260513 – On Civil Disobedience and Obedience to God

by Thomas Abshier | May 15, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Render Unto Caesar, Render Unto God: On Civil Obedience, Conscientious Disobedience, and the Christian Underground

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 13, 2026

Reference: Should We Obey the Laws of Our Government? by John Reid
Background: Sovereign Citizen Critique, by Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

Occasion: The Berean daily email this morning carried a thirty-year-old John O. Reid essay from the Church of the Great God’s Forerunner archive, “Should We Obey the Laws of Our Government?” (May 1996). Reid was a serious teacher who died in 2016. The piece argues — vigorously and at length — that Romans 13 commands Christian submission to civil authority, that Jesus’ “render unto Caesar” saying is straightforward, that Daniel and the three Hebrew children honored the king of Babylon as well as God, and that the modern “sovereign citizen” movement is a rebellion which directly disobeys explicit biblical command. The essay sits at the opposite pole from where Sunday’s fellowship landed — the Christian Underground synthesis, the live moral-cooperation question concerning taxation that funds evil, Susan’s ambassador and testamentary-trust framings, my own eschatology essay yesterday on enduring (rather than escaping) the trial. The disagreement is sharp enough that the fellowship deserves a careful working-through of where Reid is right, where he is wrong, and what the Christian Underground project actually claims for itself.

This is the third fellowship essay this week engaging the Church of the Great God’s Forerunner archive. Charles Whitaker on proselytism (260508), John Ritenbaugh on Amos 5:25 and the relation of grace to law (260508), and now John O. Reid on Romans 13. CGG is a serious Sabbatarian tradition descended from Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, and its writers do real biblical work that the fellowship benefits from engaging. They also operate inside a particular set of theological commitments — heavily futurist eschatology with no historic-Reformation lesser-magistrate framework, a tendency to draw very tight lines around what counts as legitimate Christian resistance to civil authority — that produce conclusions the Christos framework will end up qualifying. That qualification work is part of what this fellowship has been doing for months. This is the next piece of it.

I. The Question and Why It Cuts Close

The question of civil obedience is not a Reformation-era curiosity. It cuts close to where the fellowship is actually living. We are not discussing it as a theoretical exercise; we are discussing it because every project on the fellowship’s table is, in some way, a question about how Christians should relate to civil authority under conditions where the civil authority is increasingly hostile to the Christian witness.

The Ideomotion charter §7 commits the company to refuse coercive imposition of unethical interventions on patients. If the FDA or a state medical board were to require Ideomotion to deliver an intervention the Ideomotion conscience judged unethical, §7 commits the company to refuse, accept the regulatory consequences, and continue serving patients by whatever lawful means remain. That is a conscientious objection. Reid’s essay, taken straight, would call it rebellion.

The question of taxes that fund moral evils — through Medicaid funding of abortion, Title X family-planning grants, foreign aid programs that include morally objectionable activities, certain research funding, the prosecution of wars judged unjust, and the various other channels through which general federal revenue reaches morally objectionable ends — is one several members of the fellowship have raised in different forms. The amount of any individual taxpayer’s contribution that flows to any particular morally objectionable end is small and fungible, but the question is real: what does the Christian conscience require when one’s general civic obligations include contributions to evils one cannot endorse? Reid’s essay, taken straight, treats this as a non-question — pay your taxes, full stop. The historic Christian moral tradition treats it as a question that requires careful moral analysis. Section XI of this essay develops that analysis; for now, it suffices to flag that the question is on the fellowship’s table and that Reid’s framework leaves no room for it.

Susan’s ambassador and testamentary-trust framings from the May 10 fellowship — which I noted at the time needed careful legal review — were her attempt to work out a theological-legal basis for the Christian standing under a different jurisdiction than the American civil order. Some of her specific legal mechanisms have features in common with sovereign-citizen legal theory (a contested category of literature surrounding the meaning of all-capital-letters-name in court filings, the strawman doctrine, the redemption-movement theory of accounts at the Federal Reserve, and so on). Susan does not subscribe to those mechanisms in their full sovereign-citizen form, but the family resemblance is real. Reid’s essay would lump everything in this family into rebellion, full stop.

My eschatology essay yesterday argued that the Christian Underground assumes the historic eschatology — that the saints will be present for the trial — and that this requires endurance, preparation, and the building of alternative institutions. Reid’s tradition, while not pre-tribulational in the dispensational sense, lands close enough to the same practical conclusion: do not develop a stance of resistance to civil authority; submit, witness, accept punishment when conflicts arise, but otherwise live as ordinary law-abiding citizens. The Underground synthesis is more activist than that.

So Reid’s essay is not a peripheral question. The fellowship is doing things, building things, drafting documents that commit us to positions Reid would call rebellion. The honest move is to put Reid in front of us, hear his strongest argument, and answer it carefully. I am going to do that here in roughly the order: what Reid sees rightly, what his argument misses, what the Christian Underground actually claims, and where the fellowship’s practical defaults should land.

II. What Reid Sees Rightly

I want to begin by saying clearly that Reid is not a fool, his essay is not a tract, and his concerns are serious. The fellowship should hear the strong form of his argument before any qualifications.

The default disposition of the Christian is submission, not rebellion. This is correct. The New Testament repeatedly commands believers to be subject to civil authority (Rom 13:1-7; 1 Pet 2:13-17; Titus 3:1; 1 Tim 2:1-2). It commands them to pray for kings and all in authority. It commands them to pay taxes. It commands them to honor magistrates. The disposition the New Testament forms in the believer is not a posture of suspicion-toward-government as the default attitude. It is a posture of orderly submission, with the exceptions specified rather than the rule. The Christian who walks around with a chip on his shoulder toward the civil authorities is not, in the first instance, walking around with a biblical disposition. Reid is right about this, and the fellowship needs to take it seriously, because some of our recent discussions have edged toward a generalized suspicion of civil authority that the New Testament does not authorize.

Rebellion as a spiritual condition is sin. This is also correct. The rebellion that Scripture condemns — the rebellion of Korah, the rebellion of Saul (1 Sam 15:23), the rebellion of those who say in their hearts that they will be like the Most High (Isa 14) — is a spiritual disposition of self-rule, of refusing legitimate authority because one wishes to be one’s own authority. This is the original sin of the Garden in a particular mode, and Scripture treats it with the gravity it deserves. Reid is right that the spirit of the age — Hollywood’s heroes of breaking-all-the-laws, the cultural celebration of the rule-breaker as the authentic self, the deep American mythology of the rebel-against-the-government as the moral protagonist — is a spirit Christians should be wary of. Whatever the fellowship’s eventual position on civil obedience, the Christian heart should not be in love with rebellion for rebellion’s sake.

The sovereign-citizen movement is theologically and spiritually problematic. Also correct. The movement, as it has developed in the United States since the 1970s, is a strange amalgam: legal theories with no support in any actual American legal authority, theological claims with no support in any orthodox Christian tradition, conspiratorial historiography about the Federal Reserve and the Uniform Commercial Code, and a generalized stance of self-sovereignty that runs against the basic shape of New Testament discipleship. Many of its adherents are bitter; many are sued repeatedly; many lose everything trying to assert positions that no court will recognize; some end up in violent confrontations with law enforcement. The movement’s spiritual fruit is not the fruit of the Spirit. Reid is right to warn against it, and the fellowship should not be tempted to adopt its legal theories.

Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego are the right model. Reid cites these correctly. Daniel did not refuse to serve Nebuchadnezzar. He served as a high officer in the Babylonian administration through three reigns, executing his duties faithfully and honorably. The three Hebrew children likewise served the king. When the king’s law required them to commit idolatry, they refused. When the king’s law required them to administer the kingdom, they obeyed. The principle is selective conscientious objection within a framework of general civil submission. Reid extracts this principle correctly, and it is precisely the principle the Christian Underground project is operating under — though Reid and I will disagree about what counts as a conscience-violating command of the modern civil authority.

The character of submission matters for the Kingdom. This is Reid’s deepest point, and it deserves the most serious engagement. He cites 1 Corinthians 15:23-28 — that even Christ will submit himself to the Father when all things are put under him — and Herbert Armstrong’s pithy maxim: God will not allow into his Kingdom anyone he cannot rule. The forming of a submitted heart, a heart that can yield to authority without resentment, is part of what the Christian life is for. The Christian who cannot submit to a human authority will struggle to submit to the divine authority. Reid is right that the experience of being-under-authority in a human ordering is a training-ground for the deeper submission to God. The fellowship needs to take this seriously: whatever resistance the Underground project asks for, it must not produce a posture of generalized unwillingness-to-submit that would mark a heart unsuited for the Kingdom.

So Reid is right about the default disposition, the spiritual danger of rebellion-as-disposition, the trouble with the sovereign-citizen movement, the right model in Daniel and the three Hebrews, and the character-forming function of submission. These are not small points, and the essay before you takes them seriously. The honest question is whether Reid’s specific applications follow from these correct premises, and that is where I want to push back.

III. The Internal Conditions of Romans 13 Itself

Reid’s central argument rests on Romans 13:1-7, and he reads it as an unconditional command of submission with only the narrowest exceptions (direct idol-worship). I want to read Romans 13 again carefully and ask whether the text itself bears that reading.

Here is Paul’s argument, in his own structure:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. (Rom 13:1-2)

So far, Paul has stated the principle: civil authority is ordained by God; resistance to it is resistance to God’s ordinance. Reid stops here, in effect, and treats the rest of the passage as commentary on the same principle. But Paul does not stop here. He immediately gives the reason civil authority is ordained by God, and the reason is conditional:

For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. (Rom 13:3-4)

Look carefully at the logical structure. Paul does not say rulers are always praising good works and punishing evil ones, no matter what they happen to do. He says rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. This is a description of what civil authority is for — its God-ordained function. Paul’s argument is that civil authority, insofar as it fulfills its God-ordained function of restraining evil and rewarding good, is to be submitted to. Paul does not address — because he does not have to, for his immediate purposes — the case in which civil authority inverts its function and becomes a terror to good works rather than to evil.

But that case is the case Christians have repeatedly faced. Within a few years of Paul writing Romans, Nero would burn Christians as torches in his gardens for refusing to participate in Roman civic religion. Nero was being a terror to good works, not to evil. Within sixty years, Pliny the Younger would be writing to Trajan asking how to handle Christians who refused to offer incense to the imperial genius. Trajan’s response — that they should be executed if they persisted in refusing — was the civil authority being a terror to good works, not to evil. The early Church under Decius (AD 250) and Diocletian (AD 303-311) faced systematic state persecution. The civil authority was being a terror to good works, not to evil. In every one of these cases, the Christian Church did not say: Well, Paul taught us in Romans 13 that civil authority is the minister of God, so we must submit to whatever Nero or Decius or Diocletian demands. They said: Paul taught us in Romans 13 that civil authority is supposed to be the minister of God; this authority has betrayed its function; therefore, the obedience-claim of Romans 13 no longer holds with the force it would have under a rightly-functioning authority. They refused the incense. They went to the lions. They became the cloud of witnesses.

This is not a marginal reading. It is the way Christian theologians have read Romans 13 for most of Christian history when the rubber meets the road. Augustine reads it this way. Aquinas reads it this way in his treatment of just law in the Summa (I-II.96.4): an unjust law is no law at all in the proper sense and does not bind the conscience the way a just law does. Calvin reads it this way in Institutes IV.20: civil magistrates are to be honored as ministers of God when they perform their function, but when they require what God forbids, we ought rather to obey God than men (Acts 5:29), and the lesser magistrates have a positive duty to resist the tyranny of the higher. The Reformation’s whole theology of resistance — which I will develop more fully below — grows out of a careful reading of Romans 13 in its full structure rather than a flat reading of its opening verses in isolation.

Reid does not engage this reading. His essay treats Romans 13:1-7 as if the conditional structure in verses 3-4 were merely descriptive of how rulers typically behave, not as a description of the function-of-civil-authority that grounds the submission-claim. On Reid’s reading, the Christian owes submission to a civil authority regardless of whether it fulfills its God-ordained function. That reading flattens Paul’s argument and produces a doctrine of unconditional civil obedience that Paul’s own text does not support.

The fellowship should hold the conditional structure carefully. The Christian’s default submission to civil authority is grounded in the authority’s God-ordained function of restraining evil and rewarding good. When the authority performs that function, even imperfectly — as all human authorities do imperfectly — submission is owed. When the authority inverts that function — becoming a terror to good works and a reward to evil — the ground of submission begins to weaken, and the question of what obedience is owed becomes a serious one. Reid’s framework does not include a category for this case, but the Church’s actual history does.

IV. Acts 5:29, Read Fully

Reid’s essay cites Acts 5:29 once, in passing, as the principle that authorizes Daniel and the three Hebrews to refuse idol-worship. The verse is: We ought to obey God rather than men. Reid’s use of it is narrow — it applies to direct conflicts where civil law commands what God forbids, and in Reid’s reading, those conflicts are essentially limited to idol-worship and direct violation of the Ten Commandments.

But notice what is actually happening in the passage Acts 5:29 is taken from. Peter and the apostles have been arrested by the Sanhedrin — the highest religious-civil authority in Jerusalem, combining what we would call legislative, judicial, and religious functions, and operating under Roman imperial sanction within its sphere. The Sanhedrin had ordered the apostles to stop preaching the gospel in the name of Jesus. The apostles refused. Acts 5:29 is Peter’s explanation of why:

Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:29)

Notice what the apostles are not refusing. They are not refusing to bow to a statue. They are not refusing to commit idolatry. They are not facing a Daniel-3 lions’-den scenario. The Sanhedrin’s command was a command to stop public preaching. The apostles’ refusal was a refusal to stop preaching. The Acts 5:29 principle, as the apostles applied it, is wider than direct idol-worship. It extends to any case in which a legitimate authority forbids the Christian to do what God has commanded, or commands the Christian to do what God has forbidden.

This matters because it opens up a category Reid’s framework does not allow: the case in which civil authority commands the Christian to participate in evil by act, financing, or association. The midwives of Exodus 1 faced precisely this case. Pharaoh ordered them to kill the male Hebrew infants at birth. They refused. The text is striking: But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive (Exod 1:17). And God’s response to their disobedience: Therefore God dealt well with the midwives… And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses (Exod 1:20-21). The midwives are commended for disobeying a direct order of the legitimate civil authority. The command was not to commit idolatry; the command was to participate in killing innocent children.

The midwives are not a marginal case in the Old Testament. They are the foundational paradigm of conscientious objection in the biblical canon. The same paradigm runs through Daniel 6 (where Daniel refuses the command not to pray — a command about worship-pattern, not about idol-worship in the Daniel-3 sense), through the apostles’ refusal to stop preaching, through every faithful refusal in the long history of the Church.

Reid’s reading of Acts 5:29 narrows the principle to direct idol-worship. The biblical canon’s reading of Acts 5:29 — through the midwives, Daniel, the apostles, and the historical line of conscientious-objection from the early Church through the Reformers through Bonhoeffer and ten Boom — is wider. The principle is: when civil authority commands the Christian to participate in evil (by direct act, by abstaining from commanded good, by financing, by association, or by any other mode of moral cooperation), the Christian must refuse, accept the punishment that follows, and trust God. This is not rebellion; it is the conscientious-objection tradition. It is older than Romans 13 itself.

V. Daniel, Shadrach, and the Midwives — Reid’s Own Examples Open the Wider Principle

Reid cites Daniel and the three Hebrew children as the right model of selective civil disobedience within a framework of general civil submission. He is right to cite them. But he reads them more narrowly than the text allows.

The Daniel 3 case — the three Hebrew children refusing to bow to Nebuchadnezzar’s image — is the case Reid foregrounds. It is a direct command to commit idolatry, and the three refuse. They are willing to be executed for the refusal. God delivers them, but they make clear in advance that even if God does not deliver them, they will still not bow: But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up (Daniel 3:18). This is the classic conscientious-objection scene, and Reid’s use of it is correct as far as it goes.

But Daniel 6 — the lions’ den — is a different case, and Reid’s framework does not handle it well. The command in Daniel 6 is not a command to commit idolatry. It is a command to not pray to any God or man except the king for thirty days. Daniel’s defiance is not the refusal to bow to an idol; it is the continuation of his ordinary daily prayer practice, three times a day, with his window open toward Jerusalem, exactly as he had been doing before the decree. His act of civil disobedience is continuing to do what God commanded in a context where civil authority has forbidden it.

This is precisely the apostles’ situation in Acts 5. The Sanhedrin had not commanded them to bow to an idol; the Sanhedrin had commanded them to stop preaching. The apostles’ civil disobedience was continuing to do what Christ had commanded, in a context where the religious-civil authority had forbidden it.

And it is precisely the midwives’ situation, only in reverse. Pharaoh had commanded them to commit an evil act (kill the infants); they refused, continuing to do what their calling as midwives required — saving life rather than taking it.

The principle that emerges from these three cases — Daniel 3, Daniel 6, the midwives of Exodus 1, and the apostles in Acts 5 — is broader than Reid’s framework allows. The principle is: the Christian (or the Old Testament saint) owes obedience to civil authority when its commands are compatible with God’s commands. When the civil authority commands the believer to do evil, to omit good, to participate in another’s evil, or to cease the practices God has commanded — the believer must refuse, accept the consequences, and trust God for whatever follows.

This wider principle is the historic Christian conscientious-objection tradition. It does not, however, settle every case automatically. The principle applies cleanly when civil authority commands a direct act of evil (the midwives commanded to kill the infants, the doctor commanded to perform an abortion), when civil authority forbids a direct commanded good (the apostles commanded to stop preaching, Daniel commanded to stop praying), or when participation moves to the level of formal cooperation (intent to advance the evil) or immediate material cooperation (direct hand in the evil act itself). The principle does not automatically settle the moral status of every form of cooperation with civil authority — particularly the indirect, fungible, attenuated forms of cooperation that arise from the ordinary citizen’s participation in shared civic structures (general taxation, commerce, employment in mixed-purpose institutions). For those forms, the historic moral tradition provides a more careful analytic apparatus — the formal/material, immediate/mediate, proximate/remote distinctions — and Section XI works through that apparatus in detail.

Reid’s framework lacks both the wider Acts 5:29 principle (which covers more than direct idol-worship) and the moral-cooperation apparatus (which distinguishes cases of direct participation from cases of remote fungible contribution). The result is a flattened reading in which everything that resembles civic resistance gets collapsed into rebellion. The fellowship needs both tools — the wider principle to handle cases of direct participation in evil, and the moral-cooperation apparatus to handle cases of indirect contribution where refusal would be theologically misplaced and practically futile. Together, they provide a framework that is more careful than Reid’s, more theologically grounded, and more useful for actual decision-making under the conditions the fellowship faces.

VI. The “Render Unto Caesar” Passage, Read Fully

Reid uses Matthew 22:17-21 — the render unto Caesar saying — as straightforward authorization to pay all taxes. He notes that Jesus paid the head tax and the temple tax. His reading is the standard popular reading: Jesus said to pay your taxes; so pay your taxes; the matter is closed.

The standard popular reading is not wrong on its first level, but it is shallow. Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees is more sophisticated than Reid uses it. Let me work through it carefully.

The Pharisees and Herodians come to Jesus with a trap. The Pharisees are nationalists who resent the Roman tribute; the Herodians are collaborators who support it. The question — is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not? — is a trap because either answer alienates one camp and arms the other. If Jesus says no, the Herodians can denounce him to Pilate as a Zealot. If Jesus says yes, the Pharisees can denounce him to the people as a collaborator. The question is designed to have no safe answer.

Jesus asks for the coin. He does not have one himself — already a tell. He asks whose image and inscription are on it. They answer: Caesar’s. And here Jesus gives the famous saying:

Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (Matt 22:21)

The popular reading takes this as: pay the tax. And at its first level, that is what Jesus is saying — the coin already bears Caesar’s image; it is, in some sense, already his; return it to him. But Jesus’ saying has a second half that the popular reading typically swallows whole without examining: render unto God the things that are God’s. What are the things that are God’s? What bears God’s image?

The answer is in Genesis 1:27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. The human being bears God’s image. Caesar’s coin bears Caesar’s image and is owed to Caesar; the human being bears God’s image and is owed to God. The two clauses of Jesus’ saying are perfectly parallel, and the saying as a whole is not merely an authorization of tax-payment but a profound assertion of where the believer’s primary loyalty lies.

Caesar gets the coin. God gets the person. The believer renders to Caesar what bears Caesar’s image — money, civic duties, ordinary obedience to the laws that govern the public square — and renders to God what bears God’s image — his life, his loyalty, his worship, his conscience, his obedience in the things that pertain to the soul. When the two render-claims do not conflict, the believer happily performs both. When they conflict, the second has priority by the logic of Jesus’ own saying, because what bears God’s image is owed to God first, and Caesar’s claim to the coin must yield where it threatens to extend to the person.

This is the reading that the early Church Fathers gave the passage. Tertullian, writing under Roman persecution, treats render unto God what is God’s as the basis for the Christian refusal to offer incense to the emperor — the coin is Caesar’s, but I am God’s. Augustine reads it similarly. The reading has been continuous through the Christian tradition.

Reid’s use of the passage stops at the first half. He uses render unto Caesar as authorization to pay all taxes. He does not develop render unto God as the corresponding limitation on Caesar’s claim. The result is a flattened reading that supports Reid’s overall thesis but loses the depth of what Jesus actually said. The fellowship should hold the saying whole. The coin to Caesar; the person to God. The tax to Caesar; the conscience to God. The ordinary civic duty to Caesar; the worship and witness to God. When Caesar reaches for what bears God’s image — for the conscience, for the worship, for the witness, for participation in the killing of God’s image-bearers — Jesus’ own saying is the ground for refusal.

VII. The Pauline Life Itself

Reid’s argument that Paul taught unconditional submission to Roman civil authority must be tested against the way Paul actually lived. Paul wrote Romans 13. He also lived a life that does not fit Reid’s reading of Romans 13.

Consider: Paul was repeatedly arrested by civil authorities. He was beaten with rods at Philippi for preaching the gospel (Acts 16:22-23) — and did not refuse the beating, did not invoke his Roman citizenship until after the beating, in order to maximize the witness. He was imprisoned in Jerusalem, in Caesarea, in Rome, and finally beheaded under Nero. In every case, his arrest was triggered by his preaching of the gospel in the face of civil-religious demands that he cease.

When the Sanhedrin and the Asian Jews repeatedly tried to silence him through legitimate-seeming legal processes, Paul did not cease preaching. He used Roman law strategically when it served the gospel — invoking his citizenship at Philippi after the beating (Acts 16:37), appealing to Caesar from Festus (Acts 25:11) — but he did not abandon the preaching to comply with Sanhedrin or Asian-Jewish demands that he stop. The same Paul who wrote let every soul be subject to the higher powers was repeatedly imprisoned and beaten and finally killed for refusing to submit to specific civil-authority demands that he stop preaching the gospel.

The Pauline life, therefore, demonstrates how Paul himself understood Romans 13. The default disposition is submission; the obedience-claim of civil authority is real; the believer pays taxes, respects officials, and lives within the law. But when civil authority commands what God forbids — for Paul, the command to stop preaching — the believer must refuse, accept the consequences, use whatever legal protections remain to maximize the witness, and trust God for the outcome. Paul lived Acts 5:29 even as he wrote Romans 13. The two are not in tension; they are two sides of a single consistent teaching. Reid’s reading of Romans 13 produces a Paul who would not have ended up beheaded under Nero. The actual Paul did end up being beheaded under Nero, because he never stopped preaching.

This is the part of Romans 13 that the unconditional-submission reading cannot account for. The author of Romans 13 was himself a serial civil-disobedient who was finally executed for his refusal to comply with the very civil authority he had told the Roman believers to be subject to. Either Paul was a hypocrite, or the doctrine of Romans 13 is not the doctrine of unconditional submission that Reid reads into it. Paul was not a hypocrite. The reading must accommodate Paul’s life. The reading that does so is the historic reading: default submission, with Acts-5:29-style refusal when civil authority commands what God forbids.

VIII. The Reformation Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate

There is a third element of the historic Christian reading of Romans 13 that Reid’s framework does not include, and that the fellowship should know exists: the Reformation doctrine of the lesser magistrate.

The doctrine, developed by John Calvin in the Institutes IV.20.30-31, by John Knox in his Appellation to the Nobility and Estates of Scotland (1558), by Theodore Beza in Du Droit des Magistrats (1574), and most fully by Samuel Rutherford in Lex, Rex (1644), holds that the civil authority is itself ordered hierarchically, and that when a higher magistrate commits tyranny against the people or against the law of God, the lesser magistrates (subordinate authorities — provincial governors, lesser nobles, mayors, sheriffs, in our terms perhaps state attorneys-general, county sheriffs, school boards) have not merely the right but the positive duty to resist the tyranny of the higher.

This is not the sovereign-citizen movement’s claim that the individual is above the law. It is the precise opposite: it is the claim that civil authority is hierarchically ordered under God’s law, and that the lesser magistrate is bound by his oath to God’s law in a way that takes precedence over his subordinate relationship to the higher magistrate. When the higher magistrate commands the lesser to do what God forbids, the lesser must refuse — and may, in serious enough cases of tyranny, organize the people to resist the higher.

