260508 Proselytization – a Proper Posture

by Thomas Abshier | May 8, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Buick Salesman and the Great Commission: On Proselytism by Example and Word, and the Eschatology Underneath

Fellowship Essay | By Thomas Lee Abshier, ND — May 8, 2026

A two-part essay landed in my inbox yesterday from Church of the Great God’s Forerunner publication: Charles Whitaker’s Proselytism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, part one and part 2, originally published in February and March of 2006 and recirculated this week. Whitaker died in 2021. The essay is being read again in 2026 because the question it engages with — what kind of Christian witness is faithful in this cultural moment — is more urgent now than when he wrote it.

Whitaker opens with a memorable extended metaphor. He invites the reader into a car show: a vast convention center where every dealership has set up its display, and where the sensory assault is total. The Lexus stand is bathed in a hundred spotlights, surrounded by sales staff dressed for fashion magazines, glossy brochures, and multimedia loops everywhere. The Audi stand makes its case for racing pedigree; the Jaguar stand insists on its proper British pronunciation. There is popcorn — chemically formulated to be irresistible — to draw foot traffic. The whole place vibrates with the message buy. None of the sellers apologizes for being there.

In a corner near the service entrance, plain and unlit, is the Buick stand. One salesman, plainly dressed, no music, no brochures, no signage. When the customer asks what the car is, the salesman whispers the answer. When the customer asks if it is a good car, the salesman says he likes it. When the customer asks how it compares to the Lexus across the room, the salesman explains that he is not allowed to make such a comparison. When the customer asks about the price, the salesman grows alarmed and warns him that this kind of questioning will get them both into trouble.

The customer backs away in confusion, then breaks into a quiet jog and picks up speed as he leaves the corner.

This, Whitaker says, is how the church has organized its witness in the marketplace of ideas — and the rest of the marketplace knows perfectly well how to make its case for evolution, for abortion, for global warming, for every consumer good and every cultural ideology. Only the gospel is whispered by people who give the impression they would prefer not to be approached.

Whitaker is right about the diagnosis. He is also, I think, only half-right about the cure. This essay is about both the half he sees and the half he doesn’t.

What Whitaker sees rightly

There are at least three substantive things in Whitaker’s argument that the fellowship should sit with carefully before responding.

The first is that the example of a faithful life is foundational, not optional, and not secondary. He grounds this in Deuteronomy 4:5-7 — Moses telling Israel that Gentile peoples who watched Israel keep God’s statutes would say Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. The model is a non-verbal demonstration. Israel was not commissioned in the Old Testament to send missionaries to the surrounding nations. Israel was commissioned to live in such a way that the surrounding nations would notice. Ruth attached herself to Naomi for that reason. Uriah the Hittite served in David’s army for that reason. Ebed-Melech the Ethiopian risked his life for Jeremiah for that reason. The pattern is consistent: a Gentile sees the lived reality of God’s people and voluntarily chooses to come under the same God. This is real. Whitaker is not making it up.

The second is that aggressive, hollow, performative proselytism — the kind Christ denounces in Matthew 23:15 — is real and damnable. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves. That is not a soft denunciation. The Pharisees were energetic missionaries. They covered ground. They made converts. And Christ’s verdict was that their converts ended up worse off than they themselves were, because the system into which they were proselytizing was corrupt. Zeal in the service of a corrupt religion makes the corruption worse, not better. Any Christian who proselytizes within a framework of legalism, hypocrisy, externalism, or coercion produces converts who are damaged by the encounter. Whitaker is right to take this seriously.

The third is that the current global landscape of Christian missions includes real charlatans, real bribery, real manipulation, and real exploitation of vulnerable populations. Some missions offer food only after a religious service is endured. Some offer education only to the children of converts. Some traffic in promises of healing or prosperity that they cannot deliver. B.B. Beach’s code of ethics for missionary work, which Whitaker reproduces, is sober and right: don’t exploit the vulnerable, don’t make false claims of miraculous healing, don’t bribe, don’t ridicule the beliefs of those you are trying to reach, don’t lie about other religions. These are minimum standards of integrity. Christians who fail them are fairly criticized. The fellowship’s recent work on the Ideomotion charter, in which we explicitly committed to non-coercion, informed consent, no exploitation of vulnerability, and truthful claims, aligns substantially with this part of Whitaker’s argument. Where he draws lines around what cannot be done in Christ’s name, we draw the same lines.

So far, so good. The disagreement concerns what comes next.

The eschatology underneath the argument

Whitaker writes from within a particular Christian tradition, and that tradition does some of the work in his argument. Church of the Great God is part of the broader Sabbatarian, Holy-Day-keeping, prophetic-eschatology stream that traces back to Herbert W. Armstrong. One of the distinctive convictions of that tradition is that the great harvest of the human race — the calling, conversion, and instruction of the bulk of humanity — is reserved for the Millennial reign of Christ, after His return. Most people, in this view, are not being called now. The few who are called now are being prepared for service in that millennial future. The work of the present church is therefore relatively limited: live faithfully, keep the law, observe the holy days, prepare oneself, and trust that the great work is coming.

