260515 – Christ, Islam, and Witnessing

by Thomas Abshier | May 16, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

To the Fellowship and Our Muslim Friends

Addressed to the fellowship, to our Muslim friends, and to the spirit yearning to be free in every human heart

Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | 15 May 2026

The reading list in our previous essay is diagnostic. It equips the fellowship to engage Islam at the level of texts, doctrines, and history. But the diagnosis is not the witness. The diagnosis tells us what we are dealing with; the witness is what we offer in its place. This postscript is the witness frame that gives the scholarly material its purpose. Without the witness, the reading list is a mere academic exercise; with the witness, it becomes preparation for an encounter that may, by the grace of God, change a life.

I write the postscript in three movements. The first is addressed to the fellowship, laying out the theological framework within which Christian witness to Islam is to be understood. The second is addressed to our Muslim friends, who may eventually read this or hear it spoken — the conversation we hope to have and the questions we offer as the entry point. The third is addressed to the spirit yearning to be free in every human breast — the imago Dei that bears witness to itself, to which the Holy Spirit speaks, and which the gospel calls home.

I. To the Fellowship — The Witness Mission and Its Theological Foundation

The Renaissance Ministries fellowship was formed to deepen our knowledge and understanding of God and His ways as revealed in the Bible, as our guide. We must plant, nourish, and mature that word in our own souls first. The fruit of our own lives will nourish the seeds we plant in the lives of others. We gather Sunday by Sunday to build each other up so that we may experience the fullness of life lived in Christ. In so doing, we become living examples of the promises of faith. A life lived fully in the joy of the Lord is the real life witness that we carry to our friends, family members, acquaintances, neighbors, and strangers. And we must be ready to defend our faith so that we are ready to effectively answer the questions of every soul whom God has placed on our path and within our reach. This is the Great Commission lived locally. The Christian Underground is not a fortress for the saved; it is the base of operation from which the gospel goes out into the surrounding culture, including the increasingly significant Muslim presence in our cities.

Christian witness, however, is not generic. Different unbeliever populations require different witness postures. The witness to a post-Christian secular humanist is not the witness to a Mormon, which is not the witness to a Muslim. The differences are not merely tactical; they reflect a theological fact that different religions have different spirits, motivations, apologetics, and histories, different cultures and assumptions about the nature of God and the purpose of life.

Every religion is animated by a spirit, and the spirit behind a religion is not always the same as the Spirit of the living God.

This claim is not a post-apostolic invention of the Christian tradition. It is Pauline. The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils (1 Cor 10:20). We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Eph 6:12). The apostolic teaching is that the religious landscape is not religiously neutral. Spirits are at work, and not all the spirits are the Holy Spirit. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world (1 John 4:1). The Christian’s task in witness is, in part, to recognize which spirit is at work in the system he is engaging, so that he can offer the right testimony in the right way.

How is the spirit behind a religion discerned? Primarily by examining the revelation content the religion claims and comparing it to the revelation God has actually given in scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ. Where the alleged revelation contradicts the biblical revelation on matters central to the gospel — the nature of God, the person of Christ, the means of salvation, the character of the moral life, the destiny of the human person — the discernment is straightforward: this is not the Holy Spirit. The criterion John gives in 1 John 4:2-3 is whether the spirit confesses Jesus Christ came in the flesh as Lord and Savior. The Spirit who breathed the New Testament will not contradict the New Testament’s central testimony.

The fellowship has done this discernment work regarding Mormonism. When we studied the Mormon claim that Christ’s redemptive act occurred primarily in Gethsemane — that the sweat-as-blood was the atoning sacrifice, that this was revealed to Joseph Smith, and that this revelation continues today through Denver Snuffer and others — we recognized that the revelation differs from the biblical revelation on the very center of Christian salvation. Scripture places the atonement at the cross. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities… and with his stripes we are healed (Isa 53:5). Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God (1 Pet 3:18). Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree (1 Pet 2:24). The Mormon-Gethsemane revelation contradicts the apostolic-cross revelation. The conclusion follows: the spirit that revealed Gethsemane to Smith was not the Spirit that breathed the New Testament. Try the spirits. The same diagnostic, applied to Islam, yields its own conclusions.

II. The Spirit Behind Islam — A Structural Observation

The same diagnostic, applied to Islam, yields a structural observation that may be more important than any particular doctrinal disagreement. The observation is this: Islam, as a revelation system, is mono-vocal at its source in a way that the biblical revelation is not, and the structural mono-vocality has consequences.

The biblical revelation comes through many human authors over approximately fifteen centuries. Moses, the prophets, the wisdom writers, the gospel evangelists, the apostles — each writing in his own genre, his own moment, his own historical context, with the Holy Spirit working through the full plurality of human voices to produce a single canonical witness. The Bible is structurally multivocal even while being singularly authoritative. There is internal dialogue: Job questions; Ecclesiastes laments; Habakkuk argues with God; Paul reasons; James practices. The plurality of voices is part of the design. The reader of the Bible is implicitly trained, by the text itself, to weigh different witnesses, to read context, to reconcile apparent tensions, and to receive truth as something dialogically discovered through the play of multiple authoritative voices speaking from multiple angles.

The Quran, by contrast, is structurally mono-vocal at its source. It is presented as the recitation given to one human prophet by one angelic messenger from one divine voice over approximately twenty-two years. The Muslim reader is not implicitly trained in the play of multiple voices; he is trained to receive a single voice as final. This is reinforced by the classical Sunni doctrine of the Quran’s eternal, uncreated nature — the Quran is not a witness to revelation but the very speech of Allah, eternal, unchanging, untranslatable in any sense that would carry its full authority. The hadith adds a second layer, but a layer subordinate to the Quran and itself transmitted as the sayings of a single prophet through chains of narrators.

The structural consequence of mono-vocal revelation is mono-vocal authority, and the structural consequence of mono-vocal authority is submission as the central religious posture. The very name Islam (al-Islam, الإسلام) means submission — the verbal noun of the Arabic root s-l-m in the form-IV verbal pattern, with the meaning to surrender or to submit. The Muslim (muslim, مسلم) is the one who has submitted. The religion is named for its central act, and that act is the submission of the will to a single voice mediated through a single prophet.

The contrast with Christian discipleship is precise. Christianity also calls the believer to submit — Christ is Lord; the believer takes up the cross; the will yields to the Father. But the submission in Christianity is to a Person who became flesh, walked the earth, conversed with his disciples, addressed each of them by name, healed them, ate with them, washed their feet, died for them, rose for them, and now indwells them by his Spirit. The Christian submission is to a relationship, not to a recitation. The relationship is what makes the submission bearable, joyful, and free. Submission to a transcendent and distant sovereign, without relationship and without indwelling, is a different kind of submission. It is the submission of the slave to the master, not the submission of the son to the Father.

I want to be careful here. The Islamic tradition is not actually as mono-vocal in its reception as its source structure would suggest. There are four major Sunni madhabs that disagree on many matters of jurisprudence; Twelver Shia, Ismaili Shia, and other branches have their own legal traditions; the Sufi tradition cultivates a relational and experiential dimension that classical jurisprudence often does not. Reformist Muslims like Khaled Abou El Fadl, Akbar Ahmed, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, and others have developed sophisticated readings that contest the classical synthesis. So Islam is plural in its reception even where it is unitary in its source. But the structural pull toward mono-vocal absolutism is real, and it has produced specific historical and contemporary manifestations that the fellowship needs to understand.

The plural reception within Islam is part of why the dialogue with our Muslim friend is worth having. We are not engaging the source structure abstractly; we are engaging a particular human person who has internalized one particular reception of the tradition. That reception may be more or less classical-traditional, more or less reformist, more or less Sufi-inflected. The witness task begins with understanding which reception we are dealing with and proceeds by offering the Christian alternative to whichever spirit has shaped the person before us.

III. To Our Muslim Friend — The Conversation We Hope to Have

If you are a Muslim reading this — perhaps because Michael Sherman or someone like him has shared it with you, or because the Zoom dialogue is being arranged and you wanted to know what we are thinking — I want to address you directly, and with respect.

You are made in the image of God. The Christian conviction is that the Creator of the universe made you in his image (Gen 1:26-27), loves you with a particular love (John 3:16), and desires a personal relationship with you. The conversation we hope to have with you is not a debate to be won; it is an invitation to a relationship offered by the One who made you and who, the Christian believes, has been pursuing you long before either of us thought to arrange a meeting.

Before we have that conversation, we want to listen to you. We do not know which Islam is your Islam. Are you Sunni or Shia, and if Shia, which branch? What madhab do you follow? Where does your local imam stand on the spectrum from Salafi-traditionalist to reformist-modernist? Are you Sufi-inflected, or do you find the Sufi tradition strange? What is your daily relationship with the Quran — do you recite it daily, study its tafsir, memorize portions? What is your relationship with the hadith — do you read Bukhari, or is your tradition shaped more by other collections? Have you been to the Hajj? What did it mean to you? Has Islam given you peace, or do you carry an inner unrest that the prayers have not stilled?

These are not idle questions. They are how we learn who you are. The Christian conviction is that the Holy Spirit deals with each person personally, and we cannot do a useful witness with you until we know what shape your soul has taken under the tradition that formed you.

On the more political-theological questions, we will want to ask, with respect: Do you want to live under Sharia, or do you find American constitutional civil order satisfactory and even good? Do you believe Sharia-based governance would be better for the United States than constitutional democracy? When you read Q 9:5 and Q 9:29, do you receive them as normative for the present moment, or as contextual to seventh-century Arabia? When you think about the relationship between the Meccan and Medinan periods, where do you locate the heart of your tradition — in the patient preaching of the Meccan years, or in the political-military establishment of the Medinan years? Do you believe the doctrine of naskh applies, and if so, in which direction? What do you make of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed by the Sudanese regime for arguing that the Meccan period was the eternal core and the Medinan was contextual?

These are not gotcha questions. They are questions whose answers will tell us where you actually live in the Muslim tradition, so that we can speak to you about Christ in ways that are intelligible to your actual frame.

