260828 – Denver Snuffer’s Critique of Christianity

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

Denver Snuffer’s Criticisms of Christianity: A Consolidated Catalogue with Validity Assessments

Drawn from the eight-lecture “Addresses to the Christians” series (2017–2019) and the eight academic assessments published at Renaissance Ministries, August 2026

Introduction and Method

Across eight lectures delivered to Christian audiences on the occasion of the Protestant Reformation’s 500th anniversary, Denver Snuffer Jr. mounted a sustained critique of historic Christianity — its churches, its text, its creeds, its clergy, its doctrines, and its readiness for the last days — as the ground for commending a new restoration through Joseph Smith, continued in Snuffer’s own movement. This document consolidates every substantive criticism of Christianity delivered across the series into a single catalogue and assesses the validity of each. The assessments draw on the eight lecture-by-lecture essays previously published, which measured each claim against (1) the documented historical record and (2) the text of Scripture (KJV). Here the same findings are reorganized by criticism rather than by lecture, so that the whole indictment can be seen at once and weighed point by point.

A note on fairness governs everything below. Snuffer’s criticisms are not uniformly wrong. Several name real corruptions, real abuses, and real neglects that Christian historiography itself acknowledges — and where a criticism is valid or partially valid, that is stated plainly. The recurring pattern, however, is this: a documented kernel is inflated into a universal; a contested minority thesis is presented as settled fact; a proof-text is read against its own syntax; or an argument is deployed that, applied consistently, would condemn the apostolic church or the critic’s own movement. Each entry below states the criticism as delivered, identifies where it appears in the series, and renders a validity verdict with the controlling evidence.

PART ONE: CRITICISMS OF THE CHURCH’S CONDITION AND AUTHORITY

1. All Christian churches today are corrupt

The criticism. Every Christian church has become corrupt; they love money, financial security, and buildings more than the poor, the needy, the sick, and the afflicted; the institutions claiming to be God’s church are all polluted by the cares of the world; the religion of Jesus Christ is “hardly practiced anywhere on earth.” (Lectures 1, 3, 5)

Validity: Invalid as a universal; valid as a warning about real tendencies. As a proposition about the interior loves of every congregation on earth, the claim is unverifiable in principle — no man can audit the hearts of hundreds of millions of believers across every continent. More decisively, it stands in direct tension with Christ’s own preservation promises: “upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18); “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20); “unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end” (Ephesians 3:21). The Bible’s own model of ecclesial corruption — the seven letters of Revelation 2–3 — names real corruption, demands repentance, threatens removal of candlesticks, and yet even in Sardis, the deadest church of the seven, Christ finds “a few names… which have not defiled their garments” (Revelation 3:4). The one biblical precedent for a total-apostasy claim is Elijah’s, and God Himself corrects it: “I have left me seven thousand in Israel” (1 Kings 19:18). Scripture knows corrupt churches; after Pentecost it does not know a wholly corrupted church. Source-critically, the universal indictment is not a conclusion from evidence but a restatement of the Restoration’s founding premise — the First Vision report that all creeds were corrupt (Joseph Smith–History 1:19) and the polemic of 2 Nephi 28. The valid kernel — that churches genuinely do drift toward mammon, property, and institutional self-preservation, and that Scripture warns of exactly this — deserves full acknowledgment; every reformer from the prophets to Wesley has said it. But the kernel indicts tendencies within the church; it does not unchurch the church. And Snuffer’s own lectures supply the counterexamples: St. Francis, ministered to by angels inside the Catholicism the thesis declares wholly corrupt, and Mother Teresa, offered by Snuffer himself as evidence that Catholic holiness exists (Lectures 7–8). The witness contradicts his own indictment.

2. A total apostasy occurred; change to the religion proves God abandoned it

The criticism. Christianity changed over its first two centuries; since God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, change to His religion signals that God was no longer in charge; an apostasia — rebellion — took place; the original faith was lost and has never been restored. (Lectures 1, 2, 4)

Validity: Invalid in its logic; partially valid in its data. The data are real: Christianity did change in form, practice, and emphasis across its early centuries, and the New Testament itself predicts defection and corruption within the church (Acts 20:29–30; 2 Timothy 4:3–4; 2 Thessalonians 2:3). But the argument’s engine — unchanging God, therefore unchanging religious forms — is broken by the very book that declares God unchanging: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). The constancy of God’s character does not entail the constancy of administration; the same canon records God changing covenant administration at Sinai and again in Christ (Hebrews 8:13). Further, the total-apostasy reading takes the corruption predictions as exhaustive and the preservation promises (Matthew 16:18; 28:20; Ephesians 3:21) as void — a selection the texts themselves do not authorize. And the lexical claim that apostasia implies a sudden, deliberate rebellion contradicts Snuffer’s own narrative of gradual transformation across generations of converts. The valid observation — real corruption entered early and cost the church much — is the shared testimony of all Christian historiography. The invalid conclusion is that the candlestick went out everywhere and God’s promise failed.

3. Only a preacher directly sent by God should be heeded; existing churches lack authority

The criticism. Romans 10:14–15 (“how shall they preach, except they be sent?”) establishes that a valid preacher must be sent; Paul was sent “not of men, neither by man”; since Christ is unchanging, the same direct divine sending is required now; therefore no existing minister has authority, and the only preacher to heed is one who plainly declares God has sent him — as Joseph Smith declared, and as Snuffer declares. (Lecture 1; commission claims repeated in Lectures 2, 3)

Validity: Invalid at four points of the biblical record. First, Romans 10 argues the necessity of proclamation for saving faith; it is not a treatise on commissioning mechanics, and it nowhere restricts valid sending to unmediated divine appearance. Second, the New Testament documents mediated sending as valid sending: the Spirit’s call to Barnabas and Saul executed through the fasting, praying congregation at Antioch (Acts 13:2–4); elders ordained “in every church” (Acts 14:23) and “in every city” (Titus 1:5); Timothy’s gift “with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery” (1 Timothy 4:14) and his charge to “commit thou to faithful men” (2 Timothy 2:2). If only unmediated sending validated a preacher, the pastoral epistles’ entire machinery of ordained succession would be invalid on its face — and Paul treats his own extraordinary call as exceptional, “as of one born out of due time” (1 Corinthians 15:8), not as the template. Third, and most important: the biblical test of a claimed messenger is content, not claimed commission. Self-declaration is precisely what Scripture instructs hearers to test: “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits” (1 John 4:1); “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel… let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8); the Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11); a prophet whose sign even comes to pass is rejected if he leads after other gods (Deuteronomy 13:1–3); “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:15–20). The boldness and cost of a commission claim establish nothing: “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name?… and then will I profess unto them, I never knew you” (Matthew 7:22–23). Fourth, applied consistently, “heed the man who plainly declares God sent him” would have required the first-century hearer to heed every claimant the apostles condemned. The criticism inverts the scriptural order: it adjudicates the doctrine by the vision claim, where the Bible adjudicates the vision claim by the doctrine.

4. Christianity was broken at Constantine and has never been fixed

The criticism. When Constantine made Christianity the state religion, it was compromised, not improved; silk robes and gold headpieces replaced the crown of thorns; imperial rank replaced servanthood; Christianity was utterly broken and remains so — the Reformation included. (Lectures 3, 7, 8)

Validity: Partially valid as evaluation; factually flawed in mechanism; invalid as a totality. The evaluative judgment — that establishment compromised the church — is a respectable position held across Christian traditions from the Anabaptists to Wesley to Kierkegaard, and the contrast between Christ’s servant-poverty (Luke 2:7; John 13:4–15; Philippians 2:5–8) and imperial pomp is a legitimate application of Matthew 20:25–28. Snuffer’s Wesley quotation (Sermon 89 on the decline of the gifts after Constantine) is genuine. The factual frame, however, repeatedly fails: Constantine did not make Christianity the state religion (he legalized and favored it; establishment came under Theodosius, 380, four decades after Constantine’s death); the bishops at Nicaea were not put “under house arrest” until they agreed (unattested in any source; the record shows imperial summons, transport, hospitality, confessor attendees, weeks of open dispute, and coercion only after the decision, in the exile of Arius and two bishops); and pre-Constantinian “Christians killing Christians” is anachronistic — before 313 the church had no coercive power and was itself the persecuted party; the first execution of a Christian for heresy at Christian instigation is Priscillian (385). Where Snuffer places the violence after Constantine, he matches the record; where before, he does not. And the totality claim (“utterly broken, never fixed”) fails on the same preservation texts and living counterexamples as criticism 1 — including the counterexamples Snuffer himself supplies. The Wesley gloss also overreaches its source: Wesley lamented the loss of the extraordinary gifts through spiritual decay; he lived and died a churchman who taught the church’s continuity, and conscripting his continuationist lament into a total-apostasy admission attributes to him a thesis he expressly did not hold.

5. Nicaea invented the Trinity by vote, and got God wrong

The criticism. The Council of Nicaea, convened by a theologically indifferent emperor, adopted Athanasius’s homoousios over Eusebius’s homoiousios by mere vote, claiming no revelation, and thereby gave birth to the Trinity — which became the false litmus test of orthodoxy. The Gospels present the Father and Son as separate beings; nothing in the New Testament makes them the same personage; the Old Testament begins with plural gods (Elohim; “let us make man”); Paul allowed “gods many and lords many.” The council got it wrong. (Lecture 2; echoed in Lecture 7)

Validity: Invalid on the history and on a category error in the theology. Historically, nearly every load-bearing detail is wrong: the Nicene dispute was the Arian question (is the Son a creature?), not homoousios versus homoiousios — the latter formula belongs to the post-Nicene controversies of the 350s; Eusebius of Caesarea was not the champion of an opposing formula (he subscribed to homoousios); Athanasius attended only as a deacon in Alexander’s retinue and became the creed’s defender afterward; and the Trinity was not born at Nicaea — trinitas is in Tertullian (c. 213), trias in Theophilus of Antioch (c. 180), and triadic baptismal confession is commanded in Matthew 28:19 and attested in the Didache and Justin Martyr, generations before the council. Constantine’s initial indifference is the one documented kernel (his preserved letter calls the dispute a trifling question). Theologically, the argument commits a category error: every text Snuffer marshals to prove the Father and Son are distinct persons — the baptismal voice, the Transfiguration, John 17 — is affirmed by, indeed constitutive of, Trinitarian doctrine, which confesses one divine essence in three distinct persons. The doctrine that Father and Son are one personage is modalism (Sabellianism), which the same tradition that produced Nicaea condemned as heresy a century earlier. Demonstrating personal distinction refutes Sabellius, not Athanasius. On the question Nicaea actually decided — the Son’s nature — the Johannine texts run against Snuffer: “the Word was God” (John 1:1); “I and my Father are one,” provoking “thou, being a man, makest thyself God” (John 10:30, 33); “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58); Thomas’s “My Lord and my God” received without correction (John 20:28). The plural-gods exegesis fails on grammar and context: Elohim denoting the God of Israel governs singular verbs (bara, “created,” Genesis 1:1 — singular), framed by “The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4) and Isaiah’s explicit denials (“before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me,” Isaiah 43:10); and 1 Corinthians 8:5–6 is quoted against its own argument, whose premise is “there is none other God but one” (8:4) and whose sixth verse places the Father and the Lord Jesus jointly on the one-God side of the ledger.

6. Orthodoxy and heresy are merely the victors’ labels; unity was coerced, not persuaded

The criticism. Original Christianity had no orthodoxy or heresy; the terms were adopted once the proto-orthodox sensed victory; dissenters were excommunicated, then killed, their scriptures burned; unity was manufactured by coercion, and true Christian unity can only come by persuasion around a minimal doctrine. (Lectures 1, 2, 7)

Validity: Mixed — the persuasion principle is soundly biblical; the historical frame is substantially wrong. The constructive half deserves full credit: persuaded rather than coerced unity is the apostolic method (“we persuade men,” 2 Corinthians 5:11; “in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves,” 2 Timothy 2:24–25; “neither as being lords over God’s heritage,” 1 Peter 5:3), and Snuffer’s insistence that doctrinal killing was a nonsense never to be repeated is common ground. The historical half fails at two points. First, the no-early-orthodoxy claim is the Walter Bauer thesis (1934), substantially qualified by subsequent scholarship: the regula fidei — the summary of apostolic teaching — is attested in near-identical substance in Irenaeus (c. 180), Tertullian (c. 200), and Origen (c. 230), across provinces from Gaul to Egypt, generations before Nicaea; and creedal formulae are embedded in the New Testament itself (1 Corinthians 15:3–4; Romans 10:9; Philippians 2:6–11; 1 Timothy 3:16). The vocabulary of exclusion is not a late invention but apostolic: “heresies” among the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:20); “a man that is an heretick… reject” (Titus 3:10); “damnable heresies” (2 Peter 2:1); doctrinal exclusion practiced in the first generation (1 Timothy 1:19–20; 2 John 10; Revelation 2). Irenaeus could only write Against Heresies because a rule already existed to measure heresy against. Second, the killing chronology is anachronistic for the pre-Nicene period (see criticism 4). The false dilemma should also be named: the choice is not only coercion or doctrinal minimalism — voluntary, non-coercive adherence to substantial confessions is a third, well-populated category throughout Christian history.

7. Professional, paid clergy is a corruption of original Christianity

The criticism. The apostolic church had no buildings and no compensated ministers; funds went only to the poor; today’s professional clergy divert tithes from the poor; clergy hostility across denominations exists because ministers have a financial stake in their denomination’s survival; polls show the majority of Christian ministers do not even have faith — they have a career they cannot abandon. (Lectures 1, 2, 8)

Validity: Invalid as history and doctrine; partially valid as a warning. The building claim is accurate (house churches until the third century; the earliest known dedicated structure is Dura-Europos, c. 235–241), and the poor-relief claim is accurate as far as it goes (Acts 2:44–45; 4:34–35). But the no-compensation claim is contradicted by explicit apostolic teaching: “the labourer is worthy of his hire” — Christ’s own rule for those He sent (Luke 10:7); “even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14); “let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things” (Galatians 6:6); “let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour, especially they who labour in the word and doctrine” (1 Timothy 5:17–18); Paul receiving Philippian support and calling it “a sacrifice acceptable, wellpleasing to God” (Philippians 4:18). Paul’s tentmaking was a waiver of the right at Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:12, 15) — and a waiver presupposes the right, which Paul expressly attributes to the Lord’s own ordinance. The apostolic practice was both/and — poor relief and ministerial support — not Snuffer’s either/or. The financial-stake motive claim attributes interior motives to entire professions, which is unverifiable in principle and contrary to the biblical caution against judging hearts (1 Corinthians 4:5); against it stands the documented fact that modern ecumenical rapprochement has been led almost entirely by salaried clergy. The majority-of-ministers-lack-faith claim is unsupported by any documented survey: real studies find substantial minorities of doubting clergy in particular liberal-Protestant and European bodies, but no polling sustains a majority claim across the world’s evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, and global-South ministry. The valid kernel — careerism and hireling ministry are real spiritual hazards (John 10:12–13), money exerts corrupting pressure on institutions, and unpaid ministry is a legitimate voluntary discipline in Paul’s own pattern — stands; the historical and statistical universals built on it do not.

8. The tithe has been redefined to fund institutions instead of the poor

The criticism. The true tithe is one-tenth of what remains after all of one’s needs are met, and gathered funds should go to the poor among the givers, not to institutional overhead. (Lecture 1)

Validity: Invalid as biblical definition; legitimate as a voluntary practice. No biblical text defines the tithe as a tenth of surplus. The Mosaic tithe is levied on gross increase at its source (Leviticus 27:30, 32; Deuteronomy 14:22), and the accompanying principle is firstfruits — the opposite of a remainder principle: “Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase” (Proverbs 3:9). The New Testament does not legislate the tithe for the church at all; its giving texts command purposeful, cheerful, proportionate generosity (2 Corinthians 9:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2). The surplus definition derives from a Restoration-internal reading of Doctrine and Covenants 119:4. The critique of institutional spending that starves the poor is a fair prophetic challenge any church should hear (Isaiah 58; James 1:27); the redefinition offered in its place is neither the Mosaic tithe nor a New Testament ordinance.

9. Forty thousand denominations prove Christianity’s failure

The criticism. Christianity has fractured into some 40,000 denominations, division upon division, demonstrating that the Reformation’s fruit is chaos and that no existing body carries the original unity. (Lectures 1, 8)

Validity: Partially valid; the number misleads. The figure derives from the World Christian Encyclopedia, which counts organizational jurisdictions per country — a single communion operating in a hundred nations is counted dozens of times, and independent congregations are counted singly. Grouped by doctrinal family, the count collapses to a small number of traditions, most of which share the ecumenical creeds. As a count of distinct theologies, “40,000” is not accurate; as a count of organizations by country, it is defensible — and Snuffer deploys it in the former sense. The underlying criticism — that Christian division is real, scandalous, and contrary to Christ’s prayer “that they all may be one” (John 17:21) and Paul’s plea against party spirit (1 Corinthians 1:10–13) — is valid and should sting. But fragmentation as an argument for a new claimant proves too much: the Restoration movement itself fractured within Joseph Smith’s own generation and has continued fracturing since (the LDS, RLDS/Community of Christ, and dozens of successors — Snuffer’s own fellowship being a further division), so by its own logic the argument condemns the remedy it commends.

10. The Reformation never attempted to restore original Christianity

The criticism. The Reformers could not even imagine non-institutional Christianity; their aim was merely to reform a corrupt institution into something marginally better; a return to the original form “was not even attempted” before Joseph Smith in 1820. (Lectures 2, 3)

Validity: Invalid — falsified externally and internally. The Radical Reformation, beginning with the Swiss Brethren in Zurich in 1525, explicitly pursued restitutio — restoration of primitive Christianity — as its program: believers’ baptism, voluntary congregations, separation from the state, discipline on the New Testament model, and in the Hutterite case community of goods on the pattern of Acts 2 and 4. Sixteenth-century writers themselves distinguished reformatio from restitutio. Later movements (English Separatism, the Baptists, the nineteenth-century Restoration movements) likewise made primitive-church restoration their stated aim. One may argue those attempts failed; the claim that no attempt occurred before 1820 is historically false. The falsification is also internal to Snuffer’s own lectures: he approvingly quotes Menno Simons and names him “one of the Reformation fathers” — and Menno is precisely a leader of the Restitution wing whose defining program was recovery of the primitive church. The lecture cites, as a Reformation father, the standing counterexample to its own claim.

11. Institutional Christianity as such is Babylon

The criticism. Every institution, by reason of being institutional — subject to laws, taxes, rules — is part of the great conglomerate reaching back to Babylon’s head of gold; Christ’s work must now be done independent of institutional control. (Lecture 5)

Validity: Invalid as ontology; valid as prudence. The by-reason-of-being-institutional premise, applied consistently, condemns the apostolic assembly it appeals to: the New Testament church appointed elders in every church and city (Acts 14:23; Titus 1:5), addressed offices (Philippians 1:1, “with the bishops and deacons”), legislated qualifications (1 Timothy 3), and issued binding trans-local decisions through a council (Acts 15:22–29, “it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us”) — while subsisting under Roman law and taxation without the apostles treating legal existence as Babylonian contamination (“pay ye tribute also,” Romans 13:6). Justin Martyr’s description of second-century worship — cited by Snuffer for informal house meetings — itself attests a presiding officer, an ordered liturgy, a fixed day, and centralized handling of funds. The prudential kernel — institutions accrete worldly entanglements, and the entanglement warnings are real (2 Timothy 2:4) — is sound and historically well-documented. The universal ontological claim exceeds it, and it is self-referentially unstable: a movement with fellowships, tithing practices, conferences, a publishing program, and a scripture committee is an institution by any working definition.

12. Christians who demand their authority be respected are antichrist

The criticism. Christ came as a servant and invited rather than compelled; those who demand that their authority be respected are antichrist, opposing the glory of Christ’s example. (Lecture 2)

Validity: The content is half right; the label is misused. The servant-leadership teaching is soundly biblical (Matthew 20:25–28; John 13:13–15; 1 Peter 5:3), and Scripture condemns authority-demanding under its own heads (Diotrephes, “who loveth to have the preeminence,” 3 John 9; the chief seats of Matthew 23:6–12). But “antichrist” is defined by the only biblical writer who uses the term, and he defines it by christological denial — “he is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22; 4:3; 2 John 7) — not by the demanding of deference. The label substitutes a rhetorical for the biblical sense. The criticism also sits uneasily beside Snuffer’s own claim that his fellowship “can trace an authority to baptize” — a claimed exclusive ordinance authority being precisely the kind of claim the principle, as formulated, would submit to its own test.

13. Christianity lacks meditative and contemplative power; lost truths fled East

The criticism. Truths broken away from Christian awareness departed into the East and were retained by Hindus and Buddhists; Christianity lacks the meditative power found in those traditions; one cannot fully understand Jesus without putting on Eastern eyes. (Lecture 7)

Validity: Invalid as history; the milder counsel is unobjectionable. The dispersal chronology is untenable: Hinduism’s Vedic stratum (second millennium BC) and Buddhism (fifth century BC) predate Christianity and cannot have received anything that “left Christian awareness.” The deficiency claim is falsified by Christianity’s own contemplative libraries: the desert fathers, the hesychast tradition and the Philokalia, lectio divina, The Cloud of Unknowing, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, and the continuous Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer. A defensible statement — that much of Western Protestant practice has neglected its own contemplative inheritance — is a common and fair observation; “Christianity lacks it” is not. The narrower principle, that truth is to be owned wherever found, has genuine biblical footing (Paul quoting pagan poets, Acts 17:28; the law written on Gentile hearts, Romans 2:14–15) and a patristic pedigree (Justin’s logos spermatikos); as hermeneutical counsel it stands — on those texts, not on Ephesians 1:10, whose “gathering together in one all things in Christ” names the cosmos summed up under Christ’s headship by God’s act, not a comparative-religion recovery project.

14. The Christian who rejects the Book of Mormon is no more Christian than the Jews who crucified the Lord

The criticism. The Jews rejected Jesus because their religion did not adequately encompass the truth about Him; the Christian who refuses to take the Book of Mormon seriously is no different — preferring a false, partial tradition to a living Redeemer. (Lecture 6)

Validity: Invalid — the anathema inverts the Bible’s own tests. The parallel condemns the hearer only if the Book of Mormon is in fact God’s message — the very conclusion under commendation; the argument assumes what it must prove, and in this conditional form it is available to every claimant equally (identical anathemas are pronounced by rival movements over their own books; a test that condemns whoever declines any claimant is no test). More decisively, Scripture places the duty of testing on the hearer and the burden of proof on the new claimant — and commends the careful tester: the Bereans were “more noble” precisely because they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11); “prove all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:21); “believe not every spirit” (1 John 4:1). The canonical anathema runs against the bringer of another gospel (Galatians 1:8–9), not against the cautious hearer. And the New Testament’s stated criteria of Christian standing are christological confession and its fruits (Romans 10:9; 1 John 4:2; 1 Corinthians 12:3) — nowhere the reception of any post-apostolic text. The comparison of a Berean-minded Christian to Christ’s crucifiers is without warrant on the Bible’s own canon of judgment.

PART TWO: CRITICISMS OF THE BIBLE — TEXT, CANON, AND TRANSMISSION

15. The New Testament text was corrupted by the winning party

The criticism. Second- and third-century doctrinal struggles altered the scriptures (per Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture); the voice at Christ’s baptism originally said “Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee” (Psalm 2:7) and was changed to defeat adoptionism — “the editors missed one” in Hebrews 5:5; the text deserves great skepticism. (Lectures 2, 6)

Validity: Invalid in its specifics; the general phenomenon is real but proves the opposite. Ehrman’s monograph is genuine, and theologically motivated scribal variants exist — that much is valid. The showcase example collapses under checking. The Psalm 2:7 baptismal variant exists in the manuscript tradition of Luke 3:22 only (a Western reading of Codex Bezae and some fathers); the majority of text critics and all standard critical editions judge the ordinary reading original. Lecture 6 escalates the claim to Matthew 3:17 — a variant existing in no known witness whatsoever — and cites the Hebrews quotation to “the seventh chapter of Proverbs,” a plain citation error for Psalm 2:7. The “editors missed one” mechanism presupposes a central editorial authority conducting a coordinated purge — contradicted by the wholly decentralized manuscript transmission of the period (thousands of copies, no recall authority), contradicted by the survival of the Bezae reading itself, and in tension with Snuffer’s own claim that early Christianity had no central control. Most tellingly, the allegedly suppressed proof-text was never suppressed: Psalm 2:7’s application to Christ stands openly at Acts 13:33, Hebrews 1:5, and Hebrews 5:5 in every Bible. And the deep logic runs against the skeptical conclusion: the variants are identifiable precisely because the abundant, geographically dispersed manuscript tradition preserves competing readings for comparison. The doctrinally significant variants are a small, catalogued set, none of which — on the testimony of the standard critical editions — removes or establishes any doctrine otherwise absent from the undisputed text. The Bible’s “muddled” abundance is not its weakness but its verification apparatus.

16. There was no New Testament in original Christianity; the canon came late, from a heretic’s idea

The criticism. Original Christianity used and cited only the Old Testament; the idea of compiling a New Testament originated with the second-century heretic Marcion; the canon was not settled until the fourth century, by which time many writings had been altered. (Lecture 2)

Validity: One accurate element; two inaccurate ones. Accurate: Marcion (c. 140) produced the first known fixed collection resembling a canon, and the formal settlement of the 27-book boundary belongs to the fourth century (Athanasius’s festal letter, 367; Hippo, 393; Carthage, 397). Inaccurate: that only the Old Testament was used or cited — the New Testament itself contradicts this, Peter classing Paul’s epistles with “the other scriptures” (2 Peter 3:15–16) and 1 Timothy 5:18 citing the saying of Luke 10:7 as “scripture”; and the sub-apostolic writers (Clement c. 96, Ignatius c. 107, Polycarp c. 110) quote gospel material and Pauline epistles as authoritative a generation before Marcion, with the four-gospel collection defended as settled by Irenaeus (c. 180). The accurate statement is that the canon’s boundary was settled late; the claim that the books were absent or unused in original Christianity is contradicted by the sources, including two canonical texts. The alteration element carries the finding of criticism 15. And the late-recognition datum cuts the other way from the use Snuffer makes of it: a canon recognized gradually by distributed, multi-generational usage across hundreds of independent congregations is a triangulated canon — the strongest kind — where a canon delivered whole by one angel to one man is a single unverifiable declaration.