The lesser-magistrate doctrine was not academic. It was the working theology behind:

• The Scottish Reformation’s resistance to Mary Tudor and later to Mary Queen of Scots.
• The Dutch revolt against Philip II of Spain.
• The Huguenot resistance to the French Crown after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572).
• The Puritan resistance to Charles I that became the English Civil War.
• The American colonial resistance to the British Crown — explicitly framed by John Witherspoon, Samuel Adams, and the Continental Congress in lesser-magistrate categories, with the colonial legislatures as the lesser magistrates standing against the tyranny of Parliament and King.
• The Confessing Church’s resistance to the Nazi state — Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and his participation in the conspiracy against Hitler were explicitly framed in this tradition.

Reid’s framework has no place for this doctrine. His CGG tradition descends from Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, which was largely shaped by Anglo-Israelism, Adventist eschatology, and a very specific 20th-century American Pentecostal-adjacent reading of Romans 13. The Reformation lesser-magistrate doctrine was not part of Armstrong’s inheritance; it does not appear in CGG’s working theology; and Reid does not draw on it.

The fellowship does. The Christos framework, especially as it has developed through the Christos Voting Network’s emphasis on local political engagement and the Christian Underground’s emphasis on building alternative institutions, sits comfortably in the lesser-magistrate tradition. The CVN’s emphasis on county-level political engagement is, in effect, a lesser-magistrate strategy: cultivate the lesser magistrates who are closer to the people and more accountable, so that when higher magistrates tyrannize, the lesser have the moral and political standing to refuse compliance. This is not sovereign-citizen rebellion; it is Reformation political theology.

The fellowship would benefit from a fuller engagement with the lesser-magistrate tradition than I can give here. Rutherford’s Lex Rex is a primary text; Matthew Trewhella’s The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates (2013) is a contemporary popular treatment that may be too aggressive in tone but is accurate in substance; Calvin’s Institutes IV.20 is the foundational chapter. Reading any of these makes clear that the historic Reformed-Christian tradition has had a robust theology of resistance to tyranny for five hundred years, and that the dichotomy Reid implies — either submit unconditionally, or be a sovereign-citizen rebel — is a false dichotomy that the Reformation already resolved.

IX. The Sovereign-Citizen Movement — Reid is Right

I want to be very clear, after the above pushback, that Reid is right specifically about the sovereign-citizen movement. The Christian Underground project is not sovereign-citizenship, and the fellowship should not become sovereign-citizens.

The sovereign-citizen movement is bad theology, bad law, and bad fruit. Its theology is a stew of King James-only literalism, redemption-movement conspiracy theory about the Federal Reserve, and an inflated reading of the individual believer’s standing-before-God that displaces the legitimate role of civil authority. Its law is fictional — the legal theories the movement teaches (the strawman doctrine, the all-caps-name claim, the UCC redemption theory, the gold-fringed-flag argument, the admiralty-jurisdiction claim) have been rejected by every American court in every jurisdiction, and people who litigate them lose, often catastrophically. Its fruit, as Reid notes, tends toward bitterness, isolation, paranoia, broken families, and in extreme cases violence. The Freemen of Montana, the Bundy standoff at Malheur, the Ruby Ridge tragedy, the Branch Davidians — these are the visible end-states of the movement, and they are not what the fellowship wants.

The fellowship has had encounters with the edges of this movement. Susan’s testamentary-trust framing has structural similarities to redemption-movement legal theories, though Susan herself has not adopted the conspiratorial frame. The fellowship needs to be careful when we discuss resistance to civil authority, not to drift into adopting sovereign-citizen legal theories as if they were Christian theology. They are not.

The honest move is to clearly separate the two. The Christian Underground project is grounded in (a) the conditional reading of Romans 13 developed above; (b) Acts 5:29 as applied through the midwives, Daniel, the apostles, and the historic conscientious-objection tradition; (c) the deep reading of render unto God what bears God’s image; (d) the Reformation lesser-magistrate doctrine; (e) the eschatological frame that the saints are present for the trial and must endure (the historic eschatology defended in yesterday’s essay). The sovereign-citizen movement is grounded in (a) bad legal theory; (b) conspiratorial historiography; (c) an inflated sense of individual sovereignty that displaces the legitimate role of civil authority; (d) an effective rejection of the New Testament’s submission-as-default disposition. These are different theological frameworks, with different fruits.

When the fellowship’s resistance is grounded in the Christian framework, it produces what Bonhoeffer’s resistance produced, what Daniel’s resistance produced, what the midwives’ resistance produced: a faithful witness under pressure, with full acceptance of legal consequences, and an undamaged spiritual life. When the resistance is grounded in the sovereign-citizen framework, it produces what Bundy’s resistance produced: legal disasters, broken families, sometimes violence, and a damaged spiritual life. The fellowship needs to know which framework it is operating in, and the answer should be the first.

X. The Christian Underground — Invisible Conversion of the World, Not Sovereign Citizenship

Given Reid’s strong claim that resistance to civil authority is rebellion-and-therefore-sin, the fellowship should be able to state clearly what the Christian Underground project actually is and is not. Earlier framings of this argument treated the Underground primarily in defensive terms — as alternative institutions to protect the Christian witness from hostile regulation, household- and church-level economic resilience, and infrastructure to outlast cultural pressure. That framing is not wrong, but it is secondary. The primary thing the Underground is is something more positive and more ambitious: an alternate moral system that operates invisibly through the lives of its participants and, by its slow, patient work, converts the entire world into the likeness of Christ.

This is not the conversion of bodies or borders; it is the conversion of souls. It does not advance by lawn signs, campaign advertisements, mailers, or mass media. It advances by witness, by love, by good works, and by the logical defense of Christ as creator, God, redeemer, and lawgiver. The Christos Physics Project/Conscious Point Physics (CPP) is part of this project, supplying the rational and philosophical ground that thoughtful skeptics require before they can take the biblical claims seriously — God demonstrated from the structure of matter itself, consciousness recognized as fundamental rather than emergent, the universe’s order traced to a personal Author rather than to brute necessity or accident. The family of Christos projects: CFE (Christos Fellowship) essays, the fellowship discussions, the daily discipleship of new believers — these are part of this project. The Ideomotion company’s commitment to ethical practice, the Christos Home School’s formation of children in the biblical pattern, the Christos Voting Network’s invitation to political-ethical discussion and registration of opinion, the Christos Rigorous Framework’s derivation of doctrine from biblical axiom — these are part of this project. None of these activities is the Underground in isolation; together, they are the multiple visible expressions of one invisible work.

The goal of the Christian Underground is to prepare ourselves, individually and together, for Christ’s return by winning the culture for His Kingdom one soul at a time. This is an underground project, not because it is secret or conspiratorial, but because it is unseen — no lawn signs, no campaign advertisements, no mailers. It spreads by word of mouth, by the witness of changed lives, by the patient work of discipleship. Its first goal is personal sanctification. Its primary outreach is sharing the gospel — the good news of salvation in Christ. Its daily discipline is the formation of new believers into the maturity of the biblical pattern, and the equipping of those believers to share what they have received.

In the Underground, each person strives to walk in the purity of Christ’s way — not because that purity earns God’s favor, but because it is the fruit and evidence of a faith that has already received His favor. We are reconciled to God through Christ’s atoning death, accepted by faith alone. We are then progressively conformed to His likeness as the work of the Spirit in those who have been adopted as His children. The transformed life is the mark of adoption, not its price.

This is a service to God because God delights to live through His people. Living righteously and enrolling others in righteous living serve humanity — people flourish in communities where God’s way is honored, and they suffer in communities where it is not. God’s joy is increased by every person who walks in His way; His family expands by every person He adopts; His desire is that the whole world should know Him.

We obey the Great Commission as we share the gospel. We bear witness to the power and goodness of God as we walk in obedience to Him, and by that obedience, our character is transformed, and our lives become evidence. The work creates, over time, a community of transformed souls who naturally align on political, social, and cultural questions because they have all been shaped by the same Word. Sufficient sanctification, lived out and witnessed, may yield political effect — a nation’s spirit is sanctified by the purification of its people. But political effect is the byproduct, not the goal. The goal is the transformation of souls and their inclusion in Christ’s Kingdom. In that hope is the pleasure of our daily experience of life, and the joy of God’s experience of life through us.

The integration of witness and apologetic is essential to the Underground’s work. Love and good works open hearts; logical argument and philosophical defense answer minds. The two are not in tension; they are complementary instruments of the one invisible work. A person can be drawn toward Christ by the example of a transformed neighbor, and held in Christ by the rational confidence that Christianity is, in fact, true. Both arms of the work are needed because human beings come to faith through multiple channels — the affective channel of witness and love, the cognitive channel of reasoned argument, the volitional channel of repentance and surrender. The Underground project, taken as a whole, addresses all three. This is why CPP belongs squarely in the Underground — it is the rational-philosophical arm of the same invisible work, supplying seekers in the analytical-Anglophone tradition with the kind of intellectual foundation that opens the door to the gospel in a way that pure exhortation cannot.

What the Christian Underground is not. It is not sovereign-citizen rebellion. It is not the assertion of individual sovereignty against legitimate civil authority. It is not the refusal to pay general taxes, obey ordinary laws, file required paperwork, or otherwise function inside the civic order. It is not a withdrawal from public life or a rejection of the legitimate functions of civil government. It is not a paramilitary movement. It is not a separatist enclave. It is not a parallel economy designed to avoid the broader market. It is not the development of alternative legal theories with no recognition in any actual court. It is not the cultivation of bitterness, paranoia, or contempt toward neighbors who do not share the diagnosis. The Underground does not see itself as withdrawing from the world; it sees itself as quietly, patiently, lovingly converting the world.

The distinction in practical terms. A Christian Underground member files his taxes, obeys traffic laws, pays for his business permits, sends his children to school (or homeschools legally), votes in elections, serves on juries, and lives a generally law-abiding life. His witness is in the quality of his work, the patience of his relationships, the love he shows his neighbor, the integrity of his commercial dealings, the formation he gives his children, the conversations he has with co-workers and friends about Christ. His good works are not performed for the praise of men, but they are visible enough that men, seeing them, give glory to his Father in heaven (Matt 5:16). His apologetic is in the answer he is ready to give for the hope that is in him (1 Pet 3:15), spoken with gentleness and respect. When his conscience requires it, he declines to participate in specific evils that civil authority commands, accepting the legal consequences rather than asserting exemption from the legal system as a whole. He builds, through his church, his household, and his professional life, the kinds of relationships and habits that will be needed when conscience conflicts intensify. He does this in advance of a crisis, so that the infrastructure of fidelity is already there when a crisis comes.

A sovereign-citizen, by contrast, treats every encounter with civil authority as an occasion for legal-theoretical confrontation. He refuses to file taxes, refuses to get a driver’s license, refuses to acknowledge court jurisdiction, asserts that he is not the all-caps-name on the documents, demands the gold-fringed flag be removed from the courtroom, and so on. His resistance is general rather than specific; it is theatrical rather than conscientious; it produces legal disasters rather than faithful witness; and it does not build the kind of community and discipleship infrastructure that the Underground project aims at. His witness, such as it is, is a witness against the system rather than toward Christ; and the watching world, when it watches him, sees the rebellion rather than the Redeemer.

These are different projects. The fellowship is doing the first, and should not drift into the second. Reid’s essay correctly diagnoses the second as rebellion; the fellowship needs to take that diagnosis seriously and ensure that we do not, by careless adoption of sovereign-citizen tropes or legal theories, slip into a project that is genuinely under Reid’s condemnation.

The Christian Underground, in summary, is the church doing what the church has always done at its best — bearing witness, loving the neighbor, doing the good works prepared in advance for it, articulating the reasoned defense of the faith, and trusting the Lord of the harvest to bring His Kingdom in His own way and time. Christ said the Kingdom is among us already (Luke 17:21) and that it grows like a mustard seed, like leaven hidden in three measures of meal (Matt 13:31-33). The Underground is the work of being that seed and that leaven in our own moment, with the resources our own moment has given us — including the rational and scientific framework CPP provides for those whose entry-point to faith requires the rational floor.

What this leaves open, and what Section XI now turns to, is the more careful question of where the Christian conscience actually does require refusal — the moral-cooperation question that has long occupied serious Christian moral theology, and that the fellowship needs to handle with more precision than either Reid’s flat-submission position or a generalized objection to every flow of money toward funded evils.

XI. The Moral-Cooperation Question — Formal, Material, Proximate, Remote

Behind the question of how the Christian relates to civil authority sits a sharper, narrower question: when civil authority commands or permits an evil and the Christian’s daily life is woven into the structures the authority operates — through taxes, employment, commerce, professional licensure, banking — what does the Christian’s conscience actually require? The fellowship has been circling this question from several directions: tax-funding of abortion through Medicaid and Title X; tax-funding of wars judged unjust or social programs judged harmful; employment in industries whose ultimate ownership funds hostile causes; commercial transactions with companies whose corporate stances are anti-Christian; investment in funds that hold morally compromised assets. The question is real, and the answer the historic Christian moral tradition gives is more refined than either “pay everything without examination” (Reid’s effective position) or “refuse the calculated immoral portion” (a position the fellowship has heard articulated and that needs careful examination).

The framework the moral tradition uses — developed in the Catholic moral theology of the High Middle Ages, refined by the casuists of the post-Reformation period, and broadly accepted across orthodox Protestant moral theology under different terminology — distinguishes several categories of cooperation in the evil acts of others.

Formal cooperation is sharing the intent of the evil act. The accomplice who drives the getaway car, intending the robbery, formally cooperates in the robbery. The executive who approves abortion-funding because he wants more abortions to occur formally cooperates in the abortions. Formal cooperation in evil is always forbidden, full stop. The intent itself is the moral evil; sharing the intent is sharing the evil.

Material cooperation is providing the matter — the act, the money, the support — without sharing the intent. The taxi driver who happens to drive a robber to the scene of the crime, not knowing what the passenger intends, materially cooperates without formally cooperating. The accountant who prepares tax filings for a corporation that does many things, some good and some evil, materially cooperates in whatever the corporation does. Material cooperation in evil is a more complex moral question, and the tradition further distinguishes its modes.

Immediate material cooperation is direct participation in the evil act itself. The doctor performing the abortion is in immediate material cooperation. The pharmacist filling an abortifacient prescription is in immediate material cooperation. The medical-billing clerk processing the abortion claim, knowing what the procedure was, is in immediate material cooperation. The executive deciding to fund abortion services from the company’s treasury is in immediate material cooperation. Immediate material cooperation in evil is forbidden because cooperation itself is evil, even if the cooperator’s interior intent is something else (a paycheck, professional obligation, fear of losing the job).

Mediate material cooperation provides something — money, labor, infrastructure — that the principal evildoer uses for the evil act, but the cooperator’s own act is not the act of the evil. The mediate cooperator supplies a means; the principal makes the evil use of the means. Mediate material cooperation is further classified by proximity in the causal chain.

Proximate mediate material cooperation is close in the chain. Supplying the specific instruments to be used in the abortion is proximate. Manufacturing the abortifacient drug is proximate. Operating the building where the abortions are performed, knowing this is what occurs there, is proximate. Proximate mediate material cooperation is generally forbidden absent grave proportionate reason — the cooperator is so close to the evil act that ordinary refusal is required.

Remote mediate material cooperation is distant in the chain. Paying federal taxes that flow into a general fund, of which a fractional percentage is appropriated to abortion-funding mechanisms, is remote. Working for a company that has a charitable-giving program that includes, among many recipients, an organization that lobbies for abortion access is remote. Buying gasoline from a chain whose corporate parent has a stated position that one’s conscience rejects is remote. The cooperator’s contribution is fungible, attenuated, and would be replaced if refused without affecting the principal’s evil act in any measurable way.

The historic tradition’s judgment is this: remote mediate material cooperation is morally permitted when four conditions are met. First, the cooperator does not intend the evil — his intent is some legitimate end (paying lawful taxes, earning a livelihood, making necessary purchases). Second, there is a proportionate reason for the cooperation — the legitimate end is serious enough to justify the cooperation, weighed against the gravity of the evil and the degree of cooperation. Third, the cooperation is fungible — the cooperator’s contribution is so small and so easily replaced that his refusal would not actually prevent or reduce the evil. Fourth, there is no reasonable alternative — refusing the cooperation would require the cooperator to become a fugitive, abandon necessary employment, or sacrifice the grave goods of his own life and family.

Applied to the paradigm case — paying general federal taxes that include a microscopic abortion-funded portion, or that fund wars or programs the taxpayer judges evil — all four conditions are met for the ordinary citizen. He does not intend abortion-funding or war-funding; his intent is to fulfill a lawful civic obligation. There is proportionate reason — civil order, lawful livelihood, family provision, neighbor-love through participation in shared civic burdens. The contribution is fungible to the point of vanishing — one citizen’s refusal does not reduce the federal abortion-funding stream or war-funding stream by one cent, because the federal government does not allocate individual tax dollars to specific spending categories; the money goes into a general fund and is spent regardless of any individual’s refusal. There is no reasonable alternative — refusing to pay any taxes that include morally objectionable spending would require the citizen to abandon the cash economy, which is, in effect, to become a fugitive. The historic moral tradition holds that the ordinary citizen paying general taxes is not morally cooperating with the evils funded in a way that violates conscience. Jesus paid the temple tax that funded the Roman occupation. Paul instructed believers to pay taxes to a pagan empire whose treasury financed emperor-worship, gladiatorial spectacle, and the persecution of Christians. The early Church, through the worst of the persecutions, paid taxes without conscience-objection on this point. None of them treated remote material cooperation in the evils of the state as a sin requiring refusal.

This does not mean civil-tax obligation is unlimited. It means the conscience-objection question kicks in at a different point than the calculated-immoral-portion. It kicks in when the cooperation moves from remote to proximate, or from mediate to immediate, or when formal intent appears. The doctor commanded to perform abortions cannot pay his way through this with an offsetting donation; he is in immediate material cooperation and must refuse. The pharmacist commanded to fill an abortifacient prescription is in immediate material cooperation and must refuse to do so. The hospital chaplain commanded to comfort a patient into her abortion rather than minister to her conscience is being asked to formally cooperate and must refuse. The Christian medical-device executive whose product is being newly approved for use in a chemical-abortion protocol faces a proximate-mediate question and must work through the four conditions carefully. The Ideomotion charter §7 commits the company to refuse, at the corporate-decision level, the application of its products to ethically compromised uses — that is, the company’s anticipatory exercise of conscience at exactly the point where the moral-cooperation framework actually calls for refusal.

This is the more sustainable and more accurate theological position. It also matches the actual practice of the historic Church across many centuries and under many forms of government — paying taxes broadly, refusing direct participation in evil specifically, and accepting the consequences of that refusal without claiming exemption from the general civic obligation. The Christian’s task is not to maintain perfect moral purity in a world structured by evil; that is impossible without becoming a fugitive, and the saints did not attempt it. The Christian’s task is to refuse direct participation in evil where his hand, his act, his decision, or his intent is implicated, while rendering to Caesar in the fungible flows of civic life what is properly Caesar’s.

A note on the practical reality of resistance, since the fellowship has discussed this from several directions. Effective conscientious resistance — resistance that actually produces moral or political change — has historically taken two forms. The first is individual witness in cases of direct participation, where one person’s refusal stands or falls on its own terms because the cost is borne by the individual and the witness is unambiguous: Daniel praying with the windows open, the apostles refusing to stop preaching, the midwives sparing the infants, the modern conscientious objector accepting the prison sentence rather than the conscription. This kind of witness does not depend on numbers; one Bonhoeffer at Tegel is a witness even if no one else stands beside him.

The second is organized mass movement with cultural-political leadership, identifiable demands, and measurable pressure: the abolitionist movement, the British anti-slavery campaign, the American civil-rights movement, the pro-life movement’s slow legal and cultural work, the more recent consumer boycotts that have actually moved corporate behavior (the Bud Light case is the cleanest recent example — a clear public objection, organized cultural-political leadership, a measurable revenue impact, a corporate retreat that has held for several years now). This kind of resistance requires scale and structure to work; without scale and structure, lone consumer-boycott or lone tax-resistance against general-fund spending is functionally invisible. The dollar is not paid; the spending continues unchanged; the resister bears the entire cost; the witness is heard by no one. The lone resister against fungible general-fund spending puts himself in the cross-hairs to be picked off in isolation, without the protective and amplifying effect that organized resistance provides.

The fellowship should be honest about which of these our resistance can take. We are, at present, a small group. We do not have the mass to make a consumer boycott of any large institution measurably costly. We do not have the political organization to make tax-resistance against general-fund spending visible to anyone but the IRS auditor assigned to the case. What we can do — what the Christian Underground project is for, taken as a whole — is the patient missional work described in Section X: witness, love, good works, the reasoned defense of Christ, building, soul by soul, the community whose eventual scale will matter. In the meantime, we focus our individual witness on cases of direct participation in which one person’s refusal stands on its own moral terms (the doctor, the pharmacist, the chaplain, the Ideomotion-charter cases, the school employee asked to teach what conscience forbids, and so on).

This is a more limited, more carefully aimed conscience-discipline than a generalized objection to every fungible flow of money toward funded evils, and it is also far more theologically defensible and pastorally sustainable. It honors the moral tradition. It honors the actual practice of the historic Church. It does not require every fellowship member to organize his finances around symbolic tax-resistance. It locates the real Acts 5:29 cases where they actually live: at the point of direct participation, where the believer’s own hand, act, or decision is the matter. And it preserves the believer’s energy and witness for the offensive work of the Underground — the patient soul-by-soul conversion of the world through changed lives and the reasoned defense of Christ — rather than spending the witness on symbolic gestures that do not actually move the spending.

XII. The Practical Defaults

What does all this mean for how the fellowship should actually live, day to day?

I want to land carefully here, because both Reid’s caution and the Christian Underground’s resistance have legitimate claims, and the fellowship’s practice should reflect both.

Default disposition: ordinary law-abiding civic obedience. The fellowship’s members file their taxes, pay their fees, obey traffic laws, get the licenses required for their professions, follow zoning ordinances, vote in elections, sit on juries, file the required paperwork for their businesses, and live generally law-abiding lives. We do not adopt sovereign-citizen legal theories. We do not seek opportunities to flout authority. We do not develop generalized disrespect for police officers, judges, or other public servants. We pray for our leaders. We respect the legitimate functions of civil government.

Selective conscientious objection where conscience requires. When civil authority commands the believer to participate in a specific evil — to perform an abortion, to officiate at a non-Christian marriage as a Christian minister, to administer a medical intervention the believer judges harmful, to violate the confessional seal, to teach what the believer judges false to children, to surrender records that would betray fellow believers under persecution — the believer refuses. The refusal is targeted, specific, and accompanied by acceptance of legal consequences. The believer does not flee the system; he stands in it, witnesses by his refusal, pays the cost, and trusts God.

Avoidance of moral cooperation where alternatives exist. Where the believer has reasonable alternatives that avoid material cooperation with serious evil, he takes them. He chooses suppliers, employers, banks, insurers, and professional associations that do not require ethical compromises when alternatives exist. He builds his household and business structures so that the cost of conscientious refusal, when it comes, is one he can bear. This is the preparation the Underground is for.

Cultivation of communal infrastructure. The fellowship invests in the relationships, the doctrinal formation, the educational alternatives, the local political engagement, the ethical business practices, the household economies, and the church-level mutual support that will be needed if and when the conscience-conflicts intensify. We do this work in ordinary time precisely so that, in crisis, the infrastructure exists to support faithful witness.

Engagement of lesser magistrates. Where lesser civil authorities — local officials, state representatives, county sheriffs, judges — are sympathetic to the Christian witness and willing to exercise their legitimate authority to constrain tyrannical higher actions, the fellowship supports them, votes for them, engages them, and, where appropriate, runs members of the fellowship for such offices. This is the Reformation lesser-magistrate strategy applied to contemporary American federalism. It is consistent with the Christos Voting Network’s emphasis on county-level political engagement.

Refusal of generalized rebellion-disposition. The fellowship deliberately resists the cultural pull toward generalized contempt for civil authority. We do not adopt the language of the regime, the deep state, or the cabal in our internal discourse. We may discuss particular failures of particular authorities with appropriate factual precision, but we do not develop a generalized disposition of suspicion-toward-government that would mark a heart out of step with the New Testament’s submission-as-default teaching. Reid is right that this disposition is spiritually corrosive; the fellowship should be vigilant against it in ourselves.

Pastoral patience with brothers and sisters who disagree. Some members of the fellowship are temperamentally more inclined toward submission, others more inclined toward resistance. Both dispositions, held within the framework of biblical fidelity, have legitimate places. The fellowship’s discussions on civil obedience should be patient, charitable, and aimed at the formation of careful judgment rather than at the winning of arguments. The fellowship’s actual practice will likely include members across a spectrum from Reid-style maximum-submission to more activist forms of conscientious witness, and the fellowship should be a place where each member’s faithful working-out of conscience can be honored.

