by Thomas Abshier | Jun 7, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
The Creator Takes a Test Drive: On Divine Permission, the Incarnation, and the Conservation of the Soul
Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 7, 2026
Occasion. Peter, you wrote to me this Sunday morning in response to the John 5:19 essay I addressed to Leonard. You did the thing that makes the fellowship worth the labor: you took the verse and ran with it, and you came back with a letter that is itself a small theology. You did not nibble at the edges. You went straight to the hardest questions a serious believer can ask — how the power of evil relates to the sovereignty of God, what it means to say God became a man, how a God who cannot die was dead for three days, what happens to the souls that refuse him, and whether our own words carry more weight than we have been told. I want to answer you the way you wrote to me: directly, by name, and without pretending the questions are easier than they are.
I am going to do something I have not done in a fellowship essay before. I am going to print your letter in full, lightly corrected for spelling so it reads clean, and then take it up move by move. Where you have seen rightly — and you have seen rightly more often than not — I will say so plainly. Where the historic Church has drawn the line in a slightly different place than your letter draws it, I will lay both lines out, give you the reasons the fellowship holds the reading it holds, and trust you to do the discernment yourself, in your own time, the way I trusted Leonard. This is what fellowship is. We think out loud together, and we hold each other to the text.
Peter’s Letter
The following is Peter’s email of June 7, 2026, lightly corrected for spelling and punctuation. The voice and the substance are his.
Hi Thomas,
Happy Sunday!
Of course, it doesn’t seem likely that the creation could ever comprehend its Creator. Thus when Pontius Pilate said to Jesus, “Don’t you know I have the power to execute you?” and Jesus answers Pilate that “unless my Father gave it to you, you would have no power,” that means even the fallen angels, Lucifer, all the satans, the Nachash in the garden, the Nephilim, and even evil people in positions of power are allowed to engage in their malfeasance only by the patience and provision of YHWH himself. In fact, at the Tower of Babel YHWH put all the nations under the power of the fallen angels they insisted on serving and worshiping. So he gave them all over to their gods. But he reserved for himself (YHWH) Abram, who became Abraham — and Abraham’s son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, who became Israel. This is where the little leaven that leavens the whole lump originates. His law is written on our hearts; he needs no nation-state. It was the “stiff necks” of the Jews who demanded kings.
But this subservience of the evil angels and people is too often overlooked. Christ even had the legion of demons beg him not to send them away, thus making it self-evident that they fully understood their complete powerlessness in the presence of Christ. Yet even the Apostles in the first-century church, who were casting out demons, healing the sick, and raising the dead, and were direct protégés of Christ, never report such groveling obsequiousness from demons. So, clearly, Christ was way above the Apostles and all the demons, and Pilate too. So why would Christ allow himself to be subjected to such incredible suffering and humiliation?
I think of it like this: If I built a sports car from scratch, I would probably want to drive it when finished. I see Jesus as YHWH, the Creator, taking a test drive in his creation. He chose undeserved suffering and death as his paramount and supreme act of solidarity with all of mankind. Nevertheless, when YHWH is in the driver’s seat of one of these mortal coils we inhabit for our trial here on earth and call a body, then we get Jesus, and that is why, if we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father. In other words: Jesus is what YHWH looks like in mortal/human form. It’s not that he isn’t human; it’s just that his consciousness was one with the Father’s — he was directly connected spiritually.
This is why it is so confusing for some of us (me). Jesus had to be all human, since he had to be legally dead in order to rise from the dead, which means dead for three days and three nights under Jewish law. But YHWH is spirit, which can’t be killed; yet Jesus was dead from Wednesday (Passover) at sundown until Saturday at sundown — three days and three nights. But he can’t be God, because God doesn’t die. Yet we say that he was God incarnate. It seems like a contradiction, but that is only because of our misunderstanding and fear of death, which I call our “lingering materialism.”
The resurrection of Jesus points to something much more glorious — and ominous — than merely his resurrection, which was HUGE! The glorious part is that we all get up from the dead at one time (the just and the unjust). It is a natural law of creation. That is the super cool part: we all rise from the dead. The ominous part is that YHWH doesn’t want any psychopaths in heaven. He doesn’t want spirits who have chosen evil (decadence, death, destruction, violence, theft, and the oppression of others) rather than choosing love (edification, life, creativity, compassion, generosity, and the liberation of all mankind) as part of his adopted family FOREVER. Pretty simple, really; even a kindergartner understands this. Who wants jerks in their family? But since in the material world matter-energy can neither be created nor destroyed (modern physics understands this), then…
The Law of Spiritual Conservation of Energy
Because individuated consciousness, too, is part of the material creation, it also can neither be created nor destroyed. Of course, YHWH could end it all at any time. But the material universe he has created operates under laws, which we call natural law. Thus our own spiritual choices are our judgments and our punishments, and are completely self-imposed. This is because the evil spirits and souls are not destroyed. Rather, they are segregated. People who choose Jesus get to go with him. They hear his voice and follow the good shepherd.
BUT those who choose evil get to go with the other spirits and souls who chose evil — but with a special treat, which is that they all get confined to a very small area, so the rest of us can enjoy the creation without their destructiveness, which will still be there, but way over there, in hell. Think of it like a prison with no innocent souls in it, only those who have chosen evil repeatedly, after having multiple chances and possibly multiple lifetimes to repent; only those souls end up in this particular prison. Oh, and there is no warden other than Lucifer himself. Anyone who wants to live there is nuts, and that is why evildoers tend to be materialists who — whether they believe in a God, gods, or the devil — think so little of themselves that they buy the lie that this life is all there is, that this is the only shot at material wealth, fame, and luxury, and that those things are important. This is why it was such a severe curse by YHWH to shorten our lifespans. We can’t pass on our experience and knowledge to the next generation, since by the time they are even curious (age 40–60) we are already dead. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
Conclusion: hell is real (if you believe in the laws of physics), and we all get to choose where we are going after this. It is totally up to us, and requires only that we set aside our egos and merely submit to a higher authority named Jesus. We don’t even have to submit to YHWH — just to Jesus. As Bob Dylan sang, we have “gotta serve somebody.” I ask, who’s it gonna be? I say, if Christ isn’t good enough to be your king, then I sincerely pity you. If he is, then you are my brother.
Love, Peter
* In fact, part of Christ’s message is that we have incredible power that we have been completely deprived of by our own belief in the lies of the enemy. In the beginning was the Word. YHWH spoke the creation into existence. We are to be like Christ, images of the Father in the flesh. What if every word you have ever consciously spoken has been either a blessing or a cursing on your own life? “A man does not defile himself by what goes into his mouth; rather, it is what comes out of his mouth that defiles him.” It is our enemy that tells us our words have no power. But they do — much more power than any of us can imagine. Prayer is not only important because of our supplications for our needs (YHWH knows what we need before we ask), but most especially because in spoken prayer we announce and decree the terms under which we ourselves, our households, and our realms will be governed. We choose God’s laws over man’s law, God’s providence over government allotments, God’s healing over pharmakeia, etc.
I. What you have seen rightly: all power is borrowed
Peter, the first move in your letter is the strongest and ties your letter directly back to the verse Leonard asked about. You begin with Pilate. Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above (John 19:11). You are exactly right about what that verse does. It empties the most powerful man in Judea of any independent authority in the very moment he is feeling most powerful. Pilate thinks he holds Jesus’s life in his hands. Jesus tells him he holds nothing that was not handed to him.
Now watch what that does when you set it beside John 5:19, the verse we just worked through. The Son can do nothing of himself. In the essay to Leonard, I argued that this is not a confession of weakness but a statement of the most intimate unity — the Son does nothing apart from the Father because the Son is never apart from the Father. But your letter adds the mirror image, and it is true. If even the eternal Son acts only in perfect correspondence to the Father, how much more is it the case that nothing in the entire creation can do anything of itself. Pilate cannot. The Nachash cannot. The legion cannot. The whole created order, good and evil alike, runs on borrowed power. The difference between the Son and the creature is not that the creature borrows and the Son does not — it is that the Son’s “borrowing” is the eternal communion of one divine being, while the creature’s borrowing is the radical dependence of a thing that did not have to exist at all.
This is why your reading of evil is sound, and why it matches what the fellowship has been calling “derivative negation.” Evil is not a second kingdom mounting an independent campaign against God. Evil has no power plant of its own. Every watt the enemy spends was first granted, and is still sustained, by the One he spends it against. You put this beautifully with the demons. The legion in the Gerasene country does not negotiate with Christ from strength; they beg (Mark 5:10–12). Thou art come hither to torment us before the time (Matthew 8:29). James says the demons believe in one God and tremble (James 2:19). You are right that this terror is conspicuously absent from the demoniacs the Apostles later confront — the demons resist the servants more boldly than they ever resisted the Master, because the servants carry delegated authority while the Master is the authority. That is a genuine observation, and it is worth keeping.
I will add one note to your Babel passage, because it is better grounded than even you let on. The reading you are reaching for — that at Babel the nations were apportioned to lesser spiritual powers while YHWH kept Israel as his own portion — is not a fringe idea. It is written into the text. In Deuteronomy 32:8–9, the older manuscript tradition preserved in the Septuagint has God dividing the nations according to the number of the sons of God and then taking Jacob as the LORD’s portion. Psalm 82 shows God standing in the divine council, judging the gods (the elohim) to whom the nations were given because they judged unjustly. The Deuteronomy 32 picture is exactly your picture: the nations handed over to the powers they preferred, Israel reserved as the seedbed of the leaven that would eventually leaven the whole lump. You have your hand on real Scripture here, not a private theory.
So the foundation of your letter is solid. Hold onto it. Everything else you wrote is built on the recognition that nothing — not Pilate, not the principalities, not death itself — stands outside the sustaining patience of God. Keep that, because in Section IV, it is going to do some heavy lifting for you, where I am going to ask you to be a little more careful than in your letter.
II. The test drive — and who is in the driver’s seat
Here is the image everyone will remember from your letter, and it is a good one: God built the sports car, and God wanted to drive it. The Incarnation is the Creator’s test drive in his own creation, with undeserved suffering chosen as the supreme act of solidarity with the creatures who have to drive these mortal coils through the trial of a lifetime. There is something deeply right in that, and I do not want my careful qualifications to bury the rightness of it. The eternal God did not stay outside what he made. He came in. He took the worst of it — the betrayal, the scourge, the nails, the godforsaken cry — not because he had to, but as solidarity. We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Hebrews 4:15). When you say “if we have seen Jesus, we have seen the Father,” you are quoting the Lord himself: he that hath seen me hath seen the Father (John 14:9). That is not your invention. That is the heart of the thing.
So I am with you on the destination. Let me just adjust the steering, because the test-drive image, taken too literally, can slide into two old ditches the Church marked off centuries ago, and I would rather you drive between them than into either one.
The first ditch: who is driving? Your letter says, “when YHWH is in the driver’s seat… then we get Jesus,” and “his consciousness was one with the Father’s.” I know what you mean, and what you mean is true. But the precise way the essay on John 5:19 framed it matters here. It is not the Father who climbed into the car. It is the Son. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not three masks the one God wears in turn — that is the ancient error called modalism, and the Church rejected it because it makes the cross incoherent (to whom is Jesus praying in Gethsemane, if the Father just is Jesus under another name?). The Son is the one who is eternally from the Father, eternally distinct in person while identical in being. When you say Jesus’s consciousness was one with the Father’s, the orthodox way to put it is the one I gave Leonard: perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of the persons. The Son’s life is the Father’s life lived from the Son’s side. So — yes, perfect unity of will and consciousness. But it is the unity of two who are genuinely distinct, not the collapse of the two into one driver wearing a human suit. Keep the persons distinct and the test drive holds. Collapse them, and you lose the Gospel of John, where the Son speaks to the Father, is sent by the Father, and returns to the Father.
The second ditch: what is being driven. A test driver is not the car. He sits in it, works the controls, and gets out at the end. If we press the image, Jesus’s humanity becomes a vehicle the divine consciousness operates from the outside — a costume, an avatar, a remote-controlled body with no human mind of its own. The Church rejected that, too. It has a name — Apollinarianism — and the answer the fathers gave is the one that protects everything you care about. The Son did not drive a human body. He became a complete human being: body, soul, mind, and will. The Word was made flesh (John 1:14) — made it, not merely wore it. This is the hypostatic union defined at Chalcedon in 451, the doctrine I leaned on for Leonard: one person, two natures, neither confused nor separated. It is why Gethsemane is real. Not my will, but thine, be done (Luke 22:42) is a true human will, genuinely afraid, genuinely surrendering — not the Father talking to himself through a puppet. If Jesus only looked human, then his solidarity with us, the very thing your letter rightly exalts, evaporates. He can only stand with us all the way down if he came all the way down — into a real human nature, not into a driver’s seat he could step out of.
So I would put your image this way, with the steering corrected: the Son — eternally distinct from the Father, eternally one with him in being — did not test-drive a body. He took the whole car into himself and became a driver who is also, fully and forever, the car. That is a stranger and more wonderful thing than a test drive. It is the Maker becoming the made, without ceasing to be the Maker. And it is the only version of the story in which “he chose undeserved suffering as solidarity with all mankind” is actually true, because only a real man can really suffer.
III. How a God who cannot die was dead
This is the knot you named most honestly: he had to be all human, since he had to be legally dead… but he can’t be God, because God doesn’t die. Yet we say he was God incarnate. It seems like a contradiction. Peter, you are feeling the exact pressure the Church felt for four centuries, and your instinct about the resolution is half-right. Let me give you the other half.
Your half: the contradiction is partly an artifact of “lingering materialism” — the assumption that death is annihilation, the snuffing-out of a being into nothing. On that assumption, “God died” would indeed mean “God stopped existing,” which is impossible. You are right to reject that. Death in the biblical frame is not annihilation; it is separation — the soul from the body, and in the worst case, the person from God. So the resurrection is not God re-creating a Jesus who had blinked out of existence. The person never went out of existence at all.
