Fear is not, at bottom, a failure of nerve. It is a failure of belief. A man who is afraid of what tomorrow holds has, somewhere beneath his feelings, concluded that God either cannot or will not take care of him. That conclusion is the real problem, and the fear is its fruit.
Scripture makes this connection in a place most of us would not expect. Near the end of the Bible, John lists those who will have no share in the city of God: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death”(Revelation 21:8).
We quickly read past the first two words, eager to reach the sins we recognize as serious. Murder, sorcery, idolatry: these we understand. But the list does not begin there. It begins with the fearful, and the very next word is the unbelieving. The order is instructive. Fear stands at the head of the line, and unbelief stands right behind it, as if to explain it.
This essay was prompted by a short devotional from Pat Higgins in The Berean, the daily commentary of the Church of the Great God (cgg.org), which traces this same thread. I want to follow it a little further: ask what kind of fear Scripture condemns, why it is a moral matter rather than merely an emotional one, and what God has given us to answer it.
The Wilderness Pattern
Psalm 78 is Asaph’s long retelling of Israel’s history, written so that later generations “might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God” (v. 7). In the middle of it he recounts what God did for the people after Egypt. He divided the sea and made the waters stand up as a heap. He led them by a cloud in the day and by fire at night. He split the rocks in the desert and brought water out of them like rivers (vv. 13–16).
Then comes the turn. Having drunk from water that poured out of stone, the people asked a question that should have been absurd: “Can God furnish a table in the wilderness? Behold, he smote the rock, that the waters gushed out, and the streams overflowed; can he give bread also? can he provide flesh for his people?” (vv. 19–20).
Notice the shape of their reasoning. They did not deny the miracle. They cited it. They granted that God had done the impossible once, and then they drew a line just past it: he did that, but surely he cannot do this. Every act of provision became, in their minds, the upper boundary of what God could do rather than a pledge of what he would do. Asaph names this elsewhere in the psalm: they “limited the Holy One of Israel” (v. 41).
And he names the cause plainly. God’s anger came up against Israel “because they believed not in God, and trusted not in his salvation” (v. 22). Their fear of starving was not an accident of circumstance. It grew from a settled refusal to believe that the God who had carried them this far meant to carry them the rest of the way.
The pattern is not ancient history. We do the same thing with our own lives. God has brought us through illness, loss, financial ruin, and our own foolishness, and then a new threat appears and we ask, in effect, whether he can manage bread as well as water. The particulars change. The logic does not.
Why Fear Is a Moral Matter
We usually treat fear as weather: something that happens to us, unpleasant but morally neutral. Scripture does not let us off so easily. When the disciples woke Jesus in the storm, terrified that they would drown, he calmed the sea and then asked them a pointed question: “Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?” (Mark 4:40). He did not ask why the storm was so strong. He went straight past the circumstance to the condition of their trust.
The reason fear carries moral weight is that it is never only a feeling. It is a judgment about God. To be governed by fear is to have concluded, whether we say it or not, that God is either too weak to help, too distant to notice, or too indifferent to care. Each of those is a false statement about him. Living by fear is therefore a way of bearing false witness about God with our whole lives.
That is why Paul could say, “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23). And it is why Hebrews, looking back on the same wilderness generation Asaph describes, gives a one-line verdict on why they never reached the land God promised: “So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19). They were not barred for lacking strength. They had the strength of God going before them. They were barred because they would not believe him.
This changes how we think about sin in general. We tend to locate the root of sin in weakness: the flesh is weak, the temptation was strong, and we gave way. There is truth in that. But underneath the weakness lies something more basic. When a man lies to protect himself, steals to secure himself, or compromises to keep his position, he is acting on the belief that God will not provide what he needs if he does what is right. Much of what we call weakness is fear, and much of fear is unbelief. Pull up that root, and a great deal of the visible sin above it loses its soil.
What Faith Is Not
If fear is so serious, a sincere believer may wonder whether every tightening of the stomach puts him in danger of judgment. It does not, and Scripture is careful on this point.
The word in Revelation 21:8 that the King James renders “fearful” is the Greek deilos, and modern translations rightly render it “cowardly.” It does not describe a man who feels afraid. It describes a man who is ruled by his fear, who shrinks back from what God asks of him because the cost looks too high. Hebrews draws the same line: “Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him” (Hebrews 10:38). The sin is in the drawing back.
The proof is in the life of Christ himself. In Gethsemane he “began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy,” and told his disciples that his soul was “exceeding sorrowful unto death” (Mark 14:33–34). He felt the full weight of what was coming. Yet he did not draw back. He prayed, he submitted his will to the Father’s, and he went forward. The feeling of dread was present; cowardice was not.
David gives us the pattern in one sentence: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee” (Psalm 56:3). He does not say I am never afraid. He says that when fear comes, he answers it with trust. Faith is not the absence of fear as an emotion. It is the refusal to let fear make our decisions.
There is also a fear Scripture commends. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). This is reverence: a sober awareness of who God is, of his holiness and his rightful authority over us. Rightly held, it is the cure for the other kind. Jesus said as much: do not fear those who can kill only the body, but fear him who holds the whole of a man’s destiny, and then remember that this same God numbers the hairs of your head (Matthew 10:28–31). The man who fears God rightly has little room left to fear anything else.
The Remedy: Remembering and Love
If the root of fear is unbelief, the remedy is not to try harder to feel brave. It is to strengthen belief. Scripture offers two practical means.
The first is remembering. Israel’s failure in the wilderness was, at its heart, a failure of memory. Psalm 78 says they “forgat his works, and his wonders that he had shewed them” (v. 11). The psalm itself was written as a corrective, so that the next generation would keep the record alive. In Psalm 77, Asaph himself, in a season of deep distress, chose the opposite course: “I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old” (Psalm 77:11). Remembering is an act of the will, not a passing mood. A believer who rehearses what God has already done, in Scripture and in his own life, is building the evidence against which his fears must argue. Every past deliverance becomes, rightly understood, a pledge of future care rather than a ceiling on it.
The second is love. John wrote, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment” (1 John 4:18). Fear and love cannot occupy the same ground for long. The more fully a man knows that he is loved by God, the less room fear has to work. Jesus prayed that the world would know that the Father had loved his followers “as thou hast loved me” (John 17:23). If that is true, and it is, then the question Israel asked in the desert answers itself. The Father who loves us as he loves his Son is not going to forget to set the table.
Paul ties these together for Timothy: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). Fear, in other words, is not native to the new life. What God gives is power to act, love that secures us, and a sound mind that sees our circumstances in their true proportion: real, sometimes grave, but never larger than the God who governs them.
Closing
The first word on John’s list is a warning, but it is also a diagnosis, and a diagnosis points toward a cure. If our fears were simply the price of living in a dangerous world, there would be nothing to do but endure them. Because they grow from unbelief, they can be answered at the root.
So the question for each of us is not whether we ever feel afraid. We will. The question is what we do when we do: whether we draw back, as Israel did, and limit the Holy One by the size of our present trouble; or whether we remember what he has done, rest in how he loves us, and go forward. The wilderness generation saw water come from stone and still could not believe God would give them bread. We have seen more than they did. We have seen the cross and the empty tomb.
When the next storm rises, the question Jesus asked in the boat is worth asking ourselves before he has to: Why am I so fearful? Where is my faith? And then the answer David gave is worth making our own: What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.
A response to Rabbi David Ostrich on revival, presence, and the test of faith
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
The Question Behind the Question
The real test of an encounter with God is not what happens in the room, but what happens on the drive home. Rabbi David Ostrich made that point recently in a short column about the Brownsville Revival, and I want to take it a few steps further.
The Brownsville Revival began at the Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida, on Father’s Day in 1995. It ran for about five years, several nights a week, and drew visitors from around the world. During those years, a reporter called local clergy, including the rabbi, and asked the questions everyone was asking. Is it real? Are the healings real? Is God actually there, or is this a well-run show?
The rabbi said he was surprised by the question. Of course God was there, he answered. God is present everywhere. He said the better question was what the worshippers did afterward. Did they drive politely, pay their taxes and child support, and treat others as they would want to be treated? He closed with a line from Episcopal Bishop Charles Duvall: a man does not truly believe in Jesus unless he behaves like Jesus.
I agree with him. I also think the matter has more layers than a newspaper column can cover, and those layers are worth working through.
Everywhere, Yet Not Always Noticed
God is present everywhere, but we are not everywhere aware of Him. That distinction explains why a revival can feel like God has arrived when in fact He never left.
The rabbi quotes Deuteronomy and Psalm 145, and both hit the mark. David says the same thing in Psalm 139: there is no height, no depth, no darkness where God is not. Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:27–28). Omnipresence is not a minority opinion in Scripture. It is the foundation on which everything else stands.
Yet Scripture also records moments when people suddenly woke up to what had been true all along. Jacob, running from his brother, lay down in the open with a stone for a pillow. He dreamed of a ladder reaching heaven, and when he woke he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not” (Genesis 28:16). God had not moved to Bethel that night. Jacob’s eyes had opened.
That is what I think happens at a genuine revival. People gather, quiet their distractions, confess what they have been hiding, sing until their guard comes down, and pray with expectation. Their attention turns, and they notice the One who was already there. The experience is real, and it can be overwhelming. But the change is in the people, not in God’s location.
This matters for the rabbi’s question. If revival is mainly a change in us, then we answer whether it was real the way we answer any change in a person: by watching what that person does next.
Every Mountain Has a Valley Below It
In Scripture, God’s people meet Him on the mountain, then return to the valley to serve. The rabbi points to Moses, and the pattern holds through the whole Bible.
Moses spent forty days with God on Sinai. He came down with the tablets in his hands and his face shining, and walked straight into a camp where a golden calf and a camp-out were out of control (Exodus 32). The glory on his face did not exempt him from the mess below. It equipped him for it. He spent the rest of his life leading a complaining people through the wilderness, and the Law he carried down was mostly about ordinary things: honest weights, fair wages, care for the widow, and returning a neighbor’s stray ox.
The Gospels repeat the pattern almost exactly. Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a high mountain, and they saw Him transfigured, His clothes shining whiter than any bleach could make them, with Moses and Elijah talking with Him. Peter wanted to build three shelters and stay. Instead, Jesus led them down the next morning, and at the foot of the mountain they found a crowd, an argument, and a desperate father whose son was being thrown into fire and water by a spirit the disciples had failed to cast out (Mark 9:2–29).
I do not think that placement is accidental. The mountain shows us who Jesus is. The valley shows us what He is for. A Christian who wants to live on the mountain has misunderstood both.
Gifts Are Not Proof; Fruit Is
Jesus Himself said that spiritual power is not the test of a true disciple; a changed life is. The rabbi asks whether tongues and being “slain in the Spirit” were only a night’s entertainment. The New Testament had already raised that question, and answered it more sharply than he did.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned that many would say to Him on the last day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and do many mighty works in Your name?” And He would answer, “I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:21–23). Prophecy, deliverance, and miracles are on that list. They are not enough. Just before, He gave the test that is enough: “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
Paul says the same thing to the church that had more spiritual gifts than any other, and more trouble. The Corinthians spoke in tongues, prophesied, and boasted of their knowledge, while they sued one another, tolerated open immorality, and humiliated the poor at the Lord’s Supper. So Paul wrote the chapter we read at weddings, though he wrote it as a rebuke: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (1 Corinthians 13:1).
The fruit Paul names elsewhere is not spectacular: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). None of it shows up well on a service video. All of it shows up in traffic, at the dinner table, in the office, and in how a man handles money. The rabbi’s list of tests (courteous driving, child support paid, taxes filed on time) is simply that fruit, described in plain clothes. James would add that faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and John that whoever says he loves God but hates his brother is a liar (1 John 4:20).
Root and Fruit
Behavior is evidence of faith, but not its source. On this point I want to add one thing to the rabbi’s argument, not to correct it but to finish it.
If we stop at “behave in godly ways,” we risk two errors. The first is moralism: the idea that religion is mainly good conduct, so that a decent agnostic and a devout believer are doing the same thing. The second is despair: a man who tries hard to behave like Jesus and keeps failing may conclude that faith is a fraud, or that he is.
Jesus did not say, “Produce fruit, and you will be a good tree.” He said a good tree produces good fruit (Matthew 7:17), and that a branch bears fruit by abiding in the vine; apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:4–5). The order matters. The encounter with God is meant to change the root: to forgive what we could not undo, to heal what we could not mend, and to give us a new heart, as Ezekiel promised (Ezekiel 36:26). The behavior grows out of that change over time, the way fruit grows: slowly, seasonally, and sometimes after a hard pruning.
So I would put Bishop Duvall’s principle this way. If an experience of God never shows up in a man’s conduct, something did not take root, however intense the evening was. And if a man’s conduct is slowly changing in the direction of love, something real is happening in him, even if he never had a dramatic night at all. Revival is valuable when it plants something. It is wasted when it only stirs the soil.
This also explains why Christians cannot simply copy the behavior of Jesus by willpower. We are not asked to imitate a dead teacher’s example. We are asked to let a living Lord reshape us from within, and then to cooperate with Him daily in the valley. That is harder than either moralism or emotionalism, and it is the only thing that lasts.
What Revival Fruit Has Looked Like
The revivals history remembers with respect are the ones that changed how people lived in public. The meetings themselves faded; the conduct remained.
