260729 – Jehovah’s Witness Origin and Doctrine vs Historic Christianity

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 29, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Rena

260728 – The Great Commission

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Developing the Courage and Certainty to Evangelize

Why the Sects Out-Evangelize the Church

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay · 28 July 2026

Preface: Context

Charlie and I had a conversation this week about the future of Renaissance Ministries and how to create an effective ministry template that leaves time for living life. Charlie was born a Catholic, was part of the LDS church for many years, went on a mission as a teen, and was married in the temple. He eventually left the LDS version of Christianity for the Historic Christian faith. One of the things he has repeatedly said was how much time he spent doing LDS activities. He was a willing servant, and the church gave him so much LDS work that his life had little room for anything else. I relate this story as a caution. We must decide how much organization and outreach we should do to spread the message of Renaissance Ministries as we become larger and more widely known. That said, I think sharing the gospel is vital; all the methods of outreach that are so effectively done by the JW and LDS are options. What kind of outreach should we do? As a proposal, I think duplicating and multiplying the small group meeting concept is a good foundation. It could include the following: Zoom or home meetings; inviting new people but limiting to an agreed-upon limit so that everyone has the opportunity to share, grow and learn together. The discussion today is about what types of evangelization should be done. How do we get the word out so that the whole world can participate and reach the depth of personal challenge we have experienced in these interactions?

I. The Facts of Evangelization by Christians

Let’s begin with a few facts: the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Latter-day Saints go door to door witnessing, and the LDS send their young people out for two years at their own expense. I have received a number of handwritten letters — two pages, in cursive — from people in this town I have never met, who believe that Jehovah of the Bible is God the Father, that Jesus was the Archangel Michael and not God, and enclose a tract. I spent 26 weeks, an hour a week, on Zoom going through the JW program of introduction to Biblical concepts with a wonderful couple who dressed up nicely for the meeting and were polite and friendly. It was an enjoyable time of fellowship and studying the Word. During that study, there was little I could identify as distinct from their teachings and those of Historic Christianity. To identify the distinction between the doctrine of the JW and Historic Christianity requires careful parsing of the scriptures and history of these two Christian traditions. Here is an analysis of the JW history and doctrine.

The one obvious difference is the level of average commitment to (boldness in) evangelization by the LDS/JW and Historic Christianity adherents. Most of us in the body of Historic Christianity will not raise the subject of salvation and a relationship with God with a neighbor we have known for decades. Very few of us spend an hour a week explaining the Bible to a potential convert. The question is then, “Should we?” The answer is, yes, I think we should.

An explanation for this difference may be that we, as Historic Christians, don’t want to risk alienation in a culture that values diversity/tolerance as a primary virtue, has touted separation of Church and State as though it was a Constitutional principle (it is not), we have been told that American is not just a Christian nation (by Barack Obama), and that America’s strength is in its diversity (by woke culture).

Those reasons are probably part of why we are so non-evangelical in comparison, but I think there is a deeper reason. I think there are two reasons the JW and LDS sects are bold. 1) They believe what they are preaching, and 2) evangelism is integral to their institutional structure (doctrine, leadership, and history). My experience with both JW and LDS adherents is that they are deeply convinced that what they believe is true, and they believe they are doing me an invaluable service by telling me about their version of Christianity.

I believe many Christians are hesitant to witness because they are not certain that they can justify their belief in the Bible against the evidence and theories of science.

It seems that the JW and LDS adherents are not concerned about arguing with or comparing their beliefs with science. They probably don’t convert many secular humanists and materialists, but I don’t know that for certain. They believe their scriptures (the JW version of the Bible and the LDS Book of Mormon) are the correct words of God, and they need no justification beyond that to share the gospel as they understand it. They are true believers and do not let arguments against Scripture or the evidence and theories of Science discourage or dissuade them from sharing and defending their beliefs.

In my experience, they speak as a man does when he is certain that what he speaks, has read, and has been told is true. I see in them no wavering, no hint of uncertainty, no room for doubt in their presentation. I do not know if they have secret questions in their hearts. I am certain that some do, given that some leave these groups.  Given this evidence, we know there is a spectrum of belief and certainty in their book, prophecies, and leadership. And while the individual may have questions in private, those doubts are never shared in public or during the witnessing and evangelization encounters. Whether that is simplistic, a strategy, or the product of pressure from leadership is unknown.

I don’t see the specifics of their organizational formality in the LDS or JW scriptures. I suspect that each tradition has developed its own culture from a combination of the leadership, community response (what worked), and interpretation of its scriptures. All organizations act like people, to a greater or lesser extent, on various traits (because they are made of people). They have a drive to survive. The bottom line is that they have evolved and survived. This is proof that their methods are effective in producing survival, not that their doctrine is true. They speak in a way that reflects certainty; they use logic that is consistent to a point and to a depth that is adequate to convince a certain spectrum of the population. The result is that a certain percentage of people will respond to that presentation. As people, we are sheep, and we will follow the most persuasive shepherd.

The shepherd we follow may be the shepherd of rational philosophy or experimental science. It may be the shepherd telling of the wonderful changes in their lives, the fulfillment of Christian fellowship, or the sense of meaning. It may be the shepherd telling the story of the Bible and its promises of salvation and restoration with God. Regardless, as humans, we all follow others, at least to some extent. None of us is an island, independently inventing and validating all morality, symbolism, metaphysics, ontology, culture, and methodology.

II. Why We Are Quiet

Consider what a Christian actually faces when he opens his mouth in this culture. The Biblical literalist claims the world was created 6000 years ago, but the Scientific Establishment claims the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The Bible says there was a flood, and the geologist says there is no such geological record. The Bible says God made the world in six days, and scientists say the Big Bang began the process out of nothing, and the Earth was formed 4 billion years ago.

I am not concerned by any of these apparent contradictions. I think the language of the Bible is sufficiently inclusive/ambiguous to allow for any length of time for the Earth to form and life to arise, however God created it. To my mind, the actual point of tension is that the Bible states, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6) In a culture whose central moral conviction is that there is no ultimate truth, no one may claim to be right, evil is relative, and right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, any behavior is permissible by adult parties in a willing contract. This single verse requires the Bible-believing Christian to make a statement which marks him as an exclusionist when he says there is only one way to God. This is a claim that makes everyone wrong, lost, and going to hell except the Christian. That type of stand does not sound like someone who is trying to find common ground to build a relationship on. This is the problem of “What about the pygmies, the people who are good people who never heard?” I think we need to confront that one right up front and admit that we don’t know how God deals justly with the person who has never heard, but I think we can trust that He will be fair with every person. To dwell on such questions is a type of avoidance; the reality is that it takes discipline to choose a life of righteousness, and we may need a miraculous change of heart to actually live it. The bottom line is really, will the person we are witnessing to live a better life if he submits to His Way? And, will a life committed to living His Way produce the best possible life for you/me/us?

How bold should we be in our witness? Should we speak or just let our excellent, loving life speak for itself? What should our posture be toward those to whom we are sharing the gospel? Should we go door to door? Should we sit in front of the DMV with a brochure holder full of tracts? Should we write letters to complete strangers?

The foundation of every Christian’s faith depends on a belief in the divine revelation of the Bible.  (My definition of the word “belief” is the state of mind that holds a concept so strongly that a man acts upon it.) We could defend our faith with a terse confession of the Bible’s inerrant authority with a statement such as, “the Bible said it, so I believe it.” But that isn’t a sufficiently complete elaboration of why people come to faith. People do not accept the Bible as the authoritative Word of God without corroborating evidence. There are many reasons that people believe the Bible. These include: its correspondence with history and contemporary documents, archaeological evidence, the evidence of the change in people’s lives, the familial tradition and teaching of the faith, the evidence of science, such as the fine-tuning argument, and the evidence of a God in nature and the resonance of the heart.

Such reasons are significant, in that they satisfy the mind and heart and spirit to a degree, but they cannot meet the standards of scientific reproducibility or explain why the atonement is necessary (the simple mechanistic reduction – the mechanio reducto).  And that is the crux: the culture we speak to has been trained to ask for the mechanism. The Bible does not offer a detailed causal explanation of the construction of the universe that would make it necessary for the literal Son of God, who is God Himself, to incarnate, live a perfect life, be falsely condemned and killed, rise again, and by doing so pay for my sins if I acknowledge His payment for my sins with His death, and commit my life to living as He lived.

The Bible is a revelation, which should be consistent with facts. The problem is that we cannot determine for certain that it is true from its own testimony. In fact, the story actually does not have enough detail to verify it by understanding and logic. This appears to be intentional,

• (1 Corinthians 2:14) — Spiritual things seem confusing: “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him… neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
• (2 Corinthians 4:3–4) — The gospel is veiled: “If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost… the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not.”
• (Matthew 13:11–13) — Jesus says the mysteries are hidden: “It is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.”
• (Isaiah 29:10–14) — A spirit of deep sleep: “The LORD hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep… the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed.”
• (Romans 1:21–22) — Minds become darkened: “Their foolish heart was darkened… professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

The apologist for Science believes he has an explanation for the existence of the universe to a great extent (knowing that he does not know the deepest mysteries). He points to relativity, natural selection, and the chain of physical causation running from the Big Bang to the present as evidence of the depth of scientific knowledge. The apologist for science believes he is standing on firm ground, as he bases his opinions on experiments, logic, and mechanism, which reflect objective reality. The Scientist believes his Christian friend is standing on ancient mythology that has been long disproven.

We are not silent because we lack courage. We are silent because we have been made to feel that we lack grounds.

III. The Priesthood Nobody Voted For

I believe we should challenge the conventional scientific doctrine and see to what degree it is valid, and where the edge of its uncertainty is. First, we ask what the materialist actually proposes. While doctrine varies within any religion, some common beliefs are: Matter existed eternally, uncaused. Matter organized itself. Matter produced life without intending to, and then produced mind — the very faculty now being used to explain matter — with no one directing any of it. I believe such an explanation for life and existence asks for more faith than Genesis does. It is appropriate to articulate the counterarguments against the certainty of Scientism.