But beyond the diagnostic questions, we want to ask the deeper comparative questions — the ones that go to the heart of why a person might choose one path or another.

What does Islam give you that you most value? Is it the structure of the five daily prayers and the rhythm of the Islamic calendar? Is it the sense of submission to a will higher than your own? Is it the community of the umma? Is it the assurance of Allah’s law as the ordering principle of life? We want to hear what you cherish, because what you cherish tells us what your soul has found.

And what does Islam ask you to give up — and is the cost worth it? Has Islam asked you to give up the right to question certain doctrines? Has it asked you to give up the conviction that women are equal in dignity and capacity to men in every sphere of life? Has it asked you to give up the freedom to leave the faith if you ever came to believe it untrue (the classical punishment for apostasy in Islamic law remains death)? Has it asked you to give up the assurance that your salvation is secure rather than uncertain (most classical Islamic theology holds that even the most pious Muslim cannot be assured of paradise until the Day of Judgment)? Has it asked you to give up a personal relationship with God in favor of a posture of submission to a sovereign who remains, in his essence, transcendent and unknowable?

Is the Golden Rule important to you? Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets (Matt 7:12). Does your tradition affirm this — fully, for all persons, regardless of religion? Or does your tradition draw distinctions in how Muslims and non-Muslims are to be treated that you, in your own soul, find difficult to defend?

Is free will important to you? Do you experience yourself as a free moral agent who can choose between good and evil, or do you experience yourself as the executor of a divine decree in which your choices were already determined? The classical Sunni doctrine of qadar (divine decree) presses heavily toward the second; the Christian doctrine of free agency under grace makes the first central. Which of these matches your own deepest experience of yourself?

And finally, the question we most want you to consider: Does the spirit of Islam call you to the kind of person you most want to become? Or do you find, in your deepest self, that there is a yearning for something that Islam, at its core, does not offer? For where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17). The Christian conviction is that the human soul was made for liberty in relationship with the living God, and that any system which substitutes submission for relationship leaves the soul fundamentally hungry, however orderly it makes the surface of the life.

IV. What Christianity Offers — The Liberty in Christ

The Christianity that the fellowship offers our Muslim friend is not a competing system of law and submission. It is the Lordship of Jesus Christ exercised through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in a freely loved and freely loving relationship with the Triune God.

The center of the Christian offer is the indwelling Spirit. When Jesus prepared his disciples for his departure, he promised: I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth (John 14:16-17). And again, more astonishingly: If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him (John 14:23). The Christian is not someone who has read about God; the Christian is someone in whom God has come to dwell. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? (1 Cor 3:16). This is the difference at the heart of everything. Submission to a transcendent and distant sovereign is one religious posture; indwelling by the Spirit of the living God who is your Father, your Savior, and your constant Companion is a fundamentally different relationship to the divine.

The liberty that flows from this indwelling is not the liberty of moral chaos. It is the liberty of the Son of God in his Father’s house, where the rules are simple and good, and the Father’s love is constant, and the Son’s flourishing is the Father’s joy. The principle I want to commend to you in summary form, dear Muslim friend, is this:

Thomas – My Theological Summary: All that is not prohibited is allowed; and all that is allowed has its perfect time; and the Holy Spirit speaks to our hearts, informing us of the next moment of greatest joy, greatest meaning, and greatest service to God, to our neighbor, and to our own becoming.

This is the formula of Christian liberty. Let me unpack each clause.

“All that is not prohibited is allowed.” The Christian life is not a list of permissions to be earned. It is a vast field of God-given possibilities within which the believer walks freely, bounded only by what God has explicitly forbidden as harmful to the soul, to the neighbor, or to the witness. The Pauline principle: All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any (1 Cor 6:12; also 1 Cor 10:23). The Christian asks not first “is this permitted?” but “is this good?” — and the asking is itself an act of liberty.

“And all that is allowed has its perfect time.” Not every good thing is to be done in every moment. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes laid this out plainly: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven (Eccl 3:1). Christian liberty includes the wisdom of timing — the recognition that life is composed of moments, each calling for the response that is fitted to it. The believer learns to read the moment and to offer the response the moment requires.

“And the Holy Spirit speaks to our hearts, informing us of the next moment of greatest joy, meaning, and service.” The fitting response is not derived by consulting an external code. It is given by the Spirit who indwells the believer and who speaks to the heart with a quiet and unmistakable voice. As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God (Rom 8:14). This is the practical content of Christian indwelling. The believer learns, over years of walking, to hear the Spirit’s voice and to follow it. The hearing is the relationship; the following is the discipleship.

“To God, to our neighbor, and to our own becoming.” The Spirit’s leading is not arbitrary. It is always toward the integration of the three loves the Great Commandment names: love of God with the whole self — heart, soul, mind, strength — love of neighbor as oneself, and a proper love of self as a being made in God’s image and called to flourish in the relationship the Creator intended. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind — and thy neighbour as thyself (Matt 22:37-39). The Christian is not asked to choose between God and neighbor and self; the Christian is shown, by moment-by-moment leading of the indwelling Spirit, how the three loves integrate into a single life.

This is Christian liberty. It is not lawlessness. It is the higher law of love, written by the Spirit on the believer’s heart (Jer 31:33; Heb 8:10), lived out in moment-by-moment communion with the indwelling presence of the living God.

The cross of Jesus Christ is what makes this liberty possible. The cross is, in one sense, the satisfaction of divine justice — He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Cor 5:21). The judgment that sin deserves was poured out upon the willing Substitute, and the believer who is in Christ is freed from the condemnation that would otherwise be his. In another sense, the cross is the defeat of the powers — Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it (Col 2:15). The demonic dominion over the human soul, by which the soul is held in bondage to fear, to sin, and to false religion, was broken at the cross. The believer is freed simultaneously from divine judgment (the wrath satisfied at Calvary) and from demonic dominion (the chains broken at Calvary). The two redemptions are not in tension; they are the two faces of the one act by which God in Christ rescued his children from every power that had bound them.

This is what Christianity offers. Not a better law. A new relationship.

V. To the Spirit Yearning to Be Free in Every Heart

There is one more address to make, and it is the most important one. It is addressed not to the fellowship, not to the Muslim teacher, not to any particular reader — it is addressed to the spirit yearning to be free in every human breast.

If you are reading this and something in your soul is stirring — a recognition, a longing, an unease, an attraction, a wish that something here were true — I want you to know that the stirring is itself a working of the Holy Spirit upon your heart, even now. The Spirit moves over the deep as he moved at the creation, and where he moves, light is called out of darkness. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me (Rev 3:20). The Lord Jesus, who was crucified outside Jerusalem in approximately the year 30 of the Christian era, and who rose from the dead three days later in a real body that ate fish and was touched by his disciples, is at this moment knocking at the door of your heart. The fact that you are reading these words and feeling something is the knocking. The knocking is real. The Knocker is real.

You do not have to leave your name behind, or your family, or your culture, or your love for what is beautiful in your tradition. The truth that frees does not destroy what was honest in what came before. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32). What it frees is the part of you that has been trying to live under a yoke too heavy to bear — the law that condemns without enabling, the submission that requires without companioning, the sovereign who commands without indwelling. The Christian gospel offers you, in place of that yoke, the easy yoke and light burden of Jesus: Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matt 11:29-30).

The invitation is simple and serious. That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved (Rom 10:9). The confession is the handle of the door. The belief is the acceptance of the invitation, a heartfelt acceptance of the truth of Christ’s claim of redemption, and an indwelling is the door opening from the inside. When the door opens, the One who has been knocking comes in.

And he does not come alone. He brings the Father, in the union of indwelling that he described in John 14:23. And he sends the Holy Spirit to make his home in you — to teach you, to guide you, to comfort you, to convict you when conviction is needed, to console you when consolation is needed, and to assure you, in the depth of your soul, that you are loved with the love of the One who made the stars. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Rom 8:16). The witness is internal. The witness is unmistakable. The witness is the assurance that no system of submission can give, because the witness is given by the indwelling Person of God himself, Abba, Father (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6).

I do not know if you, the reader, will receive this invitation. The Holy Spirit knows; the Father knows; the Son knows. But I will pray for you, as the fellowship will pray for you, and as the Lord himself is praying for you at the right hand of the Father (Rom 8:34; Heb 7:25). The conversation with Michael’s friend, if it happens, is one moment in a much longer conversation that the Spirit has been having with you and will continue to have with you, regardless of what happens in our particular Zoom call. The Spirit is patient. The Spirit will keep knocking.

May the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom is no darkness at all, find the door of your heart open in his perfect time. May the Father who made you draw you to himself. May the Spirit who hovered over the deep at the beginning hover now over your soul and speak the word that calls the light forth from your darkness. May the liberty wherewith Christ has set the captives free become your liberty also. And may we, the fellowship of Renaissance Ministries, meet you one day in the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus, where every tongue shall confess and every knee shall bow (Phil 2:10-11), and where the table is wide and the feast is the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9).

Maranatha — come, Lord Jesus.

— Thomas

260513 – Islam Reading List

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

Islam — Reading List and Source Citations

A Reference Document for Understanding Islam and Fellowship Engagement

Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | May 13, 2026

Purpose: This document gathers the primary-source citations, classical-jurisprudence references, and scholarly reading list relevant to the assertions made about Islam in last week’s fellowship meeting. It is also intended as a durable fellowship reference for future Islam-related discussions. The compilation is research-assisted but reflects my own framing of the questions at stake.

I. Direct Assessment of the Sunday-Discussion Framing

In Sunday’s fellowship discussion, the claims made about Islam were, in summary:

1. Islam has expansionist, warlike, world-domination scriptural-prophetic imperatives.
2. The Quran contains two phases of teaching — a Meccan phase (more coexistent) and a Medinan phase (more forceful and commanding).
3. Muhammad’s posture changed when he gained the ability to wield power, and the revelations he reported reflect this change.
4. The classical Islamic project includes the establishment of a worldwide caliphate under Allah’s rule.