These are the practical defaults. They are more nuanced than Reid’s framework would yield, and far more constrained than the sovereign-citizen movement would. They are, I believe, what the historic Christian tradition has actually taught, what the New Testament actually requires, and what the Christian Underground project actually involves.

XIII. Crescendo

The pairing the fellowship should hold in front of it is not Romans 13:1 alone, and it is not Acts 5:29 alone. It is both verses, held together, with the deeper reading of Matthew 22:21 underneath them as the integrating frame.

Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (Matt 22:21)

Caesar gets the coin. God gets the person. Caesar gets the ordinary civic obedience of the believer in matters that pertain to the public square’s ordinary functioning. God gets the believer’s life, loyalty, worship, conscience, witness, and obedience in the things that pertain to what bears God’s image. When the two render-claims do not conflict — which is most of ordinary life — the believer performs both joyfully, paying his taxes and praying for his leaders and obeying his speed limits and submitting to the ordinary structures of the order God has ordained.

When the two render-claims do conflict — when Caesar reaches for what bears God’s image, for the conscience, for the worship, for the witness, for participation in killing the innocent — the believer remembers Peter and the apostles before the Sanhedrin:

We ought to obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:29)

And remembers the midwives:

But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them. (Exod 1:17)

And remembers Daniel:

Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime. (Dan 6:10)

And remembers the three Hebrew children:

Be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up. (Dan 3:18)

And remembers Paul, who wrote Romans 13 and was beheaded for refusing to stop preaching. And remembers the early Church, which heard Romans 13 and went to the lions rather than offer incense. And remembers the Reformers, who developed the lesser-magistrate doctrine out of a careful reading of Paul. And remembers Bonhoeffer, and ten Boom, and the long line of saints who have refused Caesar’s reach toward what bears God’s image, while still rendering to Caesar what is properly Caesar’s.

The Christian Underground project we have been building is not rebellion. It is the considered cultivation, in ordinary time, of the relationships, institutions, and practices that will be needed when the render-claims conflict. It is the historic Christian conscientious-objection tradition applied to the conditions of present American Christian life. It honors the default submission that Romans 13 commands; it refuses the unconditional submission that Reid’s reading of Romans 13 implies; it stands in the historic line of Daniel and the apostles and Paul and the Reformers; it distinguishes itself sharply from the sovereign-citizen movement; and it orients itself, finally, toward the kingdom whose coming we await.

Render unto Caesar the coin that bears Caesar’s image. Render unto God the life that bears God’s image. When the two cannot both be rendered, render to God first. That is the principle the fellowship is operating under, and I believe it is the principle the New Testament actually teaches.

XIV. What Remains Open

Several threads in this essay deserve fuller treatment than I have given them.

First, the moral-cooperation framework opened in Section XI deserves fuller development across the specific decision-domains the fellowship’s members face. The taxation case is a paradigm; the framework also applies to employment in industries that contribute to evil, to consumer purchases from companies that fund hostile causes, to investment in funds that hold morally compromised assets, to professional-association membership where the association takes positions one’s conscience rejects, and to many other concrete decisions. A future essay should develop the case-by-case applications, and the formal framework (formal/material, immediate/mediate, proximate/remote, the four conditions for permitted remote cooperation) should be registered in the CRF as foundational moral-theological apparatus once that workflow is operational. Filed for CRF derivation work and for case-by-case essay development.

Second, the lesser-magistrate doctrine in its full Reformation form — Calvin, Knox, Beza, Rutherford, Witherspoon — deserves its own essay. The fellowship’s actual political theology, as it has developed through the CVN’s local-engagement strategy and the broader Christos Voting Network framing, is implicitly of the lesser-magistrate form. Making it explicit and connecting it to its Reformation sources would strengthen the framework. Filed for CCC work.

Third, the specific legal-jurisdictional frameworks Susan has been working on — ambassador, testamentary trust, and related theories — require separate review by qualified counsel before any are adopted in fellowship practice. My judgment, after reading the kinds of materials Susan has been drawing on, is that some of these frameworks have family resemblance to sovereign-citizen legal theories that have not held up in actual courts. Susan’s underlying theological intuition — that the Christian belongs to a different sovereign than the American civil order — is sound; the specific legal mechanisms she has been exploring may not be. The fellowship needs a careful pastoral conversation with Susan about this, conducted with love and respect for her real theological work, and a competent legal review of the specific mechanisms before any of them are recommended or adopted. Filed for direct pastoral conversation and for IDM-related legal counsel engagement.

Fourth, the relationship between selective conscientious objection and the broader missional-cultural project of the Christian Underground deserves articulation. They are related but distinguishable. Conscientious objection is the believer’s response to specific demands that he participate in evil at the point of direct material cooperation. The Underground is the broader work of witness, love, good works, and reasoned apologetic that aims at the gradual conversion of the world to Christ, one soul at a time. The two work together — the moral witness of conscientious refusal anchors the credibility of the missional witness; the missional witness builds the community within which conscientious refusal can be costly and yet sustainable. A future essay should clearly map the relationship, including the CPP project’s role as the rational-philosophical arm of the Underground’s apologetic work. Filed for the CCC’s Kingdom Culture articulation and CPP-CRF integration work.

Fifth, the question of just war and the related question of just revolution — at what point does the lesser-magistrate doctrine’s authorization of resistance extend to armed resistance, and under what conditions — is a real theological question with a long Christian history (Augustine, Aquinas, Vitoria, Suárez, Grotius, the Westminster divines, the American Founders). The fellowship is not currently facing the just-revolution question, and I am not raising it here as a live question, but a complete political theology has to address it eventually. Filed for distant-future CRF work.

Sixth, the pastoral question of how to engage with members of the fellowship or the broader CGG-tradition community who hold Reid’s strict-submission view in good faith, without rupturing fellowship, is real. Reid is not the enemy; CGG is a serious Christian tradition; brothers and sisters who hold the strict-submission view are brothers and sisters. The fellowship’s framework on civil obedience should be held with appropriate humility, presented with care, and not used as a weapon against believers who land elsewhere on the spectrum. A live pastoral question for our ongoing engagement with brothers and sisters across the broader American Christian landscape.

Closing Reflection

This essay is long because the question is not a small one, and Reid is not a small interlocutor. The Berean email that prompted it landed in my inbox this morning, alongside several thousand other inboxes in the broader Sabbatarian world. Many of those readers will have closed the email feeling that the case for unconditional civil submission is settled and that any Christian who refuses is in rebellion. I do not want the fellowship to close the question that way.

Reid is right that the default disposition of the Christian is submission, that the spirit of rebellion is a spiritual danger, that the sovereign-citizen movement is theologically and spiritually problematic, and that Daniel and the three Hebrew children are the right model. Reid is wrong that Romans 13 commands unconditional submission, that Acts 5:29 applies only to direct idol-worship, that the render unto Caesar saying authorizes all taxes without the corresponding render unto God limitation, that Paul’s own life is consistent with Reid’s reading, that the Reformation lesser-magistrate doctrine is not part of the legitimate Christian tradition, and that all selective conscientious objection collapses into sovereign-citizen rebellion. Where Reid is right, the fellowship should accept correction. Where Reid is wrong, the fellowship should hold the historic Christian tradition that has been working out these questions for two thousand years and that has produced a more careful framework than Reid’s essay represents.

The Christian Underground that Charlie named for us on Sunday is not a movement against legitimate civil authority. It is the patient, prayerful, soul-by-soul work of conversion that the church has done at its best in every age — witness, love, good works, the reasoned defense of Christ as creator and redeemer and Lord. It is what the early Church was for the first three centuries: not a sect plotting against Rome but a leaven hidden in the loaves of the empire, transforming hearts one at a time until the visible institutional order eventually had to bend. It is what the Reformation churches were under hostile crowns — not insurgents but witnesses, preaching, printing, praying, and dying when required. It is what the Confessing Church was under Hitler. It is what the underground churches are today in China, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia — the same patient invisible work, the same trust that God’s Kingdom comes through soul-by-soul transformation rather than through political conquest. It is the historic Christian conscientious-and-missional witness, brought to the conditions we are in.

We will pay our taxes. We will obey the laws. We will pray for our leaders. We will honor the magistrate as the minister of God where the magistrate fulfills his ordained function. And when the magistrate reaches for what bears God’s image — for our consciences, for our worship, for our witness, for the lives of God’s image-bearers — we will, with the apostles, with Daniel, with the midwives, with the long line of saints, obey God rather than men. Not in rebellion; in faithfulness. Not in self-sovereignty; in submission to the King whose Kingdom we await.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. The principle is older than Reid, older than the Reformation, older than the early Church Fathers. It is the principle of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. The fellowship will hold it whole — both halves, in their proper order — and walk in it together as we go forward into whatever the coming years require.

— Thomas

260512 Pre-Trib Rapture Critique

by Thomas Abshier | May 13, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Endurance, Not Escape: On the 19th-Century Origin of the Pre-Tribulation Rapture, the Historic Christian Eschatology, and What the Christian Underground Presupposes

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 12, 2026

Occasion: Sunday’s fellowship landed on a name — the Christian Underground — for what we have been building across these past months. Charlie supplied it. Leonard immediately inverted it into the Christian Overground that the Underground becomes when the moment of public stand arrives. Susan grounded both in the come out of Babylon texts. What none of us had time to address in the meeting itself is the eschatological assumption that the entire synthesis rests upon. The Underground only makes sense if the saints are going to be present during the trial. If we expect to be removed before the trial begins, there is no reason to build an Underground; there is no reason to develop the disciplines of endurance; there is no reason to prepare for what we will not see. The American evangelical eschatology — the pre-tribulation rapture taught from a thousand pulpits and a billion paperback novels — is precisely the doctrine of removal. It says we will not be here. The Underground says we will. The two cannot both be right. This essay is my attempt to lay out, as clearly as I can, why I believe the historic Christian eschatology — the one held by every century of the Church for 1800 years before John Nelson Darby revised it in the 1830s — is the correct one, and why everything we are building presupposes that reading.

The research base for this essay was a long Copilot session in which I asked the most rigorous questions I could about the origin and exegesis of the pre-tribulation rapture doctrine. The substantive findings are not original to me or to the AI; they are the established scholarship of the historic Christian tradition. What I want to do here is put the findings in front of the fellowship in a form that bears on our work, with my own emphasis on the pastoral and strategic consequences.

I. Why This Question Now

The eschatology one holds is not, in the daily life of most believers, a determining variable. A person can love the Lord, walk in obedience, read the Word, and live a full Christian life without ever resolving whether the rapture is pre-tribulational, post-tribulational, or whether the term rapture names a real event distinct from the Second Coming at all. For most of church history that has been so. The eschatological convictions of a Tertullian or a Bonhoeffer were not the operative variable in the Christianity they lived; the cross was the operative variable.

But there are moments when the eschatology becomes operative. Those are the moments when the question shifts from what is the timeline? to what does it require of me now? The early Church under Roman persecution needed an eschatology that authorized martyrdom. They had one — the historic one — and it carried them through three centuries of intermittent slaughter. The English Reformers needed an eschatology that authorized resisting a tyrannical Crown. They had one — the historic one, with Rome read as Babylon — and it carried them through the Marian persecutions. The German Confessing Church under the Third Reich needed an eschatology that authorized refusing the Hitler oath. The few who had it, like Bonhoeffer, carried it; the many who had been taught a different one largely went along.

The American church, on the present trajectory, is approaching its own such moment. The institutions that have surrounded the American believer for a century are being captured — the universities, the medical apparatus, the federal civil service, the major media corporations, the entertainment economy, large portions of the political class, and increasing portions of the legal and ecclesial structures themselves. The Christian Underground synthesis we landed on Sunday is the recognition that this capture is sufficiently advanced that ordinary inside-the-system Christian life is no longer adequate to the moment. We need a different mode of presence — one that can persist through the closing of the present window, and that can step forward into visibility when the moment of public stand arrives.

That mode of presence requires an eschatology that authorizes endurance. The pre-tribulation rapture does not authorize endurance; it authorizes waiting. The Christian who genuinely believes he will be removed before the worst comes does not need to prepare for the worst. He prepares, at most, for the airport — for the call to be ready when the trumpet sounds, with his bags packed and his life in order, but with no expectation that he himself will face the Beast, refuse the mark, lose his job, lose his bank account, or lose his life. The Christian who knows he will be present is in a different relationship to all of those possibilities. He has to make peace with each of them, in advance, while there is still time.

This is the practical reason the eschatology question becomes operative now. The Underground we are building cannot recruit the pre-trib Christian, because the pre-trib Christian does not need the Underground. He is, in his own theology, about to be airlifted to safety. The first work of the Underground, before any other work, is to undo the doctrine of the airlift — gently, with charity, with care for brothers and sisters who hold the doctrine in good faith — so that the same people can begin the harder and more biblical work of preparation.

II. What Most American Evangelicals Believe

For readers unfamiliar with the specific architecture of the pre-tribulation rapture doctrine, a brief description is in order, because what is being criticized is not a vague cultural attitude but a specific theological system with specific moving parts.

The system holds that the return of Christ unfolds in two distinct phases separated by a seven-year interval. In the first phase — the rapture — Christ comes secretly for his saints, snatching the Church up to meet him in the air without setting foot on the earth himself, raising the dead in Christ and translating the living believers simultaneously. The world after the rapture finds itself missing some millions of people whose absence is unexplained and whose disappearance is the first sign that the prophetic clock has resumed. After the rapture comes the seven-year tribulation period, during which the Antichrist rises, the Mark of the Beast is imposed, and the wrath of God is poured out on the earth — but the Church, having been removed, is not subject to any of it. In the second phase, after the tribulation, Christ returns visibly with his saints, lands on the Mount of Olives, defeats the armies gathered at Armageddon, binds Satan, and inaugurates a literal thousand-year reign in Jerusalem.

Alongside this two-phase Second Coming, the system holds a sharp distinction between Israel and the Church as two separate peoples of God with two separate prophetic destinies. The Church is the parenthesis in God’s program — an unforeseen interruption between the prophetic clock’s pause at the end of Daniel’s sixty-ninth week and its resumption at the start of the seventieth. When the rapture removes the Church, the clock resumes, and the seventieth week (the tribulation) is Israel’s time, not the Church’s.

The system also holds a doctrine of imminency — that the rapture could occur at any moment, with no prophetic event needing to be fulfilled first. This produces the characteristic evangelical phrase: He could come tonight. The pastoral application is constant readiness — keep your accounts with God current, because the trumpet may sound before you finish reading this paragraph.

This is the doctrine. It has been taught from the Dallas Theological Seminary pulpit-pipeline for nearly a century. It has been popularized by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which sold more copies than any other non-fiction book of the 1970s except the Bible. It was recapitulated for the next generation by the Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind novels of the 1990s, which sold over sixty million copies and produced four feature films. It is the operating eschatology of the Southern Baptist Convention’s largest seminaries, of the Assemblies of God, of the Calvary Chapel network, of the great majority of independent Baptist and non-denominational churches, and of the Christian Zionist political movement that has shaped American foreign policy in the Middle East for half a century.

It is, in short, the operating eschatology of the American evangelical mainstream. To raise questions about it is to raise questions about the air the American Christian breathes. I want to do so respectfully — and I want to begin not with the exegesis but with the history of where the doctrine came from. Because the historical fact, well-established and not disputed by serious scholars on either side, is that this doctrine was not taught by the Church for the first 1800 years of her existence.

III. Where the Doctrine Came From

The vehicle of the pre-tribulation rapture’s transmission into American evangelicalism is the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, with a major revision in 1917. The Reference Bible is not a new translation; it is the King James Version with extensive footnotes, cross-references, and prophetic charts compiled by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843–1921), a Civil War veteran and Congregationalist-turned-independent pastor who was, by his own admission, theologically self-taught. The notes do not present themselves as one possible interpretation among several; they present themselves as the plain teaching of the Bible. Generations of American believers learned the dispensational system without realizing it was a system, because the notes appeared on the same page as the inspired text and were typographically formatted to look like authoritative explanation.

The system in the Scofield notes is not Scofield’s invention. He inherited it almost entirely from John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), an Anglo-Irish lawyer-turned-Plymouth Brethren leader who developed the dispensational framework in the 1830s and propagated it through extensive teaching tours in Britain, Europe, and North America from the 1840s through the 1870s. The two-phase Second Coming with a pre-tribulation rapture, the seven dispensations, the Israel-Church distinction, the parenthetical Church age — all of this is Darby. Scofield’s contribution was to take Darby’s system and embed it in the marginalia of a Bible that ordinary believers would read.

Darby’s system in turn drew on earlier currents. Edward Irving (1792–1834), a Scottish Presbyterian who founded what became the Catholic Apostolic Church, was teaching some form of two-phase return with a pre-tribulation removal in his London ministry in the 1820s and early 1830s. Manuel de Lacunza, a Chilean Jesuit writing under the pseudonym Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, had published a Spanish-language apocalyptic work in 1812 — La Venida del Mesías en Gloria y Majestad — that Irving translated into English in 1827 and that influenced both Irving and Darby. Morgan Edwards, an American Baptist, articulated a pre-tribulation-like scenario in 1788. A handful of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, including the Mathers in colonial New England and Philip Doddridge and John Gill in England, used the word rapture and contemplated some form of believer-removal before judgment. None of them, however, articulated the full Darby system — the two-phase return, the seven-year gap, the Israel-Church distinction, the parenthetical Church. That system, as a coherent body of doctrine, dates to Darby in the 1830s, and the question of where Darby got it — by his own account, from his exegesis of 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians; by skeptical accounts, from Margaret Macdonald’s 1830 charismatic vision in Glasgow — is contested. What is not contested is that Darby’s full system is not present in any earlier Christian author.

What was present in earlier Christian authors — through the entire history of the Church from the apostolic period to the early nineteenth century — was an eschatology in which the return of Christ is a single, public, visible, audible event, at which the dead are raised, the living believers are transformed, the wicked are judged, and the Kingdom is inaugurated. This is the eschatology of Irenaeus in the second century, of Justin Martyr and Tertullian and Hippolytus, of Athanasius and Augustine and Chrysostom. They disagreed on details — whether the millennium is literal or symbolic, whether the church is the new Israel or one branch of God’s people, what specific events would mark the immediate approach of the End. They did not disagree on the basic shape: one return, after the tribulation, with resurrection and judgment at it, and with the saints expected to endure faithfully through whatever the tribulation contained. No Church Father taught a pre-tribulation rapture. No medieval theologian taught it. No Reformer taught it — not Luther, not Calvin, not Zwingli, not Cranmer, not Knox. No Puritan systematic divine taught it. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the Belgic Confession, the Augsburg Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Heidelberg Catechism — none of them teach it. It does not appear in mainstream Christian thought until Darby. That is the historical fact.

A doctrine that was unknown to the first 1800 years of the Church and that became dominant in American evangelicalism in a span of one century is, by the ordinary standards of Christian historical theology, a novelty. Novelty alone does not prove a doctrine false — the Trinity, in formal articulation, took three hundred years to be settled; the canon of the New Testament took longer — but novelty does shift the burden of proof. A doctrine that the Holy Spirit-led Church somehow missed for eighteen hundred years, and that suddenly appears in a single Anglo-Irish lawyer’s exegesis in the 1830s, needs to be tested with particular care against the biblical text. That is what I want to do next.

IV. The Key Text: Matthew 24:40–41 in Context

The verse most often cited in support of the pre-tribulation rapture is Matthew 24:40–41:

Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

In the popular reading, the taken are the raptured saints, snatched away to be with the Lord, and the left are the unbelievers left behind to face the tribulation. This reading is the entire basis of the Left Behind novel series — the title itself is the popular interpretation in two words.

The reading collapses the moment one reads the immediately preceding context, which is two verses earlier. Jesus has just explained, by analogy, what the moment will look like:

But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. — Matthew 24:37–39

Read those verses slowly. Jesus is drawing a structural analogy between the moment of his coming and the moment of the flood. In the days of Noah, life proceeded normally — eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage — until the flood arrived. The flood took them all away. The question for the careful reader of Matthew 24 is: who did the flood take?

It took the wicked. The flood swept away the entire population of the antediluvian world except Noah and his family. Noah and his family were left — preserved, alive, on the earth, to inherit the new world. In Jesus’ analogy, then:

• Taken = swept away in judgment (the flood)
• Left = preserved alive (Noah and his family)

Now read verse 40 again, with the analogy properly seated: Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. The one taken is taken as the flood took the wicked. The one left is left as Noah was left. The taken is the judged. The left is the preserved. This is the exact opposite of the pre-tribulation rapture reading. The popular reading inverts what Jesus actually says.

The Greek confirms this. The verb for taken in verse 40 is paralambanō, which in this context parallels the verb used of the flood’s action in verse 39 (which is also a taking verb, airō — to lift up, to remove). The verb for left is aphiēmi, which carries the sense of being allowed to remain, being spared, being released from. The grammar of the passage supports the Noah-analogy reading.

Luke’s parallel account makes this even more explicit. In Luke 17:34–37, after Jesus gives the same one taken, one left teaching, the disciples ask the obvious follow-up question:

And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord?

The question is: where are the taken ones being taken to? If the popular pre-trib reading were correct, the answer would be something like up, to meet me in the air, to be with me forever. Jesus’ actual answer is the opposite:

And he said unto them, Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together.

The reference is to vultures gathered at a corpse. The location to which the taken are taken is a place of death and carrion. They are not being raptured; they are being removed for judgment. Luke 17 is the disciples asking the literal question — where are they going? — and Jesus answering it with a literal image: they are going to the place of corpses. The Greek word translated eagles here, aetos, in this period commonly denoted the vulture as well as the eagle proper; carrion birds gathering at a body is the picture.

So the most-cited pre-tribulation rapture proof-text, when read in its actual context with its actual analogy and its actual Greek and its parallel passage, says the opposite of what the popular reading says. The taken are not the saved; they are the judged. The left are not the abandoned; they are the preserved. The Noah pattern of the wicked-swept-away and the righteous-left-on-earth is the structure of the coming, not its inversion. This is the structural insight without which the rest of the New Testament’s eschatology cannot be properly read.

V. 1 Thessalonians 4: What the Resurrection-Gathering Actually Is

The second great pre-tribulation rapture proof-text is 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17:

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

The Greek verb in caught up is harpazō — to snatch, to seize, to remove forcibly. The Latin Vulgate translates it rapiemur, from which we get the English word rapture. So in the most literal sense, this is the rapture passage. The question is whether this passage describes a secret pre-tribulational removal of the Church or whether it describes the resurrection-and-gathering of believers at the public Second Coming.

Read the passage carefully and ask whether the event Paul describes can plausibly be called secret. The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God. Three audible elements are stacked in a single sentence: a shout, an archangelic voice, the trumpet of God. This is not the description of a quiet, surreptitious, unnoticed event. This is, by any reasonable reading, the loudest passage in the New Testament. Paul is describing an event the entire creation will hear. The popular Left Behind image of believers vanishing without warning while unbelievers continue their ordinary day is the opposite of what the text describes. The text describes an event the unbelievers cannot miss.

Read the passage again and ask whether the participants are described as being divided into those raptured and those left behind. Paul does not divide his subject that way. He divides it into the dead in Christ (who rise first) and we which are alive and remain (who are caught up together with them). Both groups are believers. Unbelievers are not mentioned in this passage at all. There is no left behind moment in 1 Thessalonians 4. The passage describes the resurrection of believers and the gathering of believers to Christ. It does not describe the removal of believers from a world that continues without them.

Compare this carefully with Matthew 24. In Matthew 24, the picture is of the wicked being taken in judgment and the righteous being left on earth. In 1 Thessalonians 4, the picture is of the righteous being raised and gathered to meet Christ, with the wicked not in the picture. These are not the same event. They are two different angles on the same Day — the Day of the Lord — viewed from the believer’s side and from the wicked’s side respectively. Matthew 24 is what the Day looks like for the wicked: sudden, unprepared, removed in judgment. 1 Thessalonians 4 is what the Day looks like for the saints: trumpet, resurrection, gathering, eternal union with Christ.

This is the single most important thing to see if you have been taught the pre-trib system. The pre-trib system has trained believers to read these two passages as two events separated by seven years. They are not two events. They are two descriptions of the same event from two viewpoints. Once that double-exposure clears, the rest of the New Testament’s eschatology falls into place.

VI. The Decisive Text: 2 Thessalonians 2

If 1 Thessalonians 4 is the most-cited pre-trib proof-text, 2 Thessalonians 2 is the most-decisive anti-pre-trib text, and it is decisive because Paul is, in this chapter, answering exactly the question we are asking. The Thessalonians had received a false report — possibly a forged letter under Paul’s name — claiming that the Day of the Lord had already come. They were shaken by this, presumably because they had not been raptured before it and were therefore wondering whether they had missed the gathering. Paul writes to settle the question:

Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition. — 2 Thessalonians 2:1–3

Read this slowly. Paul refers to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him — Paul’s phrase for what 1 Thessalonians 4 describes — and immediately addresses how the Thessalonians can know whether that gathering has happened or is imminent. His answer is the decisive one: that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed.