The structure of science is not explanatory; it is a collection of experiments and facts with explanations that are not consistent with one another. There is one theory for particles and mass and another for fields and energy. Space and time are a mystery. Relativity explains the large, and quantum mechanics explains the small, and the equations describing the two are incompatible, and a century of effort has not joined them. Science is not a cathedral; it is a construction site. Science has constructed a theory of the universe and its implied morality. The fact is that the edifice of science is a hodgepodge of theory and experiment with no unified logic to justify its claim to truth.

I believe this realization relocates the burden. As Historic Christians, we have been made to feel like defendants by the apologists for science. But when we examine the foundations of science, we see that it is also a system of faith. We hold that the Bible implies God by the evidence of the revelation. Science holds that there is no God, based on the evidence of experiment, which does not provide a logical proof.

But there is something more going on here than a disagreement about evidence and theory. Physicists have become the de facto priesthood of this age. They have been given the authority to tell us what is real and the implications of that revelation. They are consulted on origins, on ends, on the nature of the human person. Their pronouncements arrive with the authority that once attached to a bishop’s. The problem is that the nature of humanity is similar to that of the sheep.  We follow leaders because we do not know the end from the evidence of the moment. We follow those who present themselves with certainty. We cannot know everything, so we follow those who understand things that we do not know. The problem is that our leaders are blind guides. (Matthew 15:14) “They be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”

A generation is being led by shepherds who do not believe in the good Shepherd. They are not wicked men. Most are careful and honest within their domain. But they are answering questions their instruments cannot reach, and the flock cannot tell the difference between questions the scientists have rightfully answered and those which are extrapolated, but unjustified by the logic of the causal chain they have derived.

This is why the physics matters to me, and why I have spent forty years on it. Not because the world needs another theory. Because the scientist-philosophers who have attempted to declare the nature of reality from the interpretation of their experiments have given their evidence credit for more explanatory power than it deserves. The Conscious Point Physics and the associated Theory of the Atonement do not prove God or the Gospel, but they do provide a plausible, logical, and unified explanatory connection between the Bible and the experimental evidence of science. I am hoping that the cause-effect arguments are small enough and well enough substantiated to at least not be dismissed as pious noise.

IV. What the Argument Can and Cannot Do

I don’t want to overpromise, since my argument is not without gaps in evidence and theory. What it does provide is a plausible sequence of causal forces that give what has been completely missing for the person who wishes to share the gospel with those who are blinded by science. It gives an argument, even if incomplete, that is like a series of stepping stones across a wide river, allowing a crossing of a vast distance in small jumps.

We now have a chain of premises for the atonement — twelve of them, ending in a conclusion that follows if the premises hold. It answers a question I have been asked all my life and never been able to answer: not that Christ died for us, but how that death reaches across two thousand years and touches me.

While the 12 Postulates and the argument leading to the conclusion are not a proof, at least they provide a pathway for the searcher to justify why God does not make Himself obvious by preventing every illness, accident, crime, and reversal. God veils Himself precisely so that agreement with and adoption of His Way is not compelled. A demonstrated God would coerce like gravity coerces a falling stone, and coerced love is not love. The whole architecture of creation, as I understand it, exists to keep a genuine choice genuinely open for us to choose God’s love. I cannot prove the necessity of the Savior with absolute certainty, and that is for the same reason that I have claimed that God has created the universe. To make such a claim is to violate the reason for which the creation exists. It can only point in the direction of truth. I cannot locate it, identify it, and prove that it is the truth. Nevertheless, I can make that final act of faith, giving one’s life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, as the culmination of a series of small steps, rather than one large step that seems impassable at first consideration.

I believe the argument is logical and valid, but it rests upon premises that remain open to challenge. Grant them, and the conclusion follows necessarily. But the premises are argued, not revealed, and a reasonable person may decline one or more. This is where faith is required. More derivation and justification of the premises can be pursued endlessly. At some point, all arguments rest on axiomatic assumptions, on evidence that cannot be proven. This is true of conventional science, and it is true of Conscious Point Physics, and it is true of accepting the directive of the Bible and the metaphysical axioms assumed by the argument justifying the atonement.

Christ said the cross would be a stumbling block, and He meant it as a permanent feature, not a temporary defect awaiting better apologetics. Our aim is not to remove the stone. Our aim is to make it a pebble — something a man may still trip over, but one which he can now step across if he is willing to have the faith of a mustard seed. That is all, and it is enough.

V. The Danger That Sits Inside the Ambition

A friend told me of a dream. He was attempting to communicate about an invention. He had the invention documented on graph paper — several sheets, each ruled to a different scale. Anyone who has used graph paper knows the problem: without a legend telling you the size one square represents, it cannot be converted into reality. Large things can be perceived as small, and the small made to appear large. In the dream, there was no legend, and he could not properly communicate the invention. Upon awaking, he understood it: We cannot communicate and come to a mutual understanding unless we are using the same standard. If we are using different scales, then we must have a way of converting them from one to the other.

This is a description of what we face in the realm of witnessing to our fellow man. We must in some way convert the standards of the Bible to the standards of Science. Until we have that legend, that conversion table available, it will be impossible for these two groups of designers to communicate in a way that bridges the gap between the logic of the gospel and the logical evidence of science.  What appears to be two factions disagreeing about a conclusion is two worldviews that need a way to connect them so they can show that they are both describing the same creation.

My friend told me about a situation in his life that served as a useful analogy to our relationship with God. He was at a church gymnasium many years ago. He asked his young daughter to take her little sister for a drink of water. The girl turned to her stepfather to ask permission. The stepfather refused. My friend was hurt and said to God: I am her father, and she is listening to strangers. The answer came back: My children do that to me all the time. I am their Father, and they listen to strangers.

There are many voices in this world, and one of them is our Father God speaking to us.  Whatever stands between the Father and His children must be identified, and we must choose to listen to Him. When a man’s words are elevated above the words of God, the children start checking with him before they will act on what their Father has said. The intermediary need not be malicious. He need only be consulted first.

This is my standing caution that I express to my Latter-day Saint friends. Not that they are unsaved. My caution is narrower, and I am concerned that they are not living in the freedom of Christ. The Book of Mormon may or may not be of divine origin; I cannot say which is true with certainty. I am concerned by the caution of the Revelation to John that says, “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life…” (Revelation 22:18-19)

I do know the Book of Mormon was delivered by a man, just as the Bible was. But the Bible was inspired by God over 4 millennia, and many authors, all speaking with one voice. Such filtering removes the dogmatism of a single perspective. I know the claims of divinity and uncorrupted lineage of these later-day revelations (Muhammad, Joseph Smith, and Russel). To the extent that there is no disagreement with the BIble, I take all claimed prophecy and literature as additional perspectives on life. It may even be a divine perspective. But to the extent that any word disagrees, the Bible should take precedence. The more tangible concern is that the organization that has arisen around the Book of Mormon has a President who is called the prophet and whose word is taken as the word of God. Such doctrine allows the word of men to be inserted into the word of God, and given superiority over it.

The danger is that the gospel of grace in the Bible can have additional conditions of salvation attached to it. The result can be man laboring endlessly at things that were never asked of him. Works become attached to salvation rather than sanctification. In effect, it is the story of the child coming to another father before our Heavenly Father. This can lead to bondage. It is not damnation, but it is not the liberty in Christ that we were promised. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” (1 Timothy 2:5)

VI. The Same Knife, Turned Toward Me

Everything I have just said applies to me.

I am building a framework. I am hoping it will be evangelistic. Bill Bright, in the 60s and 70s, created Campus Crusade for Christ and had four spiritual laws. I have developed an apologetic with twelve premises and nine axioms. I believe they tell a deeper story that makes it easier to accept that the Bible may be true, but it is the story about the real story, the Bible. I don’t want to become a Mary Baker Eddy, Russell, or Joseph Smith. I just want to make it easier to believe the Bible is God’s word.

I do not want this or future generations to take my words and treat them as Scripture. If this theory becomes widely known, people may quote the premise chain or CPP axioms. This is fine. It’s just one man’s opinion. Everyone’s opinion deserves consideration to the extent that it helps make the Word of God, the Bible, more accessible and understandable. Many men have done the same: Armstrong, Campbell, Schofield, Finney, Calvin, Luther, etc.  All have illuminated some aspect of Scripture, but none are worthy of being its replacement. The same is true of my work. I do not have a final proof of God’s existence, or that Jesus is the Way to the Father, but I believe my argument, if followed, will make it easier for the modern scientific man to accept that the Words of the Bible are reasonable, and justify making Jesus the lord of one’s life.

I am pointing at Christ. That is all. My words are not the words of God; they are the words of a man who needed help understanding the words of God, and who wrote down what helped him. If the framework assists you, use it. If it becomes a substitute, then put it down and study the Bible, and put my words in their proper place, as support, not replacement.

The test is the same for any book or teacher. Does it send people to Scripture, or does it substitute for Scripture? Does a man leave the argument more able to read his Bible, or more dependent on my explanation of it?

VII. What We Are Actually Commissioned To Do

One further thought, a realization I had during our last fellowship meeting. We read the Great Commission as a command to baptize with water. But look at what it says: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” (Matthew 28:18-20) Perhaps the command was not about baptizing in water, but baptizing in the Name. Baptism means immersion. Perhaps we are being told to immerse people in the Name itself: the nature, the essence, the character of God.

Perhaps the water is a symbol of the all-encompassing presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Putting a man under water pictures the level of immersion in God that we should live inside of. The name, nature, and presence of God, Son, and Holy Spirit should fully envelop us so much that it becomes the medium we move in. We are told of John the Baptist, “John answered, saying unto them all, I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” (Luke 3:16) If we are promoting baptism in water as the goal, we are advocating for the same weaker version of baptism that John the Baptist said was inferior to what Jesus Christ was bringing. I think we should be preaching, teaching, and evangelizing for the greater, the more powerful, the more effective, and life-transforming immersion in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

If that reading holds, it reorganizes what we should be doing when we witness and evangelize. The task is not primarily to secure a decision to say the Sinner’s prayer or baptize in water. I think such a decision and symbolism are of great importance. Rather, I believe we should be focusing on the Great Commission’s clear command to go into all nations and encourage a person to immerse himself in the character of God until he is living in it. The argument clears an obstacle. The framework makes the stumbling block a pebble. But no one is saved by a premise chain, and the work is not finished when a man says he is persuaded. The work is ongoing sanctification, developing character, and serving our fellow man.