The Methodist awakening under John and Charles Wesley in eighteenth-century England was full of emotion: weeping, shouting, people falling down under conviction. But it is remembered for what came after. Wesley’s converts organized into small groups that met weekly to ask one another how they were actually living. Many miners and laborers stopped drinking away their wages. The movement fed prison reform, schooling for the poor, and the campaign against slavery. One of the last letters Wesley wrote, in 1791, urged the young William Wilberforce to keep fighting the slave trade.
The Welsh revival of 1904–05 left similar stories. Accounts from that time describe taverns losing business, debts being repaid, and stolen goods returned. One often-repeated story says the pit ponies in the coal mines were confused for a while because the miners had stopped cursing at them, and the animals had only ever been driven with oaths. Whether every detail is exact, the stories people chose to tell were about changed behavior, not about the services.
Brownsville produced fruit of this kind too. People who attended tell of broken marriages restored, addictions ended, and young men and women who went into ministry and missions. It also had its share of excess, conflict, and a painful aftermath, as most human movements do. That mixture is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to judge it the way Jesus told us to: one life at a time, by the fruit, over years rather than nights.
The Drive Home
The question for us is not whether God was in Pensacola, but whether He is in our conduct this week. Most of us will never attend a five-year revival. All of us have had moments on the mountain: a sermon that cut through, a prayer that was answered, a quiet morning when God felt near.
The test of those moments is the same one the rabbi proposed. When I leave church this morning, will I let someone merge in front of me without resentment? Will I keep a promise that costs me something? Will I tell the truth on a form when a lie would save money? Will I be patient with the person in my house who tries my patience most? Will I ask, and mean it, what Jesus would do, and then do it?
I am grateful to Rabbi Ostrich for asking the question so plainly. Jesus summarized the whole Law with two commands from the Torah: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind (Deuteronomy 6:5), and love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). A Jewish teacher reminding Christians of that is not a stranger correcting us. He is pointing us back to the text our Lord quoted.
God is in this place, as Jacob learned. The proof that we know it will be found on the road home.
For the Christos Fellowship, to be prayed together each week
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
How to Pray This
We are not persuading God to do something He is reluctant to do. He wants His kingdom to come more than we do. We agree with Him aloud, ask Him to do what He already wills, and offer ourselves to be part of it.
Pray it slowly. Praying in the Spirit means being conscious of each word as we say it, and of standing in His presence. Feeling is welcome but not required. Attention is.
Take turns. One person reads each section, and everyone speaks the bold lines together.
Keep the silences. Where the text says (Silence), stop for a minute or two. The silence after confession is for searching our hearts. The silence after each request is for listening.
One standing condition covers every request. We ask for each thing only if it is His will. If He has a better plan, method, or timing, we ask Him to show it to us by revelation and by the thoughts He brings to mind.
Write down what comes. If anyone receives a thought, a Scripture, or a conviction during the silences, he can note it and share it at the end.
Entering His Gates
“Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name. For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.” (Psalm 100:4–5)
Our Father in heaven, we come into Your presence with thanks.
Thank You for life, breath, and this day. Thank You for Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose again, and for the Holy Spirit, who lives in us. Thank You for this fellowship, the friends gathered here, and everyone You have joined to this work.
Thank You for this nation: for its Christian founding, the liberty our fathers secured, and the revivals You sent in our history when we needed them most. You did not abandon us then, and You have not abandoned us now.
We praise You because You are good. You are holy, righteous, and true. You made the heavens and the earth out of nothing, and You hold every particle of it in being moment by moment. You are the foundation beneath everything we will ever discover. Your wisdom exceeds our understanding, and Your mercy endures forever.
For the LORD is good; His mercy is everlasting; and His truth endures to all generations.
Thy Kingdom Come
Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Lord, You desire Your kingdom on earth. You want righteousness to rule in our hearts, our homes, our churches, and our laws. You want every man to know You, to be forgiven, and to live in the freedom of obedience. We do not need to convince You of any of this. We come to agree with You, and to offer ourselves to be used however You choose.
We confess that we do not know how to bring revival. We cannot manufacture it, schedule it, or earn it. Only You can send it. But You have told us the condition: that Your people humble themselves, pray, seek Your face, and turn from their wicked ways. We have come to do that now.
You resist the proud and give grace to the humble. Our generation thinks itself wise because of its machines, but we understand very little of how anything truly works at its foundation. Forgive our pride, and forgive our nation’s pride. Begin with us.
Search Me, O God
“Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23–24)
Lord, You said, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” We mourn for our sin. We are sorry for what we have done against You and against one another.
We confess the desires of the flesh we have entertained: lust, greed, envy, gluttony, anger, and the love of comfort above You. We confess what we have done: words that wounded, promises we broke, truth we withheld, and time and money we spent on ourselves that belonged to You and to our neighbor. We confess the good we left undone. We confess the times we stayed silent when we should have spoken, and the times we approved of what You call sin so that others would think well of us.
Show us now what is holding us back: the hidden sin, the grudge, the fear, the idol we have not named.
(Silence: each person confesses privately to God.)
“Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” (James 5:16)
This is a safe place. What is confessed here stays here. We listen without correcting, advising, or repeating it to anyone. Anyone who wishes may now confess a sin to the group. After each person speaks, the group answers together:
We have heard you. God has heard you. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)
(Time for anyone who wishes to speak.)
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
Lord, we forgive those who have sinned against us. We release them, as You have released us.
(Silence: each person names, privately, anyone he needs to forgive.)
Our Commitment
Together:
Lord, we turn from our sin. By Your grace we will not practice what You call sin, and we will not approve of it in others, in our churches, or in our laws. We will not call evil good or good evil. We will speak the truth in love, even when it costs us. We will make right what we can make right. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us. (Psalm 51:10)
Our Requests
“Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.” (Philippians 4:6)
Lord, here are the things we believe You want. We ask for each of them only if it is Your will. If You have a better plan, method, or timing, show it to us by revelation and by the thoughts You bring to mind. After each request, the group answers together: Thy will be done. Then we pause to listen.
Revival in Your church. Send a spirit of conviction and repentance on Your people, beginning with us. Raise up pastors who preach the whole counsel of God: Your commandments, sin, judgment, the cross, and grace. Expose every false gospel, and call back those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not know You. Restore the Book to Your house, as You did in the days of Josiah. Thy will be done.
Prayer. Raise up praying people across America, in homes, churches, workplaces, and schools, two and three at a time, as You did in 1857 and in the Hebrides. Keep us faithful in prayer when nothing visible is happening. Thy will be done.
Righteousness in government. Let our laws be measured first by Your righteousness, then by love, and then by whether we would want them done to us. Raise up leaders who fear You, who keep their word, and who govern as servants. Bring accountability to every office that has abused its power. Thy will be done.
The protection of life. End the killing of unborn children in this land. Turn the hearts of mothers and fathers toward their children. Protect the sick, the disabled, and the elderly from being treated as burdens. Thy will be done.
Marriage and the family. Restore marriage as You designed it, one man and one woman for life. Heal broken homes. Turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers. Thy will be done.
Our children. Protect children from every teaching that confuses them about who You made them to be. Guide the development of the Christos Homeschool, and give parents the wisdom and courage to raise their children in Your truth. Thy will be done.
Truth about You in science. Remove the false belief that science has no place for You. Give wisdom and understanding to the work of the Conscious Point Physics theory. If it is true, bring it to light. If it is wrong anywhere, show us where. If it is Your will, let one clear, testable prediction, such as the nature of dark matter, open the minds of scientists and ordinary people to consider that You are the foundation beneath everything. Humble the pride of our age, beginning with ours. Thy will be done.
Abundant energy and provision. Give our nation wisdom to develop safe, clean, abundant energy, such as thorium reactors, so that the poor are not priced out of warmth, work, and food. Teach us to care for the poor, the widow, and the elderly as Your people should, through families, churches, and just laws. Thy will be done.
Health and healing. Restore our health in body, mind, and spirit. Teach us to care for the bodies You gave us as temples of the Holy Spirit. Thy will be done.
Healed hearts and relationships. Heal the wounds people carry from the past. Bless the development of the psychological healing tools (such as the advice and information on MyCounselor.com, the color therapy emotional resolution program promotion, and development of whole brain enrollment by neurofeedback instrument and method), and every honest effort to help people be transformed by the renewing of their minds. Thy will be done.
Freedom and conscience. Protect our liberty to worship, speak, and live by conscience. Keep artificial intelligence and every powerful technology in the service of human freedom, not control. Give jurors the courage to judge by conscience and by Your law. Thy will be done.
Protection from false religion. Protect this nation from every doctrine and system that would enslave men’s consciences or take away their freedom, including Islam’s design to rule by its law. Open the eyes of Muslims among us, and of all who do not know You, to the love and truth of Jesus Christ. Thy will be done.
The peace of Jerusalem. We pray for the peace of Jerusalem, as You commanded. Bless Israel, and bring her people to know their Messiah. Thy will be done.
Voters and elections. Wake Christian voters to vote by Your standards, not by party, fear, or self-interest. Guide the development of the Christos Voting Network in its work to fulfill the promise of government of, by, and for the people. Let honest elections be honestly counted. Thy will be done.
This witness and this campaign. Lord, if it is Your will, use the Dr Thomas for President campaign as a voice calling this nation back to You. Prepare it for its launch next July. Give it wisdom, the right words, the right people, and favor where You want it to go. Keep it humble, and truthful. If You have a different plan, show us, and give us the grace to follow it. Thy will be done.
(Silence: listen for anything the Lord brings to mind. Anyone may add a request in his own words.)
For All Men
“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” (1 Timothy 2:1–2)
Lord, we pray for the President, the Congress, the courts, our Governor, and every official in authority over us. Give them wisdom, restrain them from evil, and bring them to repentance where they need it.
We pray for those who oppose You and those who oppose us. We do not ask for their harm. We ask for their salvation, as You asked for ours while we were still sinners.
We pray for our families, our neighbors, and the members of this fellowship by name.
(Silence: each person names, privately or aloud, those on his heart.)
“Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints.” (Ephesians 6:18)
Listening and Closing
“Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)
(Silence: two or three minutes of listening together. Afterward, anyone may share what came to mind, and the group notes it.)
Lord, we have made our requests known to You, and we leave them with You. Give us this day our daily bread. Make us the answer to our own prayers wherever You choose to use us. Wilt Thou not revive us again, that Thy people may rejoice in Thee?
Together:
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
No one returns to this world for a second life, and yet some children speak as though they remember one. A new study from the University of Virginia presses that tension harder than any before it, and the Christian should neither wave it away nor follow it where its popular readers want to go.
Since the 1960s, the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has collected what it calls “cases of the reincarnation type”: young children, usually between two and six years old, who describe the life of someone who died before they were born. In the strongest cases, investigators located a real deceased person whose name, family, home, and manner of death matched what the child said. The archive is the largest of its kind.
In August 2026, researchers Saeedeh Sadeghi, Philip Cozzolino, and colleagues published an analysis of every case in that archive with an identified deceased person, 1,678 in all, in the American Psychological Association journal Psychology of Consciousness. They measured what they call the “intermission”: the time between the remembered person’s death and the birth of the child who seems to remember him. Among the 1,319 cases with usable dates, the median intermission was 16 months.
The striking finding is that the intermission depended on how the person died. When the death was fully expected, as with a long illness in old age, the median interval was about 21 months. When the death was sudden and unforeseen, by accident, violence, or abrupt medical crisis, the median was about 12 months, a reduction of roughly 43 percent. The more abrupt the death, the shorter the wait.
Why the Easy Dismissals Do Not Hold
The skeptic’s first answer to any single case is that someone embellished it. A grieving family hears what it wants to hear, a story grows in the retelling, and a child absorbs details from adult conversation. These explanations are often correct for individual cases, and the researchers say so. Their point is that a consistent statistical pattern across more than a thousand cases is much harder to manufacture by accident than a single good story.
The second answer is culture. Many traditions teach that a person who dies suddenly leaves unfinished business and returns sooner. If families who hold that belief were shaping the stories, we would expect the pattern to be strongest among them. The researchers found the opposite: the effect held after controlling for the quality of the verification, the accuracy of the child’s statements, prior acquaintance between the two families, social status, and religious belief, and it was stronger in families whose religion did not teach reincarnation.
The researchers are careful about what this does and does not show. The relationship is modest: the manner of death accounts for only about two to three percent of the variation in intermission time. Their claim is not that the cause of death strongly predicts the interval, but that it predicts it at all, when no known ordinary mechanism connects the two. Sadeghi describes herself as agnostic about the mechanism, and says the pattern is a reason to keep looking. That is an honest posture, and I share the conviction that the right response is to look harder, not away.
What the Finding Does to Materialism
Before asking what the cases mean, it is worth noticing whom they trouble most. The materialist holds that a person is his brain, and that when the brain dies, everything it held is gone. On that view, no information about a dead man’s life can reach a child except through ordinary channels: someone told him, he overheard it, or the investigators were fooled.
If even a small fraction of the verified cases are what they appear to be, that view fails. A three-year-old in one village names the relatives, the house, and the manner of death of a stranger from another village, and the details check out. Something carried that information across a gap that matter alone does not cross. The timing pattern adds a second difficulty: the circumstances of a death somehow bear on when the information surfaces. Nothing in the materialist picture connects the two.
The Christian has no stake in defending materialism. Scripture has always taught that the person is more than the body, that the spirit survives death, and that unseen persons act in the visible world (Ecclesiastes 12:7; Matthew 10:28; Ephesians 6:12). Data that embarrass the materialist are not a threat to the faith. The question for the believer is narrower and more important: if these children are receiving real information about the dead, who is delivering it?