17. Sola scriptura fails: Latin-only Bibles, damned illiterates, and Luther’s translation

The criticism. In 1517 the Bible existed in authorized form only in Latin; Luther translated it from Latin into German; if scripture alone defines the faith, fifteen centuries of illiterate Christians were incapable of salvation; the Bible was first translated into English only about 470 years ago. (Lectures 1, 2, 3)

Validity: Invalid on nearly every factual particular; the doctrine attacked is misdescribed. The Latin-only claim was true of England under the Constitutions of Oxford (1408) but false of Christendom: at least eighteen printed German Bible editions preceded Luther’s 1522 New Testament (from the Mentelin Bible, 1466), alongside printed Italian (1471), French, Dutch, and Czech (by 1488) Bibles, most circulating with ecclesiastical toleration. Luther translated not from Latin but from Erasmus’s Greek and the Hebrew — bypassing the Vulgate was the distinguishing mark of his work. Vernacular translation did not begin with Luther: Wycliffe’s complete English Bible circulated from 1382, and the “first English translation c. 1547” claim is wrong on its own terms (Wycliffe 1382; Tyndale 1526; Coverdale 1535; Great Bible 1539). The illiteracy inference misconstrues the doctrine: sola scriptura asserts that Scripture is the supreme norm of doctrine — no pope, council, or tradition may bind the conscience contrary to it — not that private literacy is a condition of salvation; the Reformers’ own practice (vernacular catechisms, preaching, liturgy) presupposed that the illiterate receive the word by hearing (Romans 10:17).

18. The Old Testament was corrupted by the Deuteronomists and rebuilt from ruins

The criticism. Pre-exilic reformers (“the Deuteronomists”) suppressed the older, richer religion; the books “discovered when the ruins of the temple were being rummaged through by Ezra” were used to rebuild a lost Old Testament, more Deuteronomist than the original; the prophet Zenos — preserved in the Book of Mormon — was deliberately excised because his Christology was too blunt to reform, while poetic Isaiah survived. (Lectures 4, 5, 6, invoking Margaret Barker)

Validity: Invalid in its narrative machinery; the scholarly category is real but contested. The Deuteronomist concept is genuine critical scholarship (Noth, 1943, and successors) — that much is fairly cited, and Margaret Barker is a real scholar whose temple-theology reconstruction exists. But her thesis is an influential, contested hypothesis, not a demonstration, and Snuffer presents it as settled. The discovered-book narrative is factually wrong on date, agent, and occasion: the finding of “the book of the law in the house of the LORD” during temple repairs belongs to Hilkiah in the eighteenth year of Josiah (2 Kings 22:8), c. 622 BC — before the exile, not during the post-exilic reconstruction, and not by Ezra; the lost-and-rebuilt-canon element conflates that account with the apocryphal legend of 2 Esdras 14 (Ezra re-dictating the scriptures by inspiration), which is a legend, not a datum. The canonical Ezra brings and reads the law (Nehemiah 8); he does not excavate it. The Zenos excision claim is unfalsifiable by construction: Zenos is attested nowhere outside the Book of Mormon — not at Qumran, not in the versions, the Apocrypha, Josephus, or rabbinic literature. Lost prophets are a real biblical category (Jasher, Nathan, Gad, Iddo are cited by canonical books), but those lost works left canonical citations as their trace; Zenos’s existence has no trace outside the record whose authenticity is the question. The supporting motive-history also fails: the corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53, alleged to have saved Isaiah from the editors, is characteristic of medieval Jewish exegesis (Rashi), postdating the alleged editorial moment by a millennium, while the principal ancient Jewish rendering (Targum Jonathan) applies the servant to Messiah.

19. The Bible is gapped: the Emmaus discourse was never recorded

The criticism. Luke, an otherwise exhaustive biographer, records “not one word” of what Christ said when He opened the scriptures on the Emmaus road — a glaring hole in the record, which the Book of Mormon’s account of Christ expounding all things to the Nephites supplies. (Lecture 6)

Validity: Invalid — the gap is stated smaller than claimed and filled within the New Testament itself. Luke twice states the exposition’s content in summary: “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27) — corpus, method, and theme all given — and the repetition to the eleven states the thesis: “thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day” (24:44–46). What is missing is the passage-by-passage detail, not “one word.” And the canon then supplies the detail: the apostolic preaching of Acts is the messianic exposition of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms — Peter on Psalms 16 and 110 (Acts 2), Philip on Isaiah 53 (Acts 8:32–35), Paul “opening and alleging, that Christ must needs have suffered” (Acts 17:2–3, the same verb Luke uses at Emmaus), and the summary “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). By the canon’s own economy the Emmaus content is not lost; it is distributed. The proposed backfill, meanwhile, rests on the hermeneutical circle assessed at criticism 21.

20. The Bible’s transmission is inferior to the Book of Mormon’s

The criticism. The Bible came down through copies of copies, demonstrably altered; the Book of Mormon came through a singular guarded transmission, survives in its original and printer’s manuscripts, and its famous “changes” are punctuation and format; it is therefore, by an order of magnitude, the more faithfully preserved and reliable witness of Christ. (Lecture 6)

Validity: Invalid — the comparison equivocates between two different transmission segments. The Book of Mormon’s print-era data are accurately reported (roughly 28 percent of the original manuscript survives after the cornerstone water damage; the printer’s manuscript is essentially complete; the tabulated changes are overwhelmingly punctuation, grammar, and format — all per Royal Skousen’s critical-text scholarship). But that documented segment spans about 190 years, and it is compared against the Bible’s nineteen centuries of manuscript transmission — like is not compared with like. The segment of the Book of Mormon’s claimed transmission that corresponds to the Bible’s manuscript centuries — the thousand-year line of record-keepers, the abridgment, the plates, the translation — is precisely the segment with no surviving witnesses: the plates are not extant and the source texts cannot be collated. “Singular transmission” means, evidentially, a transmission that cannot be checked; the Bible’s abundance of witnesses across regions and centuries is the very property that makes verification (and Ehrman’s own discipline) possible. The argument converts unverifiability into evidence of fidelity — the inverse of the evidentiary situation. The accurate narrow statement — the Book of Mormon’s English printed text has an unusually short, well-documented history — is true and proves nothing about the disputed stage.

21. The latest scripture interprets all earlier scripture — so the Bible must be read through the Book of Mormon

The criticism. The first principle of hermeneutics (per Walter Martin himself) is that the old is interpreted in light of the new; the Book of Mormon, coming forth in 1830, is the latest; therefore the consistent Christian must interpret both Testaments by it. Its own prophecy answers the objector: “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible… wherefore murmur ye, because that ye shall receive more of my word?” (Lecture 5)

Validity: Invalid — an equivocation and a circle. The principle as held by Martin and the tradition is canonical, not chronological: the New Testament interprets the Old because it is received as the inspired apostolic witness to the fulfillment — its lateness is incidental to its warrant. Made purely temporal, the principle proves far too much: the Qur’an, Swedenborg, and Science and Health would each in turn govern all that preceded them, the Book of Mormon included — a consequence Snuffer would not accept, which exposes the suppressed premise: that the Book of Mormon is inspired scripture of canonical standing. That is the conclusion the argument exists to establish; assuming it in the hermeneutical step is a petitio principii. The Bible’s own instruction runs the other direction — the later claimant is tested by the earlier deposit: “to the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20); Galatians 1:8; Acts 17:11. And 2 Nephi 29’s rebuke answers the psychological objection (“we have enough”) while leaving the criterial question — how a claimant is tested — exactly where Scripture puts it: on conformity of content. God’s continuing speech is affirmed on all sides; every claimant to embody it is measured against the faith once delivered (Jude 3).

PART THREE: CRITICISMS OF REFORMATION AND HISTORIC DOCTRINE

22. “Grace alone” was not original Christianity

The criticism. Original Christianity required baptism for salvation; therefore the Lutheran principle of grace alone was not original Christianity. (Lecture 2)

Validity: Invalid — the doctrine attacked is misdescribed. The baptismal catena Snuffer cites is accurate and genuinely establishes baptism’s commanded place (Matthew 3:15; Romans 6:3–5; Galatians 3:27; 1 Peter 3:21). But sola gratia opposes salvation by human merit, not the necessity of baptism — and Luther taught baptismal regeneration emphatically (Small Catechism IV: baptism “works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation”); the Augsburg Confession, Article IX, states baptism is necessary to salvation, and the Lutherans condemned the Anabaptists on precisely that point. The argument refutes a position Lutheranism does not hold. (Two narrative slips travel with it: Saul was not “renamed Paul” at conversion — the double name appears years later, Acts 13:9 — and 1 Peter 3:21 carries its own qualifier, with Luke 23:43 recording salvation pronounced on the unbaptized thief.)

23. “Faith alone” was not original Christianity

The criticism. The original Christians believed in progressing in godliness (Romans 6; 2 Peter 1:4–10); therefore faith alone was not original Christianity. (Lecture 2)

Validity: Invalid for the same reason. Both passages are accurately quoted and genuinely teach that saving faith issues in transformed life. But sola fide concerns the ground of justification — the sinner accounted righteous through faith apart from the merit of works (Romans 3:28; 4:5; Ephesians 2:8–9) — not a denial of sanctification. The Lutheran confessions teach that faith necessarily produces good works and condemn antinomianism by name (Augsburg VI, XX); Luther’s preface to Romans calls faith “a living, busy, active, mighty thing” that cannot exist without works following. Snuffer’s proof-texts and the Reformers’ proof-texts are the same texts read the same way. The genuine historic dispute — whether works are the fruit of justification or part of its ground — is not the dispute the lecture describes.

24. The cross was not where Christ paid for our sins; the atonement occurred in Gethsemane

The criticism. Many men suffered scourging and crucifixion under Rome; Christ’s own reflection on His suffering (an 1829 revelation, D&C 19) mentions only Gethsemane; therefore “His death on the cross was not where He paid the price for our sins” — He suffered for sins in the garden and died on the cross merely as testimony. A companion vision describes the garden suffering as waves of torment — perpetrators’ pains and victims’ resentments in mirrored pairs — which so weakened Him that crucifixion could take His life. (Lecture 3)

Validity: Invalid — contradicted by the New Testament’s explicit and repeated statements. That Christ’s suffering included Gethsemane is biblically secure (Luke 22:44; Matthew 26:38; Hebrews 5:7). But the cross-exclusive conclusion is contradicted by the New Testament’s uniform location of sin-bearing in the death on the tree: “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24); “having made peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20); “nailing it to his cross” (Colossians 2:14); “being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Galatians 3:13); “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10); “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3); “It is finished” spoken on the cross (John 19:30); Paul resolving to know “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” and glorying “in the cross” (1 Corinthians 2:2; Galatians 6:14). The many-died-similarly premise addresses only the physical mode of death; the cross’s atoning uniqueness lies in the identity and office of the One dying (2 Corinthians 5:21), not the intensity of the pain, so the premise never reaches the biblical claim. Even D&C 19 does not state that the suffering occurred only in Gethsemane — the exclusion is Snuffer’s inference from silence. The weakness-unto-death mechanism contradicts the stated voluntariness of Christ’s death: “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18); and the victim-resentment-conquest framework predicates of the sinless One (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22) a resentment requiring conquest that Scripture nowhere attributes to Him — Luke 23:34 presents forgiveness as His disposition, not a hard-won acquisition. Notably, Snuffer’s own Lecture 4 contradicts Lecture 3, affirming that the death itself was “the actual sacrifice to which everything else pointed” — the series argues against itself, and the Lecture 4 formulation is the biblical one.

25. The cry of dereliction is universally misunderstood

The criticism. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” was not a lamentation; Christ was not forsaken; He was reciting the first line of Psalm 22, invoking the whole psalm of vindication as a declaration of purpose. (Lecture 3)

Validity: A defensible reading asserted with unwarranted exclusivity. The incipit interpretation — citing a psalm’s first line to invoke the whole — is a recognized, seriously defended reading, and Snuffer presents it competently; Psalm 22’s crucifixion correspondences are real and taken up by the evangelists themselves (22:7–8, 16, 18). But the traditional reading — a real dereliction borne by the sin-bearer (“he hath made him to be sin for us,” 2 Corinthians 5:21) — is likewise textually grounded and held across the classical commentators, compatible with John 16:32 as judicial forsakenness distinct from ontological abandonment. Both readings converge on the psalm’s triumphant ending. The criticism’s error is not its option but its verdict: “misunderstood… not a lamentation” delivered as settled fact, where the evidence compels no such exclusivity.

26. Salvation is based on Christ’s personal visitation, which the churches wrongly denounce

The criticism. “The testimony of Jesus” is His testimony to you — His personal manifestation confirming your salvation; this was once the expected, normal Christian experience; “Christian salvation is based upon the testimony of Jesus to you of your salvation”; the denominations now denounce the very experience that saves. (Lecture 7)

Validity: The promise is biblical; the basis-claim inverts the New Testament’s stated economy. That Christ manifests Himself to the faithful is affirmed as promise — “he that loveth me… I will love him, and will manifest myself to him… we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:21, 23) — and instanced (Stephen, Paul, John on Patmos); churches that categorically denounce all such experience are poorer for it, and the subjective reading of “the testimony of Jesus” in Revelation 19:10 is a live exegetical option. But the proposition that salvation is based upon a personal visitation stands against three explicit texts: the beatitude reserved precisely for faith without sight — “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29); Peter’s description of the normal Christian condition — “whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice,” receiving salvation in that unseeing believing (1 Peter 1:8–9); and the stated organ of assurance — “the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16; 1 John 5:13). The New Testament’s stated basis of salvation is grace through faith confessing the risen Lord (Ephesians 2:8; Romans 10:9); a christophany is a promise and possibility within that economy, not its basis. The doctrine makes the exceptional instance the criterial norm — and quietly disinherits the blessed multitude of John 20:29.

27. Christian judgment-theology is wrong: God evaluates by noblest aspiration

The criticism. Aspirations can be perfect while conduct is reprehensible; God takes into account the perfection of one’s hope and evaluates a person by their most noble aspirations. (Lecture 3)

Validity: Half of the biblical picture presented as the whole. Consistent elements: God regards the heart (1 Samuel 16:7); “if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath” (2 Corinthians 8:12); the Father’s compassion on frame and frailty (Psalm 103:13–14). But the uniform biblical statement is judgment “according to their works” (Revelation 20:12–13; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 2:6; Matthew 16:27), and Christ’s own warning targets precisely the substitution of profession and aspiration for doing: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord… but he that doeth the will of my Father” (Matthew 7:21; James 1:22). As encouragement toward the ideal it is pastoral; as doctrine it states the merciful half and omits the half the texts state most often.

28. Sacrifice is the necessary condition of faith (against comfortable Christianity)

The criticism. It is the order of heaven that faith is proven by the sacrifice of what one holds dearest; the rich young ruler declined the proof and forfeited walking with Christ; comfortable, cost-free Christianity is not the faith. (Lectures 3, 8)

Validity: Substantially valid, with a doctrinal precision. The governing principle — faith demonstrated and perfected in sacrificial obedience — is biblically consistent (Hebrews 11:8, 17; James 2:21–22; Luke 14:33; Philippians 3:7–8), and the critique of cost-free Christianity is a needed word to every age. The stronger formulation — sacrifice as the necessary condition of faith, the order of heaven — is the signature doctrine of the sixth Lecture on Faith (1835), a Restoration source; the biblical texts support sacrifice as faith’s fruit and proof, which is adjacent to but not identical with the necessary-condition doctrine. This is among Snuffer’s most valid criticisms in spirit; its doctrinal machinery exceeds its texts.

PART FOUR: CRITICISMS OF CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY AND KINGDOM UNDERSTANDING

29. The kingdom was never established; Christianity is a step, not an end

The criticism. Christ did not establish Daniel’s stone kingdom; He left the image’s influences intact; “Thy kingdom come” petitions a future kingdom; the stone did not happen in Christ’s time and He knew it; Christianity is a way-station awaiting the real restitution. (Lecture 4)

Validity: Half right — the not-yet is secure; the denial of the already is contradicted by Daniel’s own prophecy. The future consummation is biblically certain, and Matthew 6:10 does look to an unrealized state. But Daniel 2:44 states that “in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed” — locating the kingdom’s establishment within the era of the final (iron) kingdom, which on Snuffer’s own identification is Rome, the era of Christ’s advent. And the New Testament asserts the kingdom’s inaugurated presence in direct terms: “if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you” (Matthew 12:28); “the kingdom of God is within [among] you” (Luke 17:21); the Father “hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13); “a kingdom which cannot be moved” already received (Hebrews 12:28). The mainstream synthesis — inaugurated at the first advent, consummated at the second — accounts for both sets of texts; Snuffer’s either/or accounts for one set and contradicts the other, including the in-the-days-of-these-kings clause of the very prophecy his argument is built on.

30. Christians misread the “other sheep,” Zion, and the coming restitution

The criticism. The Jerusalem disciples wrongly supposed “other sheep” (John 10:16) meant the Gentiles; Christ meant scattered Israel, personally visited (per 3 Nephi 15–16). The prophecies name two capitals — Jerusalem and a New-World Zion with its own temple — which Christendom fails to see. Acts 3’s “times of restitution” has already begun through a sent messenger, dated even by the heavens (the age of Aquarius beginning c. the 1840s), and the churches are asleep to it. (Lectures 3, 4, 5)

Validity: Invalid on each exegetical point. Other sheep: the Johannine corpus supplies its own resolution — Christ would die “not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad” (John 11:51–52), and the apostolic writings present the one-fold consummation as the union of Jew and Gentile in “one new man… one body” (Ephesians 2:14–16), fulfilled in the Gentile ingathering of Acts 10–15; the Book of Mormon reading requires that fulfillment to be a misunderstanding, against texts it does not engage. Two capitals: the proof-text’s own Hebrew parallelism identifies the two names as one place — “out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3; Micah 4:2), with Zion expressly equated with the city of David (2 Samuel 5:7; Psalm 76:2); and the Bible’s New Jerusalem descends from God out of heaven (Revelation 3:12; 21:2) — it is not built by a religious body in advance; the built-in-America doctrine is Restoration scripture (Ether 13; D&C 57, 84) presented on biblical footing it does not have. The sun-never-sets rationale is a modern imperial idiom, not a prophetic datum. Restitution begun: Acts 3:19–21’s own syntax defeats the application — heaven must receive Christ “until the times of restitution of all things,” placing the sending of Christ at the restitution as His personal return, not before it through intermediaries. The star-clock: the precession astronomy is accurate, but the “gospel in the stars” thesis is a nineteenth-century speculative construct without ancient attestation; no ancient source calls a pole-star change “a new heaven”; constellation boundaries are modern conventions (formalized 1930), published Aquarius-onset estimates range across a millennium, and selecting the boundary that yields the 1840s — and thereby Joseph Smith — is a constructed alignment. Scripture itself forbids deriving religious guidance from the astral order (Deuteronomy 4:19; Isaiah 47:13–14). The valid substrate — that Christians should live awake to prophecy and expectant of Christ’s return — is common ground; the specific timetable and its beneficiary are not in the texts.

31. Christ’s milieu — and by extension the Christian inheritance — was already corrupted and truncated

The criticism. Second-temple Judaism was disconnected from pre-Babylonian religion, with hardly any connection to Abraham; the blood of Israel was gone; even Moses delivered a diminished second-choice religion after a greater one was refused; Christ came as a restorer of the more ancient original — a restoration still unfinished; Christianity inherited the truncation. (Lecture 4)

Validity: Partially valid; overstated at every load-bearing point, with Restoration sources supplying the distinctive machinery. Valid: the returned community was dominated by Judah, Benjamin, and Levi; the leadership of Christ’s day was corrupt by His own indictment (Matthew 23; Mark 7:6–13); and the law’s lesser, preparatory character is Paul’s own teaching (“the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ,” Galatians 3:24; Hebrews 7:19; 10:1). Overstated: “hardly any connection to Abraham” — the period’s Judaism was saturated with Abraham (John 8:33; Matthew 3:9; Romans 4); “the blood of Israel is gone” — against Anna “of the tribe of Aser” (Luke 2:36), “our twelve tribes, instantly serving God” (Acts 26:7), and “the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” (James 1:1); the greater-religion-withdrawn-at-Sinai mechanism — against the plain statement that the second tablets bore “the words that were in the first tables” (Exodus 34:1; Deuteronomy 10:2, 4), the diminished-dispensation doctrine deriving from the Joseph Smith revision and D&C 84; and restorer-Abraham (recovering the first fathers’ religion) — attested in no biblical text (Joshua 24:2 runs the other way: the fathers “served other gods,” and Abraham was called out), its source being Abraham 1 in the Pearl of Great Price. Christ as restorer has a genuine Pauline foothold (the gospel “preached before unto Abraham,” Galatians 3:8) — but the New Testament equally insists on genuine newness (“a new covenant,” Hebrews 8:8–13; “new wine into new bottles”); the biblical category is fulfillment — continuity of promise with newness of administration (Matthew 5:17) — not antiquarian repetition.

32. God’s religion has never been fully restored; a new dispensation, new prophets, and new scripture are required

The criticism. The governing thesis of the whole series: the original faith was lost by degrees, never recovered by the Reformation, and awaits — indeed has begun to receive — restoration through Joseph Smith and his successors, with new scripture (the Book of Mormon and continuing revelation) as the ensign to which all Christians must rally. (All lectures; explicit in 2, 5, 8)

Validity: Invalid as demonstrated; the premises do not survive their own evidence. This is the conclusion into which every prior criticism feeds, and it inherits their defects. The universal-corruption premise fails against the preservation promises and its own counterexamples (criticisms 1, 4). The commission argument fails against the New Testament’s mediated sendings and content-tests (criticism 3). The corrupted-text and corrupted-canon premises fail on the manuscript evidence and the canon’s own history (criticisms 15–16, 18). The hermeneutical warrant for the new scripture is circular (criticism 21). The deferred-kingdom and begun-restitution readings are contradicted by their own proof-texts (criticisms 29–30). What remains, on the Bible’s terms, is exactly what remained at the beginning: God’s continuing speech and works are affirmed (Hebrews 1:1–2 names the Son as the culminating mode; the gifts continue, 1 Corinthians 12–14); and every claimant to canon-bearing authority is tested by conformity to the faith once delivered (Jude 3), under the anathema that binds even angels (Galatians 1:8), by hearers whom Scripture commends for testing (Acts 17:11). Evidence that God still acts is not evidence that any particular claimant speaks for Him; miracles continuing and canon continuing are separate claims, and the series persistently treats evidence for the first as evidence for the second.

PART FIVE: THE PATTERN OF THE WHOLE

Surveying the thirty-two criticisms together, four structural findings emerge.

First, the valid core is real, and it is Christianity’s own self-criticism. Where Snuffer is right, he is right in the company of the prophets, the Anabaptists, Wesley, Kierkegaard, and every honest churchman: churches drift toward money, property, and self-preservation; establishment corrupted much; the medieval church’s abuses were real and are acknowledged by Catholic historiography itself; denominational division is a scandal against John 17; careerist ministry is a spiritual hazard Christ Himself named (the hireling, John 10:12–13); cost-free Christianity is not the faith of Hebrews 11; the contemplative inheritance is neglected in much of the West; and Christ, not affiliation, is the criterion of authentic discipleship — the parables of the virgins, the wedding garment, and the Samaritan, which Snuffer expounds soundly and movingly. None of these valid criticisms is new, and none requires a new revelator; each is the Bible criticizing the church from within, which is the Bible doing what it has always done.

Second, the characteristic method is the inflation of a kernel into a universal. Real corruption becomes total corruption; a real minority of doubting clergy becomes “the majority of ministers”; a real jurisdictional count becomes 40,000 theologies; a real neglect of contemplation becomes “Christianity lacks it”; a real Luke-only textual variant becomes a purged Gospel record (and, by Lecture 6, a variant in Matthew that exists in no manuscript on earth); a flagged inference about the magi becomes “according to the New Testament record.” The inflation is not incidental — the universal is required, because only a total failure of the church licenses a wholly new commission. The kernel indicts; only the inflation unchurches.

Third, the load-bearing arguments repeatedly fail against their own proof-texts, and the series repeatedly contradicts itself. Daniel 2:44 establishes the kingdom “in the days of these kings” against the deferral thesis built on Daniel 2. Isaiah 2:3’s parallelism locates Zion in Jerusalem against the two-capitals reading built on Isaiah 2. Hebrews declares the modes of God’s speaking changed in the same breath that declares Christ unchanging. Exodus 34:1 puts the first words on the second tablets against the diminished-law doctrine. Galatians 2’s fellowship verses refute the apostolic-disunity thesis quoted from Galatians 2. And internally: Lecture 4 locates the atonement in the death that Lecture 3 relocated to the garden; the lecture claiming no Reformer sought restoration cites Menno Simons as a Reformation father; St. Francis receives angels inside the church declared wholly corrupt; and Lecture 8’s claim that Brigham Young invented plural marriage is unintelligible beside Lectures 1–2, which ground Joseph Smith’s death in the Nauvoo Expositor’s exposure of that very practice during Smith’s life. A case that must argue against its own citations and its own installments is announcing the verdict on itself.

Fourth, the distinctive doctrines ride on unidentified Restoration sources presented as biblical. Across the early lectures, Moses 8 was read as Genesis; 3 Nephi 11 was read three times as “the doctrine of Christ” without attribution; D&C 101 was presented as “what the Lord has said”; the Enoch city, the restorer-Abraham, the withdrawn greater law, the temple-blood foot-washing, primeval baptism, and the built New Jerusalem all entered as though on biblical footing while resting on Moses, Abraham, Ether, and the Doctrine and Covenants. To a biblically literate audience this is the decisive datum: the criticisms of Christianity presented as arising from the Bible in fact arise from the alternative canon the criticisms exist to commend — the conclusion smuggled into the premises. The later lectures attribute more honestly, which is recorded to their credit; the argumentative structure does not change.

Conclusion

The final tally, then, is not a blanket dismissal. Snuffer’s indictment contains true counts — counts the church should plead to and repent of, because her own Scriptures charge her with them. But every count that is true is a count the Bible itself brings, requiring no new prophet to bring it; and every count that would require a new prophet — total apostasy, lost authority, corrupted text, deferred kingdom, relocated atonement, new canon — fails on the evidence: inverted proof-texts, misdescribed doctrines, anachronistic history, contested theses presented as settled, unverifiable claims presented as fact, and arguments that condemn the apostolic church, the critic’s own movement, or the critic’s own earlier lectures when applied consistently. The Christian answer to the valid criticisms is the one Scripture always prescribes — “repent, and do the first works” (Revelation 2:5) — carried out within the church whose gates hell has not prevailed against. The Christian answer to the invalid ones is the Berean’s: search the scriptures daily, whether those things are so — and having searched these, record that they are not.