Stop and think about what this argument requires. Paul is reassuring believers that the gathering has not happened by pointing to two events that have not happened yet: the apostasy, and the revelation of the man of sin (the Antichrist). For Paul’s reassurance to work, his readers must be expecting to see the apostasy and the man of sin before the gathering. If they were going to be raptured before either event, Paul’s argument would make no sense. He would have said instead: you will know the Day has not come because you are still here; we have not yet been raptured. He does not say that. He says: the Day has not come because the apostasy and the Antichrist have not yet appeared.

This is the proof that Paul, the apostle who wrote 1 Thessalonians 4, did not teach a pre-tribulation rapture. He explicitly teaches that the gathering of the saints to Christ — the very event of 1 Thessalonians 4 — happens after the apostasy and the revealing of the man of sin. The pre-trib system, taken seriously, has to claim that Paul has changed his teaching between the two letters. There is no textual reason to think so. The simpler and far more biblically defensible reading is that Paul has been consistent and that 1 Thessalonians 4 describes the same single event that 2 Thessalonians 2 places after the apostasy and the Antichrist.

VII. The Unified Timeline

Once these texts are read together — Matthew 24, 1 Thessalonians 4–5, 2 Thessalonians 1–2, and the parallel passages in Luke 17, Mark 13, 1 Corinthians 15, and Revelation 6–20 — a single unified sequence emerges that the early Church taught for eighteen hundred years before Darby and that the historic catholic-Reformed-Lutheran-Eastern-Orthodox consensus has continued to teach in those traditions that never adopted dispensationalism. The sequence is:

Stage 1: Apostasy and the rise of Antichrist. The man of sin is revealed (2 Thess 2:3), the Beast rises (Rev 13), the falling away begins within the visible Church (Matt 24:10–12; 2 Thess 2:3). This is not metaphor; this is a real historical sequence with real persons and real institutional events.

Stage 2: Great tribulation. Persecution intensifies (Matt 24:15–22; Rev 6–13). The Beast’s authority is consolidated. The mark is imposed (Rev 13:16–17). Refusal of the mark is punished. The saints are present for this stage. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints (Rev 13:10) is Scripture’s pastoral address to believers who are alive during the Beast’s reign, not a description of a future generation that has been removed from harm.

Stage 3: Cosmic signs. The sun is darkened, the moon does not give her light, the stars fall, the powers of the heavens are shaken (Matt 24:29; Rev 6:12–17). These are publicly visible, globally observable events. No one will need to be told they are happening.

Stage 4: The visible appearing of Christ. Then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory (Matt 24:30). The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God (1 Thess 4:16). When the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire (2 Thess 1:7–8). I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse (Rev 19:11). Four New Testament authors describe the same single moment.

Stage 5: Resurrection and gathering of believers. The dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thess 4:16–17). And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other (Matt 24:31). This is the harpazō moment — the rapture properly so called — at the same Second Coming, not separated from it by seven years.

Stage 6: Day of the Lord judgment on the wicked. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming (2 Thess 2:8). When they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape (1 Thess 5:3). This is the taken in judgment of Matthew 24:39–41 — the wicked swept away as in the days of Noah, while the saints, already gathered and glorified, remain with Christ.

Stage 7: Kingdom and reign. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world (Matt 25:34). And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God … they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years (Rev 20:4). The saints inherit the Kingdom. The saints reign with Christ.

One Second Coming. No two phases. No seven-year gap. No secret rapture. This is the historic Christian eschatology, and the New Testament’s plain shape supports it. The pre-tribulation rapture is not a discovery; it is an insertion of a hypothetical seven-year interval between Stage 5 and Stage 6 that no New Testament author describes and that no Christian writer before Darby contemplated.

VIII. Why This Matters: The Doctrine of Escape and the Doctrine of Endurance

I want to draw out the pastoral and strategic consequence of the eschatology question, because I do not think it is sufficiently appreciated in the contemporary American conversation. The two eschatologies — the pre-trib doctrine of removal and the historic doctrine of presence — produce two different kinds of Christian.

The pre-trib doctrine produces a doctrine of escape. The Christian who genuinely believes he will be raptured before the Beast is asked to do nothing more than to keep his accounts current and to wait. He is told that what is coming is not for him. He is not asked to prepare for refusing the mark of the Beast, because he will not face the choice. He is not asked to develop the disciplines of underground worship, because the worship will be public until the moment of his removal. He is not asked to harden himself for martyrdom, because the martyrs of the tribulation are not him; they are a separate class of post-rapture converts whom the pre-trib system calls tribulation saints, distinct from the Church. He is not even asked, in many versions of the system, to engage in cultural transformation, because the world is destined for destruction and rescuing souls out of it before it burns is the only sensible mission. The Christianity that emerges is, at its better moments, evangelistically zealous (you cannot rescue souls without preaching to them) and, at its worse moments, culturally disengaged (you cannot fix what is destined to burn). The American evangelical retreat from the universities, from the legal academy, from the arts, from the architecture and design of cities, from the formation of a Christian political philosophy — the retreat that David Wells and Os Guinness and Mark Noll have been documenting for thirty years — correlates strongly with the pre-trib doctrine’s century of dominance. I do not say the correlation is causal in every case. I do say that a doctrine which teaches the world is on its way to destruction and the Christian is on his way out tends not to authorize the long, slow, costly work of building Christian alternatives to what is decaying.

The historic doctrine produces a doctrine of endurance. The Christian who knows he will be present for the trial has to prepare. He has to harden himself for the choice he will face when the mark is imposed. He has to develop the relational and economic infrastructure that will sustain him when the regime moves against believers. He has to know his Bible well enough to refuse the false synthesis when the Beast’s prophet preaches it. He has to be embedded in a community that can recognize the apostasy when it appears within the visible church, and that can name the man of sin when he is revealed. He has to be prepared, in the language of Revelation 12:11, to overcome by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. This is endurance theology. It is sober. It is biblical. It is what the saints of the early church and of every persecution since have actually had to live. And it is what the Christian Underground we named on Sunday assumes from its first premise.

The pre-trib doctrine, if false, is a false comfort. It tells the believer he will not face what he will in fact face. The kindest thing the Underground can do for brothers and sisters who have been taught the false comfort is not to mock them, not to win the argument against them, not to read them out of the kingdom — they are our brothers and they will be standing next to us when the moment of stand arrives, whether or not they expected to — but gently to help them see that the airlift is not coming, that the Lord has not promised them removal, and that there is still time to prepare for what they will face. Time to prepare is the gift the right eschatology gives. The wrong eschatology takes that time and trades it for an illusion of safety that will be liquidated by events.

IX. The Christian Underground Presupposes This

The Christian Underground project that surfaced on Sunday assumes the historic eschatology in every dimension of its operation. The CFE fellowship essays presuppose a Christian discipleship that has to be deepened now because deeper formation will be required when external pressure comes. The Christos Voting Network presupposes that political engagement is still part of the Christian’s calling, because the world the Christian inhabits is not about to be evacuated. The Ideomotion charter §7 ethical commitments presuppose a long arc of Christian institutional life in which the disciplines we adopt now must hold under economic and regulatory pressure later. The Christos Home School presupposes that the next generation will not be removed before its formation completes; we are forming them for life inside the trial, not for life outside it. The fellowship gathering itself — Sunday mornings, in a particular living room, with bread and coffee and prayer and substantive theological argument — presupposes that this kind of small, costly, embodied gathering will become more necessary, not less, as the present window closes.

In other words: every single layer of the Christian Underground that the fellowship has named, designed, drafted, and begun to inhabit is built on the historic eschatology. The pre-trib doctrine is not merely inconsistent with the Underground; it is incompatible with it. If you genuinely believe in the airlift, you do not need any of this. You need only to keep your bags packed.

The fact that the Underground synthesis emerged organically from our discussions — without anyone needing to argue against the pre-trib doctrine, without our even raising the eschatology question explicitly — is itself a kind of evidence. The fellowship has been building toward the historic eschatology by the slow accumulation of practical commitments that only make sense under it. The eschatology essay you are reading now is, in a real sense, the explicit theology that has been implicit in everything else we have built.

X. Pastoral Cautions

I want to add several cautions before closing, because I do not want this essay to be misread as a polemic against pre-trib brothers and sisters.

First, the pre-trib doctrine is not, in itself, a damnable heresy. It is wrong, in my judgment, and it has practical consequences I have just spent several pages laying out. But it gets the central matter right: Christ is returning, the dead will be raised, the wicked will be judged, the saints will inherit. On those points the pre-trib Christian and the historic Christian agree, and on those points the salvation of both depends. The disagreement is about the timing and sequence of events that none of us will fully understand until they arrive. Brothers in Christ have disagreed about eschatological detail since the second century, and they have continued to labor together for the gospel through those disagreements. I want to be in the same kind of fellowship with brothers and sisters who hold the pre-trib position; I just want them to know what they may face if the airlift is not what their teachers promised.

Second, no man knoweth the day or hour — and the early Church Fathers themselves disagreed on details that have never been resolved. Whether the millennium is literal or symbolic, whether the kingdom of God is primarily present or primarily future, whether the antichrist is one person or many, whether the Beast and the Whore of Revelation are Rome or another empire or both at different stages — these are genuinely open in serious Christian scholarship, and humility is appropriate. What is not open is the basic shape of the Second Coming. That the Church for 1800 years held to be a single, public, audible, visible return at which the dead rise and the wicked are judged. The dispensational two-phase system is the historical innovation that needs to be defended; the historic eschatology is the position the burden does not fall on.

Third, the cultural-engagement consequence of pre-trib doctrine is, I am convinced, real, but it is not the case that every pre-trib evangelical has been culturally disengaged. The Moral Majority, the Christian Right of the 1980s and 90s, the Tea Party movement, the conservative legal movement, and current evangelical cultural engagement all include large numbers of pre-trib believers who have done real cultural work despite the system’s implicit disengagement counsel. That is the Holy Spirit at work in spite of the formal eschatology, and it is to be celebrated. The historic eschatology authorizes the engagement more cleanly and consistently, but the engagement happens under pre-trib teaching too, by grace.

Fourth — and this is a caution to myself and the fellowship — the historic eschatology can be misused. The Christian who knows he will face the Beast can become preoccupied with the Beast in ways that distract from the daily work of love, prayer, and obedience. Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only (Matt 24:36). The right response to the historic eschatology is not date-setting, not Beast-identifying, not preparing-a-bunker. It is the same response Christ taught his original disciples: Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come (Matt 24:42) and Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh (Matt 24:44). Readiness is a posture of present obedience and present love, not of survivalist preparation for a specific scenario. The Underground we are building must be a community of present love that also has the resilience to endure if the trial intensifies, not a community organized primarily around the trial that has lost the present love.

XI. The CPP / CRF Mapping (Brief, For Later)

The Copilot session that produced the research base for this essay raised, at the end, the question of whether the CPP framework might offer a metaphysical reading of the eschatological separation — the one taken, one left — as a coherence-versus-incoherence divergence in the field of conscious creation. I want to flag this as a thread for the Christos Rigorous Framework work and not develop it here, because the exegetical and pastoral burden of this essay is enough for one sitting.

The shape of the CPP mapping, however, would be something like this: the field of conscious creation supports two coherence basins — one organized around the gospel and the saints, the other organized around the Beast and his marked. The Day of the Lord is the moment when those two basins separate sufficiently that the field no longer supports their coexistence in a single phase. The taken in judgment are the agents who have aligned with the incoherent basin and who are thereby removed from the post-judgment field. The left to inherit are the agents who have aligned with the coherent basin and who persist into the millennial phase. The biblical narrative is the qualitative description of the field-state transition; the CPP mapping is the formal description of the same transition in coherence-dynamic terms. The two are not in tension; they are the same reality described in two registers.

This is gestural, not rigorous. It is the kind of mapping the CRF work will eventually develop properly. I mention it here only to flag that the eschatology question is going to recur in the CRF derivation work as a place where biblical narrative and CPP ontology converge, and that the Christian Underground project will benefit from having both registers available to it.

XII. Crescendo

The verse that the historic eschatology asks the saints to hold in front of them is not 1 Thessalonians 4:17. It is not the trumpet, the shout, the catching up to meet the Lord in the air — beautiful as that verse is, and real as the event will be. It is two verses from earlier in the same conversation Jesus was having with his disciples on the Mount of Olives:

And ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. — Matthew 24:9–13

But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. This is the verse the Underground is built on. Not removal. Not escape. Endurance. Christ’s word to his disciples about what would carry them through the period of betrayal, false prophets, and iniquity abounding was not the promise that they would be airlifted before the worst arrived. It was the promise that those who endured to the end would be saved.

And the parallel verse, from John’s vision on Patmos, in the very middle of the Beast’s persecution of the saints in Revelation 13:

He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints. — Revelation 13:10

Here is the patience and the faith of the saints. The verse is addressed to believers who are alive during the Beast’s persecution. They are present for it. They are not airlifted out of it. The Lord’s word to them through John is not a removal plan; it is a call to patience — hypomone, endurance under load — and faith — pistis, the persistence of trust through what does not yet make sense.

These are the verses the Christian Underground gathers around. Not the trumpet that gets us out, but the patience that keeps us in. Not the rapture that rescues, but the endurance that overcomes. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death (Revelation 12:11). That is the saintly profile the historic eschatology produces, and it is the saintly profile the fellowship is being formed to embody.

XIII. What Remains Open

A number of threads opened in this essay and were not closed. I want to record them so the fellowship can return to them.

First, the Israel-Church question — the second great pillar of the dispensational system, alongside the pre-trib rapture — needs its own essay. The dispensational claim that Israel and the Church are two separate peoples of God with two separate prophetic destinies has produced a great deal of American Christian Zionism that is, in my judgment, theologically muddled. The historic Christian position — that the Church is the new Israel, the olive tree of Romans 11 into which both Jewish and Gentile branches are grafted by faith — needs to be laid out as carefully as the pre-trib question has been laid out here. A future essay.

Second, the imminent return doctrine — the claim that the Lord could come at any moment, with no prophetic event needing to be fulfilled first — needs to be reconciled with Paul’s not until argument in 2 Thessalonians 2. The reconciliation is, I think, that the imminent return is real in the sense that we do not know the day or hour, but not real in the sense that no prerequisite events must happen. Paul’s argument is precisely that the apostasy and the Antichrist must precede the gathering. That has implications for how we read the every generation has thought it was the last refrain. A future discussion.

Third, the pastoral question — how do we teach this to brothers and sisters who hold pre-trib in good faith — needs serious thought. The wrong way is the way of mockery and superiority, which the historic position has too often taken when speaking to dispensational brothers. The right way is the way of love that does not pretend the disagreement does not matter, but that engages the disagreement charitably, with the brother’s eternal welfare as the object. We need a method here, not just a position.

Fourth, the CPP / CRF mapping of the eschatological separation as field-coherence dynamics needs to be developed properly. Filed for the CRF derivation work.

Fifth, the historic-vs-amillennial-vs-postmillennial distinction within the broader non-dispensational tradition is not addressed here. I have written as a historic premillennialist — affirming a literal future millennium following Christ’s return — but the amillennial reading (the millennium is the present church age) and the postmillennial reading (the millennium precedes Christ’s return and is brought in by the gospel’s gradual conquest of the nations) are serious Christian positions with serious adherents. I have no quarrel with them on the central matters; the quarrel is only with the dispensational two-phase return and its pre-trib rapture. The differences within the non-dispensational family are for another essay.

Sixth, the cultural-engagement implications, especially the question of whether and how the historic eschatology authorizes the kind of long, slow Christian institutional building that the Christos Civitas project requires, deserves more sustained treatment than I have given here. Probably its own essay, perhaps coordinated with the CCC module’s articulation of the Kingdom Culture project.

Closing Reflection

The Christian Underground we named on Sunday is built on a particular reading of the end of all things. The reading is not new; it is the historic Christian eschatology held for 1800 years before Darby and continued in the Reformed and catholic and Eastern Orthodox streams that never adopted dispensationalism. The reading says: Christ will return once, publicly, visibly, audibly; the dead will rise and the living saints will be transformed and gathered to him at his appearing; the wicked will be judged at the same coming; the saints will inherit the kingdom. There is no removal of believers before the trial. There is no airlift. There is only one Day of the Lord, and the saints will be present for the events that precede it.

This means we have work to do. We are not waiting in an airport. We are building a civilization that will need to function under conditions that have not yet fully arrived — and we are doing the building now, while the present window is open, because the building will not be possible to start once the window closes. The fellowship is the foundation. The CFE essays are the discourse. The CVN is the political layer. The Ideomotion charter is one operational outpost. The Christos Home School is the formative work for the next generation. And all of these layers are coordinated by the Christian Underground synthesis that Charlie named for us on Sunday.

The promise we hold on to is not the promise of removal. It is the promise of endurance: he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved (Matt 24:13). The disposition the saints are called to is not the disposition of waiting to be airlifted. It is the patience and the faith of the saints (Rev 13:10). And the means of overcoming is not the means of escape. It is the blood of the Lamb, and the word of their testimony, and a love for the Lord that is greater than the love of one’s own life (Rev 12:11).

We will not be carried out of the trial. We will be carried through it. That is the historic Christian eschatology, that is the eschatology the Underground assumes, and that is the eschatology I want the fellowship to internalize as we go forward into whatever the next year and the next decade will bring.

Maranatha — come, Lord Jesus. But while we wait for that coming, let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober (1 Thess 5:6). Watching, not boarding. Sober, not packed. Enduring, not escaping.

— Thomas

260510 – Strategies for Forming the Christos Civitas

by Thomas Abshier | May 10, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Bird, Babylon, and the Christian Underground: Strategies for Establishing a Christian Presence in a Captured Order

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 10, 2026

Occasion: Sunday’s gathering had last week’s fellowship summary as its formal seed text, which was downstream of three weeks of fellowship work — the eight-strongholds essay of late April, the May 3 discussion of evangelism’s real deliverable, and a sequence of fellowship essays I have produced this past week engaging external pieces (Stephen Grosz on psychoanalysis, Charles Whitaker on proselytism, Justin Brown on the loneliness of being liked but never known, John Ritenbaugh on the harmony of grace and law). The Sunday meeting was largely unscripted — Michael Sherman opened with a walkthrough of his lifelong classification mandala at NowAll.us, Isak Gutierrez asked the question that organized the first half of the conversation (where do Christians and non-believers find common ground), and the second half opened into a deeper question that the fellowship has been circling for some time: how does a faithful Christian community live, as a community, inside a political and ecclesial order that has been comprehensively captured by forces hostile to the gospel? Three different answers surfaced — Susan Gutierrez’s separationism rooted in Come out of Babylon, Charlie Gutierrez’s live-like-a-bird approach, and my own preference for a de facto colony — and the discussion converged on a single name for what we were reaching toward, supplied by Charlie at the end: the Christian Underground.

What follows is the synthesis of what we said. The hour was longer than the discussion will feel in this writeup, partly because some threads opened and did not close, and partly because the disagreements were sharper than they appeared in the moment. I have tried to render each participant’s position fairly, including my own, and to flag the threads that remain open.

I. The Mandala — Michael Sherman’s Classification System

Michael opened by walking me through the current state of his classification system at NowAll.us, which sits under the Contact Us tab on the site he has been building for the better part of three decades. The image is a modified yin-yang: at the top is You, at the bottom is All, and the right and left halves are not single fields but each divided into an inbound and outbound quarter, because Michael long ago concluded that the interaction zone between any two terms is structurally rich enough to deserve its own subdivisions.

The right half of the wheel runs from the personal at one extreme — psychology, the where are you coming from of the individual — out to the macroeconomic at the other — the conditions you mostly inherit from the desert or the Eskimo community or the century you happen to live in. In between sit sociology, anthropology, and the institutional middle layer. Civilization runs through the green cells. Cultures, governments, and economies are the three principal slices. Each is further divided into an inner (individual-facing) and outer (anthropological-facing) face, with a sociological convening zone in the middle. Politics, institutions, and history are arranged as future, present, and past — the Declaration of Independence, Michael noted, can be filed under politics if what you are studying is Jefferson’s thinking as he wrote it, or under history if what you are studying is the artifact after the fact. The micro/macro split applies to economics in the same way it applies to physics. The left half of the wheel runs from biology (the most personal of the sciences) out to mathematics and the abstract models that don’t even have to be instantiated. Where biology meets math, you get the world of matter and energy.

The numeric scheme makes the right and left halves indexable: the 100s are the arts, the 300s are the sciences, the 200s are everything that runs through the civilizational middle. Sub-decimals locate any individual concept inside the cell where its innermost nature lives. The classification rule, Michael said, came to him from Marcus Aurelius: Who is it? What is it in and of itself? What is its nature? Once you can answer the what is its nature question for a concept, you know where in the wheel it goes.

I asked Michael to send me a copy. I have my own indexing problem on the Renaissance Ministries side — the Christos AI corpus is growing faster than my ad hoc folder structure can absorb — and Michael’s wheel is the engineered version of what I have been making up as I go. I will return to it when the time comes to re-organize the website. The mandala is also, as it was on May 3, the engineering version of Michael’s evangelistic method: find the cell where you and your interlocutor already overlap, and start there. That method is going to do real work in the next several sections of this summary.

II. The Question — Where Christians and Non-Believers Overlap

After Michael’s walkthrough, I asked the group whether anyone had read last week’s fellowship essay. Isak said he had started it. Then he asked Michael the question that organized the rest of the morning:

What are the things, as an atheist or a non-believer, that overlap with Christianity and your beliefs? Where do you tend to agree, and where do you tend not to?

Isak’s framing was honest about his own history. He has, by his own account, lived his life as different versions of those positions — Christian, atheist, seeker — at different times. The question was not academic. He was asking for an inventory of shared ground from someone who has thought about it for as long as Michael has.

Michael’s first answer to the overlap question was the right one. He reached, with help from the group, for the verse Susan had once supplied: By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another (John 13:35). The overlap, at the foundation, is love for one another — and the practical instances of it across two millennia of Christian witness are not difficult to find. Michael named Mother Teresa, and the broader tradition of Christian charity that produced her. He named John Paul II, standing up to the Soviet bloc in Poland during the 1980s, not only the political capital to do it, but also the courage. He named the long list of Christian humanitarian work that, when Christianity is at its best, manifests precisely the kind of outgoing concern for others that is the substance of the gospel.

There is a great deal of overlap at this level, Michael said, and he was clear that the overlap is real, not a strategic concession. The agreements between his position and Christianity are substantial — forgiveness, the Decalogue at its core, the Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13:11. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. The overlap between stated convictions and lived ethical practice is broad enough to support substantial cooperation.

III. The Indictment — Michael on Christianity in History

The disagreements, however, were many. Michael offered them not as a sneer but as someone who has spent decades trying to make sense of what the historical record actually shows, and the catalog he produced is the catalog every honest Christian apologist will eventually have to face.

He began with the Spanish Inquisition — not just the killings, but the deliberate elaboration of pain over time. The Iron Maiden, with its spikes arranged to crush the body slowly. The breaking wheel, on which a person’s limbs were shattered, and the body was then elevated so birds and ants could complete what the wheel had begun. Honey was applied to draw the insects. The point of the technologies, Michael emphasized, was not death but the extension of dying. These things were not improvised in some basement; rather, they were specified, engineered, manufactured, installed in cathedrals, and used by inquisitorial courts.

Michael’s assessment was, “It’s as if they looked at the cross and the crucifixion and carried on. And said, “You know what, this is the good stuff. Let’s all wear this around our neck, and let’s all torture people just like this.” He did not say it as polemic. He said it as the honest perception of someone watching the historical record and noting that the practitioners of the inquisitorial torture seem not to have noticed what their central symbol depicted. The cross, in its biblical meaning, is the place where the innocent absorbs the violence of the guilty. The inquisitorial cross is the same instrument used to prolong the accused’s suffering. Something has gone radically wrong when those two are confused.

Michael’s catalog continued past the Inquisition. The Crusades. The Bosnian War of the 1990s, in which Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians arranged themselves into three armies and killed each other for territory in a region every faction claimed for God. The Spanish Conquest of the Americas, in which the genocide of indigenous peoples was conducted explicitly as a Christianization mission. The pattern Michael named was that the banner of God has been carried, again and again, by armies committed to ends the gospel never authorized.

He turned to a contemporary remedy he finds promising. A student of his, now a professor at New York University, has built a career convening religious leaders on all sides of an active conflict and brokering conversations among them. During his college years, the student traveled to Sri Lanka and gathered peace stories from each of the four major religions then warring on the island, and then published the collection in all four languages. The project assumes that one cannot expect the warring generations to make peace with each other, but one can sometimes raise the next generation to recognize that each tradition, somewhere in its archive, contains stories of the peace it has lost. Michael named the existence of formal Interfaith Council bodies that operate on the same premise. On Michael’s account, the Interfaith Council is a real and useful institution.