Assessment of these claims, in order of confidence:

(1) Mecca/Medina distinction — well-established, broadly accepted. The chronological distinction between the Meccan period (610–622 CE) and the Medinan period (622–632 CE) is standard in both Muslim and Western academic scholarship. The general character difference — Meccan suras tend to be shorter, more theological, more universalist; Medinan suras tend to be longer, more legal and political, more concerned with concrete community matters, including warfare — is also standard. This was not a controversial claim to make in the discussion. (See sections II and IV below.)

(2) Posture-change correlated with power — broadly accepted, with explanatory disagreement. Both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars accept that Muhammad’s posture toward unbelievers shifted across the two periods. Muslim apologists typically explain this as a defensive shift in response to Meccan persecution and as a legitimate response to threats from surrounding tribes. Critical scholars often read it as an opportunistic exploitation of newly available power. The factual claim of change is uncontroversial; the explanation of the change is contested.

(3) Classical Islam includes an expansionist warfare doctrine, well-established but contested by reformists. The classical Sunni jurisprudential tradition, codified by the four major madhabs (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali) and visible in foundational works like al-Shaybani’s Siyar (8th century), al-Mawardi’s al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya (11th century), and the Shafi’i manual Reliance of the Traveller (still used and certified by Al-Azhar), includes a robust doctrine of jihad fi sabil Allah (struggle in the path of Allah) that is partly individual-spiritual but importantly also collective-military. The world is classically divided into dar al-Islam (abode of Islam) and dar al-harb (abode of war), with offensive jihad being a fard kifaya (collective obligation) of the Muslim community. This is not invented; it is in the books. However, contemporary reformist Muslim scholars (Abou El Fadl, Akbar Ahmed, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha) contest whether this classical jurisprudence should be normative for modern Muslims, arguing variously that the verses were contextual, that the classical synthesis was a historical artifact rather than divinely required, or that the Meccan phase represents the eternal core of the message.

(4) Worldwide caliphate as eschatological/theological goal — present in classical tradition, varies by school. The expectation of a restored caliphate under which Allah’s law would rule the earth is present in classical Sunni eschatology and in many hadith. The Mahdi tradition (more elaborated in Shia, present in Sunni) anticipates a future Islamic ruler who will establish justice over the entire earth. This is a real strand of Islamic doctrine; whether it is normative or how it is interpreted varies enormously across modern Muslim communities.

Where the Sunday framing was overstated:

The language used in Sunday’s discussion — “Islam wants to dominate the whole world for Allah,” “all who do not believe must pay the tax” — telescopes the variation within Islam into a single voice that the actual community of 1.8 billion Muslims does not speak with. The classical jurisprudential tradition contains the materials for that voice; specific historical movements have expressed that voice; some contemporary movements (Khomeinist Iran, Salafi-jihadism, the Muslim Brotherhood’s classical project, various Mahdist movements) continue to express it. But many other contemporary Muslim communities — especially in the United States, Western Europe, Indonesia, Senegal, Morocco, and elsewhere — operate inside a framework that has substantially set aside the classical militant doctrine in favor of reformist, Sufi, or pragmatic accommodations. Michael’s experience of friendly mosque visits is real; so is the classical jurisprudence Thomas referenced. Both are true at once. The dialogue with Muslims will be most productive if both truths are held simultaneously, realizing that the Muslim doctrines are heterogeneous among the various sects.

Where the framing was correct:

The substantive content of the classical tradition is what Thomas described. A Muslim teacher who is honest about the tradition will acknowledge the existence of dar al-Islam/dar al-harb, the doctrine of offensive jihad as classically formulated, the dhimmi/jizya institution, and the expansionist orientation of classical Islamic law. The honest disagreement will be about whether these classical doctrines are normative for contemporary Muslims. Thomas’s position is that they are at least the latent doctrine that surfaces under conditions of population-scale and political opportunity; the reformist position is that they were contextual and have been or should be set aside. Both positions can be argued seriously from within Islamic studies.

II. The Meccan-Medinan Distinction: The Standard Scholarly Picture

Muhammad’s prophetic ministry traditionally divides into two periods:

The Meccan period (610–622 CE). Muhammad began receiving revelations in Mecca around 610 CE, at the age of approximately 40. For roughly twelve years, he preached as a minority figure among the dominant pagan Quraysh tribe, with a small group of followers, facing persecution and social ostracism. The Meccan suras (traditionally identified by a combination of internal evidence and Muslim tradition) tend to share certain features:

– Shorter, more poetic, more rhythmic – Focused on theological themes: the oneness of Allah, the resurrection, the Day of Judgment, the stories of earlier prophets (especially those shared with Jewish and Christian tradition) – Often more universalist in tone — addressing humanity generally, “O mankind” – Less concerned with concrete community structure (no community of any size existed yet) – Generally more tolerant of People of the Book (Jews and Christians), often appealing to common ground

Examples of Meccan suras include 96 (al-‘Alaq, traditionally the first revealed), 109 (al-Kafirun, often cited as containing “to you your religion, to me my religion”), 73 (al-Muzzammil), 74 (al-Muddaththir).

The Hijra (622 CE). Muhammad and his small community migrated to Yathrib (renamed Medina, “the city” of the Prophet) to escape Meccan persecution. This year is so important that the Islamic calendar dates from it (1 AH = 622 CE). In Medina, Muhammad became simultaneously a religious teacher, a political leader, a judge, and a military commander. The community grew rapidly through conversions, alliances, and conquests.

The Medinan period (622–632 CE). The Medinan suras tend to share different features:

– Longer, more discursive, more legal/regulatory – Focused on community-organizational matters: marriage, inheritance, criminal law, ritual practice, contracts, warfare, treaties – Often addressed to “O you who believe” — assuming an established community – More differentiated treatment of People of the Book — both verses of accommodation (e.g., Q 2:62, 5:69) and verses of severe critique (e.g., Q 9:29, 5:51, 5:60) – Containing all the major Quranic passages on jihad as armed struggle

Examples include 2 (al-Baqara, the longest sura), 3 (Al ‘Imran), 4 (al-Nisa’), 5 (al-Ma’ida), 8 (al-Anfal, “the Spoils”), 9 (al-Tawbah, “Repentance,” traditionally one of the last revealed and containing the so-called “sword verse”).

Why this matters. When a Quran reader encounters two apparently contradictory verses — one tolerant, one militant — the chronological question becomes immediately relevant: was the tolerant verse revealed when Muhammad was a minority preacher, and the militant verse later, when he was leading an expanding state? In many cases, the classical answer is yes. The classical jurisprudential response to this chronological asymmetry is the doctrine of naskh.

III. The Doctrine of Naskh (Abrogation)

The Arabic word naskh (نسخ) means abrogation, repeal, or supersession. In classical Quranic studies, it refers to the principle that some Quranic verses cancel or modify earlier ones. The doctrine has Quranic foundation:

Q 2:106: We do not abrogate (nansakh) a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring forth one better than it or similar to it. Q 16:101: And when We substitute a verse in place of a verse — and Allah is most knowing of what He sends down — they say, “You, [O Muhammad], are but an inventor.”

Classical Muslim scholarship developed elaborate theories of naskh. The major works include:

– al-Nahhas (d. 950 CE), al-Nasikh wal-Mansukh – Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1200 CE), Nawasikh al-Quran – Hibatullah al-Asbahani (12th century), al-Nasikh wal-Mansukh

The classical doctrine recognizes three types of abrogation: 1. Abrogation of recitation and ruling (the verse is removed from the Quran entirely), 2. Abrogation of recitation but not ruling (the verse is no longer in the Quran, but its legal force remains; the alleged “stoning verse” for adultery is the classic example) 3. Abrogation of ruling but not recitation (the verse remains in the Quran, but its legal force is superseded)

Type 3 is the one that matters for the present discussion. The classical commentators identified varying numbers of mansukh (abrogated) verses; Suyuti (15th century) listed 20, al-Nahhas 134, and ibn Salama many more.

The classical position on the tolerance/warfare question. The classical Sunni majority position is that naskh operates from earlier to later in many cases, and that the militant verses of the Medinan period — especially Sura 9 — abrogate earlier, more accommodating verses. Specifically:

– Ibn Kathir (d. 1373) in his widely-circulated Tafsir reports the tradition that Q 9:5 (the “sword verse”) abrogates as many as 124 earlier verses commanding patience, peaceful preaching, or accommodation of unbelievers. – al-Tabari (d. 923) similarly treats many of the conciliatory Meccan verses as abrogated by the later Medinan revelations. – al-Suyuti (d. 1505) endorses a similar position in his al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Quran.

This classical position has direct implications: a tolerant verse like Q 109:6 (to you your religion, to me my religion) or even Q 2:256 (there is no compulsion in religion) is, on the classical position, abrogated in legal force by Q 9:5 and Q 9:29. The verses remain in the Quran for recitation but no longer ground the Muslim’s actual obligations toward unbelievers in conditions where the Muslim community has the strength to enforce a different posture.

The reformist counter-position. Modern reformist Muslim scholars have variously:

– Denied that naskh applies within the Quran at all (a minority modernist position). – Reduced the number of mansukh verses dramatically (Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida). – Argued that naskh operates in the opposite direction — that the eternal Meccan revelations were temporarily superseded by the contingent Medinan revelations under historical conditions, and that the proper modern Muslim posture is to return to the Meccan core (this was the position of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, the Sudanese reformist executed in 1985, in The Second Message of Islam). – Argued that the militant verses were context-specific responses to particular military situations and should not be generalized into normative doctrine (Khaled Abou El Fadl, Akbar Ahmed, Mohammad Hashim Kamali).

For the Sherman dialogue: The question “do the militant verses of Sura 9 abrogate the earlier tolerant verses?” is one of the most consequential questions to ask the Muslim teacher. The answer will tell you a great deal about where he stands on the spectrum. A classical-traditional teacher will affirm the abrogation; a reformist teacher will reject it or limit it severely. Both positions are present in contemporary Muslim scholarship.