“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” — Isaiah 8:20

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” — 1 Thessalonians 5:21

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260825 – Seeing God’s Light in the Creation

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

260825 – The Museum of Emotions and Senses: Naming, Will, and Seeing God Through the Senses and Emotions

A fellowship essay drawn from a Thomas and Isak conversation on Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Introduction

This essay continues the thread of the fellowship on “Triangulating Truth,” taking a deeper look at the claim that the existence of God is, in some way, like the experience of red: an experience and belief that is certain from the inside but inaccessible to the laboratory. Sunday’s meeting established that literally everything is unavoidably known by faith. There is always a remnant of the unknown which we rely upon as true, but which we cannot justify. This same unknown underlies the experience of the qualia (the sensory experience of red, salty, harmonic, pain, or pungent). We have experience, but we do not understand what it is or where it comes from. Monday’s essay traced the canon and its counterfeits. The present conversation examines: How does God actually do a miracle? What is a thing? What is our naming of things? Where does the experience of blue come from? And what is will (i.e., the feeling of desire and the faculty by which a desire becomes manifested)? The answers form a single connected structure, presented here as points to consider rather than settled doctrine. We developed these answers through revelation by conversation. We groped in the dark in our search for truth. We searched with the confidence that truth exists, but without certainty that we could see the final mystery. We tried to connect the dots of Conscious Point Physics theory as currently developed and apply those concepts to the origin of life and the development of the experience of the contents of consciousness. This was an exercise in extrapolating how God may have used the Conscious Points to assemble these elements of consciousness and existence to postulate how God manifested the abstract experiences of consciousness (internal vision, sensory experience, desires, emotion, and qualia) to assemble a plausible unbroken causal sequence between the seen, the felt and known, and existence (which is ultimately unseen and unknowable).

I. Two Preliminary Notes: The Apocrypha and the Parrot

Two matters carried over from the weekend deserve conclusion.

On praying for the dead. The chief doctrinal objection to the deuterocanonical books is the passage in 2 Maccabees 12, where Judas Maccabeus, finding pagan amulets under the shirts of his slain soldiers, prays and sends money to the temple for their sins, and the narrator concludes it is “a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead.” Examined directly, the passage offers thin ground for a doctrine: it reports what some men did in a context already compromised by paganism (the idols under the shirts). This practice as expressed was not a command of God. Interestingly, the New Testament contains its own adjacent puzzle — Paul’s rhetorical question, “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?” (1 Corinthians 15:29). This is an acknowledgment that some in Corinth practiced such a baptism. Paul appears to deploy it as an argument for the resurrection, not as an authorization of the practice. The sober conclusion: the deuterocanon merits reading — the early church used it, which is credential enough for study. Doctrine stands on the commanded, not the merely reported. The 66 books that survived every winnowing carry the highest credential of proximity to Christ; the rest may inform without governing.

On parroting versus reasoned faith. A distinction surfaced worth preserving: much religious speech—in Mormonism’s general-conference cadences, and just as true in Christian circles—is parroted faith: phrases repeated from leaders and books, echoed between believers as tokens of belonging. Parroted faith is not necessarily insincere, but it is blind rather than reasoned; it rests on the group rather than on the ground. And a sobering observation attaches to it: the fact that we have spent the better part of a year carefully dissecting the Mormon system looking to see if we could detect its points of error is itself the measure of its subtlety. A crude fraud would have collapsed in an afternoon. The counterfeit that takes a year of triangulation to distinguish from biblical doctrine is precisely the type that can capture generations. The Mormon doctrine heavily incorporates the communal mechanics of belonging (acceptance on entry, escalating investment, fear of loss on exit, salvation itself held as the final hostage). Such personal attachment to group, belonging, and survival holds its members in a way that the arguments cannot. Which is why the Christian answer to Mormonism can never be merely argumentative; it must demonstrate/live/model the fruit of the Spirit in fellowship whose belonging is real and satisfying. And in contrast to those captured inside of the Mormon system, a fellowship that reflects the freedom in Christ to come and go while maintaining the bonds of love.

II. How God Does a Miracle: The Holding Mechanism

The physics conversation produced a plausible mechanism by which Conscious Point Physics accounts for both evolution and miracles—the two turned out to be aspects of the same process operating at different speeds.

The problem with unassisted evolution. The thermal environment is a double agent. The same random molecular collisions that occasionally assemble something useful — an amino acid, a peptide, a lipid bilayer — also relentlessly tear assemblies apart. Every collision transfers energy; energy makes and breaks bonds. Entropy is a measure of the number of microscopic configurations (microstates) a system can occupy, including all possible arrangements of atoms, molecules, and their bonds. Higher entropy corresponds to a greater number of accessible configurations and a lower likelihood that any specific ordered structure will form or remain stable. The primal environment provides the raw materials that can possibly form a given state, and probability determines how often a given species can form, but it cannot ensure progress toward assembly, because the mechanism that builds (random collisions of varying magnitude) is the mechanism that demolishes the assembly. Progress toward a cell under pure chance is like a random walk in a field, moving right, left, forward, backward, choosing the next step without regard to the previous, rarely sustained in one direction for more than a few steps. Such progress makes assembling the cell’s interlocking machinery, let alone the Cambrian explosion’s variety, a proposition of vanishingly low probability on any available timescale. The naturalist’s mechanism is not impossible in principle; it is merely an unlikely strategy; the reality of life and the variety of its manifestation shows only that some mechanism actually worked, not that it was driven by any particular mechanism. We, those who look at the big picture, must evaluate the probability that this process produced the cell, complex configurations of cells, differentiation into cell types for specialized organ function, coordination of organs for systemic function, goal-directed activity, and self- and other-awareness.

The proposed mechanism: make a little and save it. The alternative, the one I postulate as God’s method of creation, requires exactly one kind of miracle, repeated: holding. God surveys the thermodynamic lottery, and when an accidental collision bonds atoms and molecules, He moves in the direction of  manifesting His design, and He says: “I like that one — hold it.” The hold is not a suspension of physics from outside; it is a command within the physics: a momentary increase in the attraction — the binding force — among the Conscious Points of that particular configuration, so that subsequent collisions no longer break its bonds. The assembly is rendered stable; it takes the hit and keeps its shape. (Remember the Colgate ingredient, the Gardol shield of the toothpaste commercials in the 50s to 70s protecting teeth from decay?) God protecting a newly formed molecular species is analogously similar to a Gardol shield around the molecule. The thermodynamic lottery of collisions between partially formed molecules and new atoms runs continuously. God drops the shield when a favorable accidental collision places the next atomic bond in the proper place, with the proper collision energy. There are 10,000 proteins that can be formed, and 200,000 types of molecular species that are present in the assembled living/metabolizing cell. All must be present in the proper concentration and location to form a working cell. The creation of every molecule needed for cellular function proceeds as the country song said it — one piece at a time. Amino acids held until a ribosome accretes its structure; a lipid bilayer held as a bag; organelles assembled separately and phagocytized into place; a swallowed bacterium held and domesticated as the mitochondrion (which even secular biology concedes). Evolution, executed by this method: conserves energy; only the gate need be opened and closed by conscious control; no atoms need be moved that disrupt the energetic balance. This may have been the method by which God gradually formed plants and animals. This ratchet/gating mechanism requires intelligence and control by the consciousness that can mediate the entire ensemble of Conscious Points as a group and coordinate its reaction and preservation. This granularity of control (atomic-level assembly of complex, necessary proteins) is a gap in the Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest mechanism. I call this mechanism “The Divine Hold.” In short, it comes down to “make a little, save a little, make a little, save a little.”

Miracle is the same operation at speed. Now run the mechanism fast. The withered hand (Matthew 12:13): every molecule of that hand is in constant thermal motion, jittering in all directions. Let every fluctuation that moves toward the restored form be held, and every fluctuation away be allowed, ultimately saving all rearranged molecules in the withered hand through a process of — yes, yes, no, yes, no, yes — in massive synchrony. On the human level, we see the hand lengthen and fill before the congregation’s eyes. Thus, we can imagine healing with this method. Shape change is likewise possible, giving us a method by which even the morphological leaps between species and the differentiation of the sexes are possible. The holding mechanism allows evolution and healing to operate at the speed of command rather than the speed of ages. In this frame, “Stretch forth thine hand” is not a violation of thermodynamics; it is a method by which thermodynamics proceeds. The same shepherd who herded molecules for four billion years can herd them in a few Moments to manifest the miracle. One mechanism, two tempos, and the dichotomy between “natural process” and “miracle” dissolves into a question of how fast the Holder chose to work.

A question was left open: whether the holding requires a group entity—a consciousness of the assembly as a whole—or only the elemental forces. The current formulation of CPP dispenses with the group entity (forces, energy wells, and thermodynamics suffice for ordinary matter), but the miracle-mechanism is admittedly easier to state if a group entity can be addressed as a unit. This opens the essay’s central topic, because we declare group entities into existence every time we speak. Words are the definitions that describe group entities.

III. Naming: How Group Entities Come to Be

Naming as creation. Consider an object on the desk. Call it a bag clip, and its bag-clipping essence seems obvious. But had it been introduced as a “corner clamper” for stacks of paper, that would have been its nature, its market, its aisle at the office store — until someone invented the “paperclip” and made a fortune by improving the original. The object did not change; the group entity — the recognized, named, functional thing — was created by the naming. This is not wordplay; it is the biblical anthropology of Adam’s first assignment: “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19). We are namers by office. Cultures prove it by naming differently: the Yūgen (幽玄) — a Japanese word pointing at the profound, mysterious sense of beauty that hints at something beyond what can be seen — like moonlight on water, distant mountains, or a crane lifting off into mist. That the group entity exists in bounded, identified, spoken-word form in that culture makes it teachable to children, communicable among adults, and usable in commerce. Words give definition; they delineate a portion of the all and enable isolation; they illuminate the fact of a distinction, an essence that is prominent and identifiable with the triangulation of multiple examples of the state in question. One culture may delineate a collection, essence, or emotion, or isolate a detail of a larger set that remains invisible to another.  Utility often presses identification, such as the many types of snow to the Eskimos and few types of precipitation noted by the Amazonian natives. A word can act as a modifier, adding detail and shifting nuance: a room, when modified by purpose, becomes a storage room, a music studio, or an office without a molecule moving—renamed by the purpose one brings through the door. We live, as the apt fictional image has it, in a room of requirement: the world opens as what we need it to be, configured by desire and declaration. The theological weight of this is considerable: reality is more fluid to purpose than it appears, and the authority to name — to carve group entities out of the continuum and thereby make them culturally real — is a delegated participation in creation itself.

Everything is a noun. Pressed to its foundation, the analysis yields a startling grammar of being. A noun is a configuration of Conscious Points. A verb is a time-sequence of such configurations — running is a series of freeze-frames, each a noun, strung on the time dimension; verbs are time-variable nouns. An adjective is a noun serving as qualifier: “blue” in “blue pencil” is itself two configurations, a pencil, and blue. The blue is the configuration of 450-nanometer waves impressed upon the Dipole Sea, perceived through rhodopsin, specific receptors responsive to 450 nm waves, and the nerve pulses corresponding to blue wavelength are routed to the cortex and attached to the pencil-noun as a modifier. When the noun is promoted to being the subject (“let us discuss blue”), its nounhood is again seen as an object. An adverb modifies the tempo or manner of a noun-sequence. Even emotions are nouns: fear, pleasure, and desire are each a specific neural pattern corresponding to a Conscious-Point configuration; a shape of synaptic activation that exists as a configuration of a flexible body part. Grammar is not a human convention imposed on a formless world; it is a map of ontology; words are the names for the various configurations of existent substance. Each sentence parses the creation into the named noun substance-configurations, their sequences, their qualifier of being and doing — and over all of it, the namer is exercising Adam’s office.

IV. The Museum of Emotions and Senses: Where Blue Comes From

Here the conversation reached the question left open in “Triangulating Truth” — the engineering of qualia. We made some conceptual advances in modeling the possible method by which we may model the intangible experiences of reality as tangible configurations of reality’s substance (the Conscious Points).

The economy of archetypes. God did not create sense receptors for every sensation. He created sense receptors for a few, and from those combinations of the primitives, the entire spectrum of sensory and emotional experience emerged.

• Color: He created red, green, and blue receptors, and from these three all of the colors of the Roy G. Biv acronym (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet). From these three, every shade and variation – aquamarine, scarlet, and teal result as an experience by combination.
• Taste: He created receptors for salty (electrolytes), sweet (energy), sour (spoilage), bitter (toxins), and umami (protein). From these 5, all tastes arise, such as the complex tastes of sushi, asparagus, and kimchi.
• Smell: is more complex, with ~400 molecular receptors that detect various molecular features, including chain length, functional groups, ring structures, chirality, volatility, and polarity.
• Sound: Contains a number of primitives, distinctions of character within the acoustic wave. The Primitive Dimensions of Sound”
  • 1. Frequency (Pitch): The rate of vibration of the sound wave. Low frequency → low pitch; High frequency → high pitch. This is a true primitive because the cochlea maps frequency spatially (tonotopy). Every other auditory quality depends on this axis.
  • 2. Amplitude (Loudness): The magnitude of the pressure wave. Larger amplitude → louder; Smaller amplitude → quieter. This is independent of frequency and is detected by firing rate in auditory neurons.
  • 3. Temporal Envelope (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release): How the sound changes over time. sharp attack → percussive; slow attack → smooth; long decay → echoic; short decay → clipped; This is a primitive because the auditory system has dedicated neurons for onset, offset, and temporal modulation.
  • 4. Timbre (Spectral Shape / Harmonic Content): The pattern of frequencies present at once. This is what makes: a violin different from a flute; a human voice different from a trumpet; two sounds with the same pitch and loudness still sound different. Timbre is a primitive because the auditory cortex decomposes sound into spectral components.
  • 5. Spatial Location (Interaural Time & Level Differences): Your brain computes: interaural time difference (ITD) → left/right timing; interaural level difference (ILD) → left/right loudness; spectral filtering by the pinna → up/down, front/back. This is a primitive because it uses dedicated brainstem circuits.
  • 6. Phase / Coherence: Whether waves align or interfere. This matters for: binaural beats; sound localization; distinguishing multiple overlapping sources. Phase is a primitive because the auditory system detects phase locking at low frequencies.
  • Touch resolves into a handful of primitives — pressure, stretch, heat, pain — whose superposition yields everything from the burn of the sun to the joy of a caress.

Summary Table — The True Primitives of Touch

Emotions are likewise combinations of primitives, though not clearly identified. These are subcortical, ancient, and shared across mammals. They are not learned — they are wired. The emotions are grouped in the following families:

• 1. SEEKING: Curiosity, exploration, anticipation, motivation. The drive to investigate, learn, pursue.
• 2. RAGE: Anger, frustration, boundary defense.
• 3. FEAR: Threat detection, avoidance, freezing, vigilance.
• 4. LUST: Sexual desire and reproductive motivation.
• 5. CARE: Nurturing, affection, bonding, parental warmth.
• 6. PANIC / GRIEF: Separation distress, loneliness, loss, longing.
• 7. PLAY: Joyful social engagement, rough‑and‑tumble play, humor.

The senses and the emotions alike reduce to a small alphabet of elemental experiences; the infinite vocabulary of life is combinatorially spelled in the phonemes of spoken and letters of written language; the RBG of colors, shapes and angles, and brightness of vision; and the minimal number of elemental nerve receptor types that mediate smell, taste, and touch. This is the same architectural signature found everywhere in CPP: a tiny set of primitives (four Conscious Points for motion, the Grid Points holding space, and the DI-bits carrying messages) generating, by configuration alone, the entire zoo of particles, forces, and conscious experiences. The Creator is an economist of elements and a spendthrift of combinations.

The Museum. Picture, then — as a working image — a room in the heavens: the Museum of Senses and Emotion. Under each glass: an archetype. Blue. Fear. Salty. Loud. Bright. Pain. Pleasure. Smooth. Fear. Lust. Play. Each archetype is a specific configuration of Conscious Points that God has established—the prototype, the first instance, the standard exemplar. With each elemental sense, He has bound a definite experience: when this shape occurs in our nervous system, the conscious experience arises from the spirit experiencing that configuration of Conscious Points. Our nervous systems do not create these experiences; they instantiate the configurations, and the indwelling spirit, perceiving the configuration, receives the experience God bound to it. Humanity’s creative capability is downstream: we combine archetypes (blue + green) and name the combinations (aquamarine, squishy, exhilarating…); God made the letters; we perceive the words (the complex assembly of sensory perception and emotional experience). In that complexity, we play out the drama of His creation and satisfy His desire for love, overcoming, creativity, and interest. And when the honest question is pressed — but how did God create that experience of blue as the seen object? How did the isness of blue arise? The analysis reaches its floor: there is no deeper excavation. The archetypes are where explanation rests, and the mystery begins. “Canst thou by searching find out God?” (Job 11:7). We have traced blue to the threshold of the throne. Beyond that is a mystery.

Seeing God through the filter of creation: Having postulated that the Almighty is the source of all experience, and that the Conscious Points are the filter, and our own spirit as the perceptive point of consciousness allows us to be aware of the universe of form. This sequence of transmission: 1) God (the pure white light of all possibilities), 2) the filter/shaping of the Conscious Point configuration (the object of sensory perception), and 3) the perceiver (the spirit-soul of the man) who is conscious of the configuration of consciousness which he is perceiving. This model gives us a way of making the intangible plausibly comprehensible in terms of a mechanistic chain of cause.

The original question was, what are we actually seeing when we see blue? On CPP’s account, we perceive only configurations of Conscious Points. The Conscious Points are the elements of consciousness that God’s mind created as points of perspective, allowing Him to look back at Himself. Therefore: every perception is a perception of God, filtered through a configuration. Picture God as pure light at the center of all things, and every configuration of the Dipole Sea as a lens, a stained pane, a filter between that light and us, the perceiving spirits. Look at God through the 450-495 nanometer configuration of the Dipole Sea, and you see Him as blue. Through the salty, a chord, the pungent smell configuration, you taste Him as salty, harmonic, and pungent. Through the sequence-configuration of a body in stride, you see God running. We never perceive the pure light directly, but we never perceive anything else but Him: “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things” (Romans 11:36); “in thy light shall we see light” (Psalm 36:9).

The uniformity of qualia across all perceivers — Sunday’s swarm argument: we all see the same blue because we are all looking at the same God through the same archetype. His experience of the configuration is the experience; ours is His received. There is a difference in hardware; the man, animal, tree, and rock are different in their capacity to resolve the patterns, the Conscious Point configurations. The source, the light of God’s consciousness, never varies, but we, as receivers, bring a different sensory mechanism and our unique framing based on experience. The Near Death Experience of brighter colors is the removal of the dimming apparatus of the sensory filter. The soul-spirit within perceives the Conscious Point configuration directly. Those who return from death’s threshold report that the colors were alive and everything was clearer and more real. That is exactly what the model predicts: direct perception of the configurations. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12); “we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Even blindness clarifies under the analysis: the blind man does not experience darkness — darkness is a seen thing. The blind man lacks the perceptive apparatus entirely, and no communion of confirmation with the seeing world can supply it. Which is the human condition itself with respect to the glories not yet revealed. We look forward to that day when we see Him as he is — “eye hath not seen… the things which God hath prepared” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

V. Will: The Noun of the Not-Yet

The question that launched the conversational exploration — what is “will” and where does it come from? — now answers itself with the tools assembled.

Will defined. Apply the grammar: will is a noun — a configuration of neural activation held in the brain and spirit — whose content is a future configuration of the world. Desire is the pull of that envisioned state; will is the commitment to make the outer world match the inner picture, and the refusal of satisfaction until it does. The willing soul says: the universe is to be in that state; I carry that state within me now; I will not release the tension between the world as it is and the world as I have envisioned it until they correspond. When the two meet, when reality corresponds to desired reality, the rush of consummation follows. Will is thus the engine that converts imagination into history. It is also, therefore, the most dangerous faculty we have: Scripture’s warning that men are drawn away by their own desires (James 1:14) is the observation that the same engine runs on any fuel. The discipline of the Godly life is not the extinction of will but its alignment — reining the desires to God’s desires, willing what He wills, until “delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart” (Psalm 37:4) describes our commitment: His desire, implanted, felt as ours, willed by us, satisfied in Him.

Where a will comes from: a case study. I examined the origin of my presidential aspiration that has been in the background, shaping the last forty years of my life. I was in a Landmark Seminar in 1986 (a New Age personal growth organization started by Werner Erhardt). The exercise of the Seminar was to think of a project that would make the world better. Each week, we shared our individual vision with our small breakout group. Each week, the seminar leader challenged us to think bigger. I recognized the pattern quickly and decided to stop escalation. I was in an impressionable state and answered in defiance, if that’s what you want, “I’ll trump you and stop this endless think bigger challenge to my small aspirations.” So, I said: “My plan is to become President and develop a participatory democracy.” That moment, that vow, that vision imprinted. The imprint took shape in my vision of the Voting Network, an initiative I developed to counter propaganda with populism. If the whole village compares notes, “the emperor has no clothes” becomes common knowledge that no authority can declare invalid. When everyone knows that everyone knows, a people can’t be fooled or deceived with misinformation, disinformation, or propaganda. I saw it as a genuinely workable idea for making a populace immune to top-down deception. I considered it worthy of a life’s pursuit. And beneath the idea, the deeper spring was the desire to make the world better. A year later, I found God, the Bible, and the understanding of the fundamental understructure of reality. I believe this is one of God’s primitive desires, to manifest the Lord’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10). I believe this goal is best explained as God’s desire to manifest and experience the world in its mature state through the voluntary acts of His children, the parts of Himself that choose to follow His way.

God has bound a good feeling to every world-bettering intention — one more exhibit in the Museum. The reformer’s fire is the experience of God’s own pleasure in repair. The willing heart is the recipient of the joy of the fulfillment of the divine desire. Here is the doctrine of a personal calling in CPP dress: “it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). Notice what this account does to ambition. Notice that my presidential aspiration is the desire not for the experience of the office (the dinners, the press conferences, the meetings, the crises, the speeches, all of which are plausibly unpleasant) but for the medium the office affords: the platform to speak, inspire, and move the nation toward the state He desires, on Earth as it is in Heaven. And so the goal can be held rightly and lightly: as the candy at the end of the maze that motivates every corridor of the work (the physics, the homeschool, the essays, the daily counsel to the nation), with full knowledge that the candy itself is not the point and may never be tasted. My Kabbalah teacher’s proverb applies: take what you want and pay for it. Every attainment has a cost; framed as service to God, our life, each moment making the world better, gives God pleasure in His experience of our participation in the struggle to push against the enemy He installed. Regarding the attainment of the ultimate outcome, if, thirty years hence, no band ever plays for this candidacy, but someone for whom the band does play implements the vision, it will have accomplished the same thing for God’s pleasure. The goal is: a populace immunized against propaganda; a nation counseled into loving one another; a commitment to a good and Godly process, not just a desirable end. If my life can inspire the group habit and institutions to move in that direction, the desire will have been satisfied in its true object. That is will purified: attached to the configuration, detached from the credit.

The daily brief as the form of the work. From this follows the practical program now taking shape: a campaign in the shape of a counsel — daily addresses, fireside chats, solution-speeches — taking each day’s news as the case study and asking every time, what is the problem, and what can be done as the long-term cure?” The Netflix Boeing “Freefall” documentary, about their descent from a quality-dedicated company to a profit-seeking one, becomes a teaching moment. It is a hard lesson on the outcome of pursuing profit and efficiency over a commitment to quality. The misplaced pursuit of profit over quality resulted in the death of 346 people in two 737 Max crashes. Providing value by service is the only reason for business. Profits follow naturally. The Iran threat becomes a campaign to transform the hearts of a captive people. Reach people longing to be free. Preach, teach, and live the gospel through every effective channel. Change the people, and the leaders will follow. Externally managing those who worship other gods (the desires of money, lust, power) is not sustainable; every man must take up the challenge and manage himself. Training/warning/counseling against every contingency is impossible; life has too many variables. The only sustainable “teaching a man to fish” type of counsel is to point every man to the source of all counsel, to God Himself, the Holy Spirit as the inner counselor. And since we have a recorded version of His voice/words in the Bible, we can use it as a pattern to model our own actions. We can listen to our inner voice and recognize the solutions it offers that correspond to/align with the way of the Words of God/the Biblical spirit. Disciplining oneself in the way of the one True God is the fastest path to personal and societal transformation. The corruption that has infected government should be called what it is – prostitution. We must all resist the temptation to trade authority/trust/values for monetary gain (see analysis below). The proposed method is to develop a vocabulary that enables understanding of God’s motivation for creating and sustaining the universe; the likely outcome of the universe’s workings; the forces guiding nature; and the structure and drives that move the minds and hearts of man. I believe a deep understanding of the elemental structure of the physical and spiritual universe would facilitate acceptance of God’s omnipresence and His rule and role in our lives. Understanding His immanence gives gravity, meaning, and accountability to our words, thoughts, and actions. Such knowledge gives a reason to act right. I believe knowing and understanding the Conscious Point understructure of the universe gives the substance and framework to understand emotions and sensory experience. The building blocks and forces composing the universe are then available to model how and why humans act and choose as they do. Such a pattern of forces and limitations makes the counsel concrete. The paradigm, if understood, gives words to concepts and unseen underlying realities sufficient to counsel a nation on how to get along. The briefs operate as ideas, reasons, and strategies to overcome temptation; to forgive the sinner who repents; and to ensure justice and responsibility/accountability for the rebellious against God’s law. Defining, naming, and hating evil with the fervor of God should be a passion for all. The goal is transforming the hearts of all to walk in the way of Christ. We must all draw the line between Godly and unGodly, and we can do this by feeding on the Word. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” (Psalm 119:11) A guiding principle is asking what we can do as a people to make America Godly. We can frame our goals around our answer to the question, “What would Jesus Christ say to the nation today, about the issues of today?” And behind the daily words, the longer purpose: every conversation recorded, every essay published, every site populated is a body of work recorded and meant to outlive its author. It is a repository of training data for a future counselor who can carry the message when my voice is gone.

VI. Revelation 12:11 — The Anatomy of Overcoming

The conversation’s height was an extended exposition of a single verse: “And 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). The three clauses, examined in order, turn out to be a complete anatomy of the transformed life.

The blood of the Lamb: transformation is real. John Howard’s lament — that it is sad if people need something untrue to hold their lives together — and Michael Sherman’s demand for evidence both presuppose that nothing actually happens in conversion: the remedy is imaginary, a false promise. The first clause answers: something real occurred, and occurs. The atonement — this is the burden of the Twelve Postulates — was not God arranging an inspiring example of suffering nobly borne; history is full of noble sufferers, and none of them saved the universe. The Cross fundamentally altered what the universe is capable of: it made possible a new kind of human being — one whose heart, upon inviting Christ in, actually changes by the invited indwelling of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Such a reborn man desires differently; his conscience now feels the neighbor’s pain as his own. The blood of the Lamb is the ontological claim that hearts can be, and are, remade — “a new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26); “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). To the excellent man who says “I don’t need it — I’m moral as I am,” the answer of this clause is: as good as you are, you can be something more than you realize — not improved but transformed, with desires you do not currently have and joys you cannot currently feel.