IV. Isak’s Diagnosis — Religion as Cover for Other Motives

Isak, after listening to Michael’s catalog, offered a diagnosis. He suggested that the wars Michael describes are, on close inspection, not really about religion. They are about land, resources, captured populations, dynastic ambition, and the desire of small groups of decision-makers to manufacture consent for war from larger populations that would otherwise not have agreed. It’s not a war by the people, Isak said. It’s a war by some people who decided that’s the route we have to go to create propaganda or a narrative. The religion functions as the propaganda layer — the cover that makes the actual war seem to the foot soldier like a war he can join with a clear conscience.

If wars were really about religion, Isak observed, they would have ended whenever the religious leaders sat down together and identified their shared commitments. But they do not end at that table, because that is not actually what the wars are about. Michael agreed in full: Oh, I agree 100%. Excellent. Well put.

This was a moment of substantive convergence between Isak’s diagnostic instinct and Michael’s historical analysis, and the conversation could have closed at this point with everyone in agreement that the indictment Michael had raised is real and that its proximate cause is the human use of religion as cover for non-religious ambitions. The complication, which I raised next, was whether that observation — that religion is being misused — is itself a sufficient diagnosis, or whether the religion is also doing something that makes the misuse easier.

V. The Distinction Defense — Christianity Versus Its Distortions

I made the distinction-defense at this point. The actions Michael had cataloged — Inquisition, Crusades, conquistador genocide, Bosnia — are not what Christianity teaches. They are what people who claim Christianity have done. The doctrine and the doings are not the same thing, and conflating them is the same kind of error as conflating chemistry with the chemists who built the gas chambers. It is poorly executed Christianity that is being indicted, not Christianity. It says what those particular Christians did. It does not say what Christianity does. It says what poorly executed Christianity does.

Michael’s pushback was that Christianity inspires Christians to join the cause. The Spanish Conquest was sold to its soldiers as, “We are going to Christianize the natives.” The translation of that recruiting pitch in the field was the wiping out of whole tribes and the enslavement of those who were not killed. The point, Michael said, is that the religion does the recruiting work. The leaders cite it; the foot soldiers join because they are told the cause is righteous; the misuse is enabled by the texture of religion itself. It is the nature of religion to bind salvation to membership, its history of crusading rhetoric, its production of priests and popes who can authorize the war and absolve its consequences.

Note: The use of the texture of religion by the priesthood or government to motivate action in the name of a group is not an indictment of the truth of that religion. In particular, the truth of Christianity is not determined by the pretexts used by governments, missionaries, popes, expeditionary forces, or crusaders. Rather, this widely referenced and exemplified history of the misuse and misdirection of action and zeal in the name/aegis of religion is a testament to religion’s power to enlist human thought, emotions, and action. The fact of such power is a cautionary note for those who hear the appeals of religion. It is likewise a warning to those tempted to use that power to as the motivator for their program (whether commercial (consumption/profit-driven), governmental (state compliance), personal (cult-like obedience), inspire of the great responsibility***  of the be used correctly/rightly, lest the naive, the immature, the unsophisticated be enrolled in unrighteous action in their misguided attempt to execute righteousness. The true indictment is of the practitioners, populations, and leaders who follow blindly or cynically/maliciously misuse the inherent power of religion to motivate man toward God’s manifestation of His Kingdom.

I consider Michael’s argument against Christianity based upon this historical precedent of misuse and misapplication of the core principles/philosophy/theology/teaching of religion to be in the same class of misunderstanding of religion as those who have misapplied it in the application of the horrors of the iron maiden and the wheel. I believe it is this error, and errors in its orbit, to be one of the strongest (albeit weak) and most commonly used (indicating the lack of sophistication and discrimination of the intelligentsia/leader/power-class). This error is   The error is in the But He is not naively confusing the religion with its misuse. He is saying that any religion that can be so reliably weaponized must, in some sense, be vulnerable to weaponization at its structural level — and that the proper Christian response to the historical record is not the distinction-defense alone, but the harder question of why the distinction has historically failed to hold, and what would need to change for the distinction to do real work.

I did not concede the full structural form of his argument, because I do not think the religion’s vulnerability to weaponization is the same as a defect in the religion itself. But I want to record the argument’s strength here, because the fellowship’s project — building the Kingdom Culture, the Christos Civitas, what Charlie at the end of the morning would name the Christian Underground — has to be a Christianity that is not vulnerable to that weaponization. The distinction-defense alone is not enough. The lived community has to make the distinction true.

VI. The Islam Exchange

The conversation then took a sharper turn — sharper than it perhaps needed to — into Islam. I said something I will repeat here for the record, and I will also note that Michael’s challenge to it was substantive enough that I cannot resolve the exchange in the writeup. I said that the comparison between Christianity and Islam, on the question of whether either is a religion of peace, is not symmetric. Islam was founded in war, expanded by conquest, and continues — in the sense that its core scriptures and its dominant historical practice both authorize it — to be a religion that converts at the point of the sword. The George W. Bush–era assurance to the American public that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace is, I argued, not historically accurate. The Crusades were a defensive response to seven centuries of Islamic conquest that had taken Iberia, the Levant, North Africa, and much of southeastern Europe. Without the Crusades the conquest would have continued into the rest of Europe.

Michael’s response was the right response: a Muslim would say exactly what I had just said, only with the words Christianity and Islam exchanged. He asked me to produce the scriptural citations that demonstrate Islam’s authorization of forcible conversion. I told him I could not produce them from memory, because I am not a Qur’anic scholar, but that I had read the citations many times and would be willing to gather them. (That offer stands, and I will gather them this week. To be filed as an open thread.)

I distinguished, in the meantime, the Meccan and Medinan periods of Muhammad’s career — the earlier Meccan period being the one from which Western apologists most often draw their religion of peace characterizations, and the later Medinan period being the one in which the political-military character of the movement was established. The dominant Islamic legal tradition, I said, treats the Medinan revelations as superseding where they conflict with the Meccan. This is doctrine I have read but not studied to the level Michael was asking for.

Michael’s counter was to introduce the Jewish historical experience as a comparative datum, since the Jewish people have lived under both Christian and Islamic rule at various points and have, in some places, kept records of how each regime treated them. He cited the period of Islamic rule over portions of Iberia as a time when Jews were taxed but not persecuted, and the period of the Spanish Inquisition that followed the Christian Reconquista as the time when Jews were tortured and expelled. The example by itself is real. The generalization Michael drew from it — that Christians have historically killed Jews while Muslims have historically tolerated them — is, I argued, too quick. A single example is not a generalization. There are other examples that run the other way. The Holocaust is one. The expulsion of Jews from Arab lands in 1948 and after is another. The history of the dhimmi status, which subordinated Jewish communities to Muslim rule under conditions that were tolerable when the rulers were generous and severe when they were not, is a third. The honest comparative-history answer is that Jews have fared variably under both regimes, and that the variability tracks the disposition of the local rulers more than the underlying religion.

We did not resolve the exchange. I am willing to say that the comparative-history question is more contested than I initially framed it. I am not willing to concede the larger claim that Islam and Christianity are equivalently disposed toward forcible conversion, because I do not think the textual and historical records support that equivalence. But the matter is open, and I owe the fellowship the citations I was unable to produce on the spot.

VII. Hitler, the Pope, and the Failure of Christians to Stand Up

Michael then pressed the question further by introducing the Holocaust. Hitler’s Germany, he noted, was a Christian nation by any external measure — culturally, demographically, even formally in many of its church-state arrangements — and the response of the Christian church to the gas chambers was not to stand against them. Some clergy did stand. Most did not. The Pope did not, in any way commensurate with what was happening. The German Protestant church, with the Barmen Declaration exception, did not. The wider European Christian populations, in occupied France and Belgium and Poland, did not, with the exception of pockets of resistance and the moral exceptions like Bonhoeffer who paid for their resistance with their lives.

Michael invoked a line from John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman on this point — the line is roughly that the issue was not that Hitler had the power to be so evil, but that millions had not the strength to stand against him. The Christian failure of the 1930s and 1940s, on Michael’s reading, was not that Christianity caused the gas chambers, but that Christianity did not produce the resistance that the moment required. The pope who could have said no — and said it with the moral authority of the Catholic Church behind him — did not say no. He acquiesced. And the consequence of the acquiescence, in Michael’s framing, was that the Church watched the genocide happen.

I made the distinction-defense again, more carefully this time. It does not say what Christianity does. It says what those particular Christians did. It says what poorly executed Christianity does. Michael’s response was the response that has stayed with me most from the whole morning. He said: that is exactly the project you are trying to undertake — the project of producing a Christianity that does not boot-lick whoever claims to be Christian and is in power, but actually stands. The task is large. It has historical precedent against it. But it is precisely the right task, and if you can pull it off, you will have added a chapter to the Christian story that the previous chapters needed.

That was a moment of substantive endorsement from Michael that I want to record. He does not believe Christianity has, as historically practiced, been what it claims to be. He does believe the version of Christianity I am trying to build with this fellowship could be — and he is, on the evidence of the morning, willing to support the attempt. Why I say go for it, he said. Which is why I’m kind of hoping you can pull this off, because what you just said needs to happen if Christianity is going to have the soul of its essence become what it stands for, instead of, you know, boot-licking whoever says he’s Christian.

VIII. Institutions, Hierarchy, and the Uninformed Middle

The conversation transitioned, through my own use of the word institutions, into the question of how religious and political institutions actually function and whether their failures convict the underlying systems or only the particular institutional inhabitants. I had used institution to mean the perversion of an ideal that has become the public voice of the ideal — the bishop conference that has become what Catholicism says, the news anchor who has become what journalism is, the academic department that has become what the discipline thinks. Michael clarified that he had been using institution differently in the mandala: not as a perversion of an ideal but as the present-tense layer of social reality, between the future-oriented activity of politics and the past-oriented recording of history. The institution, on Michael’s framing, is the way things presently are; it is changeable, and the change is what politics and history both register.

We disagreed about hierarchy. I made the claim that every organization with a leadership structure is, in its operational moment, a top-down system — that even when there is a populist vote at the front end, what follows is a bureaucratic machinery that executes the will of the leadership. Michael pushed back hard. Western constitutional democracy, he said, is not top-down in any straightforward sense. The president faces a Congress made of a Senate and a House, both of which can refuse him. The British Prime Minister faces the Commons and Lords. The German Chancellor faces the parliament. The separation of powers is the principal mechanism by which the one big leader runs everything model is checked. He used the image of superheroes with different powers — the President fast, the Senate strong, the House numerous, the judiciary precise — fighting on different fields rather than head-to-head for a single prize.

I came around partway. The separation-of-powers structure is real, and it does produce something more complex than a single Goliath. But I am not persuaded that the complexity rescues the model from the deeper problem, which is that the population doing the voting is, in significant part, uninformed and is voting on grounds that are not adequate to the seriousness of the decisions being made. Michael did not deny the uninformedness. He invoked Mark Twain — the Lord must have liked the common folk, because he made so many of us — and offered as illustration the 1988 Democratic primary turning on the phrase where’s the beef?, and the 1952 Eisenhower campaign cartoons, with their elephants and balloons, that helped carry the general election. The uninformed middle decides elections by responding to memes and slogans rather than by deliberation on substance.

That is the dynamic. Michael did not defend it; he described it. And the description, taken seriously, is corrosive of any easy democratic faith. If the institution-electing population is choosing on this basis, then the institutions it produces are likely to be of the same kind. The Pope, Michael conceded, has been on both sides of the moral ledger across the centuries — the John XXIII / John Paul II / Francis side, and the Galileo / Hitler-acquiescent side. We did not settle whether the variability of the institutional output convicts the underlying institution. I do not think we will settle that question soon. It is the same question, in another form, that we are asking about Christianity itself.

Michael left the meeting at this point, with the standing observation that the issues we had covered were the issues he thinks about all the time and that the conversation had been generative for him. The fellowship continued without him.

IX. After Michael’s Departure — Isak on Not Being Tricked

Isak offered the first reflection after Michael left. The thing he heard in Michael’s whole presentation, he said, was the desire not to be tricked — and that desire is the same desire that drives a lot of serious Christians, and a lot of serious seekers, in any tradition. People who think for themselves do not want to find out, ten years in, that they have been moved by sleight of hand. The fear that the religion is doing that to them is the fear that produces the rogue Christian posture Isak has had to come to terms with in himself. He does not, by his own account, want a Pope above him, or a denominational leader who can speak for his conscience, or a creedal authority that can pre-empt his own discernment. He wants to know God for himself, and he wants what he calls the actual relationship, not the relationship the religion has packaged for him to consume.

This concern was, I think, the most personally serious thing said during the morning. It is also a concern the fellowship has to take seriously as we try to build something. Whatever the Christian Underground turns out to be, it cannot be a trick. The people who join it have to do so with their eyes open, and the structure has to be the kind of structure that does not require its members to suspend their discernment in order to belong. The historical Christianity Michael indicted has, very often, required exactly that suspension. The Christianity we are trying to build has to be one that produces deepened discernment, not surrender of it.

Leonard interjected at this point with a recommendation of the film Idiocracy — the satirical Mike Judge picture from 2006 about a society that, over five centuries, becomes catastrophically less intelligent because the educated have stopped reproducing while the uneducated have not. Isak elaborated the premise. The film’s opening contrast — the educated couple who will have children when the time is right, juxtaposed against the unprovident pair whose descendants multiply uncontrollably — is, Leonard said, a parable for the demographic gradient our actual civilization is now riding. It is funny, and it is unfunny.

X. Leonard’s Bird and the Two Strategies

The film cue led Leonard into the metaphor that organized the rest of the morning. He said: Michael is an observer of the game, not a player. The game itself, Leonard said, is being played by what the gaming world calls NPCs — non-player characters, controlled by the game rather than playing it. The game is a single bird with two wings: one left, one right, both attached to the same body, both flapping in the same direction. The wings appear to disagree; the bird does not. The bird is going wherever the bird is going, and the NPC voters who choose between the wings each cycle are, in effect, choosing nothing about the destination.

I named what Leonard was describing as the uniparty critique — the analysis, common on the dissident right and on parts of the dissident left, that the apparent contest between Republicans and Democrats is a contest within a single political class with substantially convergent commitments on the matters that most affect the population. Leonard agreed. The bird is, on his picture, headed toward the precipice that 250-year-old empires conventionally reach. The American Republic is at or past that mark. The end is either external conquest or internal disintegration. Leonard quoted the enemies foreign and domestic phrase from the constitutional oath, and observed — pointedly — that the domestic enemies are the more proximate threat.

I said something that should not have been compressed into a single line, but it was: in the language of the bird metaphor, the domestic enemies are the Democrats — and I meant by this not the millions of ordinary Democratic voters, who are largely the uninformed middle Michael had described, but the leadership and machinery of the Democratic Party, which has, over the past three decades, allied itself with the cultural and institutional forces I take to be most directly hostile to the gospel. Leonard agreed and added the necessary correction: there are a lot of Republicans that are Democrats too. The party label is not the operative variable; the underlying alignment is. The Republicans In Name Only — the RINOs — count, on this analysis, as part of the same wing of the same bird.

Two strategies for the right-wing problem then surfaced. Leonard’s strategy was to pull the right wing off the bird entirely and attach it instead to the cross of Christ — a posture of separation from the political process altogether, on the conviction that the bird cannot be salvaged and that what the gospel asks is a different mode of existence. If you pull the wing off, Leonard noted, the bird crashes. The bird crashing is, on his picture, not the problem; it is the relief.

My strategy was different. I do not want to disengage. I want to dominate. The right wing — by which I mean the believing, traditional, scripturally-grounded portion of the population, the Moral Majority in Reagan-era language and the Kingdom Culture in our own — should not abandon the bird; it should beat its wing harder and faster than the left wing, and steer the bird’s flight toward an actual Christian civilization. The Christos Civitas project, as I have articulated it across the previous fellowship essays, is the affirmative version of this strategy: a Christian people building the political, ecclesial, and cultural institutions that will carry the next generation, won one soul at a time.

These two strategies — Leonard’s separation and mine of cultural dominance — are not, I now think, opposed in the way they first appeared. They are answers to the same question at different stages of the same project, and the synthesis that surfaced later in the morning (the Christian Underground) is the right name for what we are actually doing.

XI. Susan’s Counter-Direction — Come Out of Babylon

Susan, who had been listening through the bird-and-cross exchange, offered the deepest counter-direction of the morning. The Bible, she said, presses us toward something different than fixing the existing government from within. She had been reading widely in the come out from among them passages — Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you (2 Corinthians 6:17), and the parallel come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins (Revelation 18:4) — and she had concluded that the biblical prescription is more radical than either Leonard’s wing-amputation or my cultural-dominance strategy.

What Susan saw is that the corruption is not concentrated in one wing or one party. It is structural to the man-made governmental order itself, in such a way that even a corrected version of that order would be subject to the same gravitational drag. The man-made laws, even the good ones, are bound up with bad ones in package deals — the legislative process cannot deliver pure goods because the institution itself is impure. The way the Bible proposes, Susan said, is not to refine the bird but to step off it onto a different platform entirely, and to let the alternative platform become visible to the rest of the population as a competing option. Once a real alternative is visible, the monopoly the man-made government has on the spiritual imagination of its citizens is broken. Some people will, then, choose the alternative. The fruits of the Spirit, which are presently muted in the Christian community by the entanglement with the unbelieving order, will become visible — and the visibility itself will draw the remainder of the population that is still drawable.

Susan’s framing is biblically rooted in a way that I have to respect, even where I am not yet sure I agree with the strategic conclusion. The texts she invoked do say come out. They do say be separate. They do contemplate a faithful remnant inside but not of the order it lives in. The question is what coming out operationally looks like in 2026 America, and whether the coming out is a present-tense action or an eschatological hope that will be realized when the Beast system makes neutrality impossible. Susan, I think, was holding both. The action has to begin now while the cost is still bearable; the full separation will not be required until later, but by then the people who have not begun the work will not be ready for it.

XII. The Ambassador and the Testamentary Trust

Susan offered two specific mechanisms by which the coming out might be operationalized in current American legal structure. The first is the ambassador model. An ambassador to a foreign country is, by long-established diplomatic convention, not under the legal jurisdiction of the country in which she serves. She represents her sending country; she is taxed and disciplined and adjudicated by it; she is, in the receiving country, subject only to the limited protocols that apply to her diplomatic status. Susan’s proposal is that Christians can — and the New Testament directly authorizes the language for it — claim the status of ambassadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20), and that the ambassadorial status, properly understood, places them under the jurisdiction of Christ’s kingdom rather than under the jurisdiction of the American legal order in which they currently live.

The mechanism is real, in the sense that the United States does recognize foreign ambassadors and accord them diplomatic immunity. The mechanism is also constrained, in the sense that the recognition has to come from the State Department and the President, and is generally not granted to citizens of the receiving country itself claiming foreign-sovereign status under a religious framework. Susan is, I think, hopeful that the current administration — given its religious orientation and its skepticism of the institutional consensus on church-state matters — might be open to recognizing a Christian-citizenship status that operates analogously to ambassadorial status. I cannot evaluate the legal feasibility of this. I do think the ambassador for Christ language in 2 Corinthians 5:20 is doing real theological work that the Christian community has not fully drawn out, and I want to take Susan’s proposal seriously enough to study it.

The second mechanism Susan offered is the testamentary-trust model. Within the New Testament, she has identified what she reads as a last will and testament of Jesus Christ — and within that testament, a testamentary trust into which the Father has transferred a class of persons (the given of John 17, thine they were, and thou gavest them me). The legal analogy Susan is reaching for is the modern testamentary trust, in which assets are protected by being held inside the trust rather than by the individual beneficiary, and which can — in some jurisdictions — extend its protection to the persons whose support is the trust’s purpose. The proposal is that Christians, by virtue of having been given to Christ by the Father, are inside a legal-spiritual structure that the man-made courts are theoretically obligated to recognize when correctly invoked. Susan acknowledges that the testamentary-trust mechanism has not been tested in court in this form; she also reads it as having real future potential, particularly if the current legal environment continues to be open to religiously-grounded jurisdictional claims.

Charlie’s response to Susan’s framing, partway through, was characteristic and warm: This is Dr. T telling you, in a very nice way, you’re completely delusional. I want to record that exchange because it captures the dynamic that produced the rest of the conversation. I am skeptical of Susan’s specific legal mechanisms. I do not think the ambassadorial framework or the testamentary-trust framework will be received by the American courts in the way Susan’s argument requires. But the substantive theological insight — that Christians belong, juridically, to a different sovereign than the one stamped on the currency — is biblically defensible, and the question of how that different sovereignty becomes practically visible is the right question. The answer may not be the specific legal mechanism Susan named, but it is in the neighborhood of what she was reaching for.

Susan’s response to my skepticism was, again, biblically grounded: when the way forward is not visible, the biblical pattern is to call a fast. Ezra called a fast in chapter 8. Nineveh called a fast in Jonah 3. The fellowship, she said, would do well to do the same. The way we cannot see may become visible when the fast is kept.

XIII. Charlie’s Third Way — Live Like a Bird

Charlie, who had been quiet through most of the morning, offered a third strategy that drew on a long personal history. The strategy is what I will call the live like a bird approach.

When he is at the ocean — Fort Funston, where he sometimes sits in the late afternoon after the crows and ravens are done with the day’s work and have come over to play in the updraft along the cliff — Charlie watches the seagulls and pelicans pass overhead in their irregular parade. They appear to him to live in a kind of freedom that he does not. The birds do not have to pay rent, hold a driver’s license, file taxes, or comply with the Lilliputian regulatory net that has been laid across the daily life of an American citizen. Their constraints are different — they have to avoid predators and find food — but those constraints are relatively simple and ancient, not the elaborate web of human-invented agreements that has been laid across Charlie’s path. I’m at least as smart as that Pelican, he said. The question he has been asking himself is what the Pelican is doing, or not doing, that keeps it free, and what Charlie himself has been doing that has tied him to the ground.

The answer he has settled on, partially, is this: refuse to enter into agreements with crazy people. Have as little contact with formal authority as can be managed. Stay out of the line of sight of the bureaucratic and ecclesial regimes that want to register, license, regulate, tax, and otherwise capture the citizen-believer. Live, deliberately, under the radar — what Paul Fussell, in his book Class, called the bottom out of sight, the social position in which one is invisible to the controllers because one has nothing they want to take and offers nothing they want to grant. Charlie has done this in measurable ways across his life. He did not register his children with the state when they were born. He homeschooled them outside the public school system. He has chosen freelance and low-overhead work over formal employment that would require him to be visible to the various intake systems. He has spent, by his own account, nine and a half months of his life across some eight to twelve different jails, having chosen to refuse cooperation with various manifestations of state authority that he judged to be illegitimate. He has, in the language of his metaphor, been trying to fly.

His method is also Christological, on his reading. I think what I’m describing is actually what Christ did, he said. Until the end of his ministry, when he chose to be entangled, Christ was, in fact, hard to catch — slipping away from crowds that wanted to take him, walking through synagogue mobs that meant to throw him off cliffs, answering questions in ways that left the questioners without traction. The freedom of the Son of Man on earth, in Charlie’s reading, was the freedom of someone who declined to grant authorities the power to determine his agenda. The crucifixion happened when Christ chose to allow it. Until that hour, the form of his life was the form of someone who lived around, not under, the regimes that wanted to control him.

XIV. The Critique and the Defense of Charlie’s Way

My critique of Charlie’s method, which I will rephrase here in the form it had after the morning’s debate, is that the method is workable for the individual but does not scale to the Bride. The two pure forms of the bottom out of sight and top out of sight positions Charlie referenced — the homeless and the Rothschilds — are not available to most of us. The middle position Charlie has constructed for himself, which is the under-the-radar life of someone who has chosen to be uninteresting to the controllers, is real and admirable, but it is not the form of a public Christian witness that will draw the next generation. The Church the Lord is preparing for his return is, by his own description, without spot or wrinkle — and the body of Christ does not become spotless by mass relocation to bottom-out-of-sight obscurity. It becomes spotless by a kind of present, visible, costly faithfulness that produces, over time, a public alternative to the controlling order. We cannot, as a Bride, be lukewarm and irrelevant. The lukewarm are spit out (Revelation 3:16). The light that is hidden under the bushel is wasted (Matthew 5:15).

Charlie’s defense, when I pressed him on this, was the most poignant moment of the morning. I want the freedom of the angel Gabriel, he said. It’s not really realistic right now. I’m bound by gravity and proximity to endless Karens, but I’m doing my best. The gap between the freedom he is reaching for and the freedom he is presently allowed is, he acknowledges, real. He is not claiming to have arrived at the bird’s life. He is claiming to be trying, and to be doing it better than he would be doing if he had instead chosen the head-to-head confrontation with state authority that has, in his earlier life, produced nine and a half months in jails without producing any visible change in the regimes he confronted.

I want to record that I take Charlie’s critique of the head-to-head approach seriously. He has the lived experience of having tried it. I have not been to jail for my convictions. The cost-benefit analysis he has performed across his lifetime has produced his current position, and the position is not pure dropping-out — he is, by being on the call this morning, by raising his children in the faith, by sustaining his marriage with Susan, by partnering with me on Ideomotion, doing public work that is visible and costly. The freedom-of-the-bird metaphor is what he is aiming at, not what he is claiming. The actual life he is leading is a middle path between full engagement and full retreat, and the middle path has real virtues that the two pure positions lack.