Which returns us to the two commandments upon which all is based. “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mathew 22:37-40) Everything else — the physics, the premises, the essays, the ministries — is support work. Useful work, but support work.

VIII. Readiness

There is a last question, and it is one of timing.

I have been told that it is time to make this public, to film the testimony, to build the channel, to put it where it can find whoever it was meant for. We are doing that to a small extent now with the website and fellowship meeting notifications. I do not intend to keep this message low profile or private until it is perfect.  There may well be a particular sort of person for whom this particular account is the method/argument that opens the door. I don’t think it will reach everyone, because even Jesus was not properly understood by Judas. The point is that it may reach some.  We each have to do the same, witnessing with whatever tools, analogies, and testimonies are at our disposal. The work is not perfect nor complete, and the infrastructure of support is not fully installed.

One of the important steps to take in the development of this program is the progression, the lesson plan, the gradient between elementary and more complex applications of the scripture in daily life.  The message is public now on the web, and a number of people receive the weekly invitation to the Fellowship meeting. My goal is for many people to meet in their own groups to study scripture, consider these essays, to share their insights, to work toward changing their hearts to be like Him. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) It is our job to share the gospel, and enroll people in full immersion in Him.

The other side of this effort is to not put your hand to the plow until you are ready. Christ waited thirty years. Thirty years of obscurity for three of ministry. “And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:62)

So the work continues: making it coherent, making it teachable, making it duplicable without my presence. For now, the summary of where we stand is this: We have a diagnosis of why the church is quiet (a fear of the culture and the authority of science). We have an argument that meets the culture on the ground it has chosen (the 12 Premises and the 9 Axioms). We have a discipline against the argument becoming proud and replacing a modern interpretation (the Bible is always the standard, not any modern prophets, revelations, or interpretations). And we have a commission to bring people into a life fully immersed in God.

That is the goal. We are making progress toward developing a coherent and more complete exposition of the questions that are stumbling blocks, moral dilemmas, and the unknown.

Thomas

Questions for Discussion

1. Is the diagnosis right? Are we quiet from embarrassment about grounds, or is something else going on — fear of relationship damage, simple disobedience, or a culture that has made all persuasion feel like aggression?
2. On the priesthood. If most belief is formed by trusting a shepherd rather than by personal verification, is that a defect to be corrected or simply how creatures learn? What follows for how we teach?
3. On the pebble. Where exactly is the line between an argument that clears an obstacle and an argument that compels? Can we tell when we have crossed it?
4. The mediator test. Apply it honestly to this fellowship: does what we produce send people to Scripture or substitute for it? What would the warning signs look like, and who is willing to say so?
5. On our LDS friends. Is bondage-not-damnation the right reading? What do we actually owe people we love who are, on our account, saved but not free — and what does love require that condemnation does not?
6. On baptism in the Name. If the commission is immersion in the character of God rather than in water, what does that change about how we would go about it this week?

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” — Matthew 28:19

“He must increase, but I must decrease.” — John 3:30

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260725 – Reconciliation of Man with the Father

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 25, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Necessity of the Son

A Deductive Argument from the Holiness of God to the Cross

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay – 25 July 2026

premise_chain_handout

Preface: What This Essay Claims and What It Does Not

The rule established in the preceding essays holds here without modification. The fact of the atonement is Register 1: certain, settled, not under revision. That Christ died for our sins, that He rose, that by Him we are reconciled to the Father — this is bedrock, and no argument below is offered as its support. Scripture does not require my reasoning in order to be true.

The mechanism is Register 3: hypothesis. What follows is an attempt to show that if certain premises hold — premises drawn from Scripture, from the observable structure of the world, and from a small number of frankly speculative postulates about the nature of God — then the atonement is not an arbitrary arrangement God happened to choose, but the only available solution to a genuine structural problem. The argument’s ambition is modest in one sense and large in another. It cannot prove the gospel. It can, if it succeeds, show that the gospel is what a coherent world would require.

The essay proceeds deductively. Premises are numbered so that any reader who wishes to reject the conclusion may locate precisely which premise he denies. That is the point of arguing this way: it makes disagreement productive rather than merely oppositional.

Part I — The Scriptural Datum: Separation Is Real and Operative

Before any speculation, a foundation must be laid in what Scripture plainly teaches. The claim to be established is narrow but essential: separation between God and sin is not a metaphor for divine disapproval. It is a real, operative condition with real consequences.

Six passages carry the weight.

Isaiah 59:2 is the clearest statement of the mechanism: “But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.” Note the direction of causation. God is not described as withdrawing in offense. The iniquity itself does the separating; the sin itself hides the face. This is the grammar of a barrier, not of a mood.

Habakkuk 1:13 requires careful handling. The verse reads: “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?”

The verse is not a flat proposition. It is the opening of a prophetic complaint, and the second half of it is a scandalized question. But observe why the question is scandalized. Habakkuk can build his complaint on the premise that God cannot look upon iniquity only because that premise is so utterly settled in Israel’s understanding of God that it can serve as the unquestioned ground of an accusation. The prophet is not arguing for divine purity; he is assuming it, and finding God’s apparent tolerance of the treacherous unbearable in light of it.

This is stronger evidence than a bare assertion would be. And it points directly at the problem this essay exists to solve. Habakkuk’s question — how can a God who cannot look on iniquity be looking at this? — is precisely the right question. The answer this essay proposes is that the iniquity is shielded, and that settlement is deferred. Paul says exactly this: God set forth Christ as a propitiation for sins that are past, through the forbearance of God (Romans 3:25). Forbearance is not indifference. It is deferred settlement against an account already underwritten. Habakkuk asks the question; the cross is the answer.

Genesis 3:22–24 gives the first instance: sin issues immediately in expulsion from the immediate presence. The pattern is established at the outset of the human story and never afterward reversed by any means but atonement.

Ezekiel 14:7 locates the agency in man: the one “which separateth himself from me, and setteth up his idols in his heart.” Man separates himself. The idol is erected in the heart, and the separation follows from the erection.

Romans 11:22 supplies the covenantal form — “otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” — establishing that the separation is not merely felt but structural, a severance of standing.

2 Thessalonians 1:9 gives the terminal case: everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power. The final state of the unreconciled is described spatially, in terms of exclusion from presence.

From these, four conclusions follow that the rest of the argument will use:

1. Separation from God is caused by sin, not by divine caprice.
2. It is initiated from man’s side, by man’s own act.
3. It is real and structural, not merely emotional.
4. It admits of a terminal, permanent form.

And one further datum, from the other side of the ledger: Ephesians 2:13 — “now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.” The separation is removable, and the means of its removal is specified.

Part II — The Lever: God’s Demonstrated Capability of Sequestration

The argument’s decisive move requires a further scriptural observation, and it is the one that makes everything else possible.

God does not merely tolerate separation. He performs it. He is demonstrably capable of taking a portion of what exists within His domain and placing it outside His fellowship while it yet continues to exist.

The angels who rebelled are the clearest case. They were not annihilated. They were sequestered — reserved in chains, held in a place prepared, permitted continued existence in a condition of exclusion (2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6; Matthew 25:41). The same operation appears in the final judgment: a place is prepared, and those who refuse are consigned to it. In every case the pattern is identical: continued existence, terminated fellowship.

This is the lever. If God possessed only the power to destroy what offends Him, the argument below could not run — evil would meet annihilation, and there would be no space in which a free creature could ever entertain it. But God possesses a subtler and more consequential power: the power to partition, to seal off a region within His own being and hold what is there at a distance from His unmediated presence, without ceasing to sustain its existence.

Everything that follows is an application of this single capability.

Part III — The Argument Proper

The Premises

P1 — God is self-existent. I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14). He owes His being to nothing outside Himself. (Register 1.)

P2 — God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). His nature is unmixed. (Register 1.)

P3 — God’s purity is constituted as an ongoing separation of light from dark. This is the essay’s first speculative postulate. On the hypothesis developed in the preceding essays, the ordered God is God allied wholly with the light — the One who, out of His own primal depth, refused all commerce with the inert and the dark and organized Himself into concentrated, wakeful consciousness. Purity, on this reading, is not a static attribute but an act perpetually maintained. (Register 3.)

The consequence of P3 is severe and must be stated plainly: if God’s very identity consists in the rejection of darkness, then admitting darkness into His unmediated presence is not merely distasteful to Him. It is self-annihilating. He would not be who He is. His being is at stake in His holiness. This is why the response to sin cannot be indulgence, and why Habakkuk’s premise is correct.

P4 — God is love (1 John 4:8). (Register 1.)

P5 — Love cannot be satisfied alone, nor by a compelled response. A love that cannot be withheld is not love; it is a mechanism wearing love’s face. Therefore the fulfillment of love requires an other capable of genuine refusal. (Register 1 in substance, reasoned in form.)

P6 — Therefore God brings forth genuine others, and ultimately a creation of free creatures, in order that love may be freely returned. (Follows from P4, P5.)

P7 — Genuine freedom to refuse requires real access to the alternative. A choice between the good and nothing is not a choice. The creature must be able to see, weigh, be drawn by, and elect the darkness — which is to say, the creature must exist in proximity to evil as a live option. (Reasoned.)

P8 — Moral disorder, once introduced, is conservative. It does not decay, and it will not anneal itself by the passage of time or the accumulation of later goods. A sinful act imprints the substrate and propagates; a subsequent good act, occurring later in time, cannot reach backward to cancel the earlier disturbance. Disorder is removed only by the injection of an exactly opposed, order-restoring pattern, and such injection is costly. (Register 3 in its physical form; Register 1 in its scriptural form — “the wages of sin is death,” and the whole sacrificial system presupposes that guilt requires discharge rather than fading.)

The Contradiction

From P3 and P7 a contradiction follows, and it is the engine of the entire argument.

• By P3, the Father’s presence cannot contain darkness.
• By P7, free creatures must be positioned where darkness is available to them.
• Therefore, free creatures cannot be positioned in the Father’s unmediated presence.