The word of their testimony: the witness that will not recant. The second clause is the swarm argument militant. The overcomers testify — this works, God is good, I was changed — and they do not stop when threatened. “If you don’t take that back, we will kill you.” — “Then you can. But it is simply true, and I will not take it back.” When no one will recant what is good, evil loses its editorial control over reality. This is the voting network in its ultimate form: the emperor’s nakedness proclaimed by every subject at once, propaganda drowned in convergent witness — and it is why the enemy’s first target is always the isolation or intimidation of witnesses.

Loving not their lives unto the death: the unbuyable soul. The third clause illustrated by an old joke with a theological spine. A man asks a woman to bed; she refuses. He offers a million dollars; she agrees. Immediately he drops the offer to ten; she demands, “What kind of woman do you think I am?” He replies, “We’ve established that. Now we’re just negotiating the price.” The principle: if you can be bought at any price, you are for sale, and everything after is negotiation. And it generalizes past money to every currency of coercion: when the choice is, “Do the deed or …” whether the consequence is death, shame, poverty, injury, loss, the decision whether to do a little or a lot of compromise is merely a type of dealmaking: each threat only discovers the price. “Loving not their lives unto the death” is the state of having no price in any currency: not wealth (the billion refused), not survival (the martyr’s calm), not reputation (immunity to shame). Such a person cannot be made a tool of Satan by any offer, because the lever — the love of this life and its goods above righteousness — has been removed. And here the personal and the political fuse: the graft system that runs the world is nothing but the joke at national scale. Campaign finance for legislative favors is prostitution. The only solution that reaches the root — deeper than any reform, any exposure, any law — is a citizenry of the unbuyable: a world where the billion is offered, and everyone says no, at which point the power of money simply evaporates, since money’s power was never anything but the purchase of consent. This is a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out. This is the behavior that reflects or at least leads to Earth as it is in heaven, and for loving your neighbor as yourself.

The corollary of service. The positive face of the third clause: the self not clung to is the self spent on others. And in the God-lives-us framework, every act of service is arithmetic in God’s own experience: the man on the corner who received the dollar, the family comforted in their loss, the load lightened. In each, God suffered, and that suffering was replaced by the relief God now enjoys. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40) is not metaphor but mechanism.

The ministry caution attached: help that collapses the helper’s own life into chaos serves no one. Lifting the fallen, the homeless were the case discussed, is a structured environment: community with Godly rules, discipline with rewards, Scripture as the curriculum, and the goal of each person receiving the changed heart, experiencing the change, and adding their word of testimony to the swarm. Shared experience, it was observed, is what lingers and multiplies — it takes a village to raise a man, and the village is the delivery system of teaching wisdom, living as an example, nourishing the weak and training in strength, and giving the grace of strong medicine.

VII. “Whatever You’re Doing — Stop It”: The Smallest Complete Sermon

The conversation closed its moral circuit with the smallest tool in the kit, and a live testimony of its power. The story (Michael Sherman’s, retold): Mrs. French, his High School English teacher with failing eyesight, could detect misbehavior she could not identify, and disciplined the class with the immortal formula: “I don’t know what you are doing, but whatever it is — stop it.” The formula is a complete moral technology. It requires no diagnosis, no analysis of the sin’s genealogy, no negotiation with the impulse: something is wrong; stop it; redirect. And the lesson includes a principle, received and practiced, that has been decisive against running thoughts and old addictions — not by wrestling the desire but by closing the option: “That’s not an option anymore. I don’t do that. Change focus; let the brain empty of it; move.” The whole discipline reduces to remembering the one thing one already knows how to do — and remembering, repeated, becomes habit: “I’m not drinking. Oh, that’s right — I don’t drink.” This is Mrs. French agreeing with Paul: “reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin” (Romans 6:11). The counsel is not to fight sin at each occasion, but to reckon it dead, a settled fact needing only recollection. And its refinement closed the loop: the stop applies even to good activity when evaluation is due — stop, assess, confirm the heading, go. This is will exercising governance over itself: the desire examined, the maze checked against the candy, the inner configuration re-aligned before the outer pursuit resumes.

Conclusion: The Points to Consider

Let us tie together the threads of conversation. God creates by an economy of archetypes and an act of holding: few elements, endless combinations, and a ratchet of divine preservation that makes both the four-billion-year assembly and the instantaneous healing one operation at two speeds. We, bearing Adam’s office, participate by naming — declaring group entities into being, carving the world of requirement into storerooms and studios and callings. Every experience in that world — blue, cinnamon, fear, the swell of music — is an archetype from God’s museum, and every perception whatsoever is a sight of God through a lens. Our experience of life is nothing else other than our sight of God. Will is the noun of the not-yet — a future configuration carried within, refusing satisfaction until the world conforms — and it is holy exactly insofar as the configuration carried is God’s. The transformed life that Revelation 12:11 anatomizes — really changed by the blood, testifying without recantation, unbuyable in every currency — is the only force that overcomes the adversary, whether in a soul, an industry, or a nation. And the whole of sanctification, on days when the architecture of morality — the structure of the physical and spiritual universe —is too much to hold in mind, abbreviate the therapy to the schoolteacher’s sentence: whatever you’re doing—stop it. You can resist, just distract your attention onto anything else. Desire cannot sustain without attention to its object.

“For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.” — Romans 11:36

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260823 – Recap – Triangulation in the Fellowship

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

260823 – Every Man His Own Trench: Triangulation Tested in the Fellowship

A fellowship essay – Fellowship meeting of Sunday, August 23, 2026
Participants: Thomas Abshier, Charlie Gutierrez, Susan Gutierrez, Leonard Hofheins, Michael Sherman, Armond Boulware

Introduction: The Essay Meets Its Examiners

Last week I sent out “Triangulating Truth,” the essay drawn from my long conversation with John — my friend of fifty years, the honest empiricist who lives uprightly without belief. I invited John to join us, but he couldn’t attend because of other obligations. Instead, Michael took up John’s arguments. Leonard argued that we have too little revelation today, rather than too much. Susan gave us her own three points she uses to triangulate truth. Armond called in from under a shade tree far from his home to join because his home had been without power for the last two weeks, and gave us his theology of adversity in one sentence. And Charlie advocated for revelation by conversation.

What follows is an example of truth being found where independent witnesses converge, and that every soul has its own narrow trench to the target.

I. Michael Takes Up John’s Part: Is Faith the Enemy of Science?

I opened by describing John to the group — a man whose parents were abusive to each other. He grew up in fear. He claims to think in words rather than pictures. His world is concrete, solid, and complete, with nothing unseen behind it. I asked Michael whether that description resonated with his own way of seeing. He felt that John “is misleading himself, because he can feel cold and hot without seeing it… Light itself, the thing that helps us see, is invisible. Sound is invisible. You can’t hit the force that lifts a paper clip to a magnet — you see only its effects… Do not deny what you clearly see merely because it’s invisible. Surely he has had love, and love is not strictly visible.”

Then Michael noted that the great advances of science were made by men who refused faith — Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein — men who would not believe the obvious, who overthrew four centuries of settled physics because they stayed open. “Faith is defiant of, in fact antithetical to, the scientific principle.” His preferred word is not materialism but reproducibility: propose a thing, test it under every condition, and assign it “a percent likelihood based on how often it holds true.” The scientist he admires is a seeker, not a believer — “I search” rather than “I believe” — and a true scientist would never even be an atheist, since one cannot prove a negative: “the scientist I’m defining would remain open, one hundred percent.”

Of course, I agree. What Michael described is how science should be done, and I have no argument with it whatsoever. My quarrel is with the culture. Michael offered that a better description would be the cult of science. As a confirmation of my assertion that science reflexively rejects the inclusion of God, I note that every AI I have asked to comment on my writing tells me the same thing about my physics papers — that any mention of God, even by implication, even the mere name “Conscious Point Physics,” will have the work rejected by arXiv, by Nature, by Physical Review Letters; that I will be considered crank physics and dismissed as not-science. Yet the same journals will publish, without irony, that mass arose from nothing by quantum fluctuation, evolved by itself, and became giraffes, poodles, and kangaroos. Those are the beliefs of a faith — the religion of materialism. My assertion is that the question is never faith versus no faith in the spiritualism vs. materialism debate; it is only what the faith is in.

Michael’s replied that AIs are not science, because you get “garbage in, garbage out”; they merely mirror the predilections of the culture that wrote them. (He is exactly right, and that is exactly my point: they are the distilled mind-gestalt of the culture, which is why their testimony about that culture is reliable.) And against my claim that even slapping the couch is an act of faith, he told two stories: 1) The ranger on the nature hike who pointed thirty children to “the red bat” in a tree, had them shout to make it flap — ninety percent saw it move — and then revealed it was a red baseball bat: “I just wanted to see if you’d agree when I said it happened.” 2) The night in the all-night coffee shop when, too tired to study, he kept catching a familiar man across the room looking up whenever he looked up, walked over to greet him, and collided with a mirror. “The certainty broken by new data is fun,” he said. “Even the couch — I give it 99.9999 percent, and I love thinking: but maybe not.”

At that point, we were able to come to convergence. I said: “That likelihood and belief held at high confidence without certainty — that is what I call faith.” And Michael answered: “Now you’ve crossed a line that causes me to find easier agreement. If it’s likelihood instead of certainty…” Likelihood is his word; faith is mine; they name the same posture. John’s provisionalism, Michael’s percent-likelihood, and the believer’s faith are one epistemic species. The dispute was never over the structure of our knowing. It is only over what the evidence, honestly weighed, points to.

II. What Is Real? The Puzzle, the Piece, and the Branch Cut Off

Michael then asked: “What is a really good piece of evidence that God exists?” I said: “I don’t know that there’s any actual evidence that God exists. I think it’s all inference. I think it’s all triangulation… Everything I see, everywhere I go, all points back at the same source. That’s the best evidence I have.” God is the unifying concept — physics seeks a theory of everything, and my answer is that the everything is God’s: “There is nothing that is not of God, in God, from God, about God.”

Michael offered the jigsaw-puzzle analogy to explain our relationship with God. God is the whole puzzle; each of us is a piece — not the puzzle, but of it, distinguishable but not separate. “My skin is not my border,” he added, “or I’d be dead — I need the oxygen outside my skin on a constant basis.” I accepted the analogy as about as good as an analogy can get. We pressed further into definitions. What is “real?” My concept is that “real is the existence independent of any human observer, God as the Observer upon whom all existence depends, the arbiter of realness; the child a couple intends is not yet real in manifestation but real in commitment, desire, and action, a progressive manifestation whose degree God alone adjudicates.” To which Michael asked, “How are you privy to God’s perspective?” My response: “We cannot be certain of God’s perspective. At some point in everything, faith is required. There is no place in our entire experience of life where faith is not required.”

Then Susan said, yes, everything is in God — but “part of the condition of mankind is that he’s been cut off from God, and that can happen while still being within God.” The unbeliever is a piece of the puzzle that has lost the larger picture and does not realize he is an integral and important part of the puzzle. She used the analogy of man’s relationship to God of the branch cut from the tree. “When a tree limb is cut off, it looks just the same as when it was connected, and you might say, oh, it’s still alive. But if it’s cut off, it’s cut off from its life source, and it is in the process of death.” Adam was told “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17) — and he lived 930 years.  But in the sense of the branch cut from the tree, he died that day: spiritually, as the cut branch dies — green for a season, dead in fact. “This,” Susan said, “is what we call life: the process of death.” The aches, the fading energy, the heart problems; it is life winding down and death working forward, unless we are grafted again into the tree through Christ.

I see the mechanism that makes the world’s play possible: God can allow parts of His own awareness to be disconnected from His own awareness, even while He remains the whole. Susan framed this structure biblically: God has put all things under the authority of Christ; Christ is in the Father, we are in Christ who is in the Father — the creation gated in its perception through the Son. That is precisely the architecture we have discussed before in the 12 Postulates: the Father created the Son; the Son created the creation; and our access runs through Him. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6) is not a gate slammed against man; it is the description of how the circuit is wired.

From there Susan and I discussed the path of salvation and agreed that the commitment of the heart to Godly action is what counts. The goal is to acheive a “well done, thou good and faithful servant.” We can can reach that even in a life that stumbles — “the good that I would I do not” (Romans 7:19), yet “as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12); then sanctification, Christ leading the committed soul “in the paths of righteousness” (Psalm 23:3), little by little, “in chunks that they can manage,” until He can “present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle” (Ephesians 5:27). And the warning she attached: the one who says “I’m saved, I don’t need to change anything” has misunderstood the transaction — commitment without willingness to be led is the seed on stony ground (Matthew 13), and the connection gained for a little while can be lost. Yet even then, she testified, God does not let go: He recognizes the decision once made, and He engineers the circumstances — as He did with her — until the wanderer says, “I’m done living like this. I want to try God again.”

III. Susan’s Three Stars: A Testimony in the Form of a Sextant

I asked: “Where in your own life has truth arrived by triangulation?” Susan came to her answer from preparing for the week’s assignment to explain the Gospel of Jesus Christ. She gave us her own three sightings, the three points by which God fixed her position before she could accept Christ.

The first star: the hard teaching. Reading John 6:53 — “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” — and watching the disciples walk away, she closed the book annoyed and told God so: Jesus didn’t have to teach it that grossly; people walked away unnecessarily. And in a split second God gave her an understanding which, put into words, was: “I don’t mind losing shallow followers in an effort to push people into a deeper relationship with me.” He showed her His perspective, and it made sense — not yet enough to believe, but a line on the chart.

The second star: the lion and the witch. Walking through the hall while the children watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — a scene she had seen many times when Aslan negotiates with the witch to die in place of the traitor boy. And the new thought came: maybe that’s why Christ died — to release us from Satan’s grip. She had always thought God could simply forgive if He wanted; here was the first live possibility of why a death was required. A second line, crossing the first. (It did not escape the fellowship that Charlie had, days before, urged me to watch The Most Reluctant Convert — C.S. Lewis’s own journey from atheism. The Oxford don’s fiction was one of the stars God used to navigate Susan home. Myth, as John insisted, can teach us eternal truths.

The third star: the prayer about sex. This one she almost kept private. For years her strongest argument against the atonement was that people abuse it — “God will forgive me,” and they go off and sin. Her mantra was the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. Christ’s teaching, she reasoned, did harm. Then one day, still not believing in Christ but believing in God, she was praying — thanking God for sex, for its beauty between a man and a woman. And God spoke: “People abuse sex. Should I have withheld that?” That made sense to her. She would never say the gift of sex should have been withheld because it is abused; then how could she say the gift of atonement should have been withheld because it could be abused? “A big brick wall… just crumbled, because I realized my own logic was faulty, and I was holding God to a standard I didn’t believe in.”

Three sightings, taken years apart, from utterly different quadrants of her life — a Bible annoyance, a children’s movie, and a prayer of thanksgiving. That was where the lines crossed. There, she was told it was time, and she decided: I guess I do believe in Christ. “So there’s your triangulation, in my experience.”

I observed that no one will ever repeat these stories. No apologist would have chosen those three points; no tract contains them. And when I asked how she knew the voice was God and not her own thought or Satan’s — she gave the biblical test — the fruit made it obvious (Matthew 7:16). The word led to brightness, growth, harmony; and when she accepted Christ she was filled with a love, peace, and joy beyond anything she had experienced, which she expected to fade and which has not. And when it occasionally withdraws, it functions as God’s summons: “You’ve got my attention. What do you want to say to me?”

Charlie added that even at her most anti-Christ period, she had detailed exchanges with God—spending hours writing her ideas of how people could be good to one another, seeking, with no reference to God, the very answer that turned out to be Him. “God,” Charlie said, “is really loving and patient.”

IV. Mercy Implies a Sentence: Why the Cross Was Necessary

From Susan’s testimony, I raised the question that has driven my Twelve Postulates: the Muslim names God “the Merciful”—but mercy for what? Mercy implies a consequence that was due and foregone, a punishment lawful, appropriate, necessary — and then not executed. What is the necessity of punishment that makes mercy possible? Susan’s answer was her cut-branch theology extended to its roots: the warning to Adam was real; the sentence is separation; and each of us recapitulates Adam personally. She brought a verse I had never once considered in this light: “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Her reading: Christ covers every infant in the womb — every child begins in relationship with the Father — and each of us, at three or four or five, sinning knowing it was wrong, is cut off by our own act, exactly as Adam was. We are not victims of Adam, over whom we had no control; we are, as I put it in the moment, victims of our own seduction. Christ alone remained uncovered by that fate through sinlessness — until, at the cross, He was cut off not for His sin but for ours: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). And the terror we cannot grasp, Susan said, is that to die cut off is to spend eternity without God — and God is love (1 John 4:8) — an eternity without love, which the unbeliever cannot imagine precisely because, even now, he still enjoys so much of Christ’s light without crediting it.

Later in the morning I gave the fellowship my axiomatic frame: God is the wholeness of everything, desiring fellowship with every part of Himself — “be fruitful and multiply” was a call for children, not rocks — and He made us with real free will, able to be His child or to reject Him. He wants no one lost; but His nature precludes embracing injustice, cruelty, and non-love, and so a soul that has chosen that polarity cannot be brought into His presence. It is not that He will not; His essence cannot. He grieves — it is God rejecting a piece of Himself, sadly, wanting it — but His nature will not allow it to be otherwise. Susan added the pedagogical purpose: God maintains the separation partly for contrast—the principle of contrast from this very essay, polarity as the precondition of perception—so the returning soul tastes the difference. She cited God sending disobedient Israel to serve a foreign king “that they may know my service, and the service of the kingdoms of the countries” (2 Chronicles 12:8). “There’s nothing in life without God that I want. The contrast is too amazing.” And Charlie shared the opening of Isaiah, five times over: “For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still” (Isaiah 9:12, 17, 21; 10:4). God is very angry with sin, but He is still reaching out. He desires obedience, not sacrifice; mercy was never Plan B.

V. Leonard and the illusion of the world

Then Leonard said: “I am going to flip the script.” Where John and Michael doubt the unseen, Leonard doubts the seen: “Everything we see in this world is an illusion… It’ll pass away. But we won’t.” What is real is what is eternal — the energy within us, the spirit, given or borrowed from our spiritual parents, “God the Father and his cohort.” We have existed forever; he knew his Debbie before this world; this earth is a school where spirits come to learn, usually by sad experience; and the one way to know any of it is not physical investigation but revelation: “The only way I can find out for sure is if it’s revealed to me by the Source… God can reveal that to me if I desire it, if He feels it’s something I need to know.” The physical search, he said, is a dead-end search; he tries to prioritize spiritual things. He told the story of Christ: the disciples were tossed in the boat and saw a figure walking on the waves, thought it was a ghost! But it was Him. “He had control over all these things, because he knew how they all work.” (Even the Wachowskis, he offered, were really close in The Matrix. Which pill are we going to take?)

I engaged Leonard as I engage everyone — by asking what stands beneath the declarations. When he invoked the conservation of energy as proof that we are eternal, I answered that energy is a secondary concept, a feature of the creation; there was a precursor to energy, and the precursor is consciousness. When he countered, “maybe they coexist — maybe energy is consciousness,” I named what had happened: he had made a postulate. And postulates are welcome — my whole physics is built on postulates — but a postulate declared is not a postulate grounded. What is incumbent on the one who declares axioms is to derive the world from them, to extrapolate from the initial state to the manifest creation, so the claim connects to something beyond itself. “You’ve stated it as truth, but it’s a belief… it isn’t grounded yet.” Leonard’s answer was, “That’s what I believe. If my belief is errant, then it’s errant. But I believe it’s true. You can’t prove me wrong; I can’t prove it right.” I said triangulation is a way to determine what is true. He replied: “It’s not physical. It’s not of this world; it’s revelation.”

Leonard’s epistemology, his way of knowing, is the question being examined by the essay. Is a fact received by declaration true because it was received from an angel, a prophet, or a feeling of eternity within? This is the form of revelation we have examined in the Snuffer series. Leonard attempted to validate his claim that we are co-eternal with God by quoting Paul, but he misquoted the verse; it actually says we are “joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17). We are heirs together with Christ; we do not exist together. Coexistence from eternity is not a biblical concept. Susan identified its actual source — the LDS doctrine of pre-existent intelligences, and behind “the Father and his cohort,” the Mother in Heaven — and she stated her standard: “If God doesn’t see fit to mention a mother in heaven, then I don’t see why I should bring mother in heaven into anything… I just want to stick to what’s in the Bible.” Charlie interpreted the “us” of “let us make man in our image” by John 1:1. That verse tells us who the “Us” was: the Father and the Word. Adding to the word, Charlie warned, would be a mistake; “the word is mysterious enough.”

Leonard’s counter-witness was the polarity to John and Michael at one pole who demand evidence for the unseen; Leonard’s polarity dismisses the seen. I believe the biblical position between them is that what is real. God speaks it, or visualizes it, or as in my Conscious Point Physics (CPP), allows it to arise from interactions which are governed by the law embedded in each Conscious Point. What we perceive as real is the perception of His mind; we, as conscious points, are perceiving the existence of other Conscious Points, and the appearance of the world is the perception of groups of Conscious Points formed into various shapes. Thus, human consciousness is aware of groups, self, other, and qualities of organization. Thus, a foundational postulate of CPP is that mind can perceive mind. Thus, that which is real is that which is the configuration of God’s mind. The God behind all of it is unknown, and the fundamental nature of God’s mind, that which we see in aggregated form indirectly through the senses and view in the screen of the brain, is what is real. There is an “is”, and it is what God sees, what the mind of God is at any Moment. And given the problem of the blind man and the elephant, we may be mistaken, thinking that a small part of reality is the whole of reality. This lack of full perspective, thinking we have the whole picture, may be true with regard to our political, moral, relational, spiritual, and scientific perspectives. Another perspective is that God created a world where seeing only one side is a primary feature of the moral drama of good and evil, the development of character, and the reality of God’s perspective. If, in fact, reality is a patchwork of aggregates, recognized only when named, then the fullness of the reality is illuminated by triangulation. In our naive/natural/limited state, we declare. I encourage triangulation over declaration, and using revelation through conversation is a method to extract reality from the one-dimensional perspectives through which we perceive life in its ordinary state.

But Leonard does not live in a world of abstract postulates about an unseen world. He has a faith, and it helps him frame his life in a way that gives him hope. He lives with, takes care of, and loves Debbie, whose aphasia slowly steals her words, who “sees it in her mind and can’t get it out.” As Leonard said, “She could be healed by Christ if it was in His heart… I don’t think she needs that. I need her to be who she is, because she’s proving how I relate to her, to help her, be with her, and endure this… It really comes down to enduring to the end.” Whatever we make of his cosmology, his cross-bearing is orthodox. By their fruits ye shall know them — and this fruit is good.

VI. The Canon Question: What May Be Added to the Word?

The fellowship continued the discussion that questions about Leonard’s theology had raised. Is there further revelation? Should there be more books? Do we have any justification for telling Leonard that Denver Snuffer and Joseph Smith’s revelations do not belong on the level of the Bible?

Two scriptures are typically used to rule against giving modern prophecy the status of canon: the “add not unto his words” passages — Deuteronomy 4:2 and Revelation 22:18–19. We examined them, and I argued that the verses refer only to those books, to those revelation-events. They are not a padlock on the whole future canon. Using the Bible to prove that nothing may follow the Bible is the very self-validation the essay warned against. The Bible’s actual authority stands on other ground. We researched the history together, live: no council created the canon — Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) recognized what the churches had already been using for centuries; the four Gospels universal by Irenaeus’s day; Paul’s letters treated as Scripture from the beginning; Athanasius’s festal letter of 367 listing our 27 books exactly.

And the Old Testament: no single moment, no real “Council of Jamnia,” but centuries of usage — Torah fixed by Ezra’s era, the Prophets by 200 BC, the Writings last — a canon recognized, not invented, formed by the long testimony of a worshiping people. The criterion that emerged in the early church was proximity to the Lord: apostolic connection, first-person witness, contemporaries of Christ who lived it, heard it, wrote it. That is why I accept Paul and do not accept Denver Snuffer. It is not because a verse forbids new prophets, but because the credentials are different. An angelic visitation proves nothing by itself: an angel might be an angel, or might be “an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). We don’t know who the angel was. That is not evidence; that is declaration.

Charlie then gave the fellowship his view of Scripture. He glued a new revelation into his Doctrine and Covenants once, as a Mormon. The canon debates, he noted, contain no claim that “an angel appeared and said this one, this one, this one” — just faithful men putting their heads together, rational and spiritual, making their best case, coming to a vote. “We’re doing that today.” Life, he said, is gumbo — everything but the kitchen sink, wildly chancy — and Apollo 13 simulations, problem after problem thrown at you; the Bible is Rashomon, one story of God’s dealings told through many witnesses, “all the errors of perception included,” and the combined effect “so deeply moving and poetic and just beautiful.” Jacob’s sons were wild, even monstrous people — and Jacob, parenting them, “probably got a realization that this is what God goes through every day.” Charlie sees contradictions in Scripture — of outlook, of flavor, Paul and Jesus — and it does not make him curse God; it makes him vigilant: “Ultimately we’re just individuals trying to have a relationship with God… If nothing else, we can always fall back on: love God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself. It’s very reliable. Everything else — stay awake.”

I offered my resolution-of-paradox principle as the instrument for those contradictions: when two accounts, head to head, appear contradictory, find the underlying truth both were describing from their different vantages — the resolution of the paradox is the triangulated truth. Two witnesses, one reality (2 Corinthians 13:1). And Susan used the  Bereans as her standard of examination: “the Bible says to prove all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Thus we have two methods of proving the Bible, which I commend to everyone as this week’s homework: First, put a biblical concept into practice. Take a concept — the woman who decided to love her enemy — do it in your real life, and watch what happens. Test it. Second, triangulate within it. Set verse beside verse beside verse until the concept emerges that all three were sighting. The third method: Christ Himself, incarnate, quoted the Old Testament. Every quotation is the Son of God validating a scripture as worthy. We are not trusting tradition’s telephone; we have the Word’s own citations. (Susan said, the Gospel, once known, unlocks verse after verse of the Old Testament — “oh, that’s what that verse is about” — the New hidden in the Old, the Old opened by the New.)

Against all of this stands the cautionary tale Charlie supplied from his friend Jeff, after the family Bible-roulette landed on the warning of aged David: “That’s what happens when you turn the scriptures into a parlor trick.” Proving is not divination. The Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11) — daily, systematically, together.