But here is the half your letter does not yet have, and it is the half that dissolves the contradiction cleanly. The resolution is the two natures of Section II. The one person of Christ has two natures, divine and human. Death belongs to him according to his human nature — a real human body really stopped, a real human soul really departed it. The divine nature did not and cannot die; God remains impassible and immortal in his deity. But — and this is the move the fathers made, called the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties — because the two natures belong to one and the same person, what is true of either nature can be said truly of the person. So we are permitted to say, and Scripture does say, that God purchased the church with his own blood (Acts 20:28). Not because the divine nature has blood or veins, but because the person who bled is God. The subject who died on that cross is divine. The dying happened in his humanity. Both halves are true at once, and they do not collide, because they are predicated of one person through two natures.
So you can keep “God incarnate was dead for three days” without contradiction. The person who was dead is God. What died in him was his humanity. What could not die — his deity — is precisely what guaranteed that death could not hold him. It was not possible that he should be holden of it (Acts 2:24).
On the calendar — Wednesday-at-sundown to Saturday-at-sundown, to fit a literal three days and three nights against Matthew 12:40 — I will only say this: it is a real position, held by careful people, and I am not going to relitigate the chronology here, because the theological core stands on either the Wednesday reckoning or the traditional Friday one. Whether the tomb held him seventy-two hours or something less, the thing that matters is the thing you already have: he was truly dead, and he truly rose. The fellowship does not need to settle the calendar to confess the Creed.
IV. The conservation of the soul — and the one place I would have you be careful
Now, your “Law of Spiritual Conservation of Energy,” which is the most original thing in your letter and the place where you and I, as a physicist-physician and a lawyer arguing theology, get to enjoy ourselves. Your intuition: matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed; individuated consciousness is part of the creation; therefore, consciousness too is conserved — souls are not annihilated, only sorted. I think the intuition is largely right, and for a reason that ties straight into the verse Leonard asked about. But it needs one anchor bolted down, and to your great credit, you bolted it down yourself, in a single sentence most people would have skipped.
The anchor is this. The conservation of the soul is not a brute metaphysical fact that stands over God. It is God’s ongoing act. The reason a created person cannot fall out of existence is that the same God who spoke him into being holds him in being, moment by moment. This is the precise teaching of John 5:26, the verse at the center of the discourse we walked: as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself. Only God has life in himself — that is the divine attribute the tradition calls aseity, self-existence, life that depends on nothing. The Son has it by eternal gift from the Father. And the creature? The creature never has life in itself. The creature has life on loan, sustained from outside, every instant. So consciousness is conserved — but it is conserved the way a note is conserved as long as the singer keeps singing it, not the way a rock sits in a field. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28), which I keep returning to because it keeps being the answer.
And here is why I say you bolted the anchor down yourself: in the middle of your conservation law, you wrote, “Of course, YHWH could end it all at any time.” That one clause is the whole orthodox correction, and you supplied it. It means you are not claiming the soul is a little uncreated, self-existent god that God is powerless to unmake. You are claiming the soul persists because God has ordained that it persist — that the conservation is a law of the creation, which means it is a standing decision of the Lawgiver, not a chain on his wrists. That is exactly right, and it is exactly the CPP picture. The Conscious Points are not eternal sovereigns. They persist because the divine consciousness sustains them, Moment by Moment, in their Perceive-Compute-Displace cycle. Conservation, in physics and in the soul alike, is God’s faithfulness expressed as regularity. Take away the sustaining, and there is no law left to conserve anything.
Now, the one place I will ask you to slow down. In describing the sorting of souls, you wrote that the lost end up where they are “after having multiple chances and possibly multiple lifetimes to repent.” Peter, I want to name this the way I named the Mormon reading for Leonard — laying the two lines side by side, giving you the fellowship’s reasons, and leaving the discernment to you. The historic, Nicene-orthodox tradition the fellowship works within has read Hebrews 9:27 as the boundary on this question: it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. One mortal life, then judgment — not a series of return trips through the body to keep trying. The reincarnation strand has had its Christian sympathizers here and there across the centuries, but the mainstream of the tradition — the same tradition that gave us the two-natures answer in Section III and the perichoresis answer in Section II — set it aside, and for what I take to be a sound reason: the whole weight of the New Testament’s urgency depends on this life being the arena of decision. Now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). If there were always another lap, the cross would not be the hinge of history; it would be one more option on an endless menu. I am not going to argue it past that. I am only telling you where the fellowship stands and why, and trusting you, as I trusted Leonard, to weigh it on your own.
Everything else in your conservation law, I am glad to keep. The dead rise — all of them, just and unjust — and that is not your speculation either. It is the climax of the very discourse Leonard’s verse opened. All that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation (John 5:28–29). You arrived, by your own road, at the exact verses I walked for Leonard. The just and the unjust both rise. The sorting is real. The conservation holds. You have the structure right.
V. Hell as the prison with the doors locked on the inside
Your picture of hell — segregation rather than active torture, a confinement of those who chose evil so the rest of creation can be enjoyed without their destructiveness, “no warden other than Lucifer himself,” the judgment self-imposed — is more defensible within orthodoxy than you may realize. It is close to the reading C. S. Lewis gave when he said the doors of hell are locked on the inside, that hell is God in the end, honoring a creature’s settled refusal of him, giving the soul forever what it insisted on having: itself, without God, in the company of others who chose the same. Thy will be done, said two ways — by the saints to God, and by the damned to themselves. On that reading, the misery of hell is not a torturer’s invention; it is what the absence of God is, experienced by a being made for him. Your “self-imposed judgment” is in the neighborhood of a serious and humane strand of the tradition.
I would only round it out, so you are holding the whole counsel of Scripture and not just the part that is most congenial. The Bible also uses the harder, more active imagery — fire, the worm that dieth not, weeping and gnashing of teeth, the wrath to come. The mature tradition has generally held that the gentle picture (self-exclusion, the absence of God, the prison locked from within) and the severe picture (judgment, fire, wrath) are the same reality described from two sides — what the lost experience as the natural consequence of their own choice is, at the same time and not by contradiction, the just judgment of a holy God. Hold both. The self-exclusion reading keeps you from making God a sadist; the judgment reading keeps you from making sin trivial. Your letter has the first and could use a little of the second.
And let me affirm the pastoral spine of this section, because it is the right spine: nobody is dragged to that prison who did not, repeatedly and finally, choose the road to it. Who wants jerks in their family? is a kindergarten way of saying something the prophets and the apostles say in their own register — that love cannot be coerced, that a heaven full of the unwilling would be no heaven, and that the God who is love will not violate the freedom that makes love possible. That is sound.
VI. The power of the word — and a caution against making the tongue a magic wand
Your footnote is, to me, the most interesting part of the whole letter, and it deserves more than a footnote. In the beginning was the Word. God spoke, and it was. We are made in his image, and you are asking whether the image carries the power — whether our words are blessings and cursings on our own lives, whether prayer is not only petition but decree. The biblical witness behind you here is strong, and you should not let anyone talk you out of it. Death and life are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21). James spends a whole chapter on the tongue as a fire, a rudder, a thing that no man can fully tame (James 3). And you have the Lord’s own word exactly right: not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man (Matthew 15:11). Words are not weightless. The God who is Word made word-bearers, and what we say does work in the world and in us.
Here is the caution: it is the same as Section I, but with a new key. The power of our word is derivative, exactly the way Pilate’s authority and the demons’ strength and the soul’s persistence are derivative. Our words have power when they are spoken in agreement with God’s word — when our “let there be” is an amen to his “let there be.” There is a counterfeit of this teaching loose in the church, the name-it-and-claim-it strand that treats the tongue as a wand and faith as a force that bends reality to the speaker’s will. That version makes me the little creator and reduces God to the power supply I draw on by speaking the right formula. That is the Pilate error turned inward: forgetting that the power was given from above. The true version — the one your footnote is actually reaching for — is covenantal, not magical. When you say prayer is the place where we announce and decree the terms under which our households and realms will be governed, the deep truth in that is the declaration of allegiance: in spoken prayer, I confess whose I am, under whose law I live, by whose providence I am fed, by whose hand I am healed. The decree has power because it aligns me with the Word who already spoke, not because my larynx is a lever on the universe. Keep the power; locate the source outside yourself; and you are on solid ground.
One small flag on “pharmakeia,” since you reached for the Greek. The word does carry the sense of sorcery and idolatrous drug-craft in places like Galatians 5:20 and Revelation 18:23, and there is a real prophetic warning in it about a culture that medicates its way around God. But the etymology should be held lightly. Luke, who wrote a quarter of the New Testament, was a physician. The Samaritan poured oil and wine into the wounds. Medicine as such is a mercy, a part of the dominion God gave us over the creation; the sin pharmakeia names is the idolatry — trusting the remedy in the place of God, or using the craft to manipulate and deceive, not the aspirin. Choose God’s healing first and always; receive his providence through whatever means he provides, the physician’s hands included. I say that as the physician in the fellowship, with no contradiction at all to choosing the Great Physician first.
VII. The CPP intersection
A brief closing meditation, the way I closed for Leonard, and held just as lightly. The thread running through your whole letter — through the borrowed power of Section I, the Son’s perfect responsiveness in his human nature in Section II, the soul conserved by God’s sustaining in Section IV — is the same thread that runs through the substrate. In CPP, every Conscious Point, on every Moment, perceives its environment, computes its response, and displaces accordingly. Perceive, compute, displace. It does nothing of itself; it acts only in response to what is given, and it persists only because it is sustained. That is the John 5:19 pattern, read all the way down to the floor of physics, and it is the pattern your letter keeps rediscovering at every level it touches. Pilate, the demons, the soul in the resurrection, the word on our lips — none of them generates its own power; each is a node in a creation that runs entirely on what God gives, and God upholds. The Son’s perfect perceive-compute-displace in the divine life is the source; everything below it is a fainter and more dependent echo of the same shape.
I am not claiming this proves anything theological, any more than I claimed it for Leonard. It is a resonance, not a demonstration. But it is the thing CPP keeps handing me: a picture of a universe in which to live the way you are describing — borrowing all power gratefully from God, speaking in agreement with his Word, refusing the lie that the soul is its own little god — is to live with the grain of how reality is actually built, from the smallest Conscious Point up to the eternal Son. In him we live, and move, and have our being. You have been writing about the grain this whole letter without naming it.
VIII. Closing
Peter, you ended your letter with Dylan’s question — we have got to serve somebody, so who is it going to be? — and with a line I want to give back to you, because it is the truest thing in the whole email: if Christ isn’t good enough to be your king, then I sincerely pity you; if he is, then you are my brother.
You are my brother. We do not agree on every clause — I have asked you to keep the persons of the Trinity distinct where your test drive blurred them, to let the two natures carry the weight of “God died” where your “lingering materialism” carried half of it, to bolt the soul’s conservation to God’s sustaining hand where your law could float free, to leave the lap of “multiple lifetimes” off the track where Hebrews draws the finish line, and to locate the power of your own words outside yourself where the counterfeit teaching would lodge it within. But look at what we agree on. That no power in heaven, earth, or hell is anything but borrowed from God. That the Maker came in and took the worst of it as solidarity with us. That he truly died and truly rose. That the dead all rise, the just and the unjust, and that the sorting is real and the stakes are forever. That a man defiles or blesses himself by what comes out of his mouth. And that the only thing the whole creation is finally asked for is to set the ego down and serve the King.
That is a great deal of agreement for one Sunday morning. The rest is what fellowship is for. We will keep thinking out loud together and holding each other to the text.
And one of the scribes… asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. — Mark 12:28–30
Serve somebody. We have. His name is enough.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – i Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | Jun 7, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
Why Jews Don’t Accept Jesus as Messiah: A Ten-Point Reel and the Deeper Question
Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 8, 2026
10 Key Reasons Christians Believe Jesus Is The Messiah While Jews Disagree
(Note: this is not the reel, but a listicle that contains many of the same points)
Occasion. A short reel circulating on social media channels under the title Why Jews Don’t Accept Jesus as the Messiah presents ten theological reasons for the Jewish rejection of Jesus’s messianic claim. The reel is in pop format and compressed, under two minutes of dense theological argument. The format compresses arguments that have been developed at great length across nearly two thousand years of Jewish-Christian theological dialogue. Maimonides made several of these arguments in his Letter to Yemen (c. 1172). The Barcelona Disputation between Nahmanides and the Dominican Pablo Christiani in 1263 addressed the suffering-servant question at length, with the rabbinic side essentially arguing what reel’s points 7 and 8 still argue today. Contemporary Jewish scholars — David Berger of Yeshiva University, Michael Wyschogrod, and the late Jon Levenson of Harvard — continue to develop these positions. The reel is compressed, but the underlying objections are not weak. They deserve serious engagement.
This essay engages each of the reel’s ten points fairly. I will state what the reel claims, acknowledge what is right in each claim, and present the Christian response with textual grounding from the Hebrew Bible itself wherever possible. I will not be polemical. I will not pretend the Jewish position is unsophisticated. I will also not pretend the Christian position is weak. At the end, I will address what I take to be the deeper question the reel’s listicle format cannot reach — the question that, if answered, settles every one of the ten points at once.
The essay closes on Paul’s reflection in Romans 11 about Israel’s enduring place in God’s economy, because the fellowship’s posture toward Jewish friends and neighbors has to be located there if it is to be located anywhere.
I. The deepest issue: divine unity, incorporeality, and the question of whether the One God of Israel could have become incarnate
The reel’s first point is the deepest. Judaism insists on God’s absolute, indivisible unity and incorporeality. Worshiping a human, per Numbers 23:19, violates monotheism. This is the issue that divides Jews and Christians at the foundation, and every other disagreement runs through it. If the One God of Israel could not have entered creation as a human being, then Jesus’s claim to be God incarnate is blasphemy regardless of anything else he said or did, and Jewish rejection is the only faithful response. If the One God of Israel could and did become incarnate, then everything Jesus claimed about himself becomes available for serious consideration.