But by P6, free creatures must exist, or love goes unfulfilled. And by P1, there is nowhere outside God for them to be placed; nothing exists outside the self-existent One (“in him we live, and move, and have our being” — Acts 17:28).

The problem is now exactly stated. God requires creatures who can choose evil. God cannot abide evil in His presence. There is no “outside God” in which to put them. These three cannot be reconciled — unless there exists a way to make a region within God that is at once sustained by Him and shielded from His unmediated purity.

The Resolution

P9 — The capability of sequestration, established in Part II, is precisely the required operation. God can partition. He can hold a region within His own being at a remove from His unveiled presence while continuing to sustain it.

P10 — The partition is effected through the Son, who creates and holds the creation. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:3). The Father does not create the physical order directly; the Son does. And the Son differs from the Father in exactly the respect the problem requires: the Son can look upon evil without immediately separating it from Himself. He can contain a domain in which darkness is a live option, sustaining it rather than expelling it.

This yields the answer to a question Scripture raises and does not explain: why the Son, and not the Father, is the Creator. On this hypothesis it is not an incidental division of labor. It is the solution to the contradiction. The Son is the interface — the shield — by which a holy Father may remain in relation to a world where evil is possible. And the shield was in place before there was any wound; the arrangement is not a repair improvised after the fall but the architecture of creation itself.

So the creation is within the Son, and the Son is with the Father, and the sin of the world is real but held — shielded, during the creature’s embodied life, from the Father’s direct and consuming regard. This is the standing answer to Habakkuk’s complaint.

Part IV — The Symmetry Requirement: Why the Sequestered World Must Be as Severe as the Father

Here the argument reaches its least obvious and most important step.

A sequestered domain could, in principle, have been built with lax rules — a nursery where wrongdoing carried no weight. But it was not, and it could not have been, for a reason that follows necessarily from the purpose of the arrangement.

The domain is not a permanent holding cell. It is a passage. Its inhabitants are intended to emerge from it into the Father’s presence. And the moment that is granted, the standard inside the domain is constrained by the standard at the exit.

P11 — The exit condition governs the internal law. If souls formed inside the sequestered creation are to pass out of it into the unveiled presence of a God who cannot abide darkness, then whatever emerges must be actually clean — not pardoned by a lower court whose judgments the higher court cannot recognize. Therefore the Son was required to construct a world whose treatment of evil is exactly as uncompromising as the Father’s own: a world in which sin genuinely incurs death, in which the disorder is genuinely conserved, in which the accounting is exact.

This explains the character of the law we actually find. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life is not primitive vengeance; it is the statement of exactness. The sentence must match the offense precisely, because an inexact settlement would leave residue, and residue cannot pass the gate. It also explains why the world is harsh — why consequences are real, why sin genuinely wounds, why the creation groans. A softer world would have been a crueler one, because it would have produced souls unfit to leave it.

So: the Son built a domain as severe toward evil as the Father is, and then stood as its gatekeeper. The severity is not a flaw in the design. It is the design’s fidelity to its purpose.

Part V — Why the Debt Cannot Be Self-Paid

Two independent arguments establish that no creature can discharge his own account.

The temporal argument follows from P8. The disturbance propagates from the moment of the act. A later good deed radiates from a later moment. The two never meet in phase; the wave has already left the shore. Restitution may settle a debt between persons — and should be pursued — but it does not reach the imprint made in the substance of the creation. Good works cannot cancel sin because they arrive too late, and they always arrive too late.

The magnitude argument follows from the exactness requirement of P11. The required payment for sin is death — not merely physical cessation but the full separation from the Father’s love and presence. A creature paying that penalty has expended himself and gained nothing; he has satisfied the debt at the cost of the existence the debt was meant to preserve. Self-payment is possible in principle and useless in fact. The one who pays this price cannot be the one who benefits from it — unless the payer can survive the payment.

Which requires someone who does not deserve it.

Part VI — Why Only the Incarnate Creator Could Generate the Remedy

P12 — The remedy must be generated inside the domain, by one who is both innocent and master of the domain.

Four conditions must be met simultaneously, and only one person in the structure can meet them all.

First, the remedy must be generated inside the created order. The disorder exists in this substrate; an exactly opposed pattern must be introduced into this same substrate. It cannot be imported from outside the system. Therefore the Creator had to enter His creation — not appear in it, but be genuinely embodied within it, subject to its law.

Second, the payer must be genuinely liable to death and yet not deserve it. A being who could not die could not pay; a being who deserved death would be paying his own account. The incarnate Son satisfies both: a real body, killable under the domain’s law, animated by a life that had incurred no sentence. He knew no sin (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Third, the death must be unjust — and here is the mechanism of the credit. In a world governed by exact accounting, where every sin demands a death, the reciprocal holds: every death demands a sin. Christ’s death entered the ledger as an effect with no cause, a debit with no corresponding debt. This is not a bookkeeping curiosity. In a domain whose justice is exact by construction, an unmerited death constitutes a standing credit within the substance of the creation — a payment made, awaiting an account to which it may be applied.

Fourth, the payer must survive to administer it. Death could not hold Him because there was no warrant against Him; the sentence found nothing in Him to grip. The resurrection is therefore not a receipt appended to a completed transaction but part of the machinery itself. A payment sealed inside a destroyed payer cancels nothing. A treasury requires a living treasurer; an acquittal requires a living Advocate — he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25).

The Critical Distinction

One clarification prevents this account from collapsing: the correction established in the July essay. What Christ bore was our liability, not our disharmony.

Scripture’s own grammar is precise: the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). Laid on — a burden set upon a bearer, not a stain contracted. This is the exact logic of the sacrificial system, in which the hand is pressed to the head of the animal, and the guilt transferred, while the animal itself must remain without blemish — for a lamb blemished by the transfer would be disqualified by the very act meant to make it useful.

So two things must be held apart. Intrinsic disharmony is the actual disorder in a soul, a property of the thing, and it is what wrath grips. Forensic liability is the standing to receive what that disorder has earned — a relation, freely assumed, not a contagion caught. Christ took the position of the debtor without taking the debtor’s corruption. The wrath coupled to the sin He held, not to the Man who held it. This is how the wrath could be total, and He could still rise.

The cost was therefore real but of a different kind than contamination. It was the agony of holding the entire disorder of the world at the precise point where disorder is answered. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me is not the cry of a man being made evil. It is the cry of a man holding evil, at the place where evil meets its answer.

And One Further Distinction

The cross generated the answer to every sentence; it did not execute every sentence.

Without this, the argument proves too much: if total wrath fell upon the whole world’s disorder, every account closed at Golgotha, and all are saved irrespective of will — which is not the gospel and cannot be reconciled with Scripture’s warnings. The resolution is that in a conservative order, a disharmony is canceled only when its exact inverse is brought into superposition with it. At the cross, the Son generated the exact inverse of the world’s whole disharmony, and the entire cost of its generation fell on Him. That inverse now exists, complete and sufficient. It cancels no particular sin until that particular sin is brought into phase with it.

The reservoir is finite in nature yet inexhaustible in supply: finite because it matches exactly the disorder it answers, inexhaustible because it is a pattern applied, not a stock drawn down. Canceling your sin does not consume what remains for mine. This is why He may administer it, soul by soul, world without end, and the treasury never falls.

Part VII — The Son as Gatekeeper: The Argument from Jurisdiction

We may now read one of Scripture’s hardest sayings as a structural statement rather than a merely sectarian one.

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6).

On this account, the verse describes architecture before it describes religion. The reasoning is jurisdictional:

1. The debt was incurred inside a domain the Son created and sustains.
2. The law under which it was incurred is the law He established, in fidelity to the Father’s standard.
3. The payment that answers it was generated by Him, at His own cost, within that same domain.
4. The exit from that domain into the Father’s presence is therefore His to administer.

He is not an arbitrary tollgate. He is the only party with standing to discharge the obligation, because it is His system, His law, His payment, and His threshold. When a soul emerges from the shelter of embodiment and stands exposed to the Father’s unveiled regard, the Son either applies the credit of His unjust death to that account, or He does not — and there is no other office in the structure competent to do it.

This also explains what happens at that threshold. Only what is clean can pass. The debt discharged, the disorder canceled, what remains of the person is what was genuinely conformed to the light — the treasure laid up, the character actually formed. What was mere accommodation of the flesh does not survive the passage; it is not smuggled through but consumed. Every man’s work shall be made manifest… and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is (1 Corinthians 3:13).

Part VIII — Why Reception Is Required: The Logic of At-One-Ment

The final step is the one most often mistaken for arbitrariness, and it is in fact the most rigorously necessary of all.

Why must the remedy be received? Why does God not simply apply it universally and be done?

Because the entire structure exists to make free love possible, and an imposed remedy would destroy at the last moment the very thing the whole arrangement was built to obtain.

Follow the chain. Creation exists so that love may be freely given (P4–P6). Freedom requires real refusal (P7). The sequestered world exists to make that freedom survivable (P9–P10). Its severity exists to make its graduates fit to leave (P11). The remedy exists because the disorder freedom produced is conservative and costly to cancel (P8, P12). If, at the final step, the remedy were applied without consent, then the creature’s will would have been overridden precisely at the point where it mattered most — and God would have obtained, at infinite cost, exactly the puppet He declined to make at the beginning.

Therefore, reception is not a fee charged for grace. It is the last and highest expression of the freedom the whole creation was built to protect.

And note what reception consists of. It is alignment — bringing one’s own disorder into phase with the remedy, which requires acknowledging that the disorder is one’s own (confession), releasing the claim to it (repentance), and submitting to the order that will replace it (Lordship). That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved (Romans 10:9). This is not the recitation of a formula but the actual turning of a will.

Hence the word: at-one-ment. Not a transaction concluded at a distance but the making of two into one. The separation established by Isaiah 59:2 is closed by Ephesians 2:13. What sin partitioned, alignment with the Son rejoins.

And the refusal remains genuinely available. The disorder stays coupled to whoever bears it; every man shall bear his own burden (Galatians 6:5). Hell requires no geography on this account — it is the condition of a soul holding its own uncanceled disorder, in a domain from which there is nowhere outside God to be exiled. Not a sentence imposed from without but a state retained from within.

