260529 – The CPP Method of Discovery and Proof

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

How a Worldview Stays Honest: Method as Christian Discipline

Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | 29 April 2026

Why method matters

There is a question that any worldview must eventually answer:

How do you know what you know — and how do you know when you’ve crossed the line from knowing into merely insisting?

Renaissance Ministries’ Kingdom Culture programme answers this question with an explicit methodological commitment that runs across all of its work — from the Conscious Point Physics programme that derives Standard Model phenomena from the geometry of the 600-cell, to the Christos Rigorous Framework that applies the same axiomatic-derivation discipline to ethics and theology, to the fellowship-cell pedagogy that builds civic conviction from explicit shared foundations. The method matters because it is what allows a worldview to be examined — by its adherents, by its critics, and by the One whose creation it claims to describe.

This essay describes that method. It is the companion piece to the CPP methodology document; together they explain why Kingdom Culture has the shape it does, and why the same disciplines that make a physics derivation honest also make a worldview honest.

The intelligible cosmos

The deepest commitment behind Kingdom Culture is that the cosmos is intelligible. Genesis opens with the assertion that God spoke creation into existence. John’s Gospel intensifies this: in the beginning was the Logos, the reasoning principle, and the Logos was God. Paul’s argument in Romans turns on the claim that what may be known about God is plain to men, because God has made it plain to them — through creation itself. The cosmos is not opaque. It is shaped, it is structured, and it is inviting of investigation.

The Conscious Point Physics programme proceeds on this commitment. It begins from a small set of axioms describing how the substrate behaves, and it works to show that the Standard Model — observed particle masses, gauge groups, mixing angles, the deep regularities of physics — follows from those axioms acting on a specific geometric ground state, the 600-cell. The 600-cell is not arbitrary. It is the unique regular 4-polytope whose symmetry group, after projection, matches the symmetry groups observed in particle physics. The geometry was discovered by mathematicians before its physical role was suspected. Its appearance at the heart of the substrate is a finding, not an assumption.

The methodological lesson is broader than physics. If creation is intelligible, then finding which structures govern which phenomena is the basic shape of all rigorous knowledge. In physics, the structures are geometric and the phenomena are particle behaviour. In theology, the structures are the names and acts of God revealed in scripture and the moral order He has placed in creation, and the phenomena are the patterns of human flourishing, sin, redemption, and worship. In civic life, the structures are virtues, institutions, and shared commitments, and the phenomena are the historical record of which arrangements produce justice and which produce ruin. In medicine, the structures are the body’s designed regulatory systems, and the phenomena are health, disease, and the body’s response to intervention.

The method is the same in each case: identify the structures, articulate the axioms that govern them, work forward from axioms to conclusions, and check the conclusions against what you actually see.

The layered scaffolding

Not all knowledge claims are created equal. A claim derived from explicit first principles is not the same kind of object as a claim that takes important premises as given. Both can be useful. Both can be true. But the kind of confidence each warrants is different, and any honest worldview needs a way of tracking that difference.

Kingdom Culture organizes its claims into a layered hierarchy that mirrors the CPP programme’s own. At the deepest layer, claims are derived from primitive axioms alone — for CPP, the eleven primitive axioms describing the substrate; for the Christos Rigorous Framework, a corresponding small set of theological-ethical axioms grounded in the revealed character of God. Most working claims, however, operate one level up: they take certain framework axioms as given. In CPP, this might be Mechanism A, the substrate’s response to disturbance. In the Christos framework, this might be a specific doctrinal commitment like the imago Dei, or the sufficiency of scripture, or the inseparability of love and truth in the character of God. The framework axiom is not derived at this layer. It is taken as given, with the explicit understanding that deriving it is itself a downstream target.

This sounds pedantic until you see what it does. A worldview that names its framework axioms can be examined for which premises it is asking you to grant. A worldview that hides its framework axioms cannot. The Reformation’s commitment to sola scriptura was, among other things, a methodological commitment: name the foundational source, work from it, and let the reader check the work. Augustine’s faith seeking understanding was a similar commitment: name what you believe, then reason forward from it, and notice when the reasoning leads you back to your starting commitments.

The layer hierarchy is intellectual honesty made institutional. It is not a hedge against criticism; it is an invitation to criticism. A claim conditional on the imago Dei says, explicitly: if you doubt the imago Dei, you should doubt this conclusion. That dependency is a feature, not a bug. It is how a worldview offers itself for examination rather than hiding behind unstated assumptions.

The hierarchy is also recursive. A framework axiom at one layer becomes a derivation target at the layer below. Mechanism A is taken as given in the F.1 stack of CPP, but its derivation from the primitive axioms is itself a registered open problem. When that derivation is found, every theorem that depended on Mechanism A moves deeper in the hierarchy — its epistemic status improves. The proofs themselves don’t change. Their status does. The architecture eats itself in the direction of deeper foundations.

The theological analog is the long Christian tradition of moving from explicit framework-level claims toward the deeper roots that justify them. Why is murder wrong? Because human beings bear the image of God. Why is the image of God morally weighty? Because God is the source of all value, and what bears His image partakes of that value. Why is God the source of all value? Because He is the uncreated ground of being, and value is grounded in being rather than the reverse. The layered movement is not regress; it is structure. Each level is supported by what is below it, and the work of theology is partly the work of making that support explicit.

Forward reasoning, bidirectional discovery

There is a common confusion about how knowing works — a confusion that conflates discovery with proof. They are not the same activity, and the distinction is central to understanding why Kingdom Culture is structured the way it is.

Discovery is bidirectional. Sometimes a known pattern is the target, and the work is to find the chain of reasoning that produces it. A physicist who knows the neutrino mass suppression scale must find a derivation that yields that scale; a theologian who knows that the wages of sin is death must find the chain of reasoning grounded in the character of God that yields that wage. Sometimes the direction is forward: a careful argument set up for one purpose yields, as a by-product, an insight no one was aiming at. Sometimes the two directions converge from opposite ends and meet in the middle, and the agreement of approaches reached independently is itself a confirmation.

These are exploration modes. They are how new knowledge is found. They tell you nothing about the logical structure of the resulting claim.

Proofs themselves always run forward. Once a chain of reasoning is found — by whatever combination of forward, backward, and middle-out exploration — the published version is monotonic: axioms, then framework axioms, then intermediate claims, then conclusion. The conclusion does not justify the premises. The premises justify the conclusion. The arrows point one way.

This distinction matters because critics sometimes accuse worldview-builders of working backward from the answers — using the desired conclusions to “find” derivations that produce them. The accusation only lands if discovery and proof are conflated. Kingdom Culture’s methodology acknowledges that discovery is messy and bidirectional, while insisting that the resulting reasoning chains are forward-running and explicit about every assumption.

Whether a Christian came to faith through experience, witness, longing, suffering, or sustained reasoning, the articulation of the faith runs forward: from God’s character, to His acts in history, to the gospel, to the response He invites. Paul’s letters demonstrate this discipline. The premises are named. The reasoning is sequential. The reader is invited to follow the argument and to check the steps. Romans is not a sentiment; it is an argument with declared premises and explicit derivations. The Christian intellectual tradition’s strongest moments — Athanasius on the Incarnation, Augustine on the City of God, Calvin on the unity of the testaments, Edwards on freedom of the will — share this character. The premises are named. The work runs forward.

Zero parameters: the discipline of being wrong

A subtle but important feature of CPP is what the programme calls the zero-parameter discipline. Every closed-form value the programme produces must come from the geometry alone, with no adjustable knobs. A derivation that introduces a free parameter to match an observed value has failed at being a derivation. It has merely produced a curve-fit dressed up as a derivation.

The discipline is severe. It means that when CPP predicts a proton charge radius of 0.851 fm, that number either matches the observed value or the framework is wrong. There is no third option. There is no “let me tune this constant to match.” The framework either yields the number from its geometry alone, or it does not.

The theological and civic analog is the corresponding discipline of allowing your principles to dictate conclusions you did not initially want, and of refusing to retrofit your principles when your conclusions are uncomfortable. A worldview that adjusts its premises whenever its conclusions disturb you is not a worldview; it is a sentiment-management strategy. A worldview that lets its premises lead — that says “this is what the framework yields; take it or leave it” — is doing work. The discomfort of an unexpected conclusion is, in this discipline, a feature: it is the sign that the reasoning is doing something other than confirming what you already wanted.

Scripture itself displays this discipline. The biblical writers do not soften the implications of God’s holiness when those implications become severe. The prophets do not adjust the indictments to fit the comfort of their hearers. Paul does not flinch from “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” nor from the harder corollaries that follow. The conclusions follow from the premises, and the premises are not adjusted to make the conclusions easier. That is what zero parameters looks like in moral reasoning.

A worldview that has internalized this discipline becomes self-testing. Once a principle is granted, its consequences are permanent constraints. If a later application of the same principle in a different domain requires the principle to mean something different, the framework is inconsistent — and the inconsistency is detectable internally, without needing new external data to expose it. The worldview tests itself against its own prior commitments every time it engages a new question. A worldview that cannot test itself cannot be improved. A worldview that can test itself is alive.

Swarm validation: how truth coheres

A single dramatic confirmation cannot rescue a worldview, and a single dramatic counterexample cannot decisively refute one. What confirms or refutes a worldview is the pattern of its engagements across many independent domains.

The CPP programme calls this swarm validation. Rather than relying on one or two smoking-gun derivations, the programme produces many predictions, each individually precise but none individually unfalsifiable, and lets the predictions triangulate the axiom set. If the primitive axioms are correct, then dozens of independent derivations across strong interactions, weak interactions, quantum mechanics, neutrino physics, and nuclear binding must all produce values compatible with observation. The probability that this happens by accident drops geometrically with the number of independent matches. The swarm is the proof.

The Christian intellectual tradition has long recognized the analog. The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. By the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established. The unity of the canonical scriptures — sixty-six books, multiple authors, multiple genres, multiple historical settings, all of them coherently testifying to the same God and the same gospel — is itself a swarm-validation event. The convergence of independent witnesses on the same underlying reality is how truth confirms itself. No single book carries the whole testimony. The whole testimony is carried by the convergence.

Kingdom Culture’s swarm spans physics, theology, ethics, medicine, and civics because creation itself is unified. A worldview that is true must cohere across all of these domains; a worldview that fragments at the boundaries between them is not a worldview but a collage. The CPP programme provides one stream of the swarm. The Christos Rigorous Framework provides another. The fellowship-cell pedagogy that builds shared civic conviction from explicit foundations provides another. The medical work of naturopathic integration — taking seriously that the body was designed and that its design implies a structure of healing — provides another. The civic work of the Christos Voting Network, building voting habits from named ethical commitments rather than from tribal alignment, provides another.

These are not separate enterprises that happen to share an author. They are sister applications of the same underlying methodological commitment, validating each other by their convergence. When a CPP derivation and a Christos Rigorous Framework derivation, working from entirely different axiom sets in entirely different domains, both depend on the same deeper conviction — that creation is intelligible, that intelligibility is grounded in the character of the Creator, that reasoning is a fitting human response to that intelligibility — the convergence is not coincidence. It is the same truth showing itself in different windows.

What Kingdom Culture is trying to be

The methodological commitments described here are not just hygiene. They are constitutive. They define what kind of worldview Kingdom Culture is.

It is not a synthesis of comfortable opinions. It is not a sentiment dressed in technical vocabulary. It is not a philosophical preference held loosely enough to avoid embarrassment when its implications become inconvenient. It is an attempt to show that the Standard Model and the cosmos, the moral order and the work of redemption, the patterns of human flourishing and the structures of just civic life, all follow from a small set of foundational commitments grounded in the character of God — with every step explicit, every assumption named, and every framework commitment registered as itself a target for deeper derivation.

The worldview could be wrong. The right place for its wrongness to surface is in the swarm: a prediction that fails to match observation, two derivations that demand inconsistent values for the same foundational principle, a moral application that contradicts the explicit teaching of scripture, a civic prescription that produces ruin where it claimed to produce flourishing. Kingdom Culture is designed to make these failures visible quickly, not to hide them. That is the point of the layered hierarchy, the registered open problems, the public timestamped repositories, the multi-reviewer confirmation cycles, and the discipline of running every claim forward from named premises.

The worldview could also be right. If it is, the rightness will accumulate the same way the wrongness would: one derivation at a time, each independently checkable, each triangulating the foundations a little more sharply, each strengthening every other derivation by their growing convergence. There is no shortcut. There is no single argument that settles everything. There is only the patient, accumulating work of carrying the method through to its conclusions across every domain where creation has placed an answer.

Either way, the method is what makes the question well-defined. A worldview built without these disciplines cannot be examined; it can only be insisted upon. A worldview built with these disciplines invites examination, expects examination, and is structured to absorb the corrections that examination produces. That structure is what Kingdom Culture is trying to be: a worldview honest enough to be wrong, structured enough to be tested, and rooted deeply enough that no honest test will exhaust it.

The same disciplines that make a physics derivation honest make a worldview honest. The same architecture that lets a physics programme grow toward deeper foundations lets a worldview do the same. The method is not separate from the substance. The method is what allows the substance to be received as truth rather than as preference. Kingdom Culture is, among other things, the cultivation of intellectual habits worthy of the Truth they seek — and worthy, by extension, of the Truth they confess.

260525 – Intelligent Design and CPP

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

Three Witnesses to a Designer: A Hoover Institution Panel with Lennox, Meyer, and Tour, and the Conscious Point Physics Extension of the Christian Scientific Witness

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 25, 2026

YouTube panel discussion on Intelligent Design:

Occasion. Yesterday Leonard sent me a Hoover Institution Uncommon Knowledge panel, hosted by Peter Robinson and recorded in Salzburg, in which three scientists of significant academic standing — John Lennox, Stephen Meyer, and James Tour — work through three contemporary scientific findings that they take to constitute a substantial empirical case for theism: the Big Bang and the universe’s beginning in finite time; the fine-tuning of physical constants on which any possibility of life depends; and the information enigma at the foundation of biology. The panel was recorded to promote the documentary film The Story of Everything — based in part on Meyer’s 2021 book Return of the God Hypothesis — which was released in theaters on April 30, 2026. Leonard asked for a substantive engagement with the panel. The request was well timed and reasonable. The topic is at the center of the CPP project and deserves engagement on its own merits. The Conscious Point Physics work that this fellowship has heard me report for several years sits in continuity with the kind of work Lennox, Meyer, and Tour are doing, and the Lennox-Meyer-Tour community is a natural audience to consider the merits of the CPP paradigm as an apologetic tool.

This essay does three things in roughly equal measure. It presents the panel’s three central scientific findings. It identifies where the panelists’ analysis is strongest and where, in my judgment, it can be carried further. And it locates the Conscious Point Physics framework as a constructive extension of the same Christian-scientific witness that Lennox, Meyer, and Tour have been building over decades. I think the Conscious Point Physics project will contribute a dimension to the larger work that the three of them have already done so much to advance.

I. The witnesses

Before the findings, the witnesses. These are not popularizers. Each of the three brings a particular kind of credibility to the panel that the fellowship should recognize before evaluating their joint argument.

John Lennox is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford and President of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. He took his doctorates from Cambridge (mathematics) and Cardiff. His teaching career included extended periods under and alongside Sir John Polkinghorne — the mathematical physicist turned Anglican priest who developed much of the modern Christian engagement with the fine-tuning argument. Lennox carries that lineage into the current generation. His arguments tend to approach issues from mathematical and philosophical angles. When Lennox discusses the Borde-Vilenkin-Guth theorem on the impossibility of an infinite past, he is speaking within his field. When he says language does not get generated by natural processes, he is making a claim he has thought about for decades.

Stephen Meyer holds a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge, previously worked as a geophysicist, and now directs the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His Return of the God Hypothesis (2021) is the most comprehensive book-length argument from contemporary cosmology, fine-tuning, and biological information to theistic conclusions to appear in the last decade. Meyer occupies a particular kind of intellectual position: he is rigorous in philosophy of science, well-versed in the relevant primary scientific literature, and willing to draw inferences that lie at the boundary of what most academic philosophers of science will go. His framing of the design inference as a matter of inference to the best explanation, drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s abductive logic, has done as much as anything in the last twenty-five years to give the intelligent-design program its current philosophical floor.

James Tour is the W. F. Chow Professor of Chemistry at Rice University. He also teaches in materials science and nano-engineering, holds more than 130 patents, has published more than 850 peer-reviewed papers, and is, by any reasonable accounting, one of the leading working organic-synthesis chemists in the world. Tour is a working chemist at the bench. When Tour says that the chemistry of the origin-of-life problem does not work, he is not editorializing from a philosophical seat; he is reporting from the bench. He has spent his career making molecules, and he knows what it takes to make them. His standing claim — that origin-of-life researchers will die of old age, and so will their children, and so will their children’s children, before the chemistry of life from non-life is resolved — is a statement made in the technical register of the discipline, by someone with the credentials to make it.

The three voices are not redundant. They cover different domains: Lennox, mathematics and philosophy; Meyer, the historical and inferential framework; and Tour, the bench chemistry of biology. Their convergence on a common conclusion is the methodological fact that gives the panel its weight. If the case for design were resting on any one of these voices alone, it would be one kind of argument. The case rests on three lines that intersect at a single point.

II. The Big Bang and the philosophical earthquake

The panel opens with the Big Bang because it establishes the contemporary case. Meyer tells the story of the relevant sequence, which begins in 1916 with Einstein’s general relativity, whose field equations described a dynamic universe. Einstein himself was unhappy with that conclusion — he preferred the eternal, static universe of Aristotelian and post-Newtonian cosmology — and he introduced the cosmological constant into his equations to balance the dynamical terms and restore the universe to a static state. He did this for philosophical reasons, not for scientific ones. His own field equations told him a different story than he wanted to tell.

In 1927, a Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, presented to Einstein, in person, in a taxi outside a conference in Belgium, both the mathematical and the astronomical evidence that the universe was, in fact, dynamic and expanding. Einstein’s reply was the famously dismissive: “Your mathematics is impeccable, but your physical intuition is abominable.” He was wrong. Within two years, Hubble’s astronomical work at Mount Wilson Observatory confirmed Lemaître’s prediction: galaxies in every quadrant of the night sky are red-shifted, which is to say their emitted light is stretched toward the longer wavelengths characteristic of a source moving away. The universe is expanding. Run the expansion backward in time, and the matter of the universe converges to a single point of effectively infinite density in the beginning.

The results of three more experiments added weight to the Big Bang hypothesis. In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, working at Bell Labs on a different problem, discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation — the relic heat from the early universe — which independently confirmed the Big Bang model of the universe. In 1966, Stephen Hawking, then a doctoral student at Cambridge, provided the first rigorous mathematical demonstration that an expanding universe of the kind described by general relativity traces its expansion back to a singularity at a finite past. We now call it the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorem. And in the early 2000s, the Borde-Vilenkin-Guth theorem (cited by Lennox in the panel) extended the result to inflationary cosmologies, demonstrating that even multiverse and eternal-inflation models cannot escape the requirement of an absolute past boundary. The evidence so far points to a universe with a beginning.

The theological significance of this is what made this conclusion intellectually disruptive. For more than two millennia, from Aristotle through the mid-twentieth century, the educated Western consensus had been that matter and time were eternal. The Genesis 1:1 claim that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth had been treated within elite scientific culture as a piece of mythopoetic prologue without empirical force. What the cosmological work of the mid-twentieth century established, against the prior consensus and against Einstein’s own initial preference, was that the Genesis claim of an absolute beginning is consistent with the empirics. The materialistic universe — eternal, self-existing, requiring no first cause — is not the universe we live in.