That eschatology is not a small thing. It is doing serious load-bearing work in Whitaker’s argument. If the great harvest is millennial, then aggressive evangelism in the current age is at best premature and at worst presumptuous — an attempt to do God’s work on God’s behalf, ahead of God’s timing. Example becomes the natural posture, because example is what one does while waiting. Whitaker explicitly tells us this is his picture: proselytism by example will be the norm in the Millennium, he writes, with the millennial reign expected to restore the same posture that obtained when God ruled Israel directly. The implicit corollary is that proselytism by word, in the present age, is the exception — reserved for those specifically commissioned, like the apostles. Ordinary believers are exemplars, not preachers.

The Christos framework does not share that eschatology. We are not waiting for the Millennium to engage the cultural moment. We hold, with the broader evangelical and Pentecostal tradition, that the Great Commission was given to the whole church for the whole age, that the harvest is now and ongoing, and that ye shall be witnesses unto me (Acts 1:8) was spoken to the whole apostolic body and through them to the whole church. The harvest is real now. The captives are real now. The bondage of the inner life, the lostness of the public square, the moral confusion of the age — these are not waiting for the Millennium to be addressed. The lifting of the yoke is offered now. Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). The cultural moment is exactly the moment for the work.

This is not a small disagreement. It is the difference between a posture of patient waiting and a posture of present urgency. Both can be held by serious Christians. The fellowship has chosen the second.

What scripture actually witnesses to

If we read scripture without the millennial-deferral assumption, the picture that emerges is not example versus proclamation. It is both, woven together, with neither subordinated to the other.

The Old Testament prophets did not, in general, live as quiet exemplars whose lives drew Gentiles to Israel. They were often the loudest people in the room. Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression (Isaiah 58:1). Jeremiah wept aloud in the streets of Jerusalem and was thrown into a cistern for it. Jonah’s entire commission — the very commission Whitaker mentions in passing — was to preach to a Gentile city: Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me (Jonah 1:2). Jonah did not bear silent witness in Nineveh; he walked through the city declaring forty days, and the city would be overthrown. Ezekiel was made a watchman, and the watchman’s job is to warn them from me (Ezekiel 3:17), with an explicit penalty for failure to warn. The prophets were rarely subtle.

The New Testament is even more direct. John the Baptist did not live a quiet life of example in the wilderness; he cried aloud, named Herod’s sin, and lost his head for the volume. Peter at Pentecost did not let his light shine quietly before the assembled crowd; he stood up and preached to about three thousand souls who were converted that day. Paul on Mars Hill did not wait to be asked; he engaged the Athenian philosophers directly, named their unknown God, and called them to repentance. At his trial, Stephen did not soften the diagnosis; he traced the history of Israel’s hardness of heart through the prophets and was stoned for it. The apostolic pattern is relentless verbal proclamation, paired with — never substituted for — lives of integrity and love.

And what of the example texts that Whitaker cites? Matthew 5:16 is one. So is 1 Thessalonians 1:7-9. Both deserve to be read in full rather than read selectively. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. The verse has two clauses joined by that and and. The shining is for the seeing; the seeing is for the glorifying. Glorifying the Father is not silent. The verse drives toward proclamation, not away from it. The example exists in order that the Father be named by the one who lit the candle, or by the one who watched it burn and asked who fueled it.

And 1 Thessalonians 1 is not, on careful reading, a text about example replacing preaching. It is a text about example amplifying preaching. Paul writes to the Thessalonians that their reputation has preceded him as he travels: he no longer needs to introduce them or explain what happened in their city, because the people in Macedonia and Achaia are already telling him about them. The Thessalonians’ lives have become a kind of viral testimony — but a testimony that travels because everyone already knows that Paul preached the gospel there and that these people received it. The lived reality and the spoken word are working in concert. Paul’s mission was no less verbal because the Thessalonians’ lives were so visible. It was more effective because the lives confirmed the words.

The dichotomy between example and proclamation, in other words, is not a biblical dichotomy. It is a tradition-specific dichotomy that arises when one accepts a particular eschatology about the timing of the harvest. Without that eschatology, the dichotomy dissolves.

The deeper diagnosis of the cultural moment

Whitaker’s car-show metaphor is brilliant, and I do not want to lose it. But I want to redirect his diagnosis.

The dominant Christian failure of our cultural moment is not, I think, over-proselytism. It is not that the church is full of Pharisaical zealots making twice-the-son-of-hell converts. It is not that we have too many missionaries crossing land and sea. The dominant failure is timidity — the Buick salesman who whispers, who refuses to compare, who hopes the customer will leave him alone. The American church, broadly, has accepted the cultural offer not to be one of the loud booths in the convention center. We have been quiet for a long time. The result is what Whitaker himself laments: a marketplace of ideas in which evolution has glossy brochures, abortion has sales staff, and Christianity has an embarrassed man near the service entrance who hopes to keep his head down.

The faithful response to charlatans is not no evangelism. It is good evangelism. The faithful response to bribery is not silence. It is integrity in proclamation. The faithful response to manipulation is not retreat into example-only. It is example and honest naming, both held with discipline. Whitaker’s emphasis on example as foundational is true. His implicit suggestion that example can stand alone in the present age is, I think, a counsel of unintended retreat at exactly the moment retreat is the wrong move.

In his metaphor, the Buick salesman is not a victim of his neighbors’ aggressive marketing. He is a participant in the conditions that have made him irrelevant. The remedy is not to whisper more carefully. The remedy is to recover the conviction that we have something to say, that the thing we have to say is true, and that saying it clearly is itself an act of love toward the one who hears.