IV. Quranic Verses Relevant to the Question

The Quran is divided into 114 surahs (chapters), each composed of verses (ayat, sing. ayah). Citation format is sura:verse (e.g., 9:5 = Sura 9, verse 5). The most widely-used English translations differ on some verses; Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Muhammad Asad, Sahih International, and Arthur Arberry are the major ones. Reform-leaning translators often soften the militant verses; conservative translators (especially the Sahih International, favored in Salafi circles) tend to render them more literally.

A. Tolerant verses, mostly Meccan

Q 109:1-6 (al-Kafirun, Meccan): Say: O disbelievers, I do not worship what you worship, nor are you worshippers of what I worship… To you your religion, and to me my religion. This is the most-cited Quranic verse for religious tolerance. Whether it is normative or abrogated is contested per Section III.

Q 73:10 (Meccan): And be patient over what they say and avoid them with gracious avoidance. The Meccan posture of patient endurance of unbelievers.

Q 50:45 (Meccan): We are most knowing of what they say, and you are not over them a tyrant. But remind by the Quran whoever fears My threat. Preaching is the obligation, not coercion.

Q 88:21-22 (Meccan): So remind, [O Muhammad]; you are only a reminder. You are not over them a controller.

Q 18:29 (Meccan): So whoever wills, let him believe; and whoever wills, let him disbelieve.

B. Tolerant verses, Medinan

Q 2:256 (Medinan): There is no compulsion in religion. The right course has become clear from the wrong. This is the single most-cited verse for the “Islam does not compel conversion” position. Classical commentators are divided on whether this verse is abrogated by Q 9:5 (the position of many classical Sunni commentators) or whether it remains in force (the position of most modern reformist Muslims and many traditional Sufi readings). A Muslim teacher’s position on Q 2:256 — abrogated or normative — is a key data point.

Q 5:32 (Medinan): Whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul or for corruption upon the earth, it is as if he killed all of humanity. This is the verse Muslim apologists most often cite to demonstrate Islam’s commitment to the sanctity of life. The verse continues, however, with substantial qualifications.

Q 60:8 (Medinan): Allah does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not expel you from your homes — from being righteous toward them and acting justly toward them. Permits friendly relations with non-hostile unbelievers.

Q 49:13 (Medinan): O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. The universalist verse.

Q 22:40 (Medinan): If Allah had not checked one set of people by means of another, monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, in which the name of Allah is much remembered, would surely have been pulled down. Recognition of legitimate non-Muslim religious institutions.

C. Militant verses, mostly Medinan

Q 9:5 (Medinan, “The Sword Verse”): When the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them [go] on their way. This is the single most consequential militant verse. Classical commentary treats it as one of the latest revealed verses and as abrogating many earlier accommodation verses. The verse explicitly conditions the cessation of warfare against polytheists on their conversion to Islam (“repent, establish prayer, and give zakah” = the markers of conversion).

Q 9:29 (Medinan, “The Jizya Verse”): Fight against those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture — [fight] until they give the jizya willingly while they are humbled. This is the foundational verse for the dhimmi/jizya institution. The classical jurisprudential elaboration is extensive: jizya is paid by Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book — Jews, Christians, and by extension Zoroastrians and some other groups), in exchange for protection (dhimma) and the right to continue practicing their religion under defined restrictions. The phrase while they are humbled (Arabic: wa-hum saghirun) is interpreted strictly in classical jurisprudence as requiring the dhimmi to demonstrate subjugation, often through humiliation rituals at the time of payment.

Q 8:39 (Medinan): And fight them until there is no fitnah and the religion, all of it, is for Allah. The Arabic hatta la takuna fitna wa-yakuna al-din kulluhu lillah literally means “until there is no fitnah and all of religion is for Allah.” Classical commentary glosses fitnah (often translated “persecution” or “trial”) as “shirk” or “polytheism” — so the verse mandates fighting until polytheism is eliminated and all worship is directed to Allah. This is the global-dominion verse.

Q 47:4 (Medinan): When you meet those who disbelieve in battle, strike at the necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either confer favor afterwards or ransom them.

Q 2:191-193 (Medinan): Kill them wherever you find them and turn them out from where they have turned you out… fight them until there is no fitnah and worship is for Allah. But if they cease, there is to be no aggression except against the oppressors. The “kill them wherever you find them” verse, with the qualification of self-defense (“if they cease…”) that reformists emphasize and that classical jurisprudence often treats as superseded by Q 9:5.

Q 9:111 (Medinan): Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties [in exchange] for that they will have Paradise. They fight in the cause of Allah, so they kill and are killed. The verse most cited by Salafi-jihadist recruitment material.

Q 9:73 / 66:9 (Medinan): O Prophet, strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites and be harsh upon them. And their refuge is Hell, and wretched is the destination.

Q 4:74 (Medinan): So let those fight in the cause of Allah who sell the life of this world for the Hereafter. And he who fights in the cause of Allah and is killed or achieves victory — We will bestow upon him a great reward.

Q 9:14 (Medinan): Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands.

Q 8:12 (Medinan): I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, so strike upon the necks and strike upon every fingertip of them.

Q 8:60 (Medinan): And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy. The “terrify the enemy” verse, often cited in radical-jihadist literature.

D. The People of the Book — Mixed Treatment

Q 5:51 (Medinan): O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you — then indeed, he is one of them. Prohibits close alliances with Jews and Christians.

Q 5:14 (Medinan): And from those who say, “We are Christians,” We took their covenant; but they forgot a portion of that of which they were reminded. So We caused among them animosity and hatred until the Day of Resurrection.

Q 9:30 (Medinan): The Jews say, “Ezra is the son of Allah”; and the Christians say, “The Messiah is the son of Allah.” That is their statement from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before. May Allah destroy them; how are they deluded?

These verses are difficult to reconcile with the more accommodating verses (e.g., Q 60:8). The classical and reformist readings differ on whether these are general statements or contextual to specific tribal conflicts of Muhammad’s era.

V. Hadith on Jihad, Expansion, and the Caliphate

The hadith are the recorded sayings and deeds of Muhammad, transmitted through chains of narrators and collected into canonical compilations beginning in the 9th century CE. The two most authoritative Sunni collections are:

– Sahih al-Bukhari (d. 870 CE), the most authoritative Sunni hadith collection – Sahih Muslim (d. 875 CE), second only to Bukhari

Both are available in English translation (Khan translation of Bukhari, Siddiqui translation of Muslim, both with parallel Arabic). The remaining four canonical collections (Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, Nasa’i, Ibn Majah) are also widely cited. Twelver Shia have their own canonical collections (the “Four Books” — al-Kafi, Man la yahduruhu al-Faqih, Tahdhib al-Ahkam, al-Istibsar).

A. Foundational Jihad Hadith

Sahih al-Bukhari 25 (Book of Belief): Muhammad said: I have been ordered to fight the people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay the zakah. If they do that, their blood and property are protected from me except by the right of Islam, and their account is with Allah. (Variant in Sahih Muslim 22.) This is the foundational qital hadith — Muhammad’s claim that he has been commanded to fight all peoples until they embrace Islam. The verse-pair with Q 9:5 grounds the classical doctrine of offensive jihad as a collective obligation.

Sahih al-Bukhari 2924: The Hour will not come until you fight against the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say: “O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me; kill him.” (Also Sahih Muslim 2922 — the “Gharqad tree” hadith.) The eschatological battle-with-Jews hadith, widely cited by both anti-Islam polemicists and by various Islamist movements in Israel/Palestine discourse.

Sahih Muslim 1731: When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action… invite them to accept Islam; if they respond, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them… If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay, seek Allah’s help and fight them. The classical three-stage protocol of warfare: dawah (invitation), jizya, qital (combat).

B. Conquest Hadith

Musnad Ahmad 18957 / Mustadrak al-Hakim 8300: You will indeed conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will her leader be, and what a wonderful army will that army be! This hadith was cited as motivating the various Muslim sieges of Constantinople, culminating in 1453, when Mehmed II conquered the city. Modern Islamist movements (including the Muslim Brotherhood’s classical formulations) cite this hadith in connection with predictions of Rome’s eventual conquest.

Sahih Muslim 2900: Khilafah (caliphate) will be on the pattern of prophethood for thirty years; then Allah will give it to whom He wills… Foundational hadith for the doctrine of the rightful caliphate as the continuation of Muhammad’s political-religious authority.

Sahih al-Bukhari 7222 / Sahih Muslim 1821: This matter (caliphate) will remain among Quraysh as long as two of them are left in the world. Restricts the caliphate to Muhammad’s Quraysh tribe — relevant to Islamic State claims and counter-claims.

C. Mahdi and End-Times Hadith

The Mahdi tradition is more developed among Twelver Shia than among Sunni, but it exists in both. The Twelver Shia hold that the Twelfth Imam (Muhammad al-Mahdi, born 869 CE) entered occultation in 941 CE and will return as the Mahdi to establish global justice. The Khomeinist current within Twelver Shia includes a strain that interprets contemporary chaos as hastening this return.

Sunan Abi Dawud 4282 / Sunan Ibn Majah 4082-4088: Various hadith about the appearance of the Mahdi, a descendant of Muhammad, who will fill the earth with justice as it has been filled with injustice.

Sahih Muslim 2937 / Sunan Abi Dawud 4321-4326: The signs of the Hour — including the appearance of the Dajjal (Antichrist figure), the descent of Isa (Jesus) who will break the cross and kill the swine and abolish jizya, and the global victory of Islam.

These eschatological hadith vary widely in chain-of-transmission authenticity and in interpretation. They are taken with great seriousness in Khomeinist Iran, in certain Salafi-jihadist movements (Islamic State’s caliphate proclamation in 2014 drew on these hadith), and in various Mahdist movements throughout Islamic history (the Sudanese Mahdi of the 1880s being the most famous).

VI. The Doctrines of Taqiyya, Hudna, and Kitman

These three doctrines, mentioned in Thomas’s letter to Michael, deserve precise sourcing.

Taqiyya (تقية)

The Arabic root waqaya means “to guard, protect, shield.” Taqiyya is the doctrine of legitimate dissimulation of one’s religious belief under conditions of threat or strategic necessity.