VII. Armond Under the Shade Tree: The Theology of Adversity

Armond joined us late from Gary, Indiana — under a shade tree, because that is where the email could reach him. Two weeks ago a derecho — straight-line winds over a hundred miles an hour, a “linear tornado” twenty miles wide — went right over his city, and Gary’s great old trees came down on every block. Thirteen days without power; perhaps a week and a half more; a story that should be national news and isn’t. And from inside it, Armond gave his perspective.

The first was the answer he’d been wrestling toward on the oldest question — why do bad things happen to good people? — “the never-ending variables of life… I came up with a really quick answer, and I don’t know if everybody can live with it: so that the followers of Christ can be an example of how we should handle adversity.” Charlie said, “That’s pretty good. It seems too simple — like, why didn’t I think of that?” Susan added: if signing up with Christ guaranteed a rosy life, “everyone would want to do that” — Charlie: “a universal insurance company” — and the profession would prove nothing. Christ promised persecution, and His presence (John 16:33; Matthew 5:11–12); adversity becomes the better test of our loyalties: when the rubber meets the road, who still acknowledges Him as Lord? Armond’s verdict on the pairing: “I don’t think you can have one without the other.”

The second gift was the lived demonstration, delivered as comedy. His wife, scrolling beside him, posted that “nine days without power has been so devastating — keep everybody in your prayers.” Armond leaned over: “Honey, can you turn the light on real quick? I just wanted some light while I read this post about being devastated.” Their generator had run since an hour after the storm; she had just cooked hibachi steak from the working refrigerator; she had never filled the generator and didn’t know how to start it. “You’ve never seen the darkness except when you turn your lights off… We’ve got to be careful with the words we use. God’s watching. How do we say we’ve been devastated when we’ve been so blessed that we’re able to bless others with our abundance?”

The second blessing that Armond shared was when the pitman arm: the steering component on his truck, simply snapped — not on the freeway, where, as Charlie observed, its failure means the steering is gone and you could be dead — but in a driveway, at walking speed, with a friend nearby, the tools available, and the repair done in a couple of hours. “It couldn’t have happened at any better point in time… I read Proverbs every day” — the righteous delivered out of trouble (Proverbs 11:8) — “and I only attribute it to God’s blessings, and Him being true and honest: if we do our part, He’s going to keep His promises.”

Here was Section VII of last week’s essay — the swarm of testimony — adding one more data point in real time, from under a shade tree, while the chainsaws worked down the block clearing the way for the linemen. Armond and his family, meanwhile, have hooked up a generator inlet for one neighbor and are cutting trees so the utility crews can reach everyone’s downed lines: the followers of Christ, showing how to handle adversity.

VIII. The Death Star Trench: What the Morning Taught About Witnessing

Near the end, Charlie asked me directly: did I feel I got across the main lesson from the conversation with John? My essay was titled “Triangulating Truth,” but the morning revealed that the deeper subject was witnessing.

Consider what happened. Susan heard my triangulation concept and immediately produced her own three points — and they were points no apologist would ever have chosen: a gross-sounding teaching, a scene in a children’s movie, a prayer of thanksgiving for sex. “Everybody doesn’t go, ‘Wow, I believe now because you triangulated those points of life and felt God was real and we should submit our lives to him! I think I’ll believe too.'” No one would. Likewise, my triangulation points are odd to others, just as hers are odd to me. That is the finding: everybody has their own triangulation. I used a Star Wars analogy to illustrate it: the Death Star had one weakness, reachable only down one narrow trench, and the pilot had to fly it exactly. Every soul has its own Death Star trench — the one particular approach by which the message penetrates to the center. John is not resisting because he wants to sin; he doesn’t. He resists because nothing in it is yet real to him. He is asking the same question as Michael: “What’s the evidence?” Leonard is seeing something different also. No master argument exists that makes everybody go “shazam.” There is no assembly line to conversion. There is individual witnessing, and God drawing (John 6:44), and each person is unique, and their story is unrepeatable.

Charlie’s closing summary was: “The important thing you’re illustrating is the general principle: you engaged John in deep, heart-to-heart, earnest conversation and we were able to benefit from seeing his perspective… When I do that, people tell me near the end of the conversation, ‘I’ve never told this to anybody’ — and it’s not that I’m special. I listen. I ask questions. I’m interested in people. This reminds me of the conversation Job had with his three friends and with God — that whole book is a conversation, so beautiful and real, all the errors of perception included. We talk in America much less than we used to, in spite of the advancement of the means of communication. In the old days people would sit on the porch and talk and talk. If nothing else, you illustrate the value of conversation. And this thing Susan and I keep talking about — revelation by conversation — it can only happen when people are talking.”

Amen. Maybe all of us should have more conversations. Maybe that’s really all it is.

Conclusion: The Fellowship as Instrument

I told the group near the end that the morning had been very grounding for me — and it was, in the navigational sense. The essay claimed that truth is found where independent lines converge. Then six independent witnesses spent three hours sighting the same reality from six different positions — Michael’s likelihood, Susan’s three stars and her cut branch, Leonard’s counter-witness and the cross, Charlie’s gumbo canon and his Isaiah refrain, Armond’s shade-tree providence, and my triangulation. The lines crossed. Not on an argument. On a Person: the God who covers us in the womb, whose anger is not turned away but whose hand is stretched out still, who prunes and grafts the branches, who is the whole puzzle and grieves for every piece that cannot see the picture, who assigns each of His children their own trench, and who was, I am persuaded, present in the conversation — as Susan prayed at the close: “I feel like your spirit was with us as we spoke.”

Her closing prayer set the week’s assignment: that we might understand something more in the Scriptures; that we might understand better how to apply Christ’s gospel in our lives; that we might come back and share it and edify each other; and that God would help us better explain the gospel of Jesus Christ, for Michael, for John, and for everyone in the world who needs to understand it better. That is the work. Prove all things. Fly your trench. And have more conversations.

“For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.” — Isaiah 9:12

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260824 – Biblical Testimony Reliability

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

260824 – The Canon, the Back Door, and the Trust Chain: An Analysis

A fellowship essay from a conversation between Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez, Monday, August 24, 2026 — continuing the canon question raised in the Sunday fellowship of August 23

Introduction

Sunday’s fellowship ended with a question we did not finish: on what ground does the Bible’s authority actually stand?  What do we say to the claim — Leonard’s claim, Joseph Smith’s claim, the New Age claim — that the canon is corrupted, incomplete, or awaiting supplementation by new revelation? The following day’s conversation carried the question further, and this essay presents the analysis that emerged. It proceeds in six movements: the historical account and evidence of biblical reliability; the discovery of the Septuagint and what it does to the “removed books” mythology; the anatomy of the corrupted-Bible narrative as a strategic attack; the historical mechanics of the Mormon counter-canon, examined as the type-specimen of that attack; the epistemology of trust chains that governs all of it; and the practical conclusion — how a moral witness should speak to a nation, which turns out to be the same question at civilizational scale.

I. The Ground of Biblical Reliability

The Sunday examination established what the Bible’s authority does not rest on: it does not rest on the Bible’s own commands not to alter it. Deuteronomy 4:2 seals the Law given through Moses; Revelation 22:18–19 seals the vision given through John. Both are the signatures of particular revelation-events, not padlocks on the future canon — and using the Bible to prove that nothing may follow the Bible is circular validation, the very epistemic structure used in cult systems. The Bible’s authority must stand on other grounds, and I believe the analysis identifies that ground.

The New Testament is reliable because it is testimony to an extraordinary man by those who were there. Jesus Christ is a man who claimed to be from the Father and one with the Father. He is a man who did miracles, who raised the dead, who predicted His own death and resurrection, who died and came back to life — and the written testimonies of the disciples who saw it. To this is added one apostle of a different kind: Paul, who never met Jesus in the flesh but encountered Him directly in the spirit, reported on that encounter, and whose letters make up most of the New Testament’s instruction on how to actually live the life of Christ.

The Old Testament is reliable on the parallel ground: it preserves the record of encounters so extraordinary — Abraham, Jacob, Moses, the Red Sea, the prophets — that a people carried them faithfully across thousands of years. The Dead Sea Scrolls supply the empirical check: the Isaiah scroll, a thousand years older than our previous oldest copy, shows that the scribal chain transmitted the text with remarkable fidelity. Oral and scribal transmission can corrupt; the evidence shows that, for this text, carried by this people, it substantially did not.

The formation of the canon, examined historically, confirms rather than undermines this ground. No council created the canon; the councils — Hippo (393), Carthage (397) — recognized what the churches had already used for centuries, by the criterion of apostolic connection: first-person proximity to the Lord. The Old Testament stabilized gradually — Torah by Ezra’s day, Prophets by 200 BC, Writings last — recognized, not invented, through centuries of a worshiping people’s usage. The process was, to use the word from Sunday, somewhat haphazard — “a little here, a little there” (cf. Isaiah 28:10) — and that is precisely its strength. A canon assembled by long, distributed, multi-generational recognition is a triangulated canon: hundreds of congregations, across centuries and continents, independently converging on the same books. A canon delivered whole by one angel to one man in one grove is a declared canon — one line on the chart, crossing nothing.

II. The Septuagint: What the “Removed Books” Story Actually Is

The conversation’s discovery concerns the difference between the Catholic 73-book canon and the Protestant 66. The received folklore, absorbed from a hundred directions, says “the Church removed books from the Bible,” and this folklore does heavy service in every corrupted-canon argument from the New Age to Nauvoo. The history says nearly the opposite.

The early church’s Bible was the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made in the third to first centuries BC. It included Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the Maccabees, and the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel. This was the Bible Jesus and the apostles used; the New Testament quotes the Septuagint 80 to 90 percent of the time; Clement, Irenaeus, and Augustine cite its books as Scripture; and the councils of Rome, Hippo, and Carthage affirmed the full 73-book, Septuagint-based canon, which remained the standard Christian Bible for over a thousand years. The 66-book Bible is the newer artifact: at the Reformation, Luther and the reformers chose to follow the Masoretic canon — the Hebrew collection finalized by rabbinic Judaism after AD 70, after the church and synagogue had parted — moved the seven books to an appendix labeled Apocrypha (“good to read but not Scripture”), and later Protestant publishers dropped them entirely. Trent (1546) did not add books; it reaffirmed the fourth-century canon against the reduction.

Three analytical consequences follow. First, the “books were removed” narrative is real—but our own tradition, the Reformation, removed them for reasons partly textual and partly doctrinal (Second Maccabees’ prayers for the dead), and it removed books the apostolic church demonstrably used. Whatever one concludes about the deuterocanon’s inspiration requires telling the story forward, not backward. Second, the discovery disarms the corrupted-canon attack at its favorite point: the attacker says “the Church hid books from you,” and the informed answer is, “No — the history is public, the books are printed, and the shorter canon is the Protestant choice, not a conspiracy; here is exactly what happened and when.” Sunlight is the whole rebuttal. Third, the right response to learning this is not anxiety but appetite: read them. Susan said the same on Sunday. The Berean posture (Acts 17:11) is not a defensive crouch around 66 books; it is confident examination of everything, “proving all things, holding fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21), with the recognized canon as the standard against which the rest is measured.

III. The Corrupted-Bible Narrative as Strategic Attack

With the history established, the analysis turns to the use made of canon skepticism, and here the conversation produced its central thesis. The claim “the Bible is corrupted — councils added and subtracted — you can’t trust it” is not, in practice, a historical conclusion. It is the necessary first move of every system that intends to install a new revelator. The logic is strictly sequential: the standard must be discredited before the replacement can be seated. New Ageism runs this program diffusely. The need for restoration is the primary ground upon which the need for the Mormon claim by Joseph Smith arises.

I believe Joseph Smith’s encounter with Moroni and the subsequent translation of the gold and brass plates using a seer stone is best understood as a demonic strategy. I think its genius lies not in any single doctrine but in its architecture. What the new revelation established was not merely a new book but a new mechanism — the principle that a person can deliver new canon. In software terms, it left a back door open. Once “a prophet may add doctrine” is installed as a principle, the channel is permanent: any voice, at any time, can be seated in the prophet’s chair, and the system has no means of refusing it — indeed it has a standing office awaiting it, “prophet, seer, and revelator,” sustained by vote, generating (as Charlie observed Sunday of the Journal of Discourses) endless words without end. The content flowing through such a door is unverifiable by design: revelations from a faraway land, angels no one else saw, plates no one else may examine, delivered as “new” precisely so that nothing existing can check them. And the door’s traffic will not announce itself honestly — “no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). No one follows a horned figure in red; everyone wants to follow an angel bearing light and a better story.

The analysis notes the seduction mechanism with care, because it is instructive rather than contemptible: the new revelation works on its audience because it is more vivid than the canon — emotional, personal, immediate, “you were there.” Detail masquerades as authenticity; completeness of narrative is mistaken for completeness of truth. And it very likely contains much that is true — it must, to be believed at all. The tares are sown among wheat (Matthew 13:25), not in a separate field. This is why the test can never be vividness, comfort, or even partial truth, but only the convergence of independent witnesses against the recognized standard — which is what the Bereans did to Paul himself, and what Paul commended them for.

IV. The Type-Specimen Examined: Masonry, the Seer Stone, and the Category of Magic

The conversation then subjected the Mormon origin claims to exactly the historical scrutiny the back-door thesis predicts they cannot survive. We must examine the results drawn from consensus scholarship, including faithful LDS historians. This enables triangulation of Joseph Smith’s revelations.

The Masonic timeline. Joseph Smith was initiated an Entered Apprentice Mason on March 15, 1842, and raised a Master Mason on March 16 — unusually fast. Fifty days later, in May 1842, he introduced the Nauvoo endowment to a select group above the red brick store. The ritual mechanics that entered LDS temple worship — secret signs, tokens, passwords, penalty gestures (throat, chest, bowels), progressive degrees, the ritual drama, the compass and square, the veil, the apron, the handshakes — are Masonic ritual vocabulary, matched element for element; every major historian, LDS scholars included, acknowledges the connection. Smith’s own explanation — that Masonry preserved corrupted fragments of Solomon’s temple rites, now divinely restored through him — is itself the tell: it borrows Old Testament gravitas (the temple was no minor thing) to authorize a nineteenth-century ritual innovation. The blood-oath penalties persisted in the endowment until 1990; the separate oath of vengeance, until 1927. These are not the marks of an ancient restoration; they are the marks of a ready-made ritual scaffolding, adopted whole and retheologized.

The translation mechanism. By the consistent testimony of the witnesses, the Book of Mormon was produced by Joseph Smith placing a seer stone — a folk-magic instrument he had used for years, of a kind common in 1820s New England treasure-seeking — into a hat, pressing his face into the hat, and dictating; the plates themselves were frequently covered or absent from the process, serving as ritual object rather than linguistic source. The brass plates exist only inside the narrative; the gold plates rest entirely on the word of Smith and his witnesses; no external evidence exists for either. Whatever else this is, it is not translation; it is divination — it is magic. Scripture’s verdict on the category is uniform and severe: divination, enchantment, the consulter of familiar spirits are an abomination (Deuteronomy 18:10–12); the instrument in the hat stands in the lineage of the occult, not of the scribes.

Regarding the connection between Masonic rituals and ancient pagan mystery religions: there is no organizational lineage from the ancient mysteries through the Illuminati to modern lodges. Many claim the historical Bavarian Illuminati lasted nine years, but many believe otherwise (a contention which has no bearing on this analysis). But a real symbolic inheritance exists: initiation degrees, oaths of secrecy, ritual death-and-rebirth, and hidden knowledge flow from the mysteries through Hermeticism to Freemasonry, and from the Nauvoo lodge into the endowment. Conceptual and ritualistic continuity, not the continuation of an ancient conspiracy.

The secrecy analysis. The question is why does the category matter beyond taxonomy? Because secrecy is an organizational technology. A secret, oath-bound, hierarchically covenanted society is a command structure exempt from external accountability — no surveillance, tight leadership control, total discipleship — which is precisely the instrument required for coordinated action against an existing order. Hence secret societies recur as the vehicle of conspiracy throughout history; and hence, plausibly, the cultural depreciation of “conspiracy theory” as a category. By eliminating the very idea of conspiracy as credible, the real instances are hidden behind the mockery of the imagined ones. The sober position: conspiracies have happened throughout history and have not stopped because humans improved and no longer band together secretly to exert influence unseen. The present fog of partisan conspiracy-mongering — each party laughing at the other’s theories in alternation — has so polluted the category that discernment, not credulity and not dismissal, is the only rational posture. We see in this analysis sufficient explanation for most worldly evil. We do not need baby-sacrificing Satanists to explain the behavior of those who have degraded the culture of business and government. Most people at the top are bought, not sworn allies of Satan. The Boeing story (the “Free Fall” Netflix documentary) is an example of the pattern: a company once wholly dedicated to quality changes leadership. The new leader is an acolyte of the shareholder-value creed, service is exchanged for stock price, and the degradation proceeds “little by little, here and there” until planes crash and a door falls off an aircraft. No cabal is required where seduction suffices. A CEO salary of thirty million dollars a year purchases most souls without any ceremony at all. “For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). The demonic does not need most men to hail Satan; it needs them to follow, sincerely, something that looked like a good idea, but had within it a transgression; the trading of quality for profit is one trade people can make.

V. The Trust Chain: AI, Textbooks, and the Universality of Faith

A methodological thread ran under the conversation that completes last week’s essay. The historical findings above were assembled in real time with AI assistance — and the immediate, correct question was: how far can AI be trusted, given that its makers have agendas and its training reflects a culture? The answer generalizes devastatingly: everything we know arrives through a chain of trust. We trust the textbook because of its sources; the sources because of their authors; the authors because of their institutions; the news because of its chain of custody. There is no unmediated knowledge of history, of science, of anything beyond immediate perception — and Sunday’s discussion established that even immediate perception rests on a final act of trust. This is the thesis of “Triangulating Truth” arriving from yet another direction: faith is required at every point in the experience of life. The question is never faith versus no faith; it is the quality of the chain — and the only known method for testing a chain is convergence across independent chains. That is why the canon findings above carry weight: AI answer, historical scholarship, LDS scholarship, and primary-source witness accounts all converge. One chain is a declaration; converging chains are a position. Limited trust, systematically cross-checked, is not cynicism; it is the Berean discipline applied to the information age.

VI. From Canon to Country: How a Witness Should Speak

The conversation’s final movement applied the same analysis to the civilizational question. A nation, like a canon, rests on a recognized standard; discredit the standard, and you open the back door for new revelators of every kind.

The diagnosis: America’s founding condition was the one Tocqueville named — America is great because America is good — and its goodness was confessedly Christian. The dismantling proceeded by the same mechanism as the canon attack: a false history installed as common knowledge. The “high wall of separation between church and state” is not in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the Declaration; it is an altered phrase from Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, written to assure a religious minority that government would not dictate doctrine to the church — and in 1947, the Supreme Court, in Everson v. Board of Education, it was inverted into a doctrine that the church must be excluded from public life. We live inside a mythology, sincerely believed by people who think the founders wrote it in stone. Meanwhile, a watered-down Christianity — pray the prayer, change nothing, do as you please — cedes the field to systems that visibly stand for something, which is why Islam and Mormonism surge: people are starving for a faith with a spine. The remedy is not primarily political. The theory of social transformation stated in the conversation deserves canonical form: the renewal of the heart is at the bottom of it all. When enough people are simply good — equipped with a true standard (the Bible), a physics that lets them hold their heads up (there is a God, and materialism is the implausible story), and channels to speak (the feedback of the good) — then the degradations from excellence get refused at every level, the bought leadership finds no one below it willing to execute the degradation, and the cream rises. Government by renewed hearts, or not at all: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD” (Psalm 33:12).

And the manner of the witness matters as much as its content — this was the conversation’s pastoral conclusion, reached through the sobering case of the Netflix documentary on Mike Wallace. The muckraker’s road — confronting the world’s dark secrets face to face, daily, before cameras — extracted a terrible price from the man who walked it: lawsuits, despair, a family neglected unto tragedy. Exposure has its place; someone must sometimes say no to evil, cast the vote, name the thing. But a ministry built on confronting evil risks neglecting to teach the speaking what to do if it dwells endlessly on what not to do. The mind that recites “don’t drink today, don’t sin tonight” is dwelling on drink and sin. The mind pursuing “loving one another, and serving one another, and pleasing God with every thought, word, and deed,” has no bandwidth left for the degradations: “whatsoever things are true… honest… just… pure… lovely… think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). A witness that draws lines in the sand, and choose what is wrong and what is right can live a life of integrity without compromise and be at peace with God, living the life of a pure conscience. By living the life of purity, of edification, of serving those in need, the heart is full.

Conclusion

The analysis of the actual history of the Bible reveals a realistic understanding of the canon; it is trustworthy not because it says so, but because it is the triangulated eyewitness testimonies to extraordinary acts of God. Centuries of the church’s use recognized it as an authentic witness. The attacks on it, from Nauvoo to the New Age, share one architecture: discredit the standard, seat a revelator, hold the back door open to endless revelation. The defense against that architecture is not anxiety but examination — read the history, read even the disputed books, test the chains, and let convergence render its verdict. The same holds for the nation, whose founding standard was discredited by the same method and awaits the same Berean remedy. And the voice that carries this defense must be the positive voice — teaching what to do, unifying in Christ, reasoning together — because the renewal of hearts, one by one, widely, is the only transformation that holds. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105).

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260819 – Triangulating Truth

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

The God Who Lives Us: A Theological Examination of a Dialogue

Fellowship Essay |19 August 2026
Evaluation of a conversation between Thomas Abshier and John
“Faith at the Boundary of Method” (see below)

Introduction

This essay is based on a conversation between John and me last Tuesday. That conversation is analyzed more philosophically in the essay below this one. This essay examines that same dialogue theologically: in this essay, I have stated each substantive point the participants raised, anchored it to Scripture, and evaluated it based on its relationship to Scripture. The governing observation is this: nearly every position taken in the conversation, both John’s position and mine, is anticipated within the Bible itself. The dialogue between the empiricist and the b

eliever is not a modern invention; it occurs, in various forms, within the canon, which both diagnoses the skeptic’s position and dignifies his honesty. The evaluation offered throughout is that Scripture substantially confirms Thomas’s framework at its load-bearing points, that John’s positions are often Biblical conditions stated by a man who has not yet affirmed the Biblical authority and validity.

I. The Limits of Willpower

The point. John contrasted two broken lives: the gym trainer who conquered alcoholism and obesity by “pure willpower,” and John’s father, who “hated life itself,” attempted suicide repeatedly, and was never restored. The implicit question, made explicit in the dialogue: can a man reform himself by will alone, or do some lives require rescue from beyond the self?

Scripture. The Bible affirms both halves of the observed data. Human resolve is real and commanded — “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10) — and yet its limit is stated without sentiment: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil” (Jeremiah 13:23). Paul supplies the interior phenomenology of John’s father: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do… O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:19, 24). The answer to Paul’s question is not the will: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13); “without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5).

Evaluation. The trainer and the father are not counterexamples to each other; they mark the two biblical categories. Common grace equips many for moral self-repair within a life that retains hope; Scripture never denies this, and the trainer’s testimony requires no supernatural explanation. But the settled hatred of being — what John rightly distinguished as a negation of life rather than a disorder within it — is precisely the condition for which Scripture reserves the language of deliverance rather than discipline. John’s father is Romans 7 without Romans 8. The theological weight of John’s own biography is that he possesses lifelong evidence that willpower has a floor through which some men fall, and his response — a childhood of total compliance offered as a substitute atonement (“maybe he’ll be happy if I do it”) — is a child’s unwitting enactment of the truth that someone must bear another’s brokenness. That office belongs to Christ: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). The boy’s instinct was correct; only the appointed sin-bearer was misidentified.

II. The Warning Dream

The point. Thomas recounted Grandma Mary’s 1922 dream that death awaited the family in the Prairie Grove house they had just purchased; the down payment was forfeited, the family left for California, and the child of the family that did move in died of the contaminated well. John neither affirmed nor dismissed it: “too chilling to discount.”

Scripture. The warning dream is an established biblical instrument of providence: Joseph was “warned of God in a dream” to flee to Egypt, and the child’s life was preserved (Matthew 2:13); the wise men were “warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod” (Matthew 2:12). Elihu states the doctrine generally: “For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night… he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction… to keep back his soul from the pit” (Job 33:14–18).

Evaluation. Thomas’s inference — that his father, and therefore his own existence and ministry, may have been preserved by direct divine warning — is not an extravagance; it is Job 33 applied to family history. The theological difficulty he honestly raised (why was Mary warned and the incoming family not?) is the difficulty of election in miniature, and Scripture declines to resolve it: “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29). John’s suspended judgment is, in this instance, the correct posture for one without the interpretive framework — but it should be noted that his refusal to discount the datum concedes the essential point: the event is evidence, and evidence accumulates. One warning dream is an anomaly; the biblical pattern plus the family instance plus the universal human testimony of such warnings is a triangulation.

III. Materialism as the Costlier Faith

The point. Thomas argued that the physics community’s tacit position — mass simply “arose” or existed forever — is not methodological neutrality but a faith commitment; that its motive is “they don’t want to be subject to God, because if there is a God, there are rules”; and that it requires more faith to believe in materialism than in “Genesis and Jesus.” John agreed that such men “are not scientists” but “men of faith.”

Scripture. The argument is Romans 1 restated. “The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God… Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:20–22). The motive Thomas named is given in the same epistle: “the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Romans 8:7), and in the Gospel: “men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). The faith-structure of all cosmology is stated in Hebrews: “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3).

Evaluation. The symmetry thesis — that materialists and theists are both believers, differing in object — is fully scriptural, and Hebrews 11:3 is its precise warrant: the origin of the visible from the invisible is known by faith on either account, since no observer attended the framing of the worlds. Thomas’s argument exceeds Romans 1 in its charity: Paul does not treat suppression as an intellectual error but as culpable refusal (“without excuse”), whereas the dialogue treats it as a correctable category confusion. The evaluation must also note the argument’s limit, which the conversation itself respected: demonstrating that materialism is faith does not demonstrate that Christianity is true; it clears the field of the pretense that unbelief is the neutral position. Psalm 14:1 assigns the materialist confession its biblical genre — “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” — locating the utterance in the heart, the seat of commitment, exactly where Thomas located it.

IV. Provisional Truth and the Nature of Faith

The point. John holds all truth provisionally — even a demonstrated God would be believed “only as long as it holds.” Thomas answered: “What you’ve just described is having faith,” and generalized that all functional commitments — to tomorrow, to the past, to an external world — are acts of faith.