What the reel gets right is that the Hebrew Bible’s insistence on divine unity is uncompromising. Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD (Deuteronomy 6:4) — the Shema — is the foundational Jewish confession, recited twice daily by observant Jews to this day. Idolatry, the worship of anything alongside or instead of YHWH, is the central sin in the Hebrew Bible. The first two commandments of the Decalogue address it directly. The exilic prophets, especially Isaiah 40-66, hammer at it. Christianity has always had to give an account of how its claim about Christ does not violate this principle.
The Christian response runs along several lines.
First, the Hebrew word for “one” in the Shema is echad, which can denote compound unity as well as bare numerical singleness. The same word appears in Genesis 2:24 — and they shall be one (echad) flesh — describing the union of husband and wife. It appears in Exodus 24:3 — And all the people answered with one (echad) voice — describing the unified response of many individuals. It appears in Ezekiel 37:17, in the prophecy of the two sticks joined together: that they may become one (echad) in thine hand. Echad does not exclude internal distinction. It denotes unity, whether the unity of a single undifferentiated entity or of multiple distinct entities joined as one. The Shema does not by itself settle whether the unity of God is the unity of a single undifferentiated Person or the unity of multiple Persons within one divine being.
Second, the Hebrew Bible itself contains several passages that gesture toward plurality within the divine being, and Christian readers have always pointed to them. The phrase ” Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26) uses plural pronouns in God’s deliberation about creating humanity. The visit of YHWH to Abraham at Mamre in Genesis 18 is a complex passage in which three men appear, one of whom is identified as YHWH, and the conversation shifts between singular and plural references. The Angel of YHWH passages — Genesis 16, Exodus 3, Judges 6, Judges 13, Zechariah 1-6 — present a figure who is simultaneously distinguished from YHWH and identified with YHWH, who receives worship that elsewhere is reserved for YHWH alone. The Word of YHWH that comes to the prophets is sometimes treated as itself a personal agent (Jeremiah 1:4 — Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying). The Wisdom of Proverbs 8 speaks as a personal agent who was with YHWH before creation (The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old). The Son of Man of Daniel 7:13-14 is given dominion and glory by the Ancient of Days and receives the worship of all peoples — worship of a non-divine being would be idolatry, so the Son of Man (Jesus Christ) must somehow share the divine prerogative of receiving worship.
These passages do not prove the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity is a New Testament development, articulated finally at Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), drawing on the full revelation of Christ. But the passages show that the Hebrew Bible is not as flat in its description of divine unity as a simple unitarian reading would require. There is room within the text for the One God of Israel to be internally complex in his being. Christianity has occupied that room and developed it.
Third, on incorporeality and Numbers 23:19: the verse reads in full, God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good? The context is Balaam’s prophecy about Israel. Balak, the king of Moab, has hired Balaam to curse Israel; Balaam, constrained by YHWH, has blessed Israel instead. Numbers 23:19 is Balaam’s explanation: God does not change his blessing the way a human might change a promise. The verse is a statement about God’s truthfulness and faithfulness — that he neither lies nor repents of his commitments. It is not a metaphysical prohibition on incarnation.
The Hebrew Bible does affirm that God is not corporeal in his essence — he is not made of matter, he does not have spatial extent in the way creatures do, his being is not limited by physical embodiment. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation does not contradict this. The Incarnation says that the eternal Logos, who is and remains God in the fullness of his divine essence, took on human nature without ceasing to be God. The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The Word does not stop being the Word. The eternal Son does not stop being the eternal Son. He adds to himself a complete human nature — body, soul, mind, will — and lives the life of a man, while remaining the eternal God. This is the hypostatic union, defined at Chalcedon in 451: one Person, two natures, neither confused nor separated.
The Jewish objection to this remains real and serious. The objection is that the boundary of God’s nature, as the Hebrew Bible draws it, excludes incarnation by definition. God is transcendent, utterly other than creation, the I AM who cannot be reduced to or contained within any created form. The Christian response is that the same God who is transcendent has also chosen to enter creation as a human — that transcendence and immanence are not opposed but coordinated, and that the same God who creates by his Word is the God who became flesh through that Word. The disagreement at this level cannot be resolved by exegesis alone. It is a disagreement about what God is permitted, by his own nature, to do.
The fellowship’s posture on this question is that we hold the Trinitarian and incarnational reading of the Hebrew Bible to be the deeper reading, supported by the texts I and many others have named, and brought to its fullness in the revelation of Christ. We also acknowledge that the Jewish objection is serious, ancient, and held in good faith by Jews who love the same God of Israel that we love. The disagreement is real.
II. The Messianic checklist and the two-stage pattern
The reel’s second and third points belong together: Judaism judges the Messiah by results, not promises, because the temple was destroyed after Jesus died, and Judaism rejects a second coming. The Hebrew Bible presents a single arrival that completes everything.
What is right in this is that the Hebrew Bible contains Messianic prophecies that look geopolitical and earthly. Isaiah 11 — the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid… they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain. Micah 4 — every man under his vine and under his fig tree. Ezekiel 37 through 48 — the reunified kingdom, the rebuilt temple, the river flowing from the sanctuary. These prophecies have not been fulfilled in their literal sense at any point in history. The rabbinic tradition consolidated, especially after the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, around a single conquering political Messiah who would fulfill these prophecies in their full literal scope. Jesus did not do this. The Temple was destroyed forty years after his death, rather than being rebuilt by him. Israel was scattered rather than gathered. Universal peace did not come. By the rabbinic checklist, Jesus failed.
The Christian response runs along three lines.
First, Jewish messianic expectations in the second-temple period — that is, during Jesus’s actual lifetime and the decades immediately following — were not as uniform as the post-70 rabbinic consolidation suggests. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 and providing direct evidence of Jewish thought in the century before and after Jesus, show that the Qumran community expected two Messiahs — a priestly Messiah descended from Aaron and a royal Messiah descended from David. Some traditions expected a suffering Messiah (sometimes called Messiah ben Joseph) who would die in battle before a conquering Messiah (Messiah ben David) appeared. The expectation of a single conquering political Messiah was one strand among several, not the unified Jewish position the reel’s framing implies. The post-70 consolidation around the conquering-political-Messiah reading was a development that happened after the Jewish-Christian split and partly in reaction to it.
Second, the two-stage pattern — a Messiah who first suffers and dies, then returns to fulfill the political prophecies — is not invented after the fact by Christians. It is present in the Hebrew Bible itself, in passages that the rabbinic tradition has always struggled to integrate.
Daniel 9:24-27 contains a prophecy that explicitly predicts both an anointed one being cut off (which is the standard Hebrew idiom for being killed) and the destruction of the city and the sanctuary. Verse 26: And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. The chronology of the seventy weeks (490 years from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem under Artaxerxes in 458 BC) lands directly on the time of Jesus. The text predicts the Messiah’s death followed by the destruction of the city and sanctuary — both of which happened in AD 30 (Jesus’s crucifixion) and AD 70 (Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple). The Messiah’s death is in the text. The Christians did not put it there.
Isaiah 52:13 through 53:12 presents a servant who is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; who is wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities; on whom the LORD hath laid the iniquity of us all; who is cut off out of the land of the living; whose grave is appointed with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; and who, after this, shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. This is a Messianic figure who dies and then prolongs his days — that is, lives again. The passage is in the Hebrew Bible. Whatever the corporate-Israel reading of the passage may offer, the death-and-then-prolonging-of-days pattern is in the text itself.
Zechariah 9:9 has the king coming to Jerusalem lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. Zechariah 12:10 has the people of Jerusalem look upon me whom they have pierced and mourn for him. Zechariah 14:3-4 has the LORD coming on the day of his return to fight against those nations and his feet standing upon the mount of Olives. The same prophetic book contains a humble Messiah coming on a donkey, a pierced figure mourned by his own people, and a conquering LORD arriving on the Mount of Olives. The two-stage pattern is in Zechariah.
Third, the Christian claim is that Jesus’s first coming inaugurated the Messianic age through his death, resurrection, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, while the eschatological consummation is still ahead. The evidence for the inaugurated phase: the spread of the knowledge of the God of Israel to the nations of the world, fulfilling Isaiah 49:6 — I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth. The establishment of the New Covenant promised in Jeremiah 31:31-34, in which the law is written on hearts rather than tablets of stone. The gift of the Holy Spirit to all believers, fulfilling Joel 2:28-29 — I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. The gathering of a people from every tribe and tongue, fulfilling the universal scope of the Abrahamic promise (Genesis 12:3 — in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed).
The Christian claim is not that Jesus failed by the rabbinic checklist and Christians invented an excuse. The Christian claim is that Jesus accomplished the deepest meaning of the messianic prophecies in his first coming, that the geopolitical fulfillment awaits his return, and that the two-stage pattern was always in the texts for those willing to read them whole.
III. Atonement, the eternity of Torah, and the false-prophet test
The reel’s fourth and fifth points belong together: Judaism rejects vicarious atonement. Moral guilt isn’t transferable, and Torah is eternal covenantal joy, not a curse. Deuteronomy 13 gives us a litmus test for false prophets. A true messiah strengthens observance.
On vicarious atonement: the reel cites Deuteronomy 24:16 — The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. The verse is real and binding. It establishes individual responsibility for criminal punishment. It does not, however, establish that voluntary substitutionary atonement is impossible — it addresses imposed punishment of one party for another’s crime, not the voluntary offering of one in the place of another.
The Hebrew Bible itself contains an entire institutional system of substitutionary atonement: the Levitical sacrificial system. The sin offering, the trespass offering, the burnt offering, the Day of Atonement ritual with the two goats (one killed, one driven into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people) — these are not minor features of the Hebrew Bible. They are the central institutional structure of the religion that God gave Israel through Moses. The Temple was the physical center of Jewish religious life precisely because it was where this substitutionary atonement was carried out. Until AD 70, when the Temple was destroyed, the sacrificial system was the operative mechanism of forgiveness in Judaism.
When the Temple was destroyed, the sacrificial system ended. Judaism had to develop alternative mechanisms — prayer, the study of Torah, charity, and teshuvah. These are real and have their own integrity. But the Hebrew Bible itself does not propose teshuvah as a complete replacement for substitutionary sacrifice. Leviticus 17:11 makes the principle explicit: For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul. The Hebrew Bible’s own theology of atonement is built around substitutionary death.
The clearest Hebrew Bible witness to vicarious atonement by a person rather than an animal is Isaiah 53. The same passage the reel addresses in its seventh point reads, in its central verses: Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows… He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities… and with his stripes we are healed… and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all… yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days… For he shall bear their iniquities… and he bare the sin of many. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the sacrificial system applied to a person. The servant is offered for sin; he bears the iniquities of others; his suffering produces healing for those for whom he suffers. This is vicarious atonement of the most explicit kind, and it is in the Hebrew Bible.
Moses himself, in Exodus 32:31-32, offers vicarious substitution when he says to God, regarding the people who had worshipped the golden calf: Oh, this people have sinned a great sin… Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written. Moses offers his own blotting out as the substitute for the people’s forgiveness. God does not accept Moses’s offer in that specific case, but the principle of voluntary substitutionary intercession is presented as something a faithful Israelite might do for his people.
The Christian claim is that Jesus’s death is the final and complete substitutionary atonement that the Levitical system foreshadowed and that obviates the need for the destroyed Temple. The book of Hebrews develops this argument at length: Jesus is both the high priest and the offering, his sacrifice is once for all, and the believer’s sins are atoned for by his blood. This is not a violation of Jewish theology of atonement — it is the deepest fulfillment of it.
On Torah as eternal and Deuteronomy 13: the reel cites Deuteronomy 13 as the test for false prophets — a prophet who performs signs but says let us go after other gods must be rejected and put to death. The reel claims that Jesus violated this test by allegedly weakening Torah observance.
The Deuteronomy 13 test, read carefully, addresses a specific kind of false prophet: one who advocates the worship of other gods. Verse 2: Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them. This is the test Jesus would have to fail to qualify as a false prophet under Deuteronomy 13. He did not fail it. He did not advocate the worship of other gods. He claimed that he himself was God in the flesh — that he and the Father are one (John 10:30), that no one comes to the Father but by him (John 14:6). The question is therefore not whether Jesus advocated other gods (he did not) but whether his claim to be the God of Israel is true. That is a different question from the one Deuteronomy 13 addresses.
On strengthening observance: Jesus’s relationship to the Mosaic law is more careful than either Jewish critics or careless Christians sometimes suggest. He said in Matthew 5:17-18: Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Jesus’s claim is that he came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. The Christian tradition has held the distinction between the moral law (the Decalogue, the love commands), which is eternally binding, and the ceremonial law (the sacrificial system, the dietary laws, the temple rituals), which was preparatory and fulfilled in Christ. This is the standard Reformed and broadly evangelical reading, going back to Augustine and developed by Aquinas in the Summa (I-II.99-104) and by the Reformers.
The fellowship’s posture: we hold the eternity of the moral law, the fulfillment of the ceremonial law in Christ, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ’s death as the deepest fulfillment of the Levitical system rather than its rejection. The Jewish objection that vicarious atonement violates Deuteronomy 24:16 is a serious one, but it reads that verse against the Hebrew Bible’s context, which affirms vicarious atonement throughout.
IV. The Jeconiah curse and the suffering servant
The reel’s sixth and seventh points are textual: Messiah requires patrilineal descent from David through Solomon. A virgin birth bypasses tribal status, while Jeconiah’s curse disqualifies Joseph’s lineage, and Judaism reads Isaiah 53’s suffering servant as the nation Israel, contextually named earlier. Alma means young woman, not necessarily a virgin.