Lennox names this in the panel as the moment when the intellectual ground shifted under his feet. The Cambridge physicists of his student generation had been raised on the eternal-matter assumption; the discovery that matter itself began at a finite past required abandoning that assumption and accepting a question that materialism cannot answer — what caused the matter? Whatever caused matter cannot itself be matter, because there was no matter prior to its existence to do the causing. The cause must therefore be non-material, must precede space and time (since space and time themselves began with the matter they contain), and must be of a kind capable of bringing matter into being from non-matter. I believe the requirements of this mechanism point to the medium through which the Creator of the Christian theological tradition manifested the universe. This is where theology and science converge.

Enter the Conscious Point Physics framework

I want to set out, in more detail than the panel’s format allowed, how the Conscious Point Physics (CPP) framework, which I have been developing since 1987, fits into the Lennox-Meyer-Tour discussion, because CPP is an attempt to do constructively what the panel does inferentially.

CPP is compatible with a Big Bang origin, and it goes further: it offers a single mechanism from which a long list of otherwise-disconnected physical facts can be derived. Within the framework, one can explain how matter arises from consciousness, why opposite charges attract and like charges repel, what energy and distance are, why time dilates near the speed of light, and why photons appear to be both waves and particles. It provides a way to visualize how God superimposed the entire universe upon a single point, and it reframes the symbolic-sounding Let there be light (Genesis 1:3) as something concrete: God instructing the Conscious Points to begin interacting — to communicate. From the attractive and repulsive relationships among the Conscious Points, the framework derives both mass and light.

The roughly twenty-nine “elementary” matter and antimatter particles that physics has cataloged as the Standard Model are, as derived in CPP, not elementary at all; they are aggregates built from just four types of Conscious Points. In the CPP paradigm, the evolution of the universe proceeds from a state in which all the Conscious Points in the universe are superimposed upon 13 Gridpoints of the underlying nested 600-cell hypericosahedral scaffolding that serves as the metric of space.  The movable Conscious Points and the immovable Grid Points are both conscious and are without dimension other than location. After initiation (God says, Let there be light), the Conscious Points communicate, like charges repel, and disperse, and opposite charges bind into plus/minus pairs. I call these paired CPs Dipole Particles (DPs). Space is densely filled with Dipole Particles, which function as carriers of electromagnetic and kinetic energy and are intimately involved in the production of mass.

CPP resolves the wave-particle duality paradox by treating photons, radio waves, and all electromagnetic quanta as points on a continuous-mode excitation spectrum of the Dipole Sea. Radio waves are omnidirectional ripples spreading through the background DP Sea medium; light is a focused, unidirectional ripple — a soliton — a narrow ripple with volume, velocity, and energy stored within its particulate-like confines.

The observation of redshift and the Hawking calculation implied a singularity that began the universe, but such a beginning cannot be rationalized by any known natural process in the lexicon of conventional physics. Alternatively, the Big Bang evolution from a few points containing the entire universe to the present universe is readily visualized in CPP. The framework’s nine axioms appear to be precisely the allowances and limitations of behavior that God’s Word (His command) established for how the Conscious Points may and may not move. In short, CPP gives imagination the tools to picture how structure and order arose from pure consciousness. This assumption rationalizes how God’s mind alone could be the substrate that was both prior to material space-time and capable of generating it.

Conscious Points as the substrate

Matter and energy are both formed from Conscious Points (CPs) in different configurations. Matter and energy each have their own characteristic organization of numerous CPs. The matter-energy equivalence is readily seen because the CPs that compose mass and energy equivalence share the same net organizational totality (i.e., have the same amount of order). The famous E=mc² equation is intuitive in this framework. Conscious Points — both when isolated as solo CPs and when bound as Dipole Particles — are the substrate from which matter and energy form. Matter is not itself elemental. It is an aggregate of many Conscious Points (both electron-type, eCP, and quark-type, qCP, both positive and negative — producing attraction and repulsion, with strong forces producing only attraction among quark CPs), organized into a configuration that remains stable, on average, for a length of time that depends on its particular arrangement. The Conscious Points are not material. They exist as loci of God’s sustaining attention. I think of them as the points from which God looks back at Himself — something like imagining yourself viewing yourself from a vantage outside yourself.

The geometric scaffolding of space

Space is filled with a dense nesting of a single geometric form called a hypericosahedron (a.k.a. the 600-cell). In three dimensions, the simplest building block is the tetrahedron — a four-vertex solid that turns up again and again when examining the structure of space. But space is not three-dimensional at its foundation; the form that actually fills it is a four-dimensional polytope, the 600-cell or hypericosahedron. (The 600-cell is so called because it is built from six hundred tetrahedral cells, which is why my forthcoming book carries the title Tetrahedrons All the Way Down.) Space is filled with these hypericosahedra, nested together. Each of their vertices is a stationary type of Conscious Point that I call a Grid Point (GP). In this packing, every Grid Point sits at the center of twelve neighboring Grid Points, and every Grid Point is simultaneously a shared vertex of twelve different hypericosahedra. The Grid Points together form a fixed gridwork — a Grid Point Matrix.

Each Absolute Moment, a movable Conscious Point makes one displacement through this grid — but the steps are not all the same size. There is a maximum distance a Conscious Point can travel in a single Moment, the Planck Sphere Radius, and that maximum is the speed of light. A Conscious Point moving more slowly covers only a fraction of that maximum each Moment; its speed is simply how much of the per-Moment maximum it uses. And when a Conscious Point’s own speed is extreme, that maximum contracts, which is the origin of relativistic time dilation.

Because we live in three dimensions, the nested four-dimensional hypericosahedra cannot be directly visualized or imagined as a whole. But the contrast with familiar packings makes the structure concrete. Stacked cubes (dice, sugar cubes, milk crates, and the sodium-chloride lattice) meet eight-to-a-corner, so each vertex is shared by eight cubes. Real space is not built this way. It is filled with hypericosahedra, and each vertex is shared among twelve of them. That twelve-fold Grid Point Matrix is the scaffolding of space: it defines the allowable positions a Conscious Point may occupy.

Two kinds of Conscious Point, and the forces between them

Creation becomes visible through consciousness perceiving consciousness. The 120 vertices of the 600-cell are themselves Conscious Points, but they are stationary; such Conscious Points are called Grid Points (GPs). The Conscious Points that make up mass and conduct light are movable. There are four types of CPs: the positive and negative electron CPs and the positive and negative quark CPs. Oppositely charged CPs attract; like-charged CPs repel. The strength of the interaction depends on both the distance and the kind of Conscious Point involved: electron CPs carry only the plus-minus force, while quark CPs carry the plus-minus force and the strong force (which is always attractive between qCPs). In every case, the force diminishes as the inverse square of the distance.

The Moment: how the Conscious Points move

The Conscious Points obey fixed rules governing their relationships — including how far each CP moves in the Displace part of the Perceive-Compute-Displace cycle of the Moment. Each Moment — each cycle of processing — consists of three phases: Perceive, Compute, and Displace. The Conscious Point perceives the forces acting on it from the concentration and proximity of the other Conscious Points in its environment. Each CP computes the resulting net force on it at each Moment and displaces accordingly, moving an amount appropriate to that force. Perceived in aggregate, a stable, bound collection of Conscious Points is mass; the transit of such a collection from place to place is velocity. If a bound aggregate composed of DPs and unpaired CPs (mass) is stressed by a collision, it will create a ripple in the DP Sea. A relatively low-energy collision may create a low-energy ripple, which is perceived as a radio wave. A high-energy collision may form a photon. Energy, in general, is a measure of the volume of CPs and DPs stressed into a configuration that differs from a random proximity distribution.

Dipole Particles and the Dipole Sea

Conscious Points of opposite charge can bind together into Dipole Particles (DPs). With the exception of a small fraction, essentially all Conscious Points pair off in this way. Space is therefore filled densely with Dipole Particles — a medium I call the Dipole Sea (DP Sea). A particle of mass, such as a quark or an electron, consists of a single unpaired Conscious Point at its center surrounded by a cloud of many Dipole Particles. (The heavier quarks and leptons are composed of a central unpaired qCP or eCP and a cage.) The Dipole Sea is not an empty backdrop; it is a physical medium that stores and conducts energy, contributes to the substance of particles, mediates and forms the fields, and sets the speed of light (which is slower as the level of stress of the DP Sea increases).

The Big Bang

The Big Bang began when God said, “Let there be light.” The Conscious Points came into relationship — perceiving then attracting/repelling — and the substrate underwent a brief, extremely rapid inflationary expansion in its first moments, settling thereafter into the steady expansion we observe today. As the CPs streamed radially outward, the temperature fell with the expansion, and with it the energy of inter-CP collisions fell, with the result that oppositely charged CPs could begin to bind. Each step of cooling left the collisions weaker, resulting in a slightly weaker class of bond surviving, enabling progressively more complex aggregates to freeze out in sequence. The process of radial expansion of the universe and cooling continues indefinitely.

The order of formation runs roughly as follows:

1. Dipole Particles (DPs)

With sufficient expansion and cooling, the simplest aggregate forms first — one positive CP bound to one negative CP. Four DP species are distinguished by the four possible combinations of CP pairing:

• eDP (+eCP / −eCP)
• qDP (+qCP / −qCP)
• Hybrid DP, Type A — hDP-A (+qCP / −eCP)
• Hybrid DP, Type B — hDP-B (−qCP / +eCP)
• The four types of DPs compose the Dipole Sea.

1.a Hybrid Tetrahedra (hTetra):

The hDP-As and hDP-Bs combine to form hTetras. This entity forms an important part of the structure of several Standard Model particles: the charm quark, the muon, and the Tau neutrino. It forms the binding scaffolding for baryons (protons and neutrons).

In aggregate, the DPs of all types form the Dipole Sea and fill all of space.

2. Charged fermions (electrons and quarks)

With further cooling, the bonds can support a stable single-particle structure organized around one unpaired central CP — an unpaired eCP for electron-type fermions, an unpaired qCP for quark-type fermions.

The central CP polarizes the surrounding Dipole Sea: in each nearby DP, the end carrying charge opposite to the core is drawn inward, and the like-charged end is pushed outward. This organized shell of polarized DPs composes most of the particle’s mass, and the oppositely charged poles of those DPs execute a rapid Zitterbewegung (ZBW) oscillation against the stationary central CP.

A final increment of mass — and with it the particle’s characteristic spin — comes from a single dipole pair in orbital motion around the core. The two poles of this orbital DP sit at a standing-wave spacing in which the outer pole orbits at exactly twice the radius of the inner pole (a radius ratio of 2). Under the inverse-square attraction that holds the structure together, the closer pole must travel faster: its orbital frequency is 2√2 ≈ 2.83 times the outer pole’s — not simply twice, as the radius ratio alone might suggest. Left to themselves, the two orbits would drift out of step and wind up; what prevents this is the inner pole’s own rapid radial Zitterbewegung, beating at the Compton frequency, which phase-locks the two orbits into a single rhythm. Because they are locked, spin and orbital orientation are not two independent degrees of freedom but a single geometric channel.

For the heavier fermions, the central CP core is enclosed in a closed cage: a single convex polytope whose vertex count V sets the particle’s mass through the cage-mass law

$$M = m_e\,(z/\varphi)\cdot V^{7/3}.$$

Heavier means a larger cage with more vertices; each particle has exactly one cage.

The lightest charged fermions — electron, up, and down — carry the minimal structure (bare core plus polarized sea) rather than a cage.

3. The hybrid-tetrahedral baryon frame

The tetrahedral cage serves in two distinct roles. Besides housing the strange quark and the muon, and being the spinning cage of the tau neutrino, it is the four-vertex frame on which baryons are built. Three of its four vertices are quark-bonding sites; the fourth — the open vertex — remains unoccupied. This frame holds the three quarks of a proton or neutron in their stable triangular configuration.

4. Mesons

Further cooling permits quark–antiquark bound states. The pair is held by a chain of qDPs running between the two cage vertices — the CPP entity that conventional physics calls the gluon flux tube (an equivalence conventional physics does not recognize). The chain’s restoring force grows with separation up to the confinement maximum, then frays and breaks, producing new quark–antiquark pairs.

5. Baryons (protons, neutrons, and other three-quark states)

At still lower energies, three quarks bind on the tetrahedral frame to form the baryons. The frame’s open fourth vertex carries a net charge — positive on the proton, negative on the neutron — and it is the open-vertex bond between baryons that produces nuclear binding: the electrical polarity of the two open vertices is correct for attraction, and the strong/colour force between the adjacent quarks is inherently attractive as well.

The complete substrate of material physics is therefore built from Conscious Points in their various binding states: unpaired CPs at the cores of the charged fermions; paired CPs as the Dipole Particles that fill space as the Dipole Sea, carry energy storage and mass, and — as spinning eDP and qDP — appear as the electron and mu neutrinos; cages of increasing vertex count (tetrahedron → icosahedron → dodecahedron → icosidodecahedron) that set the masses of the heavier Standard Model particles; and the tetrahedral frame, which serves both as the empty spinning frame of the tau neutrino and as the scaffold of the three quarks that compose a baryon (proton-neutron).

The mass we observe is an organized composite of these various sub-elements of the elemental CP substrate — not of the Dipole Sea alone.

Relation to the panel

None of this conflicts with the Lennox-Meyer-Tour account; it extends it. The panel’s argument from the Big Bang is that the universe had a beginning, and that the beginning requires a non-material cause. CPP attempts to supply a specific account of what that non-material cause looks like structurally — the conscious-point substrate, its instantiation as the Dipole Sea, and the hybrid-tetrahedral scaffolding, and the geometric constraint of the 600-cell. The panel argues that there must be a non-material cause for the universe. I completely agree. The panel members have correctly identified that the medium underlying these phenomena is non-material, but they do not attempt to speculate on the specific mechanism or medium that mediates the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and the carriage of information. The CPP postulate fills in the gap that they have identified as non-material. The CPP and Lennox-Meyer-Tour levels are complementary.

III. The fine-tuning and the Goldilocks universe

The second of the panel’s three findings is the fine-tuning of the physical constants. The fine-tuning argument has been developed in a serious form since the 1970s by Brandon Carter, Martin Rees, Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne, and others. The basic empirical claim is this: the parameters that govern the behavior of matter and energy in the universe — the cosmological constant, the gravitational force constant, the masses of the elementary particles, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the strength of the weak nuclear force, the speed of light, the charge of the electron, and several dozen others — must each fall within extremely narrow ranges in order for any stable physical structure to exist. A little too strong, and the universe collapses on itself before stars can form. A little too weak, and matter never coalesces. The ranges are so narrow that, on any straightforward probabilistic accounting, the appearance of a universe capable of supporting any kind of chemistry, let alone biology, is astonishingly improbable.

The numbers Meyer cites in the panel are the standard ones. The cosmological constant is fine-tuned to one part in 10^90 — that is, to one part in a number with ninety zeros. The initial entropy of the universe (the figure Roger Penrose has worked out from the second law of thermodynamics) must have been set with a precision of one part in 10^(10^123) — a number so large that, as Lennox notes in the panel, you could not write it out even by placing a single digit on every elementary particle in the universe. Sir Fred Hoyle’s discovery in the 1950s of the precise resonance energy of carbon — the resonance without which the carbon atom that all earthly life is built on could not form in the cores of stars — led Hoyle, an atheist, to say that a common-sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics. Hoyle did not become a Christian, but he did change his metaphysical position significantly toward something like cosmic teleology. James Tour adds to the standard list of fine-tuned parameters one further example from his own discipline: the dipole moment of the water molecule (the asymmetric distribution of electron density across the H-O-H structure) must be tuned to within a fraction of a percent of its observed value, or water loses the hydrogen-bonding properties on which all known biochemistry depends.

Meyer noted that the illustration John Polkinghorne developed at Cambridge has become the standard way of conveying the fine-tuning intuition: imagine a control room with several dozen dials, one for each tunable parameter of physics. Each dial has an extremely narrow range — a few percent at most, often a few parts per million, sometimes one part in many billions — within which a universe of any complexity is possible. Outside the narrow ranges, the universe is either too unstable to form structure, too short-lived to permit chemistry, or too inhospitable to support any kind of self-organizing physical pattern. The empirical observation is that each dial is set within its narrow range. The probability of this occurring by chance, calculated naively as the product of the narrow probability of each individual setting, is so small that the universe-as-fortunate-accident hypothesis becomes statistically unsustainable.

The materialist’s response to the fine-tuning argument has historically been one of two moves. The first is the multiverse hypothesis — the postulate that an enormous (perhaps infinite) ensemble of universes exists, each with its own parameter settings, and that we observe the one with the favorable settings because that is the only one we could observe. This response has its own difficulties — it is empirically unverifiable; it requires the postulate of a universe-generating mechanism that itself must be parameterized (which only relocates the fine-tuning question rather than answering it); and it does not address how that universe-generating mechanism could itself be fine-tuned — and serious materialists have begun to retreat from it. The second response is to argue that the fine-tuning is illusory, or that the apparently improbable settings are necessary consequences of some deeper underlying principle. This second response is, interestingly, where the Conscious Point Physics framework begins to enter the conversation constructively.

The CPP intersection. The Lennox-Meyer-Tour panel treats fine-tuning as evidence of a tuner — that is, of a designer who chose the parameter settings the universe exhibits. The argument is inferential: the settings are so improbable that they are unlikely to have been produced by accident; minds are the only known cause of improbable functional arrangements; therefore, the settings are evidence of a mind.

The CPP framework offers a different but compatible explanation for the existence of the settings as they are seen. In CPP, the physics parameters are not freely tunable dials whose values are chosen from a range of possibilities. Rather, the parameters are derivable from the underlying structure of the conscious-point substrate and the geometric constraints of the 600-cell polytope. The fine-structure constant, for example, in the CPP work published over the last eighteen months, is derived with zero adjustable parameters from the polytope’s geometric ratios and the conscious-point cycle structure. The mass of the proton, the mass of the electron, the strong-force coupling, the magnetic moments of the nucleons — all of these are derived in CPP from the same nine axioms, with no free parameters added at any step.

If the CPP derivations continue to extend (and they have, over the last year of intensive work), they will demonstrate that fine-tuning is not a series of independently improbable settings. Fine-tuning is a necessary consequence of a single underlying structural constraint: the geometric form of the framework of space — the 600-cell Grid Points upon which the Conscious Points move. From this perspective, the fine-tuning argument as currently framed in the Lennox-Meyer-Tour tradition is understated. The argument, as currently framed, is that the dials are set to extremely improbable values, and therefore a designer set them. The CPP argument is that there are no independent dials at all. The apparently independent constants are all expressions of one underlying geometric form. That form is itself the product of mind — but the form is one form, not several dozen. The improbability is more profound than the current fine-tuning argument captures, because the question is not why each of several dozen dials lands in its narrow range, but why this particular geometric form, capable of generating all of the constants of physics, is the form of reality.

I cannot declare that space is definitely structured, or provably organized, on a 600-cell backbone. The CPP derivations are ongoing. By our estimate, the body of theorems required to show that all the laws of physics follow from the nine axioms is between 15 and 40 percent complete. But the trajectory is clear, and the methodological point stands: fine-tuning, properly understood, is not evidence of dial-tuning by a divine engineer. Fine-tuning is evidence that the underlying form of reality is itself information-rich, and that the information is of the kind that has the signature of being produced by a mind. This is, I believe, the deeper version of the panel’s argument, and it is the version the CPP work attempts to make explicit.

A note on the method by which the theoretical understructure of CPP is developed: proving the CPP model correct depends on constructing logical chains of causality between the nine axiomatically postulated properties of the universe and the empirically observed structures of the universe (the gravitational constant, for example, may be taken as an empirically established fact of nature, to be reached). The chain can be developed in either direction — backward from the empirical end to the axioms, or forward by connecting the axioms into theorems that arrive at empirical reality.

IV. The information enigma and the deepest argument

The Big Bang section opens the panel’s case for evidence of a Creator. The fine-tuning section establishes the improbability of a universe whose constants of nature permit mass to aggregate into galaxies, stars, planets, and ultimately life. The information section, presented by James Tour, makes the deepest of the three arguments. In its bare form: living cells contain meaningful, complex, highly improbable configurations of information-carrying mass-structures; such high-information configurations are commonly observed as products of mind, and exceedingly rarely produced by random aggregation; therefore the origin of living cells points to having been produced by mind. The materialist origin-of-life research community has challenged this argument from many angles for the better part of a century; in each challenge, the case for information as a product of mind has been strengthened rather than weakened.