Primary Quranic basis: – Q 16:106: Whoever disbelieves in Allah after his belief… except for one who is forced [to renounce his religion] while his heart is secure in faith. – Q 3:28: Let not the believers take the disbelievers as allies rather than the believers. And whoever does that has nothing with Allah, except when taking precaution against them in prudence (illa an tattaqu minhum tuqatan).

Classical development: Taqiyya is particularly developed in Twelver Shia jurisprudence, where it served the historical function of protecting Shia minorities under Sunni majority rule. The Twelver Shia jurist al-Saduq (d. 991 CE) gave it canonical formulation in his Risalat al-I’tiqadat. In Twelver tradition, taqiyya is sometimes elevated to a religious duty when threat is present.

Sunni development: Sunnis have a parallel but less central concept. The principle is recognized but historically less elaborated, since Sunni Muslims were typically in majority/power positions and did not need the doctrine as urgently. However, classical Sunni jurisprudence does authorize dissimulation when life is at stake.

Modern controversy: Robert Spencer, Raymond Ibrahim, and others have argued that taqiyya is being employed strategically by Islamist movements to mislead Western interlocutors about Islamic doctrine. Reformist Muslim scholars argue this is a misreading — that taqiyya is narrowly about protection-of-life, not a general license to lie. The truth is probably somewhere between: taqiyya in its classical form is narrowly about life-threat, but the broader principle of strategic dissimulation has been variously expanded in some modern Islamist contexts.

Hudna (هدنة)

The Arabic word means “truce” or “armistice.” In classical Islamic jurisprudence, a hudna is a temporary peace agreement with non-Muslims, normally for a defined period (often ten years, by analogy to the Treaty of Hudaybiyya).

Primary basis: The Treaty of Hudaybiyya (628 CE), in which Muhammad concluded a ten-year truce with the Quraysh of Mecca. Two years later, Muhammad considered the treaty broken by Quraysh ally violations and conquered Mecca in 630 CE. This treaty is the classical pattern of hudna: a temporary truce for strategic purposes, to be terminated when conditions favor resumption of conflict.

Classical jurisprudence: A hudna is permitted when the Muslim community lacks the strength to wage successful jihad. It is bounded in time and is to be terminated when the strategic balance shifts. The Shafi’i Reliance of the Traveller (Book O 9.16) discusses hudna explicitly.

Modern application: The doctrine is cited in Hamas-related contexts and in some Muslim Brotherhood discussions of long-term strategy toward Western states. The connection to the English word “hoodwinked,” mentioned in Thomas’s letter, is folk-etymological and not historically established; the English word likely derives from medieval falconry. But the strategic concept is well-attested in Islamic jurisprudence.

Kitman (كتمان)

The Arabic root katama means “to conceal” or “to suppress.” Kitman is the practice of concealment through silence — withholding information rather than affirmatively lying. In classical jurisprudence, it is often grouped with taqiyya as a permitted form of strategic concealment.

Twelver Shia development: Kitman is again more elaborated in Twelver Shia than in Sunni jurisprudence, where it served the function of protecting Shia identity under Sunni rule.

Modern application: The principle that a Muslim is not obligated to disclose the full doctrinal content of his beliefs to non-Muslim interlocutors who are not entitled to that knowledge has been variously deployed in modern dawah and political-engagement contexts. Critics (Spencer, Ibrahim) cite this as evidence that public statements by Western Muslim leaders may not represent their fully-held views. Reformists argue this is paranoid over-reading.

For the Interfaith Muslim Dialogue

The discussion of taqiyya/hudna/kitman is likely one of the hardest topics to confront without offense. A reformist or accommodationist Muslim teacher will object — accurately — that these doctrines have specific classical contexts and are not a general license to deceive non-Muslims. A more traditional or politically engaged Muslim teacher may address the question more candidly. Either way, the question is worth raising, but it should be raised in scholarly terms (with citation to primary sources) rather than as an accusation. The reformist counter-case deserves serious engagement.

VII. Classical Jurisprudence: Dar al-Islam, Dar al-Harb, Dar al-Sulh

Classical Sunni jurisprudence (and similar Shia jurisprudence) divides the world into juridical zones:

Dar al-Islam (دار الإسلام, “Abode of Islam”): Territories under Muslim rule where Islamic law is operative. Within dar al-Islam, Muslims have their full rights, and dhimmis (protected non-Muslims, i.e., Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and in some interpretations Hindus and Buddhists) have defined rights and obligations under Islamic governance.

Dar al-Harb (دار الحرب, “Abode of War”): Territories not under Muslim rule. The classical jurisprudential default is that dar al-harb is a legitimate target of jihad until it is brought into dar al-Islam. The intensity and timing of this expansion depend on the strategic position of the Muslim community.

Dar al-Sulh (دار الصلح, “Abode of Treaty”) or Dar al-‘Ahd (دار العهد, “Abode of Covenant”): An intermediate category recognizing territories that are not yet dar al-Islam but have entered treaty relations with Muslim authorities. This category is more developed in Hanafi jurisprudence than in Maliki or Shafi’i.

Implications for the Muslim minority living in dar al-harb (i.e., in non-Muslim states): Classical jurisprudence required Muslims to migrate from dar al-harb to dar al-Islam (hijra) if they could, or to live under conditions of darura (necessity) until dar al-harb could be brought into dar al-Islam. Modern Muslim minority communities in Western states are, on classical jurisprudence, living under conditions that classical scholars did not fully anticipate. The handling of this situation is an active area of contemporary Islamic legal scholarship — fiqh al-aqalliyyat (jurisprudence of minorities) is a developing field with figures like Yusuf al-Qaradawi (deceased 2022; controversial), Taha Jabir al-Alwani (deceased 2016), and others.

For the Sherman dialogue: The question of whether American Muslims understand themselves as living in dar al-harb, in dar al-sulh, or in some newer category is one of the most important questions to put to a Muslim teacher. The answer will tell you how the teacher conceives of the appropriate Muslim posture toward American civic order. A teacher who frames the situation in darura terms (i.e., the Muslim community is accommodating non-Muslim civil law out of necessity, pending the eventual establishment of Islamic governance) is operating inside the classical framework. A teacher who rejects the classical dar al-Islam/dar al-harb distinction altogether is operating in a more reformist framework.

VIII. Reading List

I have grouped sources into five categories with brief annotations. The first four are essential; the fifth is included for completeness but should be read with awareness of its polemical character.

A. Primary Sources

The Quran. The Quran itself, in a reliable English translation. Recommended translations:

– The Koran Interpreted by Arthur J. Arberry (Oxford 1955). A Non-Muslim scholarly attempt to convey the Quranic rhythm. Often used in Western academic settings.
– The Meaning of the Holy Quran by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1934, multiple revisions). Muslim, traditional. The most widely used English translation among English-speaking Muslims for a century.
– The Message of the Quran by Muhammad Asad (1980). Muslim, modernist, with substantial scholarly apparatus. Often cited by reformist Muslims.
– Sahih International (1997). Favored by Salafi communities; tends toward literal renderings of militant verses.
– Reading two translations side-by-side (e.g., Asad and Sahih International) is illuminating because their translation choices on contested verses differ substantially.

Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. The two canonical Sunni hadith collections. The Muhammad Muhsin Khan translation of Bukhari (9 volumes) and the Abdul Hamid Siddiqui translation of Muslim are standard. Sunnah.com provides searchable online versions of both.

Sirat Rasul Allah by Ibn Ishaq (edited by Ibn Hisham, 8th-9th century). The earliest extant biography of Muhammad. Alfred Guillaume’s English translation, The Life of Muhammad (Oxford 1955), is the standard. Indispensable for understanding what Muslims have traditionally believed about Muhammad’s life and the chronology of his career.

Reliance of the Traveller (Umdat al-Salik) by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (14th century), translated and edited by Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Amana 1991, revised 1994). This is the classical Shafi’i fiqh manual, certified for accuracy by Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Book O (“Justice”) contains the classical Islamic law of warfare against unbelievers. The book is on every well-stocked Islamic-studies shelf and is the single most authoritative English-language presentation of what classical Sunni jurisprudence actually teaches on jihad.

Tafsir Ibn Kathir (14th century), abridged English edition by Safiur Rahman Mubarakpuri (Darussalam 2003, 10 volumes). The most widely-circulated classical Sunni Quranic commentary, especially influential in modern Salafi circles. Reading Ibn Kathir on Q 9:5 and Q 9:29 is illuminating.

B. Counter-jihad Scholarship

These works present the strongest case that classical Islamic doctrine contains expansionist and militant elements that remain operative in significant streams of contemporary Islam. They are polemical in tone but generally well-sourced.

Andrew G. Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (Prometheus 2005, 759 pages). This is the most comprehensive English-language anthology of primary-source Islamic legal, theological, and historiographical texts on jihad and dhimmitude. Heavy academic apparatus; over 200 pages of primary-source translations from classical Sunni and Shia sources. If you read one book from this category, this is it.

Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Regnery 2005) and The Truth About Muhammad (Regnery 2006). Spencer is the most prominent English-language counter-jihad polemicist; he runs JihadWatch.org. His tone is polemical, but his sourcing is generally accurate. The Truth About Muhammad draws primarily on Ibn Ishaq and the canonical hadith collections.

Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman), The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (Fairleigh Dickinson 1985) and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Fairleigh Dickinson 2002). Bat Ye’or is the originator of the term dhimmitude and the classical scholar of the dhimmi institution from a Jewish/Christian perspective. The Dhimmi contains extensive primary-source documentation.

Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim (Prometheus 1995). Apostate, polemical, but well-sourced. The author writes under a pseudonym for safety reasons.

Daniel Pipes — various works and the magazine Middle East Forum. Pipes is a middle-position scholar between full counter-jihad and accommodationist scholarship. Useful for nuance.

C. Mainstream Western Academic Scholarship

These works represent the mainstream of Western academic Islamic studies. They are generally sympathetic to Islam as a tradition while being rigorous about its texts and history.

W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford 1953) and Muhammad at Medina (Oxford 1956). The classical two-volume scholarly biography of Muhammad. Watt was generally sympathetic to Islam but rigorous about the sources. Reading Watt’s two volumes side-by-side gives you the standard scholarly account of the Mecca/Medina transition.