Part IX — The Conclusion Stated

The argument may now be set out in a single chain:

God is love, and love unreciprocated is unfulfilled → therefore free others must exist → freedom requires access to evil → but God’s own being consists in the rejection of evil, and there is nothing outside God → therefore a sequestered domain is required, which God is demonstrably able to make → the Son creates and sustains it, being able to look upon evil without expelling it → but its exit opens onto the Father, so its law must be as exact as the Father’s own → therefore sin genuinely incurs death and disorder is genuinely conserved → therefore no creature can pay his own account, being both too late and too small → therefore the remedy must be generated inside the domain by one innocent and sovereign within it → therefore the Creator incarnates, dies unjustly, and thereby establishes an exact credit in the substance of the creation → and rises, that a living Advocate may administer it → and administers it upon reception, because imposing it would destroy the freedom the whole structure exists to protect → and the one who receives it is made clean, and passes the gate, and is at one with the Father.

Therefore the Savior is not an accommodation. He is a necessity — the only possible bridge between a holiness that cannot tolerate darkness and a love that requires free creatures who can choose it.

The cross is not an arbitrary transaction. It is the costly, exact, and structurally required remedy that makes the continuation of a free, love-capable universe consistent with the purity of God. And the acceptance of that remedy is not a religious formality but the act by which a creature, freely and with open eyes, aligns himself with the order that alone can sustain him in the presence of the Father.

Part X — Objections, and the Limits of the Claim

Intellectual honesty requires that the weakest joints be named rather than concealed.

On the language of the Son’s origin. This essay has spoken of the Father “bringing forth” the Son and of the Son as the one through whom the Father acts. The stronger formulation used in the July essay — that the One who was alone divided His own perspective into Father and Son — is preferable to any language of the Son being created, and should be standardized. The distinction is not pedantic. The historic confession is that the Son is begotten, not made — eternally of the Father’s own being rather than the first of His products. Language suggesting the Son is a creature is the position the Church examined and rejected at Nicaea, and any essay of mine that appears to teach it will be read as teaching that whatever else it says. The argument here does not require it: everything above works, and works better, if the Father-Son distinction is an eternal self-distinction within the one God rather than a manufacture.

On the cosmogony. That God arose by stages from an undifferentiated depth is the most speculative element in the framework, and I have said before that the passage from nothing to something is indefensible. The distinction between priority of organization (an inner sequence within one being) and priority of being (owing existence to another) does real work in protecting the doctrine of divine aseity, but it is a repair applied to a strain, not the absence of strain. The main argument does not depend on it. If one holds simply that God is eternally light with no darkness in Him, every step from P3 onward survives intact. Readers who find the cosmogony unhelpful should discard it and keep the rest.

On “nothing exists outside God.” This is foundational to the framework and must be guarded carefully. It is panentheism — all things within God — and not pantheism: we are not God, do not become God, and do not share His perspective or authority. Acts 17:28 supports it. But the guard must be explicit every time it is asserted, because the distance between “in Him we have our being” and “we are divine” is short in most readers’ hearing.

On the framework’s relation to the tradition. The account developed here is closer to received theology than it may appear. The structure of exact satisfaction is essentially Anselmian. The distinction between borne liability and contracted disharmony recovers the classical separation of guilt from pollution which the Reformed tradition has long maintained. That an independent line of reasoning arrived at distinctions the tradition already possesses is evidence that the reasoning is tracking something real.

On the tension we have not resolved. The framework predicts nothing whatever about how many are finally saved. It describes how the remedy is made and how it is applied; it is silent on how many present themselves. That silence is honest, and the hope of a wider reconciliation is held here as hope and not preached as promise — for a promise of certain rescue, published and leaned upon, would remove the very reason a soul might set out.

Closing

We live in exactly the kind of world that would require a cross. That is the whole of the claim.

If the mechanism proposed here helps a doubting mind see why the sacrifice of Christ is reasonable rather than arbitrary, let it serve. If any part of it is wrong — and some part of it surely is — the cross stands unaffected. The reasoning is a crutch for those who need one, offered by a man who needed one. It is not the gospel.

The gospel is shorter, and it does not depend on me:

For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. — Romans 5:10

In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. — Ephesians 1:7

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. — Ephesians 2:13

And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? — Luke 6:46

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260719 – Recap – God, the Beginning, and the Atonement

by Thomas Abshier | Jul 21, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Evolution from Nothing, the Veil, and the Eternal Relationship

An Inquiry into Atonement, Freedom, and the Purpose of Creation

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay · July 19, 2026

I. Introduction

The fellowship’s most recent gathering began with a discussion of the atonement and the questions it raises. How does the death and resurrection of Christ reconcile humanity to God? In particular, what is the nature of the universe that such an offering could be effective?

A satisfying answer requires a story that combines all aspects of life inclu, divine revelation interacting with physical forces and structures, patterns and facts of life, existence and the hypothetical origin of a God who has no beginning, the self-imposed limits and needs of God, man’s weakness and what he can offer God, the purpose of life and the suffering of innocent victims, the interaction of complexity and existence, consciousness thought and emotions, pleasure and pain, and polarity.

The bottom line: we don’t know the details of why Jesus had to die for our sins. The best we can do is look in retrospect, triangulate the data of scripture and life, and speculate why the atonement was necessary.

Some of the foundational axioms (assumptions) about the fundamental nature of life include:

• Human freedom is central to creating a world with significance, purpose, and meaning. Free will requires that God must remain hidden.
• Randomness and multiple layers of emergent phenomena play an important part in disguising ultimate cause.
• God knows the future, and human freedom stays intact.
• Sin separates us from God and death is its outcome.
• The mystery of existence is ultimately unknowable.

The fellowship is a small group; we encourage everyone to express their opinions, think outside the box of conventional Biblical interpretation, and maintain its letter and spirit. I believe scripture represents a logical and understandable reason underneath its claims.

A note on what is knowable based on Biblical revelation and physical observation, and what is speculation. We accept Scripture as divine revelation. To the extent that Scripture is unambiguous, we accept these revelations as authoritative and settled. To the extent that the mechanisms of these revelations are unspecified, I consider such doctrine open for speculation. Likewise, ambiguous Scripture is open to speculation.

Unambiguous doctrine includes: Christ died, rose, and He reconciles those who receive Him. Why this is true, or how it was done, is unspecified in causal/mechanistic/logical language; thus, it is open for speculation.

The speculation considered includes a cosmological hypothesis and a physical model of disorder drawn from the Conscious Point Physics (CPP) framework. These are presented as reasoned conjecture. Today’s essay is a study in hypothetical explanation for questions around the atonement. This discussion and these ideas are not 1) authoritative, 2) a replacement for scripture, or 3) divine revelation. Rather, we are engaging in informed reasoning to help give unbelievers a foothold into an abstract reality and to strengthen the faith of believers by offering a plausible explanatory metaphor to forces, structures, and rules to which reason can be applied to fill the gaps left by scripture.

II. The Application of the Atonement: Sufficiency and Reception

The discussion opened on our attempt to weigh the suffering of Christ against the accumulated evil of history. If any sin condemns a man to death, how does the death of one man compensate and counterbalance so vast a quantity of wrong committed by humanity?

The difficulty resolves when we consider the atonement is not a quantity of merit against a quantity of guilt. That is, the redemption is not a matching of sums. Rather, an entirely new paradigm must be constructed to understand how the death of the God-man, Jesus Christ, was sufficient to forgive the sins of the entire universe.

Foundational assumption: The Word/Son, as the Creator, is the essence, totality, and substance of the spirit-mind-body of the entirety of the creation.

Hypothetical method: The Son/Word declared the Conscious Points from His mind-spirit to create the “body” of creation (the physical universe), of which we are composed. We base this on John 1:3, John 1:14, Acts 17:28, among others. The important point: Christ is the entirety of the universe. The universe, the physical, psychic, soul, and spirit world of us and the creation, cannot be separated from Him. The universe is not the creation of God the Father. The Son was His creation. The universe was created by/of/from the Son. And my point of conjecture: The universe cannot be separated from the Son; the universe is an extension of the existence of the Son.

John 1:1-4 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”
John 1:14 “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Acts 17:28 “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.”

Jesus Christ was the creator of the entire creation. When Jesus incarnated into the creation, His spirit, as God the Son, was retained. Thus, the man Jesus Christ is intimately connected with the body of all creation, all creatures, and all men. Given that His spirit is the source of all, His incarnation is, in effect, the embodiment of every object, creature, and man. Thus, in a very literal sense, the death of His body was the death of the body (physical substance and spiritual essence) of the entire creation. The death of the source underlying all of creation is the death of the essence sustaining every man, creature, and object.

But death could not hold Him. There was no warrant against Him. The death that God demanded for sin (that is, the complete separation of Himself from the presence of the carriers of sin/darkness/disharmony)

But given that His death was unjustified within the rules according to the divine order (sin = death), His death represents an injustice that must be corrected to balance the scales. Because every sin demands a death, every death demands a sin. Thus, by the rules of justice, by the nature/essence/foundation of the God who sustains the Son, He demands justice. The balance/goodness/light of the creation/nature of God demands fairness and justice. Thus, every death must have a corresponding sin to ascribe to it. Since the body of the creation is connected to the body of Christ through His spirit (being the source of all existence of the physical world), the death of the body of Christ is in some related sense a death of the world/creation/all men. ***

Since the relation of God to Christ is one of Creator/created, and likewise, the Spirit of God is the Spirit of the Son, and in His existence/economy/nature, fairness must be executed exactly: if there was sin, death follows necessarily. This is a requirement of God’s existence/being/nature. He allows nothing dark in His spirit. He can keep the Son in His intimate presence because the Son is pure. The sin of man is hidden in the perfection of the Son. The creation is hidden in the Son. The sin of man is invisible to the judgment of God. Thus, when a man leaves the womb/the covering of the physical creation, His spirit/soul/character/deeds are exposed to the Father, and there is a separation from His spirit if there is impurity.