The fellowship’s working answer

The fellowship has been working through exactly this calibration in another context for the past several days. The Ideomotion ministry charter — the first ministry-business in the Renaissance Ministries ecosystem, serving the disabled and mobility-impaired — went through three drafts in two days, and the trajectory of the drafts is a small case study in the question Whitaker raises.

The first draft (v0.1) was Thomas-the-founder’s first instinct after a phone call with Charlie: be unapologetic, name the King of the Universe, refuse to soft-pedal, and recognize that the customer is in front of you because they want what you offer. That instinct was, I think now, partly Whitaker’s diagnosis of the Buick salesman correctly received and partly an over-correction of it. The instinct was right that timidity is not a Christian virtue. The instinct was wrong: the answer to timidity is not rhetorical maximalism.

The second and third drafts (v0.2, v0.3) revised the working position toward something more mature: sincere, unconcealed, service-oriented, never coercive. The ministry identity is not soft-pedaled. The customer is told plainly that Ideomotion operates under the authority of Renaissance Ministries, that the work is consciously rooted in Christian conviction, and that fellowship and prayer are available upon request. The customer is also told plainly that none of this is a condition of service, that no one is treated differently based on belief or non-belief, and that the spiritual conversation can be declined without consequence. Integral and adversarial are different things. The ministry character is integral. The adversarial posture is renounced.

That working answer is, I want to suggest, what a faithful application of Whitaker’s principles produces when joined to a serious Great Commission urgency. The example floor is preserved: the device must work, the rehab must help, and the customer must be honored. The proclamation is also preserved: the King of the Universe is named; the gospel is available; the fellowship is offered. Neither is sacrificed. Neither is shouted at the expense of the other. The Buick is a perfectly good car; the salesman knows it; he is willing to say so; he refuses to deceive or manipulate; he treats the customer with full respect, whether or not the customer buys. That is not the Buick salesman of Whitaker’s metaphor. It is what the Buick salesman should have been.

Crescendo

The verse Whitaker himself closes on is the right verse for this fellowship to close on too. It deserves the full reading.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. — Matthew 5:16

The light shines. The works are seen. The Father is glorified. Three movements, in that order, joined by that and and. Whitaker is right that the candle is lit by a faithful life. He is right that the seeing comes through the lived reality, not through the megaphone. But the verse does not stop at the seeing. It drives toward the glorifying, and glorifying the Father is not silent. It is the moment in which the flame burns in the candle that is named.

Both, in their proper measure. Example as the floor. Proclamation as the integral identity. Neither timidity nor maximalism, but the steady, costly, joyful work of being a people whose lives are visible enough to be asked about, and whose words are clear enough to answer.

That is what I want for Renaissance Ministries. That is what I want for Ideomotion. That is what I want for every fellowship gathering, every essay, every Christos Voting Network conversation, every interaction with the people God has put in front of us. The Buick salesman’s whisper is not the end of the story. Neither is the Lexus stand’s barker. The end of the story is a people who shine, and works that are seen, and a Father who is glorified — by the visible witness of the candle, and by the audible naming of whose flame it is.

We are not waiting for the Millennium to do this work. We are doing it now, in the marketplace of ideas as it actually exists, with the integrity Whitaker rightly demands and the courage he sometimes seems to defer.

Sources

Charles Whitaker, Proselytism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Part One), Forerunner, February 15, 2006. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1114.

Charles Whitaker, Proselytism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Part Two), Forerunner, March 10, 2006. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1137.

Both articles received via cgg.org email distribution, May 8, 2026.

Lawrence Uzzell, “Don’t Call It Proselytism,” First Things, October 2004 (cited by Whitaker).

B.B. Beach, “Evangelism and Proselytism: Religious Liberty and Ecumenical Challenges,” International Religious Liberty Association, irla.org (cited by Whitaker).

United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 18 and 19, December 1948.

Renaissance Ministries internal references: IDM_ideomotion_ministry/IDM_charter.md (current charter, v0.3) for the §6.5 Public Religious Identity working position discussed in the closing sections; founders_vision/260430_three_level_stronghold_framework.md for the broader proclamation-and-deliverance framework.

Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Deuteronomy 4:5-7; Matthew 23:15; Matthew 5:16; Matthew 28:19; Acts 1:8; Acts 9:15; 2 Corinthians 6:2; Isaiah 58:1; Jonah 1:2; Ezekiel 3:17; 1 Thessalonians 1:7-9.

260506 Psychoanalysis versus Faith and Works

by Thomas Abshier | May 6, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Loosening the Spell, Lifting the Yoke: On Stephen Grosz, the Inner Life, and the Cross

Fellowship Essay – 5/6/2026

Daphne Merkin has a long, careful profile of the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz in the New York Times — occasioned by his new book, Love’s Labor, and his earlier bestseller, The Examined Life. Merkin is one of the most thoughtful writers we have on the inner life; Grosz is one of its more humane practitioners. The piece is worth reading in full, and the books are worth the reader’s time. I commend both before I take up the question that the profile pressed on me.

The question is this. Grosz, an American who has practiced in London since 1987, says something near the end of the article that I believe bridges the gap between the psychoanalytic and Biblical perspectives. He observes that in some families, suffering operates as a kind of spell — it dominates relationships, becomes a child’s identity, becomes safe by being familiar, and the person caught in the suffering stays in it because that is what they know. He says, with admirable honesty, that the central clinical problem in psychoanalysis is helping someone who is unconsciously determined to undo their own improvement. And he says, more hopefully, that if the patient can be brought to look at the suffering the way he and Merkin were looking at it together in that conversation, the spell can begin to weaken.