Why Scripture Closes the Door on Rebirth
The plainest answer is that the remembered person is not coming back. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). The writer makes the point to show that Christ’s sacrifice, like a man’s death, happens once and is complete. A single life followed by judgment is the frame for the whole argument; a cycle of returns would dissolve it.
The rest of Scripture speaks with one voice. Job says that a man who goes down to the grave “shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more” (Job 7:9–10). David, mourning his infant son, says, “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23). In the account of the rich man and Lazarus, the dead man asks that someone be sent back to warn his brothers, and he is told that a great gulf is fixed and that the living have Moses and the prophets (Luke 16:19–31).
Two passages are often offered on the other side, and both fail on inspection. Jesus said John the Baptist was the Elijah who was to come (Matthew 11:14; 17:12), but John himself denied being Elijah (John 1:21), the angel said he would come “in the spirit and power of Elias” (Luke 1:17), and Elijah never died in the first place (2 Kings 2:11). The prophecy concerned a ministry, not a returning soul. When the disciples asked whether a man born blind had sinned before his birth, Jesus rejected the premise outright: neither he nor his parents had sinned to cause it (John 9:2–3).
The doctrine matters because of what it carries. Rebirth goes hand in hand with karma: the soul works off its debt across many lives. The gospel says the debt is paid once, by Christ, and offered freely. Reincarnation is not a neutral hypothesis about timing; it is a competing account of salvation.
A Better Reading: Who Is Doing the Remembering
Here is the position I take. The best cases are real, in the sense that the children are receiving information about dead persons that they could not have learned by ordinary means. But the dead person is not the one delivering it. The information comes from a living spiritual agent who knew the deceased, and the child mistakes that agent’s knowledge for his own memory.
Scripture names such agents. The law forbids consulting a “familiar spirit” (Leviticus 19:31; Deuteronomy 18:10–12). The familiar spirit was the spirit who seemed to know the dead and to speak for them through a living medium. Paul met a girl in Philippi who spoke true things through a “spirit of divination,” and he cast it out in the name of Jesus Christ (Acts 16:16–18). Her statements were accurate; their source was not God. Paul also warns that Satan presents himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). Accuracy is not the test of a spirit; its origin and its fruit are.
This reading explains the features of the cases at least as well as reincarnation does:
The information is specific and verifiable. A spirit present in a person’s life would know his name, his relatives, his house, and how he died.
The child is very young. The statements typically come between two and six years old, when a child’s sense of self is still forming and he is least able to tell his own thoughts from another voice. The reports commonly fade as he grows into his own identity.
The deaths are disproportionately sudden and violent. Investigators have long noted that violent deaths are overrepresented in these cases. Scripture locates evil spirits where murder, terror, and despair are concentrated, since the devil “was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44).
The timing follows the manner of death. If a spirit attached to a violent death seeks a new host, a shorter interval after a sudden death is what one would expect: the spirit moves while the circumstances are fresh, rather than waiting for a life to wind down.
The last point deserves care. The researchers note that many traditions see an abrupt death as leaving unfinished business that drives a quicker return. That intuition may be tracking something real, but it has misidentified the traveler. What lingers after a violent death is not the dead man’s soul, which has gone to judgment, but the spirits who were party to his death or drawn to it.
There is one other candidate. Some researchers have proposed that the child somehow draws information from living minds, the grieving family of the deceased. That view keeps the information real and removes the reincarnation. It explains the specificity but does less well with the timing, since the pattern is tied to how the person died, not to the grief of the survivors. Either way, the remembered person is not the speaker.
Why the Concern Stands, and Where the Uncertainty Lies
I stand on the side of Scripture: no one returns for a second life, and the verified cases are best explained as spiritual contact that impersonates the dead. I hold that position open to a better argument, and the reader should know where the uncertainty lies.
What we cannot know from this study. The archive rests on interviews, sometimes taken months or years after the child first spoke. Investigators worked hard to rule out contamination, but testimony is never as clean as measurement. The effect is small, and a statistical association, however consistent, does not reveal its cause. A conventional explanation may still emerge. For example, a sudden or violent death is more talked about in a region than a quiet death in old age, and a recent, well-known death may be easier to match to a child’s statements; that could shorten the apparent intervals without anything anomalous at work. The researchers’ controls for prior acquaintance and verification quality reduce this concern, but I cannot say they eliminate it.
What we cannot know from Scripture alone. The Bible does not describe these cases, and it does not tell us the mechanism by which a spirit might supply a young child with another person’s history. The familiar-spirit reading is an inference from what Scripture says spirits do, applied to a phenomenon it does not discuss.
Why the concern remains plausible all the same. First, there is an intuitive sense of wrongness in a small child grieving for a wife he never had or terrified of the way a stranger died; that is not the innocence God gave children, and many parents in these cases have felt it. Second, reincarnation belief is spreading in the West, and ScienceAlert reports that over 30 percent of Americans now hold it; each new headline about “evidence for past lives” moves that number in one direction. Third, the doctrine travels with a system. Where reincarnation is believed, it supports karma, works-based salvation, and in some cultures a social order that treats suffering as deserved. Where it is believed about a particular child, families sometimes encourage him to take up the dead person’s identity, relationships, and even name. Ideas about the soul do not stay in the journals; they shape how parents raise children and how societies treat the suffering.
Counsel for the Believer
The right response to this research is neither fear nor ridicule. Ridicule fails because the data are not foolish; serious people gathered them carefully over sixty years, and the pattern they found is real enough to deserve an explanation. Fear fails because Christ has already “spoiled principalities and powers” and made a show of them openly (Colossians 2:15). Nothing in these cases is beyond His authority.
For a parent whose child begins to speak of another life, the counsel is simple. Do not encourage the child to take on the identity of the person he describes, and do not seek out the other family to confirm it. Keep telling him who he is: your son, made by God, with one life of his own to live. Pray over him in the name of Jesus, and ask a mature pastor or elder to pray with you. The reports usually fade with time; help them fade.
For everyone else, these cases are a reminder of what is at stake in the doctrine of one life. Reincarnation offers another chance; the gospel offers something better. It offers a debt paid in full, a judgment already borne by Christ for those who trust Him, and a resurrection in which each person rises as himself, not as someone else (1 Corinthians 15:42–44; 1 John 3:2). The child who seems to remember a stranger’s death needs what every one of us needs: not a return to this world, but the life that death cannot touch.
Faith and Certainty: A Conversation on Mormonism, Authority, and the Hope of Transformation
Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez — 21 October 2026
A discussion essay written from the recorded conversation. Notes marked Note add references or corrections where the discussion left something out or got a detail wrong.
The Occasion
Before the recording began, Thomas read Isak the second installment of a column by Scott Lively titled “Part Two: The Birth of Mormonism.” The conversation that followed ran for about three hours. It began with the column’s claims about Joseph Smith, moved through race and the Latter-day Saints, the place of Israel in Christian thought, and Isak’s misgivings about organized religion, and ended with an extended exchange on faith, knowledge, the necessity of deception and confusion in a real creation, and whether the transformation Isak has undergone can be passed on to others.
The Column: Lively’s Argument
Lively opens by saying he has worked alongside Mormons whom he regards as exemplary people and reliable allies in defending marriage and the family, and that his quarrel is with the institution rather than its members. He then sets the scene: early nineteenth-century America was a frontier nation, aflame with the Second Great Awakening, with no settled means of checking extraordinary claims. Into that vacuum came a series of hoaxes — the Cardiff Giant, Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid, the Kensington Runestone, Piltdown Man, the Cottingley fairy photographs, and the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Each was eventually exposed.
Lively’s thesis is that one fraud of the period did not collapse but scaled. Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in March 1830 and organized the church the following month with six members; it now claims more than seventeen million. Lively points to the 1826 hearing before Justice Albert Neely in Bainbridge, New York, where Smith was charged as a disorderly person in connection with treasure-seeking by seer stone, and to a neighbor’s affidavit describing Smith’s use of the stone to locate a box on the hill where the golden plates were later said to be found. He acknowledges that the sources are contested — the trial account is a recollection published decades later, and the affidavit was collected by a hostile former member — but argues that independent neighbors describe the same stone-gazing. His conclusion is that Mormonism survived where the others failed because it built a world inside its story, with social costs for leaving and rewards for staying, and that the only time the law reached Smith was before he had anything worth defending.
Note: Several details in the column need correction. Barnum exhibited the Feejee Mermaid in 1842, not 1872. The Willard Chase affidavit was taken in 1833 and published in E. D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (1834), not in 1830. The 1826 complaint was brought not by Josiah Stowell but by his nephew, Peter Bridgeman; Stowell himself testified in Smith’s favor. Although no transcript of the hearing survives, Justice Neely’s bill of costs and the constable’s bill, discovered in 1971, confirm that the proceeding took place. The Kensington Runestone claims a date of 1362, about 130 years before Columbus. The Cottingley photographs were taken in 1917; Conan Doyle publicized them in 1920.
Why Mormonism Took Root
Isak said that the story did not read to him like a man who found religion and changed. It read like a man who had been scheming all along and found a scheme that paid. He asked what made the time and place susceptible. His answer was that the American frontier was fresh ground: people who already thought of themselves as Christian, often with little religious education, were moving west in search of community and leadership, and there was no established church — no Vatican — to hold the field. The land had its indigenous beliefs, but among the European settlers it was, in his phrase, fair game.
He then described Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, written by a Latter-day Saint, which is set in a folk-magic version of early America where people are born with “knacks.” The protagonist is the first Maker in a century, a figure with allegorical echoes of Christ, and his adversary is the Unmaker, the force of decay in all things. The books introduced Isak to practices such as dowsing, which Thomas identified as water witching. Isak asked whether such folk magic was real, or snake oil, and whether, if Smith’s seer stone did reveal anything, its source was God or an evil spirit. He said that he does not believe in seer stones or reading tea leaves, that he believes in the Spirit of God, and that he believes demons exist without knowing what they are like. If Smith’s claims were a lie, Isak said, then they were an evil spirit of some kind, in the sense that a lie is itself a spirit that clouds reality.
Is Jesus Another Joseph Smith?
Isak raised the objection he has heard from skeptics: that Jesus was doing the same thing Smith did. The charges laid against Jesus — heresy, claiming to be the Son of God — are the same charges one would lay against Smith. Isak wondered what would have happened had the Pharisees not succeeded in having Jesus killed and had the Jews believed him; he compared this to Smith, who was also killed, but only after his movement was established. Any new movement, he observed, will be opposed by the establishment it challenges. He added that the religious leaders of Jesus’ day had become so ensnared in their own laws that they forgot the way of life the laws were meant to serve.
Isak said that he would regard Christianity as a fraud — one more figure, like Smith or Muhammad, revising an older faith — were it not for the good it does in people: the change of heart and the spirit that appear when a person encounters Christ. He added that Mormonism drew strength from a population that already believed in Christ and had been promised a Second Coming, and so was waiting for more of the story. He asked how one answers a person who says the two are the same.
Note: The conversation returned to this question later under the heading of authority (below). One historical difference was not raised: the earliest Christian testimony to the resurrection, the creed Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, is generally dated to within a few years of the crucifixion and names living witnesses, whereas the Book of Mormon rests on plates that only Smith’s chosen witnesses were said to have seen and that were not available for examination. The New Testament also anticipates the specific form of Smith’s claim — an angel bringing a different gospel — in Galatians 1:8 and 2 Corinthians 11:14.
Race, Slavery, and the Latter-day Saints
Isak said that he had been thinking about a passage in the Book of Mormon in which God curses a people with dark skin as a sign of disfavor, and that he grew up hearing his father call the book racist — white, or light-skinned, propaganda. He compared it to the use of Scripture in the antebellum South to justify slavery, and asked whether religion is sometimes simply an instrument for wielding power over others. Nothing Jesus said endorses slavery, Isak said; the Old Testament’s regulations of slavery may have been concessions to how things were then done, while Jesus points toward freedom, including freedom from sin.
He then read search results on the history of the church and race. Brigham Young, who led the church from 1847 to 1877, legalized slavery in Utah Territory and taught that Black people were cursed descendants of Cain; the church barred Black men from the priesthood and Black members from the temples. During the civil rights era the church defended the ban with folklore, including the idea that Black people had been neutral in a premortal war in heaven, and Ezra Taft Benson, later church president, called the civil rights movement a communist plot. The church opposed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1976, lifted all racial restrictions in 1978, and in 2013 formally disavowed the earlier racial explanations, stating that dark skin is not a sign of divine disfavor. Joseph Smith, by contrast, opposed immediate abolition yet ran for president in 1844 on a platform to end slavery, and allowed Black men to be ordained.
Isak asked whether the dark-skin passages might be aimed at Semitic, Middle Eastern peoples, or at the native inhabitants of the land where the story is set.
Note: The “skin of blackness” curse is in 2 Nephi 5:21 and the phrase “dark and loathsome” in Mormon 5:15. In the book’s narrative the cursed Lamanites are descendants of Laman, a son of the Israelite Lehi, so the curse falls on one branch of an Israelite family, not on Semitic peoples as such. In LDS tradition the Lamanites were long identified with Native Americans. The ban on Black members drew instead on the separate “curse of Cain” and “curse of Ham” folklore. Smith’s 1844 platform proposed ending slavery by 1850 by compensating slaveholders from the sale of public lands. Elijah Abel, a Black man, was ordained to the priesthood in 1836. The 1852 Utah statute was titled “An Act in Relation to Service.”