Thus, the death of Jesus Christ was effective as the atonement for the sins of humanity because He was (at His essence, by metaphor, and familial lineage) the body of all of humanity. As the embodied creator, His physical death was the representative of the physical death of the entirety of the creation. Thus, His death was sufficient in kind rather than exhausted by degree — a remedy whose efficacy does not diminish with use and which is therefore not consumed in application.

Thus, when Christ died, He imprinted the creation with a death. Essentially, the creation died, and the creation paid a death. The Son, the oversoul, the source of the creation, did not sin; thus, there was no sin to credit to His account. Thus the universe/the Son has an internal imbalance of credit and debit. Normally sin produces death, but death without sin is an effect missing a cause. As such, the universe is imbalanced. The cause-effect justice that God requires is not balanced.

This reframing clarifies the point that the atonement, while offered universally, is applied only upon reception. The distinction is between the sufficiency of the remedy and the necessity of its acceptance. On this reading, the work of Christ is adequate for all and effective for those who receive it; the remedy is inexhaustible, but its application is not automatic. The question is then how to access that application. The Bible declares that the atonement is applied to “those who believe.” This, of course, immediately raises the question of what constitutes belief.

As usual, the justice of hell for those who never encounter the name of Christ was an issue. The eternal condemnation of the unevangelized to loss through no fault of their own was rejected, with qualifications. Two considerations were offered. The first is scriptural: the light that “enlightens everyone” (John 1:9) is not confined to those who hear the explicit proclamation, and the moral law written on the heart (Romans 2:14–15) constitutes a genuine, if partial, access to the good.

The second is a matter of divine character: it is held to be inconsistent with the justice and mercy of God that culpability should attach to ignorance. The conclusion drawn was not a doctrine of universal automatic salvation but a refusal to close the door that scripture leaves ajar — an insistence that whatever the mechanism of reconciliation for those outside the explicit covenant, it must cohere with a God who is both righteous and merciful. The explicit pathway of the Great Commission remains essential; its necessity for those who do hear does not settle the standing of those who do not.

An alternative perspective, and the insight/vision that my ministry is based upon, is that the universe is inseparable from God, and that man was created for God’s pleasure. I believe God created us to fulfill His need for love. The Bible is a revelation of His Way of being that satisfies Him. The BIble describes the narrow gate:

• Not allowing souls into the presence of the Father without passing the gate of Christ
• He ascribes His atonement on our behalf.
• Because God does not openly inform people of His existence, we are uncertain of the consequences of living His way. Such hidden revelation allows free will. We can give unforced love (living Christ’s way) since there is truly a choice. We are not absolutely sure of His existence, rules, and consequences. We give our lives to him based on loving His Way and trusting His way is good. That is loving Him.
• Truly creating independent beings who could give love from a position of options.
• Wanting people to accept Christ to develop their character and their open-eyed love of Him.
• Allowing people in who have accepted His way in the call from their hearts.
• The deficiency is that they have not grown in character and maturity.
• What God the Father really wants is mature children to be in fellowship.
• The Father wants as many souls as possible to live through. He wants each of us to grow as a mature Son in our love of Him. He asked us to cleanse, to make Jesus Lord, and to grow in Him.
• Hebrews 5:12–14 (KJV)
  “…ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles… For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness… But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age…”
• 1 Corinthians 3:1–2 (KJV)
  “And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual,
  but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it…”

“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” John 14:6 (KJV). The Son cleanses the soul of its guilt of sin before coming into the presence of the Father.

The question we are really answering is, “What serves God’s ends?” God desires that none be lost,

III. Freedom and Its Shadow

Beneath the question of application of the atonement lies a prior question about the nature of the disorder that the atonement addresses. Here the discussion turned to the origin of evil, and to a distinction between Lucifer and Satan. It appears that “Lucifer” designates a particular exalted being, the light-bearer, while “Satan” functions as a title, the accuser, applicable to any who set their own will against the will of God. The scriptural warrant/validation of this title was illustrated when Peter, resisting Christ’s path to Jerusalem, is addressed as “Satan.” This usage clearly indicates that the term “Satan” is a role of opposition rather than a proper name. “But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.” (Matthew 16:23)

In the LDS version of Satan, the adversary proposed an alternative economy of salvation — one that would secure obedience by removing the capacity to disobey. The proposal is significant because it is seductive in its efficiency. In a world in which agency is abolished, no one can fall. Such a world would also be one without love, because there would be no free will. The reasoning is that the foundational structure of reality was created so that love can be freely given. Love which cannot be withheld is not love. Coerced righteousness is a counterfeit. And it is impossible to even recognize goodness when there is no polarity to compare it with.

This yields a principle that governed much of the subsequent conversation: the same freedom that makes genuine love possible makes genuine refusal possible, and through the identical door. Sin, on this view, is not a created substance but a disharmony with God’s Way, a deviation from the order that constitutes God’s own being. God does not author evil; He permits the condition of freedom because no other condition allows the expression of real reciprocity of love. The adversary’s alternative, whatever its promise of safety, would have destroyed the very thing creation exists to make possible.

IV. The Wrath of God and the Nature of Hell

If sin is the use of freedom to choose darkness in its varying forms, what is the divine response to it? The Biblical language, “wrath of God,” may be reframed without diminishing it. In the common picture, wrath is imagined as active hostility — a God who strikes at the sinner in anger. The proposed alternative construes wrath instead as withdrawal: the removal of the divine presence and love from those who have set themselves against it. Because human beings are constituted for relationship with the Father, the withdrawal of that relationship is not a mild consequence but a crisis at the root of the self. Wrath, so understood, is not the opposite of love but one of its expressions — the honoring of a creature’s refusal, and the permitting of the consequences that refusal entails.

The analogy is parental: the parent who releases an addicted adult child to the consequences of his choices does not thereby cease to love him, but recognizes that love cannot underwrite self-destruction. The withdrawal is itself an act of love, in that it refuses to sustain the illusion that the choice is without cost. This reframing carries a pastoral benefit noted in the discussion. It replaces the picture of an angry and unappeasable deity, whom one must perpetually placate, with the picture of a God whose “wrath” is the felt absence of love. The love of God never stops, but He cannot by His nature allow unrepentant sin in His presence.

The nature of hell was treated as continuous with this account. Three descriptions were placed side by side. The LDS description construes hell as damnation in the etymological sense of arrest — to be “dammed” is to be stopped, halted in one’s progression toward the divine, cut off from association with God by one’s own turning away. On this view, eternal damnation need not mean unending punishment; “eternal” functions as a name of God, so that “eternal damnation” is God’s damnation, a condition from which, in the vast economy of an eternal existence, one might yet be recovered. A Catholic described a movement away from the image of a subterranean place of fire toward the recognition that one carries heaven or hell within, wherever one is — while retaining belief in heaven as a genuine destination. A third description, a Protestant standpoint, located hell in the absence of God’s love: not primarily a place but a condition, and a company — those who are together in their separation from the source of love, in a state that the observable miseries of this world only faintly anticipate.

These accounts differ; in each, hell is understood as the natural terminus of a refusal to submit to the Lordship/Way of Christ, rather than an arbitrary sentence externally imposed. It is self-borne — the retained condition of one who has declined the only order that sustains life and love.

V. The Veil: Why God Remains Hidden

A philosophically central thread concerns the hiddenness of God. Why, if the divine reality is as glorious as the tradition maintains, is it not simply shown? Why must faith operate across a veil of unknowing? Three answers were advanced

1. The first is that the veil is necessary for the development of faith, which is important because God desires that we have faith in Him. “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6). The question is then, why does God desire us to have faith? Why does this please Him? The answer may be that He wants us to trust His character. Trust is an aspect of love. Faith is aspirational. Faith exists only over a distance. Relationship can only occur across a separation. Faith has an element of mystery, the unknown, and desire. All of these add attraction and polarity, which draw us closer. Separation is required in a universe where there is only One, and all relationship with and “other” is an illusion. Thus, while separation is an illusion, it is central to the experience of love. Faith, hope, and love are the three that are fundamental to establishing relationship.
2. The second answer is that the veil is the condition of freedom. Deductive proof would compel like gravity — and compulsion abolishes the freedom that love requires. Consider a person acting under the threat of a leveled weapon: such a person is nominally free to move, but the situation has rendered that freedom meaningless. If the perfection of God’s way and the futility of every alternative were rendered obvious beyond the possibility of doubt, there would be no genuine choice but to love God, and therefore no genuine love. The opacity of the world is not a defect in its design but a feature of it: the very fact that things are not self-evidently “peachy” is what makes a free response possible; deductive proof would remove any need for faith.
3. The third answer is that the veil is a form of protection. If the gravest sin is the deliberate rejection of goodness in full knowledge of what one rejects. The sin that scripture names blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and declares unforgivable is held behind a veil. By withholding full knowledge, man has been spared the possibility of committing that ultimate refusal. “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.” (Matthew 12:31) On this reading, no creature now living possesses the unveiled vision that would make such a sin possible; even the most monstrous historical actors retained some measure of the protecting ignorance. The unforgivable sin is unforgivable not because God is unwilling to forgive but because it is the rejection of goodness at its foundation, leaving no place from which repentance might begin. The veil, then, is mercy: it prevents the creature from arriving at the one condition from which there is no return.

VI. A Speculative Cosmogony of Light and Dark

The essay now enters expressly speculative territory, and the reader is asked to hold what follows as conjecture. The framework’s author is emphatic that this cosmological hypothesis is not offered as the teaching of scripture, but intends the speculation to be within the bounds of that which is consistent with/non-contradictory of scripture and hence plausibly reflecting reality.

The primary deficiency we face in our understanding of reality is that the conceptual passage from nothing to something is indefensible. We have no idea how existence arose from nothing (or alternatively, how existence is eternal/had no beginning). It is my contention that there was a beginning, but again, we have no concept of how such a transformation could occur.

I say this as a preface to our examination of the plausibility of atonement, because we need a radically different model of the universe to justify a universe where the death of the creator of this universe, who incarnated, can be logically ascribed to be a logical necessity or efficacious act to restore his relationship to God. Therefore, the question we face is how we can economically and logically explain the creation in such a way that the atonement followed naturally from the structure of the creation. That is, the atonement and the other Scriptural declarations, requirements, and declarations produce a logical necessity.