Scripture. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). “For we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Evaluation. Hebrews 11:1 vindicates Thomas’s reframing with precision: faith is there defined not as certainty but as evidence (elenchos — proof, conviction) of the unseen — that is, warranted commitment beyond direct observation, which is exactly the epistemic state John described and disowned the name of. First Corinthians 13:12 grants the provisionalist his strongest premise from within the faith: the believer also knows “in part,” and Thomas elsewhere applies the verse to himself (“I think I look through a glass darkly”). The genuine theological correction to be entered against both men’s usage is that biblical faith is not merely an epistemic posture but a personal fidelity: its object is not a proposition held provisionally but a Person trusted wholly — “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). One may hold cosmological propositions provisionally while trusting God absolutely, as a child may be uncertain of his father’s reasons while certain of his father. The dialogue’s equation of the two faiths is epistemically true but covenantally incomplete.

V. Statistics, the One-Off, and Abrahamic Commitment

The point. Against John’s claim to greater faith (in investments, in natural processes), Thomas distinguished ensemble-confidence (the Pachinko distribution over a million trials) from singular commitment (one ball, one spin), professing full faith in the former and none in the latter, since the variables of a one-off exceed all monitoring.

Scripture. “Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and buy and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow… For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that” (James 4:13–15). “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift… but time and chance happeneth to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). And the counter-case: “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went” (Hebrews 11:8).

Evaluation. Thomas’s refusal of one-off market faith is James 4 exactly: the singular future is the Lord’s, not the statistician’s. But the distinction runs deeper than the investment question, and the unstated corollary deserves explicit theological statement: saving faith is itself a one-off—a singular, unrepeatable staking of a life, formally identical to the wager Thomas declines in markets. Abraham did not diversify. What makes the singular commitment of faith rational where the singular trade is not is the character of the counterparty: “he is faithful that promised” (Hebrews 10:23). Ensemble-faith rests on the law of large numbers; covenant-faith rests on the faithfulness of God, which is not a statistical property but a personal one — “God is not a man, that he should lie” (Numbers 23:19). The dialogue thus arrived, without naming it, at the correct location of religious warrant: not in the ensemble, and not in the blind one-off, but in the trustworthiness of the One on whom the single bet is placed.

VI. Testimony as Evidence

The point. Thomas argued that the vast, structurally identical population of conversion testimonies — ruin, futile remedies, decisive encounter, drastic transformation — constitutes evidence by convergence (“swarm” logic), lowering the plausibility of hallucination or placebo, while carefully limiting the claim: transformation “may” follow, it is “not cause-effect,” and the proper speech-act is invitation.

Scripture. Scripture institutionalizes convergent testimony as its own evidentiary standard: “In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established” (2 Corinthians 13:1; cf. Deuteronomy 19:15). The healed man’s testimony is the canonical form of the argument’s individual unit: “one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25). The apostolic proclamation is explicitly testimonial: “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you” (1 John 1:3); “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables… but were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16). The eschatological verdict on the method: “they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony“ (Revelation 12:11). And Thomas’s crucial “may”: “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God” (John 1:12), with the Spirit’s sovereign unpredictability — “The wind bloweth where it listeth… so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

Evaluation. The swarm argument is not a modern apologetic imposed on Scripture; it is Scripture’s own canon of proof, extended from courtroom to phenomenon. The evaluation should sharpen one element the conversation left implicit: the independence of the witnesses is the argument’s engine, and Christian testimony satisfies it unusually well — the converts span every century, culture, class, temperament, and prior religion, which is exactly the profile that defeats explanations from social contagion. John’s dread in the Boise car — waiting to be asked for his own account — is itself a datum the argument predicts: testimony demands testimony, and the man without one feels the vacancy. His honesty about the dread is more evidentially interesting than his skepticism.

VII. The Cross as “Sales Pitch”

The point. John’s candid reading: the Gospel narrative of maximal sacrifice struck him as “a big sales pitch… brilliant” — a pedagogical exaggeration for “people that are not that bright,” who cannot grasp abstractly that life requires sacrifice.

Scripture. Paul states John’s thesis before John does, and assigns it: “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). “The Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified… unto the Greeks foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:22–23). And the inversion: “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:27); “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).

Evaluation. John’s reading is anticipated verbatim in the canon — which is theologically significant in both directions. It confirms that his reaction is the expected reaction of the educated Greek mind, not a modern discovery that embarrasses the faith; and it warns that the expected reaction is diagnostic rather than probative: foolishness-to-the-perishing is what the cross predicted it would look like from outside. John’s specific claim — that the story exists for the simple — inverts the actual sociology twice over: the argument of the Twelve Postulates is that the cross is intelligible only to the most rigorous examination, and Paul’s argument is that its apparent folly is aimed precisely at humbling the wise, not accommodating the dull. The evaluation must also credit John’s instinct: he correctly perceived that the cross is a communication — “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He mistook the rhetoric of ultimate love for the rhetoric of sales; the genre error is understandable in a man who has only ever been sold to.

VIII. The Lament and Its Presupposition

The point. John’s governing sorrow: “if it all is not true, it’s just sad to me that human beings need something that isn’t true just to maintain their sanity.” Thomas identified the presupposition: the lament pre-judges the something as imaginary — “it wasn’t an evidence-based statement; it was a preconception.” John conceded, restating it as a possibility; Thomas completed the symmetry: “it’s possible that it is.”

Scripture. Paul himself asserts John’s conditional, from inside the faith: “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain… If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:14, 19). And on answering before hearing: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13).

Evaluation. This is the dialogue’s most theologically elegant moment, because John’s lament is biblically licensed as a conditional. Paul agrees without reservation: if it is not true, Christians are pitiable, and the sadness is warranted. The entire dispute therefore compresses into the antecedent — and Paul stakes the antecedent not on pragmatic benefit but on testimonial fact: “he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once” (1 Corinthians 15:5–6) — the swarm argument again, at the faith’s foundation. The theological verdict on the exchange: John’s sorrow is the sorrow Paul commands us to feel under the hypothesis; his error was holding the hypothesis as a settled premise; his concession under Thomas’s correction was an act of intellectual repentance in miniature — the very motion (metanoia, the changed mind) that conversion scales up.

IX. Sacrifice as Investment

The point. John naturalized sacrifice as investment — deferred gratification for long-term return — reading ancient ritual as misattributed causal work (Peterson), Socrates’ cock to Asclepius as satire, and his own marital fidelity as a ledger: the “penny” of the available woman against the “countless millions” of a lifetime with Jeannette. Thomas reframed: the sacrifice asked of us is the surrender of unhealthy pleasures, and its ground is that God, who lives us, receives the long-term joy.

Scripture. Scripture is strikingly unembarrassed by investment logic: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” (Matthew 13:44). “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost?” (Luke 14:28). “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). Even the atonement itself is described in the ledger’s grammar: “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2). Moses “esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward” (Hebrews 11:26). Yet the corrective is equally canonical: “To obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Samuel 15:22); “Thou desirest not sacrifice… The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit” (Psalm 51:16–17); “though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3); “I beseech you therefore, brethren… that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1).

Evaluation. John’s investment theory is far more biblical than either man noted in the moment: Jesus routinely argues from reward, and Hebrews applies the identical calculus to the cross itself. The theory’s deficiency is not its ledger but its beneficiary. In John’s economy the return accrues to the self (fulfillment, conscience, the marriage’s millions); in the biblical economy the transaction terminates in a Person — the field is bought for the treasure, and the treasure is communion. First Corinthians 13:3 is the decisive audit: a maximal sacrifice with no love profits nothing — the ledger without the Beloved does not merely underperform; it zeroes out. Thomas’s reframe supplies exactly this missing term: the return on righteous sacrifice is God’s own enjoyment of the life He lives in us, which converts investment into gift and gift into worship. Romans 12:1 unites the two vocabularies — sacrifice that is living, bodily, and “reasonable” (logikēn — rational, calculated) — as if written to adjudicate this very conversation.

X. Conscience and Its Lawgiver

The point. John’s bedrock: the clear conscience (his aunt: “the most important thing in life… if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything”) and honesty when discovery is impossible (Roberta’s grandfather). Thomas pressed beneath: a conscience can only be clear if something could cloud it — who constitutes the standard? John’s terminus: “my own self-respect; that’s as deep as I can go.” Thomas’s published evaluation added that habitual override can re-polarize the heart, so universal moral recognition is a datum, not a proof, and the question of its source remains.

Scripture. Paul supplies the precise mechanism: the Gentiles “shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another” (Romans 2:15). The grandfather’s counsel: “He that walketh uprightly walketh surely” (Proverbs 10:9); “all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Hebrews 4:13); “there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed” (Luke 12:2). Paul’s own practice: “herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men” (Acts 24:16). The degradation Thomas warned of: “having their conscience seared with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4:2). And the cleansing John’s economy cannot supply: “How much more shall the blood of Christ… purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:14).

Evaluation. Romans 2:15 answers Thomas’s question in canonical form: conscience is a witness, and a witness testifies to something other than itself — the law written on the heart implies a Writer. John’s self-respect terminus is therefore not false but truncated: self-respect is real, and it is the phenomenal surface of the accusing-and-excusing court Paul describes; what it cannot do is convene itself. Two further biblical notes complete the evaluation. First, 1 Timothy 4:2 confirms Thomas’s caution against treating conscience as an infallible universal: the witness can be seared, which is why moral consensus is a swarm-datum rather than a proof. Second — and this is the pastoral edge the conversation approached but did not state — a merely clear conscience is not the Gospel’s ceiling. Paul: “I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord” (1 Corinthians 4:4). John possesses the cleanest conscience natural diligence can produce; Hebrews 9:14 names the cleansing it still awaits.

XI. “God Lives You”: The Divine Indwelling of Experience

The point. Thomas’s signature doctrine: God actually experiences every human body from the inside; righteous living gives God the long-term enjoyment of “living you”; self-respect and fulfillment are the phenomenal surface of this indwelling.

Scripture. “For in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you… therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). “And he is before all things, and by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17).

Evaluation. The doctrine’s scriptural footing is broader than a proof-text: Acts 17:28 places all human existence within God; Matthew 25:40 makes Christ the receiver of what is done to every human body, which is the experiential claim in judicial form — the Judge testifies that He underwent what the least underwent. Galatians 2:20 states the redeemed case explicitly. The necessary theological guardrail, which Thomas’s larger system must and does maintain, is the Creator-creature distinction: the God who lives us is not exhausted by us — “the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee” (1 Kings 8:27); “my thoughts are not your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8). Rightly bounded, the doctrine is panentheistic in the sense of Acts 17 (all things in God) and never pantheistic (God merely the sum of things); the conversation’s formulation — God as the Experiencer who remains the Standard — keeps the boundary. Its ethical yield is immense and thoroughly biblical: every private act becomes an act toward God (Psalm 51:4, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned”), and every service to neighbor becomes service to Christ (Matthew 25). The doctrine does not merely ground conscience; it re-personalizes the entire moral field.

XII. Qualia, the Swarm, and the Realm of God

The point. The being of red — with cinnamon’s taste and the caress’s sweetness — will never yield to experiment; spectroscopy measures 640 nanometers, not the experience. Perception requires polarity (“if something is always white, you don’t know it’s ever white”). The uniformity of qualia across all perceivers defeats the inverted-spectrum and group-hallucination hypotheses by swarm analysis, indicating “an underlying something that actually is true.” Conclusion: “The realm of God existing is in the same realm as red” — maximally certain from the inside, constitutionally inaccessible to third-person method.

Scripture. On the divine origin of the perceptual faculties themselves: “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that formed the eye, shall he not see?” (Psalm 94:9); “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them” (Proverbs 20:12). On polarity as creation’s method: “And God divided the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:4); “I form the light, and create darkness” (Isaiah 45:7); “God also hath set the one over against the other” (Ecclesiastes 7:14). On interior knowledge inaccessible to method: “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:11); “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16). On the invitation to first-person verification: “O taste and see that the LORD is good” (Psalm 34:8).

Evaluation. The identification of God’s reality with the realm of qualia is the conversation’s most original apologetic move, and Scripture supports it at every joint. First Corinthians 2:11 draws exactly the parallel Thomas drew: the inner life of a man and the things of God share an epistemic type — knowable only by the indwelling spirit, never by external instrument. Psalm 34:8 is the biblical form of the conclusion: the imperative is taste, a first-person, non-transferable verification — the only kind the subject matter admits. Genesis 1 grounds the polarity condition: creation proceeds by separations (light/darkness, waters/waters, day/night), as if contrast were the grammar of manifestation — which is what Thomas’s structural condition asserts. Psalm 94:9 quietly reverses the materialist’s burden: the argument from planted ear to hearing God is precisely an inference from qualia to their Source. One caution completes the evaluation: Romans 1:20 insists the invisible things are “clearly seen… by the things that are made” — general revelation licenses the triangulation outward from experience but forbids retreat into pure interiority; the God known like red is also the God whose handiwork the heavens declare publicly (Psalm 19:1). Thomas’s method honors both poles: private certainty, public convergence.

XIII. Fact, Faith, and Speculation

The point. The dialogue jointly assembled a three-tier epistemology: demonstrated fact (the method’s domain); warranted faith (triangulated conviction beyond method); mere speculation (conjecture without convergent support). Thomas locates theism in the second tier by swarm-triangulation; and the word “speculation,” both agreed, wrongly imports an aura of fancy into warranted belief — as “myth” has been degraded into “falsehood.”

Scripture. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The Bereans “were more noble… in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables” (2 Peter 1:16).

Evaluation. The three tiers are biblical practice made explicit. Scripture commands proving (tier one where available), commends reasoned faith (tier two — the “reason of the hope,” the searched scriptures), and repudiates the third tier by name (fables, “profane and vain babblings,” 1 Timothy 6:20). Second Peter 1:16 is especially pointed for this dialogue: the apostle explicitly denies that the faith is myth-in-the-degraded-sense and stakes it on eyewitness testimony — placing Christianity, by its own founding documents, in the evidence-bearing tier and inviting exactly the scrutiny John’s method demands. The evaluation may fairly conclude that John’s method, consistently applied to the actual evidentiary corpus of the faith, is not the faith’s enemy but its assigned examiner: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 1:18).

XIV. The Twelve Postulates and the Necessity of the Atonement

The point. Thomas’s Twelve Postulates argue that Incarnation, unrighteous death, and resurrection were not merely actual but necessary — “you couldn’t have created a universe any other way” — reverse-engineering the cosmos from the datum of the atonement, in answer to his lifelong question: “What kind of world are we living in, where that could even be true?”

Scripture. The New Testament itself provides the vocabulary. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:26). Paul reasoned “that Christ must needs have suffered” (Acts 17:3). “Without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). The atonement’s logical structure — justice and justification simultaneously satisfied — is stated as a solved constraint problem: “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:26). The exchange formula: “For 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). And the project’s warrant against the charge of presumption: “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), bounded by “the secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

Evaluation. The dei — the divine “must” — running through Luke and Acts establishes that necessity-of-atonement is not a rationalist intrusion but a dominical category: Christ Himself taught the Emmaus disciples that the suffering was necessary, and faulted them for not deriving it (“O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken,” Luke 24:25). Anselm’s cur Deus homo and Thomas’s Twelve Postulates stand in this commissioned tradition: faith seeking the understanding of what it already believes. Romans 3:26 confirms that the atonement has an intelligible internal logic — God’s justice and mercy are reconciled, not merely juxtaposed — which is precisely what a postulate-set attempts to expose. The boundary is Deuteronomy 29:29: the revealed logic may be traced; the unrevealed depths may not be exhausted; and any derivation must remain corrigible to the text it explicates. Against John’s “sales pitch,” the Postulates constitute the maximal counter-claim: the cross is not rhetoric for the simple but the unique solution to the constraint equations of a moral universe — foolishness to the Greeks, wisdom to the examined (1 Corinthians 1:24).

XV. Heidegger, the Question of Being, and the I AM

The point. Heidegger’s thesis — philosophy since Plato attended to beings and forgot Being, “the fact that anything is at all,” with technological thinking issuing in nihilism — was recognized by both men as the question the whole evening had been asking: What is the being of red? What is mass? What am I in all this? Alongside stood Heidegger’s counsel of presence (live in the washing of the dishes), the authenticity question (one’s own motivations versus the mob), and the biographical scandal of his Nazism and the Arendt affair.

Scripture. The question of Being receives, in the canon, a Name for its answer: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14) — Being self-declared as a Person. “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). “By him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17); “Thou art worthy, O Lord… for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Revelation 4:11). On presence in the task: “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men” (Colossians 3:23). On authenticity against the mob: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2); “For do I now persuade men, or God?… for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10). On the forgetting itself: they “worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). On brilliance without righteousness: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1); “Though I understand all mysteries, and all knowledge… and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Evaluation. Heidegger asked the right question and stood in the wrong bush. The philosopher who recovered the astonishment that anything is at all had, in Exodus 3, a predecessor who met the astonishment answering back — and the biblical claim is precisely that Being is not an “it” to be thought but an “I” who addresses: the question of Being has an Answerer, which is where the two friends located their entire disagreement. Heidegger’s presence-in-the-task is Colossians 3:23 without its “as to the Lord”; his authenticity is Romans 12:2 without the renewing Mind; his agrarian piety is Sabbath-longing without the Lord of the Sabbath — in each case the structure survives, and the Person is deleted, which is Romans 1:25 performed at the highest level of sophistication. His moral catastrophe then serves as the evaluation’s exhibit: the man who thought Being most profoundly in his century joined its century’s most efficient destroyers of beings, confirming 1 Corinthians 13:2—all mysteries without charity is nothing—and demonstrating that unrepentant ontology is no safeguard. The Arendt coda, two enemies-by-category forgiving across the abyss, gestures at the one thing Heidegger’s philosophy could not derive and the Gospel makes central: “forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32).

XVI. Beauty, Trained Senses, and the Divine Experiencer

The point. John denied objective beauty, then undermined that denial: appreciation is a function of formation—the trained ear hears what the untrained cannot. Thomas resolved the tension: God is the Experiencer; each nervous system, native or cultivated, is a differently trained organ of His experiencing; aesthetic formation is the education of God’s instruments. John’s historicism (each era’s music voices its “groove”) and Peterson’s dictum (“you don’t hold ideas; ideas hold you”) closed the evening.

Scripture. On formed discernment: “But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). On objective beauty grounded in God: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1); “worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96:9); “whatsoever things are lovely… think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). On ideas that hold men: “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 10:5); “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men” (Colossians 2:8); “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7); “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

Evaluation. Hebrews 5:14 is the exact biblical warrant for John’s own observation against his own subjectivism: the senses are exercised by use to discern — discernment is real, trainable, and ranked, which entails a standard being discerned. Philippians 4:8 commands attention to the lovely as a category, unintelligible if loveliness is merely private. Thomas’s resolution — the universal located in the Experiencer rather than the object — harmonizes the data: tastes differ as instruments differ, while the One who experiences through all instruments grounds the reality of beauty itself; Psalm 96:9 unites the terms, beauty and holiness, in a single act of worship. The Peterson dictum receives its full biblical weight in 2 Corinthians 10:5: Scripture agrees that ideas hold men — it calls them strongholds and imaginations — and prescribes the only emancipation the dialogue’s own logic permits: not the exchange of one holding idea for another, but captivity to the Truth who is a Person (John 14:6), whose holding is freedom (John 8:32, 36). The evening’s final theological word is thus its quietest: two men examining the ideas that have them were, on the biblical account, being examined — “the word of God is quick, and powerful… a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

Conclusion

Evaluated theologically, the conversation resolves into a single finding: John’s positions are Scripture’s conditionals, and Thomas’s positions are Scripture’s conclusions. The lament (“if it is not true…”) is 1 Corinthians 15:19 with the antecedent unexamined; the investment theory of sacrifice is Hebrews 12:2 with the Beneficiary deleted; the clear conscience is Romans 2:15 with the Lawgiver unnamed; the provisional method is Acts 17:11 awaiting its Berean object; the question of Being is Exodus 3 before the bush speaks. Nothing John holds must be surrendered for him to come; everything he holds must merely be completed. That is the classical shape of the Gospel’s approach to the honest pagan — “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23) — and it is the theological justification for the dialogue’s method of clarification over conquest. The conversation’s own deepest doctrine supplies its closing assurance: if God indeed lives every man, then He was present in the dialogue on both sides of it — the Experiencer of Thomas’s witness and of John’s honesty alike — and the completion of what John holds is not finally an argument’s work: “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44). The friends’ obligation is the one they discharged: to reason together, to bear witness, and to leave the drawing to the Father — “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6).

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

Faith at the Boundary of Method: Philosophical and Theological Dimensions of a Dialogue

Fellowship Essay: 19 August 2026
Conversation between Thomas Abshier and John (college friend)

Introduction

On its surface, the conversation is a wide-ranging exchange between two old friends covering local politics, longevity supplements, family history, and plans for a 1920s jazz orchestra. Beneath that surface, however, runs a sustained, philosophically serious dialogue between two well-defined epistemological positions: a provisional, method-bound empiricism, articulated by John, and a theistic realism grounded in what Thomas calls triangulation. The method seeks evidence of truth through the convergence of independent lines of evidence. By this method, that which cannot be observed directly (the existence of God, the validity of the Biblical message of salvation and sanctification, the reality of a conscious universe) exists by inference, but whose reality no single experiment can confirm. The conversation is notable because neither party is evangelizing in the ordinary sense. John repeatedly insists that he applauds religious belief in others and will never argue anyone out of the commitments that organize their lives; Thomas, for his part, does not press for conversion but for conceptual clarification — repeatedly asking John what his own terms (sacrifice, self-respect, fulfillment, speculation) ultimately rest upon. The result is a Socratic exchange in which the deepest disagreements turn out to be disagreements about the scope of the scientific method, the nature of faith, and the ontological status of experience itself. The dialogue culminates in Heidegger—a philosopher who focused on the “question of being.”

I. Willpower, Inheritance, and the Problem of the Broken Life

The conversation’s first philosophical consideration is anthropological: what accounts for the difference between a life that recovers and a life that collapses? John recounts the testimony of a gym trainer who, by his own account, overcame alcoholism and hundred-pound obesity through “pure willpower.” He was inspired by stories of extraordinary discipline, such as the young ballplayer who hit five hundred balls a day regardless of illness or fatigue. The trainer’s creed was that when the will is total, success follows, because no one else will match that expenditure of effort. John remarked that the trainer’s son had received a great gift in witnessing his father weak and then witnessing him overcome. This was the gift that John never received.

John’s told the story of his father, who was overcome by brokenness. He was captured by an addiction, and “hated life itself,” attempted suicide repeatedly, and found nothing in existence enjoyable or good. The philosophical distinction John draws was between the trainer’s episodic addiction in a fundamentally upbeat person and a settled, global hatred of being. This is a distinction between a disorder within a life and a negation of life. John’s childhood response was to assume total responsibility for his father’s happiness — “I did everything he wanted me to do, every single thing, without arguing… maybe he’ll be happy if I do it.” John did not believe he was the cause of his dad’s dysfunction, but thought maybe he could change him by pleasing him with compliance and excellent performance. Thomas observes that this pattern is common: the child attempts to rescue, or take responsibility for, the parent’s suffering. The question is whether human beings can, in fact, “get it together” by will alone, or whether some lives require a supernatural rescue, a belief in God and the hope and power that exceeds the self.

This reminded Thomas of what may have been a supernatural intervention in his family’s life, possibly one that impacted his very existence as a born entity. His paternal grandparents, Mack and Mary, had put a down payment on a house in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, in 1922. It was a significant investment for them as newlyweds. Prior to moving in, Grandma Mary dreamed that death awaited the family in their new home. Both Mack and Mary took her dream so seriously that they forfeited the down payment and left for California; the well proved contaminated, and a child of the family who moved in died. Thomas’s father could have been that child who died. Perhaps this was divine intervention, a rescue so important that God directly intervened in warning of the impending tragedy. Why was Mary warned and the new family was not? We don’t know, but we might not be meeting today if Grandma Mary hadn’t had that dream and they heeded it.

John’s response is epistemologically exemplary of his whole stance: “I wish we could come down on… how that really works, if it works at all. I just don’t know. But it’s too chilling to discount.” The premonition story functions in the conversation as a datum. It is knowledge without mechanism. John’s refusal to affirm or dismiss it is an appropriate provisional acknowledgment of facts with no category that connects to known, accepted, and integrated cause-and-effect validity.

II. Does Physics Demand Belief? Materialism as Faith

The explicit philosophical argument begins when Thomas raises John’s written objection to his August 1 essay: John had denied that physics “demands belief in anything.” The ensuing exchange carefully disambiguates this. John defends the scientific method as belief-free in principle: science proposes nothing without evidence, holds even its best-supported claims as temporary, and, on the question of the origin of mass, says only “we haven’t got a clue” — which is not a belief but an honest confession of ignorance. Thomas concedes that this is how science should speak, then relocates his claim: his target was never the method but the culture—what he calls “a culture of physics materialism.” John immediately ratified the distinction: there is the scientific method, and there is the scientific community, and they are not the same thing.

On this shared ground, Thomas builds his stronger thesis. The scientific community, he argues, enforces a taboo: any speculation about the origin of mass involving any theistic speculation is inadmissible in a physics paper and discredits its author. The tacit assumption that mass simply “arose” or “existed forever” passes without controversy. This asymmetry, he contends, is not methodological neutrality but a substantive metaphysical commitment.

John offers a sociological alternative — perhaps the community is merely closed-minded or politically captured. Thomas postulates that the motivational drive for materialistic explanation is that “they don’t want to be subject to God. They know that if there is a God, then there are rules imposed upon His creation.” John’s response is that anyone who reasons that way “is really not scientific.” Thomas agrees, as this was his point. They both agree that the materialist physicist is not a scientist but “a man of faith,” whose faith happens to be in materialism.

Thomas, quoting from his original essay: it requires more faith to believe in materialism — that everything popped out of nothing, formed itself, and became capable of thought, feeling, and meaning — than to accept “Genesis and Jesus.” John agrees: “Well said.” The argument’s structure deserves note: it does not attempt to prove theism. It attempts to erase the presumed asymmetry between the believer and the unbeliever by showing that the unbeliever’s position, at the level of ultimate origins, is equally a commitment beyond evidence — and, on Thomas’s accounting, a costlier one.

III. The Anatomy of Faith: Provisionality, Statistics, and the One-Off

The conversation’s central conceptual move occurs when John articulates his epistemology of provisional truth. Even if he were persuaded by accumulated evidence that God exists, he explains, his assent would remain provisional — held “only as long as it holds,” permanently open to countervailing evidence, never a settled possession: “I don’t think of truth that way. Truth… needs to be continually refined over centuries.” Thomas’s reply reframes the entire discussion: “What you’ve just described is having faith.” He then generalizes: nothing is certain — not the truth of the Bible, not the nature of mass, not the arrival of tomorrow, not the reality of the past, not the existence of a world beyond one’s own neurons. All functional commitments to these things are “entirely acts of faith.” The believer and the empiricist are thus not divided by the presence or absence of faith but by its objects and its warrant.