Note: Isak recalled that Lively had called the Book of Mormon full of anti-Semitic language. The column does not make that claim; the only antisemitic text it names is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Philo-Semitism and Its Critics
Isak then read a summary of the debate over the Latter-day Saints and the Jews. The Book of Mormon and official LDS teaching are generally favorable to Jews: 2 Nephi 29 rebukes Gentiles who despise the Jews from whom the Bible came, and 3 Nephi 29:8 forbids mocking them. LDS theology rejects the idea that the Church has replaced Israel, holds that the Jews remain a covenant people who will be gathered, and records that Smith studied Hebrew with a Jewish tutor and that early leaders supported a Jewish return to Palestine. Critics point to the Book of Mormon’s stated aim of convincing Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, to an eschatology in which Jerusalem suffers a final siege before surviving Jews accept Jesus, to remarks by some leaders about Jewish hardship as divine chastisement, and to members’ posthumous proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims against church policy.
Israel and the People of God
From there Isak turned to a question about Christians and Israel. If Jesus is the Messiah who sent his followers to Jew and Gentile alike, he said, that does not erase Jewish history; it is the next chapter and a fresh start — a turn from stoning and mutual judgment to loving God and neighbor, from which everything else follows. Yet many American Christians hold that Israel is God’s people, that its enemies are God’s enemies, and that Israel can therefore do no wrong. Isak said that history and the Bible both show that this is not so. The gospel was received by the Gentiles as an expansion of God, not of Israel, and Israel remains bound to obey God’s commands.
He reasoned that if a Christian believes Muslims need conversion, he must likewise believe Jews need it, along with Mormons and Hindus — but that this is harder to say in America, where many regard Israel as already holy. He said that he does not believe anti-Semitism is right, but that criticism of the state of Israel is routinely labeled hatred of Jews. He compared it to his own criticism of America, which is not hatred of Americans but of the way evil corrupts people. He left open whether particular Israeli actions were despicable or were self-defense. His question was whether, if Christ is real, Christians should still regard Israel as Zion and the place set apart, or whether God’s people are now all who have met the God of the Israelites, who turns out to be the God of everyone.
Note: Paul addresses both sides of Isak’s question. He writes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek (Galatians 3:28) and that not all who descend from Israel are Israel (Romans 9:6), and he also writes that God has not rejected his people and that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:1, 11:29). Christians who hold opposing views of the modern state of Israel generally build their positions from these two strands of Romans 9–11.
What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?
Thomas asked Isak what problem he was trying to solve. Isak said that he had talked himself in a circle. His starting question was whether Mormonism was racist and where that had led it. His larger question was whether every religion that follows Christ ends up doing what the religion Christ rebuked had done — writing a rulebook and producing more separation. He said that he did not know whether that was right, nor quite what his question was.
What Isak Believes
Thomas asked whether there was anything Isak did believe. Isak said that he believes Christ’s words are powerful and good, that Christ is who he said he was, and that people ought to be good and seek God for their goodness. He said that he finds it hard to see organized religion as a lasting force for good, though he believes a force of good lies underneath it. He believes that most people who believe in a higher power mean the same one — the Creator, the being who is or holds all beings — and that this God is less like a man in the sky than many are taught. He said that he has met people who emulate God’s character, which persuades him that there is a goodness people can grasp that is not their own, though they can make it their own.
Isak described the Mormons he knows as good and well-rounded people and contrasted them with what he called the clutter of a church: a history of radical positions and views that have not aged well. He said that he enjoys connection more than religion, and that his favorite conversations are with friends trying to work out how to be good and how to bear the suffering of being human. When religion works smoothly, he said, it can become a well-oiled machine of control that moves people in the wrong direction without their noticing. A true connection with God should make a community inclusive, but churches tend toward us-and-them, until members quietly come to believe they are right and better. He said that this was his own view, shaped by his experience and not the whole picture, and that he believes in Jesus and does not know what else to believe in.
What Isak Believes About Jesus
Asked what about Jesus he believes, Isak said that he goes back and forth but holds that Jesus was God embodied on earth and a savior who allowed himself to be sacrificed, taking on the sins of everyone and the wrath of God — something that, having talked it through with Thomas, he now believes made sense. He described Jesus as countercultural: a king who did not act like a king, who taught that the first will be last and that the greatest must be the least, and who showed the humility of the heir of the world.
Isak said that he has known God since childhood and sometimes wonders whether that was only a child forming his own picture of God. But he has had encounters with God that changed him, and he attributes to God the sense of wrong that comes when he does, or is about to do, or sees someone else doing, something wrong. He believes that through Jesus past evil no longer binds a person, provided he keeps seeking God and trying to do what Jesus said, and that this is the way to real community. Jesus, he said, revealed a family deeper than race, culture, or inherited religion — the family of the Father, of whom a human father is a kind of metaphor — but human divisions make that one family hard to imagine.
He compared himself to Peter, who denied Christ out of self-preservation, and asked whether he would hold up if questioned, or whether he had been a Judas. He called himself a very imperfect disciple, but a disciple. He said that he is trying to find his role in not denying Christ and also in not becoming a Pharisee who turns Christ’s words into a code instead of seeing that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He noted that Jesus told different people different things: the rich young ruler, who had kept the commandments since boyhood, could not sell his possessions and follow. Isak said that his own version of those possessions is usually ego — the life he has planned in his head — and that letting it become secondary to God’s plan is hard.
He said that the world is full of voices that sound alike, and that without the words of Jesus he could not tell them apart. He compared himself to someone who sees, as Jesus did, parasites in the temple but, lacking Jesus’ authority to drive them out, simply concludes that he cannot trust everyone who claims the moral high ground. He wondered whether, if he is a Peter, the “other Christs” he denies are the many religions and churches whose views he hesitates to stand beside — many of which he thinks are good — and said that he is trying to be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove in deciding which voices to heed.
Note: Peter’s denials (Matthew 26:69–75) are followed in John 21:15–17 by his restoration, in which Jesus asks him three times whether he loves him and three times commissions him. The parallel the discussion did not draw is that Peter’s failure did not end his discipleship. The rich young ruler is in Matthew 19:16–22; “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” is Matthew 10:16; “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” is Matthew 4:17.
Thomas’s Reading: A Muddle
Thomas summarized what he had heard. Isak believes in Jesus but thinks little of how those who call on his name behave. Every interpretation and every prophet seems to offer something and to contain something wrong, so there is no one to follow, and those who claim to have found the foundation do not live by it. Thomas said that Isak did not seem to have committed his heart to a direction because he lacked a view of the long run: he could see that Jesus is good, but beyond that point everything was a muddle — colors, sounds, and movement without a clear sense of what to trust, whom to ally with, or who is good and who is bad. He asked whether he had caught it.
Isak said that it was probably more of a muddle than he would admit. But he has an understanding of good and evil that shapes how he lives, and he tries to emulate Christ, not to earn a prize but as an experiment: does doing good improve people’s lives, his own included, and change his heart? He has found that it does, and that small acts have wide effects, which tells him that he is connected to something larger than himself. He said that his role is to be present and to care for people, recognizing that everyone is trying to survive and that survival is not only physical. The muddle comes from the billions of competing voices: deciding whom to welcome and whom to turn away — which he does not think is contrary to God — and whether to help by feeding people or by telling them the gospel, when such telling may no longer be heard. He said that he finds Thomas’s view of the world beautiful, and that perhaps he lacks faith.
Faith in What?
Thomas asked: faith in what? Isak said faith that God can do anything, that faith can move a mountain. Thomas distinguished between faith that God can move a mountain and faith that God will — because of prayer, desire, or grace — and said that he did not believe Isak doubted God’s ability. Isak agreed and said that the matter is aligning oneself with God’s will, which Thomas restated as the belief that such alignment has an effect. Isak cited Jesus cursing the fig tree and the power of life and death in the tongue, and said that he sees such power working gradually rather than miraculously. His lack of faith, he concluded, is not in God or in Jesus but in a group of people coming together and getting it right.
Thomas asked whether Isak believed that he himself could get it together and have an effect. Isak said that he could. Thomas restated: so you could ally with others, but others won’t. Isak said that he finds it hard to imagine the world’s religions and cultures uniting under Christ, or simply as one people, because although many are close to the truth, histories of conflict and division keep them apart.
Note: Matthew 17:20 and 21:21 tie mountain-moving faith to prayer; 1 John 5:14 adds the condition Isak named — that God hears what is asked according to his will. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” is Proverbs 18:21. The fig tree is in Mark 11:12–14, 20–24.
The Impossible Dream and the Data Point
Thomas put Isak’s doubt in his own words. The vision Thomas pursues, including through his presidential candidacy, looks like Don Quixote tilting at windmills: people are formed by their early teens and stay that way; individuals change now and then, but mass conversion does not happen; even a voice from the sky would be dismissed the next day as a bad tamale. Isak agreed that he sometimes rejects the dream and then returns to it, and that he has trouble picturing it as real. But, he said, he knows that he has changed — through talking with Thomas, with God, and with his mother, and through the Sunday meetings.
Thomas proposed taking that as a data point. The combination of what they had done together — physics study, group meetings, long conversations, and applying all of it to business and money — had produced a change. Isak said that it had given him a more holistic and more accurate view of the world, and also an awareness of how little he knows, how vast the world is, and how many views conflict. His own views now lean toward doing good, finding God, and treating others as part of God and as his brothers and sisters, but they come with despair that people will not learn to live together.
Thomas said that he regards Isak as someone who “made it.” It took about a year and a half of conversation, which shows that such conversation can change a person. He then asked whether God wants that transformation for everyone. Isak said that he probably does.
The Hat with a Screen
Thomas said that he cannot conceive of a God who wants joy, peace, and love for some people but not for others whom he dislikes; the idea is absurd enough to be comic. The question, reduced to its simplest form, is whether God wants everyone to experience peace, joy, love, happiness, and uncertainty; relationship with him; love and hope for others; a moderate life with appropriate highs and lows; and the knowledge that all of us live inside God’s heart, mind, and consciousness. God is experiencing all of it and wants to experience us appreciating him for it. That, Thomas said, is the whole message. Getting along is a small consequence of it: God is the whole, feels the pain of our discord, and therefore wants us to get along. Disputes over Sharia, the Mahdi, the Buddha, Kali, Brigham Young, and Joseph Smith come from looking too small.
He offered an image: a person wearing a hat with a screen hanging in front of his eyes, so that wherever he looks he sees only his own movie. By ten or fifteen years old the hat is so firmly on that he does not know he is wearing it and will scoff at any suggestion that reality is other than what he sees. Removing it requires showing him the holes in the story on the screen.
His example was matter. Mass is made of atoms, atoms of protons and neutrons, those of quarks — and there the account stops. Asked where quarks came from, the answer is that they arose from nothing, which has to be taken on faith. Thomas said that this sounds like myth, no more credible than Apollo or Venus, and that stopping at quarks is like the falling studio light in The Truman Show — a sign that the scenery is incomplete. He noted that Millikan’s oil-drop experiment established the electron’s charge and that Murray Gell-Mann inferred quarks with fractional charges from patterns among particles, and asked whether such a pattern justifies calling quarks the foundation of everything.
Against this he set the conscious-point account: everything can be described in terms of conscious points; quarks and electrons are built from them; and conscious points come from the mind of God. Where God came from remains unknown — the same mystery the materialist account ends in — but the story is a level deeper and of far higher resolution, like 4K compared with 640 by 480, and it derives space, time, energy, and entropy from one source instead of leaving them as unrelated pieces that one trusts experts to understand.
Note: Mainstream physics does not quite say that quarks came from nothing. In quantum field theory, particles are excitations of fields, and the vacuum is a state of those fields, not nothing; cosmological accounts of the early universe begin with fields and laws already in place. Where the fields and laws themselves come from is not answered within physics, which is the gap Thomas is pointing to. Millikan’s oil-drop experiments ran from 1909 to 1913; J. J. Thomson had identified the electron in 1897. Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed quarks in 1964, with charges of +2/3 and −1/3.
Why There Is Anything: The Loneliness of the One
Thomas said that the conscious-point story also supplies a purpose: God was alone in the beginning. Recalling Three Dog Night’s song about one being the loneliest number and two being little better, he said that the Father created the Son, but two is still lonely, so the Son was sent to make everything, that there might be many to be in relationship with. The multiplicity distracts from the fact that there is ultimately only One. Each being has needs, and the loneliness is painful, but the pain is met when we ease one another’s burdens, and the experience of loneliness is what makes companionship good. We cannot walk together forever, Thomas said, but we can enjoy walking together now, and that is the best available. He called it a sad story, but the only one we have.
Isak agreed that it is sad and said that the work is to make the walk shared — to bring more people into walking with God, becoming like children, and treating each other well, so that no one is alone, just as God did not want to be alone. People are already living a version of that life, he said, only with less awareness.
Note: The New Testament describes creation as made through and for the Son (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16) and describes God’s own nature as love (1 John 4:8), which is the theological basis usually given for creation as relationship rather than necessity. Thomas’s account frames it in terms of the loneliness of the One.
The Necessity of the Liar
Thomas referred to The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” whose narrator is a misunderstood, hated man whose life is given over to lies. He said that this describes the life of Satan. It had to exist because it was one of the polarities of possible existence — one that God chose not to be, embodying instead love of the other and appreciation of being. Thomas said that this figure was probably one of the points of consciousness Christ created, one of the possibilities that had to be lived out for creation to be complete. A real creation, he said, cannot be a game in which some possibilities are left out; it must contain everything, including the liar.