The strengthening has come from three directions.

First direction: the maturation of our understanding of the cell

In 1953, when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of DNA, the cell came to be understood as something fundamentally different from the simple jello-like blob that nineteenth-century biology had assumed it to be. The cell is, instead, a digital memory-processing-output system. The DNA molecule encodes, in a four-letter alphabet (A, T, G, C), instructions for protein assembly. The proteins are themselves the machinery of the cell. The transcription, translation, and assembly process by which DNA’s coded information is read out and used to construct the cell’s working parts is a sophisticated digital information-processing system, more complex than anything human beings have ever built. Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, only much more advanced than any software we have ever created. Richard Dawkins, an avowed atheist, has acknowledged that DNA is machine code.

Second direction: the failure of origin-of-life chemistry

This is Tour’s specialty, and his evidence is convincing. The famous Miller-Urey experiment of 1952, which produced a small fraction of amino acids in a closed chemical system simulating early-Earth conditions, was hyped in popular science writing as the first step toward a laboratory synthesis of life. Seventy-three years later, no laboratory has produced anything remotely approaching a living cell from non-living chemistry. The Miller-Urey experiment itself, Tour notes, has aged badly: the amino acids it produced were dominated by glycine and alanine (the structurally simplest of the twenty biologically relevant amino acids); the yield was low; the chirality was racemic (a fifty-fifty mix of left- and right-handed isomers, whereas biological amino acids are exclusively left-handed); and the Maillard reaction — the same chemistry that browns bread in the oven — would have rapidly destroyed the amino acids if the experiment had been allowed to run longer. To get the experimentally observed yield, the researchers had to stop the reaction early, before the amino acids decomposed.

This is not a small problem. The reality of the Maillard reaction and the corresponding rapid decomposition of any complex biological molecule outside the protective machinery of a living cell underlie Tour’s most striking observation in the panel: time is the enemy, not the savior, of origin-of-life chemistry. The popular materialist response to the chemical difficulty has been that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and that there has been plenty of time. But proteins, in solution, last on the order of days before they decompose. RNA molecules last hours. Lipid bilayers last weeks at best in the absence of active maintenance machinery. The longer the chemistry is allowed to run, the further it gets from any useful precursor of life, because the chemistry is degradative on net. More time makes the problem worse, not better.

Third direction: information itself is not material

The third direction of strengthening is the most fundamental philosophically. Lennox makes the point in the panel: what kills materialism for him is the recognition that information itself is not a chemical or physical quantity. This point deserves more development than the panel’s format allowed, because the structure of information — what it is, and what it requires — is doing more work in the design argument than the panel makes explicit.

Information and meaning are not the same thing. Following Claude Shannon’s formal information theory, information in its basic technical sense is the reduction of uncertainty associated with a non-random configuration of physical states — anything that distinguishes a particular arrangement from the maximally disordered alternatives available to the same physical substrate. Meaning, by contrast, is what a configuration signifies — what it refers to, points to, or instructs the world to do. The two are categorically distinct. Information can be measured in bits without any reference to meaning. Meaning is recognized only by a mind that knows how to read the configuration as a sign of something else.

This second layer — meaning superimposed on information — admits a variety of relations between a physical carrier and what it signifies. The varieties matter for the design argument, because each variety requires a mind capable of operating that particular kind of mapping:

• Direct depiction. A physical configuration that resembles its referent — a sign-language hand-shape for tree, a painted landscape of a tree.
• Symbol of object. A conventional configuration that refers to an object without resembling it — the spoken or written word tree, where neither the sound nor the marks resemble a tree.
• Symbol of symbol. A code whose elements refer to other symbols — Morse dots and dashes referring to letters; letters referring to phonemes; binary strings referring to characters.
• Configuration evoking experience. A non-random arrangement whose effect on the reader is emotional or aesthetic rather than purely propositional — Van Gogh’s Starry Night evoking wonder, Munch’s The Scream evoking existential dread.
• Process representing state. An unfolding pattern that represents something more abstract than itself — a running figure representing kinetic energy, an assembly line representing productivity, a flowing river representing the passage of time.
• Neural state carrying internal experience. A brain configuration that carries the experience of imagining, intending, feeling, or willing — the inwardly seen image of a face, the inwardly heard voice, the felt resolve to act.

What unites all six is that each requires a mind to read it. The configuration alone is dead. The sign-language hand-shape, considered as a configuration of skin and muscle, contains no tree. The Morse dot, considered as an electrical pulse, contains no letter. The DNA base-sequence, considered as a chemical arrangement, contains no protein and no organism. The reader is required to bridge the gap between the physical carrier and what it signifies. The information lives on the carrier; the meaning lives in the reader.

Consciousness as the reader. The deepest case of mind-recognizing-information is the case in which a mind recognizes its own internal states. The experience of being aware of something — external object, internal imagery, internal voice, internal feeling, internal intention — is what we call consciousness. The brain state on which the experience rides is physical; the experience itself is something more than the brain state. Awareness of awareness, awareness of internal and external imagery, the felt presence of being a self at all — these constitute what contemporary philosophers of mind call the hard problem of consciousness: the absence of any causal chain by which we can deconstruct consciousness into a mechanism of action, a physical origin, or a material medium. Consciousness is a functional fact, an existing phenomenon, the experience of information as information. That it exists is given; how it exists, on any materialist account, remains unaddressed. The CPP framework takes the position that consciousness cannot be explained by deeper-level physics because consciousness is not downstream of physics. Consciousness is upstream of it.

DNA in this light. The chemical letters of DNA (the A, T, G, C nucleotide bases) are material things; their physical arrangement on the DNA backbone is a material arrangement. But the significance of that arrangement — what the gene specifies, what role its protein product plays in the cell’s larger system, what regulatory relationships the gene has with other genes — is not material. The chemistry is the medium. The arrangement is the message. The meaning lives in a different category than the medium, and meaning is recognized only by a reader.

The mutual specification of code and reader. What has to arise simultaneously, on any plausible undirected-chemistry account, is not just the code but the system that knows how to read it. The transcription-and-translation machinery of the cell is itself an information-processing system whose own configurations must match, with the precision of a key in a lock, the code it is meant to read. Code without reader is mute. Reader without code reads nothing. The two have to arise together, calibrated to one another in their first appearance, or neither produces life. This double improbability — that not just one but two complementary information systems would assemble simultaneously by random chemical processes — is the deepest blow to undirected-origin theories. The probabilities are not merely small; they are multiplicatively small, and they require coordination across the two emergent systems that has no plausible mechanism in undirected chemistry.

The teleological chain. When this point is generalized, a still deeper pattern appears. All information transactions are translation operations: one configuration is converted into another by an intermediating reader whose own configuration specifies the conversion. The longer the chain of translations — each link presupposing reader-machinery calibrated to the link before it — the more improbable it is that the entire chain assembled by accident. In life, the chain is extraordinarily long: from the geometric substrate of physics, to the chemistry of carbon, to the genetic code, to transcription, to translation, to protein folding, to cellular metabolism, to tissue function, to organ systems, to whole organisms, to nervous systems, to minds, to free creatures capable of recognizing their Creator and offering Him love. At every link, configurations are read and translated into new configurations. The chain ends with creatures that can themselves originate the highest forms of information transaction — language, art, science, worship.

If this chain ran the other way — if it began with chaos and ended with chaos — it would not require explanation. But it begins with a finely tuned substrate, runs through layer after layer of mutually specified code-and-reader pairs, and ends with a creature capable of free, loving response to a Creator. The terminus of the chain looks suspiciously like a purpose. Read teleologically — from the end backward — the chain looks like a system designed to produce the end it produces. The Biblical pattern, in this reading, is straightforward: God desired children capable of freely loving Him; He created from His own mind the substrate that could host the information chain leading to such children; He arranged the chain so that no single link in it requires obvious miraculous intervention — the divine influence is distributed across so many links that each one looks natural in isolation, while the cumulative direction of the chain points unambiguously to mind. In him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). The mind of man is, on this account, a reflection of the mind of God — made in His image (Genesis 1:27), capable of the same operations of recognition, translation, and creation that He performs on a cosmic scale.

The mutual specification of code and reader, multiplied across every link in this chain, reduces the plausibility of an undirected chemical origin of life to a probability so small that the inductive case for a directing mind becomes overwhelming. This is the panel’s argument when fully unpacked. It is also where the Conscious Point Physics framework can offer something the panel does not.

The CPP intersection: what information is, and where it came from

The materialist framing assumes that material reality is the floor of being, and that information is a derivative phenomenon — minds, meanings, and codes arising as patterns within matter that was already there. CPP reverses the order. In CPP, mind is the foundation. The Conscious Points are the substrate; moving on the 600-cell grid of space, they assemble into mass (stable aggregations of Conscious Points) and energy (non-random concentrations of Conscious Points and Dipole Particles within the background Dipole Sea). The structured pattern of Conscious Points is what material reality is — the observable expression of an underlying conscious substrate. Meaning, in this framework, is not derivative of matter. Rather, matter is the derivative ordering of the conscious substrate, and the ordering of matter is itself a secondary layer of information. The DNA letters of biology are therefore not the first appearance of information in the universe. They are one particular expression of information, at the biological level, arising from the degrees of freedom that the nine CPP axioms allow.

To make this precise, CPP says what information is at the foundational level — and distinguishes information from meaning in the way the panel does not. Meaning is the purpose that information serves, which is implied by the effect the information has on the world that receives it. A protein that no receptor recognizes carries information without meaning; the meaning emerges only when the configuration is read by something whose own configuration translates the input into a downstream effect.

What information is

At its theoretical root, information depends on the existence of at least two distinguishable states that an object in a system can occupy. The axis along which an object can swing between two states is a degree of freedom. A system whose objects cannot take both a state and a not-state cannot carry information about that state at all; there is nothing to vary, and therefore nothing to mean.

Given objects that can take state A or state B, information appears as inhomogeneity — as a departure from even distribution. If the count of state-A objects versus state-B objects in one localized volume differs from the ratio in another volume, that difference is information. Notice that two axes are already in play: the state axis (A versus B) and the comparison axis (here versus there — one volume against another). The state axis supplies the variability; the comparison axis supplies the here-and-there against which the variability registers as a pattern rather than as noise. The simplest case — A present versus not-present, compared across one volume versus another — is a one-dimensional binary distinction: a single bit, a small quantity of information. Introduce more degrees of freedom — more comparison volumes, more countable states, additional axes such as time — and the space of possible distributions grows enormously, and with it the quantity of information the system can carry.

This is the general principle: information can exist only on a substrate whose objects can carry a state and a not-state — more generally, a state A and a state B — and only where order along some axis can be distinguished from disorder.

The Conscious Point / Grid Point system as an information substrate

CPP’s primitives are precisely designed to provide these degrees of freedom. Recall the two kinds of Conscious Point: the movable Conscious Points (the positive and negative electron CPs and quark CPs) and the stationary Grid Points (the vertices of the 600-cell lattice on which the movable CPs hop). The movable CPs occupy positions on the Grid Points, and the first and most basic state distinction is simply which Grid Points are occupied — present versus not-present, here versus not-here, a count of occupants in one volume against another. That alone is the substrate’s capacity to carry bits.

But the Conscious Points carry far more than position. Each brings a set of binary or near-binary distinctions: positive versus negative charge; attraction versus repulsion; for the quark CPs, the always-attractive strong force that nonetheless varies with distance; positional state (here versus there on the 600-cell); distance-increment state (which location on the lattice); and temporal state (now versus then, indexed by the sequential Perceive-Compute-Displace processing of each Moment). It is this multiplicity of binary distinctions, laid across multiple independent axes — distance, volume, time — that gives the system the combinatorial room to display an essentially unlimited number of ordered configurations. The rules governing where the Conscious Points may sit and how they may move on the 600-cell grid are the distinctions out of which all higher information is eventually built.

Order against disorder

Order is meaningful only by contrast with disorder. A binary system at maximum disorder sits at fifty-fifty — equal numbers of state A and state B, evenly distributed, homogeneous, without distinction along any axis of number, location, volume, or time. The Gaussian distribution is the signature of that randomness in a system with many degrees of freedom and a fixed set of allowable states. Against this homogeneous baseline, order shows up as a departure: when the distribution shifts as you move along some degree of freedom — a different ratio of A to B at a new location, or at a new time — that shift is the information carried by that variable.

The deep point is that disorder is not the enemy of information; it is its necessary precondition. Order is identifiable only by comparison with the randomness it departs from. A signal is a signal only against a background of noise; a form is a form only against the formless. It is out of exactly this polarity — order distinguishable against disorder — that life arises. Life is possible because of the asymmetry between the two: the number of disordered, non-living configurations available to the Conscious Points is vast almost beyond reckoning, while the number of ordered configurations that actually live — that locomote, perceive, think, and reproduce — is vanishingly small by comparison. It is this ratio, the astronomical preponderance of dead configurations over living ones, that the panel’s statistics are measuring, and it is this ratio that drives the inference to a designer.

The design inference, grounded in the substrate

Here CPP and the Lennox-Meyer-Tour argument meet. The intelligent-design hypothesis rests on the claim that it is overwhelmingly improbable that the ordering of DNA which yields functional proteins and living cells would arise without a designer to nudge the probabilities toward the living outcome. CPP grounds that claim in the structure of the substrate itself. The Conscious Points and Grid Points did not have to produce life. The number of configurations they could have taken that yield only randomness — non-life — is, exactly as the panel’s statistics indicate, enormous. The conclusion CPP draws is the same as the panel’s, but with a mechanism underneath it: biology would almost certainly not have arisen unless a mind both created mind-objects (the Conscious Points and Grid Points) capable of taking definite state and not-state values, and then directed those objects into the staggeringly improbable configurations that behave the way life behaves.

The biological distinctions the panel points to — amino-acid sequences in proteins, nucleic-acid sequences in DNA, the bonding arrangements around a central carbon atom in organic molecules — are, in this account, the high-level expressions of distinctions embedded far beneath them. The attraction-repulsion rules carried within the Conscious Points, together with the constraints on their movement across the 600-cell lattice, are what make atomic and molecular order possible in the first place. The molecular order of life sits on top of layers of more fundamental order, reaching all the way down to the axioms.

The resolution of the two questions

This is how CPP answers the two questions the panel raises but does not resolve: what is information? and where did it come from?

What is information? It is the distinction of state from not-state — order distinguishable from disorder — borne on a substrate whose objects can take one of at least two values along one or more degrees of freedom.

Where did it come from? From a mind capable of the creative act of establishing those distinctions: first creating the Conscious-Point and Grid-Point objects together with their sub-distinctions (positive and negative electric charge, the strong charge, attraction and repulsion, displacement, the Moment-indexed Perceive-Compute-Displace sequence that gives time its grain), and then supplying the force that separates the states and superimposes order upon them. Mind creates both the substrate and the order within the substrate. The distinctions of type and action embedded in the Conscious Points and Grid Points are what enable them to serve as information-bearing objects at all; the capacity of mind to move and order those points on the lattice is the motive force behind the nudge that produces life and its necessary constituents. In the framework’s sequencing, the substrate of matter, energy, space, and time was established at the beginning of material time, and the order of organic molecules was superimposed by the Creator afterward.

So biology requires a mind twice over: once to produce the substrate of distinction-bearing objects, and again to impose upon that substrate the improbable order that constitutes life. The question of what information is, and where it came from, is answered by the postulation of a mind able to perform both creative acts — the making of the distinctions and the ordering of them.

Why this matters for the panel

This is, I believe, where CPP makes its largest constructive contribution to the broader Christian-scientific witness. The Lennox-Meyer-Tour panel demonstrates, by the force of probability, that materialism cannot account for biological information with anything but vanishing likelihood. That is the negative result, and it does as much as a probabilistic argument can do. What it cannot do, on its own, is supply an alternative mechanism — a positive account of how the information actually came to be.

CPP supplies that mechanism. The divine mind, being pure consciousness, is capable of creating mind-objects which are of His substance and under His authority. The information carried by matter is, on this account, the order of those mind-objects. The substrate of information is itself mind-substance. Within this frame, what information is at the level of the substrate becomes describable, and the question of how a mind could have created both the substrate and the order it carries becomes tractable rather than mysterious. The two arguments — the panel’s by probability, CPP’s by mechanism — are complementary. Together they close the plausibility gap that either alone leaves open. The panel reduces the materialist position to vanishingly low probability; CPP opens the door to an explanatory account of the alternative. Neither replaces the other. They function as a pair: the probabilistic case removes the materialist exit, and the mechanistic case makes the theistic alternative concrete enough to think with.

V. In the beginning was the Word

The moment in the panel that I want to mark explicitly is when James Tour, having walked through the chemistry of the origin-of-life problem with the precision of the working synthesist that he is, allows the scientific argument to open into the explicitly theological. Tour says, near the end of the discussion of information:

We even see this in the scriptures. It says, in the beginning was the Word — that is information — and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This starts with information right here. And then it was that Word, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. That Word then took on the material. It starts with information. Always starts with information. Which itself is immaterial.

This is the move from natural theology to revealed theology, and Tour makes it deliberately. The argument from biological information to a designing mind is a natural-theology argument — an argument from features of the observable world to conclusions about its underlying cause, accessible to anyone with the relevant scientific and philosophical training, regardless of religious commitment. The Johannine prologue — In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:1, 3) — is a revealed-theology claim, accessible only through the Christian scriptural tradition. Tour’s move is to recognize that the two claims are pointing in the same direction. The natural-theology argument from the immateriality of information arrives at a mind is at the foundation. The revealed-theology claim of the Johannine prologue specifies the mind at the foundation is the Word — the Logos — through whom all things were made, who became flesh in Jesus Christ. The natural and the revealed converge.

The Conscious Point Physics framework affirms exactly this convergence, and is in fact a deliberate attempt to develop, in the technical register of physics, what the Johannine prologue affirms in the register of revelation. The Logos through whom all things were made is the Conscious Mind whose attentional pattern, in CPP’s working ontology, is the space filled with Conscious Points and Dipole Particles — the substrate from which material physics derives. In the beginning was the Word is not a poetic flourish in the CPP framework; it is the substrate axiom. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made is the methodological commitment. CPP is, in this sense, an attempt to do physics from inside the Johannine prologue — to take seriously, as a starting point for empirical and mathematical work, the claim that the Logos is foundational and that material reality is derivative.

Tour does not develop the connection between his natural-theology argument and his revealed-theology citation as far as a fellowship essay can. The panel format does not allow for it. But the move he makes is the move CPP makes more explicitly, and the alignment is worth marking. The Johannine prologue is not in tension with rigorous physics. The Johannine prologue is, when read with sufficient attention, the structural specification under which a rigorous physics of consciousness becomes possible.

VI. The reception problem

The panel does not avoid the question of why these three voices, and others like them, encounter such hostility from the broader academic-scientific establishment. Tour describes his own experience: when he has challenged credentialed PhD chemists and biochemists to engage publicly with the origin-of-life chemistry, they have largely declined. The decline is not because his arguments are obviously wrong; the decline is because, as he puts it, they see exactly what I see. This is not a mystery. What I’m bringing forth is quite obvious to the scientist. Any working chemist knows what I’m talking about. The reception problem in the working community is not an evidentiary problem. It is a sociological problem. The methodological norm of contemporary academic science forbids the design inference for reasons that are not themselves scientific; the norm is enforced through the standard mechanisms of academic professional life (peer review, grant funding, hiring committees, dissertation supervision). The cost of crossing the norm in a tenure-track career is steep enough that most credentialed scientists who privately see what Tour sees will not say so publicly.