On the Jeconiah curse: Jeremiah 22:30 declares of Jeconiah (also called Coniah and Jehoiachin), the next-to-last king of Judah before the Babylonian exile: Thus saith the LORD, Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah. The reel’s claim is that since Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:11-12) includes Jeconiah, and since the curse forbids any of Jeconiah’s descendants from ruling on David’s throne, Jesus is disqualified.
The Christian response runs along three lines.
First, the curse was reversed within the prophetic tradition itself. Haggai 2:23, addressing Zerubbabel (Jeconiah’s grandson), says: In that day, saith the LORD of hosts, will I take thee, O Zerubbabel, my servant, the son of Shealtiel, saith the LORD, and will make thee as a signet: for I have chosen thee, saith the LORD of hosts. The language of “signet” directly reverses Jeremiah 22:24, where YHWH had said of Jeconiah, though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence. Haggai’s prophecy explicitly puts back what Jeremiah had taken off. The curse, in the prophetic tradition’s own internal development, was lifted on Zerubbabel’s line.
Second, Luke’s genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3:23-38) traces a different line than Matthew’s, and the standard Christian reading is that Matthew gives Joseph’s legal line (through Solomon) while Luke gives Mary’s biological line (through David’s son Nathan, avoiding Solomon and Jeconiah entirely). On this reading, Jesus has the legal Davidic claim through his legal father Joseph and the biological Davidic claim through his biological mother Mary, without the Jeconiah issue affecting the biological line.
Third, the virgin birth does not “bypass tribal status” as the reel suggests. Mary is Davidic (Luke’s genealogy strongly implies this; the traditional reading has always taken it as such). The biological Davidic descent of Jesus runs through Mary. The legal Davidic descent runs through Joseph by Joseph’s adoption of Jesus as his legal son. Both lines meet in Jesus. The Jeconiah curse, if it applied, would touch only the legal line through Joseph, and Haggai 2:23 has already addressed even that. The reel’s framing of the genealogy issue presents a simpler problem than the actual Christian position addresses.
On the suffering servant of Isaiah 53: the reel’s claim is that the servant is the nation Israel, contextually named earlier in the surrounding chapters. This is a real reading, and it has rabbinic support. Israel is called the servant of YHWH at Isaiah 41:8, 44:1-2, and 49:3, and these references precede chapter 53. The corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53 has a substantial pedigree.
The Christian response runs along three lines.
First, the text of Isaiah 53 uses singular pronouns throughout — he, his, him, the singular noun servant. The corporate-Israel reading must take all these singulars as collective, which is grammatically possible but textually strained in such a sustained passage.
Second, Isaiah 49:5-6 explicitly distinguishes the servant from Israel: And now, saith the LORD that formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him… I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles. The servant is sent to Jacob/Israel. The servant is therefore distinguished from Jacob/Israel in this passage. If the servant in chapter 49 is distinguished from Israel, the servant in chapter 53 — three chapters later — may also be distinguished from Israel.
Third, Isaiah 53:8 makes this distinction explicit within chapter 53 itself: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. The servant is stricken for the transgression of “my people.” The servant cannot be “my people” if the servant is stricken for their transgression. The servant is distinguished from the people for whose transgression he suffers.
Fourth, the rabbinic tradition itself has long contained a strong Messianic reading of Isaiah 53. The Targum Jonathan (the authoritative Aramaic translation/paraphrase of the Prophets, used in synagogue worship for centuries) explicitly identifies the servant as the Messiah, though it then redirects the language of suffering away from him and onto Israel. The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b) discusses the suffering Messiah and references Isaiah 53. The midrash Pesikta Rabbati contains explicit Messianic readings of the passage. The consolidated corporate-Israel reading came later and was developed partly in response to Christian use of the passage. The pre-medieval Jewish tradition is more complex than the reel’s framing acknowledges.
On almah: the reel claims that almah in Isaiah 7:14 means “young woman” rather than “virgin.” This is partially right — almah does not strictly mean “virgin” in the way that the Hebrew word betulah does. But the Hebrew word almah in every one of its uses in the Hebrew Bible refers to an unmarried young woman of marriageable age (Genesis 24:43 — Rebekah; Exodus 2:8 — Miriam; Psalm 68:25 — young women playing timbrels; Proverbs 30:19; Song of Solomon 1:3 and 6:8). In the ancient Near Eastern cultural context, the presumption for an unmarried young woman of marriageable age was virginity — the virgin reading was not a stretch; it was the default cultural assumption.
The Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced by Jewish scholars in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BC, well before any Christian controversy — translated almah in Isaiah 7:14 as parthenos, which unambiguously means “virgin.” The virgin reading of Isaiah 7:14 was therefore the reading held by Jewish scholars centuries before Jesus. Matthew 1:23 quotes the Septuagint; he did not invent the virgin reading, he inherited it from the Jewish translation tradition.
The Jewish objection here has more force on chapter 53’s identification than on chapter 7’s almah. Both are real exegetical questions. Neither yields easily to either side. The Christian reading has substantial textual grounding; so does the rabbinic alternative.
V. National redemption, historical trauma, and the Bar Kokhba precedent
The reel’s eighth, ninth, and tenth points address the broader question of how the messianic question has played out in actual history.
Judaism emphasizes communal geulah and tangible peace in this world. Christianity’s individual salvation and non-worldly kingdom reflect divergent aims. This is the eighth point.
What is right in this is that there is a real difference of emphasis between Jewish and Christian tradition on the corporate-vs-individual and this-worldly-vs-otherworldly axes. Jewish tradition is robustly this-worldly and communal — the messianic age is a renewed world, gathered Israel, universal peace among the nations. Christian piety, especially in its evangelical and Protestant forms, has often been more individual and otherworldly — personal salvation, escape from the world to heaven.
But the dichotomy is overstated as an absolute. The Christian tradition contains strong this-worldly and corporate dimensions:
The Kingdom of God preached by Jesus is a thoroughly Hebraic concept of God’s reign breaking into the world. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10) — the Lord’s Prayer asks for the kingdom to come on earth, not for the saints to escape from earth. The New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:2 descends from God out of heaven to a renewed earth — the ultimate Christian hope is the renewal of creation, not its abandonment. The resurrection in the Christian tradition is bodily, not spiritual-only — Christ’s risen body is the firstfruits of a general resurrection in which all the dead will be raised in their bodies. Romans 8:19-23 describes the redemption of the entire created order: the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. The Christian eschaton is the renewed heavens and earth, not the spiritualization of believers into a disembodied paradise.
The Christian tradition has also, periodically, recovered its this-worldly and corporate dimensions when they have been forgotten. The post-Holocaust theological reckoning, the resurgence of robust eschatology in writers like N.T. Wright (especially Surprised by Hope), the recovery of Hebraic-Pauline readings of the kingdom of God in the last fifty years — these represent the Christian tradition’s own internal correction when it has drifted too far toward individual and otherworldly emphases.
The disagreement here is real but less binary than the reel suggests. The Jewish emphasis on corporate and this-worldly redemption is right; the Christian tradition has these dimensions in its own resources, but has not always lived them. The fellowship can affirm both the personal salvation that comes through Christ and the cosmic renewal that the same Christ will complete.
Centuries of persecution under the cross forged trauma, making conversion feel like betraying ancestors. History compounds theological disagreements. This is the ninth point, and it deserves engagement.
What the reel describes is true, and Christians must not minimize it. The Crusades of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries unleashed violence against Jewish communities across the Rhineland and beyond, often by Christian armies on their way to fight Muslims in the Holy Land. The medieval period saw the blood libel — the false accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes — used as justification for pogroms across Europe. The Inquisition, beginning in Spain in 1478, expelled or forcibly converted Jews on pain of death and continued to persecute conversos for generations afterward. The expulsions — England 1290, France 1394, Spain 1492, Portugal 1497, and many smaller events — uprooted Jewish communities that had lived in those places for centuries. The pogroms of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Eastern Europe killed thousands and destroyed countless communities. And the Holocaust — six million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime, with the broad cooperation or silent acquiescence of much of European Christendom — was the catastrophic culmination of a thousand-year pattern.
Much of this was done by people who called themselves Christians, often invoking the cross, often justifying their violence with theological language drawn from a misreading of the Gospel. This is the historical reality the reel names. The fellowship cannot dismiss it. The Christian response must include several things:
Honest acknowledgment of the historical evil, without minimization or excuse. The Crusades’ violence against Jews was evil. The Inquisition was evil. The pogroms were evil. The Holocaust was the worst evil in human history, and Christian failure was a major contributing factor.
Repentance. The Christian church has, in pockets, begun to engage in serious repentance — the Confession of Stuttgart (1945) by the German Evangelical Church, Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate (1965), and the various Protestant denominational statements over the last sixty years. This work is incomplete. It must continue.
Recognition that this is not what Christ taught. Jesus was Jewish. His mother was Jewish. His apostles were Jewish. The earliest church was Jewish. The God of Israel is the God of the Christians. Christian anti-Judaism has always been a betrayal of Christianity from within. Salvation is of the Jews (John 4:22). The fellowship holds this without qualification.
The Pauline reading of Israel’s place. Romans 9 through 11 is Paul’s extended reflection on Israel’s relationship to the gospel. Paul, himself a Jew, weeps for his unbelieving fellow Jews — I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh (Romans 9:3). He insists that the Jewish people remain beloved for the fathers’ sakes (Romans 11:28), that God has not cast away his people (Romans 11:1-2), that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29), and that ultimately all Israel shall be saved (Romans 11:26). The Pauline reading does not give Christianity permission to despise Israel. It commands the opposite.
The historical trauma is not, in itself, an argument that Jesus is not the Messiah. The reel’s framing here is honest — history compounds theological disagreement. The historical trauma compounds the disagreement; it does not constitute the disagreement. But the trauma is real, and Christian engagement with Jewish friends and neighbors has to account for it.
Past claimants like Bar Kokhba, endorsed by Rabbi Akiva, died before succeeding. Rabbis conceded failure rather than inventing sequels. This is the tenth point.
Simon ben Kosiba, called Bar Kokhba (son of the star — a messianic title), led the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome from 132 to 135 AD. Rabbi Akiva, the leading sage of his generation, endorsed him as the Messiah. The revolt was crushed; Bar Kokhba was killed; Akiva was tortured to death by the Romans; the Jewish population of Judea was decimated. The rabbinic tradition subsequently acknowledged that Akiva had been wrong about Bar Kokhba, that Bar Kokhba was not the Messiah, and that the messianic expectation had to continue. The rabbis did not invent a second coming for Bar Kokhba. They acknowledged failure.
The reel’s point is the obvious comparison: Jesus is to Bar Kokhba as Akiva’s mistake is to the Christian mistake. Both were messianic claimants who died before succeeding. Both attracted followers. Both should be rejected on the same grounds.
The Christian response is that the cases are not parallel.
Bar Kokhba was a military leader who attempted a political-military revolution against Rome and failed. Jesus was not a military leader; he explicitly declined military-political revolution (John 18:36 — my kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight). He went deliberately to the cross.
Bar Kokhba died and stayed dead. There were no claims of resurrection. The movement collapsed with his death.
Jesus’s followers claimed that he rose from the dead, and the movement built around this claim has lasted two thousand years across every continent, with two billion adherents today. Whatever else can be said about it, the trajectory of the Jesus movement is not the trajectory of the Bar Kokhba movement.
The Bar Kokhba precedent actually highlights what is unique about the Jesus case rather than discrediting it. If Jesus’s case were parallel to Bar Kokhba’s — military leader, defeated revolt, dead and stayed dead — the reel’s argument would be conclusive. But Jesus’s case is not parallel. The single empirical difference between the two cases is the resurrection. And that difference is everything.
VI. The hinge the reel cannot reach: the Resurrection
The reel makes ten points. Each point has substance. Some have considerable substance — the Jeconiah curse, the corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53, the historical trauma. Some have less. But every one of them operates at a level that is answered from above by a single historical question: did Jesus rise from the dead?
If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then he was a failed messianic claimant of the Bar Kokhba type, and Jewish rejection of him is reasonable on essentially all of the reel’s ten points. The corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53 wins by default. The Jeconiah curse stands. The messianic checklist is unfulfilled. The “second coming” is indeed a retroactive fix. The historical trauma is uncompensated. Akiva was wrong about Bar Kokhba, and Peter and Paul were wrong about Jesus, and the matter is closed.
If Jesus did rise from the dead, then everything has to be re-read. The corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53 loses to the singular-Messiah reading that the early rabbinic tradition itself contained. The Jeconiah curse is reversed (which the prophetic tradition itself attests in Haggai). The messianic age has been inaugurated, with the consummation still to come. The two-stage pattern was always in the texts. The historical trauma is real and to be repented of, but it does not change who Jesus is. Akiva was wrong about Bar Kokhba; Peter and Paul were right about Jesus.
Everything turns on this one question. And the reel cannot reach it, because the reel operates at the level of theological argument, and the question is at the level of historical evidence.
The Christian case for the resurrection rests on several lines of evidence that the fellowship has engaged at length in other essays and that I will only summarize here:
The empty tomb, attested by multiple independent sources, including the testimony of women (whose testimony was not legally valid in first-century Jewish or Roman courts, which makes their inclusion in the gospel accounts a counter-productive choice unless the events actually happened that way).
The post-resurrection appearances, attested across multiple independent sources to individuals, to small groups, to large groups (1 Corinthians 15:6 reports an appearance to above five hundred brethren at once), to skeptics like Thomas, and to the hostile Saul of Tarsus who became Paul.
