Greek grammar says.

I’m no expert in Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, but one of the few things I’ve learned is we must remember that Greek words are built like Lego blocks, with different pieces that each carry meaning. Πορευθέντες is made of three parts:

• πορευ-: the root of the word, which simply means “to go” or “to travel.”

• -θ-: a marker that shows this is in the “aorist passive” form—a particular way of talking about action as a whole, not as something ongoing.

• -έντες: an ending that tells us this is a participle (like the “-ing” form of a verb in English) and that it’s plural, matching the disciples Jesus is speaking to.

Thus, when you look at a Greek lexicon, you’ll see that this word is parsed out, or classified as, VAPP-PNM:

• Verb – This simply means the word comes from a verb, an action word. In this case, the action is “to go.”

• Aorist – Greek verbs don’t just tell you when something happened (past, present, future), but also how the action is viewed. The “aorist” tense views the action as a whole, almost like a snapshot rather than an ongoing video. So instead of “while going,” it’s more like “having gone.”

• Passive – Voice tells you how the subject relates to the action. In English, active is “I throw the ball,” passive is “I am thrown.” Here, it’s “passive” in form, but the verb πορεύομαι is what’s called “deponent.” That means it looks passive but has an active meaning. So we translate it simply as “go,” not “be gone.”

• Participle – A participle is a verbal adjective. Think of English words ending in “-ing” like “running” or “singing.” In Greek, participles connect actions to the main verb, usually adding time or circumstance. Here, the participle links the going to the main command: “make disciples.”

• Plural – This shows that Jesus isn’t addressing one person but all the disciples together. It’s a group command, not a private commission.

• Nominative – Greek nouns, pronouns, and adjectives change form depending on their role in the sentence. The “nominative” case usually marks the subject (the one doing the action). So this participle matches the subject of the sentence—the disciples.

• Masculine – Greek words also reflect gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). Here it matches the masculine form of “disciples,” though it doesn’t imply only men. It’s simply grammatical agreement.

Put it all together and πορευθέντες means something closer to “having gone” or “after you go.” It’s not a present-tense “as you are going,” but an aorist participle—Greek’s way of describing something as a completed action that sets up the main command.

Why Parse Words?

When looking at phrases like this, isolating verbs like this can certainly provide a deeper understanding and more critical study of the Greek language. However, the main verb in the verse is not “go” at all, but “make disciples.” The “going” is assumed; the command is to disciple. This matters because the difference between “in your going” and “having gone” changes the force of the passage. “In your going” can sound casual—make disciples if and when you happen to have the opportunity. But “having gone” is deliberate—it assumes you are going out, moving beyond where you are, and once you’ve done that, the command is to make disciples.

Modern translations handle this differently. The ESV and NASB both say simply “Go therefore and make disciples,” which captures the push outward without softening the command. The NIV also translates it as “Therefore go and make disciples,” leaning into the same sense. But the “in your going” explanation often used in teaching tries to make the verb less forceful than it actually is.

The Point: Keep It In Context

Here’s what I’m getting at: Jesus wasn’t saying, “If you happen to go, remember to make disciples along the way.” He was saying, “Having gone out into the world, make disciples of all nations.” The grammar itself underlines the mission. The Church is not meant to stay put and disciple if the chance arises—it is sent, and once sent, it must disciple. Craig Blomberg says this in commenting on the verb in question:

The main command of Christ’s commission is “make disciples” (mathēteusate). Too much and too little have often been made of this observation. Too much is made of it when the disciples’ “going” is overly subordinated, so that Jesus’ charge is to proselytize merely where one is. Matthew frequently uses “go” as an introductory circumstantial participle that is rightly translated as coordinate to the main verb—here “Go and make” (cf. 2:8; 9:13; 11:4; 17:27; 28:7).1

Yet, even in my retort against this interpretation, we must still be further careful not to fully ignore the contextual and often localized nature of how God calls us. Many will not go to foreign places or strange lands, but may remain where their family has been for generations; case in point, I’m among the first in my family to leave the East Coast where we’ve been for decades. It is in this vein that Blomberg continues:

Too little is made of it when all attention is centered on the command to “go,” as in countless appeals for missionary candidates, so that foreign missions are elevated to a higher status of Christian service than other forms of spiritual activity. To “make disciples of all nations” does require many people to leave their homelands, but Jesus’ main focus remains on the task of all believers to duplicate themselves wherever they may be.2

Conclusion: Sent and Sustained

Parsing πορευθέντες reminds us that Jesus’ commission is neither casual nor optional. The grammar does not allow us to reduce the Great Commission to a vague encouragement to share our faith if the opportunity arises. Nor does it elevate “going” as if the mere act of traveling were the main thing. Instead, the text places the weight squarely on making disciples, with the going—whether across the street or across the globe—assumed as part of obedience.

This means two things for us. First, every Christian is sent. Some will indeed cross cultures and borders, while others will remain in familiar neighborhoods and family networks. But both are expressions of the same obedience: having gone into the world, we are to make disciples. Second, every Christian is sustained. The Commission ends not with a burden, but with a promise: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20). The command is great, but so is the presence of the One who gives it.

So, no matter your context—whether you are the mom in Northern California, the pastor in a pulpit, or the student at a campus—you are sent under the authority of Christ and sustained by His presence. The Great Commission is not “in your going” as if discipleship were a side project of daily life. It is “having gone,” the very purpose for which Christ sends His Church into the world.