It follows, Thomas said, that those who want only goodness will be told lies, that some will believe and follow them, and that colonies will form around lies, which become more believable as more people hold them. A liar’s most effective message is the closest possible replica of the truth with the smallest imperfection in it.
Thomas said that he believes this is what Mormonism is: an almost perfect copy, not invented by Smith but told to him by a demon. Taking the best case for argument’s sake, everything in it might be true except the claim that it came from God. That single false claim, he said, is enough to lead people away from God’s revelation as transmitted over four thousand years and toward gold plates, Moroni, and a translation said to be without error. Even if every word were true, following it would mean following a demon’s revelation instead of God’s.
The further consequence, Thomas said, is a precedent: once a new revelation has been accepted from one man, the next man’s revelation can be accepted too, and a church can be built on the latest word of its leader, who declares earlier revelation corrupted. Truth then comes to be established by a man’s say-so. Isak named it: the authority had changed. Thomas agreed that this was the word he had been looking for.
Note: Galatians 1:8 warns against an angel from heaven preaching another gospel, and 2 Corinthians 11:14 says Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 1 John 4:1 instructs believers to test the spirits. The “Urim and Thummim” Smith described as his translation instruments take their name from the priestly lots of Exodus 28:30.
The Question of Authority
Isak developed the point. In Christianity, he said, authority rests in Christ, the one the Scriptures of both Testaments describe and the one who read them in the synagogue as their author and spoke as one having authority. In Mormonism, Smith’s name runs through every sentence of a conference, and whatever the prophet says becomes binding; people hear “he says Jesus said” instead of hearing Jesus. The separation that was abolished when the temple veil was torn is restored, and the organization grows stronger the longer it stands, with money and unpaid labor sustaining it. Isak said that this is a root of his distrust of organized religion, and he noted that other Christian bodies have also revised doctrine over time, leading people to ask which version of the Bible is right.
Thomas said that the question is not which version but what truth the Bible points to, and that the answer is Christ — which he called Isak’s mother’s mantra, and said she is right. Denomination, translation, and interpretation are secondary. He invoked Leonard’s teaching that each person is to be a prophet: each is to go to the throne, ask God to speak, and receive revelation from the Holy Spirit. Because no one can be sure whether he is hearing the Spirit or, like Smith, a demon, believers must counsel together — “What did you hear, brother? What did you hear, sister?” — and accept what is confirmed by two or three witnesses.
Applying that test to Smith, Thomas said, shows a man bringing a new gospel by an angel of light, which is what the New Testament warned of. He said that the converts’ transformation is real and that the Mormons he has known live out the light of Christ, but that they then submit to a prophet whose demands consume their lives — a point he credited to Isak’s father. He described the beehive, a Latter-day Saint symbol, as an apt image: workers and drones serving a queen in a hive that is not the kingdom of heaven. Missions and obligations, he said, feel like slavery, not the freedom of Christ, and a promise that it will be good someday is the same promise the Mahdi made. He said that the freedom in Christ is for today.
Thomas concluded that disputes over denominations and Bible versions, and even the claim that every word of the Bible is true, are distractions. The Bible is an imperfect instrument pointing at something perfect, and finding it is each person’s part in a drama — a game in the sense of a meaningful drama, not a trivial one — that makes the best of a world made of nothing that came out of nothing.
Note: Jesus “taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:29); his reading in the Nazareth synagogue is Luke 4:16–21; the tearing of the temple veil is Matthew 27:51, interpreted in Hebrews 10:19–20 as opening access to God. “In the mouth of two or three witnesses” is Deuteronomy 19:15, repeated in 2 Corinthians 13:1. Leonard’s point about every believer receiving revelation echoes Joel 2:28 and Acts 2:17, and Paul’s instruction that prophets speak two or three at a time while the others weigh what is said (1 Corinthians 14:29) is the scriptural model for the communal testing Thomas described. Freedom in Christ is Galatians 5:1.
Confusion, Entropy, and the Pearl of Great Price
Thomas said that the many hypocrites — each saying “follow my way” while living badly — tempt a person to conclude that all are false and to resign himself to confusion. Instead, he said, one should recognize confusion as part of the drama. Just as the liar had to exist, confusion had to exist; without it, every pronouncement would be accepted at once and there would be no struggle, no victory, no overcoming. He said that science calls this entropy, which he described as the number of ways things can happen, and characterized something that happens often as low entropy and something that happens rarely as high entropy.
Note: In standard statistical mechanics this is reversed. A state that can be realized in many ways — and so occurs often — has high entropy; one realized in few ways has low entropy (S = k ln W). Thomas’s underlying definition, that entropy counts the ways things can happen, is the standard one.
The universe, Thomas continued, had to be confusing and the truth hard to find in order to be worth living in. Truth is a pearl of great price, for which a person sells everything; having found one, he looks for another, and each costs a great deal. A world in which everyone comes along is possible, he said, but its price is almost beyond imagining. God wants it and knows the cost. Thomas distinguished hope from faith: hope wants the outcome; faith pays the dues and holds on until it is real, even when the odds look long.
Isak said that giving up out of cynicism helps no one. Thomas voiced the cynic’s position — that he himself found the truth only after a long search, that others do not care, and that they are lost causes — and Isak replied that this was not the answer he wanted: he wants others to experience what he has, and more.
Note: The pearl of great price is Matthew 13:45–46. Thomas’s distinction between hope and faith can be compared with Hebrews 11:1, which calls faith the substance of things hoped for, and Romans 8:24–25, on hoping for what is not seen and waiting for it with patience.
Testimony and Transmission
Thomas said that Isak’s wish for others to experience what he has is a testimony, and the foundation of real transformation. His own change came forty years ago; Isak’s perhaps a year and a half ago. Either way, a testimony says that it is not theory or statistics — it happened, and if it happened to one person it can happen to another, because people differ only in their programming. Thomas said that he took off his own hat-screen after wearing it a long time and found that he did not have to keep wearing it.
What drives him, Thomas said, is certainty that this change is possible for everyone. The method is trial and error: find what works for which type of person, then develop strategies, a school, a book, social-media channels and videos, speeches, groups, an explicit picture of the goal and the way there, devices that change how people think and see, and historical context. Teach twelve, who teach twelve. He said that what changed for him was Isak’s remark a few days earlier — “I think I got it.” Whatever its degree of certainty, it showed a change, and that showed that the approach was good enough to have an effect on someone else. A method that moves a person in the right direction can be followed further, and refined — concentrated, clarified, better illustrated, made more appealing — until a seed becomes something that transforms everything. The key point, he said, was that it was transmissible and made a difference.
What Has Changed in Isak
Isak said that he sees the change in his conversations with others. Around Thomas he has more questions; with others he has more answers, and ordinary conversations turn into conversations about God, introducing and questioning ideas in the way he and Thomas do. He sometimes hears Thomas in his own words — not exactly what Thomas would say, but close enough to what he thinks God would say that it comes naturally. He said that he brings more life to people and is no longer someone others should avoid.
He described his mind as a constant battleground, with every view on the internet as accessible as any other and the chaos of the world pressing the question of what to feel without becoming numb. Yet he feels more at peace than before, and sobriety comes more easily. When friends ask how not drinking is going, it affects them, and some drink less. He said that this feels more real than his youth in church, when he went through the motions and tried to look and act like a Christian — though he thinks he did good then too. Then he thought he knew everything; now he thinks he knows nothing and is working back toward knowledge he can hold without second-guessing. What never goes away is the effort to weigh right and wrong and live accordingly. He described it as a painful awareness of how limited his knowledge and faith are, but one possible only for someone who has some faith and knowledge of God. The God he knew as a child feels the same inside as the God he knows now, and that continuity sustains him.
Isak told Thomas that he regards his mission as noble and apologized if his cynicism ever discourages him. He said that he wants to keep questioning without undermining what he already knows to be true, and without becoming so cynical that he does nothing. His usual prayer, he said, is for wisdom like Solomon’s — not for glory, but to know what is right for others, to weigh everything, and to judge right and wrong well.
Note: Solomon’s request for an understanding heart to judge between good and evil is 1 Kings 3:9. The sense of knowing less as one learns more echoes 1 Corinthians 13:12.
Fairness and the Bad Bounce
Thomas said that what seemed to trouble Isak was a generic question — “What about this group?” — applied to people of other sexual practices, gods, customs, books, revelations, politics, economic classes, and conditions of birth. Each functions as a showstopper: if God were fair, how could it be this way? He asked whether he was on track.
Isak said partly, but that he has come to terms with whataboutism, since it can be raised against anything. He said that he regards life not as fair by human judgment but as balanced: what goes up comes down, and there is an upswing to every downswing. He cited Jesus’ answer about the man born blind — that neither the man nor his parents had sinned, but that God’s works might be shown in him. Isak said that God is often seen most clearly in those who have been beaten down and still proclaim themselves children of God, and in the weak who need food and shelter — present in the one who gives a cup of water, but especially, as Jesus taught, in the one who receives it. He said that a world without unfairness would be perfect, easy, and dull, and would leave no room for character; that unequal experience should not be imposed, but is part of life; and that people mostly fend for themselves and, if they do it well, help others do the same.
Thomas agreed that unfairness cannot be used as evidence against God, the Bible, or Jesus. A created world must contain difference, and difference means a spectrum of experiences, some good and some bad, with an element of chance. He said that arguments such as “I was born with same-sex desire, so there is no God, or God is evil, or God made me this way” are theories that fail to fit the whole picture. The principle that fits everything is that whatever can happen probably will: the pachinko ball sometimes takes a bad bounce. The right response is to acknowledge the hardship, offer what help one can — even a glass of water — and encourage the person to endure, because everyone carries a cross, including those who seem to have none. He said that Isak sounded grounded in his faith.
Note: The man born blind is John 9:2–3. The cup of water given in Christ’s name is Matthew 10:42, and Christ’s identification with those who receive help is Matthew 25:35–40. Carrying one’s cross is Luke 9:23.
Faith and Knowledge
Isak said that he believes he is grounded most of the time, despite wavering thoughts. He values the world as something beyond his control, sustained by God’s power. He expects that much of what Thomas says is correct, but said that he cannot yet know it; he trusts that understanding will come — through God’s guidance, the right books, or life itself — starting from the knowledge that we exist and that this is God’s.
He said that his faith is stronger than his questions suggest. Living in the internet age, he constantly sorts competing ideologies, and what he voices is often that sorting, not his own position. He feels more secure in his faith about God and Christ than in his knowledge of politics and the world, which is only beginning to open up. He described himself as a faithful, optimistic person with questions that need answering.
Thomas said that more faith than knowledge describes everyone, himself included: his knowledge is small compared with his faith that everything will work out and that everyone will come to the knowledge of Christ. He uses what knowledge he has to fill gaps in others’ knowledge where a question is keeping them from faith. Faith requires some knowledge as its object, he said, but faith is by nature not yet manifest, hope not yet present, and knowledge always limited.
He described the conversation as mapping a terrain of people moving toward God. Isak represents the questioner — the person who says “I don’t know; I’m searching” — in contrast with those who are certain of their own system, whether Mormon, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or cult member. Thomas stated his own standard: that Jesus is Lord and the creator of all, that God is all and came from an unknown source, and that Christ came through the prophets and Israel to the disciples and from them to the world.
Windows onto God
Thomas said that he is not a multiculturalist: he does not believe all cultures are equally valid, though each contributes a perspective. He recalled Huston Smith’s account of Hinduism, in which each of the many gods is understood not as God but as a window onto God, and said that this is how he looks at everything. Some windows open onto a shallow world; others onto a vast one. Christianity in its purest form, he said, encompasses all of them, because Christ is the source of everything created, including Gautama, Muhammad, and Krishna (if Krishna was historical).
He said that the Buddha probably saw something deep and transcendent — that everything is connected and that life must be lived in balance — and that the Eightfold Path teaches kindness, sexual morality, good treatment of others, and reverence. The Buddha did not emphasize God. Thomas said that, having studied Buddhism extensively, he has found nothing in it that is evil, only teachings that go part of the way in the right direction and stop short; he said that the same is true of almost everything, even individual Bible verses, which lead on to something further.
He tied this to what he said the previous Sunday about the yantra, a meditation symbol: God stands behind everything one might focus on, and the question is what to focus on in order to see the Father. Christ is the shortest route, he said, because everything came from him; the Buddhist path to the Formless One passes through teachers and incarnations and reaches Christ along the way. He said that the Buddhists he has met are sincerely trying to be good, but that he feels sorry for them because they are not aiming at the highest point, and much of their practice, though it may aid focus or discipline, is unnecessary beside following Christ and loving one’s neighbor. The path of the liar, he added, is also a portal one can take, but a hard and sad one, with many rituals to pass through before reaching Christ and the One. He said that he feels for those on it.
He closed the theme by recalling a line from Canned Heat’s “Refried Boogie,” heard in his youth, to the effect that love can be found anywhere, even in a guitar.
Note: Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions was first published in 1958 as The Religions of Man. The claim that all things were made through Christ rests on John 1:3, Colossians 1:16–17, and Hebrews 1:2. The Eightfold Path comprises right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. “Refried Boogie” appears on Canned Heat’s Living the Blues (1968); the wording of the line Thomas recalled has not been verified.
Closing
Thomas said that the conversation could become another story, book, witness, and video, and that he felt very hopeful after it and believed they were on the right track. Isak thanked him for hearing his viewpoints and walking him through his questions, which he said he did not expect to be easy, and called the conversation enriching. Thomas said that the point of all of it is to take it to the world. Isak said that they would make it happen, and Thomas said he knew they would.