The transformation of the disciples. The same men who fled at Jesus’s arrest, who denied knowing him at his trial, who locked themselves in an upper room after his crucifixion, became within weeks the founders of a movement willing to be flogged, imprisoned, and killed for what they claimed to have witnessed. This is not the trajectory of men who knew their leader had merely been executed. It is the trajectory of men who believed they had seen him alive again.
The conversion of Paul. Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee educated under Gamaliel, hostile to the Christian movement, on his way to Damascus to arrest more Christians, became the most influential Christian missionary in history after an encounter on the Damascus road. His own letters, written within twenty-five years of the crucifixion, contain creedal fragments (Philippians 2:6-11, 1 Corinthians 15:3-7) that show very early belief in the resurrection and the divinity of Christ — early enough to make later legendary development implausible.
The rapid spread of the movement despite intense persecution. The Jesus movement spread across the Roman Empire within decades, in conditions where being a Christian could result in execution. The motivation for this spread requires explanation. The traditional explanation — that the witnesses were so persuaded of what they had seen that they were willing to die for it — has the merit of fitting the evidence.
This is not a deductive proof. The resurrection is not provable in the way that a mathematical theorem is provable. It is an inductive case. But the inductive case is substantial and has persuaded billions of people over two thousand years, including many Jews, from the first generation of the apostles to Saul of Tarsus to the Messianic Jewish movement of the contemporary period.
The fellowship’s claim is not that the reel’s ten points are weak. The claim is that ten reasonable theological points, considered individually, cannot withstand the historical evidence for the resurrection, considered as a whole. The hinge is at the historical level, where the case is finally made.
VII. The fellowship’s posture toward Jewish friends
What does all this mean for how the fellowship actually engages Jewish friends and neighbors?
Several things, drawn together from the engagement above and from the broader corpus the fellowship has been building this week.
First, with respect for the depth of Jewish theological reflection. The arguments compressed in the reel have a pedigree — Maimonides, Nahmanides, the medieval disputations, and the contemporary scholars. The fellowship engages them as substantive arguments, not as straw men.
Second, with honest acknowledgment of Christian historical failure toward the Jewish people. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust — these are not items to be argued away or minimized. They are evils that Christian repentance must continue to address. The Cherry-Picked Centuries essay earlier this week addressed Rawan Osman’s careful treatment of Christian-Jewish historical relations, and the fellowship’s posture there also applies here.
Third, with confidence in the truth of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, but without crude apologetic triumphalism. The Christian conviction is not that we are clever and the Jews are slow. The Christian conviction is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob sent his Son into the world for the salvation of Israel and of the nations, that the Son was crucified and rose from the dead, and that the messianic age has been inaugurated and will be consummated at his return. This conviction is held with the seriousness that two thousand years of careful Christian theological reflection have given it, but in conversation with the equally serious Jewish reflection that has run alongside it.
Fourth, with patience. Most Jewish people who come to faith in Christ do so slowly, over years, through relationships rather than through arguments. The argumentative engagement is necessary — the questions are real and deserve real answers — but it alone rarely persuades. What persuades is the lived witness of Christian lives that look like Christ. The fellowship’s commitment to holiness in the dirt of life, articulated through this week’s corpus, is not a small thing in this context. The most powerful Christian witness to Jewish friends is not the bumper sticker. It is the marriage that holds, the children raised in faith, the work done with integrity, the suffering borne with grace, the love that does not fail.
Fifth, with the conviction held by Paul in Romans 11 that the Jewish people remain in a unique relationship to God’s redemptive plan. I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid (Romans 11:1). They are not all Israel, which are of Israel (Romans 9:6) — Paul holds the line that ethnic Israel and the church of Christ are not simply identical, but neither are they simply separate. The wild branches (the Gentile believers) are grafted into the olive tree of Israel (Romans 11:17). The natural branches (the Jewish people) that have been broken off are not permanently lost — they can be grafted in again (Romans 11:23). And in the end, all Israel shall be saved (Romans 11:26). What this means in specific eschatological detail is debated within Christian theology. What it means for the fellowship’s practical posture is clear: love Jewish friends and neighbors; witness to Christ honestly when invited or appropriate; never coerce, never disrespect, never minimize the historical trauma; and trust that the God who promised will fulfill.
VIII. Closing
I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew… For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?… For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.
— Romans 11:1-2, 15, 25-26
The reel makes ten points. The fellowship engages each of them as the serious theological arguments they are. The disagreement at the foundation is real — the disagreement about whether the One God of Israel could and did become incarnate, the disagreement about whether the Messiah comes in two stages or one, the disagreement about whether Isaiah 53 speaks of a corporate or singular figure. The fellowship holds the Christian reading of these questions for reasons grounded in the Hebrew Bible itself, in the historical evidence for the resurrection, and in two thousand years of careful Christian theological reflection. The fellowship also holds, with Paul, that the Jewish people remain beloved by God, that the historical trauma is real and to be repented of, and that the God who promised to gather all Israel will do so in his own time.
The question hinges upon whether a particular man who walked the roads of Galilee two thousand years ago rose from the dead three days after his execution. If he did not, the reel is right. If he did, every one of its ten points has an answer.
The fellowship believes, on inductive grounds substantial enough to bet our lives on, that he did. We hold this conviction with respect for those who do not share it, with honest acknowledgment of Christian failures, and with the patience that comes from trusting that the same God who began this work will complete it.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | Jun 1, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
Verily, Verily, I Say Unto You: Comparing the Mormon, Reformed Christian, and CPP Perspectives on John 5:19
Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 7, 2026
Occasion. Leonard, you asked me to write a fellowship essay on John 5:19. I am taking the request seriously and addressing this essay to you directly, because I think the verse you have asked about is one you have been holding as an anchor of Covenant Christian/Mormon doctrine, and I think the question underneath your request is one that deserves a careful examination. The verse has a long history. It is one of the most contested verses in the New Testament. It has been a Christological controversy since the second century, and the way it is read tracks closely with the way the broader Christian tradition holds the relationship of the Son to the Father. The reading you were probably raised with in your childhood training as a Mormon may be different from what is held by the Christian Reform tradition. Both are serious readings of the same Greek text, given by serious people, but they do not arrive at the same place. I want to lay out, as carefully as I can, what the verse says within its full discourse, how the historic Christian tradition has resolved the question it raises, and what it means for how a disciple actually lives.
The verse in question, in the King James Version:
Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. — John 5:19
Five sections follow. The first establishes the setting in which Jesus says these words, because the setting is the key to almost everything that follows. The second reads the verse inside its larger discourse, which runs from 5:18 through 5:30, and which any honest reading of 5:19 has to engage. The third lays out the classical resolution that the historic Christian tradition arrived at after several centuries of working at this passage and its companions, and acknowledges. The fourth turns from the Christological question to the pattern-of-life question — what John 5:19 looks like when a disciple takes it as a model for daily living. The fifth offers a brief CPP-framework reflection on why the pattern of life John 5:19 names has structural resonance with the substrate of physics as I have come to understand it.
I. The setting: why Jesus says what he says
You cannot read John 5:19 without reading John 5:1-18 first. The verse is an answer to an accusation, and the accusation determines the shape of the answer.
The setting is the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. The pool is a place of healing — the lame, the blind, the withered gathered around it, waiting for the moving of the water. Jesus encounters a man who has been infirm for thirty-eight years. He asks the man whether he wants to be made whole. The man explains his difficulty — he has no one to put him into the pool when the water is troubled, and others always reach the water before him. Jesus does not put him into the pool. Jesus simply tells him to rise, take up his bed, and walk. The man is healed instantly. He picks up his bed and walks.
It is the Sabbath. The Pharisees, observing the healed man carrying his bed, accuse him of Sabbath-breaking. The man explains that the one who healed him commanded him to take up his bed. The Pharisees press him for the healer’s identity. He cannot tell them at first — he does not know who Jesus is. Later, Jesus finds him in the temple, gives him a brief teaching, and the man reports to the Pharisees that it was Jesus. The Pharisees then turn their accusation toward Jesus himself.
John records the accusation in two stages. The first stage, 5:16: Therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day. Jesus responds in 5:17: My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. This response intensifies the conflict because it now includes a second offense beyond Sabbath-breaking. John makes this explicit in 5:18:
Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.
This is the accusation Jesus is answering when he speaks 5:19. The Pharisees are not accusing him merely of healing on the Sabbath. They are accusing him of claiming a relationship to God that constitutes equality with God — and in the second-temple Jewish frame, this is a capital offense, a claim of divinity that, if false, is blasphemy of the most serious kind. The Pharisees have understood Jesus correctly. He is claiming what they think he is claiming. What he says next is his explanation of how the claim is true.
Hold that in mind, the opening word of 5:19 — Verily, verily, I say unto you — is the strongest oath formula Jesus uses in the Gospel of John. He uses it twenty-five times in this Gospel, always to introduce a teaching of unusual weight. He is about to say something he wants his hearers to take very seriously. And what he is about to say is His answer to the charge of making Himself equal with God.
If 5:19 were a denial of that charge — a simple disclaimer of equality with God, an admission of merely creaturely status — the conflict in the passage would dissolve. The Pharisees would have no further reason to pursue him. But that is not what happens. The Pharisees continue trying to kill Him through the rest of the discourse, and Jesus continues escalating His claim. Whatever 5:19 says, it does not de-escalate the charge of equality with God. It redescribes equality in a way the Pharisees still cannot accept.
This is the first interpretive datum. Any reading of 5:19 that yields a less divine Jesus than the Pharisees accused him of being reads against the narrative grain. Jesus is in the middle of a high-stakes confrontation in which he is claiming what the Pharisees think he is claiming, and his use of verily, verily, I say unto you is telling his hearers — including us — to take what follows with full theological weight.
II. The verse inside the discourse
John 5:19 opens a discourse that runs through 5:30. The discourse is a single, sustained argument. It must be read whole. Let me walk you through it.
5:19 — The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.
This is the opening claim. The Son does nothing in isolation from the Father. Whatever the Father does, the Son does in exact correspondence. Notice already the strength of the parallel: not some of what the Father does, not similar things, but what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. The correspondence is total.
5:20 — For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth: and he will shew him greater works than these, that ye may marvel.
The Father loves the Son and conceals nothing from him. All things that himself doeth. And there will be greater works to come. The Pharisees who marvel at a Sabbath-day healing are about to be given much more astonishing reasons to marvel.
5:21 — For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will.
This is the first of the greater works. Resurrection — the prerogative most exclusively reserved to God in the Hebrew Scriptures — is now declared to be the Son’s prerogative. And the qualifier is striking: whom he will. Not whom the Father wills and the Son merely executes — whom he will. The Son exercises his own will in the giving of life, and his will is sufficient to give it.
5:22 — For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son.
The second prerogative: the final judgment. The Father has committed all judgment to the Son. Not partial judgment, not assistant judgment, not advisory judgment. All.
5:23 — That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.
This is the explicit declaration of the equivalence that the Pharisees objected to. The Son is to be honored even as the Father is honored. Refusing the honor to the Son is refusing the honor to the Father. In the Second-Temple Jewish frame, this is a stunning statement. Worship is to be rendered to God alone (Deuteronomy 6:13). The verse asserts that the same honor is to be rendered to the Son, and that failure to render it to the Son is failure to render it to God.
5:24 — Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.
The second verily, verily. Faith in Jesus is the condition of eternal life — and the Father’s authority underwrites the Son’s word. Hearing the Son’s word is, in effect, the way faith in the Father is exercised.
5:25 — Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.
The third verily, verily. The dead will hear the voice of the Son of God — and live. Resurrection is the Son’s act. The dead respond to his voice.
5:26 — For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.
This is the verse that most directly addresses the question of the Son’s relationship to the Father. The Father has life in himself — aseity, self-existence, the divine attribute most distinctive of God in the Hebrew tradition. And the Father has given to the Son to have life in himself. The Son has the same self-existing life as the Father. The “giving” here is not the giving of a finite gift from a greater to a lesser; it is the eternal communication of the Father’s own life to the Son, by which the Son shares fully in the divine aseity.
5:27 — And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man.
5:28-29 — Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.
The final, universal resurrection. All that are in the graves will hear the Son’s voice and come forth — some to the resurrection of life, some to the resurrection of damnation. The dead recognize his voice. The Son speaks; they obey; they rise. This is not the act of a subordinate creature. This is the act of God.
5:30 — I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.
And here the discourse closes with the same statement it opened with. I can of mine own self do nothing. The bracket completes the structure. 5:19 and 5:30 say the same thing, and between them lies the unpacking — every divine prerogative committed to the Son, every act of God now declared the Son’s act, every honor due God now declared due the Son.
This is the structure that any reading of 5:19 must engage with. The claim is not that the Son is less than the Father in any ontological sense. The claim is something else entirely. The Son does nothing in isolation from the Father — because the Son is never in isolation from the Father. The Son’s every act is the Father’s act, the Father’s every act is the Son’s act, and what looks at first like a statement of subordination turns out, when followed through to 5:30 with all that lies between, to be a statement of the most intimate possible unity.
III. The classical resolution: what the verse means, and what it does not mean
This is the section we must walk through carefully because it bears most directly on what I take to be the question underlying the Mormon perspective. The fellowship works within the historic orthodox Christian tradition’s reading of these verses. The Mormon tradition works within a different reading. Both readings have their reasons. I want to lay out the orthodox reading the way the fathers worked it out, and at the close, I will name the difference between the two.
The verse first became a battleground in the fourth century. A presbyter in Alexandria named Arius read John 5:19 and other texts of similar shape — John 14:28 my Father is greater than I, Mark 10:18 why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God, Hebrews 1:4 the Son being made so much better than the angels — and concluded that the Son must be ontologically subordinate to the Father. The Son, in Arius’s reading, was the first and highest creature of the Father, more exalted than any other creature, but a creature nonetheless. There was a time when he was not — Arius’s famous formula. The Son was begotten, in this reading, in the sense that he was brought into existence by the Father at some point before the creation of anything else, and his unique status consisted in being the Father’s first and greatest creative act.