That is a true sentence. It is also an incomplete one. I want to say what is true in it, what psychoanalysis sees that most of the modern world has stopped seeing, and what is missing — what the Cross does that the analyst’s chair, however well occupied, cannot.

What Grosz sees that the world has forgotten

Begin with the steelman. We live in what Merkin rightly calls post-psychoanalytic times. The interior life, the kind that requires patient attention to oneself and another person across years rather than minutes, has been displaced by symptom-driven therapies promising relief in eight to twelve weeks, by pharmaceuticals promising relief in eight to twelve hours, and by the externalized confessional theatre of social media, where the secret is not examined but performed. Whatever else psychoanalysis is, it is a holdout against the idea that the self is shallow enough to be repaired in a season.

Grosz’s particular gift, evident in both books, is a refusal to play the wizard. He does not pretend to know more than he knows. His signature formulation — “two people not knowing together” — names the analytic relationship as a shared expedition into territory neither person yet sees clearly. That is not a small thing. The patient comes because she cannot find a way of telling her story; in the absence of that telling, Grosz observes, the story tells her — through dreams, through symptoms, through behavior she does not understand. The work is to bring the buried thing into language, in the company of someone who is paying attention.

Anyone who has sat with another human being whose life is being run from below will recognize the diagnosis. The patient is not lying. He does not know. The story is telling him, and he cannot hear it.

Grosz also sees something most of our current therapeutic vocabularies obscure: that the past is not undone by being understood. He says this plainly. The damage done in childhood is a historical fact; it cannot be erased. What can change is the patient’s relationship to that damage — what was once lived in isolation can now be held in a relationship and thought about together, without the patient being overwhelmed. That is a smaller hope than the culture currently sells. It is also more honest. Freud’s old definition of analytic success — converting hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness — is the same hope, stated more grimly.

This much is true, and Christians who dismiss the whole enterprise as godless self-absorption have not actually engaged it. Grosz is doing what a great many pastors used to do, before the office of pastor was hollowed out into program management. He is sitting still, listening with what one of Merkin’s friends, picking up an old psychoanalytic phrase, calls the third ear, and refusing to let the patient be alone with the story he cannot yet tell.

The spell and the stronghold

Now: the convergence. Grosz says suffering is sometimes a spell. Scripture says it is sometimes a stronghold. The territory described is the same territory.

Paul writes to the Corinthians: For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). The Greek word translated ” strongholds “ — ochuroma — names a fortified place, a fortress, a structure built up over time that holds something inside and keeps something outside. Paul is not speaking metaphorically about a mood. He is naming an architecture.

The architecture Grosz sees from his chair is the same architecture Paul sees in the Corinthians. Patterns of suffering are built. They are inhabited. They are defended. They are familiar — and, as Grosz rightly says, what the captive knows best is what the captive returns to. Galatians puts it as a yoke: Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1). Bondage is not always imposed from outside in chains. It is also chosen from inside, again and again, because the yoke fits the shoulder it has already shaped.

Two vocabularies examine the same phenomenon. The vocabularies are not interchangeable, but they overlap. Where they overlap, Grosz is genuinely seeing what is there. Where they do not — and they do not — is where the gospel begins.

What psychoanalysis cannot do

The structural difference is this. Psychoanalysis loosens. The gospel lifts.

A test for the distinction: ask what each system has available to it as resources. The analyst has the patient, his own training, the years of relationship, and the slow accumulated work of language and attention. The psychotherapist provides the patient with the experience of walking with a traveling companion. The trained and empathic listener provides the patient with, finally, being accompanied. The article provides ample evidence that the psychoanalytic intervention is beneficial. The boy named Thomas in Grosz’s earlier book was so badly damaged in childhood that his life as an adult was permanently compromised; he calls Grosz several times a year, decades later, asking whether Grosz remembers him, and Grosz says yes. That is real. It is also, by Grosz’s own admission, intermittent. The damage is not undone. It is held.

The Christian, at the bottom of the same dilemma, has more.

The Christian has, first, an account of why the architecture is real and not merely habitual. If reality is what materialism says it is — atoms in the void, the self an emergent illusion — then strongholds are nothing more than ruts in a brain that will eventually decay. There is no ontological weight to them. They are inertia. But if reality is what the Bible describes and what the Conscious Point framework articulates in a contemporary register — if every point of the creation is sustained moment by moment by the consciousness of God, and if the moral landscape is a real feature of that creation rather than a projection onto it — then the captivity of the inner life is real. It is bondage to something with a structure. The spell has weight. And what has weight can be lifted.

The Christian has, second, a deliverer. Paul’s strongholds are pulled down, and the agent of the pulling is named: the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God. The Christian is not asked to free himself by his own examination of himself. He is told that another has come into the territory of his bondage and broken the architecture from inside. This is not a thing the analyst can offer. The analyst can sit with the patient in the dark; only Christ has been into the dark for the patient and come back.

Grosz writes, beautifully, that a journey to the underworld is a necessary part of every analysis — to see the light, you have to go down into the dark. The image is older than psychoanalysis; it runs through Dante and through the older mystics, and behind those, through the descent of Christ into hell that the creed names. But the Christian descent is not symmetrical with the analytic one. In the analytic version, the patient and the analyst go down together and bring back what they can. In the Christian version, the descent has already been made by Someone who did not have to go and went anyway, and the patient is invited not to descend in his own strength but to receive what was won there. He hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13).