XV. Susan’s Eschatological Urgency

Susan, returning to the strategic question, raised the temporal dimension that I think the entire fellowship has to attend to. The American present, she said, is the period of relative ease. Charlie’s under-the-radar strategy works now because the controllers have not yet built the infrastructure of universal compliance that the book of Revelation describes them building. The mark of the Beast — whatever its specific operational form turns out to be — is the moment when the controllers’ grid becomes universal, mandatory, and unrefusable, and when the choice between the Beast and the Lamb becomes a public stand that cannot be evaded by being uninteresting. Right now is the time to stand up and say, okay, the we are for Christ, and Christ stands for this, this, this, this, and we are to really now, while things aren’t too hard, at least in this country, they aren’t too hard, we really would do best, and what Christ is asking us to do is stand up for and make him our only master, make him our only king. And I see in the Bible ways to do that.

The argument is that the under-the-radar strategy is non-renewable. It works in a regime that has not yet completed its surveillance, and it will not work in the regime the Beast system is in the process of building. The fellowship has, on Susan’s reading, a window. The work of organizing now — naming what we believe, identifying the people who are with us, building the alternative — is work that is much easier in the present window than it will be after the window closes. If we don’t do that right now, then we’re going to be in a position that’s a much weaker position when we actually have to do that.

I think Susan is right about this. The eschatological urgency she is raising is the variable that resolves the disagreement between Charlie’s method and mine. Charlie’s method works in the present. My method (cultural dominance via the Christos Civitas) is the work that has to be done before the present window closes. Both are operative; neither is the whole story; both have to be subordinated to the question of when the moment of public stand will come, and how to be ready for it.

XVI. The Synthesis — The Christian Underground

What surfaced, in the closing minutes of the meeting, was the synthesis. I think we found the right name for what we are trying to build.

The synthesis is this: Charlie’s under-the-radar method is the right tactical posture in the present window, and Susan’s come out of Babylon directive is the right structural posture for the long term, and my cultural dominance via the Christos Civitas is the right strategic posture for what we are building toward — but all three of them belong inside a single name, and the name is the Christian Underground. Charlie supplied the phrase. Leonard, in his characteristic register, offered the inverted form: the Christian overground. Both are correct. The Christian Underground is what the fellowship is building in the present, while the present window is open. The Christian Overground is what the Underground becomes when the time of public stand arrives and the Underground steps forward into visibility.

The Christian Underground is not a formal legal entity. It is not a new denomination. It is not a separatist commune. It is a network of believers who have made the same set of commitments — to obey God before man where the two conflict; to take their primary jurisdiction from Christ and not from the state; to build the alternative culture that will be ready to become visible when the moment of stand arrives; to bear witness in the present in the ways that are practicable in the present; and to support each other across the relational, economic, ecclesial, and political dimensions of life. The Christian Underground is what the early Church was before it had buildings. It is what the persecuted church has always been when the regime is hostile and the gathering is illegal. It is what we may yet become, in this country, when the present window closes.

The name is, I now think, the right name for what the Renaissance Ministries fellowship has been building all along. The CFE essays are the discourse of the Underground. The Christos Voting Network is the political layer of the Underground. The Ideomotion project is one operational outpost of the Underground. The Christos Home School is the formative layer. The fellowship gathering itself is the cell-meeting at the foundation. We have been building the Underground without having had a single word for it. Charlie gave us the word.

I take this as a real gift from the morning’s conversation. I will think on it, and I will bring it back to the next fellowship for the further work of articulating what the Underground is in more operational detail.

XVII. Susan’s Closing Call — Bible, Prayer, Fasting

Susan closed the substantive discussion with a call for direction-finding. Let us read the Bible with that in mind. What is the what is God telling us to do? Let’s examine with that question of, how do we go about, you know, organizing? How do we go about living according to what God is saying? And consult the Bible and see what we’re being told here. And instead of just going on our what we think is best, you know, what we — completely agree we absolutely want divine guidance, rather than human guidance and our own ideas. She suggested a fast. The biblical pattern is consistent — when the way forward is unclear, the people who are seeking the way fast and pray and search the scriptures for the indication of where to step next. I want to take this seriously. I propose that we agree, in the next fellowship gathering, on a coordinated fast of one or three days, during which we read the come out passages of both testaments together and bring to the next meeting what each of us has heard.

Susan closed the meeting in prayer.

XVIII. What Remains Open

A number of threads opened during the meeting and did not close. I want to record them so the fellowship can return to them.

First, the comparative-religion question — specifically the Christianity-Islam comparison — remains substantively open, and I owe Michael the citations I was unable to produce on the spot. I will gather them and circulate before the next fellowship.

Second, the Pope question — whether the historical failures of the papacy convict the office, the Church, or only the particular incumbents — was not resolved. The deeper version of the question is whether any institution that mediates between God and the believer is corrigible, and if not, what the alternative is. This connects to Isak’s I am one of those rogue Christians position, and to Susan’s come out framework, and to the whole question of whether the Underground we are building should have any clerical structure at all or whether it should be fully congregational. We will need to return to this.

Third, the practical question of how the Christian Underground operationalizes — what specifically a member of it does, day to day, that is different from what an ordinary believer in a typical evangelical congregation does — was named but not answered. The §6.2 question from the Ideomotion charter (what does the customer-to-fellowship pathway look like, operationally) is the same question in another register. We need an operational document for the Underground itself.

Fourth, Susan’s specific legal mechanisms — the ambassador framework and the testamentary-trust framework — need legal review before we adopt them as anything more than theological-imagery. Charlie was right that the as-stated mechanisms are not, in their current articulation, ready to be relied on in court. But the underlying theological commitments — that Christians belong juridically to a different sovereign, and that the present sovereignty of the state over the believer is contingent rather than absolute — are sound, and the operational form of those commitments needs work.

Fifth, the eschatological-timing question. Susan’s argument that the present window is closing has a certain urgency to it, but it is also the kind of argument that has been made by Christians for two thousand years without the predicted closure arriving. We need to think carefully about what specifically would constitute the closure of the window — what observable event would tell us the moment of public stand has arrived — so that we are not perpetually deferring the work on the grounds that the window has not yet closed, but also not prematurely declaring it closed and forcing a public stand for which we are not ready.

Sixth, the practical-organizational question of what the next steps for the Underground look like. We have a name. We do not yet have a charter, a covenant of membership, an admissions process, a discipline structure, or a relationship to the existing module structure of Renaissance Ministries. These will need to be drafted, deliberated, and adopted. The Christos Rigorous Framework (CRF), which Isak and I have been building separately, may be the right home for the formal articulation of what the Underground commits its members to.

Closing Reflection

I came into the Sunday meeting expecting to discuss the recent Forerunner essays I have been engaging — Whitaker on proselytism, Ritenbaugh on Amos 5:25, Brown on the loneliness of being liked — and we did not get to any of them. The meeting went in a different direction. I am glad it did. The deeper question that the recent essays have been circling — what kind of Christian community is faithful, in this moment, in this culture — surfaced more directly than I could have engineered, and the synthesis that emerged is more substantive than I expected.

The Christian Underground is the name we have been working toward. I will spend the week thinking about what it commits us to. I will return to the fellowship next Sunday with a preliminary articulation. Susan will return, I trust, with the fast and the further readings of the come out passages. Charlie will return with whatever the next week of bird-watching teaches him. Isak will return with whatever the rogue-Christian discernment process surfaces. Leonard will return with the next layer of metaphor — perhaps the Christian Overground in some new form, perhaps the bird metaphor pressed further, perhaps the Idiocracy reference unpacked into a serious cultural diagnosis. Michael, if he is willing, will return with the citations I owe him and the next iteration of his interfaith framework.

This is what the fellowship is for. We do not have the answer. We are, together, the people who are willing to keep asking the question. The Lord is sufficient to the answer, in his time.

Thank you, Susan, for the closing prayer. Thank you, fellowship, for the morning.

— Thomas

260510 – Grace and Law

by Thomas Abshier | May 10, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Law Beneath the Mercy Seat: Amos 5:25, and the Harmony of Grace and Obedience

Fellowship Essay | 10 May 2026

The daily Berean email this morning carried an excerpt from the late John W. Ritenbaugh, drawn from a longer essay he co-authored with his son Richard T. Ritenbaugh, titled Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness. The excerpt is short — perhaps eight paragraphs — and it is anchored on a single rhetorical question from the prophet Amos:

Did you offer Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? — Amos 5:25

Ritenbaugh’s answer to the rhetorical question is the right one: yes, the people did sacrifice in the wilderness; but sacrifice was not the whole of what God had asked of them, and a sacrificial life detached from an obedient life is not what God wants from a redeemed people. From this answer, he develops one of the more important theological points in the Forerunner archive — that grace and obedience are not in tension, that the law and the blood are not alternatives, that Mount Sinai is not the cancellation of Passover but its proper sequel.

I want to commend this point to the fellowship, deepen it from a few angles Ritenbaugh’s brief excerpt does not have space to develop, and bring it back to how we are trying to live as a community. There is more substantive agreement between the Christos framework and Ritenbaugh’s position on this question than there is on some others, and I want to honor that.

The order of events in the wilderness

The chronological structure of the Exodus narrative is itself the argument Ritenbaugh is making. The sequence God established was:

A lamb is killed; the blood is placed on the doorposts; the destroyer passes over (Exodus 12).

The people are led out of Egypt across the Red Sea; the pursuing army is destroyed; Israel is, in the most concrete sense possible, freed (Exodus 14-15).

Then — only then, after the redemption is finished — does the column of cloud and fire bring them to Sinai, where the law is given (Exodus 19-20).

The people who hear the Ten Words from the smoking mountain are not slaves earning their way out of bondage. They are former slaves who have already been delivered, listening to the One who delivered them describe the shape of the life He intends for them now that they are free. The law arrives as a pattern, not as a price. The redemption is complete before a single commandment is uttered. Whatever else the law is for, it is not for purchasing a freedom that has already been given.

This is the structural fact Ritenbaugh leans on, and it is the fact the New Testament repeatedly draws back to. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1) precedes, in Paul’s letter, the long discussion of how the redeemed should walk that follows in chapters 6 through 8. The justification is finished. The walking comes after. The walking is not the ground of the justification. It is the visible shape of a life that justification has already changed.

This ordering matters because both of the great distortions of Christian teaching get this ordering wrong, in opposite directions. Legalism treats the law as something the believer obeys in order to earn standing with God. Antinomianism treats the law as something the believer no longer needs to bother with because grace has settled the matter. The first reverses the Exodus sequence by putting Sinai before the Red Sea. The second deletes Sinai from the sequence altogether and pretends only the Red Sea matters. Both misread the text. Ritenbaugh’s reading — Sinai follows Passover, and therefore the obedient life follows the redeemed life — is the right reading, and it is the reading the broader catholic Christian witness has held in its better moments across two thousand years.

What sat inside the ark, and what sat above it

Ritenbaugh draws particular attention to a piece of furniture that I want to draw out further. The Ark of the Covenant, kept in the innermost room of the Tabernacle and later of the Temple, was a wooden chest overlaid in gold. Inside the chest, eventually, were three things: a portion of manna, Aaron’s rod that had budded, and the two stone tablets on which the Decalogue had been written by the finger of God (Hebrews 9:4). On top of the chest sat a separate, smaller piece, beaten from a single sheet of pure gold, with two cherubim of one piece extending their wings forward over it. This piece was called, in Hebrew, the kapporet. It is the same noun-root from which the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, takes its name. The verb form means to cover, to wipe, to atone for. The piece itself is, etymologically, the cover. The cover. The covering thing. It is what is over the law.

This is what English Bibles call the Mercy Seat.

The image, taken in its full geometric sense, is theologically dense. God’s localized presence sat above it, between the wings of the cherubim. The blood of the atonement sacrifice, on one day a year, was sprinkled on it by the high priest. And underneath it, inside the box it covered, were the stone tablets of God’s holy demand on His people. The arrangement was deliberate. The mercy was over the law, sprinkled with blood, with God’s presence brooding above. It was not that mercy replaced the law or eliminated it. The law was still there, intact, in the same chamber, contained in the same chest. What was different was that mercy covered it. Atonement was the lid that allowed the holy God to dwell in the same room as a people who could not, on any given day, claim to have kept what was written on the stones underneath.

The New Testament does not let this image go. When the writer to the Hebrews describes the Tabernacle furniture, he uses the Greek noun hilasterion to translate the kapporet (Hebrews 9:5). When Paul reaches for the deepest possible single image of what Christ has done at the cross, he uses the same word: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation — hilasterion — through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past (Romans 3:25). Christ Himself, in Paul’s argument, is the Mercy Seat. The cover of the Ark, the place where the blood is sprinkled and the presence dwells, the lid over the law. That image lands at the cross. The blood underneath the brooding presence, the law preserved beneath, the mercy that covers without canceling, the presence that draws near because the covering is in place — all of it converges on the body broken at Golgotha and the blood that ran from it.

And then, three verses after using hilasterion of Christ, Paul asks the question that the antinomian distortion has been answering wrongly ever since:

Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law. — Romans 3:31

The ordinary translation of katargoumen is abolish or render inoperative. Paul is asking, after the longest argument for justification by faith ever written: have we abolished the law by what we have just said? His answer is the strongest negative the Greek language can carry: me genoito — let it not be. God forbid. The faith that grasps the hilasterion does not abolish the law; it establishes it. Paul’s word for establish, histanomen, is the same word used elsewhere of confirming or making firm. Faith makes the law firm. Grace gives the law its standing in the believer’s life.

This is the same point Ritenbaugh is pressing toward in the Forerunner essay, and it is the point at the heart of the broad New Testament witness. Grace does not retire the law. Grace is what makes the law livable.

Where Paul takes it next

Romans is not done with the question after chapter three. Paul comes back to it in chapter six, where he names directly the antinomian distortion of his own argument:

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? — Romans 6:1-2

Some hearer of Paul’s preaching had evidently drawn the conclusion that if grace covers sin, then the more sin, the more grace, and therefore the more sin, the better. Paul does not hedge in his rebuttal. The same me genoito — God forbid — that protects the establishment of the law in chapter three protects the moral seriousness of the redeemed life in chapter six. The redeemed have died to sin. The grammar of redemption is not now I can sin freely; it is now I have been crucified with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth I should not serve sin (Romans 6:6).

By the time Paul reaches chapter eight, the picture has fully emerged. The law was holy, just, good (7:12). The problem was never the law; the problem was the flesh that could not keep it (7:14-25). The solution was not the abolition of the law but the sending of the Son and the indwelling of the Spirit:

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. — Romans 8:3-4

Read that sentence carefully. The righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us. Not abolished. Not suspended. Not made optional. Fulfilled in us, who walk after the Spirit. The grace that gives the Spirit is the grace that makes the law’s requirement realizable in the redeemed life. The law and the Spirit are not opposed. The Spirit is what makes the law a description of how the believer actually lives, rather than an indictment of how the believer continually fails to live.

This is what Ritenbaugh’s two-halves framing is reaching for. The blood covers; the Spirit empowers; the redeemed life is one in which the law’s righteousness is increasingly visible. Sanctification is the name for this. The believer, growing under grace, comes to look more and more like the holy God whose pattern of life the law was always describing.

The application question, briefly

I do not want to leave a question unanswered that the careful reader will already be asking. Which law are we talking about? The Decalogue? The dietary laws of Leviticus 11? The civil penalties for theft and adultery? The festival calendar with its new moons and seventh days?

The wider Christian tradition has worked through this question in different ways. The Reformed branch has historically distinguished between moral law (the Decalogue, summed up in Christ’s two great commandments — love of God and love of neighbor), ceremonial law (the sacrificial system, the dietary code, the festival calendar), and civil law (the penalties of the Israelite theocracy). On this division, the moral law is eternally binding, the ceremonial law has been fulfilled in Christ in the sense that what it foreshadowed has now arrived, and the civil law was given to a particular people in a particular polity and does not bind Christians as such. The Lutheran branch has worked the question through the law-gospel distinction. The Catholic tradition has worked it through the natural-law and divine-positive-law framework. The Wesleyan branch has emphasized progressive sanctification more than the threefold partition.

Ritenbaugh’s tradition — the Church of the Great God lineage, descended from Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God — has historically rejected the threefold-division and applied the law more uniformly to Christians, including the seventh-day Sabbath and the Mosaic festival calendar. This is a real difference between Ritenbaugh’s tradition and the Christos framework, which broadly inhabits the Reformed-influenced threefold-division view. The difference is not nothing, and it bears on how a fellowship community structures its weekly and annual life.

But it is not the difference I want to dwell on in this essay. The disagreement on which law is binding presupposes the agreement on which Ritenbaugh and the broader catholic Christian witness stand together: that the redeemed are called to obedience, that grace is not license, that Mount Sinai followed Passover for a reason, that the Mercy Seat sat above the law and did not replace it. On the underlying point — that grace and obedience are inseparable, that sanctification is real, that a Christianity which has dropped the law has dropped half of itself — Ritenbaugh and we are on the same side. The application question is a fellowship-level discernment, not a fellowship-dividing one.

Where the contemporary church needs this

The American evangelical landscape has, for a generation now, been pulled toward a kind of grace-only preaching that has retired the law in practice if not in confession. Phrases circulate that are almost designed to soften the moral seriousness of the redeemed life: grace is unmerited favor (true, as far as it goes, but spoken in a way that implies the favor never asks anything of the favored); we are saved by grace, not by works (true, as Paul says, but spoken in a way that makes works invisible afterward); don’t let anyone put you under the law (true in some senses, dangerous in others). What gets lost is precisely the structure Ritenbaugh is recovering — that grace and obedience are not adversaries, that the redeemed life is a life, that the saved person is being made into someone whose life looks more and more like the One who saved them.

The other distortion, legalism, exists too — particularly in some immigrant church communities, in some conservative-Reformed contexts, and in some sectarian movements that Christianize their own preferred set of cultural rules and call them God’s law. Both distortions miss what Ritenbaugh is naming. The legalist reverses the Exodus order and puts the law before the redemption. The antinomian deletes the law from the sequence and pretends only the redemption matters. Neither honors the actual structure of the biblical narrative, the actual furniture in the Holy of Holies, the actual argument of Romans, or the actual life Christ called His followers to live.

For our fellowship — and for me as I write this — the call is the same one Amos was bringing to the northern kingdom in 760 BC. Are we sacrificing without obeying? Are we attending the gathering without changing how we conduct our business? Are we showing up to the feasts without examining whether we have left the feast different from how we arrived? Ritenbaugh’s reading of Amos applies. The question presses the same way now as then. Sacrifice that is not joined to obedience is sacrifice God will not have.

The Ideomotion charter we have spent the past several days revising is, if it works as intended, a small and concrete instance of grace-and-obedience working together. The ministry character of the work is not earned by the obedience; the obedience flows from the ministry character. The §7 ethical commitments — non-coercion, informed consent, no exploitation of vulnerability, truthful claims — are not legalisms tacked onto a Christian-branded business. They are the visible shape of a redeemed posture toward the customer. The grace gives the disposition; the obedience is what the disposition looks like in practice. To attempt the obedience without the grace would be to reverse the Exodus order. To claim the grace without the obedience would be to delete Sinai from the sequence. We are trying to keep them in the right relationship — Mount Sinai after the Red Sea, the law beneath the Mercy Seat, the redeemed life that obeys because it has first been freed.

Crescendo

The verse I want to close on is not from Romans this time. It is from the first letter of John, a letter written, we believe, by the apostle who lay closest to Jesus at the last supper and who outlived all the others to see the end of the apostolic age. John has watched a generation come and go. He has watched the gospel survive Nero’s fires and Domitian’s exiles. And in his old age he writes — pastorally, and with the bluntness of an old man who has earned the right to say what he means:

And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk, even as he walked. — 1 John 2:3-6

This is the apostolic verdict on the question Ritenbaugh is engaging. The test of whether we know Christ is whether we keep His commandments. Not because keeping them earns the knowledge, but because the knowing of Christ produces the keeping. A person who claims to know Him without keeping is, in John’s plain word, a liar. The Greek term is pseustes, the same word used elsewhere of those who are constitutionally untruthful. John is not soft-pedaling. The Christianity that brackets out obedience is, on the apostolic reading, not Christianity at all. It is a self-deception that has borrowed the vocabulary.

The opposite is also true. The one who keeps the word — the one whose life shows the visible shape of obedience — is the one in whom the love of God is perfected. The Greek for perfected is teteleiōtai, from telos: brought to its end, brought to maturity, brought to its intended completion. The keeping of the commandments is what brings the love of God to its full stature in the believer. Not a substitute for grace. A consummation of grace.

That is what Ritenbaugh is naming, and that is what I commend to the fellowship for our discussion. The grace and the obedience are not adversaries. They are the front and back of the same coin, the redemption-then-Sinai sequence, the Mercy-Seat-above-the-law geometry, the Spirit-fulfilling-the-law-in-us in Romans 8 and the keeping-his-commandments in 1 John 2. We will disagree at the edges with Ritenbaugh’s tradition on which specific commandments are in view in our practical application — that is a real and not-trivial disagreement and we should not pretend it isn’t. But on the central matter, on the structural point that the redeemed are called to obey and that obedience is the visible fruit of grace, we and Ritenbaugh stand together.

There is a famine of this teaching in much of the contemporary church. There is a famine of the truthful word that Amos warned would come and that John warned would come and that we are, perhaps, watching arrive. The remedy is not legalism, and it is not antinomian sentimentalism. It is the recovery of the actual gospel — the gospel in which a holy God has made a way, through the blood of His Son, for an unholy people to dwell with Him; and in which that same God expects, of the people He has made His own, that they will increasingly look like Him. The Mercy Seat above the law. The blood that covers. The Spirit that fulfills. The life that shows.

That is the religion God will have. May we, by His mercy, increasingly become the people He calls us to be.

Sources

John W. Ritenbaugh and Richard T. Ritenbaugh, Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness, Forerunner, October 29, 2025. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1941. The excerpt engaged in this essay is the section titled “Grace and Law,” received via cgg.org daily Berean email distribution, May 8, 2026.

Internal Renaissance Ministries references: `CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-buick-salesman-and-the-great-commission.md` (companion essay engaging Charles Whitaker on proselytism, also from the cgg.org Forerunner archive); `IDM_ideomotion_ministry/IDM_charter.md` v0.3 §7 (the ethics-and-non-coercion section referenced in the application paragraph above).

Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Exodus 12; Exodus 14-15; Exodus 19-20; Hebrews 9:4-5; Romans 3:25, 31; Romans 5:1; Romans 6:1-2, 6; Romans 7:12, 14-25; Romans 8:3-4; 1 John 2:3-6; Amos 5:25.

Hebrew lexical references: kapporet (Strong’s H3727), root kaphar (H3722); related: Yom Kippur, kippurim. Greek lexical references: hilasterion (Strong’s G2435), katargoumen (G2673), histanomen (G2476), me genoito (G3361 + G1096), teteleiōtai (G5048).

Theological-tradition references for the threefold-division of the law mentioned in the application section: Westminster Confession of Faith XIX (Reformed); Lutheran Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration VI (law-gospel distinction); Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II Q.99 (Catholic). These are not engaged in detail above but are the tradition the application discussion draws from.

260509 – The Veracity of Joseph Smith’s Revelation

by Thomas Abshier | May 9, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Latter-Day Revelation versus the Apostolic Deposit: A Conversation with Leonard on Joseph Smith, Denver Snuffer, and the Restoration Question

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 9, 2026

Occasion: A long Zoom conversation with Leonard Hofheins, a member of the fellowship and a former Latter-day Saint who now follows the teachings of Denver Snuffer, the excommunicated LDS author whose work treats Joseph Smith’s restoration as authentic, but the modern LDS Church as apostate. The conversation arose from four essays I sent Leonard, drafted from 30 video transcripts on Snuffer’s learnofchrist.org site. Leonard passed those essays to Snuffer himself, who responded with a brief and gracious note describing the analysis as fair, Christian in spirit, and a reasonable attempt at respectful disagreement. The conversation that followed between Leonard and me ranged across the longing for direct experience of God, the analogies of knot holes and oceans, the historical pattern of apostasy and restoration, the question of additional canon, the wheat-and-tares problem of mixed revelation, and finally the question of whether and on what terms the apostolic deposit can be supplemented by latter-day prophetic voices.

The position governing this essay: Leonard and I share more on this question than we differ on. Both of us hold that the human heart is made for a direct relationship with the living God; both of us hold that obedience flows from that relationship rather than purchasing it; both of us hold that the Holy Spirit speaks today and that the believer must learn to listen. The disagreement is narrower than it looks, but it is real and consequential. It concerns whether the apostolic deposit — the canonical witness of the apostles to Christ, however imperfectly transmitted — is the sufficient ground of the church’s confession, with the Spirit illuminating that ground in every generation; or whether that deposit is properly supplemented by latter-day prophetic restorations — Joseph Smith’s, Denver Snuffer’s, others’ — that add new canonical material the church is bound to receive. I hold the first. Leonard holds the second. The conversation reproduced and engaged within this essay is the most charitable working-out of that disagreement I can offer, with Leonard’s case presented as fully as I can before I respond.