The orthodox response, hammered out at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and refined over the following decades by Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Cyril of Alexandria, and the three Cappadocian fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa), was that the Arian reading could not be sustained against the full witness of Scripture. The fathers worked their way through John 5:19, and the broader Johannine corpus, and what they pointed to was the structural impossibility of Arius’s reading within the discourse in which it sits.
The argument runs like this. Read 5:19 in isolation, and Arius has a case. The Son can do nothing of himself — could be read as the limitation of a finite, dependent creature. But carry the reading through to 5:21, and the same Son who can do nothing of himself quickeneth whom he will. The same Son who can do nothing of himself is the giver of life — and not just life, but eternal life, to whom he will. This is not what a creature does. Resurrection is God’s prerogative throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. The Son exercises it as his own will.
Carry the reading to 5:22 — all judgment is committed to the Son. No creature judges all things. The final judgment of all rational beings is the prerogative of God. The Son holds it.
Carry the reading to 5:23 — all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. No creature is to be honored as God is honored. The fathers pointed to this verse repeatedly as the hinge. If the Son is a creature, then commanding that the Son be honored as God is honored is commanding idolatry — the rendering to a creature of the honor due only to the Creator. And no honest reading of the Gospel of John can support the conclusion that the Son commands idolatry.
Carry the reading to 5:26 — as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself. The Son has life in himself — the divine attribute of aseity, the self-existence that no creature possesses. The Father has given this to the Son not as one gives a finite gift, but as the eternal communication of the Father’s own life to the Son in the eternal generation of the Son from the Father.
Carry the reading to 5:28-29 — the dead in their graves hear the Son’s voice and rise. The voice of a creature does not raise the dead. The voice of God raises the dead. The Son’s voice is the voice of God.
By the time the fathers reached 5:30 — the closing bracket of the discourse, restating the opening claim — they had built the case. The Son can do nothing of himself could not mean ontological subordination, because the same Son does everything God does in the same discourse. What 5:19 and 5:30 must mean, given the rest of the passage, is something other than ontological subordination. They must mean relational subordination: the Son does nothing apart from the Father, because the Son is never apart from the Father. The two are one in being, one in life, one in act. The “subordination” is the mode of the Son’s eternal communion with the Father, not a hierarchy of ontological standing.
The Greek theological term that emerged for this — coined, in its current technical sense, by John of Damascus in the eighth century, drawing on patristic developments before him — is perichoresis. The mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity. The Father dwells in the Son; the Son dwells in the Father; the Spirit dwells in both. What the Father does, the Son does with the Father, not after the Father — because there is no temporal sequence between the eternal Persons. The Son’s seeing of the Father in John 5:19 is not the Son observing an external Father and then imitating Him. It is the Son’s eternal participation in the Father’s life such that the Son’s act is, simply, the Father’s act seen from the Son’s side.
Cyril of Alexandria put it perhaps most clearly in his commentary on this passage. The Son says I can of mine own self do nothing, Cyril wrote, not because the Son lacks any divine power, but because the Son is so perfectly one with the Father that there is no “of myself” that could be separated from the Father in the first place. The “of himself” the Son disclaims is the very thing a creature has — an independent, separable will set over against God’s will. The Son has no such will. His will is the Father’s will, eternally, by the unity of the divine nature. To do anything of himself in that creaturely sense would be to act against his own nature as the Son. So he does nothing of himself. And in doing nothing of himself, he does everything the Father does — because the Father acts only in the Son, and the Son acts only in the Father.
This is the orthodox resolution held by the entire Christian tradition that received Nicaea — Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, Baptist, and the broader evangelical mainstream. It is, in its substance, what the Athanasian Creed declares: the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God. The Son is of one substance (Greek homoousios) with the Father — not similar to the Father, not lower than the Father, but the same divine essence in the second Person.
I want to acknowledge directly that this is not the reading of the Latter-day Saint theological tradition, in its formal articulation since Joseph Smith’s Lectures on Faith (1835) and elaborated through the King Follett Discourse (1844) and the works of later LDS theologians, who have held that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three distinct beings, unified in purpose but distinct in substance — that the Son is, in some real sense, a separate Being from the Father, not consubstantial with Him in the Nicene sense. On this reading, John 5:19 lands more naturally as a statement of genuine functional subordination: the Son, as a distinct Being, defers to the Father, observes the Father’s actions, and acts in correspondence. The relationship is closer than any other in the universe, but the two remain ontologically distinct.
I am not going to argue with that reading here, but what I can offer is the fellowship’s reading of the verse, which is the orthodox Nicene reading I have just walked through — and the reasons we hold it. The reasons are not because the tradition told us to. The reason is that the discourse 5:19 sits inside, taken whole, will not yield the subordinationist reading without breaking. The Son who can do nothing of himself is also the Son who gives life to whom he will, judges all things, is honored as the Father is honored, has life in himself, and raises the dead with his voice. These are not the prerogatives of a separate being deferring to a greater one. They are the prerogatives of God, exercised by the Son.
What I can say, on the orthodox side of the line, is that the verse, read in its full context, with attention to what the Pharisees thought Jesus was claiming and to what Jesus actually said in answer, is one of the strongest Christological verses in the New Testament. It does not diminish the Son. It identifies the mode of the Son’s eternal unity with the Father. That is what verily, verily, I say unto you was meant to mark for serious attention.
IV. The pattern of life
Now I want to turn to the second thing the verse is doing, because it is not only a Christological declaration. It is also a pattern of life for the disciple.
The Son does nothing of himself. The Son does only what he sees the Father doing. The Son’s every act flows from his perception of the Father’s act.
This is the eternal pattern of the Son’s life. It is also the pattern the Son models, through his incarnation, for the disciple to enter into. Not the eternal generation — that is the Son’s alone — but the responsiveness. The disciple is invited to live in such close attention to the Father that the disciple’s acts flow from what the disciple perceives the Father doing.
This is not a passive posture. The Son in 5:19-30 is intensely active — he heals the man at Bethesda, he gives life to whom he will, he judges, and he raises the dead with his voice. The activity is total. What is absent is self-origination. The Son does not initiate from himself. He initiates from what he sees in the Father.
The contemplative tradition of the church has been working at this for two thousand years. Watchman Nee, in The Normal Christian Life, develops the doctrine of the indwelling Christ as the source of the disciple’s action — not I, but Christ liveth in me (Galatians 2:20) is the same pattern from the disciple’s side, the indwelling Son in the disciple producing the works the Father has prepared. Andrew Murray, in Abide in Christ and The Master’s Indwelling, walks the same path — the disciple’s life is fruitful in proportion to the disciple’s abiding in the Vine. Brother Lawrence, in The Practice of the Presence of God, names the discipline of continual attention: the disciple turning to the Father every moment, asking what the Father is doing, acting in correspondence. Frank Laubach’s daily attention exercises — game with minutes, he called it — are a twentieth-century version of the same discipline.
What every one of these writers is reaching for is the disciple’s small daily version of the eternal pattern of John 5:19. The disciple cannot do what the Son does — the disciple cannot give eternal life to whom he wills or judge all men. But the disciple can, by attention and discipline and the gift of the indwelling Spirit, move toward a pattern of life in which his own self-originating initiations decrease and his responsiveness to the Father increases. He must increase, but I must decrease (John 3:30) — John the Baptist’s confession of the same dynamic in a different key.
The Mormon tradition has its own version of it, the doctrine of personal revelation, the still small voice, the prompting of the Spirit. The Covenant-Christian framework (the Denver Snuffer-led movement) deepens this: the direct relationship with the Lord, the seeking of his face, the willingness to be moved by what he shows you. The orthodox Christian tradition I am writing from has its own forms — the Jesus Prayer of the Eastern tradition, the Ignatian discernment of spirits, the Reformed doctrine of the Spirit’s witness in the heart of the believer. These are all different traditions working out of how the disciple lives the John 5:19 pattern. The pattern is the same. The vocabularies differ.
What I want to suggest, for fellowship reflection, is that the John 5:19 pattern of life is more practical than it sounds. It does not require a contemplative retreat or a monastery. It requires three things, which can be cultivated in the middle of an ordinary working week:
Attention. The disciple practices noticing where the Father is at work — in his own marriage, in his own work, in the small encounters of an ordinary day. The discipline is not mystical. It is the discipline of asking, before acting: Father, what are you doing here? Show me that I may join you. Brother Lawrence’s practice. Laubach’s game with minutes. The discipline is to turn the question on as often as one can remember.
Restraint. The disciple holds back from acting on his own initiative when the Father has not yet shown him what to do. This is the hardest discipline. The disciple’s instinct is to initiate — to fix, to solve, to push, to perform. The pattern of John 5:19 is to wait. The Son can do nothing of himself. The disciple, on his small scale, learns to do nothing of himself either — to wait for what the Father shows.
Action. The disciple acts in accordance with what he has seen the Father do. What things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. The acting is total. There is nothing passive about it. The disciple gives what the Father gives, speaks what the Father speaks, and builds what the Father builds. The activity flows from the responsiveness rather than from the self-originating will.
This pattern is what I have been experiencing while writing the fellowship essays over the last several months. I described it to Charlie on a long phone call earlier this week, which he framed as: You are describing the process of writing a song or painting a painting. You become a medium, and it flows through you. Yes. The hours of work are real. The structural decisions are agonizing. The sentence-by-sentence labor is exhausting. But underneath the labor, when the substrate of attention and prayer and study has been adequately prepared, something else comes through that I did not produce. The wind is at my back. I am, in the small way available to a writer, doing the John 5:19 pattern — perceiving what the Father is doing, responding in correspondence, acting as the medium for what wants to come through. The work is mine to do. The gift is not. The Son’s pattern in eternity is the disciple’s pattern in time. The disciple cannot reach the Son’s perfect responsiveness, but the disciple can move toward it. He must increase; I must decrease.
This is what I would commend, as the personal application of the verse. Not the Christological controversy — though that is real and the fellowship has worked through it as honestly as I know how in section III. The pattern of life. The disciple’s small, daily version of what the Son eternally inhabits. Father, what are you doing? Show me that I may join you.
V. The CPP intersection: perception and response in the substrate
A brief closing meditation on the Conscious Point Physics frame, because this perspective ties the biblical to a larger, objective frame that makes it real for a mind grounded in science, and because there is a real structural resonance here worth marking.
In the CPP framework, the substrate of physical reality is composed of Conscious Points moving on the 600-cell geometric grid of space. Each Conscious Point, on each Moment, executes a three-phase cycle: Perceive, Compute, Displace. The CP perceives the forces acting on it from the other CPs in its environment. The CP computes the appropriate response given those forces. The CP displaces accordingly. Perception, evaluation, and action is the pattern of proper life processing at the most fundamental level of life’s substrate.
Consider John 5:19 against this pattern. The Son perceives the Father. The Son evaluates the circumstances and judges optional actions according to the Father’s nature and law. The Son acts as the Father acts. The structural shape of the Son’s pattern at the divine level is the perfected case of the structural shape of every Conscious Point’s pattern at the substrate level. Each CP on the substrate perceives and evaluates within its small environment. The Son in eternity is perceiving and evaluating within the divine life. The pattern is the same; the levels are different.
This is illuminating, but it must be held with care. I am not claiming that John 5:19 proves CPP, or that CPP requires John 5:19. The resonance is suggestive, not demonstrative. The risk of overstatement here would be to make Christology into physics or physics into Christology — both are legitimate domains, both speak to the structure of reality, but neither reduces to the other.
What the resonance does suggest, I think rightly, is something more modest. If the substrate of the universe is perception, evaluation, and response from the bottom up, then the disciple living the John 5:19 pattern is not living against the grain of how reality works. The disciple is living with the grain. The disciple’s attention-restraint/evaluation-action discipline is the same shape as the substrate’s perceive-compute-displace cycle. The Son’s eternal pattern is the same shape that ramifies through every level of reality, from the Son’s perfect responsiveness to the smallest CP’s response to its local environment.
In CPP terms, when the disciple practices the John 5:19 pattern, he is not adopting an artificial spiritual discipline that runs counter to the animal reality of human nature, which tends to follow the most ego-feeling-habit-gratifying life choice. He is conforming his life to the grain of how the universe is built. The grain runs from the substrate of physics through the structure of biology and human cognition, all the way up to the eternal life of the Son in the Father. The disciple is aligning himself with the architecture of being. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). Yes. In the most concrete possible sense. The CPs through which the disciple’s body is built are themselves doing, every Moment, the small-scale version of what the Son does eternally and what the disciple practices in spiritual discipline. The whole of creation, from the smallest CP to the highest Son, runs on the John 5:19 pattern.
Hold this lightly. It is a meditation, not an argument. The argument was made in sections II and III. This is the gift the CPP frame offers: a way to see how deeply the John 5:19 pattern runs in the structure God has built.
VI. Closing
The verse we examined today is one of the most theologically rich verses in the New Testament. It opens a discourse that contains the highest Christological declarations Jesus makes in the Gospel of John, and at the same time offers a pattern of life that has been at work in the deepest contemplative traditions of the church for two thousand years. The Christological question finds its resolution in the patristic working out of perichoresis and Nicene unity. The pattern-of-life question has its application in the daily discipline of attention, evaluative, and responsive action that the contemplative tradition has been refining since the desert fathers.
I have written this to ensure the fellowship’s reading of the verse, as the orthodox Nicene reading can be justified. The Mormon tradition reads it differently. I have laid both out as fairly as I can, and I trust you to do the work of discernment on your own time and in your own way. What I will say is that the orthodox reading, read inside the full discourse from 5:18 through 5:30, holds together, and having read it carefully, I am persuaded the verse says about Christ what the historic Church has always understood it to say.