Counterfeits, Confusion, and the Possibility of Transformation
A Philosophical-Theological Inquiry
Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez | 21 October 2026
Introduction
The conversation began with a column. Thomas read Isak the second part of Scott Lively’s “The Birth of Mormonism,” which argues that Joseph Smith’s church was the one fraud of America’s credulous nineteenth century that did not collapse but grew into an institution. Over the next three hours, the two men moved from that claim to a series of questions underneath it. How does anyone tell a true revelation from a counterfeit? Why does religion so often become an instrument of control? Who are the people of God? Can a person who has been changed expect that others can be changed, and on what grounds? Why would a good God make a world that contains a liar, confusion, and unfairness?
This essay treats each question as a problem. For each, it states the problem as sharply as the conversation allows, sets out the responses offered, and weighs them. During editing, I inserted post-production notes to correct facts and add relevant unspoken considerations. A closing section applies the whole to its intended purpose: a campaign to bring the nation to Christ. The aim is not a transcript or a summary but an argument: to see what follows if Thomas and Isak’s positions are taken seriously and pressed.
Problem 1: Discernment — How Is Jesus Different from Joseph Smith?
The problem
Isak put the skeptic’s question plainly. The charges that would be brought against Joseph Smith — that he claimed divine authority, revised an older faith, and attracted followers who wanted to believe — are the charges that were brought against Jesus. Both were killed by the establishment they challenged. Both built on a prior expectation: Jesus on Israel’s hope for a Messiah, Smith on Christians’ hope for a Second Coming and more. If a person rejects Smith’s claim, on what principle does he accept Jesus’ claim? Without such a principle, the believer’s acceptance of one and rejection of the other looks like an accident of upbringing.
Candidate solution 1: the test of fruit
Isak’s first answer to why people accept Jesus’ claim was the good Christianity does: the change of heart and the spirit that come over people who encounter Christ. Were it not for that, he said, he would think Christianity a fraud.
This test has scriptural support (“by their fruits ye shall know them,” Matthew 7:16), but the conversation itself exposed its limit. Isak and Thomas both said that the Mormons they know are good people who live out the light of Christ. If good fruit settled the question, it would settle it in Mormonism’s favor too. The fruit test can disqualify a teaching whose followers become worse; it cannot by itself distinguish two teachings whose followers both become better.
Candidate solution 2: the test of authority
The conversation’s decisive move came later. Thomas proposed, for argument’s sake, the strongest possible case for Mormonism: suppose every word Smith delivered were true, and the only falsehood was the claim that it came at the direction and with the authority of God’s approval. In that case, the follower would be following a spirit’s revelation rather than God’s. The consequence would extend beyond the content: accepting Smith’s revelation as God’s authorized message to man would set a precedent that truth comes through a man who announces a new revelation and declares earlier ones corrupted. Once people accept that precedent, the next man’s revelation can also be given divine standing, and a church can organize around whatever its current leader says. Isak named what had happened: the authority had changed.
The Christian and Jewish perspective is that God authorized his revelation over four thousand years, culminating in Jesus. The apostles warned against receiving any other gospel, even if it came from an angel of light (Galatians 1:8). That warning does not forbid all later revelation — the New Testament itself expects prophecy in the church (1 Corinthians 14) — but it does forbid a revelation that presents a different gospel or sets itself above the one already given. Smith’s revelation did both: it declared the prior transmission corrupted and established a new line of authority in himself and his successors. If the Bible’s revelation came from God, then a revelation like that did not. It came from a spirit other than God.
The concession made for argument’s sake should not obscure the actual case. LDS doctrine differs from the apostolic gospel on central points: it teaches that God the Father was once a man and has a body of flesh and bone, it replaces the Trinity with three separate beings, and it holds that faithful humans may be exalted to godhood. The hypothetical shows that even a perfect copy would fail the authority test; the actual teaching also fails the content test.
The test of authority asks not “Is this content good?” but “Where does this message relocate authority?” In Isak’s description, Jesus read the Scriptures as their author and spoke with authority (Matthew 7:29; Luke 4:16–21); He claimed the authority of being the fulfillment of what Israel had already received. Smith’s revelation claimed the same standing, so the decisive question is not only whether the message was true. It is what spirit gave Smith and his successors authority. What authority gave Joseph Smith the right to say the prior transmission was defective? The message of four thousand years ending with Jesus completes a lineage. Joseph Smith’s message retells that story with much additional material. Even if that story were completely true, if God did not authorize it to be told, it sets a precedent for telling stories that men receive from spirits. That is how other spirits come to influence men.
Candidate solution 3: the test of lineage and warning
Thomas also pointed to what the New Testament anticipated: an angel of light bringing another gospel (Galatians 1:8; 2 Corinthians 11:14). Smith’s claim — an angel, a new book, the prior church corrupted — matches the form the apostles warned against. By contrast, the Christian claim ends a four-thousand-year transmission that Thomas traced through the patriarchs, prophets, and Israel to Christ and the disciples.
Note: A historical consideration the conversation did not raise strengthens this test. The creed Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 is generally dated to within a few years of the crucifixion and names living witnesses to the resurrection whom readers could question. The plates on which the Book of Mormon rests were, by Smith’s account, returned to the angel and could never be examined.
Assessment
Of the three tests, the fruit test is necessary but not sufficient. The lineage test answers the question within the Christian frame, and the authority test does the most work because it explains why good fruit and true content can come from a false source. The inquiry’s answer to the skeptic is therefore this: Jesus and Smith differ not chiefly in the goodness of their followers or the plausibility of their stories, but in the spirit that delivered the revelation. A revelation that shifts scripture’s authority from God’s revelation through history to a spirit speaking through a man — whatever else it contains — is, by its own structure, a different religion (if we define different religions as originating in different spirits).
Problem 2: The Near-Perfect Counterfeit
The problem
The authority test raises a harder question. If a teaching can be true in every particular and still be a deception, then content alone cannot be the final criterion. But then what protects the believer from the same error? The Bible, too, came through human hands; Christians, too, have revised doctrine; Isak asked why everyone has changed the Bible so much and which version is right.
Candidate solution: Christ behind the text, tested in community and against provenance
Thomas answered that the question of versions, denominations, and doctrines is a distraction. The real question is what truth the Bible points to, and that truth is Christ — the conviction Isak’s mother returns to as our source of truth. The Bible is an imperfect instrument pointing at something perfect. The believer’s task is not to defend the instrument’s perfection but to find what it points at.
How do we do that without falling into Smith’s error? Thomas invoked Leonard’s teaching that each person is to be a prophet — to go to God and ask him to speak. Then he added the safeguard: since no one can be sure whether he is hearing the Holy Spirit or, like Smith, another spirit, believers must counsel together. “What did you hear, brother? What did you hear, sister?” A thing is established in the mouth of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15; 2 Corinthians 13:1).
Of course, if all hear the same spirit speak, they will hear the same confirmatory message. This is in fact the Latter-day Saint method: Moroni 10:4 invites the reader to pray and receive an inner witness that the book is true. Communal hearing therefore cannot be the last check. What a community hears must be tested against things outside the hearers: agreement with the gospel the apostles already delivered, the public evidence of history, and the fruit of a teaching across generations.
So the issue of provenance arises again. How did the Bible come about? How did Joseph Smith’s revelation come about? Which one seems more likely to be the work of God in terms of method? Defenders of the Bible argue that God divinely stewarded His words over millennia, through many writers in many places who could not have coordinated, and that this stewardship itself indicates God’s hand blessing that message. Defenders of Joseph Smith claim the teaching was pure and uncorrupted because an angel delivered it directly to a single man seeking the true denomination. The circumstances surrounding Smith support that claim. Before the Book of Mormon, he was a paid treasure-seeker who looked for buried silver by gazing at a seer stone in a hat, and he was brought before a justice in 1826 on that account. He produced the Book of Mormon by the same stone-in-the-hat method, by the testimony of his own scribes. By his account, the plates went back to the angel. The papyri he said he translated the Book of Abraham from, rediscovered in 1967, are ordinary Egyptian funerary texts that say nothing about Abraham.
Assessment
This answer distributes revelation without dissolving it. It avoids two failures: the single prophet whose word is binding (the Mormon structure) and the isolated individual whose private impression is final (the structure of every self-made sect). It also matches Paul’s instruction that prophets speak two or three at a time while the others weigh what is said (1 Corinthians 14:29) and John’s instruction to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). The criterion that ties it together is the one from Problem 1: every revelation is tested against Christ, and none may set itself above him. On this view, the believer is protected from the near-perfect counterfeit not by owning a perfect text but by keeping authority where the text locates it, and by checking every inner witness against the public record.
The answer has a cost the conversation acknowledged: it requires humility about one’s own hearing. Thomas said that no one knows in the moment whether he is Joseph Smith (hearing an angel of light) or hearing the voice of God. The community’s testimony, the apostolic standard, and the circumstances of the revelation give us indicators.
Problem 3: Religion as an Instrument of Power
The problem
Isak raised the history of race in the Latter-day Saint church: Brigham Young’s legalization of slavery in Utah Territory and his teaching that Black people bore the curse of Cain; the ban on Black men in the priesthood and Black members in the temples, kept until 1978 and defended with folklore during the civil rights era; and the 2013 disavowal of those explanations. Joseph Smith himself had been more equivocal — opposing immediate abolition, yet running for president on a platform to end slavery and allowing the ordination of Black men. Isak connected this to the antebellum South’s use of Scripture to defend slavery and asked whether religion is, at bottom, an excuse for wielding power over others.
Candidate solution 1: distinguishing concession from command
Isak suggested a distinction within Scripture itself. Some Old Testament laws regulated practices such as slavery because that was how things were then done; they told people to treat slaves rightly without commending slavery. Jesus, by contrast, nowhere endorsed slavery and preached freedom, including freedom from sin. This reading has a basis in Jesus’ own words about divorce: Moses permitted it “because of the hardness of your hearts: but from the beginning it was not so”(Matthew 19:8). On this view, some law is concession, and the direction of revelation, fulfilled in Christ, is toward freedom.
Candidate solution 2: distinguishing revelation from institution
LDS history shows a church whose teaching on race tracked the surrounding culture: more open in its first years, hardened under Young, defended during the civil rights struggle, and abandoned when the culture moved on. That pattern is what one would expect if a doctrine came from the institution rather than from God. It confirms the conclusion of Problem 1: when a man’s word carries prophetic authority, the man’s prejudices and his era acquire that authority as well.
Note: The Book of Mormon’s dark-skin curse (2 Nephi 5:21; “dark and loathsome” is Mormon 5:15) falls on the Lamanites, who in the book’s own narrative are descendants of the Israelite Lehi. It is not directed at Semitic peoples, as Isak wondered. LDS tradition long identified the Lamanites with Native Americans; the exclusion of Black members rested on the separate “curse of Cain” folklore.
Assessment
Religion becomes an instrument of power when an institution claims the authority that belongs to God and then speaks with it on matters where it is merely repeating its culture. The remedy is not to abandon religion, but to keep it calibrated where it belongs. Christ’s teaching—love God, the first last, the greatest the servant, the neighbor loved as oneself—is the standard against which every church’s practice is measured, including its treatment of those it would rather exclude. Christianity has not escaped this failure; the antebellum South is Isak’s own example. But this failure betrays the standard of loving God and neighbor rather than expressing it.
Problem 4: Who Are the People of God?
The problem
The LDS discussion of the Jews — favorable in its official teaching, criticized for its eschatology and for proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims — led Isak to a question about American Christianity. Many Christians hold that Israel is God’s people, that its enemies are God’s enemies, and that Israel can therefore do no wrong. Isak objected that history and the Bible both show otherwise. If a Christian believes that Muslims, Hindus, and Mormons need Christ, consistency requires him to say the same of Jews. Yet that is hard to say in America, and criticism of the state of Israel is routinely called hatred of Jews. Are God’s people still a set-apart nation, or are they all who have met the God of Israel, who turns out to be the God of everyone?
Candidate solutions
Two answers compete within Christianity, and both claim Paul. One emphasizes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek (Galatians 3:28) and that not all who descend from Israel are Israel (Romans 9:6); on this view God’s people are those in Christ, and the modern state has no special theological standing. The other emphasizes that God has not cast away his people and that his gifts and calling are irrevocable (Romans 11:1, 29); on this view Israel retains a distinct place in God’s purposes.
Isak’s own position, reasoned in the conversation, holds three things together. First, the gospel did not erase Jewish history; it is the next chapter. Second, Israel remains bound to obey God, and a Christian who believes Christ is the Messiah must believe that Jews, like all others, are called to him. Third, opposing a state’s actions is not hating a people, just as his criticism of America is not hatred of Americans.
Assessment
The framework Thomas set out later in the conversation answers this question. He described the standard he wants everyone to meet: that Jesus is Lord of all creation, and that the lineage running through the prophets and Israel arrives at Christ and goes out from him to the world. On that framework, Isak’s position follows. Israel’s calling is real, and it is a calling to Christ, not an exemption from him. The irrevocability Paul speaks of is God’s faithfulness to call, not a guarantee that a political state acts righteously. And because the God of Israel is the God of all, membership in his family is not a matter of race or culture — the point Isak made when he said that Jesus revealed a family deeper than any nation.
This position should be held together with a clear rejection of anti-Semitism, which Isak affirmed. Hatred of Jews as a people is hatred of neighbors and stands condemned by the same standard that calls everyone, Jews included, to Christ.