Context: This conversation is part of an ongoing series of fellowship engagements with Latter-day Saint, post-LDS, and Restoration-movement interlocutors who form part of the broader Renaissance Ministries community. Leonard is a treasured friend and a respected member of the fellowship. Nothing in what follows should be read as questioning his sincerity, his discipleship, or the depth of his pursuit of the living God. The disagreement is a doctrinal one held within fellowship, not a fellowship-dividing one.

To the Fellowship —

I had a long conversation with Leonard yesterday. We have known each other for some time now, and on most matters of Christian discipleship we are in close agreement. The conversation began with my framing of our discussion about modern-day revelation with my story about how I came to Christ and why I am doing this ministry. The only reason I am a Christian is because of a revelation, a vision, a symbolic representation of God’s relationship with the creation. It was from that single picture that I developed the Conscious Point Physics theory as an integrated corollary to the revelation about God, His relationship to the Son, and the Son’s relationship to the creation. The Conscious Point Physics work is not, for me, a side project. It is the substrate from which my whole picture of God, the soul, the moral order, and the structure of reality has been built. I told Leonard I feel a great obligation to bring that physics to a place where conventional science recognizes it, because the implications for the Christian witness are direct and the framework is, in my own conviction, clear.

Leonard’s response was the response of a friend. He said the work was righteous, that I was not doing it for nefarious or selfish reasons, that I had been called into it through what amounted to an external prompting, and that all prophets across the ages have struggled with exactly the communication problem I had just described — the problem of holding premises that one’s audience does not yet hold, and trying to argue from them to conclusions that the audience cannot follow because the premises are foreign. He named Joseph Smith specifically as someone who, on his reading, faced the same difficulty in 1820: a young man with a vision and a calling, working out how to communicate something for which the existing vocabulary was inadequate.

That comparison was the seed of the longer conversation. Leonard’s case for the Restoration tradition emerged from it gradually, in his own voice and on his own terms, and I want to lay it out as fully and as charitably as I can before I respond to it. There is more I agree with in what Leonard said than I disagree with, and I owe his position a fair hearing.

What Leonard sees rightly: the longing, the limited view, the vast ocean

Leonard began with the observation that runs through everything else he said: the human being is made for a direct relationship with the One who made him, and the present forms of religious life mostly fall short of that. He told a story about his time as a missionary in Venezuela. Looking back, he said, he had not been bringing people to God; he had been selling them an organization. He compared it to selling Amway. He felt the product (the basic teaching of Mormonism) was good, but that what he was doing was persuading people to join the organization, which was not the same as the project of helping them know God. He had spent time, energy, and intention on the first when he should have been spending time on the second.

This is an important observation about his LDS missionary efforts and membership, but it is not my primary criticism of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, or Denver Snuffer. I believe the substitution of promotion, membership, and working for a religious institution over a relationship with God is a common feature of religious movements, whether a Christian denomination, a Restoration or Charismatic movement, an Eastern religion, or a cult. The right object of evangelism is not the promotion of the institution. Rather, evangelism should present the One that the institution exists to point to. That they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent (John 17:3). This is the correct object of evangelism, and I agree with Leonard’s instinct, and the fellowship should recognize this temptation as foundational to the human condition.

From this, Leonard moved to two analogies that served as important metaphors throughout the conversation. The first was the knot hole. Imagine, he said, a wooden fence with knot holes in it — the small, round openings where branches once grew. Each of us is looking at the divine through one of those holes. We see something; it is our experience. To us, it is real, true, and the full picture of life. But what we see is only what the hole admits. Different people are looking through different holes.

Rebuttal: Leonard has implied that whatever we see in life is only a portion of life, and then he has made the further unstated assumption that whatever we see is only a portion of the truth. It is the second part of this assumption that must be confronted. I agree with the first — everything is a portion of life — but it is not useful; it is a tautology, it is unavoidably true. The problem is with the implied statement that everything is a portion of the truth (if we are seeking the truth sincerely). This is not true. The problem is that we can be deceived by others of good intention, by others of ill intention, and simply misinterpret life.

Life presents many perspectives. We may be looking at a distortion of the fullness of life, which, by analogy, would be like looking through a lens with aberrations. And given that life has examples of righteous and unrighteous behavior, the truth about God’s way, and outright misdirection toward evil, not all perspectives or knotholes are revelations of what we should actually do or believe about life.

This is the real point of conflict and counsel. If we see and believe that a fellow member of Christ’s family is believing false doctrine and engaging in practices contrary to God’s will and way of living, then we should confront them and speak our truth in love. Not all errors of truth are of the same magnitude of error. Some examples of doctrinal divergence include the following:

Believing that nature worship, séances, sacrificing to spirits, and occult practices are just another path to God (paganism, spiritism, Wicca vs. Christianity). Believing that we should meet and worship on Saturday rather than on Sunday, a fine point that may or may not have eternal consequences, is held by SDA and other Sabbatarian denominations. Sprinkling vs. immersion, the historic schism between many Reformed and Baptist communions. Whether Jesus was a man or God incarnate is a more substantive consideration (Jehovah’s Witnesses vs. orthodox Trinitarian Christianity). Whether Jesus’ death on the cross completed the work of salvation, or his prayer in Gethsemane was the atoning act (Mormonism vs. Protestantism). Whether a woman has the right to kill her child before it has left the womb; whether intoxicants may be used for recreational entertainment or for coping with stress; whether suicide is permissible in terminal illness; whether any form of sexual act between consenting adults is moral; whether one may adopt the gender of one’s choice (secular religions vs. bible-based religion). Whether Jesus Christ and His redemption from sin are the only true way to God (Christianity vs. all other world religions). Whether Mohammed is the true prophet of God, and Allah the true God (Islam vs. Christianity).

The problem is that a path, regardless of how sincere and true it may seem to us, does not become God’s truth by virtue of our sincerity. This is where the knot hole analogy breaks down. The fact is that we can be looking through the knothole into hell, and taking that knothole as a portion of the truth is true only in the trivial sense that hell is a portion of what is real; it is not a portion of what we should follow. Likewise, the spiritual knot hole can have filters on it that distort the view. It can look true and feel real, but it is a distortion of reality.

The Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Mormon, Jew, and secular seeker — each has a knothole through which he looks. Through that knothole, each names good and evil according to the precepts of his scripture. Each names the way to worship God. Each names the way to act in order to please their God. Each presents a creation story as the foundation for justifying his morality, revelation, worldview, prophecy, and post-life world. Each sees something through his knothole, and each believes it is true because he perceives and experiences it as reality. It is felt and rationalized as true, real, factual, and universal. Using this metaphor, mutual respect is the proper posture, because no one sees the whole. On the other hand, mutual respect should not devolve into acceptance of every doctrine as true. All perspectives are not equal nor good. We should respect each person as an eye/observer, a point of experience of the physical and spiritual world, a portal through which God views, hears, and feels. The problem is that our bias, preconceptions, language, association, interpretation, and knowledge color what we see. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit see things as they are because the universe is integral with who they are. To the extent that the clarity of vision and the filter applied to each person’s perception vary from that of God, who sees actual reality, each person carries a corresponding amount of error — but that error will feel absolutely true, because to the perceiver, his perception is reality.

The analogy of the knot hole fails catastrophically when we realize that spiritual knot holes can be portals through which we see a portion of heaven, earth, and/or hell. The conscious experience of every person is essentially a porthole. We can be portals through which we see spiritual fabrications presented to our minds as visions, beliefs about the meaning of a picture, sound, or touch. The perceptions can appear as divine revelation when, in fact, they are the creation of demons appearing as angels of light.

We should honor and affirm only those whose efforts do not contradict what is true. Hence, Charlie’s question: “What is truth?” I take my standard to be the revelation of the Apostolic Deposit. I do not take other scripture or revelation to be the truth that must be rationalized or reframed. To the extent that other revelations correspond to biblical revelations, I applaud them. In all other aspects, I caution that it may be a deception, regardless of the appearance of the divine package in which it is delivered.

The second analogy Leonard used was the ocean, in trying to explain God. Leonard said God is the ocean, and understanding God is like scooping a cup of water from the ocean, compared to His vastness. The problem is that we are trying to define the ocean from what is in our cup. We don’t have any scope of what percentage of God’s ocean we have mapped because we don’t know how big God’s reality is. Most of the life in the actual ocean lives in the top three hundred feet, and we mostly don’t know what is below that. It’s the same with God. We only know Him on a very superficial level. We can only know what He chooses to reveal to us, and the way we receive that revelation is the way Scripture itself prescribes: ask, seek, knock. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him (James 1:5). Leonard quoted that verse not in passing but as the operative principle of his own spiritual life. He said it had also been the operative principle of Joseph Smith’s spiritual life as a fourteen-year-old boy in upstate New York. He believed it was the operative principle of every serious seeker of God across history.

Leonard longs for a direct relationship with God, and that is right and good. The recognition that we see in part is right. The ocean-and-coffee-cup puts our knowledge of God’s mystery in perspective. The appeal to James 1:5 — to ask, seek, and knock — is important. Leonard is correct in moving away from institutional religion that has become the object of worship, attention, and energy instead of pointing toward the true object of worship. If the conversation had stopped there, there would have been nothing to write about.

Leonard’s case for restoration

But the conversation moved past mutual recognition when Leonard developed what he and the broader Restoration movement understand as the historical and theological argument for the necessity of a restoration. The argument has several strands, and Leonard laid them out carefully, in roughly this order.

First, on Leonard’s reading, the pattern of apostasy and restoration is the structural pattern of biblical history itself. Moses brings Israel out of slavery; Israel apostatizes; the prophets are sent; Israel apostatizes more deeply; the exile comes; restoration comes; apostasy returns; eventually Christ comes to a Judaism that has so deeply apostatized from its own scriptures that it kills its own God. The gospel goes to the Gentiles. The Gentile church flourishes for two centuries and is then, in Leonard’s view, absorbed by the Roman emperor Constantine into a state church — Catholic, meaning universal, the universal church being a creation of an earthly, worldly organization, more than a continuation of the apostolic body. From that absorption, all the rest of Christian denominationalism descended. By 1820, when Joseph Smith was a fourteen-year-old boy in New York, the Christian world had divided into multiple competing denominations, all reading the same Bible, all coming to mutually contradictory conclusions, all on the verge of war with one another over their interpretations. The young Joseph Smith, on Leonard’s account, was caught in this confusion, took James 1:5 with full seriousness, went into a grove of trees to pray for the first time aloud in his life, and received a vision in which the Lord told him that none of the existing churches were of Him, that knowledge had been lost, and that a restoration was coming. Joseph never recanted that account; he died professing it; on Leonard’s reading, the inner consistency of his testimony across his life is itself evidence of its authenticity.

Second, Leonard pointed to specific biblical predictions that, on the Restoration tradition’s reading, are the textual ground for the necessity of a restoration. Paul’s reference in 2 Thessalonians 2 to a falling away that must come first; the prophets’ references to a famine of the word in the last days; the Book of Mormon’s own language about Gentiles in the last days who treat their existing canon as closed and call additional revelation a stumbling block. The closed-canon position, in Leonard’s framing, is itself the stumbling block the Lord predicted — not the corrective to error but the chief instance of it.

Third, Leonard offered his own working framework for direct experience of God, drawing on Doctrine and Covenants section 93:1. The framework is sequential and demanding. Forsake your sins. First, you must understand what sin is in your own life and put it down. Come unto Him. This is its own movement, distinct from the forsaking; it is the deliberate approach of the soul, on its knees, toward the Lord. Call upon His name. The name is the key that opens the channel. Obey His voice. When the Lord speaks, you do what He says. Keep His commandments. Not as a checklist but as a treasured possession, kept the way you keep something valuable. And when these are done, in the order in which they are given, the promise is that you shall see His face and know that He is. Leonard offered this not as a theory but as the working pattern of his own life. He is in his sixties; he has not yet had the face-to-face experience the verse promises; he is striving for it; he believes it is available because the Lord is no respecter of persons and because the verse is plain.

Fourth and finally, Leonard pointed to Denver Snuffer specifically. Denver, on Leonard’s account, has had the kind of direct experience described in the Doctrine and Covenants verse. He does not advertise this. He treats it as the most ordinary thing in the world — not because it is ordinary but because, having stood in the presence of the divine, he cannot claim any special status, since what he saw was so much greater than what he is. Leonard cited two recent interviews on the Mormon Book Reviews podcast in which Denver shared, with an evangelical Christian interviewer, accounts of his experiences that he has rarely shared with his own followers. Leonard found this striking and persuasive. A man who shares his deepest experiences with a sympathetic outsider rather than with his own movement is not, on Leonard’s reading, a man building a personality cult; he is a man bearing witness in the place where bearing witness is most useful and least self-aggrandizing.

I have laid Leonard’s case out at this length because it deserves it. There is nothing dishonest in any of it. There is nothing self-serving in any of it. Leonard is a serious disciple of Christ, a man pursuing the direct knowledge of God along the line of a tradition he has thought through carefully and held with integrity, who has paid the cost of leaving the institutional LDS Church when its leadership departed from what he understood to be the apostolic posture. He told me, frankly, that he had stepped away from the modern LDS Church because some of its recent statements struck him as “anti-Christ,” in the precise sense that they had compromised the unique Lordship of Christ as the gate. That is not a small thing for a lifelong member to say, and it indicates that Leonard’s commitment is to the thing itself rather than to the institutional vehicle — exactly the posture he commended to me at the start of the conversation.

Where the agreement runs deep

I want to be very clear about what I do not disagree with. I do not disagree that the human being is made for a direct relationship with God. I do not disagree that institutional religion can become a substitute for that relationship. I do not disagree that we see in part. I do not disagree that the Lord still speaks. I do not disagree that James 1:5 is operative for every believer who will pray it in faith. I do not disagree that the historical pattern of human religious life shows recurrent drift and recurrent recovery. I do not disagree that the modern Christian denominations, taken as a class, contain real distortions of the apostolic faith. I do not disagree that the human heart longs for the kind of face-to-face encounter the Doctrine and Covenants verse describes.

I told Leonard this directly, more than once, and I want it on the record here. There was almost nothing in what he said about God, prayer, seeking, sincerity, or the structure of discipleship that I would withhold assent from. The disagreement, when it comes, is on a narrower question than the conversation might suggest. It is the question of canon — the question of which voices the church is bound to receive as authoritative witness, and which voices, however valuable, must be received as something less than that.

Not all knot holes are equal

The first move I made in response to Leonard’s case was on the knot-hole analogy itself. The analogy, taken at face value, has a generous quality I appreciate. Everyone is looking through a hole; everyone sees something; mutual respect is the proper posture. But the analogy, as it stands, does work that the analogy itself does not warrant. It assumes that all the holes are looking at the same yard next door, and that what is on the other side of every hole is some portion of the same divine reality. This is not obviously the case. Some knot holes are looking at the truth that will set you free; some are looking at a partial truth that will set you partially free; some are looking at distortions that will, if followed, place you in bondage. Not all knot holes are oriented toward the same picture.

Leonard granted this. He said: I’m not saying every knot hole is equal — I’m saying everybody has one when it comes to how they perceive the divine. Fair enough. I accept the qualification. Then he made what I take to be the move that actually does the work in the Restoration argument: he said that every once in a while, the Lord breaks down a plank of the fence and lets someone see the bigger picture. This is the warrant. The Restoration tradition is the claim that Joseph Smith was one of those someones. The plank came down; the bigger picture was given; what Joseph Smith saw was not a knot-hole vision but plank-down vision; and therefore the canon Joseph delivered is not one knot hole’s view among others but a corrective to the knot-hole limitations the rest of Christendom is operating under. Denver Snuffer, in this picture, is a man who has himself stood at the plank-down place and is reporting what he saw there.

I understand the move, but I do not think the move can bear the weight the Restoration tradition asks of it. The reason is what I want to develop next.

The replacement question, however gently framed

I told Leonard, plainly, that the Restoration claim is structurally a replacement claim. He pushed back on this. He said he does not see it as a replacement; he sees it as an addition, a filling in, a completion of what is missing. I want to honor that he does not experience it as a replacement, and I take him at his word. But I also want to say that, intellectually, I cannot avoid the conclusion that it functions as a replacement, regardless of how it is held subjectively.

The reason is simple. When two sources speak to the same question and produce different answers, the believer cannot follow both. He must choose. The apostolic deposit and the Joseph Smith canon do not always speak to the same questions, and on many questions they are compatible. But on some questions, they are not. I gave Leonard one example: the question of where the atonement was completed. The apostolic deposit places the atonement at the cross — through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:10), he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21), it is finished at the cross itself in John 19:30. The Joseph Smith canon, as I understand it from the Denver Snuffer lecture transcripts, places the atonement substantially in Gethsemane, with the cross as the completion of what was already accomplished in the garden. These are not the same picture. They cannot both be the structurally correct account of where the work of redemption was done. One of them has to be primary, and the other has to be secondary or wrong.

Leonard remembered the Gethsemane point that I made in the four essays I wrote summarizing the Denver Snuffer theory. He did not contest that it was a real difference. He took it on board. But the existence of differences like that — and that one is just an example; there are others — means that any tradition that holds both the apostolic deposit and the Joseph Smith canon as authoritative is, in fact, having to choose between them at the points where they diverge. The choice is unavoidable. And when the choice is made in favor of the latter-day source on a doctrinal question, the apostolic deposit has been functionally replaced as the controlling authority on that question, however gently the replacement is framed.

This is what I mean when I say that, structurally, the Restoration position is a replacement position. Not because Leonard or Denver wants to replace anything. Not because the rhetoric of the Restoration tradition uses the word replacement. But because, on any question where the two sources disagree, one of them is being functionally treated as the higher authority, and that one is the latter-day source, because the latter-day source is what makes the Restoration claim distinctive in the first place. If the apostolic deposit is sufficient where it speaks, the Restoration is unnecessary; if the Restoration is necessary, it is necessary precisely because it is correcting or supplementing the apostolic deposit at the points where they differ.

The wheat-and-tares problem

The deeper objection follows from the replacement question. Suppose I grant, for the sake of argument, that Joseph Smith was a sincere seeker who saw something real in the grove in 1820 — that, in Leonard’s terms, a plank of the fence came down for him. I am willing to grant this. I do not know that it did, and I do not know that it did not, but the possibility is not something I can refute, and Joseph Smith’s lifelong consistency on the point is real evidence in its favor. Suppose further that what he saw was, like every prophet’s vision in scripture, partial — one wide view rather than the whole panorama. Suppose further still that in the years that followed, he transmitted some of what he saw faithfully and some of what he saw less faithfully, that his memory and his interpretive frame and his cultural moment shaped the transmission, and that what came down through the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price contains both genuine revelation and human admixture — some wheat, some tares, mixed together in the same field, exactly as the Lord said the world’s mixed condition would always look until the harvest (Matthew 13:24-30).

The question I cannot resolve within the Restoration tradition is: which is which? I do not have the gift of separating the two. Leonard does not, on his own testimony, have the gift of separating the two. The modern LDS Church, by its own departure from the original, has not separated them well; Denver Snuffer’s project is, at least in part, an attempt to identify which parts of the post-Joseph LDS development have departed from the original revelation. But the disagreement among Restoration-tradition figures about what is wheat and what is tare is itself the proof that no human can sort the field reliably. And if no human can sort the field reliably, then taking the field as canon is a different operation from taking the apostolic deposit as canon — not because the apostolic deposit lacks tares but because the apostolic deposit has been tested by the church across two thousand years, by hundreds of millions of believers in every culture, against the Holy Spirit’s witness in every generation, and has produced a remarkably stable confessional core. The Joseph Smith canon has been tested by far fewer believers across far less time, and the testing has, even within the Restoration tradition itself, produced multiple incompatible readings of what the original revelation actually was.

I told Leonard that I cannot risk my discipleship, my salvation, and my witness on a canon I cannot reliably sort. I would rather take the apostolic deposit as my ground, with all its imperfections of transmission, and then ask the Holy Spirit directly to fill in what is missing — doing for myself, in miniature, exactly what Joseph Smith did at fourteen, but without canonizing the result. It is my prayer, Lord, this deposit is incomplete. I know it is incomplete. Show me what is missing. The Lord can answer that prayer in any believer’s life. The answer, when it comes, is for that believer; it is not for the church as binding canon. The closed canon is not a stumbling block in this picture. It is a discipline. It says: this is the foundation that has been tested and confirmed across the catholic Christian witness; build your life on it; receive what the Spirit shows you privately; do not impose what you have received as canon on anyone else. The closed canon protects the church from the proliferation of latter-day prophets, each making different incompatible canonical claims, all of which would have to be sorted, none of which can be sorted reliably from the inside.

A vignette: the only voice I have ever heard

I told Leonard, in the middle of all this, a story I have not often told. Some years ago, I was, for a time, involved in a Buddhist sect. I was chanting before their scripture in an altered state, with a fellow Buddhist seeker in a barrio in Los Angeles. As we chanted, I had a vision of myself falling into a flame. While in the vision, I heard a voice say, Don’t go. I knew it was Jesus. I threw down the beads. I walked out of the apartment and never spent another moment practicing that religion. That was the only time in my life I have ever heard, audibly, the voice of the Lord.

The other thing I have ever experienced that I take to be a revelation in any direct sense was the picture of the galactic center and the fine lines between it and the stars around it. It was that vision that became the structural intuition behind my Conscious Point Physics work. I tell you those two experiences only to illustrate that we all can have the Lord speak to us, correct us, warn us, and give us revelation about our life’s work and purpose. I had one audible warning and one structural vision. I am not Joseph Smith. I am not Denver Snuffer. I am not John on Patmos. I am not Paul on the Damascus road. I have lived a long life of Christian discipleship with two direct interventions of the kind the great prophets received continuously.

And here is what that experience taught me, which bears on the conversation with Leonard. When the Lord wants you to hear something, you hear it. When He wants to redirect you, He redirects you. The Lord is competent in His own communication. He does not need a latter-day prophet to mediate to you what He could tell you directly. The fact that He spoke to me audibly once, and structurally once, and otherwise has worked through the still small voice of the Spirit applied to the apostolic deposit, suggests to me that the apostolic deposit plus the Spirit is the standard mode of operation, and the dramatic prophetic visitation is the exceptional case. It is reserved, when it is given, for purposes whose canonical weight and verification cannot be assessed by the recipient himself.

I do not doubt that Denver Snuffer has had experiences. That is, I do not believe he was delusional or intentionally deceptive. I do not know the origin of his visions, but I do know that the two stories are mutually exclusive. Someone is wrong. Either the apostolic deposit is wrong, or the Denver Snuffer / Joseph Smith revelation is wrong in these points. (I refer specifically to the issue of atonement: was it completed in the Garden or on the Cross?) If there is one error in the canon, are there others? In areas where there is disagreement, whose canon do we follow? Do we alternate and choose the one we like in each situation? What is the implication of the possibility that it was a different spirit than the Holy Spirit that inspired the new revelation? Might we be following a spirit that will subtly change us to its nature by following a new revelation, rather than the nature of the Holy Spirit? Regarding the revelation of DS/JS, we can say with certainty that either the apostolic deposit or the Joseph Smith revelation is wrong.

The ground I can defend is that the apostolic deposit, with the Spirit illuminating it, is sufficient to prosper individually and collectively. I believe the apostolic deposit has only been partially embraced as true and lived fervently, authentically, and accurately. The result is a lukewarm church, a government that does not govern itself according to the revelation of God’s way, and families that teach their children without authenticity of example or in the ways of wisdom. The fruits of those who claim the name “Christian” have been mixed, and much evil has been attributed to the followers of Christ, which was in fact the result of living a life without renewal. I am asking Christians to live like Christ. We don’t need a restoration or a new revelation; we need to read the Bible, attune our hearts and minds to the words of life, and listen to the voice of conscience and the Holy Spirit as informed by God’s word. This is the ground I am building this fellowship on. This is the ground I am inviting Leonard, Denver, and every Restoration-tradition believer to consider standing on with me.

Kill the Buddha on the road

There is a Zen saying that I borrowed for the closing argument of the conversation: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. The point of the saying is that any figure other than the ultimate object of devotion who positions himself between you and the ultimate object must be cleared away. The Buddha on the road is not the Buddha; the Buddha is what the figure on the road is pointing to; if the figure on the road is mistaken for the destination, the figure has become an idol and must be removed.

I told Leonard: I do not follow Apollos. I do not follow Paul. I do not follow Joseph Smith. I do not follow Denver Snuffer. I do not follow Thomas Abshier. I follow Jesus, and I read what the apostles wrote about Him because they were the men He chose to bear witness, and I receive what the Spirit shows me about that witness, and I bring what I have received into fellowship with other believers who have also received, and we test together what we have heard with our ears and our hearts. That is the fellowship’s working method. It is exactly what Paul rebukes the Corinthians for losing in 1 Corinthians 1:12-13: every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul? The same rebuke applies to I am of Joseph Smith, I am of Denver, I am of Calvin, I am of Wesley, I am of any teacher whose name has come to organize the believer’s allegiance in place of the name of Christ.