The hypothesis offered to thread the gauntlet of scriptural requirements and observed physical reality, and logical causality is as follows: God always existed, but He arose from nothing to His maturity by gradations. (Note this statement silently disguises the fact that we have no idea how God began His existence.) The scripture describes doctrine being built “line upon line” rather than by abrupt leaps from nothing to perfection. “For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line;
here a little, and there a little:” (Isaiah 28:10)

In the same way, I postulate that God arose/manifested from nothing in stages. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1–2). Clearly this is symbolic language. The question is perhaps He manifested conscious points to create a primal polarity against which to establish a standard by which He defined Himself as light, faith, hope, and love.

His establishment of the primal worlds may have been in the same way the Son manifested the universe and spiritual worlds. Thus, God may have generated a background of light and dark, awake and asleep, attraction and repulsion,  as the first polarity. From that nothingness may have been an undifferentiated space, a mixture in which light and dark, the polarities of awareness and inertness, wakefulness and sleep. It is from this mixture that I postulate the being we recognize and name God arose. God is the One who is wholly allied with the light. He is the one who refuses all commerce with the dark. He is concentrated into pure and ordered consciousness, “in whom is no darkness at all,” in whom there is no shadow of turning. The separation of light from dark, a scriptural image, is here read as the self-organization of the divine by the total rejection of the inert.

From this initial assumption, the remainder of the hypothesis follows with comparative ease. The fact that a unified theory of body, soul, and spirit, creation, God, free will, sin, accidents, and the purpose of life is explained is what gives this theory a sense that it is true. Because the divine nature is love, and love requires an other capable of free response, God wills a genuine other. But a being who is to be capable of choosing the light must also be capable of choosing the dark. The Father, by His very constitution and nature, is committed to reject the dark and those who choose it.

To allow man to be in the same space as God, the Father created the Son, identical to Himself, committed to Godliness/light/Truth, beauty, justice… The difference between the Father and Son is that the Son can look at evil without separating the evil from His creation. Thus, the Son created the Conscious Points, from which he could create a physical universe and living beings clothed in bodies of matter. Each person has a spirit, which is the light of man, and is from Christ. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:4) The soul of the man arises from the configuration of the Conscious Points composing the body. The spirit of man is like the Son, eternal, created in the image of God. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27).

Life as soul-formation, refinement, and maturation:

• “Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.
  But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” (James 1:3–4)
• “I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried.” (Zechariah 13:9)
• “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16)
• “Tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope.” (Romans 5:3–4)
• “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth… Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous… but afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness.” (Hebrews 12:6, 11)
• “We all… are changed into the same image from glory to glory.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)
• The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree… Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish… They shall still bring forth fruit in old age.” (Psalm 92:12–14)
• “The trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth… might be found unto praise and honour and glory.” (1 Peter 1:7)

Thus, it appears that the spirit is immature when it comes into a body. The spirit watches, and the soul learns. There is a distinction between body, soul, and spirit:

• 1. The clearest verse: spirit, soul, and body distinguished:
  “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 5:23) Paul lists three distinct components of human nature.
• 2. The Word of God divides soul and spirit: “For the word of God is quick, and powerful… piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow…” (Hebrews 4:12) This verse teaches that soul and spirit are not identical — they can be “divided.”
• 3. Body vs. spirit: “The body without the spirit is dead.” (James 2:26) The spirit is what gives life to the body.
• 4. Spirit returns to God: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” (Ecclesiastes 12:7) Body → earth Spirit → God
• 5. Soul as the seat of life and personhood: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” (Ezekiel 18:4) The soul is treated as the moral, personal self.
• 6. Jesus distinguishes soul and body: “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul…” (Matthew 10:28) Body ≠ soul.
• 7. Spirit vs. flesh (body): “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Matthew 26:41 (KJV) Spirit = inner will, Flesh = physical weakness

Summary of biblical anthropology

• Body: Physical form “Dust of the ground”, can be killed by men
• Soul: Personal identity, seat of emotion, desire, moral agency, can be saved or lost, distinct from the body
• Spirit: God‑given life principle, Returns to God, Distinct from the soul, and can be “divided” from the soul (Heb 4:12)

The story: the Spirit is given by God but placed in a fog of forgetfulness. (The spirit was either aware before life, or was created newly and then grew with the soul.) Thus, man either does not know or does not remember that this is a challenge to mature his soul. Man, incarnated, blind to the spirit world, can look upon both light and dark and freely choose either one. The way of the flesh is more attractive in the short run, and the way of the spirit is more attractive in the long run.

This hypothesis incorporates and gives explanatory weight to two mysterious declarations of Scripture

• 1) The Son, and not the Father, is the creator of the physical universe and the Heavens, John 1:3
• 2) The Son was born a man, lived a sinless life, claimed to be God and the Son of God, did miracles, taught the way to God, prophesied His own death, was crucified, was dead for 3 days, and the Father raised Him to life.
• The Son entered His creation as a man, experienced the temptations of men, and yet did not sin. He lived in the exact resonance of man, and yet His spirit was the spirit of the Son of God. He was condemned and executed unjustly, and separated from God.
• Death could not hold Him because He had violated no law.
• The laws that are in effect in the physical universe are the laws of God, and the Son shields the sin of the physical universe from the Father;
• He was the Son of God; He was perfect; He shielded the creation and its evil from God; when man emerged from His body into the presence of God, the Son had the right to pay the debt of the sinner. The right due for sin is death. The isolation/the banishment from the kingdom of light and life is the requirement of a Holy God, which is what The Son lives inside of. The universe has evil in it, but the Son is the gatekeeper, and He insures justice is perfect within His unverse, and thus complies with the overall requirement of the Father’s being. It is for this reason that the Son had to create a universe that paid for the sin overall, and thus allowed fungibility, the exchange of one debt for the payment of another. Thus, the system is one of balanced score overall, which allows sinful man to leave the universe (upon his death) with His debt paid and enter into God’s realm of purity, having had his debt paid, and having committed his heart to living the way of God – aligned with the light that is the only allowable state in the presence of the Father.

The possibility of freely given love and the possibility of consciously chosen evil enter the world together. The mediation of the Son is what allows a holy God to remain in relation with a world in which evil is possible.

VII. The Cancellation of Disorder: Physical and Relational Accounts

The question is then, how the atonement accomplishes what it accomplishes. Two accounts are offered. They are not rivals but descriptions of a single event at two levels: the one causal and structural, the other relational and juridical.

The first account draws on the CPP framework and is, again, speculative. It construes moral disorder as conservative in terms of acts and consequences: every act of goodness or sin imprints the substrate of reality with a disturbance that propagates outward through the substance of creation, the Dipole Sea. Given the time-bound relation between acts and effects in the physical world, the imprint of evil cannot be undone by a subsequent ripple of good deeds. The ripple of evil travels at the speed of light through the DP Sea, and a good deed done later would not erase that original etheric imprint. It may offset a human’s debt to another, but it does not affect the imprint on the creation. The wrong, once committed, has already “left the shore.” The proposed remedy that Christ offers with the atonement is not compensation but cancellation. Cancellation can be understood by analogy. Consider a wave tank with a paddle (a 2×4 floating on the water, pushed up and down) that makes long waves that travel down the tank from one end. On the other end of the tank, a similar block is driven up and down, creating waves that travel the opposite direction, driven in exact anti-phase, generating a wave that meets the first and, by superposition, returns the surface to rest. Using this concept of opposite-phase superposition, Christ in His death imprints the substrate with the full weight of death, and in His resurrection imprints it with life; and because He is master of the created order, the wave of life He has generated may be applied, upon command and request, to any disturbance of death, neutralizing it. The result is not concealment of sin but its abolition — the disorder is not hidden but gone, and the creature is thereby rendered “presentable” before the unveiled purity of God.

The alternative account reframes the atonement not as a quantitative transaction of multiplied punishments but as a drama of persons, consequences, and repair within nested realities. Sin is understood through its propagating effects: a single wrong act enters the web of personal relationships and sends ripples outward. Each person touched by it transmits the damage onward, often unconsciously, so that the full cost of even one sin is ultimately incalculable across the community of persons.

Into this wounded economy Christ enters. He does not absorb an accumulated quantity of penalties scaled to every sinner. Instead, He undergoes the punishment in kind—the complete withdrawal of the Father’s love and presence that any single soul’s sin would merit. Because He is without sin, physical death cannot retain Him. The injustice of His death therefore stands as an open credit in a conservative moral universe: an unmerited separation that must be answered by restoration or by transfer.

The universe the Son created exists inside the Father’s larger reality. Within the Son’s created order, sin is shielded during earthly life by the protective structure of embodiment and the Son’s sustaining presence. When a person dies and sheds the body, that protection ends. The sin, previously hidden, is exposed to the Father’s direct judgment. The individual stands unclean and faces the separation—the “outer darkness” and self-torment—that sin inherently produces.

As Creator of that inner universe, the Son bears a real liability for what occurs within it. From the Father’s perspective, the impurity generated inside the Son’s world is, in a derivative sense, the Son’s responsibility. At the cross this liability is actualized. The veil is torn; the Father beholds the sin the Son has taken upon Himself. The sentence of separation that rightly belongs to the sinner passes to Christ. Yet because Christ remains personally sinless, the sentence has no destructive power over Him, and He was resurrected to life by the Father because death could not hold him.

Death and separation are neutralized in His case. He survives the wrath He has shouldered. Two paths are thereby opened for the sinner. Either the Son is banished from the Father’s presence on account of the impurity He has carried (an unjust outcome, since He Himself is pure), or the Son remains in the Father’s presence and, upon the sinner’s emergence from earthly protection at death, receives the judgment in the sinner’s stead.

The second path is realized at the cross. The Son, having already undergone the required separation as a man, now stands as the gatekeeper. When a person who has trusted in Christ dies, the Son applies the credit of His own unjust death to that individual’s account. The record of sin in the DP Sea is blotted out. The person is cleansed. His noble/worthy/good character, the treasure he has laid up in Heaven, is saved, and the worthless character, the part that catered to the flesh, is erased, salted with fire and burned.