Lennox locates the problem more precisely. It is not a clash between science and God, he says. It is that we’re coming up with two diametrically opposed worldviews. … Take the Nobel Prize for physics. Many atheists have won it. Christians have won it. Their science doesn’t divide them, but their worldview does. The contemporary academic-scientific establishment has been organized for several decades around a methodological-naturalist worldview that, while it is not the only worldview compatible with rigorous science, is treated within the establishment as if it were. Scientists who do not share the methodological-naturalist worldview, even when their scientific work is rigorous by every internal disciplinary standard, find themselves marginalized from the institutional centers of the discipline. The marginalization is not a function of their work being scientifically deficient; it is a function of their worldview being out of step with the establishment’s preferred metaphysical framing.

The fellowship’s exposure to this reception problem. I anticipate that the Conscious Point Physics work will encounter the same reception dynamics that the Lennox-Meyer-Tour panel describes. Establishment physics is institutionally reluctant to engage seriously with a framework that grounds physics in consciousness rather than treating consciousness as either an unsolved mystery or a derivative emergent phenomenon. The reluctance is not, in my judgment, evidentiary; the CPP framework’s nine axioms, fifty-four proven theorems, and one hundred and eight zero-parameter predictions are not deficient as a body of scientific work. The reluctance is worldview-driven. The methodological naturalism that organizes contemporary academic physics treats the prior commitment to consciousness-as-substrate as off-limits before any evidentiary discussion can occur. This is the same dynamic that has organized the academic reception of the intelligent-design program more broadly.

The standard institutional pathway — submission to flagship physics journals, presentation at major conferences, recruitment of senior collaborators inside top-tier research universities — is largely closed to a consciousness-grounded framework, for the worldview-sociological reasons described above. CPP’s path forward is therefore not primarily institutional. It is the slower path of quiet witness — paper by paper, theorem by theorem, prediction by prediction, with the published corpus standing as its own evidence and waiting to be encountered by whoever is willing to encounter it. The Lennox-Meyer-Tour platform, the Story of Everything documentary, and the broader Christian-scientific community they have helped build are the natural surrounding community for that witness. CPP is not in competition with the intelligent-design program; CPP is, if successful, a constructive extension of the program into the foundations of physics.

VII. Russell, materialism, and self-refutation

The panel closes with Peter Robinson’s quotation from Bertrand Russell’s 1907 essay A Free Man’s Worship. The Russell passage is one of the great twentieth-century statements of the materialist worldview, and it is worth quoting because Russell’s eloquence makes the worldview seem, at first, more sustainable than it actually is:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms … and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins, all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Lennox’s response in the panel is the right one, and it is the response Sir John Polkinghorne taught him as a student at Cambridge. That statement is self-refuting. If Russell’s account of the human condition were true — if human thought were nothing but accidental collocations of atoms — then we could have no confidence that Russell’s account itself is true, because his account is itself a piece of human thought, and his account therefore reduces, on its own terms, to a random collocation of atoms with no claim to truth-tracking validity. Materialism, taken as a complete account of human cognition, cannot certify itself. It saws off the branch on which it is sitting. Russell’s confident assertion that materialist philosophy is so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects it can hope to stand is, on materialism’s own terms, simply a particular arrangement of his cerebral atoms, no more truth-bearing than any other arrangement.

This argument — the self-refutation of consistent materialism — is older than the Lennox-Polkinghorne articulation; it goes back at least to C. S. Lewis’s Miracles (1947), to G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (1908), and to Augustine’s response to the late-classical materialists. The argument’s persistence reflects its strength. Materialism as a partial account of physical reality is one thing; materialism as a complete account of mind is not coherent. The Lennox-Meyer-Tour panel’s contribution at this point is not novel, but the panel does mark, clearly and at the close, that the materialist worldview is intellectually exhausted in ways that the contemporary academic establishment has not yet caught up to.

The fellowship will recognize the structural symmetry here with the Schiff Syndrome we have been working with for some months now. The materialist establishment’s commitment to methodological naturalism is not, in its current institutional form, primarily an evidentiary commitment. It is an identity commitment — the worldview that organizes the establishment’s sense of who it is and what it is doing. As such, it is held in a way that is structurally similar to the way other identity-driven worldviews are held, with similar consequences: evidence that complicates the commitment is filtered, evidence that confirms it is amplified, and credentialed people who challenge the commitment face social and professional costs disproportionate to the evidentiary status of their work. This is not because materialists are intellectually dishonest as individuals. It is because the establishment is operating, at the worldview level, the way every establishment of every era has operated when its organizing commitments are challenged.

VIII. What the fellowship can take from this panel

Several things, in summary.

First, the panel demonstrates that there is a serious Christian-scientific community at the highest academic levels, doing rigorous work on the questions that matter most. Lennox at Oxford, Meyer at the Discovery Institute, Tour at Rice — these are not popular-apologetics figures. They are working scientists and philosophers of science with major academic credentials and substantial bodies of peer-reviewed work. The fellowship is not alone in the larger Christian-scientific project. The Story of Everything documentary, released at the end of April 2026, gives the broader Christian community access to this work at a more accessible level than the technical literature provides. Fellowship members who want a substantive entry point into contemporary Christian scientific witness will find the film a good starting place.

Second, the panel sharpens the recognition that the contemporary scientific establishment’s hostility to theistic conclusions is largely a worldview-sociological phenomenon, not an evidentiary one. This is important for the fellowship’s own self-understanding as we approach the open-source-CPP launch. The reception we will face will, in significant measure, not be a reception of the evidence; it will be a reception of the worldview the evidence implies. We should not expect a fair hearing in establishment journals or conferences in the first instance. We should expect — and prepare for — the same kind of marginalization-by-classification that has been visited on the intelligent-design program. At some point, when the CPP paradigm is sufficiently mature, an open-source pathway may be a way to route around this marginalization by recruiting the credentialed working community directly, contributor by contributor, regardless of the establishment’s institutional gatekeeping.

Third, the panel’s three lines of evidence — the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and the information enigma — each point toward a Creator. The materialist’s standard response is that a metaphysical claim cannot be established by experimental evidence, and in one sense this is correct: the spiritual world cannot be detected by physical instruments or confirmed by direct experimental observation. The Creator, treated as a hypothesis, is therefore not the kind of entity that can be proven by deductive demonstration. No single experiment and no logical syllogism will prove God’s existence in the way that one proves a theorem. But this is the wrong standard. God’s existence is the proper object of inductive argument, and under an inductive standard, every observation consistent with His existence raises its probability. Each of the panel’s three claims is precisely this kind of argument — a marshaling of experimental evidence, logic, and probability — and each is consistent with the hypothesis of a Creator. The cumulative weight of independent, mutually reinforcing lines of evidence is what makes the inductive case strong, even though no one line is a deductive proof.

My Conscious Point Physics project belongs to the same genre, and I believe it strengthens these arguments by supplying what they lack: a mechanism. CPP attempts to show that all physical phenomena follow as the logical consequences of nine axioms — a rigid mathematical derivation rather than a loose inference. This does not escape the argument’s inductive character (induction only raises the likelihood as the number of consistent data points grows); it deepens it. The question simply moves one level back: where did the nine axioms come from? That the mind of God is their source still cannot be established by a deductive syllogism (an argument of the form if A = B and B = C, then A = C). What CPP can do is greatly strengthen the inductive case. It raises the likelihood that a Creator authored the nine axioms out of mind-substance. The successful mechanism of the CPP paradigm depends on the perceptive, computational, and locomotive capabilities of what clearly appear to be mind-entities; implementing that mechanism requires the active participation of Conscious Points and Grid Points, which behave as if rules have been implanted within each. This implies a Creator with mind-capability, creating Conscious Points of the same essence as His own. The argumentative force here is especially strong because of what successful unification would mean. If CPP can in fact derive all phenomena from nine axioms, it will have unified physics — the goal Einstein died pursuing and that every subsequent effort has failed to reach. A successful unification would be powerful evidence that the premise underlying it is true: that a single mind underlies all of creation. And that conclusion is precisely what the Biblical worldview asserts, which would in turn raise the probability that the Biblical worldview is correct.

For these reasons, I believe the fellowship should teach this material as a valid worldview perspective — to the parent homeschooling K-12 students, to the Christian college student, and to the Christian professional, all of whom have been quietly intimidated by the cultural assumption that science has somehow disproven theism. With an argument as coherent and fundamentally mechanical-logical as that provided by CPP and the Lennox-Meyer-Tour material, the whole culture of science, and the secular culture downstream of it, can be bent toward acceptance of the proposition that we humans live within the mind of God and, as such, are lived by Him. Sin, on this account, is the willful choice — made in the exercise of free will — to engage in activities repugnant to His experience. The doctrine of salvation through Jesus Christ’s substitutionary punishment — His acceptance, on our behalf, of the death-penalty that sin contractually requires — becomes a logically defensible postulate once one grants the premise of a conscious universe created by a loving and morally perfect God who has granted free will. The Lordship of Jesus likewise becomes a logically defensible requirement: as our Savior, we owe it to Him to follow His Way, letting Him guide us in righteousness so as not to offend the experience of the Father — the Almighty God, the One in whom we live and move and have our being. It is the purpose of Renaissance Ministries, and by extension the larger fellowship of all enrolled in the Christos Underground project, to propagate this philosophy-science argument and to cultivate a population-wide culture of holiness. The methods of propagating this witness of science, logic, and righteousness should span the entire spectrum of media — film, books, online content — and ultimately the personal witness of a changed and holy life. The broader Discovery Institute corpus, with its materials for catechesis and apologetics, will be a natural partner in the project of winning the world for Jesus Christ and sanctifying the Church: That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:27).

Fourth, the Conscious Point Physics work the fellowship has been studying sits in continuity with the Lennox-Meyer-Tour program. The CPP paradigm is still in development, but it is displaying a consistent arc: the derivation of all phenomena from nine axiomatic postulates. Those axioms rest, at their foundation, on a single move — the postulation that consciousness is primitive, uncaused, axiomatic. That postulate in turn implies the existence of God-as-consciousness, from whom the entire universe is constructed. These are axioms, and axioms by their nature cannot be proven by experiment or deduction. They are supported only inductively — by a vast accumulation of experimental observations and repeated, never-falsified chains of reasoning that converge on a single conclusion: that consciousness, and by deeper implication God, is the one source and first cause of all that is.

Because the foundation is inductive rather than deductive, an element of faith is required — faith that consciousness underlies all of reality, that God exists, that the Bible truly reflects His nature and His moral law, and that all physics, all consciousness, and all spiritual phenomena are sourced from Him. But the faith required here is roughly the same faith required to believe in gravity. We never observe gravity itself; we observe its effects, everywhere, without exception, and the evidence is so ubiquitous that we honor the pattern with the name law. The same is true of God’s existence and the totality of His immanence. The underlying fact can never be proven in the deductive sense; a small remainder of faith is always required. The hard-hearted man can still rationalize a life of sin on the microscopic possibility that there is no God — that creation is only lifeless, purposeless mass, that life is accidental and without meaning, that God does not see and feel every violation of His law, that He neither requires nor administers exact justice. The rebel against God can build a life on that possibility and self-justify his self-centered abuse of others and his disregard of God’s law, which is evident even in nature. But his alibi grows ever thinner and less defensible, and his rebellion becomes ever more clearly the evidence of a lawless and selfish character — betraying his allegiance to God’s enemy, the god of all that is Not-God. For such a man, isolation from fellowship with God, separation from the Most Holy, is both perfectly just and, in truth, his own preference.

I expect this knowledge — of His omnipresence, of the CPP evidence, of the whole program of the Christos Renaissance — to grow underground, unseen, shared person to person, first among the most devout and then spreading to the less committed as they watch the fruits of the Spirit blossom in those around them into a peaceful, blessed, harmonious life of loving God, neighbor, and self. The projects developed by Lennox, Meyer, and Tour are complementary to this work; they are fellow travelers and allies in the same culture-wide, downstream flowering of the Christian-scientific witness. Each group contributes from a different disciplinary angle, all converging on the same conclusion.

Fifth, and most personally: Leonard, your request that I engage this material was the right request to make. The panel and its underlying program are exactly what the fellowship should be looking at as we prepare for the next phase. Thank you for bringing it to the meeting and for asking for the essay. I hope this essay does the panel justice. The conversation — both yours and mine, and the larger fellowship’s — continues.

IX. Closing

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

— John 1:1-5

The Big Bang says: the universe began. The fine-tuning says: the universe is structured to permit life. The information enigma says: life is built on a code, and codes come from minds. The Johannine prologue says: the Word is the foundation, the Word is God, the Word made all things, the Word became flesh.

These four statements are continuous. The first three are natural-theology findings, accessible through rigorous science. The fourth is the revealed identification of the One whom the first three point toward. Lennox, Meyer, and Tour have done the work of making the first three accessible to the contemporary educated reader. The Conscious Point Physics work, as it matures, attempts to provide the structural physics-of-consciousness substrate within which all four become a single integrated account.

The fellowship’s work is, in this sense, part of a much larger and older work. The work has been going on since at least Augustine. It will continue, by God’s grace, until the Word made flesh returns.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

One heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

260524 – Fellowship on Governmental Obedience and the Covenant Christian Restoration

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

Two Conversations: Render Unto Caesar, and the Covenant Christian Restoration

Fellowship Discussion Summary | May 24, 2026

Occasion. This was the Sunday following a long week of theological-production work — the engagement with Reid’s Romans 13 essay published May 15, the distilled summary completed Friday, the pronoun essay engaging the convention of generic he/him in formal writing, and three Facebook-post fellowship essays produced in a single day (the Mark Smith Obama list, the Manookian/Williams Ninth Circuit post, and the Rawan Osman piece on early-Zionist quote-mining). The Sunday meeting itself unfolded across roughly three and a half hours, with four distinct conversations that the transcript treats as a single document but that the fellowship’s actual structure marks as four. They deserve to be drawn out separately, both because each does its own work and because the day, taken whole, exhibits a cross-domain pattern that is itself worth naming. I will treat the four in order and close with the pattern.

The two main conversations were these:

1. The main fellowship on the May 13 Reid-engagement essay, during which Charlie offered an interpretive reading of render unto Caesar that I had not previously heard articulated in this form — a reading not of image but of title and ownership. The conversation then ranged across the spectrum from Reid-style maximum-submission to active conscientious refusal, with substantive contributions from Michael Sherman, Susan, and Leonard.
2. The LDS-Covenant Christian conversation that opened when Leonard mentioned, in passing, that Abraham was almost sacrificed by his father — an extracanonical claim that pulled the meeting into a careful working-through of the relationship between the Covenant Christian branch of LDS Restorationism (which Leonard now affiliates with) and mainstream Salt Lake LDS theology (which he has departed from), with Susan and Charlie speaking from their own former-LDS history.

Part I — Render Unto Caesar: Charlie’s Reading and the Spectrum of Resistance

The Reid foil

The main fellowship opened with Charlie’s report on having tried to read the Reid essay I had sent earlier in the week (the original CGG Forerunner article from 1996 that the May 13 fellowship essay engages). His first response was this guy is such a coward and sissy. I don’t like him. My response, this is exactly what an essay needs in order to be written, an interlocutor whose position is sharply wrong enough to be answered. I responded that Reid is a foil in the literary sense — the figure whose definite position provides the resistance against which the essay can develop its own definite position. Reid is not a strawman. The May 13 essay tries hard to give him his due (he is right about the default disposition, right about rebellion-as-spiritual-disposition being sin, right about the sovereign-citizen movement, right about Daniel and the three Hebrew children as the right model). But the essay disagrees with him on the structural reading of Romans 13, on the scope of Acts 5:29, on the two halves of Matthew 22:21, on the witness of Paul’s actual life, on the Reformation lesser-magistrate doctrine, and on the moral-cooperation analysis required by the contemporary tax question. Charlie had skimmed past the sovereign-citizen sections — Susan and I are definitely not that — and had landed in the body of the argument, which he then began to engage substantively.

Charlie’s title-and-ownership reading of render unto Caesar

Charlie highlighted the render unto Caesar passage:

Christ in that exchange about render unto Caesar — another way to look at it, is that what he was asking us to do was to make a decision on ownership and a decision on title. Just because Caesar puts his image and superscription on every coin doesn’t make him the owner of every coin. What Christ asks us to do, in my opinion, is in all ways judge who is the owner of any given thing. God owns everything, including Caesar, and so just because Caesar makes a claim doesn’t mean he gets what he claims. It means that we have an obligation every single moment of our lives to render to the owner what is theirs.

Leonard, who had not yet read the May 13 essay, immediately recognized this as the heart of the render unto Caesar saying as he had received it. Hardly anybody gets that, Charlie. That’s the first thing that jumps to my mind, that gulf between render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s. It’s like, okay, who owns what here?

Charlie’s reading is, I think, a third interpretive layer beyond the two layers the May 13 essay had developed. The popular reading is to pay the tax; the matter is closed. The middle reading of the May 13 essay developed at some length is the image reading — the coin bears Caesar’s image and is therefore owed to Caesar; the human being bears God’s image and is therefore owed to God; the parallelism is the integrating frame. Charlie’s reading does not displace these but adds, beneath them, the title question: under what authority does the image function as a claim of ownership? The answer, in Charlie’s reading, is only insofar as the image-impresser actually owns what he has stamped. Caesar’s stamp does not constitute ownership; it presupposes a prior question about whether Caesar has standing to claim the coin in the first place. And the deeper biblical answer is that God owns Caesar, and therefore God owns the coin too; thus, the believer’s act of rendering the coin to Caesar is itself conditioned by God’s prior and superior ownership of everything, including Caesar.

This makes the render unto Caesar saying not a flat division of two ownership-domains (mine to Caesar, mine to God) but a single judgment exercised under God’s universal lordship: render to the rightful owner what is the rightful owner’s, recognizing that the rightful owner of everything is God, and that Caesar’s claim is real only to the extent that God authorizes Caesar’s stewardship of the coin. The believer is being asked to make a constant ownership judgment — whose is this? to whom does this rightly belong? — and to render accordingly, with the understanding that even what is correctly rendered to Caesar is rendered through and under God’s prior title.

This is, I think, the highest reading of the saying. It absorbs the popular reading (the coin is materially Caesar’s, and is materially returned to him), absorbs the middle image-bearing reading (the person bears God’s image and is owed to God), and adds a layer of judgment-under-divine-ownership that orients every act of rendering toward God as the ultimate owner.

Summary: This perspective sheds new light on the meaning of Jesus’ “Render unto Caesar, Render unto God”  response to the Pharisees and Herodians. The bottom line is that we are required to make a judgment about who owns what. This means that we must judge the morality of the situation the way that God would. The judgment is thrown back on us. We must study God’s law, listen to the Holy Spirit, carefully examine the reality of each situation, and judge rightly who is the proper owner in each circumstance. This is exactly what this discussion was about. It was about establishing the distinctions.

Charlie on civil order and the Constitution

Charlie, by his own description, falls on the rebellious side of the temperamental spectrum — he has spent significant portions of his life as a guest of the state, in the Contra Costa County Jail and elsewhere, mostly over disputes with the state about child-support arrangements that he believes were inverted in the application against him. I’m all for civil order, he said, but I’m also all for our civil servants to read the Constitution once in a while, which apparently they never do. The principle behind his statement is one that the May 13 essay touched on only briefly: the United States Constitution itself, when read closely, is far closer to a charter for restraining the federal government than to one for empowering it. Charlie had to learn the Constitution from the law library shelf in the county jail in order to make arguments to the state that the state’s own agents either do not know or do not honor.

This is the lesser-magistrate doctrine running in a different direction than the May 13 essay developed — not the doctrine that lesser civil magistrates must restrain higher civil magistrates, but the related doctrine that the constitutional charter itself is a lesser magistrate over the federal executive and its agencies, and that citizens have standing under that charter to demand performance of its terms. Charlie’s working theory of his own legal exchanges with the government is that when I point out what the Constitution actually says, I have had many successful exchanges. The Constitution is a document that the agents of the state have largely forgotten how to read. Citizens who have read it possess an authority the agents lack.