The pattern-of-life dimension, I think, is where we can all agree. Whatever else divides our traditions, the discipline of Father, what are you doing? Show me that I may join you is, I believe, common ground. The Son’s pattern is the disciple’s pattern. The disciple’s pattern is the substrate’s pattern. In him we live, and move, and have our being.
Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.
May the verse continue to work in all of us.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | May 30, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
Each Head Is a World: On Truth-Seeking, Worldview Lock-In, and the Witness Problem
Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 28, 2026
Occasion. Charlie Gutierrez and I spoke for nearly two hours on Wednesday evening. The call wandered, as our calls always do, across business decisions, pastoral matters, and moral and philosophical issues.
The relevant thread is this: how does a Christian witness actually function in a world where each person holds a different, largely impermeable worldview? Charlie’s grandfather used to say, “Each head is a world.” This is the question the fellowship is always working on, because our meetings and the goal of the group are not about just personal edification and sanctification; they are about the Great Commission, taking the Gospel to all the world. The Hoover-panel essay approached the topic from a scientific, evidentiary angle. The Render-Unto-Caesar essay examined the question from a civic angle. This essay takes a cut at where Charlie’s witness operates across worldviews and their seeming lock. What is our habit/de facto method we use as a group when witnessing? What color does the group chat-medium add to our individual and group witness?
I. Each head is a world
The phrase came up in the middle of the call. Charlie was reflecting on his never-Trumper friends — four of them, longtime friends, with whom the subject of Trump is now impossible. They see Trump as the most reprehensible figure to ever walk the earth. The elections were not stolen; the very suggestion is offensive; there is no available bridge. Mass psychosis was Charlie’s phrase for it. These are people he loves and who continue to love him despite his impossible heterodoxy. He marveled that the world manages to keep functioning, given that almost everyone is operating inside a different and largely impermeable reality:
Each head is a world, my grandfather used to say. And it’s remarkable. Think what it’s like to get on the same page with your wife. It is not easy, and I don’t know if anyone actually ever does it. Becoming one flesh is the labor of a whole marriage. Then we have these other relationships, and we have so much less time, energy, and influence, and I don’t know how far we get. It’s just amazing that people aren’t constantly at war.
The phrase from his grandfather is the right framing for what the fellowship has been working on. Each head is, in fact, a world — a coherent, integrated, self-consistent system in which the elements of belief, experience, value, expectation, and interpretation hang together. Within each head-system is a story, a reason that people feel, think, and act as they do. We should see them through the lens of knowing that we don’t know the sequence that led to that state. Oh, but for the grace of God, there go I, is genuinely true. That story is genuinely invisible. The person inside the system is not lying when he says he does not see what an outsider obviously sees. He really does not see it. The system has done what systems do: it organizes perception, sorting incoming data into pre-existing categories. The reality of the totality of the other person’s history and decisions to react to life does not fit those categories. Life is filtered before it ever reaches conscious examination.
This is not a new observation. Augustine had it. Pascal had it. The twentieth-century sociology of knowledge made a whole discipline out of it. What is fresh in our moment is the sheer multiplication of incompatible worldview-systems and the speed with which any given soul can be habituated into one. A century ago, a soul born into a particular village inherited the village’s worldview by something close to physical necessity; the alternatives were too distant to be live options. Today, a soul has access to several thousand worldview options before age sixteen, and the algorithmic systems that mediate that access are optimized to deepen whichever worldview attachment first takes hold. Charlie’s never-Trumper friends did not arrive at their worldview through anything resembling deliberation. They arrived at it the way most worldviews are arrived at: through reflexive integration into a community that performs the worldview as the price of membership. Their case is not unusual. It is the modal case.
For the fellowship, the practical question is what to do about this. We are tasked, in the Great Commission, with going into all the world. The world we are entering is populated by people, living in their own worlds, each with mutually exclusive worldviews. The straightforward approach — argue the truth, show the evidence, expect the hearer to update his beliefs — runs straight into the lock-in problem. The hearer does not update because the hearer’s worldview filters the input before it reaches the deliberating mind. Something more is required. That is the question for this essay.
II. Three pictures of lock-in
It will help to have three concrete examples of the lock-in phenomenon in front of us, because the dynamics are the same across very different content domains.
The first picture is Charlie’s never-Trumper friends. Political worldview-lock. Four people, intelligent and educated, who hold a particular reading of the 2020 election and the moral status of the forty-fifth president as if it were elementary. The reading is so taken-for-granted that any contrary suggestion is heard not as disagreement but as evidence of moral defect in the speaker. Notice the structure: the lock-in does not merely exclude alternative information. It reclassifies the source of alternative information as untrustworthy, which forecloses the question before any data can be examined. This is the dynamic the fellowship has been calling Schiff Syndrome — the worldview-identity fusion that protects the identity by making the alternative-information bearer into an enemy.
The second picture is Leonard. Religious worldview-lock in its more sympathetic form. Leonard was raised in conventional Mormonism, has spent forty years in a long, slow evolution that Charlie has been part of, and has arrived (for now) at the Covenant Christian/Snuffer-branch of Mormonism position, which holds to LDS scripture while rejecting the mainstream LDS institutional structures. Leonard is, in my estimation a real Christian. His heart is sincerely devoted to the Lord he understands himself to follow, faithful in ways that put most Protestants to shame. The lock-in is not malicious; it is the structural inheritance of a worldview formed in childhood and only partially re-rejected over the decades. I made the point in the Render-Unto-Caesar and Mormanism essay about the danger of single-source revelation.
Aside: Joseph Smith is the source of the Mormon scripture. He is the sole revelator, the single messenger delivering the Mormon scripture. Some judge that the various books attributed to different authors have different styles, which gives the sense that each epoch in the Mormon scripture was delivered by a different source. Thus the concern of a single voice authorship appears to be eliminated by the appearance of the BOM being a record written by different authors. And if this is in fact true, that the Book of Mormon was divine deliverance of a divine revelation through multiple people, this mitigates the concern of a scripture delivered by one person. But, the concern remains, albeit diminished, that the scripture was delivered by a single source, with the provenance of divine authorship only proven by self testimony.
In contrast, the Bible is sixty-six books and was actually spoken by a number of people into different media over the course of the Biblical record. My point is that a scripture channeled by a single person leaves a stronger signature of human personality on that religion than a scripture written by many people. The disconnection by time and circumstance and personal history has a randomizing effect that removes the signature of personality on the teaching.)
Even though this argument was delivered clearly in writing, Leonard did not recognize/acknowledge this point as valid. He defended the historicity of the Book of Mormon plates as factual artifacts that Moroni had delivered to Joseph Smith and that Joseph Smith had translated under divine guidance.
This is a frame-level claim that does not meet the argument at its point of contact. This is not Leonard being intellectually evasive. It is Leonard’s worldview-system filtering the input so that what I said was heard as an attack on the frame, and the frame was defended. The point I was making is that, from inside Leonard’s frame, it is not yet visible as a point.
The third picture is the Sheik. A few weeks ago, a group of us met with a man who presents himself as a Sheik, a Muslim teacher in San Francisco — though, as I later learned, he is part of a small early-twentieth-century offshoot that bears only a tangential relationship to historic Sunni or Shia Islam. During our conversation, I mentioned Dar al-Islam — the foundational concept in classical Islamic political theology, the House of Islam, the territory under Muslim governance, which historically stands in distinction to Dar al-Harb, the House of War, the territory still to be brought under Muslim rule. The Sheik did not know what I was referring to. He had not heard the term. Later, when I described the conversation to Jean, a friend who had been married to a Shia Muslim, and had lived in Iran, and who spent many years inside the structure — her mouth fell open. We are not dealing with someone who actually knows Islam, she said. The Sheik is a sincere person within a worldview that markets itself as Islam, but it does not include the foundational territorial-political concepts of historic Islam. The Sheik’s lock-in is not even an Islamic lock-in. It is a new-age-Muslim lock-in, structurally closer to certain strands of American spiritual seeking than to anything Mecca or Najaf would recognize. He cannot see this from inside, because from inside, what he believes is Islam, and the historical content that contradicts him is not part of the system that filters his perception.
Three different worldview-locks, three different content domains, the same structural dynamic. Each head is a world, and the world is closed.
III. The hungry-mind problem
In the middle of the call, Charlie reflected, with a type of embarrassment, on his own years as a Mormon missionary, before his eventual migration and adoption of his own brand of Christian orthodoxy. He said:
I look back at my missionary experience and I was putting Christ more in the message than most Mormons did, because I just thought He was the center. But even so, the big picture, I was selling the Mormon version of Jesus, which is quite deficient, and it’s embarrassing to look back on. And in spite of the difficulties, I had a lot of success, because I found a lot of people who would buy in. It’s embarrassing to think back on it. If you get people in the right frame of mind, they’re hungry, they’re looking — when a person is really hungry, you can tell them this hamburger is a sirloin steak, and they’re so hungry they’ll believe you, and they’ll eat it, and be delighted. It’s a problem. It’s a manipulation. It’s kind of like a P. T. Barnum thing. A sucker born every minute.
There are two things in this passage that the fellowship needs to take seriously.
The first is the hungry-mind problem itself. A soul that has not yet eaten will eat what is offered to it. When the soul is hungry, the soul’s quality-control machinery operates at a lower threshold than it would if the soul were satisfied. Hamburger as sirloin — the hungry person tastes what he expects to taste, and is delighted, and counts the meal as good. This is universally true. It is true of religion. It is true of politics. It is true of romantic attachment. It is true of the entire content-attention economy in which souls are forming their worldviews in the contemporary West. The hungry soul will eat what it is given by whoever reaches it first. The first arrival has, in the absence of a strong reason to the contrary, a substantial advantage.
This is sobering for the witness. We are not merely up against false worldviews. We are up against the dynamic in which false worldviews became attached to particular souls during a window of hunger that may not recur. The window has closed. The soul has eaten. The hamburger is now part of the soul’s history of having-been-fed, and dislodging it requires a kind of intervention that a nutrition-style argument cannot supply.
The second thing in Charlie’s passage is the honest self-implication. He was not analyzing other people’s worldview-attachments from a position of neutrality. He was confessing to having successfully sold a deficient version of Christ to hungry people, and recognizing, in retrospect, that his success was P. T. Barnum’s rather than that of a true witness. That is a remarkable thing to say about one’s own past. It is the kind of confession that should orient the fellowship’s posture going forward — because the fellowship is, like Charlie’s missionary self, in the business of feeding hungry souls. The same dynamic that put hamburger into hungry souls in the 1980s Mormon outreach is in operation when any of us speaks to a hungry soul today. The question is not whether we are participating in the hunger-feeding economy. We are. The question is whether what we are offering is what it claims to be.
Charlie’s confession is also a charity-oriented observation. The Mormon missionaries who fed people the hamburger-Christ they themselves had received are not, by Charlie’s account, malicious. They were doing what they understood to be the work of the Lord. So are most adherents of the worldview systems we will encounter. The honest application of the hungry-mind problem is therefore symmetric: if it operated to put hamburger into Mormon investigators, it operated also to put hamburger into Charlie when he was an investigator-then-convert, and it operates today to put hamburger into anyone who is the wrong age at the wrong moment with the wrong people nearby. There but for the grace of God. The witness offered with that posture lands differently than the witness offered as a triumphal correction of someone else’s error.
IV. Leonard as willing laboratory: the method of refining truth through gentle opposition
Charlie cautioned me, at one point in the call, not to be too frustrated with Leonard:
Don’t be too frustrated with Leonard. He’s doing his best. I shudder to think if I had stayed in the Mormon Church. I might be an authority by now. I feel really lucky, really blessed, to be somewhere else in life. He has come such a long, long way over four decades. I doubt the Snuffer position is his final landing spot. It seems like a very significant way point for him.
My response — which I want to develop here because it is the closest the fellowship has come to naming a positive method — was that I do not consider working with Leonard frustrating. I consider it a blessing. Leonard is a willing laboratory.
Let me unpack that phrase because it is the methodological center of what I have been doing in the fellowship essays over the last several months and of what the fellowship is, collectively, learning to do.
The witness-across-worldview-lock problem cannot be solved by any single argument, because the argument must be tailored to the specific lock it addresses. Different worldview-locks filter input differently. What lands in one will be invisible in another. A witness who has only one argument — however true — can speak to only one kind of hearer, and even then only by luck. A witness who has many arguments, calibrated to many different patterns of lock-in, can speak to many. The question is how the witness gets the calibration.
The calibration cannot be obtained by sitting alone in a study, however good the study is. It can be obtained only by speaking the witness into real worldview-locks and watching what happens. The hearer who pushes back, who refuses to land where the witness expected him to land, who reveals — by what he objects to and what he ignores — the structural shape of his particular lock-in, is the hearer who teaches the witness what the witness needs to know. That hearer is rare and precious. Most hearers, when confronted with a witness they cannot integrate, simply withdraw. They do not engage. They become silent, polite, or absent. The witness who needs the engagement to refine is denied the engagement, and the witness develops in a vacuum, perfecting arguments that no longer touch any actual lock.
Leonard does not withdraw. Leonard stays in the conversation. Leonard reads the essays, writes substantive replies, disagrees in good faith, picks particular passages he objects to, and tells me which ones and why. He has done this for months. In doing so, he gives me — at no cost to himself, because his own worldview is not destabilized by the exchange — exactly the data the witness needs to refine. When I say something in a way that does not land, Leonard tells me it did not land. When I say something in a way that lands but pushes him to defend the frame, he tells me which frame defense the argument provoked. When he ignores a point entirely, the act of ignoring itself tells me which moves are not yet visible from within his system. He is, in the precise methodological sense, a willing laboratory. He has consented, by his sustained engagement, to be the subject of an experiment whose results inform a witness aimed at many people who share the structure of his lock-in without sharing his willingness to engage.