Removing the accumulated debt and the enslaving tendency to sin leaves a renewed person fit for the Father’s presence. This account yields a doctrine of repair that extends beyond the individual’s cleansing. The reconciled person does not cease to be an author of ripples. Past sins have already sent consequences into the world, and new choices continue to do so.

Reconciliation therefore carries a commission: the restored individual is yoked to Christ in the ongoing work of reversing disorder. The only instrument of repair available in the framework of the physical world is the drawing of other persons into the same reconciliation. Each soul brought to Christ becomes, in turn, an agent who can interrupt the propagation of damage and initiate healing in others. The result is a snowball dynamic. As more persons enter reconciliation, the sphere of active disorder contracts. Opportunities for new damage diminish.

In this light, the Great Commission is not primarily a program of recruitment but the practical mechanism by which a wounded world is progressively restored. One participant in the discussion extends this logic to a hope of universal reconciliation, holding that Scripture ultimately points toward the salvation of all. That conviction is offered here as a live tension with conventional interpretation of Scripture, but sufficient references to the salvation of all are present in Scripture that it must be included as one of the poles of a paradox that begs for a larger explanation.

The convergence of the two accounts is the essay’s central claim. The physical model describes the cleansing required to stand in the presence of a wholly pure God; the relational model describes the restoration of the world of persons and consequences. They are the same reconciliation told from different frames, and each is impoverished without the other. Neither, it should be added, could be accomplished by a God who did not become incarnate: only a real death, unjustly borne in a genuine body, could generate the wave of life that overcomes it, and only an embodied life could furnish the authority by which that life is dispensed.

VIII. The Question of Purpose and the Posture of the Child

Having gotten some insights into how the process of atonement may have been implemented, the next question to address is the purpose of creation, which corresponds to many of the “Why” questions: Why death and resurrection? Why the obligation to obey? Why this life? Why the labor of teaching others? And why the suffering of the innocent?

The issue of the suffering of the innocents gives the why questions teeth. We see the injustice of suffering, that lack of conservative cause-and-effect in the cycle/orbit/domain of any individual person’s life. For many, there is an obvious injustice in the lack of causal connection between a life profoundly and undeservedly afflicted. We heard this vividly illustrated by the story of the sudden health loss for a young woman with a great capacity for joy. A second story of a young survivor of grievous childhood abuse who transformed her suffering into a vocation of care for others.

The theological register of these accounts is the pattern of John 9, in which the man born blind is neither his own fault nor his parents’ but an occasion for the works of God to be displayed. This falls under the aphorism that one’s joy is one’s sorrow unmasked, and that the depth carved into a person by suffering becomes the measure of what that person can afterward contain and give. The essay records these instances with sobriety and without resolution, as the discussion did, refusing the false comfort of an explanation that would make the suffering acceptable in advance.

To the question of ultimate purpose, no single answer was imposed. What emerged instead was a proposal about the posture proper to creatures who do not possess the answer. Perhaps, in the face of such suffering, we must become as a little child to enter the kingdom. The child does not stand outside each moment appraising it, comparing its yield of satisfaction against alternatives not chosen, anxiously projecting how long it will last. That recursive self-regard — the endless calculation about experience rather than the having of it is itself a species of hell. The child simply receives what is given. Perhaps this receptivity is a foretaste of what heaven is: not a reward earned and then evaluated, but presence fully occupied by what is present. We note that the Latin pax is the derivation for both peace and a pact. The peace is the result of the settled accord. Heaven, on this reading, is the condition of those who have entered into accord with God and now simply dwell within His order, as within a world that is good.

This posture does not dissolve the “why,” and it was not offered as a substitute for the inquiry the question demands. It offers, rather, the disposition in which the inquiry can be borne without despair — the recognition that finite creatures, working at an immense subject with partial knowledge, may proceed in trust rather than in the paralysis of demanded certainty. The parallel to the essay’s account of the veil is exact: as faith is the medium proper to a veiled knowledge of God, so childlike presence is the medium proper to a veiled knowledge of purpose.

On Why:

Having noted that we do not know why, we nevertheless long to know, and we speculate.

• Why the death and resurrection of Christ?
  • His death and resurrection were simply methods of creating a doorway through which we can escape from the physical world and be in relationship with a perfect God. Without the womb of the physical universe shielding our sin from His perfection, we would not have been able to grow to be mature, develop our own character, and be individuals with free will.
• Why the obligation to obey?
  • Obedience is a requirement to live in God’s universe. If we are not perfect, we cannot survive in God’s body-mind.
• Why this life?
  • Life was created to satisfy God’s desire for companionship in the fullest way possible. To satisfy God’s heart, life must be real. Life truly is as unknown inside His perspective as it seems to be from ours. Our perspective truly is His perspective from our viewpoint. He desires to fully experience relationship, and it is as hard for Him to be satisfied by it as it is for us.
• Why the labor of teaching others.
  • This is the process of teaching others to enjoy living inside of life, and doing it from God’s perspective. It is the lighting a candle from another candle, and lighting another; the light spreads. This is all for expanding His joy. If we do not have joy, neither does He. We are teaching faith, hope, and love in the midst of the confusion.
• Why the suffering of the innocent?
  • If there were no possible consequence of disorder, then there would be no joy in the order. The sorrow of the innocent victim is incomprehensible in the frame of the individual. It is sorrow/pain/loss… in the heart of God. God desires to maximize His joy/love/peace, and if everyone takes their lot in the best way possible, we have served God by appreciating the experience of being in this world. Pushing against difficulty and doing it well is of more benefit than living a life of ease and simply enjoying the goodness of life. There is a reward in following His way, developing character, and trials provide more opportunity to develop character.

IX. Conclusion

The discussion this week was in the form of a single argument. Its claim is that the atonement is the act that allows the reuniting of man with God the Father in relationship. Without the atonement, man is held in the cocoon of the physical universe, sustained by Christ, insulating sinful man from the perfection of the Father. In this state, it is impossible to leave that protective environment to be in direct fellowship with the Father. But because of the atonement, man has the possibility of escaping the confines of the physical universe and being in that open, unveiled relationship with Him.

God is love according to scripture, and from common sense we derive that He is inherently alone if he is the source of all. Love by its nature requires the experience of an “other”. He created creatures capable of free will, which means beings capable of refusing to love Him and choosing to follow the way of the flesh over the Way of Christ.

There must be a separation between God and man in a meaningful way for God and man to have a relationship. And while we probably don’t understand and have not described/concepturalized exactly how He produced a split from One into many, the illusion of separation is significant enough that a statement of “I am me, and God is someone else,” seems absurdly obvious.

If God’s nature is pure harmonic order as a synonym or metaphor for His state of love, light, truth, beauty, justice, life… and there is no shadow of their counterpart in His world, then He cannot allow sinful humanity to enter that space. So the ability to generate genuine love is dependent upon the creation of separation that allows us to exist in the space of His existence.

Creating a world of order and goodness is the creation that a perfectly good God can create. A holy God cannot allow the disorder in His presence that man, with true free will, generates. The Son, creating a creation that man could live in and be free, allows God to be separated from the sin that man must use as his other lover against which God competes for man’s affection. In ordinary life, it is our way of being, the holiness and goodness of one’s life that brings honor and commendation to the Father and Son as the pattern of the life of God.

The atonement is purely a reparative strategy to allow man to emerge from the womb of the physical universe, within the shield of the Son’s purity before the Father, and to exist. The death of Christ was necessary as a fulfillment of prophecy, and prophecy was necessary as a symbolic pointer giving plausible proof of revelation to those with eyes to see.

The atonement was the death of the physical death of the incarnation of the creator of our universe. If death unveils the soul to judgment, and there is impurity/sin/unGodliness associated with that soul, then the Father will cast Him out. He did not. He raised the Son/Jesus Christ to life. The death that the Son experienced in His incarnation was unjust, and as such, in God’s environment of perfect justice, is a credit looking for a debit. As such, Christ can supply that debit to the account of anyone who enters the plane of the Kingdom of God.

Thus there may be multiple layers upon which the atonement is acting. Ultimately, we live in a command-based universe. The Conscious Points operate, perceive, compute, and move according to rules. The ultimate cost and consequence of enforcing all of the rules (in this paradigm) is the postulate of a God who is committed to focusing on light/life/awakeness, and allowing any darkness into His consideration/dwelling/meditation would be contrary to His being; in fact, He would not be who He is if He allowed darkness in His being. His very being is at stake. He is focused/aware/alive because He is committed to those. He is who He is because He has rejected all other aspects of Himself/the primal grey/mixture of light and dark, and embraced only light. “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)***

Perhaps the As purely the disorder must not be overlooked but canceled; and because the cancellation must be accomplished within the created order by one who is both innocent and master of that order, it is accomplished by the incarnate Son, whose death and resurrection generate the remedy that reconciliation applies. The wrath that this order requires is best understood as the honoring of refusal by withdrawal, and the hell that terminates unremedied refusal as a self-borne condition rather than an imposed sentence. The veil across which all of this is transacted is at once the condition of faith, the guarantor of freedom, and a protection against the one refusal from which there is no recovery.

The framework’s speculative elements — the cosmogony of light and dark, the wave model of moral disorder — are offered as reasoned conjecture. We do not know the mechanism by which God maintains the universe or why He could not have created the universe directly, and not through the Son. We do not know the actual mechanism by which Christ pays the debt, or what rule required Him to die to pay for our sins and restore our relationship to Him.

The only thing we know is that the Bible says we are reconciled with God by the blood of Christ and by making Him Lord of our lives. If the model of creation proposed here is helpful in rationalizing why Jesus’ sacrifice is effective and reasonable, then use it; otherwise, just remember, belive, and act on the Biblical promises:

• Romans 5:10 (KJV) 
  “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”
• Colossians 1:20–22 (KJV)
  “And, having made peace through the blood of his cross…
  you… hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death…”
• Romans 10:9 (KJV)
  “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus,
  and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
• Luke 6:46 (KJV)
  “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”
• Colossians 2:6 (KJV)
  “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him.”
• Ephesians 1:7 (KJV)
  “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the  forgiveness of sins…”
• Philippians 2:11 (KJV)
  “…that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38