Michael Sherman on venue and the wrong-direction-on-the-freeway protest

Michael Sherman raised the point about venue — that tax-protest of the symbolic kind is, in his framing, the wrong venue for the kind of resistance that civil-conscience refusal actually requires. It’s sort of like, okay, therefore I’m not going to obey this country’s laws because of their evils, and I will drive going in the wrong direction on the freeway. Ha ha on them. Well, I get the protest idea, but not the right venue to do it. It will only cause you a lot of grief if you run into another car or one into you, and it doesn’t address the issue.

Michael’s structural point lines up exactly with the moral-cooperation analysis the May 13 essay developed in §IX: symbolic refusal of remote material cooperation (the calculated immoral portion of the general tax) does not actually move the spending, does not constitute conscientious objection in the historic sense, and exposes the resister to consequences disproportionate to any effect achieved.

Michael’s wrong venue is the same insight stated as practical wisdom rather than as moral theology. The real thing is, you really want the unjust or ungodly law to change. I picture living like Winston in 1984, or picture a Nazi citizen watching his neighbors being hauled away to concentration camps and saying, well, what can you do? Well, I don’t know what, but hide them — something that’s important. Your voice matters if you really think it needs to change. The right venue is an organized political-cultural witness that moves the law itself, or a specific conscientious refusal at the point of direct participation, where one’s own hand is implicated. Symbolic tax refusal is neither.

The Rockefeller / Trump income disclosure thread

Leonard raised the well-known story of Nelson Rockefeller’s confirmation-hearing testimony in 1974, when asked why he had paid no income tax in a particular year — because I have no taxable income — and the parallel of Trump’s release showing very low income-tax payments due to legal carry-forward losses. The story was offered in the spirit of the tax laws being a mess, which is true, but Michael Sherman corrected the framing in the direction of accuracy: it is not the case that anyone can avoid taxes by knowing the loopholes; it is the case that ownership of businesses generating Schedule-A losses creates write-off opportunities that wage earners do not have. The structural inequity is real and is a recurring topic of congressional reform proposals. The thread did not extend beyond this, but it is worth noting in the summary because the fellowship sometimes drifts into the territory of imagining that ordinary citizens have hidden legal tools available to them that they merely have not discovered. Mostly, we do not. The wealthy have access to structures that wage earners do not. This is not a conspiracy; it is a feature of the tax code that operates differently across income types and that ordinary citizens cannot easily access without the kinds of asset structures that wage employment alone does not generate.

Susan’s choreography point — the relinquishment of grandiosity

Susan said, of the larger question of what one person can do:

It’s important to recognize in our own minds and hearts that it’s Christ that’s choreographing his work. We are just doing one part of Christ’s work, and so instead of looking at this thing that we do as the thing that’s going to change everything, it’s more like, okay, Christ is choreographing, and he has untold amounts of people on this earth, who knows how many, who really love him, and who are doing their part, or trying to do their part, or will do their part. And we don’t have to think that we are going to facilitate everything. It’s all Christ wants us to do — our part.

This is the relinquishment-of-grandiosity move that the fellowship needs to hear regularly, because the work the fellowship is doing — across CFE, CCC, CPP, CRF, IDM, CHR, CHS, CVN, and now the Walk Center — is sufficient to produce in any single contributor an over-identification with outcomes that are not the contributor’s to produce. Susan’s instinct is correct. The job is not to win the world; the job is to do one’s part faithfully and to trust the choreographer for the rest. Michael Sherman picked up on this, holding the Catholic-Protestant religious-war counterexample as a needed complication (Christians killing Christians, both armies blessed by their respective clergy, is a difficult case for the Christ is choreographing this framing if taken simplistically). Susan answered the complication well: He gave us a beautiful gift by saying, “This is how you will know my disciples—they will have love for one another.” So, in helping us to know who his disciples are, we can also know who his disciples are not, and we can recognize when people are at odds with each other and killing each other, that isn’t Christ. People can abuse Christ’s gospel, his name, and we don’t have to lump them in together with the people who are truly obeying.

The believer does not have to endorse every event that happens in the Christian-cultural sphere as Christ’s choreography. The believer is permitted — required — to identify what is Christ’s and what is not, to do his part in the work that is Christ’s, and to leave the choreography to the Choreographer.

The pointillism image

The Christos Underground project contains many pieces. In describing the larger project that the CFE essays and the broader Christos work are aiming at, I use the image of pointillism. The Christos work, taken as a whole, is not a single argument, a single book, a single cultural intervention — it is a tapestry of ideas, relationships, organization, and work. Each essay, conversation, demonstration, engagement, business decision, and act of faithfulness is a single point of color on the canvas of culture. None of them is, on its own, the picture. But assembled — placed beside each other, accumulated over years, viewed from the right distance — they resolve into a portrait. The portrait is the face of Christ as he would be lived in our particular cultural moment, applied across the full domain of contemporary life. The Christos Underground is a positive intervention program rather than a defensive reaction. It is the slow, patient pointillism of a Christ-portrait being built up by many hands.

The image is useful because it organizes the otherwise overwhelming sprawl of the work. We do not have to know what the whole picture will look like in its grand/full comprehension. We have to put down the dot in front of us by taking the right/good/Godly action in each moment. We are each placed in a specific circumstance that intersects with the past and future of our lives and with the lives and circumstances of others in the present. The color we place on the canvas of life is the action and spirit we bring to each moment. As we listen to the Holy Spirit, we are being directed in the grand Choreographer’s composition of the Kingdom of Heaven manifesting on Earth.

Part II — Restoration, Restoration, Restoration: The Covenant Christian Question

How the topic opened

The LDS-Covenant Christian conversation opened sideways. Leonard, late in the meeting, was citing biblical examples of saints who would not cross the line, and mentioned Abraham was almost sacrificed by his father. I challenged him on that. I had not heard the claim, and did not recognize it as biblical. He clarified that it’s in our scriptures. It was an additional revelation given to Joseph Smith, recorded in the Pearl of Great Price (the Book of Abraham). The story Leonard then told is not, properly speaking, identical to the midrashic Abraham-smashes-his-father’s-idols tradition that appears in Genesis Rabbah and in various Jewish and Islamic sources, though it draws on the same well. In Joseph Smith’s version, Abraham is sentenced to be sacrificed on an altar to his father’s idols and is miraculously delivered. The delivery sets him on the path to seeking greater knowledge, leading to his eventual reception of the Abrahamic covenant.

I noted that in the canonical Bible, the sacrifice narrative concerning Abraham is the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son and then provides a ram. The Joseph Smith addition reverses the spiritual polarity. Abraham is the Godly would-be victim, with his idolatrous father as the would-be sacrificer. Leonard noted that this is not contradictory but an additional perspective. He presented the Joseph Smith story as background history that predates the binding of Isaac, and that the test prepared Abraham to be the kind of man who would later be willing to bind Isaac.

The canonical Bible creates a typological structure through the story of Abraham sacrificing his only Son, establishing a type/shadow/future recapitulation. The binding of Isaac is the pre-figuration of God the Father’s offering of the Son. The lifting up of the brazen serpent is the pre-figuration of Christ lifted up on the cross. The Passover lamb is the prefiguration of the blood of the Lamb of God, which protects against the spirit of judgment. These typological pre-figurations are the literary evidence, internal to the canon, that the canon was authored by a single divine Mind over many human pens across many centuries. They are how we know the Bible is what it claims to be. The Joseph Smith addition does not disrupt the canonical typology; it merely adds a chapter before Genesis 22. The canonical Genesis 22 is spare. The Pearl-of-Great-Price account is detailed and narrative-driven.

Leonard’s actual position

Leonard’s position deserves to be stated carefully, because Leonard is a member of this fellowship and because his theological location is more complex than either mainstream LDS or former LDS who has come to evangelical orthodoxy. He is part of the Covenant Christian branch of LDS Restorationism as revealed by Denver Snuffer, which has formally departed from the Salt Lake institutional LDS Church to return to what its adherents understand as the original Joseph Smith teaching prior to the institutional corruptions of the Brigham Young era and after. He rejects the contemporary LDS Church’s temple-building program. He rejects the proxy-work-for-the-dead temple endowment structure. He renounces, in strong terms, the LDS framing of sanctification as independence. He holds that as one becomes more righteous, one becomes less dependent on God. He believes that doctrine is heresy and categorizes it as an attempt to manipulate people with the seduction of power and importance. He believes that separation from God is the last thing you would want to do.

Susan grew up in the LDS Church; she had absorbed precisely the sanctification-as-independence framing as a young woman, and was really glad to hear Leondard reject that framing. Leonard and Susan, were both speaking from inside the LDS tradition as they had each known it, agreed in real time that the as you become more righteous, you become less dependent on God trajectory is a heretical reading of sanctification, and that the orthodox-biblical pattern is the precise opposite: sanctification draws the believer into deeper dependence on God, not into independence from him.

The exaltation question

Where Leonard left the question of exaltation open. Exaltation is the LDS doctrine, articulated most explicitly in Joseph Smith’s King Follett discourse, that the faithful believer, after a long process of becoming-like-Christ-through-Christ’s-power, will eventually share in something like the divine nature in a way that the canonical Christian tradition does not affirm. Leonard’s working formulation is biblically careful: he cited 2 Peter 1:4 (partakers of the divine nature) and Christ’s be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48), and offered the King Follett move as a long-process extrapolation of those texts. I can’t do it myself; it’s impossible; there’s no way I can be like him except if he gives me his power, if he saves me, and he will if I give him my trust, my faith. So yes, I do believe God can save me and help me become like him. That’s what he wants. He wants his children to be like him in his family.

The canonical Christian tradition, particularly in its Reformed and broadly evangelical forms, has historically read partakers of the divine nature as a deification (theosis) language that does not entail ontological identity with God but rather participation in God’s character through the indwelling of the Spirit. The Eastern Orthodox tradition reads theosis more strongly than the Western Protestant tradition but still maintains the creator-creature distinction. The LDS reading — that the faithful become ontologically gods, with their own creations, in the King-Follett sense — crosses a line that the canonical tradition has held since Athanasius against Arius and through the Cappadocians. Leonard, in his Denver Snuffer expression of the doctrine, does not appear to me to be claiming the full King-Follett ontological reading. He is claiming something closer to the Eastern Orthodox theosis with a long-process eschatological extension. That is closer to the canonical position than mainstream LDS.

Susan, again, drew the line precisely where the canonical position draws it: as far as becoming gods and all of that, because it is so clearly spoken against in the Bible — about there being other gods, there’s only one God — that kind of thing, I tend to accept that. Susan’s posture is the right one for a member of the fellowship who has come out of the LDS tradition. She affirms what she finds in the canonical text, declines to add to the canonical text, and trusts God for whatever the eschatological end will reveal that the canonical text did not specify. Whatever happens in eternity, it’s going to be good, and I don’t know what it is. I trust God.

The Mother-in-Heaven / Proverbs 8 question

Leondard cited Proverbs 8, with its personified female figure of Wisdom, as evidence for the LDS doctrine of a Heavenly Mother. The Proverbs 8 chapter does indeed personify Wisdom in unambiguously feminine grammatical and rhetorical terms (Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? She standeth in the top of high places…). The question is whether the personification is ontological — pointing to an actual feminine divine being — or literary — using Hebrew poetry’s standard personification device to give Wisdom-as-divine-attribute a vivid voice. The biblical-scholarly consensus, including across the Christian theological spectrum, has overwhelmingly been the literary reading. Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is the same Wisdom that the New Testament identifies with Christ himself (1 Corinthians 1:24, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God), and the feminine grammatical gender of the Hebrew word for wisdom (chokmah) does not constitute evidence for an actual feminine divine being any more than the feminine gender of ekklesia (church) constitutes evidence that the Church is ontologically female.

Leonard’s reading is the LDS reading, and it sits structurally beside the mainstream LDS doctrine of Heavenly Mother (which, intriguingly, the LDS Church has historically discouraged from public devotional practice — Eliza R. Snow’s hymn O My Father is the canonical reference, but the LDS Church has long counseled members not to pray to Heavenly Mother). Leonard’s Covenant Christian version of the doctrine appears to honor Heavenly Mother but, like the mainstream LDS, declines to direct worship to her. She doesn’t want to be worshipped, Leonard said when Susan pressed the point.

Susan declined to assert that the Bible teaches a Heavenly Mother or that it forbids one. She located herself in the same epistemic posture she had taken on exaltation: I feel like it’s best to just not talk about Mother in heaven. It may be that there’s a Mother in heaven, but the Bible is silent on the personage of the Mother in heaven. This is the Protestant-evangelical posture, and it is consistent with the Sola Scriptura discipline that has structured the Reformed tradition for five hundred years. The Bible authorizes what it authorizes. It does not authorize devotional practice toward a divine person it does not name. The believer can speculate about what may or may not exist in the divine economy beyond what is named, but the believer’s devotional practice must remain within what is named.

I suggested that there might be a spirit in charge of wisdom — an angelic or ministerial figure to whom the wisdom-function is delegated, without that figure constituting a fourth member of the Trinity or a feminine divine consort. The idea has some footing in the broader biblical-angelology literature (the Wisdom literature of the intertestamental period, including Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon, develops the Wisdom-personification in directions that some early Christian writers later identified with the pre-incarnate Christ, others with the Holy Spirit, others with the angelic order). The canonical text personifies Wisdom poetically and identifies the same Wisdom in the New Testament with Christ; it does not authorize devotional practice toward a Heavenly Mother; we hold to what the canonical text authorizes and decline to extend beyond it.

References to the female aspect of God in scripture include: The Isaiah 49:15 (Can a woman forget her sucking child… yet will I not forget thee), Isaiah 66:13 (as one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you), Hosea 11:3-4 (the maternal-tender-parent imagery), and Matthew 23:37 (how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings) maternal-metaphorical references to God. These are, of course, metaphorical illustrations of God’s character, not ontological assertions about a feminine divine person. The canonical text uses them and does not extend them.

Charlie on the temple as Mormon center

Charlie, who came out of mainstream LDS in his own life trajectory, was familiar with the LDS-Nauvoo-Masonic relationship. In LDS doctrine, the temple, the endowment, and all the ceremonies are huge. He mentioned a former church leader whom he had known as a child, who had told him about a temple room in his home — a room where pictures of the LDS temple are displayed and where the family is reminded that the temple and its rituals are a primary value. Charlie did not know this was a feature of Mormon culture, even though he had been raised in a mainstream LDS household. Susan confirmed it. The Nauvoo-period temple endowment is not a peripheral feature of LDS practice that the fellowship can dismiss as a Masonic accretion; for the mainstream LDS believer, it is the central spiritual experience of his life, and the temple itself is functionally the center of LDS devotional reality. Susan and Charlie both went through the endowment ceremony before leaving the LDS Church. Both took the temple oaths that were in force at the time — oaths that, until 1990, included blood-penalty consequences for revealing the ceremony’s specifics. Both regard the experience now as a serious spiritual entanglement that the LDS Church has, in their judgment, taken pains to play down in its public-facing materials. Susan said that in her opinion, it opens the door to a lot of demonic.

I have not had the experience Susan and Charlie are describing. Susan’s and Charlie’s first-hand witness on the temple-endowment question is, for any responsible engagement with the LDS tradition, primary source material that an outside observer cannot supply.

Closing the section

The LDS-Covenant Christian conversation closed with a prayer led by Susan — a benediction that modeled the very posture the conversation had been working toward. We thank you and praise you for our fellowship, and we ask you to please go with us this week. Help us, help us to grow, help us to understand, help us to gain understanding. Open our eyes — not for our sakes, but for your sake, God, that you might be glorified. The session had confronted substantive disagreement on substantive matters, but shared opinions within the context and expression of mutual love.

Joining today: Thomas, Charlie, Armond, Leonard, Susan, and Michael.

Departed midway: Michael (~01:23), Leonard (~02:30), Susan (~02:32). Charlie and Armond remained for the post-meeting.

Closing prayer offered by Susan.

Word count: ~5,300.

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute One heart to make Christ King.

260523 – LDS and Snufferite Restoration

by Thomas Abshier | May 23, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

What Mormonism Claims to Have Restored: An Examination of LDS and Snufferite Restorationism

By: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND Date: May 23, 2026

Coming out of the May 17 fellowship meeting with Leonard and the encounter with Sheikh Ra Sadiq, several brothers have asked me to write more carefully about what Mormonism actually is — both the conventional Latter-Day Saint form and the Snufferite branch that one of our brothers follows. The questions are reasonable. Mormonism is, on the one hand, claiming to be Christianity, and on the other hand, claiming to be Christianity restored after a catastrophic loss. To understand whether either claim is true, and to engage Mormon brothers and sisters faithfully, we have to know what is actually being claimed and on what authority it rests.

This essay attempts a clean synopsis. I will cover, in order: the LDS claim about historic Christianity (the Great Apostasy doctrine); the development of LDS doctrine from Joseph Smith’s First Vision in 1820 to his death at Carthage Jail in 1844; the Book of Mormon and the question of its source; the Nauvoo temple endowment and its undeniable Masonic origins; the doctrine of exaltation and the three degrees of glory; the diagnostic question of what specifically Mormonism claims to supply that the apostolic deposit lacked; the Snufferite branch and how it differs from the LDS Church proper; the structural critique I have come to think is load-bearing for Christians engaging Mormons; and a pastoral note on how the fellowship should hold itself in relation to Mormon and Snufferite brothers and sisters.

I write as a Christian who sees Mormonism as structurally distinct from historic Christianity, and who therefore cannot ratify its core authority claims. I am not writing as a neutral observer. But I have tried to represent the LDS and Snufferite positions accurately, including consulting research drawn from contemporary LDS-history scholarship and from sympathetic LDS sources. Where I disagree, I have tried to disagree on identifiable grounds rather than by caricature. I assume my Mormon brothers and sisters are sincere, devoted, and in many cases more disciplined in their religious practice than many Christians I know. The disagreement is not about sincerity. It is about the structure of the authority claim and what that structure does to the believer over time.

I. The Great Apostasy: What Mormonism Claims Christianity Lost

To understand Mormonism, one must understand its claim about what came before. The LDS Church does not present itself as a denomination within Christianity in the sense that Lutherans, Reformed, Methodists, Baptists, or Pentecostals are denominations — that is, communities within a continuing Christian tradition that disagree on secondary questions while sharing a common biblical canon and a common confession of Christ. The LDS Church presents itself as the only true church on earth, restored after a period during which no true church existed at all.

This is the doctrine of the Great Apostasy. In its standard LDS form, the doctrine holds that after the death of the apostles around the end of the first century, the Christian Church fell into total corruption. Priesthood authority was lost. Saving ordinances became invalid. True doctrine was distorted by Greek philosophical influence, political maneuvering, and human additions. Revelation ceased. For roughly eighteen hundred years, from the late first century until 1820, no Christian church on earth held God’s authority, and no ordinances performed in any Christian church were valid.

This is a strong claim, and it is the load-bearing claim of the entire LDS system. If the Great Apostasy is not true — if historic Christianity in its various forms has continued to hold the genuine apostolic deposit, valid ordinances, and the Spirit’s working — then there is no need for a restoration, and Joseph Smith’s mission collapses at the foundation. Every distinctive LDS doctrine downstream from the Great Apostasy depends on it being true.

The Christian engaging Mormonism faithfully has to recognize that this is where the disagreement begins, and it is not a small disagreement. The standard Christian view, held across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions, is that the Church Christ founded has continued through history — sometimes in great purity, sometimes in significant corruption, sometimes through reformation from within, but never extinguished, never absent from the earth. Christ himself promised: upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matt 16:18). He also promised: lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world (Matt 28:20). The Christian who hears the LDS Great Apostasy doctrine has to ask: at what specific moment did the Church Christ promised to preserve actually disappear? When did Christ’s promise fail?