Problem 5: The Recurrence of Pharisaism
The problem
When Thomas asked what problem he was trying to solve, Isak stated a pattern. Jesus rebuked a religion that had become ensnared in its own laws. Yet every movement that comes after him seems to do the same: write a rulebook, draw a boundary, and produce more separation. Isak describes the result: a church that works smoothly can become a well-oiled machine of control, and its members slowly come to believe they have it right and are better, cutting them off from the world they were sent to reach. He prefers connection to religion — conversations with friends trying to learn how to be good and bear the suffering of being human.
Candidate solution 1: connection without institution
Isak’s preference is real and valuable: the conversations he describes are the kind that actually change people. But the solution has a limit, which Isak himself named. His doubt is not about God but about groups — about whether people can come together and get it right. Connection without a shared standard or structure cannot carry what Isak wants: for others to experience what he has. Transmission requires some form.
Candidate solution 2: freedom in Christ now, under Christ’s authority
Thomas’s answer located the failure precisely. The Mormons he has known are good people, but they submit to a prophet whose demands consume their lives — a point he credited to Isak’s father. He described the beehive symbol as apt: a hive of workers and drones serving a queen, which is not the kingdom of heaven. Obligation without end feels like slavery, and the promise that it will be good someday is a promise every false messiah has made. Against this he set the freedom in Christ (Galatians 5:1), which is for today.
Assessment
Pharisaism recurs whenever a community’s rules acquire authority independent of the one who gave the community life. The solution is not the absence of community but a community that keeps Christ as its authority and practices the shared discernment described in Problem 2. Such a community still has boundaries — Isak himself said it is not against God to tell some people they cannot come into his home — but its boundaries serve love rather than replacing it. The test of whether a church has become Pharisaic is the one Thomas applied: does it give its members the freedom of Christ now, or a burden in exchange for a promise?
Problem 6: The Object of Faith
The problem
After describing his beliefs, Isak said he might lack faith — faith that God can do anything, that faith can move a mountain. Yet he also said that he believes God is real, that Jesus did and said what is recorded, and that he has been changed. What, then, is the faith he lacks?
Candidate solution: separating capacity, will, and alignment
Thomas asked a clarifying question: is it faith that God can move a mountain, or faith that he will — because of prayer, desire, or grace? He said that he did not believe Isak doubted God’s ability. Isak agreed and said the matter is aligning oneself with God’s will, which Thomas restated as believing that such alignment has an effect. Isak said that he does see that effect, gradually rather than miraculously. He concluded that his doubt was not in God or in Jesus, but in whether a group of people could come together and get it right. When asked whether he could have faith that he could join with others and have an effect, Isak said yes.
Assessment
The distinction clarifies what kind of doubt Isak has. It is not unbelief in God’s power or in the efficacy of aligning with God’s will (1 John 5:14). It is doubt about other people’s willingness — a prediction about human nature. That reframes the problem: Isak’s question is not theological but anthropological. Can people change in large numbers? The next problem takes it up.
Problem 7: Can People Change at Scale?
The problem
Thomas stated Isak’s doubt in its strongest form. His own vision, including the purpose of his presidential candidacy, looks like tilting at windmills. People are formed by age ten, twelve, or fifteen and stay that way. Individuals change here and there, but entire religions do not turn around. Even a voice from the sky would be dismissed the next morning as a bad tamale. If that’s how people are, the vision is a dream and without power.
Candidate solution: the argument from the data point
Thomas answered with an argument that can be laid out in steps.
Isak has changed. He said so himself, attributing it to conversations with Thomas, God, and his mother, and to the Sunday meetings. Thomas called him someone who “made it,” after about a year and a half of conversation.
So, change like this through this kind of conversation is possible. It is not theory; it happened.
God wants this transformation for everyone. Thomas found the alternative — a God who wants joy and peace for some but not for others he dislikes — absurd to the point of comedy. Isak agreed that God probably does want it for all.
The change was transmissible. When Isak said a few days earlier, “I think I got it,” Thomas heard evidence that the method was good enough to affect someone else.
A method that moves a person in the right direction can be followed further and refined — concentrated, clarified, illustrated, made more appealing — and taught to others who teach others, as Jesus taught twelve.
Therefore, what God wants, and what has been shown possible in one case, can, with persistence, be extended.
Objections and replies
The obvious objection is that one case proves little; a single transformation does not show that millions will follow. Thomas’s argument does not claim that it does. Step 2 establishes possibility, not inevitability. The gap between possibility and realization is filled not by the data but by two further things: God’s will (step 3) and human perseverance (step 5). The argument’s conclusion is not “It will happen” but “There is no reason to stop, and every reason to continue.”
A second objection is that Isak’s change was produced by unusual conditions — long, personal attention from one teacher — which cannot be multiplied. Thomas’s answer was method: categorize people, find what works for each type, and build the means of reaching them: a school, a book, video, social media, speeches, groups, and devices that change how people’s brains resolve emotional trauma and their ability to comprehend — the color-and-light therapy and the Thinking Cap device he is developing for that purpose. The one-person-teaches-twelve pattern is how a personal method becomes a movement.
Note: Isak supplied independent evidence for step 4. He reported that his own conversations with others have become spiritual conversations, that he sometimes hears Thomas’s way of thinking in his own words, and that friends who ask about his sobriety have begun drinking less themselves. Transmission had already passed one more link.
Assessment
The argument from the data point does not answer the pessimist by predicting success. It answers him by showing that his premise — that people do not change — is false in at least one observed case, and that the conditions of that change are not unique in kind. Pessimism about human nature is a generalization; a counterexample defeats a universal claim. What remains is a practical question of method, a moral question of persistence, and a question the argument cannot answer by itself: whose work the change finally is. The next problem takes that up.
Problem 8: Method and Grace
The problem
The argument of Problem 7 is built almost entirely from human means: conversation, categories of people, strategies, media, devices, the twelve. Yet the goal — a nation brought to Christ and sanctified — is inhumanly high, and Thomas holds that no human effort can achieve it; it must be a divine move. This creates a dilemma. If transformation is a matter of method, then the project is a human program with God’s name attached, and its failure would be a failure of technique. If transformation is entirely God’s work, then method seems pointless, and one might simply wait.
Candidate solution: planting, watering, and the increase
Scripture refuses both horns. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him”(John 6:44): conversion is God’s work. Yet Paul planted, and Apollos watered, and Paul does not call their labor pointless; he says only that God gave the increase (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). The same pairing appears in Philippians 2:12–13: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, “for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” The human labor is real and commanded; its success is God’s. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts”(Zechariah 4:6).
The data point itself confirms this. Isak did not attribute his change to conversation alone. He named conversation with Thomas, with God, and with his mother, and he said that the God he knows now is the same God he has known since childhood, who has guided him all along. The method was the occasion; on Isak’s own account, the change came from a source the method did not provide.
This locates prayer at the center of the project rather than at its edges. Jesus, looking at the multitudes, told his disciples to “pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest”(Matthew 9:38). The great American awakenings were not engineered by any program. They came when prayer and preaching met a moment God chose: the revivals under Edwards and Whitefield in the 1730s and 1740s, the Second Great Awakening that Lively describes, and the 1857–58 Prayer Meeting Revival, which began with a handful of businessmen praying at noon in New York.
Assessment
The relation between method and grace is the relation between sowing and harvest. The sower cannot make the seed grow, but without sowing, there is no harvest. Method is therefore not a technique for producing conversions; it is faithfulness in sowing, done in prayer, with the outcome left to God. This answers both horns of the dilemma. The project is not a human program, because its success is not in human hands. It is not passive waiting, because faith, as Problem 13 argues, pays its dues. The proper posture is the one Thomas described: hold the faith that God wants the outcome, and act as though He will grant it.
Problem 9: What Is the Change? Repentance and Righteousness
The problem
Much of the essay’s language for transformation is the language of sight: a hat with a screen, windows onto God, higher resolution. That language is accurate as far as it goes, but it risks suggesting that transformation is merely a change of perspective — seeing the world more truly. Thomas names the goal as sanctification, and sanctification is more than seeing. It is turning from sin and becoming holy. Without that content, “bringing the nation to Christ” has no definite meaning a nation could recognize or measure itself by.
Candidate solution: turning, and the measure of the turn
The conversation contains the content, though it did not set it out as such. Isak described Christ as taking on everyone’s sins and God’s wrath. He described the sense of wrong that comes when he does, or is about to do, something wrong, and attributed it to God. He said that through Jesus, past evil no longer binds a person, but that this requires continuing on the path — seeking God and doing what Jesus said. His own change includes sobriety and the surrender of the life he had planned in his head. He compared himself to Peter, who failed and was restored (John 21:15–17). That is repentance: a change of mind that becomes a change of life (Acts 3:19; 2 Corinthians 7:10). “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”(1 Thessalonians 4:3).
Thomas’s platform provides the measure of the turn: an ordered test he applies to personal and public acts alike. First, is it righteous — is it what God judges and establishes, is it lawful before him? Second, if it is righteous, is it loving? Third, would I want it done to me — feeling the neighbor’s situation in my own body, mind, and heart, measured not by momentary appetite but by the self committed to righteousness and the soul’s eternal perspective? Love that bypasses righteousness becomes humoring, and humoring a neighbor in his sin is not love: “thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him”(Leviticus 19:17), followed in the next verse by “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Assessment
Seeing and turning are two halves of one change. The person who takes off the hat sees God and a standard; the person who repents begins to live by them. A campaign that offered only the first would produce people with a larger view and the same habits. The ordered test gives sanctification a public form: it can apply to a personal decision, a family practice, or a proposed law, and it can be argued openly. It also guards against the opposite error, the Pharisaism of Problem 5, because its second and third questions require applying righteousness with love and feeling the neighbor’s experience as one’s own.
Problem 10: The Hat with a Screen — Why People Cannot See
The problem
If change is possible, why is it rare? Thomas offered an image. People live wearing a hat with a little screen in front of their eyes. Wherever they look, they see only their own movie. By early adolescence, the hat is so firmly on that they don’t know they are wearing it and scoff at any suggestion that reality is anything other than what they see. This is the problem of epistemic enclosure: a worldview that cannot be questioned from inside because it supplies the very terms in which questions are asked.
Candidate solution: showing the holes in the screen
Thomas’s method is to show the person a place where their movie falls apart: it contains errors and cannot be trusted as the final standard and evidence of truth. His example was matter. Mass is made of atoms, atoms of protons and neutrons, those of quarks — and there the account stops. Where did quarks come from? As he put it, they arose from fields. Physics does not say where the seventeen or so fields of the Standard Model came from; they are simply given. Anyone who keeps asking “why?” and “where from?” must therefore conclude either that the fields have no source — that they came from nothing — or that they have a deeper one physics has not named. To rest on the first is faith of the same kind as belief in Apollo and Venus, and stopping at quarks and fields is like the falling studio light in The Truman Show: a sign the set is incomplete.
Against this, he offered a deeper account. Everything can be described in terms of conscious points; quarks and electrons are built from them; and conscious points come from the mind of God. The origin of God remains a mystery — the same place the materialist account ends — but the story is a level deeper and of far higher resolution, like 4K compared with 640 by 480, and it derives space, time, energy, and entropy from one source instead of leaving them as separate pieces to be trusted to experts.
Note: Conventional physics assigns the fields no origin. The Standard Model takes its fields as given. Proposed deeper theories — grand unification, string theory — would derive them from a more fundamental structure, which is then itself given. Some cosmologists do speak of the universe arising “from nothing”: Alexander Vilenkin’s proposal of quantum tunneling from nothing, and Lawrence Krauss’s popular A Universe from Nothing. But the “nothing” in those models already contains quantum laws, a point the philosopher of physics David Albert pressed in his review of Krauss. So the extrapolation in the text holds: every chain of “where from?” ends either in an unexplained given or in “nothing,” and physics supplies neither an origin nor a reason. Millikan’s oil-drop measurements of the electron’s charge were made in 1909–1913 (the electron had been identified by Thomson in 1897), and Gell-Mann and Zweig proposed quarks in 1964.
Assessment
The method is sound in form. It does not ask a person to abandon his screen on the questioner’s authority; it asks him to look closely at what his screen shows and notice where the picture stops. The strength of the physics example is that it meets the secular person on his own ground: the materialist believes he has escaped faith, and the example shows that he has only relocated it. The burden then shifts to comparing accounts by their explanatory reach. Thomas’s claim for the conscious-point model is that it reaches further — one source for all of physics, and that source is a mind. Whether that claim persuades depends on the model’s success as physics, which lies outside this conversation; but the argument’s structure does not depend on any one model. Its point is that every worldview rests on a given, and the person who sees that has taken the hat off far enough to ask which fundamental postulate is best. That lets him withdraw his allegiance from materialism as the ground of his morality.
Problem 11: Why Is There Anything — and Why a Liar?
The problem
If God is the source, why did he create? And why would his creation include the liar, the deception he enables, and the confusion that follows? This is the classical problem of evil in a particular form: not simply “Why suffering?” but “Why counterfeits that lead good people astray?”
Candidate solution 1: the loneliness of the One
Thomas began with creation’s purpose. God was alone in the beginning. The Father created the Son, but two is still lonely, so the Son made everything so there would be many to relate to. Each being has needs, and loneliness is painful, but the pain is answered when we ease each other’s burdens; loneliness makes companionship good. Thomas called this a sad story, but the only one we have. Isak’s response gave it direction: the work is to make the walk shared — to bring more people into walking with God, so no one is alone, because God did not want to be alone.