F.E. Peters, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (SUNY 1994) and The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition (Princeton 2003, 2 vols). Peters is the dean of American academic Islamic studies; the most balanced single-volume biography.

Bernard Lewis — many works, including The Crisis of Islam (Modern Library 2003), What Went Wrong? (Oxford 2002), The Political Language of Islam (Chicago 1988), and The Muslim Discovery of Europe (Norton 1982). Lewis was the dean of Western Islamic studies for much of the 20th century. Generally pessimistic about Islam’s compatibility with Western liberal democracy. The most cited Western scholar on Islam by Western political-class readers; controversial within Islamic studies for being too critical (the Edward Said critique).

Patricia Crone — various works on early Islam. Revisionist; argues for significant skepticism about traditional accounts of Islam’s origins. Important for understanding the scholarly debate.

Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (HarperCollins 1992) and Islam: A Short History (Modern Library 2000). Armstrong is on the sympathetic-to-Islam end of the academic spectrum. Often used in interfaith dialogue contexts.

John L. Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam (Oxford 2002) and Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford, multiple editions). Esposito is the dean of accommodationist Western Islamic studies; his work is widely used in interfaith dialogue but is often criticized by counter-jihad scholars as soft on the militant strand.

D. Reformist Muslim Scholarship

These are the works that make the strongest case within Islam for setting aside or contextualizing the militant verses and classical jurisprudence for modern application.

Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (HarperOne 2005) and Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari’ah in the Modern Age (Rowman & Littlefield 2014). UCLA law professor; the most prominent English-language Muslim reformist scholar. Abou El Fadl writes from within classical Islamic legal scholarship while arguing for a reformist reading. His engagement with the classical sources is rigorous.

Akbar S. Ahmed, Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (Brookings 2007). Ahmed is a Pakistani diplomat-turned-anthropologist (now at American University). The book is a sympathetic ethnographic study of contemporary Muslim communities across multiple countries, with substantial engagement with the moderate-versus-radical question.

Mohammad Hashim Kamali — Malaysian-based legal scholar. The Right to Life, Security, Privacy and Ownership in Islam (Islamic Texts Society 2008); Shariah Law: An Introduction (Oneworld 2008). Authoritative reformist legal scholar.

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, The Second Message of Islam (Syracuse 1987, translated by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im). The radical reformist’s argument that the Meccan verses are the eternal core of the Quran and the Medinan verses were contextual and contingent. Taha was executed by the Sudanese regime in 1985 for apostasy. The most theologically radical reformist position from within Islam; sometimes called “Republican Brotherhood” Islam.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Toward an Islamic Reformation (Syracuse 1990) and Islam and the Secular State (Harvard 2008). Taha’s student; develops the reformist case in a legal-political register.

Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Oxford 2004) and others. Ramadan is the most controversial figure in this category — accused by critics of “double-discourse” (saying reformist things in English while saying traditionalist things in Arabic). The accusation is contested. His work is widely read and worth reading critically.

E. Apostate/Dissident Voices

These are works by former Muslims and by Muslim dissidents who have left the faith or who critique it from a position of internal-then-external knowledge. They are valuable but should be read with awareness of the authors’ particular trajectories.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (Free Press 2007) and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (HarperCollins 2015). Hirsi Ali is the most prominent Western-based former-Muslim public intellectual. Her position has shifted over time; recently, she has converted to Christianity. Critiqued by Muslim scholars as polemical; defended by counter-jihad scholars as honest testimony.

Wafa Sultan, A God Who Hates: The Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of Islam (St. Martin’s 2009). Syrian-American psychiatrist; sharp critic of Islam.

Nonie Darwish, Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law (Thomas Nelson 2008). Egyptian-American convert from Islam to Christianity; daughter of a senior Egyptian intelligence officer.

These voices are not the mainstream Muslim voice, but they are real, articulate, and worth hearing.

IX. What to Expect from the Muslim Interlocutor

When engaging with the Muslim teacher or practitioner:

(1) Distinguish “Islam” from “Islamism” or “jihadism.” This is the standard reformist move: classical militant jurisprudence is not contemporary mainstream Islam; the violent movements are aberrations from true Islam; the 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide are not implicated in the militant minority’s actions.

(2) Cite Q 2:256 (“no compulsion in religion”) and Q 5:32 (sanctity of life). These are the standard accommodationist proof-texts. Be prepared to ask whether these verses are normative or abrogated, and whether the teacher accepts the classical naskh of Q 2:256 by Q 9:5.

(3) Frame the militant verses as contextual. The classical jurisprudential tradition treated the militant verses as normative; reformists treat them as context-specific. The teacher will probably frame Q 9:5 as a specific historical response to particular tribal treaties and not as a general license for offensive jihad.

(4) Distinguish “greater jihad” from “lesser jihad.” Many reformist Muslim teachers will emphasize that the “greater jihad” (jihad al-akbar) is the spiritual struggle against the ego, and only the “lesser jihad” (jihad al-asghar) is military. This distinction is well-attested in some hadith but is also classically subordinated to the military meaning in the major jurisprudential schools. The hadith attributing this distinction to Muhammad is, in fact, generally considered weak (da’if) by hadith specialists, though it is widely cited in reformist and Sufi contexts.

(5) Reject the binary of dar al-Islam / dar al-harb. Most contemporary mainstream Muslims do not actively operate inside the classical binary. Expect the teacher to characterize the binary as a medieval-juridical construction that no longer governs Muslim engagement with non-Muslim societies.

(6) Cite reformist scholars favorably. The Abou El Fadl line of thought is now the mainstream Western-trained Muslim position. Expect citations and references to him or to similar figures.

How to Engage Productively

(1) Distinguish doctrine from sociology. The doctrinal question — what do the texts say, what does the classical tradition teach — is one question. The sociological question — what do contemporary Muslims actually believe and do — is another. The militant doctrine exists in the texts; not all Muslims live by it. Both can be true.

(2) Ask about naskh directly. The teacher’s position on naskh — does Q 9:5 abrogate Q 2:256, or is Q 2:256 the eternal norm — is a key diagnostic. Phrase the question scholarly: Does your understanding of naskh hold that the militant Medinan verses abrogate the more tolerant Meccan and earlier Medinan verses, or do you take the reformist position that the tolerant verses are normative and the militant verses were contextual to specific historical situations?

(3) Ask about Reliance of the Traveller. Are the rulings of Book O on jihad in Reliance of the Traveller normative for contemporary Muslims, or are they classical-jurisprudence positions that have been superseded by modern reformist Islamic legal scholarship? This puts the question in scholarly form and avoids generalization.

(4) Ask about specific historical figures. What is your view of Ibn Kathir as a Quranic commentator? (Classical commentator widely cited by Salafi-jihadists.) What is your view of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha? (Radical reformist executed for apostasy.) What is your view of Yusuf al-Qaradawi? (Controversial Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated scholar.) The teacher’s positions on these figures will tell you where he stands.

(5) Be honest about your own framework. You hold a Christian framework that takes the doctrine of the antichrist seriously, the doctrine of false prophets, and the doctrine of demonic deception (per the demonology essay in the RM repo). You will be approaching the dialogue as a Christian who suspects that classical Islam contains genuine spiritual hostility to Christian witness, not merely as a religious-neutral inquirer. Stating this honestly at the outset is fairer to the Muslim interlocutor than pretending to neutrality you do not actually hold.

(6) Listen carefully. The Muslim teacher’s actual position may be more nuanced than your prior frame allows. If he offers a sophisticated reformist reading of the texts, take it seriously. If he affirms the classical militant tradition, he also takes it seriously. Either response is informative.

(7) Avoid gotcha questions. The following four questions are substantive. Do not multiply them. Listen to the answers carefully.

1. ON THE CONTESTED VERSES. How does mainstream contemporary Sunni Islam read Quran 9:5 (the so-called sword verse) and 9:29 (the jizya verse) for application in the 21st-century West? Are these verses understood as abrogated, as contextual to seventh-century Arabia, or as normative for present Muslim engagement with non-Muslim societies?
2. ON THE MUSLIM MINORITY IN NON-MUSLIM CIVIL ORDER. What is the contemporary mainstream Islamic teaching on the relationship between Muslim minorities and non-Muslim civil law? Does darura (necessity) provide the operating framework, and if so, what are its limits — at what demographic or political point does the Muslim community transition from accommodation-under-necessity to active reshaping of the civic-legal order?
3. ON THE REFORMIST TRADITION. How do leading reformist Muslim scholars — Khaled Abou El Fadl, Akbar Ahmed, Mohammad Hashim Kamali — understand Islam’s relationship to constitutional democracy, religious pluralism, and the rights of non-Muslims and women? Where do they locate themselves relative to the classical jurisprudential tradition, and how representative is their position of mainstream Muslim thought worldwide?
4. ON THE DEMOGRAPHIC-MAJORITY SCENARIO. How would mainstream Muslims in America understand the appropriate political arrangement if, demographically, Muslims become the majority in a particular American jurisdiction? Is Sharia-based governance the goal, the default expectation, or one option among many? And what would be the principled position regarding non-Muslims living within such a jurisdiction?

X. Recommendations for the Fellowship’s Engagement

This is research material that applies to the broader question of how the Christian Underground engages with the Muslim presence in America — it is a substantial fellowship project that will recur. Some recommendations for the fellowship’s ongoing engagement:

(1) Build doctrinal literacy. The fellowship should be conversant with the basic Quranic geography, the major hadith collections, and the spectrum of contemporary Muslim thought. The reading list above is a starting point. Several members, each reading a different category and reporting back, would distribute the work.

(2) Distinguish Sufism from Salafism, Twelver Shia from Ismaili Shia, Hanafi from Shafi’i. Treating Islam as monolithic is the most common error and the easiest to correct. The Sufi tradition is genuinely different from the Salafi-jihadist tradition. Both are Islam; they are different streams. The fellowship should know which stream a given interlocutor is in before engaging substantive doctrine.