The LDS answer is that the Church disappeared with the death of the last apostle, likely the Apostle John around the end of the first century. But this is asserted, not demonstrated. The early church fathers — Polycarp, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Rome, Tertullian — wrote within the first and second centuries and clearly held the gospel content the apostles delivered. They worshipped Christ as God incarnate. They confessed the Trinity (in substance if not always in fully-developed Nicene vocabulary). They held the resurrection as historical and central. They administered baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They were martyred for their faith in the same Christ the apostles had proclaimed. The trajectory of total corruption that the LDS narrative requires does not match the documentary record of the second-century church. The corruption-narrative is theologically required by the LDS system, not historically derived from the evidence.

This matters because the LDS apologetic argument depends on a particular reading of church history — one in which there is a complete break between the apostolic age and everything that followed. If the break is not complete, then continuity has been preserved through Christ’s promise, and the restoration thesis loses its foundation. The historical record, fairly read, does not support the complete-break reading. It shows continuity through suffering, reformation through controversy, and the Spirit’s preservation of the gospel core across twenty centuries despite significant institutional failures along the way.

Still, the Great Apostasy is the entry-point for LDS theology. Everything that follows is built on the premise that something was lost that needed to be restored.

II. Joseph Smith’s Story: From the Sacred Grove to Carthage

The next thing to understand is the story of Joseph Smith himself, because every LDS claim ultimately rests on the credibility of his account of his own experiences. The biographical arc runs from 1820 to 1844, a period of roughly twenty-four years, during which the entire structure of LDS theology was assembled. The development was not all at once. It came in stages, and the stages are theologically distinct enough that it is fair to speak of an early Joseph Smith and a late Joseph Smith, with the dividing line falling roughly at the move to Nauvoo, Illinois in 1839.

The early period (1820 to roughly 1838) is the period of the First Vision, Moroni, the golden plates, the translation of the Book of Mormon, the founding of the church, the restoration of priesthood through angelic visitation, the early revelations published in the Doctrine and Covenants, and the establishment of communities in New York, Ohio, Missouri, and eventually Illinois. The late period (1839-1844) is the period of the Nauvoo temple endowment, the introduction of plural marriage (polygamy) as a doctrine, the doctrine of eternal progression and plurality of gods (the King Follett Discourse, 1844), the priesthood keys for sealing, and the full ritual system that defines mainstream LDS temple worship today.

The First Vision is the foundational moment in LDS theology. Joseph Smith reported that in the spring of 1820, at age fourteen, he went into a grove of trees near his family’s farm in upstate New York to pray about which Christian church he should join. He had been moved by the religious revival in his region and wanted to know which denomination was true. According to his canonical 1838 account, two personages appeared to him — God the Father and Jesus Christ — and told him that none of the existing Christian churches were true, that they were all corrupt, and that he was to join none of them. This vision, in LDS theology, established Joseph Smith as a prophet called by God to begin a restoration.

There are important wrinkles in the First Vision account that any honest examiner has to acknowledge. Joseph Smith gave multiple accounts of the First Vision during his lifetime — the 1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842 accounts — and they differ on significant details. The 1832 account mentions only one personage (the Lord) and presents the vision primarily as a personal forgiveness experience. The 1838 account, which became canonical, mentions two personages and emphasizes the rejection of all existing churches. The 1842 account (the Wentworth Letter) gives yet another framing. These variations are well-documented in mainstream LDS-history scholarship; they are not a fringe critique. LDS apologists explain them as Joseph emphasizing different aspects for different audiences, or as memory development over time. Critics see them as evidence that the canonical 1838 account was a retrospective construction shaped by the theological needs of the developing church. The variations do not by themselves disprove the vision, but they complicate the simple narrative that the First Vision was a fixed, foundational event reported consistently from the beginning.

The biblical tension with the First Vision is also worth noting. John 1:18 says no man hath seen God at any time, and 1 John 4:12 repeats this categorically. The biblical position is that the Father has never been seen directly by any human being in his unmediated essence; what humans have seen are theophanies (visible manifestations of God in some form) and Christophanies (pre-incarnate appearances of the Son), with the Son himself being the visible image of the invisible God (Col 1:15, John 14:9). Joseph Smith’s First Vision in its 1838 form claims a direct visual experience of both the Father and the Son standing together. This is, on the standard biblical reading, an unprecedented kind of vision that has no parallel in the canonical record and that sits uneasily with the categorical statements in John 1:18 and 1 John 4:12.

After the First Vision, the next major reported event is the visitation of the angel Moroni in 1823. Moroni, according to Joseph’s account, was a resurrected being who had been a prophet-historian in an ancient American civilization. He told Joseph about a set of golden plates buried in a hillside near his family’s farm, containing the record of that civilization, and instructed him on how the plates would eventually be entrusted to him for translation. Joseph received the plates in 1827 and translated them between 1827 and 1829, producing the Book of Mormon, which was published in 1830. The translation, according to Joseph, was accomplished by means of two stones set in a frame, called the “interpreters” or the “Urim and Thummim” (a borrowed term from the Old Testament high priest’s breastplate). Joseph reportedly looked into the stones, saw English text, and dictated it to a scribe.

The Church of Christ (later renamed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) was formally organized on April 6, 1830, with six original members. Within months it had grown significantly. The early growth was driven by missionary work and by the appeal of the Book of Mormon’s claim to be a restored ancient scripture validating Christianity in the Americas.

The priesthood restoration is the next major piece. According to Joseph Smith’s accounts, in 1829 John the Baptist appeared and conferred the Aaronic priesthood on Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. Soon afterward, Peter, James, and John (the resurrected apostles) appeared and conferred the Melchizedek priesthood. These angelic priesthood-restoration events grounded the LDS claim that the Church now held genuine apostolic authority — the same authority that, in their telling, had been lost during the Great Apostasy.

The church moved from New York to Ohio (1831), then to Missouri, where the LDS settlers experienced significant persecution and were eventually expelled. They moved to Illinois and established Nauvoo in 1839. Nauvoo grew quickly to become one of the largest cities in Illinois.

The Nauvoo period is the second great phase of Joseph Smith’s theological development. Several major doctrines emerged in this period that were not part of the early movement:

In May 1842, Joseph Smith introduced the temple endowment ceremony. This was a structured ritual involving washing, anointing, clothing in temple garments, instruction in the creation/fall/redemption narrative, and the conveying of “tokens, signs, and penalties” — a ritual structure that closely parallels Masonic ritual (which I will examine in Section IV).

In 1843, Joseph Smith dictated D&C 132, which established the doctrine of eternal marriage and authorized plural marriage (polygamy) as part of the restoration. Joseph Smith himself practiced plural marriage from at least the late 1830s, though he denied it publicly during his lifetime. After his death, Brigham Young made plural marriage a public doctrine and the LDS Church practiced it openly until 1890, when the Manifesto officially ended the practice (though splinter groups continue it to this day).

In April 1844, three months before his death, Joseph Smith delivered the King Follett Discourse at the funeral of a deceased member. In this discourse, he articulated the doctrine of eternal progression — that God the Father was once a man who progressed to godhood, that men can do the same, and that there is a plurality of gods. As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become, in the later formulation by Lorenzo Snow. This is one of the most theologically distinctive LDS doctrines, and it is at substantial variance with historic Christian monotheism.

Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage Jail in Illinois on June 27, 1844, by a mob. He was thirty-eight years old. His death triggered a succession crisis in the church, eventually resolved (in the mainstream branch) by Brigham Young’s leadership of the migration to Utah and the establishment of Salt Lake City as the new LDS center. Other branches developed alongside the Utah-based church — the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now the Community of Christ), the various fundamentalist polygamist groups, and (much later) the Snufferite movement, which I will discuss in Section VII.

This is the historical framework. The question for the Christian engaging Mormonism is not primarily whether Joseph Smith was sincere — he likely was — but whether his claims about angelic visitations, priesthood restoration, the source of the Book of Mormon, and the late-Nauvoo doctrines are actually true. To that question we now turn.

III. The Book of Mormon and the Question of Its Source

The Book of Mormon is the central distinctive scripture of Mormonism. It is presented as the translated record of ancient American civilizations — primarily the Nephites (descended from the prophet Lehi, who left Jerusalem around 600 BC) and their adversaries the Lamanites — culminating in a visit by the resurrected Christ to these peoples around AD 34. The book is presented as containing the fullness of the gospel and the plain and precious truths that had been lost from the Bible during the Great Apostasy.

The structure of the Book of Mormon includes historical narratives, theological discourses, prophetic warnings, and a sustained Christological focus — the resurrected Christ’s visit to the Americas is the central event, parallel in importance to his crucifixion in the Old World. The Book of Mormon affirms the divinity of Christ, the atonement, the necessity of repentance and baptism, and many other doctrines familiar to Christianity. The Mormon claim is that this book restores the parts of the gospel that the Old World scribes corrupted or lost.

The Book of Mormon’s authority rests entirely on Joseph Smith’s account of its source. He claimed an angel showed him the plates, he translated them by divine gift, he showed them to a small group of witnesses, and then he returned them to the angel. The plates are no longer available for examination. The translation method (looking into seer stones placed in a hat, according to multiple firsthand accounts) is unverifiable. The witnesses’ statements, while attested in the early LDS movement, came from a small group of close associates of Joseph Smith, several of whom later left the church or had complicated relationships with their original testimony.

The empirical challenges to the Book of Mormon’s historical claims are substantial. The book describes pre-Columbian American civilizations using horses, cattle, sheep, wheat, barley, iron tools, swords, chariots, and various other items that the archaeological and biological record indicates were not present in the pre-Columbian Americas. The book describes large-scale wars and major cities that have not been identified archaeologically despite extensive investigation. The linguistic record shows that Native American languages do not derive from Hebrew or Egyptian, contrary to what the Book of Mormon’s Lehite-descent narrative would predict. The DNA evidence shows that Native American populations are primarily of Asian descent (via the Bering land bridge) rather than of Middle Eastern descent, contrary to what the Lehite-origin narrative predicts. None of these are fringe critiques; they are the considered conclusions of mainstream archaeology, linguistics, and genetics.

LDS apologists have offered various responses — that the Book of Mormon describes a small group within the larger pre-Columbian population (the “limited geography” model), that the terms for animals and items might be translation choices for unfamiliar things, that the DNA evidence cannot definitively rule out a small Lehite contribution, and so on. These responses are not unreasonable, but they require substantial recalibration of the straightforward historical reading the Book of Mormon itself seems to present. The defensive moves are sophisticated, but they are defensive moves.

There is also the question of the book’s nineteenth-century context. The theological concerns the Book of Mormon engages — anti-Catholicism, anti-infant-baptism, anti-Masonic conspiracy (in the Gadianton Robbers material), debates about the doctrine of grace, the gathering of Israel — are precisely the religious controversies that animated 1820s upstate New York, the region known as the “Burned-Over District” for its religious revivalism. The Book of Mormon’s theological emphases fit comfortably into the religious imagination of Joseph Smith’s specific time and place, in ways that would be more difficult to account for if the text were truly an ancient American document being faithfully translated.

What I want to emphasize is not that any one of these challenges is conclusive but that, taken together, they shift the burden of proof. The Book of Mormon is a substantial claim — an ancient American civilization, a divinely-mediated translation, a restored fullness of the gospel — and the standard of evidence required to substantiate such a claim is correspondingly high. The available evidence does not meet that standard. The book stands or falls on Joseph Smith’s personal testimony, with no independent verification possible.

For the Christian, this matters because the LDS view treats the Book of Mormon as scripture on par with — and in some respects superior to — the Bible. If the Bible’s authority rests on its multi-vocal testimony across four thousand years, with extensive external corroboration (fulfilled prophecy across centuries, the historical record of the early church, the manuscript tradition with thousands of manuscripts allowing textual reconstruction, the archaeological record largely consistent with the biblical narrative in its central claims), then the Book of Mormon’s authority rests on a structurally different foundation. The Bible is, in the vocabulary I have been developing in recent essays, a multi-vocal canon — dozens of authors writing across many centuries, in many genres, with many independent witnesses to a single redemptive story. The Book of Mormon is a mono-vocal deposit — one revelator, one translation event, one set of plates, with no independent verification of either the source or the process. The structural difference matters.

IV. The Nauvoo Endowment and the Masonic Question

Of all the puzzles in LDS history, the Nauvoo temple endowment is the one that requires the most careful examination, because the historical evidence is unambiguous and the theological implications are significant.

In March 1842, Joseph Smith was inducted as a Master Mason in the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge, advancing through the three Blue Lodge degrees in unusually rapid succession. Approximately six weeks later, in May 1842, Joseph Smith introduced the Nauvoo temple endowment ceremony. The structural parallels between the Masonic ritual and the Nauvoo endowment are not minor or coincidental. They include:

• A staged ritual progression through degrees or stations
• The use of specific hand grips and signs as identifying tokens
• The conveying of “penalties” associated with violating sacred secrecy (the LDS Church removed the explicit penalty-language in 1990)
• A ritual narrative tracing humanity’s progress from a primordial state through a fall to redemption
• Specific ritual clothing including aprons and other vestments
• The wearing of an inner garment as a symbol of covenant commitment
• The use of stylized “lectures” or instruction-passages explaining the symbolic meaning of the elements
• An emphasis on secrecy regarding the specific content of the ritual

LDS historians, including faithful believing scholars such as Richard Bushman (in his biography Rough Stone Rolling) and others, acknowledge these parallels openly. The question is not whether the parallels exist — they unambiguously do — but how they are to be theologically explained.

Joseph Smith’s own explanation, repeated by later LDS leaders, is that Freemasonry preserved corrupted fragments of ancient temple rites going back to Solomon, and that God, through Joseph Smith, was restoring the pure original form that Masonry had only partially retained. On this account, the similarities are not evidence of borrowing but of common ancient origin: Masonry preserved what it could of the ancient ritual; Joseph Smith restored what it lost. This is the standard apologetic move.

The problem with this explanation is that there is no historical evidence that Freemasonry preserves ancient Solomonic temple rites. Freemasonry, as a fraternal order, traces its organized history to the early eighteenth century in Britain, with various older legendary genealogies that historians do not credit. The Masonic ritual elements that parallel the Nauvoo endowment are themselves of eighteenth-century origin within the Masonic tradition, not of ancient origin. So the LDS claim that Masonry “preserved” ancient rites that Joseph Smith then “restored” requires positing an unbroken transmission of ancient ritual material through eighteenth-century European Masonry — a claim for which no historical evidence exists. The simpler explanation, the one that fits the documentary record, is that Joseph Smith encountered Masonic ritual through his initiation in March 1842 and incorporated its structure into the endowment he introduced six weeks later.

If this is correct, then the temple endowment is not an ancient restoration but a nineteenth-century synthesis of Masonic ritual structure with Joseph Smith’s developing theological vocabulary. This is not a damning conclusion in itself — many religious traditions adopt ritual structures from their cultural context. But it does undermine the specific LDS claim that the endowment is an ancient ordinance restored after a long absence. The endowment is, on the historical evidence, a new ritual introduced in 1842 with very recognizable nineteenth-century-Masonic-American sources.

The temple garment is part of this same ritual complex. It is not mentioned in the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants (prior to the Nauvoo period), or the Pearl of Great Price. It is not connected to anything in Moroni’s reported revelations, the golden plates, or the Urim and Thummim. It originates in the Nauvoo endowment ceremony of May 1842, where participants are given a “garment of the holy priesthood” to wear under their clothing as a reminder of temple covenants. The garment’s design has changed several times in LDS history, most notably in the 1979 two-piece revision. It is, in its origin, a ritual artifact of the late-Joseph-Smith Nauvoo period, not an ancient practice.

For a Christian examining Mormonism, the Masonic question is significant because it touches the credibility of the broader restoration claim. If the most distinctive ritual element of LDS temple worship is, on its face, a nineteenth-century adaptation of Masonic forms rather than an ancient restored practice, then the broader claim of restored ancient practice has to be evaluated against the possibility that other “restored” elements are similarly nineteenth-century innovations dressed in ancient vocabulary. This is the structural concern: not that ritual borrowing is bad in itself, but that the specific LDS claim about the ritual’s origin does not match the evidence.

V. The Three Degrees of Glory and the Doctrine of Exaltation

What does Mormonism claim to offer that historic Christianity does not? This is the question every serious convert eventually asks, and the answer reveals the substantive theological core of LDS doctrine.

In May 1832, Joseph Smith dictated D&C 76, which describes three “degrees of glory” or kingdoms into which the righteous and the unrighteous are sorted in eternity. The three kingdoms are:

• The Celestial Kingdom, the highest, where God the Father dwells. This kingdom is itself divided into three sub-levels, the highest of which is exaltation. Only those who have received the LDS temple ordinances and have been sealed in eternal marriage can enter the highest level of the Celestial Kingdom.
• The Terrestrial Kingdom, the middle, where Jesus Christ is present but the Father is not. This is reserved for honorable people who did not fully accept the gospel in mortality — well-disposed unbelievers, partly-faithful believers, and similar categories. According to LDS theology, this is where most morally-decent non-Mormon Christians will go.
• The Telestial Kingdom, the lowest of the three glories, where neither the Father nor the Son is directly present, but the Holy Ghost is. This is for the wicked who eventually repent during a post-mortal probationary period (the LDS spirit world / spirit prison).

There is also a category of Outer Darkness for the very small number of “sons of perdition” — those who, having known the truth, willfully reject it and remain in rebellion.

This three-tiered cosmology is one of the most distinctive features of LDS theology, and it does not appear in historic Christianity. The biblical evidence LDS theology cites for it is primarily 1 Corinthians 15:40-42, where Paul speaks of “celestial bodies” and “bodies terrestrial” and of differences in “glory” between the sun, the moon, and the stars in connection with the resurrection. This is not, on the historic Christian reading, a description of three separate kingdoms after judgment. It is a description of the different glory of the resurrection body compared to the earthly body. The LDS use of these terms in D&C 76 is an interpretive overlay, not a straightforward biblical exposition.

The doctrine of exaltation is the load-bearing element of the LDS soteriology, and it is the doctrine that most clearly distinguishes Mormonism from historic Christianity. Exaltation, in LDS theology, is not merely salvation in the historic Christian sense — it is godhood. Those who attain exaltation become gods themselves, capable of eternal increase (producing spirit offspring), ruling their own worlds, progressing eternally in glory. The Lorenzo Snow couplet captures it: As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become. This is theosis in a literal and ontological sense, not in the analogical or participatory sense in which Eastern Orthodox theology has historically spoken of theosis as union with God’s energies while remaining a creature.

The metaphysical implications are substantial. LDS theology, particularly in its Joseph-Smith-late and Brigham-Young-era expressions, holds that God the Father himself was once a man who progressed to godhood through a similar process of faithfulness and ordinances. There are, in this view, many gods — perhaps infinitely many — with our God the Father being the God of this particular world or system. This is henotheism (worship of one god while acknowledging the existence of others), not the monotheism of biblical revelation. The biblical pattern is unequivocal: I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me (Isa 45:5); Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD (Deut 6:4). The LDS doctrine of plurality of gods, however carefully it is presented, is in substantial tension with the foundational monotheism of both Testaments.

Eternal marriage and family sealing are part of the same exaltation framework. Marriages performed in LDS temples by sealing-priesthood authority continue beyond death; marriages not so sealed dissolve at death (“till death do us part” being, on the LDS view, a confession of insufficient marriage). Children sealed to parents in temple ordinances become part of the eternal family unit. The deceased can have ordinances performed for them by proxy (baptism for the dead, temple sealing for the dead) so that they may, if they accept the gospel in the spirit world, still attain the exaltation that requires these ordinances.