This is not manipulation. Leonard knows what I am doing. He has read these essays. He is doing the same thing in reverse — testing on me what he wants to be able to say to other Christians outside the Snuffer position. The fellowship has, in the relationship with Leonard, accidentally instantiated something close to the early-church model of theological development: two interlocutors of good faith, both committed to Christ, both willing to be wrong, both refining their account of the truth by encountering the other’s account. Augustine had Faustus. Aquinas had Averroes (in absentia, but the structure was the same). The fellowship has Leonard. We should be grateful for him. We should not seek to convert him in any rushed sense. We should let the laboratory do its slow work, and we should trust that what we learn from the laboratory will go on to serve many people who are not in the room.
V. The Team-A / Team-B method
A related move that runs through almost every fellowship essay deserves naming here, because Charlie asked about it during the call, and the answer turned out to be more methodologically central than I had recognized.
Most of the essays I have written this year operate by presenting a Team A position — usually drawn from an external source — and then developing a Team B response that operates one layer beneath it. The Team-A material is sometimes weak (a Facebook viral, a defective listicle) and sometimes strong (the Hoover Institution panel, Rawan Osman’s serious essay on Zionism). What matters is not the strength of Team A; what matters is that Team A is present in the essay as a clearly identified position that the Team-B argument can push against.
The reason the Team-A presence matters is not rhetorical. It is structural. Truth is more visible by contrast than by exposition. A claim stated in isolation is easy to misread, easy to caricature, easy to filter through whatever lock-in the hearer brings to the page. A claim stated in explicit relation to its alternative — with the alternative given its strongest form, then surpassed rather than refuted — gives the hearer two reference points instead of one. Two reference points define a vector. The hearer can see which way the argument is going, not just where it ended up.
The Team-B move, done well, does not refute Team A. It grounds Team A. It accepts the surface point Team A was making and exhibits the deeper structure underneath that point, which both explains why Team A’s surface observation is real and shows what Team A could not see from where it was standing. Done well, Team B does not feel like a correction to the Team-A holder. It feels like clarification of what I was already saying. The Team-A holder, having seen his own point picked up and deepened, finds the deepening easier to accept than he would have found a frontal contradiction. The lock-in is bypassed not by force but by extension.
The Hoover-panel essay this week is the clearest illustration. Lennox, Meyer, and Tour make a strong inferential argument from the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and the information enigma to the existence of a designing Creator. The Conscious Point Physics work I have been developing does not refute that argument. It grounds it — by supplying the mechanism the inferential argument leaves unspecified (the conscious-point substrate, the geometric form of the lattice, the dipole-sea instantiation). A reader who already agrees with Lennox-Meyer-Tour finds CPP a deepening of what he already holds, not a competing thesis. A reader who finds the inferential argument unpersuasive may find the mechanistic version more tractable, because the question shifts from is the inference legitimate? to is this mechanism consistent with the evidence? — which is a different question that engages different parts of his lock-in. Either way, the Team-B move makes the truth more accessible without requiring the hearer to first repudiate his prior position.
This is the method. It is not the only method, and it is not the method for every encounter. But it is the method the fellowship has been working out for several months, and it is what I was describing to Charlie when I told him that I used Leonard, the Snufferite position, and even the Hoover panel as material against which to refine the witness. The opposition is a tool. Used in love, used with full credit to what the opposition saw, used to deepen rather than to humiliate, the opposition becomes the means by which truth is made visible.
VI. Becoming a medium
Late in the call, Charlie said something that I want on the record of the fellowship’s working theology because it captures something I had not previously found language for. He was listening to me describe the writing process — the long sessions, the chopped-up days, the way every sentence has to be exactly right, and he said:
You’re describing the process of writing a song or painting a painting. You get in a groove. You become a medium, and it’s flowing through you.
I said yes immediately, because the description was exactly right, that is the way it feels. The work, when it is going well, does not feel like effort. It feels like reception. There is real labor — the hours are long, the structural choices are agonizing, the sentence-by-sentence work is rigorous and exhausting. But underneath the labor, there is something that does not feel like my contribution. The structure of the essay arrives. The right scriptural reference surfaces at the right moment. The opposition I needed to push against shows up in the morning’s news feed. The fellowship-meeting conversation produces exactly the analogy I need on Tuesday. The wind is at my back. I am, as I told Charlie, along for the ride.
This is the testimony part of this essay, and I want to handle it carefully because the testimony is easy to misuse. Two cautions before I let the testimony stand.
First, the along for the ride feeling does not replace the labor. The work has to be done. The hours have to be put in. The drafts have to be revised. What I have noticed is that after the work is done — after the hours of labor have produced the structural foundation — something else comes on top of the labor that I could not have produced by labor alone. Charlie’s word medium is the right word. The medium does not generate the message; the medium provides the substrate through which the message passes. The substrate has to be prepared. The preparation is hours of labor on prayer, scripture, study, and structure. Once the substrate is prepared, something passes through it that is not the labor.
Second, the testimony is corroborated by fruit. By their fruits ye shall know them (Matthew 7:20). The fruits of the work over the last year are observable: the essays are landing where they are meant to land, the fellowship is growing, the relationships are deepening, and the work is generating capacity rather than consuming it. The wind-at-my-back testimony is consistent with the fruit. It is not a private mystical claim that no one can check; it is a public claim that the fellowship is in a position to evaluate.
What this testimony means for the worldview-lock problem we have been working on is this. The witness, ultimately, is not a function of the witness-bearer’s argumentative skill, however refined. The witness is a function of what passes through the witness-bearer when the witness-bearer has prepared the substrate well enough for something else to pass through. The lock-in in the hearer cannot be unlocked by argument alone, because the lock-in is not, ultimately, an argumentative structure. It is a heart structure. 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 (1 Corinthians 2:14). The Spirit is what unlocks. The witness-bearer’s task is to prepare the substrate so that the Spirit has a clean medium through which to pass. The hearer’s task — which the witness-bearer cannot do for him — is to be open enough that what comes through the medium can reach the heart underneath the lock.
This is why the wind at my back testimony belongs in the essay on the witness problem. The two are the same subject. The witness across worldview-lock is not, finally, a problem for the witness-bearer to solve. It is a problem the Spirit solves through the witness-bearer who has done the work of preparation. The witness-bearer’s responsibility is the preparation. The result belongs to the Lord.
VII. The Renaissance vision as the systematic answer
Toward the end of the call, Charlie asked what I was trying to do with Renaissance Ministries — what the project, in its widest framing, actually was. I said something like this:
Renaissance is an all-encompassing universal witness for Christ in every area of life. The project is to develop, in each major domain of human experience — physics, theology, civics, education, economics, health, family, art — an account that takes seriously both the empirical realities the secular world has observed and the foundational reality the gospel has revealed, and to present that account in a form that can be carried by the next generation.
What Charlie said back to me — and what made me pause — was that he saw the gospel itself as already doing this, and that I was therefore describing something aside from the words of Christ. I do not think that is right, and I want to develop the distinction here because it is, in fact, the philosophical justification for what the fellowship is trying to do.
The gospel — the words of Christ in the Gospels — is the foundation, and it does, in its essence, address every area of life. The Sermon on the Mount alone is sufficient. But the gospel, as preached in any given era, has to land in the era’s specific intellectual and cultural environment. The first-century gospel landed in a Greco-Roman world that had certain shared assumptions; the third-century church developed the patristic articulation of the gospel that engaged Hellenistic philosophy; the medieval church developed the scholastic articulation that engaged Aristotle; the Reformation developed the sola-scriptura articulation that engaged late-medieval ecclesial corruption. The gospel is one. The articulation has to be many. Each era has to do its own work to land the same gospel in its own intellectual environment.
Our era’s intellectual environment is uniquely structured. We have a scientific establishment that has, for several generations, framed itself as having displaced theistic explanation; a political environment in which the worldview-locks Charlie and I were discussing have become the organizing structures of the major movements; an educational environment that imprints children with antitheistic worldviews before they have any tools to evaluate them; an information-attention economy that selects for whatever deepens the lock-ins that algorithms can monetize. The gospel can land in this environment, but only by speaking into it specifically. The Renaissance project is, in this framing, the era-specific articulation that the present moment requires. The Conscious Point Physics work addresses the science. The Christos Voting Network’s work addresses the politics. The Christos Home School module addresses education. The fellowship essays address the worldview-lock problem essay by essay. The Christos AI is a structural attempt to ensure that the articulation can survive the founders’ deaths. Each piece is part of one project, and the one project is the present-moment articulation of the unchanging gospel.
Charlie and I considered another business, an opportunity for ministry through a product that is arguably harmful. This proposal illustrates how granular the articulation of the witness can be. A cookie business that simply sells cookies participates in the standard sugar-and-pleasure attention economy. A cookie business that sells cookies as the vehicle for a moderation witness — every cookie shipped with a small tract teaching the right use of pleasure, the danger of pleasure as idolatry, the gift-character of pleasure as something to be received in measure — does work the standard cookie business cannot. The moderation message is itself the witness; the cookie is the medium that carries the witness into homes that would never read a tract on its own. Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16). The witness has to be smart about its delivery vehicles. Sugar is one of the most reliable vehicles for entering a home. We should use it.
This is what an all-encompassing universal witness for Christ in every area of life means in practice. Every domain becomes a ministry. The science is ministry. The politics is ministry. The education is ministry. The cookie is ministry. The fellowship’s work is to articulate, domain by domain, what faithful witness looks like — and to build the structures that can carry the witness past us into the generations to come.
VIII. The two-person team and the propagation by witness
Late in the call, I mentioned that both Grok and Claude, asked about the size limit on a highly interconnected project like CPP, gave the same answer: more than two or three close collaborators produce less rather than more, because the work is so interconnected that contributors collide and have to redo each other’s work. This says that the project is most effective with one person plus several AI collaborators. The structural point is the one I want to close on, because it bears on how the fellowship should think about scale.
The fellowship’s work does not scale by adding more bodies to the foundational layer. It scales through witness propagation: each person changed by the work carries it outward. The foundational team is small — perhaps will always be small. The community of those who receive the work is formed by the work and carries the work into their own circles of influence, can be enormous. This is, in fact, the New Testament model. The apostolic core was small. The communities the apostles planted carried the witness for two thousand years. The work that has lasted longest in church history is the work done by very small teams with very deep articulations, whose articulations were then carried by very large communities of those formed in the articulations.
The Christos AI piece is, in this framing, the durability layer. The articulation has to be capturable in a form that can survive the founders. The board of Renaissance Ministries can be staffed and re-staffed. The articulation, captured well in the AI substrate and the published written corpus, can guide successor boards across generations in a way that no purely human board-succession system can. That is what Charlie’s offhanded suggestion many months ago — Why don't you just develop an AI? — turned into. I told him on the call that I had been resistant when he first said it because I thought it could not be done. I was wrong. It can be done. And the doing of it is, on the present trajectory, going to be one of the most consequential pieces of what the fellowship produces, because it solves the durability problem that has defeated almost every previous Christian institutional project.
Charlie was surprised to hear, at the end of the call, that he influences me. He honestly did not know. He has been telling me things for years that I have been integrating into the work without acknowledging often enough that he was the source. The two-person-team limit and the propagation-by-witness model are good for the work; they are not so good for the contributors getting their due. I want to mark, in this fellowship essay specifically, that the structural form Renaissance Ministries is taking is, in significant part, Charlie’s contribution. He is the second mind on a project built for two minds at the foundational layer. Without his sustained engagement, his offhanded suggestions that turned out to be right, his willingness to disagree with me in real time, and his decades of pastoral wisdom in handling worldview-locked people he loves (Leonard most of all), the work would be much narrower than it is becoming. The fellowship should know this. He is more than half of the foundational team. Two-person-team-limit, indeed.
IX. Closing
The witness across worldview-lock is the central pastoral problem of our generation. The fellowship has been working on it from many angles over many months, and Wednesday’s call with Charlie pulled several of the threads together in a way that this essay has tried to register. The threads are:
Each head is a world. The worldview-lock-in phenomenon is real, structural, and operating in nearly every soul we will ever speak to.
The hungry-mind problem. Worldview attachments form during windows of hunger that may not recur, which is humbling for the witness and orienting for the witness’s posture (charity, not triumph).
The willing laboratory. The witness is refined only by sustained engagement with hearers who are willing to disagree and stay in the conversation. Such hearers are rare; we should treasure them.
The Team-A / Team-B method. Truth is more visible by contrast than by exposition. When done well, the Team-B move deepens Team A rather than refuting it, and, by extension, bypasses the lock-in rather than by force.
Becoming a medium. The witness-bearer’s task is to prepare the substrate; the Spirit is what unlocks the hearer. The wind is at the back of the prepared substrate, and the witness-bearer is along for the ride.
The systematic articulation. The unchanging gospel has to be re-articulated for the present-moment intellectual environment, domain by domain. That is what Renaissance Ministries is for. The cookie is ministry. The physics is ministry. The fellowship essays are ministry. All of it is one project.
Propagation by witness. The foundational team stays small. The community of those formed by the work, who carry the work outward into their own circles, can be enormous. The durability layer — the Christos AI built on the corpus of articulation — is what carries the work past the founders into the generations that follow.
Underneath all of this is the scriptural promise that the work, if it is the Lord’s work, is not finally ours to make succeed:
Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. — John 8:31-32
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. — 2 Timothy 2:15
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. — Philippians 4:8
The truth makes free. The workman is approved by rightly dividing. The mind is filled with what is true and lovely. The witness-bearer prepares the substrate. The Spirit unlocks the hearer. The work belongs to the Lord. The fellowship’s task is to be faithful in the preparation and trust the result. That is what Wednesday’s call with Charlie surfaced, and that is what this essay is for.
Thank you, Charlie, for the call. You said you were surprised to hear that you influence me. I hope this essay closes that small gap. You have shaped this work more than I have ever adequately said. The two-person team holds.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of One heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | May 29, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