John tests that statement: he claims to have exhibited, on occasion, greater faith than Thomas — for instance, faith in investments, or faith in natural processes generally. Thomas’s rebuttal introduces a genuine philosophical distinction: the categorical difference between statistical confidence and singular commitment (belief that a single choice will result in a desired outcome). He has complete faith that a Pachinko machine played a million times will yield a Gaussian distribution; he has no faith at all about where a single ball will land. Confidence in law-like regularity over ensembles is not the same act as staking oneself on a one-off outcome — “putting your money on red two and spinning the wheel” — is like betting on an outcome in a world whose relevant variables are too numerous to monitor. John’s professed faith in “natural processes,” on this analysis, is ensemble-faith masquerading as singular faith, and the investment case is precisely the singular kind.

The exchange leaves an implicit, unstated corollary hanging over the dialogue: religious faith, as Thomas practices it, is not ensemble-faith either—it is a singular, existential commitment, and its warrant must therefore come from somewhere other than statistics. The conversation’s later movements address where it comes from: triangulation.

IV. Testimony, the Bandwagon, and the Logic of Religious Evidence

Thomas supplies part of that warrant in his treatment of testimony, describing (with reference to Susan, a member of his Sunday fellowship, who collects such accounts) the canonical structure of conversion narrative: a life not going well; many attempted remedies; a decisive experience — sometimes at the threshold of death — of God’s reality; and a subsequent transformation drastic enough to demand explanation. His analysis is carefully hedged and explicitly probabilistic. A single such story proves nothing; but the pattern — enormous numbers of independent instances (“evidenced by testimony and evidenced by bandwagoning”) converging on the same structure with the same magnitude of change — lowers the plausibility of deflationary explanations such as hallucination, placebo, or self-deception. He is scrupulous about the limits: transformation is not guaranteed (“the key word is may“), the phenomenon is “definitely not a cause-effect,” and the appropriate speech-act is invitation rather than promise: “This happened to me. I encourage you to try it too.” The argument is thus an inference to the best explanation operating over a population of testimonies — the same “swarm” logic he will later apply to the uniformity of color perception.

John’s counter-material is autobiographical and equally structured. He recounts the car ride to Boise during which two acquaintances traded testimonies of ruin and redemption through Jesus, embracing “like two Republicans that had never really spent quiet time with each other,” while John sat in dread of being asked for his own account. His interpretation of what he heard is the conversation’s most candid statement of the skeptic’s suspicion: the Gospel narrative struck him “almost like a big sales pitch… brilliant” — a story of maximal sacrifice engineered to make the necessity of sacrifice vivid “for people that are not that bright… that they just can’t get it otherwise.” On this reading, the Cross is a pedagogical exaggeration: a moral truth (that life requires sacrifice) packaged in an extreme narrative for those who cannot grasp the truth abstractly.

Two further autobiographical episodes complete John’s religious self-portrait. In the first, from his twenties, a churchgoing passenger in his car invited him to church; John replied that he already lived honestly and with good character and felt no need of it; the man answered, “If you’re that much of a man that you can live up to that kind of a standard without this, then I applaud you — but that’s a very unusual thing.” John has carried the exchange for fifty years, wondering whether he is genuinely the “one-off” the man described. In the second, prompted by Grok’s recommendation of the Ethical Culture Society as a non-religious ethical community (which John investigated and rejected as left-leaning nature-worship), John states his governing lament: when he hears that people needed religion to reassemble their lives, “if it all is not true, it’s just sad to me that human beings need something that isn’t true just to be able to maintain their sanity.” People should be able to get their lives together “without ever thinking about the universe.”

Thomas’s rejoinder is a precise piece of informal logic: John’s sadness presupposes the very conclusion at issue. To grieve that people needed “something that isn’t true” is to have already judged the something imaginary — “it wasn’t an evidence-based statement; it was a preconception.” John immediately concedes the overstep: he meant only that it could be untrue. Thomas completes the symmetry: “It’s always possible. But the other half is that it’s possible that it is.” The exchange models the dialogue’s ethic—a genuine correction, genuinely received—and it converts John’s lament from a verdict into an open question, which is exactly where Thomas’s theory of testimony wants it.

V. Sacrifice: Investment, the Chicken of Asclepius, and Being Lived by God

The conversation’s richest theological exchange concerns sacrifice. Pressed by Thomas — if Jesus’s death is the exemplar of sacrifice, what sacrifice is the believer now called to make? — John develops a fully naturalized theory. “Sacrifice,” he argues, is an ancient term whose modern translation is investment: deferring immediate satisfaction for longer-term return. Drawing explicitly on Jordan Peterson, he treats the sacrificial systems of antiquity as confused externalizations of a real economy — the farmer who sacrifices to the gods for rain is, in fact, sacrificing his own leisure to plow the field, and the ritual misattributes the causal work. He seasons the account with Socrates’ dying instruction to offer a cock to Asclepius, which John reads as the philosopher’s final ironic joke at the expense of the whole apparatus — the absurdity of supposing that killing an unrelated animal improves one’s life. On this analysis, the word “sacrifice” is defective: it “emphasizes what you’re giving up, not what you’re investing for,” and is apt only “in the framework of someone who can’t think big enough.” Everything — diet, fidelity, education, service — is a trade-off; wisdom is the art of making the trades whose long-term return is fulfillment. His concrete example is marital: confronted hypothetically with an available young woman, he runs the ledger — the decades of trust with Jeanette, the corrupted conscience whether or not she ever learned, the “penny back” against “countless millions” — and passes. The calculation, he says, is as deep as he can go.

John cites his aunt to validate this valuation (“the most important thing in life is not health but a clear conscience; if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything”) and his former girlfriend’s grandfather (“be honest when nobody could ever find out — that’s when you need it most”).

John treats a clear conscience as a bedrock value. But a conscience can only be clear if something exists that could cloud it; who or what constitutes the standard?

Thomas accepts the psychology and then asks what lies beneath the motivation for a clean conscience. If John’s fidelity is finally grounded in “self-respect,” what grounds self-respect? Why does a clear conscience mean anything at all?

Thomas agrees with John’s evaluation of a clear conscience and justifies the experience of his stand using his signature theological formulation: God actually experiences your body—God lives you. The sacrifice of the unhealthy pleasure is therefore not merely a trade within one life’s balance sheet of pleasure and pain; it is the choice to give God, who undergoes every human experience from the inside, the long-term enjoyment of “living you” well rather than the short-term pleasure of the transgression. Self-respect, on this account, is the phenomenal surface of a deeper ontological fact: the divine indwelling of experience.

John’s response is: “I have no problem with that, but for me, it’s more metaphorical.”

Thomas’s counter-question — if it is a metaphor, what is the reality underneath the metaphor? John replies with his final position: “my own self-respect; that’s as deep as I can go.”

The disagreement is thereby located not over how to live, on which the two men substantially agree, but over whether the ground floor of moral experience is the self or God. My sense is that the human heart can adopt almost any moral polarity given enough exposure to an environment and practice. In other words, what was once the prick of conscience of the God within can be overridden by habitually overriding its voice. The postulate that there is good and evil, Godly and unGodly, cannot be proven by the fact of a common, near-universal recognition of good and evil behavior. Empirics can only place it as one dot on the swarm analysis graph. It is not a proof; it is a datapoint, and the question remains: what is the underlying source of that species-wide consistency?

VI. The Problem of Red: Qualia, the Swarm, and the Limits of Method

From ethics the dialogue ascends to what contemporary philosophy of mind calls the hard problem of consciousness, though neither speaker uses the term. Thomas introduces it through a spontaneous analogy: the sense that a clear conscience matters belongs to the same family of questions as “where does red come from? where does the taste of cinnamon come from? where does the enjoyableness of a caress come from?” These questions concern the experienced quality of experience, and Thomas claims they all share a single source. His constructive proposal is twofold.

First, a structural condition: perception requires polarity — “if something is always white, you don’t ever know it’s white.” Every possible experience presupposes a contrast-structure, and that contrast-structure is not incidental; God established polarity as reality’s underlying nature. Creation proceeds by distinctions, and perception lives on them.

Second, the thing left unknown, the missing concept. Granting photoreceptors, rhodopsin, and optic nerves, the question of how the appearing of red arises is grasped only lightly: what is the substance underlying that perception? The Conscious Point Physics theory, as presently formulated, posits no entity that carries red, cinnamon, or pungency. This is the frontier Thomas confronts constantly. The engineering of qualia — “how did He do that?” — is presented as a genuine open problem. (Note: I have below, within this section, attempted to elaborate on this concept and offer a plausible perspective by which the intangibility of qualia may be processed and presented to the observer for conscious experience.)

John raises the classical inverted-spectrum hypothesis: perhaps each person has lived a lifetime seeing “red” where another sees “yellow,” with no possibility of comparison. Thomas’s dismissal introduces a named methodological instrument from his physics: swarm analysis. When a thousand people living utterly different lives converge on identical judgments and identical reactions, the convergence itself is evidence of a common underlying reality rather than coordinated private variation. The inverted spectrum is “interesting philosophy and science fiction — it might be true, but I don’t think so.” John supplies the parsimony argument that ratifies the verdict: members of one species, with a common brain design, are more rationally presumed to perceive alike than differently.

Thomas then states his epistemology: no one ever perceives anything but internal brain stimulation. “The only perception we have is of the brain inside the cranium; we only experience the activation patterns of the brain from sensory stimulation. That is all anyone ever sees.” The existence of the external world is therefore an inference — an extrapolation from the consistency of the inner display. What licenses the inference is the display’s uniformity across all perceivers: the fact that we all triangulate on the same world and call it by the same names makes it overwhelmingly unlikely that each person’s color, taste, tone, and touch are private inventions. The uniformity of perception argues for a single underlying reality that all souls perceive in common.

That conclusion opens directly onto the metaphysical hypothesis at the center of Thomas’s system: the single underlying reality is a single underlying consciousness — God’s existence as the only existence. Each of us filters that one reality through the senses, through the machinery of neural transmission, and through the neural-net weighting of sensory, memory, and meta-cognitive inputs. The individual perceiver is not the ground floor of reality; he is a localized perspective within it.

The mechanism Thomas proposes for this localization is the aggregation of micro-consciousness. The elemental units are the postulated Conscious Points: each capable of perceiving, remembering, processing, and acting upon the states of other Conscious Points. Their aggregates take two visible forms. Some aggregates are living beings possessing a sense of “I.” Others are the Conscious Points composing ordinary mass, whose internal coordination is so simple, diffuse, and static that it fully disguises their fundamental nature as conscious entities. On this postulate, the macro-consciousness we each know as “I” — a unified point of view that recognizes itself as a perceiver and recognizes others as aggregates of the same type — arises from an alliance of micro-consciousnesses. The localization of self into a unified perspective, inside the larger body of consciousness that is the source of all perception, is the miracle of God creating “other” within Himself.

The creative sequence, so conceived, runs in two movements: atomization, then reassembly. God first individuates elemental units of perspective — the Conscious Points — and then assembles them into masses capable of perceiving self and other. The atomization is not an accident of the design; it is the required step. A fully individuated, self-aware, multi-perspective consciousness can only exist inside an only-existent, nothing-but-this-exists singular consciousness if the singular consciousness is first divided into elements and the elements are then recomposed. And one criterion governs the recomposition: disguise. The reassembled units must be aware of themselves without being aware of the unity that is the source of all awareness. The goal is creatures who genuinely experience being “other” — selves who do not see the seam joining them to the One.

Why would the One do this? The unifying fact of existence is that there is a single consciousness that is the source of all consciousness. But a solitary consciousness, perceiving only itself, unchanging and unopposed, is — if we may put it so — uninteresting even to itself. If we permit ourselves to anthropomorphize desire, the motive follows naturally: the desire for variety, for relationship, for perception of self from a vantage outside the self. Having established the motive, we can state the postulate: the Singularity — the One Consciousness, the self-existent One — internally individuated Himself by imagining, visualizing, and instantiating the perception of Himself from innumerable perspectives.

This framework yields a definition of qualia. The elemental units of perception assemble into coordinated units of consciousness, each with its own distinctive organizational type and functional capability, and each type of assembly produces a characteristic experience when perceived. That characteristic experience — the gestalt of a configuration of Conscious Points, as registered by another configuration of Conscious Points — is what we call the qualia of an experience. Perception is always an encounter between two assemblies: the perceiver and the perceived; each has its own configuration of elemental consciousness, and the relationship between the two configurations produces the felt quality of the encounter. “Red,” on this account, is not a property smeared onto photons; it is the gestalt of a particular receptor-assembly meeting a particular object-assembly, apprehended by the larger “I” within which both sub-assemblies report. There are likely subunits of awareness below the fully integrated consciousness we recognize as “I” — layers of perceptive capability whose contributions arrive already synthesized. Even mass itself fits the scheme: mass is the “I”‘s perception of those aggregates whose internal coordination is too simple and static to present as anything but object.

The alternative to all this is the brain-in-a-vat picture: each of us alone, experiencing nothing but input, the apparent world a private or collective hallucination. The swarm dismisses it. The convergence of all perceivers on one coherent world indicates “an underlying something that actually is true.” The structure of the argument should be noted: it is the testimony argument of Section IV transposed into the philosophy of perception. Convergent independent witnesses — whether to spiritual conversion or to redness — point beyond themselves to a common real, at once physical and spiritual.

The exchange then turns to John’s defense of his word “speculation,” which Thomas meets with a diagnosis: John has silently categorized all experience of life into the realm of things whose truth science can determine. He has promoted the scientific method from a tool into an ontology — an elemental construct upon which the world is built. John registers the observation as genuinely new: “I never thought — I have to think about that one.”

Thomas’s demonstration case is red itself. Spectroscopy can detect 640 nanometers, but the question was never the wavelength — it was the reality of the experience, and that will never be detected or determined by experiment. John spontaneously supplies the aesthetic parallel that seals the agreement: analyzing a piece of music can never answer “why did that cause my heart to swell?” Both men assent: no experiment reaches it. Thomas then draws the conclusion the whole evening had been preparing: “The realm of God existing is in the same realm as red.” Both exist in the realm of consciousness. Both are existent as consciousness. Both resist the kind of third-party interaction that would yield concrete evidence more identifiable than the experience itself. The existence of God is therefore not a defective scientific hypothesis awaiting evidence that never comes; it is a reality of the same kind as qualitative experience — maximally certain from the inside, constitutionally inaccessible to third-person method. John’s response — “Interesting. Okay. Very good point.” — is as close to concession as his provisionalism permits.

A lexical sub-dispute refines the demarcation. John protests the degradation of the word “myth” into “falsehood,” invoking Peterson’s dictum that fiction can be “more true than fact” — a story that never literally occurred may render a truth more accurately than any actual instance could. Thomas agrees that myth is “a dual-use word.” John then clarifies that his own use of “speculation” was never dismissive — a speculation “could very well be the truth,” lacking only agreed-in-advance reproducible evidence. Thomas offers the final distinction: a claim supported by enough data points triangulating back to it deserves the name faith rather than speculation, since “speculation” carries an aura of fancy that misdescribes warranted but unprovable belief. The two men thus jointly assemble, almost inadvertently, a three-tier epistemology: (1) demonstrated fact — the scientific method’s domain; (2) warranted faith — triangulated conviction beyond the method’s reach; and (3) mere speculation — conjecture without convergent support. Thomas holds that theism belongs to the second tier: the swarm of convergent witness, inner and outer, triangulates its conclusion as existent reality.

VII. The Twelve Postulates and the Intelligibility of Atonement

Twice in the conversation Thomas gestures toward his recent theological work, the “Twelve Postulates,” a document (sent to John as an attachment) articulating his conception of why the Incarnation, unrighteous death, and resurrection of Jesus were not merely actual but necessary — “you couldn’t have created a universe any other way.” He frames it as the terminus of a sixty-year search that began with the question that defined his own path to belief. Confronted with the Biblical claim that Jesus died for our sins, “what kind of world are we actually living in, where that could even be true?” The question is methodologically distinctive: it treats the central Christian datum not as an article to be swallowed but as a constraint on cosmology. If the atonement is true, the universe must be the kind of place in which it could be true, and the theologian’s task is to reverse-engineer that universe. Within the conversation, the Postulates function as Thomas’s answer to John’s categorization of the story of the Cross as a “sales pitch.” John sees the Bible and belief in such a mythology as a pedagogical exaggeration for the simple-minded. Thomas claims a structural necessity intelligible only to the rigorous examination of the empirically observed structure of the universe and how it intersects with its Biblically/divinely revealed structure. The same event is read as being worthy of opposite ends of the intellectual dignity spectrum. The dialogue does not review or recapitulate the substance of the twelve postulates. They are noted as being consistent with:

• 1) Thomas’s physics, the fundamental construction of the universe from Conscious Points whose essence is arguably of the substance of the mind of God;
• 2) his corollary doctrine that God experiences every body because there is no substance or being that is not integral with His being/Consciousness/essence; and
• 3) his rationalization of life, unjustified death, and resurrection as the ritual required to meet the boundaries of God’s character of total purity; His desire for reciprocal love given freely; and the necessity of a justifiable and attractive “other lover” that gave men an option to love more than God.
• These elements of reality, when assembled logically, rationalize the arc of the Biblical narrative with its culmination in sacrifice (giving up of the opportunity to live in Heaven in glory, live on earth with respect and justice) to open the possibility that God’s wrath at sin could be satisfied in quantity and direction by the substitutionary death of Christ. “For 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
• The entire Biblical ontology (the existent reality of the universe as revealed and implied by the Bible) becomes rational through understanding the structure of the universe, the nature of God, and how these factors dictated His being.

VIII. Heidegger: The Question of Being as the Conversation’s Mirror

The dialogue’s philosophical guest arrives late and functions as its retrospective interpreter. John, who has been “listening to Heidegger” through Grok, presents him as a man of contradictions: he bought into the Nazi movement, yet was thoughtful and had interesting ideas. John’s summary conveys three Heideggerian themes.

• First, the critique of technological modernity and the romance of agrarian dwelling: Heidegger’s counsel not to treat washing dishes as an impediment to be gotten past but to “live in the actual action of what you’re doing — otherwise you’re shortchanging yourself on your life.”
• Second, authenticity: Grok’s pointed question to John — would Heidegger approve of your life? Are you true to your own motivations, or “filling the pattern of society… carried away by the mob”? — is a serviceable paraphrase of Heidegger’s distinction between authentic existence and absorption in das Man. John’s self-examination reported that (he worked to fund the life he wanted, enjoying the process where he could) shows the question landing.
• Third, the biographical enigma of the Arendt affair — the passionate relationship between the philosopher who joined the Nazi party and the brilliant Jewish thinker, their mutual estrangement and strange late forgiveness, “he kind of forgave her for being a Jew, and she kind of forgave him for being a Nazi” — which John offers as a case where reality outruns fiction’s capacity for invention.

Thomas looked up Heidegger mid-conversation. Heidegger’s thesis is that philosophy from Plato onward attended to beings — things, objects, ideas — while forgetting Being itself: “the fact that anything is at all”; and that traditional metaphysics and technological thinking obscure Being, issuing in cultural nihilism. Thomas’s remarked: “This really is very similar to what we’ve been talking about — what is the being of red?” This reflects our opening question about nature/beingness: what IS mass?  The entire dialogue has been about beingness: 1) the taboo on asking where mass comes from by the scientific community; 2) the inscrutibility of “redness” as far as its origin and it unsatisfying irreducibility of the conscious experience of red to nanometers; 3) the insufficiency of a the ego and brain as the ultimate source and basis for conscience; 4) the proposition that “God is in the same realm as red.”

This is perhaps the distinction between sustained complaint that the modern intellectual settlement answers every question about beings while forbidding the question of Being. John’s gloss completes the convergence: Western thinking, he summarizes, studied all the phenomena and “completely forgot — wait a minute, what am I in all this?” Two men who disagree about God discover that they share Heidegger’s question; they differ on whether the question has an Answerer.

IX. Aesthetics, the Spirit of an Age, and Ideas That Hold Men

The conversation’s final movement translates the evening’s metaphysics into aesthetics and philosophy of history. John, planning the revival of his 1920s jazz orchestra, denies objective beauty outright: “You can’t just say that something is objectively beautiful… it’s a very personal feeling, and you either get it or you don’t.” Yet his own elaboration undermines the pure subjectivism: appreciation, he argues, is a function of formation — “pleasure really comes down to how much thought you’ve given it before… your exposure to what leads up to a particular performance.” His marveling at a perfectly tuned sectional is available only to the trained ear that knows what the musicians are doing for one another; the untrained listener “may say they like it, they really don’t know why.” He honestly confronts the resulting puzzle: is a taste requiring more training thereby better? “I don’t know.” Thomas resolves the tension with his central theological instrument: God is “actually the experiencer,” and each human nervous system — some pleasures native to the body (sex, sugar, thrill, peace), others requiring cultivated discrimination — is a differently trained organ through which that experiencing occurs. Aesthetic formation, on this account, is the education of God’s instruments; subjectivity of taste and objectivity of the Experiencer are reconciled by locating the universal not in the object but in the One who undergoes all appreciations.

John’s philosophy of musical history supplies the sociological counterpart. Every style of music “reflects the mentality of an age”: the ecstatic, machine-metaphor jazz of the 1920s — the banjo’s chunk echoing the flivver engine, “a well-oiled machine” as the era’s highest compliment, saxophonists on biplane wings and Charleston dancers on skyscraper ledges — expressed a generation raised on unprecedented optimism, while the blues and later rage-forms express pent-up frustration and grievance foreign to that decade. Thomas’s harsher judgment of contemporary popular forms — “primitive… guttural… one note… the note of sex… little children” — is tempered by John into the more defensible historicist claim: the music is a faithful mirror of “whatever the groove is of the age.” Into this frame John sets his most philosophically consequential borrowing from Peterson: “You don’t hold ideas; ideas hold you.” His illustration is Calvin Coolidge, the twenties president possessed by the idea of a freewheeling prosperous society, who candidly confessed he couldn’t even envision the interventionist responses the Depression era demanded — “the idea had him, and the ideas moved on.” The dictum quietly reframes the entire evening: if ideas hold men rather than the reverse, then the materialism of the physics community, John’s method-bound provisionalism, and Thomas’s theistic realism are not merely positions the two friends hold but powers that hold them — and the dialogue itself, with its real concessions on both sides, becomes the rarer thing: two men attempting, together, to see the ideas that have them.

Conclusion

The conversation enacts, with unusual completeness, the modern encounter between methodological empiricism and theistic metaphysics — and it does so without a single moment of rancor, sustained by John’s principle that he will never argue against the reasons anyone has for being good, and by Thomas’s practice of interrogating foundations rather than demanding assent. Its philosophical yield is a set of jointly constructed distinctions of genuine value: scientific method versus scientific community; ensemble-faith versus one-off commitment; demonstrated fact, triangulated faith, and mere speculation; myth versus falsehood; the wavelength of red versus the being of red. Its theological center is Thomas’s doctrine that God lives every human body and experiences every human experience — a claim that grounds conscience, transfigures sacrifice into gift, locates God’s existence in the same epistemic realm as qualia, and answers Heidegger’s forgotten question of Being with a divine Experiencer. Its unresolved remainder is John’s honest terminus: the metaphor works, the life it recommends is the life he already lives, but “my own self-respect — that’s as deep as I can go.” Between that floor and Thomas’s foundation the dialogue does not force a decision; it does something more durable, clarifying exactly where the floor lies and exactly what would have to be true for there to be something beneath it. The final image belongs to both men equally: two friends who agree that no experiment will ever explain why the heart swells at music, disagreeing — provisionally, faithfully — about Whose heart it is.

260816 – Competing Claims of Revelation

by Thomas Abshier | Aug 20, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Triangulating the Absolute

On Adjudicating Between Competing Claims of Revelation — and Why the Test Itself Is an Act of Faith

Christos Fellowship Essay; 16 August 2026

Purpose and posture

This essay addresses a live question inside our fellowship: when two scriptures, the Bible and the Book of Mormon, each claim to speak for God, and each validates itself by its own testimony, how does anyone adjudicate between them?

Leonard holds that God still speaks; that the biblical text has suffered corruption in transmission, translation, and canon-formation; and that the revelations given through Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer restore what was lost and therefore govern where they differ from the received text. He puts the question to me this way, “If you believe God can do such a thing, why do you not believe He has?”

I want to answer that question and test it. I will apply every test I propose to my own position as well, and I will name in advance what would change my mind. A test that only ever convicts the other side is not a test; it is a verdict wearing a test’s clothing.

Leonard spent five decades inside an institution, applied the test of fruits, and left when the fruits failed. That is precisely what Scripture asks a believer to do. The question this essay pursues, therefore, is not whether a man should test, but which tests, and whether the tests can return a negative.

I. The challenge

Let me state Leonard’s case:

1. The corruption premise. The Bible we hold is not the autograph. It passed through copyists, translators, councils, and empires. Denver Snuffer develops this at length in his 8 lectures. He claims the biblical text is true but incomplete, and that gaps, mistranslations, and politically shaped decisions prevent it from preserving God’s whole counsel. This is not a fringe claim in its general form; textual scholars of every persuasion acknowledge variants, translation difficulties, and a canon assembled by human process.

2. The living-God premise. A God who spoke to Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and Paul is not a God who has gone silent. To insist that revelation ceased at a particular date is itself a doctrine — one not obviously taught by the text — and it has the odd effect of making God more accessible to the ancients than to us.

3. The self-reference problem. The Bible warns against other gospels and other spirits. But a document that certifies itself and disqualifies its rivals is doing exactly what any self-perpetuating system does. Citing the Bible’s warnings against competitors to a person weighing whether the Bible is complete is circular.

4. The conclusion. Given 1–3, when the received text and the latter revelation conflict, the latter — being direct, recent, and not subject to the intervening centuries of corruption — is the better witness.

5. The charge. Refusal to weigh the new revelation is not discernment but closed-mindedness — a limit placed on God rather than on the claimant.

That is a serious argument. Points 1, 2, and 3 each contain something true. My disagreement is not that these are foolish; it is that the conclusion does not follow, and that point 3, taken seriously, destroys the very position it was deployed to defend.

II. The reframe: Testing the Spirits

My resistance to accepting Joseph Smith and Denver Snuffer’s teaching of ongoing revelation is not that I don’t believe God speaks to men now. My question is whether the Smith/Snuffer revelations contradict the Bible. I believe God has already spoken enough through revelation through various prophets to guide His people to a full life. If errors of omission or addition to the text due to scribal inexactitude or political agenda, I do not believe those errors were substantial enough to obscure or distort the message of the Bible as recorded and delivered. I think God orchestrated the Bible’s assembly, and it was delivered intact from antiquity to modernity. I think the Bible adequately informs us how God directs man’s mind through temporal situations: the best path to conduct war and pursue peace, legislate, adjudicate, and execute government policies, and navigate the rough waters of business and relationships. Thus, the challenge of examining Denver’s revelation is not a question of the size of my faith or open-mindedness; it is the question of the content of his revelation.