This is, in many ways, the substantive doctrinal heart of conventional LDS Mormonism. It is what Mormonism offers that Christianity does not: not just salvation, but exaltation; not just heaven, but godhood; not just resurrection, but eternal increase; not just family reunion, but eternal family-sealing. For someone who finds historic Christian eschatology insufficiently rich, the LDS offer is genuinely more elaborate. For someone who reads the biblical material as setting boundaries on what God promises (a resurrection to eternal life with God, but not deification in the ontological sense; a new heavens and new earth, but not a multiplicity of worlds; reconciliation with the Father, but not equality with him), the LDS offer is an overreach.

VI. The Diagnostic Question: What Was Actually Missing?

This brings me to what I think is the load-bearing question for any Christian examining Mormonism. It is the question Charlie’s pressure at the May 17 fellowship meeting was implicitly pointing toward, and it is the question I tried to develop in Section III of the fellowship summary. The question is simple to state:

What specifically was missing from the apostolic gospel that the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, the Nauvoo endowment, and the LDS prophetic tradition supply?

This question matters because it forces the LDS claim to be evaluated on the level of substantive content rather than on the level of institutional authority. If something genuinely necessary for salvation was lost during the Great Apostasy and restored by Joseph Smith, then the restoration is justified. If nothing genuinely necessary was lost — if the apostolic deposit, as preserved in the New Testament and applied through the indwelling Spirit, is sufficient — then the restoration is offering a competing institutional authority rather than supplying a missing soteriological content.

When I ask this question of the LDS claim, I do not find a satisfying answer.

Was the gospel of grace through faith in Christ missing? No — the New Testament preserves it with overwhelming clarity (Eph 2:8-9, Rom 3:21-26, Rom 5:1, Gal 2:16, Phil 3:9, and many more). Was the doctrine of Christ’s atoning death and resurrection missing? No — it is the central claim of the apostolic preaching (1 Cor 15:3-8 names it as the gospel of first importance). Was the indwelling of the Holy Spirit missing? No — John 14-16 develops it explicitly, Acts 2 records its fulfillment, and Romans 8 articulates its operation in the believer’s life. Was the ordinance of baptism missing? No — Christ commanded it and the apostles practiced it (Matt 28:19, Acts 2:38-41). Was the Lord’s Supper missing? No — Christ instituted it and Paul carefully preserves it (1 Cor 11:23-26). Was prayer access to the Father through the Son missing? No — Christ taught it (John 14:13-14, John 16:23-24), and the apostolic writings repeatedly affirm it. Was the moral law summarized in the Great Commandment missing? No — Christ articulated it and the New Testament works it out in detail.

What, then, did the Book of Mormon supply that was missing? The LDS answer would name the doctrine of exaltation, eternal marriage, the three degrees of glory, the priesthood-keys system, the temple endowment, plural marriage (in its historical period), and the doctrine of plurality of gods. But the appropriate question is whether any of these were missing in the sense of being soteriologically necessary, or whether they were added in a way that goes beyond what the apostolic gospel actually requires.

I do not think they were missing. I think they were added. The apostolic gospel, as preserved in the New Testament canon, is sufficient for salvation. The believer who confesses Christ as Lord, repents of sin, is baptized into the name of the Triune God, receives the indwelling Spirit, and walks in the apostolic teaching has everything that the New Testament names as necessary. The LDS additions go beyond the apostolic deposit; they are not restorations of what was lost but accretions onto what was already complete.

This is where the sola fide commitment becomes important to name openly. My argument that nothing was missing depends on the conviction that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ’s atoning work, received by the indwelling Spirit, with the canonical Scripture sufficient as the rule for sanctification afterward. A serious Mormon interlocutor would not deny that grace is necessary; he would deny that grace alone is sufficient. He would say that ordinances, temple sealings, priesthood authority, and continuing prophetic revelation are also necessary, layered on top of grace. The disagreement is not whether grace is necessary but whether anything else is also necessary. I hold to sola fide — salvation by grace through faith alone, with the indwelling Spirit and the apostolic Scripture sufficient — and that conviction is the foundation of my argument that nothing was missing. A reader who does not share that conviction will have to engage the sola fide question first, before the canon-closure argument can land.

The biblical case for sola fide is, in my view, overwhelming. Ephesians 2:8-9 (For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast) is the clearest single statement. Romans 3:28 (Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law) is direct. Galatians 2:16 (Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ) is emphatic. The works that James 2 calls for are the evidence of saving faith, not a co-condition of salvation; the Reformed reading of Romans-Galatians-James as a coherent whole, with faith justifying and works confirming, is exegetically defensible and theologically clean. The LDS framework that requires temple ordinances, eternal marriage, and priesthood-mediated authority as conditions of the highest salvation adds something the apostolic gospel does not require.

The biblical tests for true vs. false prophets reinforce the diagnostic. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 says that a prophet whose teaching draws people after other gods is to be rejected even if his signs and wonders come to pass; the primary test is doctrinal consistency with prior revelation about God’s character. Deuteronomy 18:21-22 says that a prophet whose predictions do not come to pass is not from God. Joseph Smith’s mature theology of God — eternal progression, plurality of gods, God as an exalted man (King Follett Discourse) — diverges substantially from the eternal, immutable, monotheistic God revealed in both Testaments, which puts pressure on the Deut 13 test. Some of his specific predictions, including the prophecy that a temple would be built in Independence, Missouri within his contemporaries’ lifetimes (D&C 84, 1832) and various imminent-Second-Coming predictions, did not come to pass as stated, which puts pressure on the Deut 18 test. The biblical tests for true prophethood do not unambiguously vindicate his claim.

Paul’s warning in Galatians 1:8-9 is the verse I find most directly applicable to the structural form of the Mormon claim. Paul writes: though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed. Paul is anticipating exactly the scenario of a later angel-mediated revelation supplementing or replacing the apostolic gospel, and he instructs the church to reject it. The Mormon claim of an angel-Moroni-mediated restoration is structurally exactly the scenario Paul has in view. Paul’s instruction is to reject it, even if it comes from an angel from heaven.

Hebrews 1:1-2 makes the related point from the positive direction: God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. The Son is the final word — the eschatological revelation that completes what the prophets had been pointing toward. Jude 3 confirms the canonical settlement: the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. Once delivered (Greek hapax paradotheisē) means once-for-all, definitively, not iteratively or progressively. The apostolic deposit is the once-for-all settlement of revelation in the Son.

These passages, taken together, do not just fail to support the addition of post-apostolic single-revelator deposits to the canon — they explicitly anticipate and warn against the pattern. The Christian who rejects Joseph Smith on the basis of these texts is not closing his ears to genuine revelation; he is exercising the discernment the apostolic deposit itself instructs him to exercise.

VII. The Snufferite Branch: What It Keeps and Rejects

The Snufferite movement is a relatively recent breakaway from mainstream LDS Mormonism, and it deserves separate treatment because it has a different structure from the conventional LDS Church and because one of our fellowship brothers is a sincere participant in it. Understanding the Snufferite position helps us understand what is actually load-bearing in his commitments.

Denver Snuffer, born 1952, is a Utah attorney who was a faithful LDS member for many decades. He began publishing books in the early 2000s describing what he reported as a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. His teaching emphasized that the LDS Church had become institutionally corrupt, particularly under and after Brigham Young’s succession, and that the true continuation of Joseph Smith’s mission required a return to Joseph Smith’s earlier emphasis on direct personal encounter with Christ rather than on institutional priesthood structures and temple ritual systems. Snuffer was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 2013 over the content of his teaching, particularly his claim to have received revelation that the LDS Church no longer possessed valid priesthood authority.

After his excommunication, Snuffer continued to write, teach, and gather a community of followers — sometimes called the Remnant movement — who accept his prophetic role while rejecting the LDS Church’s institutional structure.

What does the Snufferite movement keep from Joseph Smith and from Mormonism more broadly?

It keeps Joseph Smith as a legitimate prophet, particularly in his early period through approximately 1830-1836. It keeps the Book of Mormon as inspired scripture. It keeps the broader Doctrine and Covenants from Joseph Smith’s era (with some interpretive flexibility about which sections are authoritative). It keeps the doctrine of the Great Apostasy as the framing for why a restoration was needed. It keeps the idea of an open canon — that God can and does continue to give revelation to chosen servants in the present.

What does the Snufferite movement reject from mainstream Mormonism?

It rejects the Brigham Young succession as illegitimate or at least seriously compromised. It rejects the LDS institutional hierarchy as corrupt — including the office of the LDS Church President, the Quorum of the Twelve, the General Authorities, and the institutional structure built up since the 1840s. It rejects the LDS temple endowment in its current form, viewing it as a Masonic-influenced innovation that has been further distorted by institutional control. It rejects the LDS temple garment as institutionally and ritually problematic. It largely rejects the elaborated doctrine of exaltation, plurality of gods, eternal progression, and the celestial-terrestrial-telestial cosmology in its developed LDS form (though there is variation among Snufferites on these points). It rejects the LDS priesthood-authority claim — that the LDS Church holds the keys conveyed by Peter, James, and John to Joseph Smith — as having been forfeited by institutional unfaithfulness.

What it offers instead is a Joseph-Smith-without-Brigham-Young Christianity: the prophetic claim, the Book of Mormon, and the continuing-revelation framework, but without the temple ritual system, the priesthood hierarchy, the plural-marriage history, or the polytheistic-exaltation cosmology. Snuffer himself claims direct contact with Christ, in the form of personal visitations, and teaches that other faithful seekers can have similar contact through repentance, scripture study, and prayer. The Snufferite movement is structured loosely, without a formal institutional hierarchy; gatherings are small, leadership is charismatic rather than institutional, and the practical religious life of the participants looks in many ways like that of a sincere evangelical Christian who happens to read the Book of Mormon alongside the Bible.

For Christians engaging Snufferite believers, this is important. The Snufferite is not, in most cases, defending exaltation, polygamy, or temple ritual. He is defending Joseph Smith’s role as a prophet, the Book of Mormon’s status as scripture, and the open-canon framework that allows Snuffer to be a continuing prophet today. His soteriology is in most cases recognizably Christian — Christ’s atoning death and resurrection as the ground of reconciliation, faith in Christ as the means, baptism as the response, the indwelling Spirit as the seal. The disagreement with historic Christianity is narrower than it is with conventional LDS Mormonism; it is concentrated on the question of post-apostolic prophetic authority and on the status of the Book of Mormon.

This makes the Snufferite case in some ways more theologically subtle than the LDS case. With the LDS Church, the disagreement is wide — exaltation, plural marriage (historically), Masonic-influenced temple ritual, polytheism, institutional authoritarianism. With the Snufferite, the disagreement is concentrated almost entirely on the epistemological question: can the canon be added to by a post-apostolic single revelator? The doctrinal content of the additions is, in the Snufferite case, less divergent from Christianity than it is in the LDS case. The question of authority remains as sharp as ever.

VIII. Why a Sincere Christian Might Follow Snuffer

Why would a person who reads the Bible carefully, confesses Christ sincerely, and lives a moral life nonetheless follow Denver Snuffer rather than remain in or move to historic Christianity? The question is worth asking, and the answer is structural rather than doctrinal.

The Snufferite who has left the LDS Church but kept Joseph Smith is not, typically, persuaded by the LDS Church’s authority claims any longer. He has seen the institution up close and found it wanting. He has, in many cases, been hurt by the institution or has witnessed its hurt of others. He has read the LDS history honestly enough to recognize the Masonic origin of the endowment, the variations in the First Vision accounts, the problematic elements of plural marriage history, and the corruption of the post-Joseph-Smith institutional structure. He is no longer credulous about the LDS Church.

But he has not given up on Joseph Smith. Why?

I think the answer is that Joseph Smith, in his early period, offered something powerful that the Snufferite cannot easily give up: the claim that God speaks directly today, through a living prophet, with new revelations that supplement the closed canon of the past. This is the open-canon claim, and once a person has embraced it, returning to a closed-canon historic Christianity feels like a contraction of the spiritual life. It feels like saying God spoke through the apostles, then stopped, and now we are stuck with a closed book and an indwelling Spirit that whispers but no longer announces. The closed-canon position is, for the Snufferite, insufficient. He wants the living Word in his own day.

The Snufferite finds in Denver Snuffer’s claimed encounters with Christ a continuation of the open-canon promise that Joseph Smith began. Snuffer claims direct revelation. Snuffer teaches that direct revelation is available to anyone who seeks it earnestly. This is a powerful spiritual promise. Compared to it, the conventional Christian assertion that the Spirit guides through the canonical Scripture, through prayer, through providence, and through the believer’s conscience — which is in fact the historic Christian position — sounds less immediate, less particular, less alive.

The Snufferite is also, very often, drawn to the remnant identity. He believes himself part of a small faithful group who have been called out from a corrupt institution to participate in the continuing restoration. This is an identity-forming claim that gives existential meaning to the believer’s life. He is not just one of many Christians; he is part of the called-out remnant in the latter days. The identity is psychologically powerful.

So the Snufferite’s commitment is not held primarily for doctrinal reasons. It is held for epistemic reasons (the open canon, the living prophet, the direct revelation) and identity reasons (the remnant, the called-out, the continuing restoration). The doctrinal content of his Christianity may be largely conventional; what makes him a Snufferite is the framework of authority within which he holds that conventional content.

This is what makes the conversation difficult and the disagreement durable. The Christian arguing doctrinal points with a Snufferite will often find substantial agreement — on the deity of Christ, on the atonement, on the resurrection, on the indwelling Spirit, on the necessity of repentance and baptism, on the priority of love. The conversation only becomes difficult at the structural-epistemological level: can the canon be added to, by a single post-apostolic revelator, through angelic visitation and personal encounter, with the additions becoming binding on those who receive them? The historic Christian answer is no; the Snufferite answer is yes. The disagreement is at the level of how truth is known and authorized, not at the level of what truth is.

IX. The Structural Critique: Mono-Vocal versus Multi-Vocal Authority

Let me close the analytical section with the structural critique that I have come to think is the load-bearing one for Christians engaging Mormons of either the conventional or Snufferite stripe.

The biblical canon is multi-vocal. Sixty-six books written over roughly four thousand years by dozens of authors in many genres — law, history, prophecy, wisdom, psalmody, gospel, epistle, apocalyptic. The voices range from Moses to John, from kings to shepherds, from Levitical priests to fishermen and tax collectors. The central figure of Christ, the Word incarnate, is himself one voice within this multi-vocal canon; his recorded teaching is comparatively brief, scattered across four gospels written from four different angles. The biblical revelation is the cumulative testimony of many witnesses across many centuries, with the Holy Spirit doing the internal application work for each believer who comes to it. The canon’s authority is reinforced by the convergence of its many independent voices on a single redemptive story — the parallax argument, I have been calling it.

Mormonism, whether in its LDS or Snufferite form, layers on top of this multi-vocal biblical foundation a mono-vocal deposit: Joseph Smith’s single set of received revelations, in the LDS case extended by the institutional prophetic succession and in the Snufferite case extended by Denver Snuffer’s continuing claims. The mono-vocal layer carries the unavoidable signature of its single human medium. Whatever Joseph Smith’s particular spiritual sensibilities, theological emphases, cultural assumptions, and personal limitations were, they are imprinted on the revelation he reported. The same applies to Denver Snuffer. The single voice cannot be separated from the message it transmits.

This is the structural concern. When a believer makes the mono-vocal deposit operatively authoritative in his life — when he allows it to interpret, supplement, or override the multi-vocal biblical witness — he is binding himself to the spirit that operates through that particular medium. The spirit’s signature, whatever it is, becomes the shape his spiritual life takes over time. The mono-vocal source has structurally narrower validation than the multi-vocal canon. It cannot be cross-checked against parallel witnesses. It cannot be verified against converging testimony. Its claim to authority rests entirely on the credibility of one person, with no independent triangulation possible.

This concern applies regardless of whether the content of the mono-vocal deposit appears to contradict the Bible. Even if the content is largely non-contradictory but additive — as is largely the case in the Snufferite version — the structural concern remains. The believer is binding himself to a particular spirit through a particular medium. The medium leaves an imprint. The imprint shapes the believer over time. The shaping moves the believer along a spectrum from the parallax-rich multi-vocal canon toward the narrower mono-vocal source. This is not a damnable error in any direct sense; it is a structural narrowing of the spiritual life.

This is, I think, the most honest critique of Mormonism in either of its forms. It does not depend on identifying specific content-level errors (though those exist). It does not depend on disproving Joseph Smith’s character (which I will not attempt — he may have been sincere). It depends on the structural observation that any post-apostolic single-revelator deposit, however well-intentioned and however well-aligned with the apostolic gospel in content, narrows the validation surface of the believer’s epistemology and binds him to a particular medium’s spiritual signature.

The apostolic gospel, by contrast, is multi-vocally attested. The eyewitness apostolic generation, writing in different cities, with different theological emphases, in different genres, converged on a single Christ and a single gospel. The cross-checking is built in. The believer who rests on the apostolic deposit rests on a parallax-rich foundation. The believer who rests on a post-apostolic single revelator, however earnest, has a narrower foundation. The difference is structural, not just historical.

X. Pastoral Closing

How, then, do we hold ourselves in relation to Mormon and Snufferite brothers and sisters?

First, with love. The Lord’s commandment to love one another is not conditional on doctrinal agreement. The Mormon brother whose primary allegiance is to Christ — and Leonard as a Snufferite is a brother in Christ regardless of the secondary commitments to a tradition we cannot ratify. He is to be loved as the Lord loves him.

Second, with clarity. Love does not require pretending that the structural concerns I have outlined here do not exist. The Mormon claim to be the restored true church, with priesthood authority that historic Christianity lost, is a substantive claim with substantive implications, and pretending we agree with it when we do not is neither honest nor loving. Honest disagreement, expressed with care, is the appropriate posture. The fellowship has been working on the texture of such disagreement in recent months and will continue to do so.

Third, with patience. The Snufferite who has invested decades in his framework, and the LDS member who was raised in his tradition and finds his identity in it, are not going to be persuaded by a single conversation, however careful. Persuasion, where it happens, will happen through long fellowship, through the Spirit’s work in the brother’s heart, and through the slow accumulation of pastoral evidence that the Christian framework is alive, life-giving, and worth attention. Our role is to hold the witness faithfully, not to demand immediate conversion.

Fourth, with the recognition that the Spirit may do more work in our Mormon brothers’ hearts than we know. The Lord knows his sheep. The Lord saves his own. We do not have to do the Spirit’s job for him. Our task is to bear witness, to love, to invite, and to leave the harvest to the harvest-master.

Fifth, with the recognition that the Christian tradition has its own institutional failures — corrupt clergy, abusive structures, doctrinal drift in various denominations, complicity with worldly power, failure to love the poor and the marginalized. The Mormon critique of historic Christianity’s failures is not always wrong about the facts; the Reformation itself was, in part, a response to such failures within the Catholic tradition of its day. Our witness is not the witness of a perfect tradition to a flawed one. It is the witness of imperfect believers to an unrepealed gospel. The gospel itself is what matters. The institutions that carry it are servants of the gospel, not the gospel itself. A Christian witness to a Mormon must hold this in mind: we are not asking him to switch tribes; we are asking him to attend to the apostolic gospel that is sufficient on its own terms.

The May 17 fellowship meeting, with Charlie pressing the Pharisee question and the Sheikh bringing his Moorish-Islamic challenge in the same afternoon, was a useful occasion for the fellowship to develop the framework that this essay attempts to systematize. The framework is not complete; the application is ongoing. But the basic structure is, I think, sound: historic Christianity rests on the multi-vocal apostolic deposit, post-apostolic single-revelator additions narrow the believer’s epistemic foundation, the content of those additions is rarely soteriologically necessary, and the gospel of grace through faith in Christ’s atoning work — once delivered to the saints — is sufficient.

The Christian Underground, as Charlie named it on May 10, is the patient soul-by-soul work of converting the world to Christ through witness, love, good works, and the reasoned defense of the gospel. Engaging Mormon and Snufferite brothers and sisters is part of that work. It is not the work of a single conversation; it is the work of long fellowship. The Lord of the harvest is the one who brings the harvest. We are servants of the field.