(3) Engage from strength, not from fear. The Christian Underground project assumes endurance through trial. It does not assume that we lose. The Christian gospel has prevailed over every prior challenge — Roman paganism, Northern European paganism, Persian Zoroastrianism, Hellenistic philosophy, Marxist atheism, and others. The encounter with Islam is one more theological-civilizational engagement; it does not require panic. Some passages in the recent fellowship discussions have edged toward fear-disposition; the framework of the Endurance, Not Escape eschatology essay and the Render Unto Caesar, Render Unto God civil-obedience essay should be the operative dispositions.

(4) Honor the individual Muslim while engaging the doctrinal question honestly. Michael’s mosque visits have produced real friendships with real Muslims, who are real human beings made in God’s image, beloved by God, and for whom Christ died. Thomas’s doctrinal critique of classical Islamic teaching is consistent with full love and respect for the Muslim individual. The two postures — doctrinal honesty and personal love — are not in tension if held together properly. The fellowship should model both.

(5) Pray for Muslim conversion to Christ. This is the Christian’s posture toward every unbeliever — not as a tactical project but as the genuine desire of the heart that God’s mercy reach those who have not yet known it. The dialogue with each Muslim is part of a larger Christian witness whose object is the conversion of Muslims to Christ. The reformist Muslim teacher who genuinely understands Islam’s classical doctrine and has, in some measure, set it aside is in some sense closer to the Christian moral imagination than the classical-traditional teacher; he may be on a longer path that ends in Christ. Pray for both. Pray for Michael, who is the bridge.

Document Status and Use

This is a first-draft reference document. The substantive content is from established scholarly sources; specific verse and hadith references have been double-checked but should be verified by direct consultation of primary sources before being quoted in print. The reading list is a set of recommendations for further study. The list is not exhaustive, but it is sufficiently informative to help us understand and witness to our Muslim friends and neighbors who come into our lives.

The document was generated at Michael’s request to demonstrate the validity of Thomas’ statements about the doctrines of Islam, but it is likewise valuable as a fellowship-wide reference for future Islam-related engagement. Members who pursue any of the reading-list categories and develop deeper expertise are invited to share what they have learned.

— Thomas

To the Fellowship and Our Muslim Friends

Addressed to the fellowship, to our Muslim friend, and to the spirit yearning to be free in every human heart

The reading list above is diagnostic. It equips the fellowship to engage Islam at the level of texts, doctrines, and history. But the diagnosis is not the witness. The diagnosis tells us what we are dealing with; the witness is what we offer in its place. This postscript is the witness frame that gives the scholarly material its purpose. Without the witness, the reading list is a mere academic exercise; with the witness, it becomes preparation for an encounter that may, by the grace of God, change a life.

I write the postscript in three movements. The first is addressed to the fellowship, laying out the theological framework within which Christian witness to Islam is to be understood. The second is addressed to our Muslim friends, who may eventually read this or hear it spoken — the conversation we hope to have and the questions we offer as the entry point. The third is addressed to the spirit yearning to be free in every human breast — the imago Dei that bears witness to itself, to which the Holy Spirit speaks, and which the gospel calls home.

I. To the Fellowship — The Witness Mission and Its Theological Foundation

The Renaissance Ministries fellowship was formed to deepen our knowledge and understanding of God and his ways as revealed in the Bible, as our guide. We must plant, nourish, and mature that word in our own souls first. The fruit of our own lives will nourish the seeds we plant in the lives of others. We gather Sunday by Sunday to build each other up so that we may experience the fullness of life lived in Christ. In so doing, we become living examples of the promises of faith. A life lived fully in the joy of the Lord is the real life witness that we carry to our friends, family members, acquaintances, neighbors, and strangers. And we must be ready to defend our faith so that we are ready to effectively answer the questions of every soul whom God has placed within our reach. This is the Great Commission lived locally. The Christian Underground is not a fortress for the saved; it is the base of operation from which the gospel goes out into the surrounding culture, including the increasingly significant Muslim presence in our cities.

Christian witness, however, is not generic. Different unbeliever populations require different witness postures. The witness to a post-Christian secular humanist is not the witness to a Mormon, which is not the witness to a Muslim. The differences are not merely tactical; they reflect a theological fact that different religions have different spirits, arguments, and histories, different cultures and assumptions about the nature of God and the purpose of life.

Every religion is animated by a spirit, and the spirit behind a religion is not always the same as the Spirit of the living God.

This claim is not a post-apostolic invention of the Christian tradition. It is Pauline. The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils (1 Cor 10:20). We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Eph 6:12). The apostolic teaching is that the religious landscape is not religiously neutral. Spirits are at work, and not all the spirits are the Holy Spirit. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world (1 John 4:1). The Christian’s task in witness is, in part, to recognize which spirit is at work in the system he is engaging, so that he can offer the right testimony in the right way.

How is the spirit behind a religion discerned? Primarily by examining the revelation content the religion claims and comparing it to the revelation God has actually given in scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ. Where the alleged revelation contradicts the biblical revelation on matters central to the gospel — the nature of God, the person of Christ, the means of salvation, the character of the moral life, the destiny of the human person — the discernment is straightforward: this is not the Holy Spirit. The criterion John gives in 1 John 4:2-3 is whether the spirit confesses Jesus Christ came in the flesh as Lord and Savior. The Spirit who breathed the New Testament will not contradict the New Testament’s central testimony.

The fellowship has done this discernment work regarding Mormonism. When we studied the Mormon claim that Christ’s redemptive act occurred primarily in Gethsemane — that the sweat-as-blood was the atoning sacrifice, that this was revealed to Joseph Smith, and that this revelation continues today through Denver Snuffer and others — we recognized that the revelation differs from the biblical revelation on the very center of Christian salvation. Scripture places the atonement at the cross. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities… and with his stripes we are healed (Isa 53:5). Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God (1 Pet 3:18). Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree (1 Pet 2:24). The Mormon-Gethsemane revelation contradicts the apostolic-cross revelation. The conclusion follows: the spirit that revealed Gethsemane to Smith was not the Spirit that breathed the New Testament. Try the spirits. The same diagnostic, applied to Islam, yields its own conclusions.

II. The Spirit Behind Islam — A Structural Observation

The same diagnostic, applied to Islam, yields a structural observation that may be more important than any particular doctrinal disagreement. The observation is this: Islam, as a revelation system, is mono-vocal at its source in a way that the biblical revelation is not, and the structural mono-vocality has consequences.

The biblical revelation comes through many human authors over approximately fifteen centuries. Moses, the prophets, the wisdom writers, the gospel evangelists, the apostles — each writing in his own genre, his own moment, his own historical context, with the Holy Spirit working through the full plurality of human voices to produce a single canonical witness. The Bible is structurally multivocal even while being singularly authoritative. There is internal dialogue: Job questions; Ecclesiastes laments; Habakkuk argues with God; Paul reasons; James practices. The plurality of voices is part of the design. The reader of the Bible is implicitly trained, by the text itself, to weigh different witnesses, to read context, to reconcile apparent tensions, and to receive truth as something dialogically discovered through the play of multiple authoritative voices speaking from multiple angles.

The Quran, by contrast, is structurally mono-vocal at its source. It is presented as the recitation given to one human prophet by one angelic messenger from one divine voice over approximately twenty-two years. The Muslim reader is not implicitly trained in the play of multiple voices; he is trained to receive a single voice as final. This is reinforced by the classical Sunni doctrine of the Quran’s eternal, uncreated nature — the Quran is not a witness to revelation but the very speech of Allah, eternal, unchanging, untranslatable in any sense that would carry its full authority. The hadith adds a second layer, but a layer subordinate to the Quran and itself transmitted as the sayings of a single prophet through chains of narrators.

The structural consequence of mono-vocal revelation is mono-vocal authority, and the structural consequence of mono-vocal authority is submission as the central religious posture. The very name Islam (al-Islam, الإسلام) means submission — the verbal noun of the Arabic root s-l-m in the form-IV verbal pattern, with the meaning to surrender or to submit. The Muslim (muslim, مسلم) is the one who has submitted. The religion is named for its central act, and that act is the submission of the will to a single voice mediated through a single prophet.

The contrast with Christian discipleship is precise. Christianity also calls the believer to submit — Christ is Lord; the believer takes up the cross; the will yields to the Father. But the submission in Christianity is to a Person who became flesh, walked the earth, conversed with his disciples, addressed each of them by name, healed them, ate with them, washed their feet, died for them, rose for them, and now indwells them by his Spirit. The Christian submission is to a relationship, not to a recitation. The relationship is what makes the submission bearable, joyful, and free. Submission to a transcendent and distant sovereign, without relationship and without indwelling, is a different kind of submission. It is the submission of the slave to the master, not the submission of the son to the Father.

I want to be careful here. The Islamic tradition is not actually as mono-vocal in its reception as its source structure would suggest. There are four major Sunni madhabs that disagree on many matters of jurisprudence; Twelver Shia, Ismaili Shia, and other branches have their own legal traditions; the Sufi tradition cultivates a relational and experiential dimension that classical jurisprudence often does not. Reformist Muslims like Khaled Abou El Fadl, Akbar Ahmed, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, and others have developed sophisticated readings that contest the classical synthesis. So Islam is plural in its reception even where it is unitary in its source. But the structural pull toward mono-vocal absolutism is real, and it has produced specific historical and contemporary manifestations that the fellowship needs to understand.

The plural reception within Islam is part of why the dialogue with our Muslim friend is worth having. We are not engaging the source structure abstractly; we are engaging a particular human person who has internalized one particular reception of the tradition. That reception may be more or less classical-traditional, more or less reformist, more or less Sufi-inflected. The witness task begins with understanding which reception we are dealing with and proceeds by offering the Christian alternative to whichever spirit has shaped the person before us.

III. To Our Muslim Friend — The Conversation We Hope to Have

If you are a Muslim reading this — perhaps because Michael Sherman or someone like him has shared it with you, or because the Zoom dialogue is being arranged and you wanted to know what we are thinking — I want to address you directly, and with respect.