This is the difference between loosening and lifting. The spell loosens when the captive is seen. The yoke lifts when the captive is redeemed.

The tempered hope and the better hope

At the end of the conversation, Merkin asked Grosz what he thinks makes for actual happiness. His answer is bittersweet and worth lingering on. Happiness, he said, is a kind of sweetness in desiring what one already has — held with full awareness of how fragile it is, how brief, how limited. Happiness is the capacity to hold reality without needing it to be otherwise.

There is something deeply honest in that, and something deeply Christian-adjacent. Gratitude for what is given, sobriety about its passing, refusal of the demand that life be other than it is — these are old virtues, and they are real. They are most of what the Stoics had. They are roughly what a thoughtful pagan, given enough time and decency, can come to.

But they are bounded by exactly the limits Grosz names: fragility, brevity, limit. Happiness defined this way is the best one can do if the things one has are the only things there are. If the relationships will end in death, the body will fail, the mind will dim, the work will be forgotten — then the wise course is indeed to hold what one has lightly and cherish it while it lasts. That is the wisdom of the underworld. It is what one comes back from the dark with when no one else has been down there for you.

The Christian hope is structurally different. It is not the absence of those losses; it is the conviction that the losses are not final. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:17-18). Paul is not denying the losses — he names them. He is saying that they are not the whole picture, because the picture has a horizon that Grosz’s framework cannot include without ceasing to be Grosz’s framework.

The post-psychoanalytic age does not have less suffering than Freud’s age. It has, if anything, more. What it has less of is the conviction that the suffering means anything beyond itself, or that anything stronger than human attention is available to address it. Grosz, to his credit, has resisted the cheapening of attention. He has not — and he could not, working within the discipline he has — offered the deeper resource. That belongs to the gospel.

What I have actually seen

I have practiced naturopathic medicine and incorporated Christian counseling in that practice since 1989. I have sat across from people whose patterns of pain were installed in childhood and have run their adult lives. I have watched what happens when those patterns are loosened — by attention, by being seen, by a counselor or a friend or a wife or a husband, finally hearing what the person was trying to say without being able to. The loosening is real. Lives become survivable. People who had been alone in their suffering are less alone in it.

I have also watched what happens when those patterns are lifted — when the same person comes to understand that the One who made them has personally come into the bondage, paid what they could not pay, and broken the yoke from the inside. That is a different event. It does not always abolish the residue of the damage; sometimes the limp remains, as it did literally for Jacob and figuratively for Thomas in Grosz’s book. But the captivity itself is finished. The self is no longer running from below. The patient is no longer the one telling himself the story; the Spirit is telling a new story, with the old one folded into it as testimony rather than as wound.

Both events are real. Both are good. The first is what a faithful, attentive, patient analyst can offer, and what we should honor when it is offered well. The second is what only Christ does. Not “Christ plus psychoanalysis,” and not “psychoanalysis as a substitute for Christ,” but the recognition that one is a tool, the other is the deliverance. We are not asked to choose between honoring Grosz’s craft and confessing the gospel. We are asked to see clearly what each is, what each can do, and what each cannot.

Faith and Works

While a miraculous transcendence of burdens is what we want and is available, my experience is that faith in the completed work of Christ is sometimes all that is required, but in most cases, the process that I have seen produce the most consistent results is a radical adoption of new eyes. The pain of childhood, the trauma of violence, the loss of ability through disease or age, the distress of an abusive or unfulfilling relationship, etc., are all solvable in some form.

There are different domains of life; there is the realm of God creating the universe, where He has that which he wants and does not want to experience within Himself. The realm of the God and the not God, but was required to create and accommodate to have a relationship with a peer who had made the same choices as He. As the sole existence, God relates only to Himself, and everything within His being He feels, unless He turns His attention from it and chooses to forget/ignore. If God has the ability to feel, to prefer, and to choose, He has a nature; He wants to be in a satisfying peer relationship; and He must allow His creations the same capabilities as Himself, at least in resonance as a microcosm of His totality.

God, as the source of all, has in His nature the possibility of all possibilities. But to create a creation, those possibilities had to be limited to non-mutually exclusive possibilities. Thus, He established rules that would allow the full spectrum of experience of His being. If God is love, and there is no shadow of turning within Him, then there must be a polarity which He never turns away from, and hence the possibility of one that He could turn from. In other words, God chose love, the never-failing turning toward relationship, as opposed to the fickle, which he turned away from.  Thus, to mirror the almighty, God must create a universe that allows for all the things He is not, so that man can choose to be like Him as a reflection of character and affinity.  It is for this reason that we are put in this time of trial, in these bodies of flesh, subjected to vanity, that we might overcome.

It is this overcoming that we as humans must rise to. The faith is that we can overcome, that we can transform, that we can be new creatures in Christ. In the psychoanalyst’s chair, the counselor guides the counselee through the process of transformation. The process is not obscure or esoteric in its basics, but it is often invisible to those afflicted reated had all the possibilities of the ruleset of creation.

The crescendo

So I commend Stephen Grosz’s book — both his books — to anyone who wants to take seriously the architecture of the inner life. I commend Daphne Merkin’s profile, which is itself an act of careful attention to a careful man. And I commend, at a register beyond either of them, what was promised long before the analyst’s office was invented:

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. — 2 Corinthians 10:3-5

The spell is real. The stronghold is real. The yoke is real. So is the One who has come into the dark for us, and broken the architecture from inside, and brought back the captives — not to a life merely loosened, but to a life made free.