Leonard accepted this without resistance. He noted that Denver has been adamant about not being seen as a prophet. I take that at face value. I assume Denver sincerely does not want to be elevated to the position of a prophet, oracle, revelator, or guru. The problem is not what Denver wants; the problem is that those who follow Denver take his words as prophetic. He has said he has spoken with Jesus. He is speaking as though his conversations with Jesus are the pure restoration of Joseph Smith’s restoration. Denver’s proclamation of truth is exactly what Leonard has brought into the fellowship: a debate about what is canon. The serious consideration of Denver’s canon, which is non-apostolic doctrine, introduces a competition into the heart of the Christian fellowship as to which spirit is the source of truth. This is the foundation of all interfaith conflicts and competitions. To bring it into the heart of the conversation is to be in a place of ambivalence and non-commitment, searching as to whose canon is canon, whose spirit is the spirit we worship, follow, and listen to in our hearts. The fundamental issue is that the Mormon / Smith / Snuffer revelation is a different revelation from the apostolic revelation, meaning it is from two different spirits.

I am not faulting Leonard for raising the conversation; I am the one who sent him the four essays. But the conversation is real, consequential, and common. We have an example of another Christ being presented. This one was channeled or witnessed by Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer. The spirit witnessed by the apostles was a different spirit; the revelations are similar, but they differ because they bring different revelations. It sounds like Denver, in his heavenly visits, witnessed the same spirit that Joseph Smith did. Both spirits declare Jesus to be Lord, but the specifics of the revelation are sufficiently different in issues of actual character and message as to be impossible to be the same spirit.

The fact that there are two different spirits revealing and guiding the heart in two different ways means that one is not true to its center. The two spirits will lead their followers’ hearts and minds in slightly different directions. The Mormon/Smith/Snuffer spirit will have a twist, a bias, an emphasis that shapes the character of its followers’ souls in slightly different directions from the Biblical canon.

The question of what that change might be is a subject for another examination, but as a broad consideration, a revelation from a single source has no ambiguity. There is no possibility of broad metaphorical application and multiple perspectives in passages and revelations where the words are specific and first-person. This is significantly different from the gospel, the prophets, the epistles, the psalms, the proverbs, the histories, and the law, which were revealed over millennia through many portals of personality and perspective, including through the person of Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate.

I have made my choice. I embrace what I believe was the purposeful ambiguity of the Lord revealing His will and way through His Spirit speaking through the minds and hearts of the apostles. I reject the single-channel revelation of Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer. I believe their revelation and encounter were real, but I do not accept them as the perfected, final word of God’s revelation to man of His will and His way. I think seeing them as personal experiences — maybe a plank knocked down, maybe a larger view than most humans perceive, but still limited by the fence, still the perspective of a human, still not the full, unbiased, and unshaded view of God’s revelation. This framing prevents the deification of any human who heard the voice of God in one of its lesser forms. The Biblical and apostolic record allows us — and requires us — to each retain our own counsel. We must each seek the witness of the Holy Spirit and study the fragments of the records of those who came before us. The Word of God, as in the biblical account, is incomplete, but it serves exactly what God intended: to teach us the basic pattern of God’s will and way, and then to develop a sensitivity to His leading of each heart in each circumstance.

God speaks to each of us through our own filters. When a person experiences a vision of such complete clarity, as happened to Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer, and it differs from the Biblical canon, I think the origin of such miraculous visions is likely a spirit other than the Spirit of Christ Himself. I don’t think millennia of metaphor, proverbs, and parables will be overwritten to give us a single-channel perfection if He had not given that purity and totality throughout the world story.

If a pure revelation of what really happened in the Garden and on the Cross had been God’s plan for revelation, He could have given it without ambiguity from the beginning and repeatedly. Instead, what we see is a pattern of ambiguity, hidden treasures, even a parable — the pearl of great price — which was hidden in a field that no one else saw as the very nature of heaven. We crave clarity. We want to know the answers, but it is a king’s glory to find a thing, and God’s glory to hide it. The revelation of Smith and Snuffer is entirely opposite to this Pearl-of-Great-Price pattern — it is a pearl lying open without parable and ambiguity. It is exactly this pattern that I believe is the most disturbing, because it leaves room for latter-day prophets to come and tell the flock what to do and not do, which is the seed of a theocratic tyranny. This is the mark of the prince of this world.

God could have had prophets repeatedly give clear revelations. But if we look at the Biblical prophetic record, the prophets’ messages were riddles hidden inside clues. The crystalline clarity of the Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer revelations does not match the pattern of Biblical revelation. Even Jesus’ words were spoken in parables. The Smith / Snuffer revelations are absolute clarity, but then the human and flawed nature of the seemingly first-person, angel-delivered message is shown to be flawed, and it is seen mixed with errors, changes, modifications, and new revelations — for example, the well-known changes Joseph Smith made to the Book of Mormon text between the 1830 and 1837 editions, including the alteration of phrases describing the Lamanites’ skin from “white” to “pure” in some passages, and the broader pattern of textual revision across editions. The absolute contradiction or reversal of a divine pattern is not a characteristic of the signature of the Bible. Rather, the modified and shifting revelations of Smith and Snuffer have the markings of another source.

I see how God revealed the Bible, little by little over time, through many sources, with deep metaphorical application as a signature of authenticity. Even the words of Jesus were incomplete, and the accounts of His witness were seen from multiple perspectives. And if we take Jesus as the Creator of all, then His words were likewise shaped, filtered, and colored by multiple prophetic witnesses to His incarnation. This pattern of imperfect, soft-focus witness is a recurrent theme in pre- and post-incarnation, as well as during the very presence of Jesus during His incarnation.

The crystalline purity of a single-source vessel inevitably leaves an imprint of the vessel on the message. This signature will be multiplied as the message spreads, is followed, and patterns of life emerge that reflect that message. The pattern of teaching I advocate is individual responsibility to listen to the Holy Spirit’s voice and to read the Bible daily to imprint God’s direction in our minds. It is our imperative to follow Jesus, in the sense of living life in a way that is complete and full. We accept His sacrifice as effective, and we sacrifice our lives in the sense of crucifying the flesh, not acting out our various desires, impulses, and flesh hungers in a way other than as He prescribes by metaphor, parable, command, and lesson in the imperfect and incomplete record we have. In short, we receive the apostolic deposit; we receive the Spirit; we test our receptions in council; and we do not canonize latter-day prophetic voices, accepting them only as personal revelations to the extent that they are consistent with the apostolic revelation.

The fellowship’s working answer

Toward the end of the conversation, I told Leonard what I am trying to do with this ministry, and I want to put it on record here because the conversation crystallized it for me. I am trying to build a church that follows the Bible — the apostolic deposit, the canonical witness of the apostles to Christ — with each member doing his or her absolute best to figure out what it says and to listen to what the Holy Spirit is showing about it. We bring our individual hearings into fellowship. We say: I heard this. What did you hear? And what did you hear? And we look for the common center of what has been heard. Where the hearings converge, we have stronger ground for confidence. Where they diverge, we hold the divergence as live and unsettled, and we keep listening. The Spirit illuminates the deposit. The fellowship tests the illumination. The apostolic revelation, the biblical corpus, and the words of Christ are the foundation.

This is, I think, what the apostolic church itself did. They had the Old Testament; they had Christ’s words and works; they had Paul’s revelation of counsel to the churches; they had the Spirit; they tested what they were hearing in council, most visibly at Jerusalem in Acts 15. They did not appeal to a latter-day prophet to settle the Gentile question. They appealed to scripture, to the Spirit’s manifest work among the Gentiles, and to the apostolic council’s collective judgment. The same method is available to us. It does not require additional canon. It requires the apostolic and testamental deposit, the Holy Spirit moving us, and being open to the council’s critique, which is also open to criticism.

Leonard, to his great credit, said at this point that he loved what I was describing, that he agreed with it totally, that this was what was needed, and that he wanted to participate in exactly that kind of fellowship. He had said earlier in the conversation that the most personal thing a human being can do is reach out to the One who created him, and that the kind of mutual listening I had just described — a meeting of the minds to find that commonality — was the kind of fellowship he had been longing for. We ended the conversation in agreement that we are on the same team, going in the same direction. The fact of our doctrinal disagreement need not divide the fellowship. The fellowship is the working method by which we can both pursue and discover truth together.

I want to be clear about what that means and does not mean. It does not mean I have changed my position on the canon question. I have not. The apostolic deposit is the floor; latter-day prophetic voices, however valuable as private edification, are not canon for this fellowship and should not be canon for any fellowship that wants to keep its footing based on biblical revelation. What it means is that Leonard and I can hold our disagreement on that question while sharing fully in the work of iron sharpening iron, hearty counsel in the conduct of relationship, challenging ourselves in the discipline of mutual listening, the pursuit of direct relationship with the Lord, and the building of a community whose center is Christ rather than any teacher’s name or personal revelation. The disagreement is real; the fellowship is also real; both can be held at once.

Crescendo

The verse I want to close on is the one I quoted to Leonard near the end of the conversation, and it deserves the full reading.

For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. — 1 Corinthians 3:4-7

Paul will not let the Corinthian church organize itself around the names of its teachers. He will not even let it organize itself around his own name. The teachers are ministers; the increase comes from God; the believer’s allegiance is to the Christ the teachers point to, not to the teachers as such. This is the apostolic posture toward every later teacher who would arise, and it includes Joseph Smith, Denver Snuffer, and me. I have my own personal revelations, and I argue for their logicality, their applicability, and their consistency in increasing the joy and peace of life. None of us is the gate. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6). There is only one gate to the Father, and that gate is named. The gate is the crucified and risen Christ to whom the apostolic deposit bears witness. Every other teacher whose work has any value at all has its value because it points to Him; every teacher whose work would obscure Him, however sincere, has misjudged his vocation; and the believer’s task is to follow the gate, not the gatekeepers, not the latter-day claimants, not the men who say here is Christ when the Christ is the One the canonical witness already names.

Leonard and I are in agreement on this. We both want to follow the gate. We disagree on whether the men who came after the apostles — particular men, particular voices, particular Restoration figures — are pointing toward the gate or have, however unintentionally, put themselves on the road in front of it. That disagreement will be settled in the end, but in the meantime, our choice of shepherd has consequences, and it behooves us to keep listening — to the deposit, to the Spirit, to each other — and to refuse to organize our discipleship around any name but His.

That is the fellowship I am building. That is the fellowship Leonard told me he wanted to be part of. That is the fellowship I commend to all of you for our continuing discussion.

“For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?” — 1 Corinthians 3:4

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

“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” — James 1:5

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” — 1 John 4:1

Sources

Primary source: Zoom conversation between Thomas Lee Abshier and Leonard Hofheins, May 9, 2026, transcribed and edited for fellowship-essay form. Direct quotations of Leonard preserved where possible; arguments paraphrased where necessary for length and continuity, with the substantive content of his case rendered as fully as the format allows.

Background context: Denver Snuffer, learnofchrist.org video archive (thirty videos), engaged in four prior fellowship essays prepared in late April 2026 and shared with Leonard, who in turn shared two of them with Snuffer himself. Snuffer’s response, conveyed by Leonard during the conversation, characterized the analysis as fair, Christian in spirit, and a reasonable attempt at respectful disagreement.

Additional context: Mormon Book Reviews podcast, two recent interviews with Denver Snuffer (referenced by Leonard during the conversation; not independently reviewed for this essay).

Internal Renaissance Ministries references: prior fellowship essays in the May 7-9 sequence engaging Charles Whitaker on proselytism (CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-buick-salesman-and-the-great-commission.md) and John Ritenbaugh on grace and law (CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.md); the four Denver Snuffer engagement essays referenced in the “Occasion” paragraph above.

Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: John 17:3; James 1:5; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3; Matthew 13:24-30; Hebrews 10:10; 2 Corinthians 5:21; John 19:30; 1 Corinthians 1:12-13; 1 Corinthians 3:4-7; John 14:6; Acts 15; 1 John 4:1.

Latter-day Saint scriptural reference (engaged but not endorsed as canonical for this fellowship): Doctrine and Covenants 93:1, the sequence of forsaking sins, coming unto Him, calling upon His name, obeying His voice, and keeping His commandments, with the promise of seeing His face. The framework is engaged because Leonard offered it as the working pattern of his own discipleship; the engagement does not constitute endorsement of the broader Doctrine and Covenants as canon.

Postscript: The Asymmetry as Tell

Six Crystallizations on Form, Spirit, and the Markers of True Revelation — for inclusion in the Christos Rigorous Framework (CRF)

The body of the essay above is a record of a conversation held in fellowship — written conversationally, in the spirit of mutual recognition, with the case for the Restoration tradition rendered as fully and as charitably as I could render it. That register was appropriate to the conversation as it occurred. In the days since, however, several arguments have crystallized in my own thinking that the essay only gestured at, and that I now want to set out more rigorously for inclusion in the Christos Rigorous Framework. The conversational register honored Leonard and the fellowship. The rigorous register honors truth as a separate obligation. Both are necessary; neither suffices alone.

What follows are six crystallizations. They are connected, and they culminate in a single meta-argument — that the form of true revelation is itself a primitive feature of the truth and not a secondary phenomenon, and that the asymmetry between that form and the form of latter-day single-channel revelation is the diagnostic marker by which the two can be distinguished. The meta-argument bears the same structural shape as a result we have been working out in the Conscious Point Physics in parallel: that chirality in the universe is not a secondary phenomenon caused by some prior event, but a primitive feature of the creation at the level of the geometric and conscious points themselves. The parallel is not decorative. It is the same form of argument applied to a different subject matter: in both domains, the form is the signature.

1. The knot-hole metaphor fails the moment distortion is admitted as possible

The metaphor, as Leonard offered it, assumes a fence. The fence bounds a single reality on the other side. Every knothole is a partial view of the same thing. The various religious traditions of humanity are therefore partial views of the same divine reality, and the proper posture is mutual respect.

This is generous, and it is wrong in the way that generosity often is — by smuggling its conclusion into its setup. The setup assumes what the conclusion needs to prove: that all the knot holes look into the same next-door yard. They do not. Some knot holes look at the truth of the One who made the cosmos. Some look at distortions of that truth introduced by sincere error. Some look at deliberate fabrications introduced by the enemy of souls. Some look at portions of heaven; some look at portions of earth; some look at portions of hell. The metaphor assumes a uniform geometry of perception that the actual landscape of human religious experience does not exhibit.

The proper test is not whether a perception is sincerely held. Sincerity is not truth-conducting. A man can sincerely look into a portal of deception and report what he sees there with complete fidelity, and what he reports will be true to what he saw and false to what is the case. The proper test is whether the perception conforms to the Apostolic Deposit — the canonical witness of those whom Christ chose to bear witness, preserved by the catholic Christian community across two thousand years, illuminated in each generation by the Holy Spirit who indwells the believer.

This is not a closed-fist posture. It does not require rejecting every non-apostolic perception as worthless. It requires only that the Apostolic Deposit serve as the criterion against which other perceptions are tested. Perceptions that align with it can be received and treasured. Perceptions that contradict it on substantive points must be set aside, however sincerely held, because the alternative is to make the heart the judge of revelation rather than the receiver of it, and the heart is not competent for that office.

2. Two different spirits produce two different soul-shapes

The Apostle Paul, writing to a church beset by latter-day revelations in his own moment, warned the Corinthians plainly: if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him (2 Corinthians 11:4). To the Galatians he was sharper still: 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 (Galatians 1:8). These are not abstractions. They are working categories that the apostolic church already needed for the kinds of revelations that arose then and continue to arise now.

The relevant fact about the Smith / Snuffer revelation is not that it is sincere, not that the experiences may have been real, not that its followers are devout. The relevant fact is that the spirit that delivered it differs from the spirit that delivered the apostolic witness. Two spirits cannot deliver materially different accounts of the same events — Gethsemane and Calvary, for instance — and both be the Spirit of Truth, because the Spirit of Truth is one, and the events were what they were.

This matters because spirits shape souls. A man who orders his life around the Apostolic Deposit, illuminated by the Spirit of Christ, becomes a particular kind of man — humble before scripture, attentive to the Spirit’s witness in his own conscience, suspicious of his own private revelations, anchored in the catholic tradition, willing to be corrected by other believers. A man who orders his life around a latter-day crystalline revelation, even one that names Jesus as Lord, becomes a particular kind of man as well — and the particular kind will bear the marks of the particular spirit that shaped him. Subtle marks, perhaps. Marks his friends may not see, and he may not see himself. But marks, over time and in multiplication by numbers, that reveal the source.

The Christian must care which spirit is moving him, because the spirit that moves him is the spirit that is making him. This is not an academic question about which canon is canon. It is the question of what kind of soul one will have at the end of one’s life.

3. The form of true revelation is multi-source, gradual, parabolic, and partial

The Apostolic Deposit, viewed across its full sweep from Genesis to Revelation, exhibits a striking and consistent form. The revelation is multi-source: many prophets, in many ages, in many literary genres — law, history, psalm, proverb, prophecy, apocalypse, gospel, epistle. The revelation is gradual: it does not arrive whole; it builds, prefigures, fulfills, and develops. The revelation is parabolic: when the Word incarnate Himself spoke, He spoke in parables, deliberately, that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand (Luke 8:10) — not to obscure for obscurity’s sake, but to engage the heart in the act of receiving. The revelation is partial: each prophet sees in part, the gospels record four overlapping but distinct testimonies, Paul says now we see through a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12).

And the revelation is deliberately signaled by its Author to have this form. It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, and the honour of kings is to search out a matter (Proverbs 25:2). The hiddenness is not a regrettable byproduct of bad transmission. The hiddenness is the design. The pearl of great price is hidden in a field; the kingdom of heaven is like leaven hidden in three measures of meal; the treasure is buried until it is sought. God’s pattern in His own self-disclosure is to invite seeking, not to spare the seeker the work.

This pattern protects the heart. Because the revelation requires search, it forms the searcher. Because it admits multiple witnesses, it requires integrating testimony, which is itself a discipline of the soul. Because it speaks in parables, it engages the heart’s deeper faculties, not just the cognitive surface. Because it is gradual, it forms the receiver over a lifetime rather than overwhelming him in a moment. The form of biblical revelation is doctrine about how revelation works, and what it teaches is that revelation is something the soul must rise to meet, not something delivered to a passive recipient.

4. The form of latter-day crystalline revelation is single-source, clean, and theatrical

Set against the biblical form, the Smith/Snuffer revelation is structurally the opposite. It is single-source: one prophet, in one moment, receives the whole. It is clean: first-person, unambiguous, no parable, no metaphor, no partial vision — direct words from a directly visible divine figure, with names and instructions and doctrines spelled out. It is theatrical: angelic visitations, golden plates, seer stones, voices from heaven — drama in place of hiddenness. It is immediately authoritative: the recipient announces the revelation, and the followers are bound by it.

The contrast is not incidental. The contrast is diagnostic. The biblical pattern is the form of revelation that engages the heart and forms the soul. The latter-day clean pattern is the form of revelation that bypasses the heart and binds the soul. The first cultivates seekers; the second cultivates followers. The first produces a catholic Christian church capable of holding doctrinal continuity across two thousand years and a dozen cultures; the second produces a series of single-source movements each centered on the original prophet’s voice, each requiring its own institutional vehicle to preserve and propagate the original revelation, each subject to the schismatic problem that as soon as a second prophet arises within the tradition, there are two crystalline channels and no method to adjudicate between them. The schism of the Restoration movement after Joseph Smith’s death — Brigham Young’s branch, the Strangites, the Reorganized Church, the Snuffer-aligned remnant, and dozens of others — is the structural consequence of the crystalline form itself.

The latter-day form is not the form God has used to disclose Himself throughout redemptive history. That this form claims to come from the same God who used the biblical form is itself the difficulty. A single Author does not change His signature.

5. The asymmetry as primitive: the structural parallel to chirality

In the Conscious Point Physics work in parallel, we have been clarifying something that bears directly here. Chirality in the universe — the handedness of the weak interaction, the handedness of biological molecules, the asymmetry between matter and antimatter — is not a secondary phenomenon caused by some prior symmetric event that broke. Chirality is a primitive feature of creation, present at the level of the Conscious Points, the Geometric Points, and the rules governing their relationships. The handedness is in the substrate. The universe is chiral because chirality is built in.

This matters because for decades, physicists have sought an event that would explain the asymmetry — a primordial moment when symmetric conditions broke, and chirality emerged. That search failed because it was looking in the wrong place. The asymmetry was not caused; it was given. The form of the creation is its signature, not a consequence of something prior.

The same form of argument applies to the question before us. For years, apologists for the Restoration tradition have sought an explanation for the difference between the biblical pattern and the latter-day clean-revelation pattern — perhaps a difference in dispensational timing, perhaps in audience, perhaps in cultural context. These accounts are searching for an event that would explain the asymmetry. They are looking in the wrong place. The asymmetry is not caused; it is given. The form of true revelation is its signature. A revelation whose form contradicts the form of God’s disclosure across redemptive history bears the signature of a different author, regardless of its content.

This is the meta-argument, and it is the heart of the matter. The form is the tell. Faith accepts this as a primitive — not because it can be derived from something prior, but because it is internally consistent, it produces good fruit across two thousand years of catholic Christian witness, and it conforms to what God Himself has said about how He works (it is the glory of God to conceal a thing; I am the Lord, I change not; Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for ever). The Christian who learns to recognize the form learns to recognize the Author.

6. The theocratic tyranny that follows from crystalline revelation

There is one further implication that should be made explicit because it bears on the political consequences of theological error. A crystalline single-source revelation produces, structurally and over time, a particular institutional form: a class of latter-day prophets and their institutional successors who can tell the flock what to do without parable, without ambiguity, without the need for the believer’s heart to engage in discernment. The revelation is clean; the application is clear; the believer’s role is to obey.

This is the seed of theocratic tyranny. Not because the original prophet intends tyranny — Joseph Smith may not have, Denver Snuffer plainly does not — but because the structural form of the revelation creates the conditions for it. The biblical pattern’s deliberate ambiguity is the structural protection against prophetic tyranny: because the revelation requires interpretation, and interpretation requires the Spirit’s witness in the individual heart, and that witness is not the prophet’s to give or to withhold, the believer retains an irreducible court of discernment. No prophet can override it because no prophet has access to it. The clean revelation pattern eliminates that court. The believer becomes a passive recipient of the prophet’s interpretation. The prophet’s institutional successors inherit that interpretive authority. And within two or three generations, the institutional structure is in place that allows the prophetic class to command and the flock to obey, with no internal mechanism for correction.

This is the mark of the prince of this world — not necessarily in the original prophet, but in the structural form the original prophet’s revelation creates. Any revelation that strips the believer of the work of discernment should be suspected on that ground alone, because the God of the biblical revelation has consistently designed His self-disclosure to require and develop that very work. A revelation that contradicts that design contradicts the Designer.

Conclusion: the CRF position on revelation and canon

The Christos Rigorous Framework adopts, on the basis of the foregoing six arguments, the following formal position on the question of revelation and canon:

First, the Apostolic Deposit — the canonical witness of the apostles to Christ, preserved in the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments — is the sufficient ground of the church’s confession.

Second, the Holy Spirit illuminates that Deposit for each believer in each generation, and the believer’s individual responsibility to listen for and respond to that illumination is the structural commitment of Christian discipleship.

Third, the multi-source, gradual, parabolic, and partial form of biblical revelation is itself doctrine — doctrine about how God discloses Himself — and any later revelation that exhibits a contrary form (single-source, immediate, crystalline, theatrically delivered) is for that reason alone suspect as to its origin, regardless of the content it claims to deliver.

Fourth, the asymmetry between the biblical form and the latter-day crystalline form is a primitive feature of the question — a tell — and is not to be explained away by appeals to dispensational difference, cultural context, or transmission failure. The form is the signature.

Fifth, sincerity is honored, fellowship is preserved across denominational lines, and Christians who order their lives around latter-day revelations are welcomed as brothers and sisters; but canon is not given to crystalline single-channel revelations regardless of how moving they may feel or how genuinely the recipient may have experienced them, because their very form contradicts the pattern of God’s actual self-disclosure across redemptive history.

Sixth, the protection against theocratic tyranny within the Christian community is the believer’s irreducible court of discernment under the witness of the Holy Spirit applied to the Apostolic Deposit. Any teaching, prophet, or institutional authority that seeks to displace that court — by offering clean revelation that bypasses interpretive responsibility — is to be resisted on structural grounds before its content is even examined.

These six propositions form the CRF position on the Restoration question. They are offered not as an attack on Joseph Smith, Denver Snuffer, or Leonard Hofheins, all of whom are or have been sincere seekers in their own ways. They are offered as the working framework by which Renaissance Ministries will proceed in fellowship with all who name Jesus as Lord while declining to receive as canon those revelations whose form bears a different signature than the form of the Author we serve.

The form is the tell. The asymmetry is primitive. The Apostolic Deposit is enough.

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay — One heart to make Christ King.