A God who does not speak needs no counterfeits. Forgery presupposes currency. It is precisely the reality of divine speech that makes false claims to it profitable — and Scripture treats this as the normal condition of the world, not an exceptional one. Moses commands testing of prophets (Deut. 13, 18). Jesus warns of false christs performing signs (Matt. 24). Paul warns that Satan appears as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14) and pronounces anathema on any other gospel — including one preached by an angel (Gal. 1:8). John commands believers to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). The Bereans are commended for auditing an apostle against the text (Acts 17:11).

The one who challenges the veracity of prophecy and revelation is the one doing what God has explicitly told him to do. To decline to test is disobedience to the One who is revealing His will and desires us to follow the way. We are to be discriminating, wary of false prophets. I believe the major tool/trick of Satan is the slight twisting of God’s word and will and offering it as new revelation. It is the pattern of Eve in the Garden.

This is the theological heart of everything that follows: the same God who gives revelation gives tests for revelation. It is our duty and honor to test every spirit. Without an absolute standard, we cannot measure truth. 

III. The real problem: two self-validating witnesses

Leonard’s third point is formally correct. No testimony is proved by the testifier’s own assertion. No one can declare truth by saying: “This is true because I think, say, or feel it is true.” The internal/subjective standard is not reliable. Likewise, the authority of the person who makes such a declaration does not validate its Truth, regardless of whether the speaker is a bishop, prophet, king, priest, soldier, judge, or book. This is a principle we must grant, embrace, and apply fully. There must be some process other than feelings/belief, declaration/proclamation, or force/indoctrination that establishes truth. We must apply this to every scripture, speaker, and authority.

My point is that if self-validation disqualifies any witness, it disqualifies all witnesses. The Bible attests itself; the Book of Mormon attests itself (Moroni 10:4 offers an internal experiential test); Snuffer’s revelations attest themselves. The principle of disregarding the testimony of the Bible does not leave the BOM/Snuffer revelation standing on the field. It leaves the field empty. We cannot escape the system of two self-referential claims by choosing one or the other; we escape only by finding a referent outside both.

So the question becomes precise: what external referent exists?

We are asking to identify an absolute (which religion gives an absolutely true revelation of God, His will and way) inside a world system, a reality of experience, that presents us only with relatives. The problem with living in a world where we see only relatives, formed from the substance of the absolute, is that the absolute is hidden and exists in both polarities. It is somewhat like the fish-in-water and man-in-air analogy, but it is even more extreme. But we can detect evidence of the absolute’s existence and its properties indirectly by looking for and examining asymmetries. If one conception of the absolute has properties that could only arise from what the revelation declares, and the other has revelations that would be false, that difference is evidence available to anyone, believer or not, without appeal to either side’s authority.

We are looking for tells.

In response to the question regarding how to distinguish which divine messages are authentic, Michael answered in three words: “How about evidence?” He was not defending my position or Leonard’s; he was stating the requirement that any adjudication must satisfy. This is a solution that will convince unbelievers and believers in alternative revelations. The unbeliever in the room supplied the criterion the believers were circling. That is worth noticing twice — once because he is right, and once because it tells us what kind of argument is actually persuasive to someone outside the family quarrel.

IV. Four asymmetries that function as external referents

Asymmetry 1 — Structure: multivocal and public versus univocal and private

Consider what the two bodies of testimony are, structurally, apart from whether either is true.

The biblical witness is multivocal: roughly forty writers across something like a millennium and a half, in three languages, on three continents, in wildly different genres and social positions — shepherds, kings, priests, fishermen, a physician, a tax collector, a Pharisee. They are not a committee. They frequently constrain and embarrass one another and themselves: Moses is denied the land, David’s adultery is preserved, the apostles are recorded as slow and quarrelsome, Peter is rebuked to his face in a letter Peter’s own church would read.

The latter revelations are univocal: in each case one man receives privately, and the community receives from him. Muhammad in the cave. Smith with the plates and the stone. Snuffer in his study. In each case, the receiving is not witnessable, and the community’s access to God’s word runs through a single throat.

Now the asymmetry: a univocal private revelation is a claim that cannot in principle be checked; a multivocal public one is a claim that could have failed and didn’t. Independent witnesses constrain each other. That is why courts prefer them; that is why science replicates. The structural difference is not a matter of piety. It is a matter of what kind of evidence each is.

And notice the asymmetry cuts precisely where Leonard’s argument needs it not to: any person, in any century, can arrive and announce that the prior record is corrupted and that he has the uncorrupted version. The move is infinitely repeatable and costs nothing. Mani, Muhammad, Smith, and dozens of lesser figures have made it, and it will be made again. A criterion that cannot distinguish among these claimants is not a criterion at all. If Smith/Snuffer’s argument against the Bible and its replacement with uncorrupted tablets or conversation is based upon the Bible’s corruption, then another man may use the same personal revelation and declaration to say the same of Smith/Snuffer.

This is not hypothetical; students of the post-Smith era report that on the order of four hundred claimants have arisen since Joseph Smith, each announcing that he restores the correct restoration. The pattern is older than Mormonism: the Montanists of the second century made continuing prophecy their distinctive, through one man and two women, and passed away. The repeatability of the move is the point. A key that opens every door secures nothing.

Asymmetry 2 — The corruption premise is checkable, and it has been checked

Here is the crucial point, and it is the one place where the argument leaves the realm of dueling authorities entirely.

“The Bible is corrupted” is not a theological claim. It is a historical one. It asserts something about manuscripts — physical objects, publicly available, examined by scholars of every faith and of none, including many with a strong motive to prove the text unstable.

And it is testable without trusting either side. Stated carefully, with the caveats that honesty requires:

• The Hebrew text. The Dead Sea Scrolls pushed our Hebrew manuscript evidence back roughly a thousand years. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ, c. 100 BC) is a complete Isaiah a millennium older than the standard Masoretic manuscripts. It carries real variation — catalogs count on the order of 2,600 variants — and the percentage of agreement depends entirely on how one counts: word-for-word identity is commonly cited near 95 percent, while stricter quantitative classifications yield figures in the low-to-mid 80s. What every counting method agrees on is the character of the variation: orthography, spelling, morphological updating, harmonization, scribal slips, occasional expansions. Assessments of the portion of Isaiah genuinely in doubt on the total evidence run near one percent. Note that this is not a partisan reading: a Latter-day Saint scholar at Brigham Young University produced the most detailed recent catalog of 1QIsaᵃ’s variants, and it documents the same categories.
• The Greek text. The New Testament is attested by thousands of Greek manuscripts plus ancient translations and patristic quotations. The variants are overwhelmingly spelling, word order, and harmonization; the doctrinally significant disputed passages are a known, cataloged, and small set, marked in the margins of any decent modern edition.
• The pattern the thesis requires is absent. The corruption thesis requires coordinated doctrinal excision—a text made to mislead on essentials. What the manuscript record shows is uncoordinated, mostly trivial variation preserved in the open, across regions that had no means of collusion.

Note carefully what I am not claiming: not that transmission was flawless, not that translation is trivial, not that canon-formation was untouched by human politics. I am claiming that the specific corruption the argument needs — deep enough to require replacement — is not what the physical evidence shows.

And note the irony at the center of the corruption argument, which I have documented in detail in the lecture assessments: the abundance that makes the Bible look “muddled” is exactly what makes verification possible. We can name the variants because thousands of independent witnesses preserve the competing readings. A text transmitted through a single line, with no surviving exemplars, is not thereby more reliable — it is simply unverifiable at the disputed stage. Silence is not accuracy.

Asymmetry 3 — Incentive: what does the new revelation add, and who benefits?

Every counterfeit must add something the original lacked, or it has no reason to exist. So ask of any new revelation: what does it add, and where does the addition point?  ***

Three tells recur across the history of these movements:

(a) It adds a mechanism that makes the revelator indispensable. The canon closes; continuing private revelation reopens it. But the reopening is never general — it is channeled through the claimant. The doctrine that authorizes new revelation is always, in practice, the doctrine that authorizes this revelator.

(b) It moves authority, money, or access. Test doctrinal novelties by following what they redirect. A revelation that adds burdens payable to the new organization, that makes salvation contingent on ordinances only the new authority can perform, or that grants the revelator prerogatives the text never granted a prophet, is displaying its function.

(c) It relocates verification inward. Where the biblical prophets offered public, checkable signs — fulfilled predictions, an empty tomb with hostile witnesses in the same city — the newer claim characteristically relocates the test to private experience: pray, and you will feel it is true. This is not a straw man; it is the test as its own adherents state it. In our discussion, Leonard described his method in exactly these terms: test the word, and if it is delicious and it sprouts, it is good — the seed test of Alma 32. Notice two properties of that test. It cannot fail in a way anyone else could observe. And it returns opposite results for sincere seekers in rival movements: the Muslim, the Witness, and the Latter-day Saint each report the same inward confirmation in the same words. An experience that confirms every claimant confirms none. The seed test is a fine description of how a truth becomes dear to a person; it is not a method for determining whether it is true.

Asymmetry 4 — Content: is it another gospel, or the same one enlarged?

Paul’s criterion in Galatians 1 is not “new” versus “old.” It is another gospel versus the gospel. So the content test is: does the new material alter who Christ is, what He accomplished, and how a person is reconciled to God?

This is where I must be careful and fair, because the answer differs by case, and honesty requires the distinction:

• Some claimants clearly preach another Christ — one who is not the incarnate Son who died and rose for sin.
• The Smith/Snuffer stream, as Leonard receives and practices it, confesses the same Christ, the same cross, the same resurrection. Its additions are chiefly structural: continuing revelation, restored authority, expanded scripture, and a particular account of the church’s apostasy.

I should say plainly what follows from that: the danger here is of a different order than an outright counterfeit Christ. A man may hold much of this and love the Lord. I say so because it is true, and because an argument that inflates its charges forfeits its credibility.

But the structural additions are not harmless, and the reason is exactly Asymmetry 3(a): a doctrine of continuing revelation that can override the canon has, by construction, no ceiling. Whatever comes next through the authorized channel governs. The believer has traded a fixed reference point he can check for a moving one he cannot. That is not a small trade. It is the trade that makes every later drift unopposable — and drift is what the history of such movements characteristically shows.

V. Asymmetry 5 — Directional error: sorting the discrepancies

This section answers a question put to me directly.

Having now assessed all eight of Snuffer’s lectures claim by claim against Scripture and the documentary record, I am left with something on the order of a hundred and fifty discrepancies. The obvious objection is the honest one: so what? Every extemporaneous speaker misremembers dates. Are these substantial, or are they merely human drift, meaning nothing?

The answer is that they are not one kind of thing, and the sorting is itself the method. Four tiers:

Tier 1 — Drift. Immaterial, and charity requires saying so. Nicaea placed at 1,675 years rather than 1,692. Alexander’s campaign itinerary out of order. “Seven thousand” for the feeding of the four thousand. A pope’s regnal name confused. Ananias called Cornelius. Missouri’s 1838 given as 1837. These are the ordinary friction of a man speaking for an hour without notes. They prove nothing, and an argument that leans on them is dishonest. Set them aside entirely.

Tier 2 — Load-bearing error. Here the error is not decoration; it holds up a conclusion, and if the error goes, the conclusion goes with it. Denver argues that sola scriptura is disproved because Luther translated the Bible out of Latin, a dead language, leaving the illiterate unable to be saved—but Luther translated from Erasmus’s Greek and from the Hebrew, precisely to bypass Latin. He argues that the Reformation never even attempted to restore original Christianity, which the Radical Reformation’s explicit restitution program from 1525 falsifies — and which he falsifies in his own lecture, where he quotes Menno Simons as a Reformation father. He argues that the Gospel text was altered at Christ’s baptism, naming Matthew 3:17 as the altered verse — where no manuscript witness anywhere contains such a variant. Each of these is a beam, not a splinter.

Tier 3 — Directional error. This is the diagnostic tier, and it is the point of this section. Random error scatters. Motivated error points.

Across eight lectures and roughly a hundred and fifty assessed claims, I can identify essentially no error that runs against his own thesis. The corruption of the text is always overstated, never understated. The Reformation’s achievements are always minimized, never magnified. Manuscript evidence is always presented at its most skeptical extreme, never at its most conservative. The claim of a persisting faithful remnant is always denied, never conceded. Where a figure could be rounded either way, it is rounded toward the need for a restorer. Where a variant is contested among scholars, the contested minority reading is stated as settled fact — and in one case escalated across lectures, from a real (if minority) claim about Luke into a false claim about Matthew.

That is the tell, and anyone can see it. It requires no theology and no trust in either party. A man honestly misremembering makes errors in both directions; the errors of a man assembling a case all point one way. This is the same reasoning any of us would apply to an expert witness whose every “mistake” happened to favor the party paying him. We would not call him a liar. We would say his errors have a direction, and that direction is information.

Tier 4 — Self-contradiction. Lecture 3 teaches that the cross “was not where He paid the price for our sins”; Lecture 4 teaches that Christ “had to die in order to complete the atonement, the propitiation for sin.” Lectures 1 and 2 ground Joseph Smith’s death in the Nauvoo Expositor affair — dissenters exposing his practice of plural marriage — while Lecture 8 teaches that the practice did not exist until Brigham Young invented it afterward. Lecture 7 declares the whole church corrupt and, in the same address, offers St. Francis inside that church as an authentic Christian ministered to by angels.

Contradictions of this kind are not moral failings; they are structural evidence. They show that the arguments were assembled to reach a conclusion rather than derived from a consistent framework. A body of teaching that arrived by derivation is constrained — you cannot get incompatible results from one set of premises. A body of teaching assembled per-occasion is not constrained, and it shows.

The summary answer, then: Tier 1 means nothing and should be conceded generously and immediately. Tiers 2 and 4 damage specific arguments. Tier 3 — the direction of the errors — is the finding that matters, because it is the only one that speaks to the character of the whole enterprise rather than to any single claim, and because an outsider can verify it without believing anything either side asserts.

VI. The definitional problem: what is a prophet?

Our discussion surfaced a difficulty that must be settled before any of the tests above can be applied, and it explains why these conversations so often run in circles.

Two definitions were in the room, and both were held sincerely.

The broad definition. A prophet is one who speaks forth the word of God — one who holds the testimony of Jesus, since “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev. 19:10). On this reading, Moses’s wish is fulfilled: “would God that all the LORD’s people were prophets” (Num. 11:29). Anyone whose witness leads another to Christ is prophesying.

The narrow definition. A prophet is one who speaks God’s words with binding authority, whose predictions are publicly checkable and whose failure is fatal to his claim (Deut. 18:20–22) — an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, one who confronts kings and whose words enter the canon.

Each definition, taken alone, produces an absurdity. The broad one makes prophets of thousands and cannot exclude a single sincere teacher, however wrong. The narrow one, honestly applied, appears to admit no one in two thousand years — which was stated aloud in our own discussion by a man arguing for the narrow definition, who found the result disturbing and said so. That candor is worth more than any argument in this essay; it is what it looks like when a man submits his own position to a test that might fail.

The resolution is that these are two different offices sharing one English word, and the argument equivocates between them. The broad sense is real and precious: every believer who testifies of Christ speaks forth God’s word, and Numbers 11:29 means what it says. But nothing in the broad sense confers the right to add to or override Scripture. My testimony of Christ does not make my opinions canonical.

Denver’s claim requires the narrow office — a man sent as the apostles were sent, whose revelations govern where the received text differs. When that claim is challenged, the defense retreats to the broad sense: he speaks only of Christ; he claims nothing beyond what God asked of him; anything that leads to Christ is good. But those two things cannot both be the claim. If the narrow claim is made, the narrow tests apply — public, checkable, fatal-on-failure. If only the broad claim is made, then his revelations are one believer’s testimony, precious but not binding, and they cannot adjudicate against Genesis or Leviticus or Galatians.

Ask which office is being claimed, and hold the answer steady. Half of the fog dissipates.

A related resolution: was Paul commissioned?

The sharpest exchange of our discussion was Leonard’s challenge on Paul, and it deserves a better answer than I gave in the moment. His argument: Denver teaches that only one sent directly by God should be heeded; Paul was such a man (“an apostle, not of men, neither by man,” Gal. 1:1); therefore Denver’s principle is Pauline. And when it was noted that Ananias laid hands on Paul, Leonard seized it — there is the commission.

He is right about the fact and, I think, mistaken about what it proves. Look at the whole Pauline pattern, which has three parts, not one:

1. A direct call from the risen Christ on the road (Acts 9:3–6).
2. Confirmation through the existing community — Ananias, “a certain disciple at Damascus,” already a member of the church Paul was coming to arrest, sent to lay hands on him and baptize him (Acts 9:10–18). Leonard’s own observation establishes this: mediated commissioning is not the enemy of divine sending; it is part of it.
3. Submission of the content to those who were apostles before him: Paul went up to Jerusalem and communicated the gospel he preached, “lest by any means I should run, or had run, in vain,” and received the right hands of fellowship on a common gospel (Gal. 2:2, 9).

Denver’s claim reproduces the first element and not the second or third. No existing community confirmed him—he was excommunicated by the body he came from and gathered a new one around his own claim. And there is no submission of content to a prior authority; the direction of judgment runs the other way, with the prior deposit corrected by the new revelation. Paul’s own precedent is the extraordinary claimant seeking confirmation against the existing deposit. That reverses the pattern in view.

So Galatians 1:1 does not establish what it is being asked to establish. It records that Paul’s call was not from men — and Galatians 2:2 records that Paul submitted its content to men anyway, because he understood that a call which cannot be checked is a call no one else is obliged to accept.

VII. Why an absolute must exist, and what it would look like when it spoke

Everything above is comparative. But Leonard’s deeper question is right: comparisons among relatives never yield an absolute. So let me state the positive ground.

If reality is sustained moment by moment — if every point of it is held in being by a will that computes and upholds it — then there exists a reference frame that is not one opinion among others. This is what the physics I have spent decades developing points toward: a substrate whose every element is conscious and sustained, in which the world’s persistence is not inertia but continuous fidelity. I do not offer that as proof of Christian doctrine. I offer it as this: the universe does not look like a closed mechanism that runs itself. It looks like something being held. If that is so, then an absolute exists, and it is personal, and the question of its self-disclosure is not naive.

Now ask the design question. If such a One intended a self-disclosure robust against the counterfeiting we have just cataloged, what would He build?

He would not entrust it to one man, because one man is a single point of failure and an unfalsifiable channel. He would spread it across many voices in many eras, so that agreement across them could not be arranged. He would anchor it in public events with hostile witnesses present. He would let the record embarrass its own heroes, so that no one could mistake it for propaganda. He would make it partly obscure — a pearl in a field — so that it would yield to the seeker rather than to the clever. And He would close it, so that His people would have a fixed place to stand when someone arrived claiming a newer word.

That describes the book we have. I take the correspondence as evidence—not proof, but the kind of asymmetry we said we were looking for.

VIII. A worked example: the tell of the tithe

Abstractions convince no one. So here is the method applied to one concrete point of difference, offered as a template for the others.

The tithe in the biblical material is a defined thing, and it is defined at the source of increase: “all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the LORD’s” (Lev. 27:30); “thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field bringeth forth year by year” (Deut. 14:22); with the accompanying principle of firstfruits — “honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase” (Prov. 3:9). Whatever disputes exist about its application under the New Covenant, its shape is publicly specified: a tenth off the top, not a tenth of what remains.

The teaching given in Lecture 1 defines it otherwise: a tenth of one’s surplus, after all needs and responsibilities are met. That is not the Mosaic tithe, and it is not a New Testament ordinance; it derives from a particular reading of a Restoration text (D&C 119:4, “one-tenth of all their interest annually”).

Now apply the method rather than the outrage. The change is small, concrete, and checkable — which is exactly what makes it useful. And here I must be scrupulous, because in this instance the redefinition runs toward the hearer’s convenience and away from institutional collection: Snuffer’s fellowships collect in small groups, pay no clergy, and disburse to needs among themselves. Asymmetry 3(b) is not satisfied here. What this example demonstrates is not enrichment but Tier 2 and Tier 3 of the previous section: a load-bearing definition presented as biblical which is not biblical, and — as with every other such substitution across the eight lectures — one that points in the direction of the newer revelation’s authority over the older text.

The template generalizes: prefer the small checkable difference to the grand doctrinal dispute. Whether Nicaea was right about homoousios is hard to adjudicate in a fellowship meeting. Whether Leviticus 27:30 says “increase” or “surplus” is not. And a pattern of many small differences, all pointing one way, is worth more evidentially than any single dramatic dispute.

(Note: where a claimant is charged with a teaching he did not hold — as Leonard testified regarding Joseph Smith and plural marriage — the correction must be made cheerfully and in writing. On that specific point the documentary record runs heavily against the exculpatory account, and I have set out the evidence in the Lecture 8 assessment; but the principle stands regardless of who is right in any instance. We do not need any single charge to be true, and an argument that clings to a disputed one has confessed its weakness.)

IX. Should this be adjudicated in front of an unbeliever?

Michael sits with us and does not believe. The reasonable worry: does an intramural dispute among Christians look, to him, like men arguing over the furniture of a house he does not think exists? Why not let each believe as he will?

I think the worry has it backward—if we conduct ourselves well. And after this morning I am no longer speculating about it.

What an unbeliever most often assumes about faith is that it is credulity: that believers accept what they are told and defend it afterward. What he is about to watch, if we do this properly, is a room full of believers applying tests — historical, structural, evidential — to a claim that flatters their own side’s openness, and being willing to follow the tests where they lead. He will see that faith here is not the suspension of judgment but the exercise of it.

The evidence that this works is that Michael did not watch from outside it. Asked how authentic divine messages are distinguished, he answered “evidence,” which is the whole thesis of this essay, arrived at independently by a man with no stake in either revelation. And when a believer in the room stated his own criteria and then announced that those criteria appeared to disqualify everyone for two thousand years — including a figure he once revered — that is a demonstration of intellectual honesty no apologetic aimed at Michael could have produced.

Three conditions, though, or the demonstration inverts:

First, method over persons. We adjudicate claims and their properties, not a brother’s sincerity or a claimant’s character. Impeaching Joseph Smith by his personal life is the weakest available line — it is contested, it is ugly, and even if granted, it proves less than the structural argument does. The tells above require no one’s biography.

Second, no other species. It was well said among us that the deepest sickness of a cult is that it divides the world into members and non-members — and that the same instinct operates in every human quarrel, sorting people into our kind and the other kind. The moment a brother becomes a category, the argument has already been lost, whatever its logic. Leonard is not a specimen of a movement. He is a man who left one at great cost, looking for Christ.

Third, real stakes, real charity. Leonard should hear his own position stated by me better than he could state it himself before he hears my objection. If he cannot recognize his view in my summary, I have not earned the right to disagree with it. And then let it be genuinely unsettled if it is unsettled. A room that performs a foregone conclusion teaches an unbeliever nothing except that we perform.

On the proposal to bracket the sources

It was proposed that we might simply agree to discuss the Bible alone, setting the Restoration sources aside, since all of us accept the Bible. The proposal is generous, and it would produce peace. I think we should decline it for one reason: the question of which sources are authoritative is not a distraction from the discussion—it is the discussion. To bracket it is to settle it silently, and to settle it silently in my favor is not fair to Leonard, who joined us openly with his sources named. The better course is the one we have taken: bring every source, and test every source by criteria stated in advance and applied to all of them, mine included.

X. What would change my mind

The discipline requires this, and it is the section that makes the rest honest. I would have to revise substantially if:

1. The manuscript evidence turned. If the physical record showed the coordinated doctrinal corruption the argument requires — not variants and translation difficulty, but excision of essentials — Asymmetry 2 collapses, and with it the strongest external referent I have.
2. A public, checkable, non-repeatable sign attended the newer revelation. Predictions with specificity, publicly recorded before the event and fulfilled; something an outsider could verify and a rival could not manufacture.
3. The additions ran against interest. If the new revelations consistently reduced the revelator’s authority, income, and indispensability, Asymmetry 3 would be answered in the strongest possible way. (I note in fairness that on the narrow question of clergy compensation, this movement does better than most: no one is paid, and the collections stay in the fellowship. That is a real datum on the other side of the ledger, and I record it.)
4. The errors lost their direction. If a careful audit of the lectures turned up errors distributed on both sides of the thesis — mistakes that inconvenience the argument as often as they serve it — Asymmetry 5 evaporates and what remains is ordinary human fallibility, which convicts no one.
5. The multivocal criterion failed on its own terms — if the biblical witnesses turned out to be a coordinated production after all, the structural asymmetry I lean on evaporates.

I do not expect these. But I hold the position in a form where they would count, and I would rather be corrected than be consistent.

XI. The method, in summary — toward “Triangulating Truth”

For the larger project, the transferable core is this:

1. Testing revelation is obedience, not doubt. The God who speaks commanded the tests. Begin here; it removes the sting from the charge of closed-mindedness without any defensiveness at all.
2. Self-validation disqualifies evenly or not at all. Grant the principle fully; note that it empties the field rather than choosing a winner; then go looking for an external referent.
3. Settle the definitions before the dispute. Most of these arguments equivocate between a broad sense of a term that no one denies and a narrow sense that is the actual claim. Ask which office is being claimed, and hold the answer steady.
4. The absolute is seen by inference, through asymmetries. Look for properties a true self-disclosure would have and a counterfeit could not easily fake: many independent voices, public anchoring, self-embarrassment, checkable factual premises, additions that run against the claimant’s interest.
5. Sort the errors before weighing them. Concede drift generously; identify which errors are load-bearing; and then look at the direction of the errors, which is the finding an outsider can verify without trusting anyone.
6. Prefer the checkable tell to the grand dispute. Small, concrete, directional differences are better evidence than large doctrinal arguments, because they can be verified in an afternoon.
7. Every cult and rival system is a subset of a center it partly reflects. They persist because they carry real light. Say so. Locating what they got right is not a concession; it shows where the center actually is, and it is the only posture in which someone inside one can hear you.
8. Hold your own position falsifiably. Name in advance what would change your mind, and mean it. This is what separates discernment from the tribalism it is so often mistaken for.

Draft status: working document. Version 0.2 incorporates the fellowship discussion of August 16, 2026. The manuscript claims of §IV.2 have been sourced and are stated with their counting caveats; the tithing example of §VIII has been documented from Leviticus 27:30, Deuteronomy 14:22, and D&C 119:4, with the incentive finding corrected in the movement’s favor. Prepared as groundwork for the “Triangulating Truth” study.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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