That is the bet I am making. That is what I have seen. That is the difference I want named clearly when we talk, in church and in clinic and in fellowship, about what is on offer for the inner life of a wounded human being.

We are not asked to choose between attention and deliverance. We are asked to know which is which, and to receive both for what they are.

Sources

Daphne Merkin, profile of Stephen Grosz on the publication of Love’s Labor, The New York Times, May 2026.

Stephen Grosz, Love’s Labor (2026).

Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (2013).

Renaissance Ministries internal reference: Three-Level Stronghold Framework: Spiritual, Individual, Institutional (April 30, 2026), founders_vision/260430_three_level_stronghold_framework.md.

Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: 2 Corinthians 10:3-5; 2 Corinthians 4:17-18; Galatians 5:1; Colossians 1:13.

260505 Trump and Iran War

by Thomas Abshier | May 5, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Cards at the Wrong Table: A Christos Civitas Reading of Friedman on Trump, Iran, and the A.I. Threshold

Fellowship Essay | May 5, 2026

Source: Thomas L. Friedman, “Who Really Has the Cards? Trump, Iran or A.I.?” The New York Times, May 1, 2026.

To the Fellowship —

Thomas Friedman’s article on Trump’s poker-game framing of great-power competition carries a lesson that goes deeper than Friedman himself articulates, and it is a lesson our framework — the one we have been developing through the eight strongholds essay and the gospel-as-radical-force discussions — is equipped to name precisely. The article’s immediate argument is sound: Trump misunderstands asymmetric warfare, has bet the American position on a blockade of Iran’s oil exports without understanding Iran’s capacity to hold out, and has failed to grasp that small powers now have the ability to inflict mass disruption on the global order through cheap tools (drones, cyberattacks, AI-enabled operations) that overturn the traditional military calculus. By that calculus, America and Israel should have crushed Iran. That they have not is evidence that Trump is playing poker with chips he does not understand while his opponent holds cards he has not even noticed are on the table.

But the deeper lesson — the one our framework allows us to name — is that Trump’s misunderstanding is not primarily a failure of information or calculation. It is a failure that emerges from a particular spiritual captivity operating at three levels simultaneously: at the level of Trump’s own individual captivity, at the level of the institutional machinery that has captured him and mobilized him, and at the level of the demonic stronghold that both Trump and the institutions that service him are functioning as vehicles for. And that spiritual captivity is not unique to Trump. It is systemic, reaching across both political parties, across the entire apparatus of American power, and into the very infrastructure that is now being weaponized against us.

I want this essay to walk through Friedman’s argument carefully, acknowledge what is right in it, and then ask what Friedman himself does not ask: what is the actual nature of the captivity that produces this configuration, and what does it mean for the fellowship that is trying to build the Christos Civitas in a world where this particular stronghold is expressing itself at civilizational scale?

I. The Thucydidean Assumption and What It Reveals

Trump’s habit of framing geopolitical competition in poker terms is not merely a rhetorical tic. It is a window into how Trump thinks power works, and it is the window into a much larger operating assumption that runs through the entire American establishment, across both political parties.

The assumption is the Thucydidean assumption: The strong take what they will, the weak endure what they must, and Justice is spoken of only between equals. This is the natural pattern of fallen humanity absent God’s restraint. It operates through a logic: (1) the strong define their needs as necessities, (2) the weak are redefined as obstacles, (3) normal principles of justice are suspended because the situation is “exceptional,” (4) the weak must endure whatever the strong impose.

This logic has no natural stopping point. It was present in the Melian Dialogue. It was present in lebensraum. It was present in the COVID response. It is present in every iteration of American great-power thinking that assumes that if we are bigger, stronger, better-resourced, and better-organized, we will prevail.

Trump’s poker metaphor is the Thucydidean assumption expressed in metaphor: you win by controlling the most chips, by having the best hand, by possessing the resources and resolve to force your will on the table. The assumption is so foundational to his thinking that he cannot imagine a world that operates on different principles. He cannot imagine that Iran is not playing poker. He cannot imagine that the asymmetric-warfare paradigm has already fundamentally reshaped the game itself.

But here is what our framework allows us to see: the Thucydidean assumption is not a miscalculation. It is a spiritual stronghold. It is what happens when human beings, in the absence of alignment with God’s nature, operate on the logic of domination. And this stronghold has captured not just Trump but the entire apparatus of American power — intelligence agencies, military establishments, both political parties, and the media ecosystems that feed the established order.

II. The Stronghold at Three Levels

Let me name what Friedman’s article reveals when we apply our three-level framework.

Level 1: Spiritual

The Thucydidean logic is a principality — an operating spirit that says: “Power is concentration. Victory goes to the biggest, strongest, best-organized competitor. If you are not winning, you have not brought enough force to bear.” This spirit is opposed to the Kingdom of God, which operates on completely different principles: multiplication through sacrifice, strength through submission, power through service.

The stronghold has a name in our framework: Concentrated Power as Ultimate Good. It captures human beings by offering them a sense of control — if we are strong enough, organized enough, resourced enough, we can determine outcomes. It is seductive because it offers autonomy and control. It is destructive because it produces fragility, not strength.