— Thomas

260522 – Forwarding Posts Discipline

by Thomas Abshier | May 22, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Thirty-Eight ‘Firsts’: On Forwarded Outrage, the Ninth Commandment, and the Christian Discipline of the Share Button

By: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

Date: May 22, 2026

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 22, 2026

Occasion. A friend named Mark Smith forwarded to his Facebook circle a list of thirty-eight items styled as “President Obama’s impressive accomplishments.” The list itself is attributed to Tom Ririe and has been in circulation, in some form, for more than a decade — copy-pasted, lightly edited, refreshed for a new audience every election cycle. Mark added item thirty-eight himself. The list opens with a sarcastic frame (“Quit trashing Obama’s accomplishments”) and closes with a sarcastic frame (“such an accomplished individual … in the eyes of the ignorant”). The thirty-eight items in between describe Obama variously as a stoner, a foreign-aid fraud, a Social-Security-number imposter, a violator of multiple laws, a tyrant who terminated American space-flight, a man who cancelled the National Day of Prayer, and an ex-president who tried to impeach his successor. The whole document is offered as a single piece of mockery: here is what your opponents call accomplishment.

This essay is not a fact-check of the list. It is a fellowship-discussion essay about what happens to Christian witness when forwarded outrage is treated as legitimate political speech, and about what the Ninth Commandment actually requires of those of us — and I include myself, plainly — who pass things along because they confirm what we already believe.

I. What is right about the underlying frustration

The list does not arise from nowhere. It arises from a real and not-illegitimate well of conservative Christian grievance about the Obama presidency, and any fellowship essay that wants to be heard by people who share that grievance has to begin by saying so. I share substantial parts of it myself.

There is a real argument that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate was a constitutional and prudential overreach. There is a real argument that the executive-action route on immigration policy (the DACA pathway in particular) circumvented Congress and weakened the separation of powers. There is a real argument that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was premature in a way that embarrassed both the Nobel Committee and its recipient — a fact Obama himself acknowledged in his acceptance address. There is a real argument that the administration’s posture toward American manufacturing, coal communities, and religious-liberty plaintiffs was hostile in ways those communities are entitled to name. There is a real argument that the broader cultural moment of those eight years included a significant erosion of the public role of Christianity in American life, and that the administration accelerated rather than slowed that erosion. None of those arguments depends on the list. All of them can be made carefully, in the daylight, with primary sources, and they have been made carefully by serious conservative thinkers — Yuval Levin, Ross Douthat, Robert George, Rod Dreher, R. R. Reno. The fellowship can read those writers and engage them. We can disagree with our brothers and sisters on the political left and do so honestly.

What the list does is something else. The list is not a careful argument. It is the form of an argument used to deliver an emotion — contempt — wrapped in a parody of accomplishment. The opening sarcasm names what is actually being transmitted: quit trashing Obama’s accomplishments. That is not how someone who has accomplishments to defend would speak. It is how someone speaks when they want the reader to feel that the opposition is contemptible. The list is the vehicle; the contempt is the cargo.

This distinction matters because the legitimate critique is poisoned by the vehicle. Mark’s actual conservative neighbors — the ones who hold genuine, defensible objections to the Obama policy record — find that the moment they speak, they are mistaken for the people who forwarded the list. And the moment they are mistaken for the people who forwarded the list, the careful argument is over. The list trains the political opposition to dismiss everyone who criticizes Obama as a person who believes the items on the list. It then trains the political ally to repeat the items on the list as though they were equivalent to the careful argument. Both effects are losses for the conservative Christian witness, and both effects are produced by the act of forwarding.

II. A taxonomy of the thirty-eight items

I am not going to walk the list item by item. The point of this essay is not to be a fact-checker. But I do want to sort the thirty-eight items into kinds, because the kinds tell us what is happening underneath.

Kind 1: Outright falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Items 1 through 3 fall here. Obama is described as the first president photographed smoking marijuana (no such photograph from his presidency exists; he wrote in Dreams from My Father about teenage drug use, which is a different matter); the first president to apply for college aid as a foreign student and then deny he was a foreigner (no documentary evidence has ever surfaced of any such application, and the claim originated as a satirical hoax published by a website that retracted it); the first president to hold a Social Security number from a state where he had never lived (the Social Security Administration has publicly explained that mid-1970s number assignment was based on the regional processing center receiving the application, not the applicant’s state of residence, and Obama’s number was issued in 1977 while he was living in Hawaii). These are not policy critiques. They are claims of fact, and the claims are false. They are repeated because they fit a story, not because they are true. Item 15 — that Obama “cancelled the National Day of Prayer” and declared America “no longer a Christian nation” — belongs to the same kind. Obama issued a National Day of Prayer proclamation every year of his presidency; he declined to host the public White House service that the Bush administration had hosted, which is a different and much smaller thing. The “no longer a Christian nation” quote, from a 2006 speech, said in full: Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. That is a descriptive statement about American religious pluralism, not a renunciation of the country’s Christian heritage. To excise the word just and report the rest as Obama denying America is Christian is to bear false witness in the literal sense — to report what was not said as though it had been said.

Kind 2: Partisan framing of ordinary or contested presidential actions. Items 4 through 13 and many of the later items fall here. The credit-rating downgrade of 2011 happened under Obama; Standard & Poor’s explicitly cited Republican-led debt-ceiling brinksmanship as a factor in the downgrade, which complicates the “first president to preside over” framing considerably. War Powers Act violations are alleged against every president since Nixon, including Reagan in Grenada and Clinton in the Balkans. Required purchase of a product (item 7) is a real complaint about the ACA’s individual mandate but is not without precedent — Social Security contributions, military draft registration, and mandatory automobile insurance in most states are all legally compelled transactions, and the constitutionality of the ACA mandate was tested and resolved at the Supreme Court. The “first to tell a CEO to resign” framing of the Chrysler bailout (item 13) ignores that the Chrysler CEO was negotiating in real time over federal bailout terms — a transaction, not an ambush. None of these is unanswerable. Each could be a real argument. But each is presented as a unique moral first, and that framing is false even where the underlying complaint has substance.

Kind 3: Personal-conduct grievances. Items 26, 30, 31, 32, 33 — golf rounds, vacations, personal trainers, dog trainers. Eisenhower played roughly eight hundred rounds of golf in eight years. Wilson and Trump golfed prodigiously. Every modern presidential family has had personnel, transportation, security, and recreation costs that ran to taxpayer expense, because the office and the family are inseparable for security reasons. To list these as moral firsts is not analysis; it is class-grievance theater. The reader is supposed to feel that the Obama family lived above the people, and the items are dressed up as accountability when their function is resentment. Whatever one thinks of the Obama family’s personal style, calling these items “firsts” is straightforwardly false.

Kind 4: Distorted-quote items. Item 34 — that Obama said the Islamic call to prayer is “the most beautiful sound on earth” — comes from a 2007 New York Times interview in which Obama, reminiscing about growing up partly in Indonesia, said the Arabic call to prayer was “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” A childhood memory of an evocative sound becomes, in the forwarded list, evidence of crypto-Islamic loyalty. The quote is real; the framing inverts its meaning. Item 36 and 37 — that Obama told the military to pay for their own war insurance and then called them unpatriotic for objecting — describe a Congressional Budget Office proposal that Obama did not endorse, and a White House response that did not occur. These are not exaggerations of true things. They are reports of events that did not happen.

Kind 5: Genuine policy critiques mislabeled as moral monstrosities. The pieces of legitimate conservative argument — that the administration overstepped on coal regulation, on immigration enforcement, on executive action, on inspector-general independence — are scattered through the list, but each is dressed as a unique evil rather than a contested policy choice. The reader who agrees with the conservative position on coal regulation is invited to feel that the disagreement is not a policy difference but a moral abomination. This is the rhetorical move at the heart of the list, and it is the one most corrosive to honest political life.

Kind 6: The added item, number 38. Mark added this himself: First ex President who was involved in trying to impeach His successor President Donald Trump! The factual claim is empty — ex-presidents have no role in impeachment, which is a House process — and the historical claim that no ex-president has ever criticized a successor is preposterous. Theodore Roosevelt ran against his own successor in 1912. John Quincy Adams returned to the House as a constant adversary of every president who followed him. Jimmy Carter has been a persistent critic of every Republican administration since his defeat. Obama, in fact, refrained from public criticism of Trump for longer than most modern ex-presidents have refrained from criticism of their successors. The item is invented. It was invented by Mark, in good faith presumably, and added to a list of inventions, because the inventional logic of the list invites continued invention. Each forwarder is given permission, by the form, to add their own.

III. Why the list works: the Schiff Syndrome in operation

The Christos Theological Grammar (v1.4, Part I, §2) names a mechanism that the fellowship has been studying since the What Is Truth essay last year. Susan called it the Schiff Syndrome — the question of how intelligent and basically decent people come to believe and repeat things that are false. The Grammar’s diagnosis is fourfold:

1. Uncertainty creates discomfort — the mind cannot tolerate ambiguity.
2. Pattern completion is automatic — we fill gaps unconsciously.
3. Coherence trumps accuracy — we prefer stories that fit over facts that don’t.
4. Identity precedes evidence — we reason from who we are, not from what we see.

The thirty-eight firsts are a perfect specimen. The reader already holds a story about Obama: that he was a foreign-influenced, anti-American, anti-Christian president who damaged the country. That story may be partly defensible on policy grounds; that is not the issue. The issue is what happens when the story is already in place and a list arrives that fits it. Pattern completion takes over. Each item is processed not against external sources but against the internal story. The items that fit are nodded at. The items that are obviously absurd (the dog trainer at $102,000, the personal trainer flown in weekly) are not absurd to the reader, because they fit the vibe of the story. The dog trainer line, by the way, originates in a misreading of a salary line item for a military aide whose responsibilities included the family pet; the actual figure was much smaller and the role was much larger. But the figure does not need to be true to function. It needs only to fit.

The Grammar’s social-economy diagnosis applies equally:

• Status from being distinctive, not correct. The reader who forwards the list signals tribal membership. The reward is fellow-conservatives nodding; the cost of being wrong is borne by no one, because no one in the reader’s circle is going to fact-check the items.
• “Secret knowledge” as social currency. The list claims to expose what the mainstream has hidden. The reader is flattered as one of the few who can see.
• Rejection becomes evidence of suppression. When a fact-checker rates the list false, the rating itself becomes proof that the fact-checker is part of the problem. The list is therefore unfalsifiable in form, exactly as the redemption-movement essay last week described an unfalsifiable conspiracy doctrine.
• The cost of being wrong is replaced by the reward of being contrarian. The forwarder is admired by his circle for forwarding. Whether the items are true does not enter the social transaction.

These are not partisan observations. They apply to the equivalent lists about Trump that circulate in left-leaning Christian circles, to the equivalent lists about Biden that circulate elsewhere, to the equivalent lists about every president of the last fifty years. The mechanism is the same. The fellowship has to learn to see it independent of which side it currently flatters.

IV. The Ninth Commandment is not a partisan amendment

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour (Exodus 20:16).

The commandment does not contain an exception for political opponents. It does not contain an exception for a president whose policies one opposes. It does not contain an exception for items that one believes to be probably true but has not verified. The Hebrew construction reaches further than perjury in a formal court; it reaches every report we make of another person to a third party. Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment (Exodus 23:1-2). The very phrase the King James translators use — raise a false report — addresses the act of repeating and amplifying. The forwarder is not the originator of the report, but the forwarder raises the report; he gives it new life, new readers, new credibility. The commandment is not silent about that.

The proverbs make the standard tighter, not looser:

He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him (Proverbs 18:13). The forwarder who has not checked the items has answered before hearing.

He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him (Proverbs 18:17). The list, read alone, seems just. The Christian’s obligation is to be the neighbor who searches.

A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall not escape (Proverbs 19:5).

A man that beareth false witness against his neighbour is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow (Proverbs 25:18).

The neighbor in view is whoever is being spoken of. Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) settled the question of who counts as a neighbor: anyone, including the one we are inclined to despise, including the one from the wrong nation, including the political opponent. Obama is our neighbor in the precise theological sense that Christ established. The Christian who would not stand in a courtroom and swear to the truth of items 1, 2, 3, 15, 26, 28, 34, 36, 37 has no warrant to forward those items on Facebook. The medium does not absolve the witness. The casual tone does not absolve the witness. The fact that everyone is doing it does not absolve the witness — thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.

V. Truth is not a partisan resource — it is ontology

Here the Christos framework descends to its load-bearing level. Truth is not a debating tool. Truth is not a strategic asset deployed when convenient and set aside when inconvenient. Truth is the structure of reality itself.

The Conscious Point Physics work the Hyperphysics Institute has been doing for the last several years argues, with mathematical rigor we have begun to publish in peer-reviewed venues, that reality is constituted by conscious points sustained in being by God’s mind. In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) is not a metaphor; it is an ontological description. The physical world is real because God holds it in being as a consistent, definite structure. Truth, then, is the alignment of what we say with that structure. A true claim corresponds to what is. A false claim describes what is not. The false claim does not merely fail; it creates, in the mind of the speaker and the mind of the hearer, a mental model that diverges from reality. That divergence is not neutral. The model occupies attention. The model shapes subsequent inference. The model travels — in the case of a Facebook share, to several hundred more minds — and the divergence is multiplied.

This is what the Bible has always called bearing false witness. The framework of conscious-point physics names the same offense in ontological terms: the construction and propagation of a reality-map that is misaligned with the actual structure of being. That is what every false item on the list is. That is what the list as a whole is.

For a community whose whole project is the manifestation of Kingdom culture — which is to say, the cultivation of patterns of life in which the structure of being is honored and worked with rather than contradicted and resisted — the discipline of truth is not a side virtue. It is constitutive. The Kingdom of God is at hand (Mark 1:15) is not just an announcement of arrival; it is an announcement of a regime in which the Word is the foundation. In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). To traffic in falsehood for political reward is to repudiate the foundation while claiming to build on it.

There is no Kingdom shortcut around an accurate description. The Christian who lies for Christ’s sake does not lie for Christ’s sake. The Christian who repeats what he has not verified, against a neighbor he has been instructed to love, has chosen a tribe over a Lord.

VI. The spirit of the content

I want to be specific about what is being transmitted under cover of the items. The list is not primarily about Obama. It is about marking a boundary between us and the ignorant. Read the closing line again: I feel much better now. I had been under the impression he hadn’t been doing ANYTHING … Such an accomplished individual … in the eyes of the ignorant! The mockery is the point. The items are the pretext. The function of the document, socially, is to invite the reader to laugh at people who voted for Obama, who admire him, who think he was a competent president. The laughter is the reward for the share.

Christ was specific about this posture. Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire (Matthew 5:22). Raca — empty-headed. Thou fool — morally vacant. The list calls Obama supporters the ignorant. That is precisely the register Christ forbade. The forbidding is not weaker because the target is a political opponent rather than a member of one’s church; if anything, the political-opponent case is harder, which is why Christ extends the command across that boundary as well: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you (Matthew 5:44).

I am not saying the forwarder hates anyone. I am saying that the vehicle he passed along carries hatred whether or not he personally bears any, and that the act of passing along amplifies what the vehicle carries. A Christian cannot remain neutral to the content he transmits. The signal he amplifies is, in part, his signal.

This is also a Christian-witness problem of a specific kind. The political and cultural fight the church is in right now is, in part, a fight about whether Christianity is a thinking faith — whether Christian conviction can be held by people who reason carefully, source claims, distinguish levels of evidence, and refuse to traffic in nonsense. Every viral forwarded list of the present kind is, in that fight, a defeat. The skeptical neighbor who reads Mark’s post is given evidence — false evidence, but evidence — that conservative Christianity is a tribe held together by shared willingness to repeat things that are not true. The witness the church is trying to make against secular materialism, against the new pagan cosmology, against the ascendant ideologies of self, is undermined every time a Christian shares a list he has not bothered to verify. The shared list says, to the unbelieving reader, you do not need to take us seriously. And the unbelieving reader, having been told, doesn’t.

VII. The discipline of the share button

The practical implication is concrete and discipline-shaped. Before a Christian forwards a political claim — about anyone, of any party — the standards that apply are not in dispute. They are scriptural and they are old:

Verify. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The triangulation method the Grammar lays out (multiple independent sources, predictive power, cross-examination, character of witnesses, coherence with established knowledge, testimony of the Spirit) is the practical form of that command. Use it.

Consider the source. A list with no author named, no source citations, no date of composition, and no specific events tied to specific places fails on the most basic triangulation step. Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God (1 John 4:1). The principle extends to the testing of every secondary witness — every list, every meme, every chain text.

Apply the standard symmetrically. The standard that applies to political claims about an opponent is the same standard that applies to political claims about an ally. The Christian who would dismiss as nonsense an analogous list about Trump must dismiss as nonsense an analogous list about Obama. A just weight and balance are the LORD’S (Proverbs 16:11). Asymmetric standards are forbidden weights. The Lord notices the scales.

When in doubt, do not share. In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin (Proverbs 10:19). The default disposition of the share button should be off. The burden of justification is on the forwarder, not on the reader. Let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil (Matthew 5:37).

When you have shared what was not true, retract. I have done this myself, more than once, on this very kind of material. The retraction is brief, public, and unequivocal: I shared this; I have since learned it is not accurate; I am taking it down and I am sorry. The retraction recovers the integrity of the Christian witness. The silence, after one has been corrected, hardens the posture. Hardening is a worse sin than the original error.

VIII. Closing pastoral note — to Mark, and to Tom Ririe, and to me

This essay is not written to mock Mark Smith. Mark forwarded what reached him, and what reached him has been circulating for over a decade and has reached, by now, probably hundreds of thousands of Christians who have done exactly what he did with it. He is in a very large company, and many in that company are sincere disciples whose political frustration is legitimate and whose share-button discipline simply has not been taught.

It has not been taught because the church has been slow to recognize, until very recently, that the social-media share is a form of speech under the Ninth Commandment. The forwarded text is testimony. The retweet is testimony. The screenshot passed in a group chat is testimony. The standard that applies to a pulpit applies, in attenuated form, to each of these. The fellowship is one of the places where that standard can be learned, by the slow work of essays like this one and by the slower work of friends correcting friends gently, in private, without contempt of their own.

To Tom Ririe, whose original list this is — I do not know you. I assume you wrote what you wrote because something real in the Obama presidency angered you, and that not every angered conservative reaction to that presidency was wrong. I would say to you what I have to say to myself: anger is not a substitute for accuracy, and the Christian writer is held to a higher witness-standard than the cable-news commentator, the meme-maker, or the partisan operator. If God will hold us accountable for every idle word (Matthew 12:36), the words we write down and circulate are not idle; they are testimony. The list as it stands cannot survive that test. Some of its items are simply false. Almost all of its items conflate policy disagreement with moral monstrosity. Its closing line names the people it differs from as the ignorant, which is the precise epithet Christ forbade. Whatever it accomplishes in conservative comment threads, in the books that will be opened it accomplishes nothing for the Kingdom. It hurts the witness it purports to defend.

To Mark — keep posting. Keep arguing for what you believe is true and good for the country. Argue against Obama’s record; argue against any record you wish; conservative Christian voices are needed in the public square and you have the courage to be one of them. But verify before you forward. Apply to claims that flatter your politics the same skepticism you apply to claims that challenge them. When you make the conservative case, make it on what is true. The conservative case can be made on what is true. It does not need the thirty-eight firsts. The thirty-eight firsts are a millstone tied around the neck of the case you actually want to make.

To me, and to the fellowship — we are not exempt from any of this. The same essay can be written about lists we have nodded at, shared, or composed ourselves. The point is not that one side is honest and the other is not. The point is that the Kingdom is built on truth or it is not the Kingdom, and that we, who claim to be building Kingdom culture, are accountable for every report we raise.

These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the LORD.

— Zechariah 8:16-17

Word count: ~4,000.

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute One heart to make Christ King.