Note: The New Testament grounds creation in the Son (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16) and identifies God’s nature as love (1 John 4:8). Thomas’s account frames that love from the side of need — the One wanting relationship — and Isak’s response frames it from the side of mission.
Candidate solution 2: the necessity of every possibility
Thomas then turned to the liar. Referring to The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” with its misunderstood man given over to lies, he said that this is the life of Satan. It had to exist because it is one of the polarities of possible existence, and a real creation must contain every possibility; a creation that left some out would be a staged game. God chose to reject the polarity of evil; He chose to embody love of the other and appreciation of being. But someone would lie, and the good would be lied to; some would believe, and colonies would form around lies, growing more believable as they grew larger. The most effective lie is the closest copy of the truth.
Thomas extended the argument to confusion. Without confusion, people would accept every pronouncement at once, and there would be no struggle, no victory, and no overcoming. He linked confusion to entropy, which counts the number of ways things can happen.
Note: In statistical mechanics, a state that can be realized in many ways — and therefore happens often — has high entropy, and a state realized in few ways has low entropy (S = k ln W). Applied to confusion: a world with many possible paths will mostly produce disorder unless something selects for order.
Objections and replies
This answer resembles two older ones. The principle of plenitude, traced by Arthur Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being, holds that a perfect creator brings every possible kind of being into existence. Irenaeus’s soul-making theodicy, revived by John Hick, holds that a world of struggle is necessary for forming mature persons. Thomas’s account combines them: plenitude explains why the liar exists, and the need for overcoming explains why confusion is good for us.
The standard objection to plenitude is that it seems to make God the author of evil. Thomas’s answer contains its own reply: God did not embody the polarity of the lie; He chose against it. The possibility was required; choosing it was not God’s. That distinction matches James 1:13, that God tempts no one. The standard objection to soul-making is that much suffering does not form anyone. The answer offered in the next problem — that hardship calls forth help from others, and that the help is itself the good — addresses part of that objection, though not all of it.
Assessment
The account explains what Isak most needed explained: why the world is full of near-truths and why sincere people follow them. It does not make the confusion less real, but it makes it intelligible. A world without counterfeits would be a world without the search, and the search — the pearl of great price, for which a person sells everything (Matthew 13:45–46) — is where finding becomes meaningful. On this view, Isak’s confusion is not evidence that something has gone wrong with his faith; it is the terrain faith was meant to cross.
Problem 12: Unfairness
The problem
Thomas suggested that what troubled Isak was a set of “what about” questions: what about people with other sexual practices, other gods, other customs and books, other politics, other classes, and other birth conditions? Each functions as a showstopper: if God were fair, how could it be this way?
Candidate solution 1: balance and the glory of God (Isak)
Isak corrected Thomas: he has come to terms with whataboutism, since it can be raised against anything. He holds that life is not fair by human judgment but balanced; every downswing has an upswing. He cited Jesus’ answer about the man born blind: neither he nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that God’s works might be shown in him (John 9:2–3). God is seen most clearly, Isak said, in those who are beaten down and still call themselves children of God, and in the weak who need food and shelter — present in the one who gives a cup of water, but especially, as Jesus taught, in the one who receives it (Matthew 10:42; 25:35–40). A world without unfairness would be easy and dull, leaving no room for character. Inequality should not be imposed, but it is part of life.
Candidate solution 2: difference entails a spectrum (Thomas)
Thomas added a structural argument. A created world must contain difference; difference means experiences are not the same; and if good and bad things can happen, they will, with an element of chance — like a pachinko ball that sometimes takes a bad bounce. This means that unfairness is not evidence against God. Arguments such as “I was born with a birth defect; how could a loving God allow such a thing to happen to a totally innocent child, so there is no God, or God is evil, or God made me this way” are theories that fail to fit the whole picture. The fitting response to another person’s bad bounce is to acknowledge it, help as one can — even a glass of water — and encourage endurance, because everyone carries a cross (Luke 9:23), including those who seem to have none.
Assessment
The two answers work at different levels. Thomas’s is explanatory: it shows why unfairness must exist in any real creation, and so removes it as an argument against God. Isak’s is existential: it shows where God is to be found within unfairness — in the sufferer who still believes and in the hand that brings water. Neither tells an individual sufferer why this particular bounce came to him, nor does either pretend to. Together, they establish that unfairness is not a reason to disbelieve, but an occasion to love. That is enough to dissolve the “what about” questions as showstoppers, which was the problem posed.
Problem 13: Hope, Faith, and Cynicism
The problem
If the price of a transformed world is almost beyond imagining, why not just live happily and settle for one’s own salvation? Thomas voiced the cynic’s position: he found the truth only after a long search, which is probably more work than most people would care to do. The difficulty of making that change, and the resistance to it, are so great that expecting it of your neighbor is almost too much, and thinking such a transformation could happen on a national or global scale is so unlikely as to be essentially impossible. In the face of such improbability, we might as well give up on expecting things to get better and just prepare for when Jesus returns and pray to get raptured soon out of this evil world.
Candidate solution: faith as paying the dues
Thomas distinguished hope from faith. Hope wants the outcome. Faith pays the dues and holds on until the outcome is real, even when it looks like a long shot. God wants the world brought along, and he knows the price. Isak rejected the cynic’s conclusion: giving up because others might not believe helps no one, and he wants others to experience what he has, and more. Thomas called that statement a testimony and the foundation of transformation: not a theory or a statistic, but “It happened to me, and it can happen to you.”
The escapist form of the cynic’s position also contradicts the commands given for the time of waiting. The servants in the parable are told to “occupy till I come”(Luke 19:13) — to trade with what they have been given, not to bury it. The disciples are sent to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19–20) and are called the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13–14), images of influence in the world, not withdrawal from it.
Assessment
This answer turns faith from a state of mind into a practice. It aligns with Hebrews 11:1, which calls faith the substance of things hoped for, and with Romans 8:24–25, which speaks of waiting patiently for what is not seen. The cynic’s error is to treat present evidence as a ceiling. The person of faith treats it as a starting point and acts as though the goal is reachable, because he has evidence (Problem 7) that it is reachable at least once, a God who wants it reached by all, and a promise that the increase is God’s to give (Problem 8).
Problem 14: The Many Religions
The problem
Isak said that the many religions are so close — each has part of the idea — yet so divided by history that unity seems impossible. Is every religion an equally valid path, or is one true and the rest false?
Candidate solution: windows onto God
Thomas said he is not a multiculturalist; he does not believe all cultures are equally valid, though each offers a valuable perspective on life. He took his model from Huston Smith’s account of Hinduism, in which each god is understood not as God but as a window onto God. Some windows open onto a shallow world, others onto a vast one. Christianity in its purest form encompasses them all, because Christ is the source of everything created (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17), including the Buddha and Muhammad.
He gave Buddhism as an example. The Buddha probably saw something deep — that everything is connected and life must be lived in balance — and the Eightfold Path teaches kindness, sexual morality, right treatment of others, and reverence. Thomas said he has found nothing evil in it, only teachings that go in the right direction and stop short in that they do not point to Christ. The question is what to focus on to see the Father, and Christ is the shortest route, because everything came from him; the long path to the Formless One reaches Christ along the way. The sincere Buddhists do not appear to be wicked; they do not have the liberty in Christ. They are aiming for liberation from the endless cycle of births and deaths, which is a very different goal than living a life of love guided by the spirit of Christ. The liar’s path is also a window, but a hard and sad one, because it moves away from God, making the path much longer; compassion dictates rescuing the drowning.
Assessment
This position avoids two errors. It is not relativism, because it ranks windows by how far they see and holds that one window — Christ — sees to the source. It is not blanket condemnation, because it credits what is true in other traditions and explains that truth: Christ, the source of all things, stands behind every window. The position also connects to Problem 1. Other traditions can contain much truth; what distinguishes them from the Christian claim is not that they contain none, but that they do not place final authority in the one from whom all truth comes.
Problem 15: Faith and Knowledge
The problem
Near the end, Isak described himself as a faithful, optimistic person with questions that need answering. He feels more secure in his faith about God and Christ than in his knowledge of politics and the world, and much of what he voices is his sorting of the ideologies around him rather than his own position. Is a faith that outruns its knowledge weak?
Candidate solution: knowledge in the service of faith
Thomas said that more faith than knowledge describes everyone, himself included. There is simply too much that we cannot see and know. His knowledge too is small compared with what is to be known. Regarding his faith in humanity’s salvation, he doesn’t know how it will happen, but he believes everything will work out and that everyone will come to know Christ. Faith needs an object to be known, but faith is by nature not yet manifest, hope is not yet present, and knowledge is always limited (1 Corinthians 13:12). Knowledge has a specific use: to fill the gaps where a particular question keeps a person from faith. He described his conversations with Isak as mapping a terrain of people moving toward God, with Isak representing one type — the searcher — distinct from those who are certain of their own systems.
Assessment
This answer reverses the usual worry. A faith that waited for complete knowledge would never begin, and a knowledge that tried to replace faith would end where the materialist account of matter ends: at a given that must simply be accepted. The proper relation is that knowledge clears obstacles and faith proceeds. Isak’s questions are therefore not a defect in his faith; they are the material from which he can build a method for reaching other seekers.
The Frame Applied: A Campaign to Bring the Nation to Christ
The conversation ended with Thomas saying the point of it all is to take it to the world. He has chosen a presidential candidacy as the vehicle to plant these ideas in the nation’s imagination as seeds. The goal is inhumanly high, and he holds that only a divine move can achieve it. The inquiry above provides the frame for such a campaign and sets conditions for it.
What the candidacy is for. It is a pulpit for sowing. A campaign reaches people who would never attend a church or read a theological essay, and it places moral and spiritual questions in the public square, where people decide how they will live together. Its proper aim is not to win obedience but to plant ideas — that there is a God behind the given, that authority belongs to Christ, that righteousness can be tested and argued for, and that change is possible — and to trust God for the increase (Problem 8).
The authority test applies to the campaign itself. Problem 1’s lesson is that authority must not shift from Christ to a man. A presidential campaign is the most person-centered vehicle in public life, and its message is easily heard as “follow the candidate.” The campaign must therefore point away from the candidate. Thomas’s stance already does this in part: he takes no money, calls his candidacy a witness, asks voters to write him in only if they are certain he would win, and otherwise asks them to vote for the best man on the ballot. Every position he advances is offered as advocacy with stated reasons, held open to a better argument, never imposed as final authority.
Law proposes; the Spirit converts. The inquiry’s own logic distinguishes what law can do from what only grace can do. A sanctified nation is a nation of sanctified people, and sanctification cannot be legislated. Prohibition is the historical warning: it legislated a moral outcome that the heart had not yet chosen and produced lawlessness and backlash. The Great Awakenings show the other order: prayer and preaching changed hearts, and reform followed. The political arm of the campaign proposes laws justified by the ordered test of Problem 9 — righteous, loving, and what one would want done to oneself — and argues for them by reason. The spiritual arm calls people to Christ by witness, and leaves conversion to the Spirit. Keeping these apart is not a retreat from the goal; it is the only route to it that avoids repeating the Pharisaic and institutional failures of Problems 3 and 5.
Seeds need soil. The parable of the sower (Matthew 13:3–23) says that most seed is lost without soil and cultivation. Isak was changed through eighteen months of sustained relationship, not through a broadcast. A campaign can sow widely, but those who respond need somewhere to go: small groups like the Christos Fellowship, where they are drawn into the kind of conversation that changed Isak, and where the one-teaches-twelve multiplication of Problem 7 can begin. The campaign’s reach and the fellowship’s depth are two parts of one strategy.
Speaking to a divided nation. The audience is plural: Christians of many traditions, Jews, Muslims, secular people, and Latter-day Saints, many of whom are allies on marriage and family. Lively’s distinction applies: people are very often better than the systems that claim them. This essay argues against an institution’s claim to authority, not against its members, and it does not depend on proving any particular Mormon claim false. Campaign speech can make the authority argument plainly while honoring the goodness of the people it addresses, which is itself the standard of Problem 9 applied to persuasion.
Faith and action together. The campaign is therefore an act of the faith described in Problem 13: faith that God wants the nation brought to him, joined to the labor of sowing, done in prayer, and measured not by votes but by whether the seed is sown truly and whether those who respond find soil.
Conclusion
The conversation’s problems converge on three ideas.
The first is authority. The difference between Jesus and Joseph Smith, the vulnerability of every church to Pharisaism, the use of religion to sanctify racial prejudice, the question of Israel, and the standing of other religions all turn on the same question: where does final authority rest? The conversation concluded that it rests in Christ, that every revelation, institution, text, nation, and campaign is measured against Him, and that the community of believers together discerns what He is saying, checking what it hears against the gospel already given. A teaching can be largely true and still deceive if it shifts authority away from Him. That is the core of the case against Mormonism, and it does not depend on proving any particular Mormon claim false.
The second is transmission. Isak’s doubt was never about God; it was about whether people can change. The answer is that one person has, that the change has already passed to others, and that God wants it for everyone. The change is not only a new way of seeing but a turning from sin to righteousness, measured by a test that can be stated and argued in public. Confusion, counterfeits, and unfairness do not count against this; they are features of a real creation, the terrain the search must cross, and the occasions for helping one another across it.
The third is grace. The goal is beyond human power. Method is sowing; the increase is God’s. Faith, on this account, is not certainty that the outcome is assured. It is the decision to pay the price of a pearl one has already found through prayer and labor, so others can find it too.
The conversation ended there. Thomas said he felt hopeful, and that the point of it all is to take it to the world. Isak said that they would make it happen.