Level 2: Individual

Trump is captured by this stronghold. Not in the sense that Trump invented it — he did not. He simply expresses it more visibly and with less restraint than the establishment politicians who are captured by the same stronghold but constrained by norms of speech. Trump’s captivity is obvious; theirs is normal. But it is the same stronghold.

The pastoral response here is crucial: Trump is not the enemy. Trump is the victim. The stronghold that has him is the enemy. And because Trump is the victim of the stronghold, he is rescuable. He is a human being made in the image of God, purchased by Christ’s blood, capable of being freed from the captivity.

But he cannot be freed by argument. He cannot be freed by logical demonstration that his approach is failing — he will simply interpret the failure as a sign that he has not brought enough force to bear, and will escalate. The only force adequate to the stronghold is the gospel itself, received and lived.

Level 3: Institutional

The Friedman article reveals something crucial at the institutional level: The institutions of American power have been systematically structured to activate and mobilize the Concentrated-Power stronghold among their constituents, their personnel, and their policy frameworks.

The military establishment has built its entire identity around the assumption that superiority in firepower produces victory. Intelligence agencies have built their entire justification around the assumption that control of information produces control of outcomes. Both political parties have organized their strategies around the assumption that their side can win if it brings enough force to bear — either military force (Republican) or coercive institutional force (Democratic).

When an institutional structure reliably activates a stronghold, rewards the expression of the stronghold, and benefits from the continuation of the stronghold, that institution becomes a vehicle for the stronghold, regardless of whether any individual in the institution intends this.

This is the institutional accountability question: To the extent that the Department of Defense, the CIA, the State Department, and both major political parties have organized themselves around the principle that American dominance flows from concentrated power, they are functioning as vehicles for this stronghold. They did not invent the stronghold, but they have built infrastructure that systematically deepens it.

III. What the Stronghold Reveals About American Character

Here is where the essay asks: what is this moment revealing? And the answer is: it is revealing that the entire American establishment, for seventy years, has been operating under an assumption that is now being tested and found wanting.

The assumption was: If we are strong enough, organized enough, and disciplined enough, we can control the outcome.

The test is the asymmetric-warfare paradigm, where small, distributed, asymmetric actors now have the ability to impose costs on the powerful faster than the powerful can defend against them. The test reveals that the assumption is false.

But the revelation is not primarily military. It is spiritual. The revelation is that concentrated power — the entire logic of great-power competition — is incompatible with reality’s actual structure. The more power you accumulate, the more expensive it becomes to defend. The more centralized your systems, the more catastrophic their failure when breached. The more dominant you become, the more incentive every smaller actor has to find ways to make your dominance unbearable.

Christ told us this two thousand years ago: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. The kingdom of God has never operated on the logic of concentrated power. It has always operated on the logic of distributed power, multiplication through sacrifice, strength through submission.

The world is now teaching us the same lesson in material terms. And what is being revealed about American character is this: We are still operating on an assumption that reality has already refuted.

IV. The Institutional Question: Fragility as Spiritual Choice

Friedman’s Mythos case reveals something at the institutional level that deserves extended naming: institutions built on the assumption of concentrated power are by their nature fragile.

The more power you concentrate, the more points of vulnerability you create. The more centralized your systems, the more catastrophic the failure when a single point is breached. The security that concentrated power seems to offer is an illusion. The actual security comes from distribution, redundancy, resilience, and the capacity to function even when attacked.

But here is what our framework allows us to see: this fragility is not accidental. It is the natural expression of a system built on the rejection of God’s nature.

God’s nature is characterized by distributed intelligence — the Holy Spirit present in every believer, not concentrated in a priesthood. God’s nature is characterized by multiplication through sacrifice — one person’s death producing resurrection life for many. God’s nature is characterized by strength through submission — the cross is the ultimate display of power achieved through apparent weakness.

A system built on the opposite principles — concentrated power, hoarding of resources, strength through domination — is naturally fragile because it is built against the grain of reality. It is living in contradiction to the way the universe actually works.

And when that system is tested, it breaks. Not because the people in it are stupid or weak, but because the principles it operates on are wrong.

V. The Real Question: What Should the Fellowship Do Differently?

Friedman’s article ends with a proposal that the United States and China should cooperate to control the proliferation of intelligence-age tools. This proposal is sensible from a realist geopolitical perspective. It is almost certainly necessary to prevent the worst outcomes. And it is almost certainly impossible.

Why? Because cooperation of that sort requires the kind of institutional coordination and mutual trust that asymmetric warfare is designed to destroy. If you believe that concentrated power wins, you will not voluntarily limit your power. You will hoard the tools that give you advantage. You will defect on any agreement that restricts your options.

But here is the real question the article should prompt in the fellowship: not “what should America do?” but “what should we do differently?”

Because the fellowship is, in a small way, attempting to build institutions on completely different principles. We are attempting to build institutions based not on concentrated power but on distributed alignment with God’s nature. We are attempting to operate on the logic of gospel transformation, not coercive control. We are attempting to build resilience through spiritual coherence rather than resilience through military might.

And the fellowship should be asking: what does Friedman’s article reveal about what we must do, and must not do, if we are serious about building the Christos Civitas?

We must not replicate the stronghold. We must not build institutions that activate the Concentrated-Power stronghold even in different form. If we build a “Christian institution” that operates on the logic of domination, control, centralized authority, and coercive compliance, we have not built a Kingdom institution. We have built a Satanic institution wearing a Christian mask.

We must build institutions that can function under attack. Because they will be attacked. And if our institutions are fragile, they will break. So we must build with redundancy, distribution, resilience, and the capacity to operate even when the centralized resources are cut off.

We must prioritize spiritual coherence over institutional size. The Concentrated-Power stronghold whispers: “bigger is better, scale is the measure of success.” But the gospel operates on different principles. A small group of believers aligned with God’s nature is more powerful than a large institution operating on the world’s principles. Jesus sent out twelve. Paul sent out pairs.

We must be honest about what we are building. We are not building “a better America.” We are not building “Christian civilization as a replacement for secular civilization.” We are building the Kingdom of Heaven — a civilization organized around the principle that God is everything, that alignment with His nature is the only genuine power, that multiplication happens through sacrifice, and that the ultimate victory belongs to the God who submitted to death and rose again.

This is not a subtle difference. It is the difference between trying to beat the world at its own game and trying to build a completely different game.

VI. The Wheat and the Tares: Distinguishing the Stronghold from the Person

One final point deserves explicit naming, because Friedman’s article, in trying to understand Trump’s error, risks a particular kind of spiritual confusion.

Trump is not the tare. The stronghold is the tare. Trump is the wheat that has been captured by the tare. The parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30) is not a sorting of people into good and bad categories. It is a sorting of spirits from people. When the stronghold lifts, the person remains — still human, still image-bearing, still capable of redemption.

This matters for the fellowship because it determines whether our response is contempt or rescue. If we believe Trump is the tare, our response will be contempt — he is an enemy to be eliminated. If we believe the Concentrated-Power stronghold is the tare and Trump is the wheat, our response will be rescue — we will see Trump as a victim of the stronghold, capable of being freed.

The same applies to everyone captured by this stronghold across all institutions and all levels of power. The military officer who has given his life to the principle that strength comes from firepower is not the enemy; the stronghold that has captured him is. The intelligence officer who has dedicated his career to the principle that information control produces security is not the enemy; the stronghold is. The politician who believes that their side can win if it brings enough force to bear is not the enemy; the stronghold is.

And the pastoral task is the same at every level: rescue through gospel transformation, not elimination through contempt.

VII. What the Fellowship Should Be Attending To

Friedman’s article points to several practical questions that the Christos Civitas movement should be wrestling with:

First, the question of what we promise. Friedman’s article assumes that the problem to be solved is how to maintain American dominance in a changing strategic landscape. But the Gospel does not promise dominance. The Gospel promises Presence — the Companion through whatever conditions emerge. And if we are serious about offering an alternative to the world’s logic, we need to be clear about what we are offering: not victory in the world’s sense, but alignment with God, peace that the world cannot account for, strength to endure what is unbearable. This is a higher offer than American dominance. But it is not the offer Friedman is looking for, and it is not the offer the world is looking for. So we must be clear about who we are offering it to, and we must not confuse the offer.

Second, the question of institutional design. If the Concentrated-Power stronghold produces institutional fragility, then the institutions we build must operate on different principles. This is not a small matter. It means thinking carefully about authority structures, decision-making processes, resource allocation, and the relationship between leadership and membership. It means asking: at every point where we are tempted to concentrate authority, to hoard information, to reserve power to ourselves — we must ask whether we are replicating the stronghold we are trying to overcome. The test is: does this institutional structure serve the Gospel, or does it serve the logic of domination?

Third, the question of what transformation actually looks like. The article reveals that Trump’s captivity is deep. He cannot imagine a world that operates on different principles. And he is not alone. The entire establishment shares this captivity. Breaking free from it requires not just intellectual assent but spiritual transformation — the kind of transformation that only the Gospel produces. So the question for the fellowship is: are we prepared to offer that transformation? Are we prepared to spend the time, the resources, the emotional labor required to help people see the world differently? Or are we just going to argue with them?

Fourth, the question of time and scale. The institutional force arrayed against the Kingdom is enormous. The Concentrated-Power stronghold is deeply embedded in every structure of authority in contemporary civilization. And the fellowship is small. We do not have the resources to outpower this stronghold through institutional counter-capture. So what is our actual strategy? How do we scale transformation? The answer lies in the Gospel itself — in the power of personal transformation that becomes visible, that becomes contagious, that multiplies through sacrifice. But this requires patience. It requires faith that God’s timeline is not our timeline. It requires the kind of faithfulness that plays the long game.

VIII. Closing Reflection: The Real Cards on the Table

Friedman asks: who really has the cards? Trump, Iran, or AI?

The answer is: none of them. And all of them. The cards are diffusing. The game is changing. The rules are being rewritten. And nobody — not Trump, not Iran, not the AI companies, not the American government — actually understands what is happening.

But the fellowship understands something Friedman does not: the game itself is becoming irrelevant. The logic that has governed power for millennia — the strong take what they will, the weak endure what they must — is being revealed as false at the very moment when its collapse is most visible.

And in that moment of revelation, there is an opportunity. An opportunity to build institutions on completely different principles. An opportunity to demonstrate that there is a power greater than concentrated force. An opportunity to witness to the Gospel in a world that is watching the old certainties crumble.

Trump asked the wrong question. He asked: who has the power to dominate? The better question is: who has the power to endure? And the answer to that is: those who have learned to live without domination, to serve without being served, to give without expecting return, to die so that others might live. That is the power that the Christos Civitas is called to build. And it is, in the end, the only power that will matter.

Soli Deo gloria.