You are made in the image of God. The Christian conviction is that the Creator of the universe made you in his image (Gen 1:26-27), loves you with a particular love (John 3:16), and desires a personal relationship with you. The conversation we hope to have with you is not a debate to be won; it is an invitation to a relationship offered by the One who made you and who, the Christian believes, has been pursuing you long before either of us thought to arrange a meeting.

Before we have that conversation, we want to listen to you. We do not know which Islam is your Islam. Are you Sunni or Shia, and if Shia, which branch? What madhab do you follow? Where does your local imam stand on the spectrum from Salafi-traditionalist to reformist-modernist? Are you Sufi-inflected, or do you find the Sufi tradition strange? What is your daily relationship with the Quran — do you recite it daily, study its tafsir, memorize portions? What is your relationship with the hadith — do you read Bukhari, or is your tradition shaped more by other collections? Have you been to the Hajj? What did it mean to you? Has Islam given you peace, or do you carry an inner unrest that the prayers have not stilled?

These are not idle questions. They are how we learn who you are. The Christian conviction is that the Holy Spirit deals with each person personally, and we cannot do a useful witness with you until we know what shape your soul has taken under the tradition that formed you.

On the more political-theological questions, we will want to ask, with respect: Do you want to live under Sharia, or do you find American constitutional civil order satisfactory and even good? Do you believe Sharia-based governance would be better for the United States than constitutional democracy? When you read Q 9:5 and Q 9:29, do you receive them as normative for the present moment, or as contextual to seventh-century Arabia? When you think about the relationship between the Meccan and Medinan periods, where do you locate the heart of your tradition — in the patient preaching of the Meccan years, or in the political-military establishment of the Medinan years? Do you believe the doctrine of naskh applies, and if so, in which direction? What do you make of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed by the Sudanese regime for arguing that the Meccan period was the eternal core and the Medinan was contextual?

These are not gotcha questions. They are questions whose answers will tell us where you actually live in the Muslim tradition, so that we can speak to you about Christ in ways that are intelligible to your actual frame.

But beyond the diagnostic questions, we want to ask the deeper comparative questions — the ones that go to the heart of why a person might choose one path or another.

What does Islam give you that you most value? Is it the structure of the five daily prayers and the rhythm of the Islamic calendar? Is it the sense of submission to a will higher than your own? Is it the community of the umma? Is it the assurance of Allah’s law as the ordering principle of life? We want to hear what you cherish, because what you cherish tells us what your soul has found.

And what does Islam ask you to give up — and is the cost worth it? Has Islam asked you to give up the right to question certain doctrines? Has it asked you to give up the conviction that women are equal in dignity and capacity to men in every sphere of life? Has it asked you to give up the freedom to leave the faith if you ever came to believe it untrue (the classical punishment for apostasy in Islamic law remains death)? Has it asked you to give up the assurance that your salvation is secure rather than uncertain (most classical Islamic theology holds that even the most pious Muslim cannot be assured of paradise until the Day of Judgment)? Has it asked you to give up a personal relationship with God in favor of a posture of submission to a sovereign who remains, in his essence, transcendent and unknowable?

Is the Golden Rule important to you? Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets (Matt 7:12). Does your tradition affirm this — fully, for all persons, regardless of religion? Or does your tradition draw distinctions in how Muslims and non-Muslims are to be treated that you, in your own soul, find difficult to defend?

Is free will important to you? Do you experience yourself as a free moral agent who can choose between good and evil, or do you experience yourself as the executor of a divine decree in which your choices were already determined? The classical Sunni doctrine of qadar (divine decree) presses heavily toward the second; the Christian doctrine of free agency under grace makes the first central. Which of these matches your own deepest experience of yourself?

And finally, the question we most want you to consider: Does the spirit of Islam call you to the kind of person you most want to become? Or do you find, in your deepest self, that there is a yearning for something that Islam, at its core, does not offer? For where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17). The Christian conviction is that the human soul was made for liberty in relationship with the living God, and that any system which substitutes submission for relationship leaves the soul fundamentally hungry, however orderly it makes the surface of the life.

IV. What Christianity Offers — The Liberty in Christ

The Christianity that the fellowship offers our Muslim friend is not a competing system of law and submission. It is the Lordship of Jesus Christ exercised through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in a freely loved and freely loving relationship with the Triune God.

The center of the Christian offer is the indwelling Spirit. When Jesus prepared his disciples for his departure, he promised: I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth (John 14:16-17). And again, more astonishingly: If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him (John 14:23). The Christian is not someone who has read about God; the Christian is someone in whom God has come to dwell. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? (1 Cor 3:16). This is the difference at the heart of everything. Submission to a transcendent and distant sovereign is one religious posture; indwelling by the Spirit of the living God who is your Father, your Savior, and your constant Companion is a fundamentally different relationship to the divine.

The liberty that flows from this indwelling is not the liberty of moral chaos. It is the liberty of the Son of God in his Father’s house, where the rules are simple and good, and the Father’s love is constant, and the Son’s flourishing is the Father’s joy. The principle I want to commend to you in summary form, dear Muslim friend, is this:

Thomas – My Theological Summary: All that is not prohibited is allowed; and all that is allowed has its perfect time; and the Holy Spirit speaks to our hearts, informing us of the next moment of greatest joy, greatest meaning, and greatest service to God, to our neighbor, and to our own becoming.

This is the formula of Christian liberty. Let me unpack each clause.

“All that is not prohibited is allowed.” The Christian life is not a list of permissions to be earned. It is a vast field of God-given possibilities within which the believer walks freely, bounded only by what God has explicitly forbidden as harmful to the soul, to the neighbor, or to the witness. The Pauline principle: All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any (1 Cor 6:12; also 1 Cor 10:23). The Christian asks not first “is this permitted?” but “is this good?” — and the asking is itself an act of liberty.

“And all that is allowed has its perfect time.” Not every good thing is to be done in every moment. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes laid this out plainly: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven (Eccl 3:1). Christian liberty includes the wisdom of timing — the recognition that life is composed of moments, each calling for the response that is fitted to it. The believer learns to read the moment and to offer the response the moment requires.

“And the Holy Spirit speaks to our hearts, informing us of the next moment of greatest joy, meaning, and service.” The fitting response is not derived by consulting an external code. It is given by the Spirit who indwells the believer and who speaks to the heart with a quiet and unmistakable voice. As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God (Rom 8:14). This is the practical content of Christian indwelling. The believer learns, over years of walking, to hear the Spirit’s voice and to follow it. The hearing is the relationship; the following is the discipleship.

“To God, to our neighbor, and to our own becoming.” The Spirit’s leading is not arbitrary. It is always toward the integration of the three loves the Great Commandment names: love of God with the whole self — heart, soul, mind, strength — love of neighbor as oneself, and a proper love of self as a being made in God’s image and called to flourish in the relationship the Creator intended. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind — and thy neighbour as thyself (Matt 22:37-39). The Christian is not asked to choose between God and neighbor and self; the Christian is shown, by moment-by-moment leading of the indwelling Spirit, how the three loves integrate into a single life.

This is Christian liberty. It is not lawlessness. It is the higher law of love, written by the Spirit on the believer’s heart (Jer 31:33; Heb 8:10), lived out in moment-by-moment communion with the indwelling presence of the living God.

The cross of Jesus Christ is what makes this liberty possible. The cross is, in one sense, the satisfaction of divine justice — He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Cor 5:21). The judgment that sin deserves was poured out upon the willing Substitute, and the believer who is in Christ is freed from the condemnation that would otherwise be his. In another sense, the cross is the defeat of the powers — Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it (Col 2:15). The demonic dominion over the human soul, by which the soul is held in bondage to fear, to sin, and to false religion, was broken at the cross. The believer is freed simultaneously from divine judgment (the wrath satisfied at Calvary) and from demonic dominion (the chains broken at Calvary). The two redemptions are not in tension; they are the two faces of the one act by which God in Christ rescued his children from every power that had bound them.

This is what Christianity offers. Not a better law. A new relationship.

V. To the Spirit Yearning to Be Free in Every Heart

There is one more address to make, and it is the most important one. It is addressed not to the fellowship, not to the Muslim teacher, not to any particular reader — it is addressed to the spirit yearning to be free in every human breast.

If you are reading this and something in your soul is stirring — a recognition, a longing, an unease, an attraction, a wish that something here were true — I want you to know that the stirring is itself a working of the Holy Spirit upon your heart, even now. The Spirit moves over the deep as he moved at the creation, and where he moves, light is called out of darkness. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me (Rev 3:20). The Lord Jesus, who was crucified outside Jerusalem in approximately the year 30 of the Christian era, and who rose from the dead three days later in a real body that ate fish and was touched by his disciples, is at this moment knocking at the door of your heart. The fact that you are reading these words and feeling something is the knocking. The knocking is real. The Knocker is real.

You do not have to leave your name behind, or your family, or your culture, or your love for what is beautiful in your tradition. The truth that frees does not destroy what was honest in what came before. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32). What it frees is the part of you that has been trying to live under a yoke too heavy to bear — the law that condemns without enabling, the submission that requires without companioning, the sovereign who commands without indwelling. The Christian gospel offers you, in place of that yoke, the easy yoke and light burden of Jesus: Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matt 11:29-30).

The invitation is simple and serious. That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved (Rom 10:9). The confession is the handle of the door. The belief is the acceptance of the invitation, a heartfelt acceptance of the truth of Christ’s claim of redemption, and an indwelling is the door opening from the inside. When the door opens, the One who has been knocking comes in.

And he does not come alone. He brings the Father, in the union of indwelling that he described in John 14:23. And he sends the Holy Spirit to make his home in you — to teach you, to guide you, to comfort you, to convict you when conviction is needed, to console you when consolation is needed, and to assure you, in the depth of your soul, that you are loved with the love of the One who made the stars. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Rom 8:16). The witness is internal. The witness is unmistakable. The witness is the assurance that no system of submission can give, because the witness is given by the indwelling Person of God himself, Abba, Father (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6).

I do not know if you, the reader, will receive this invitation. The Holy Spirit knows; the Father knows; the Son knows. But I will pray for you, as the fellowship will pray for you, and as the Lord himself is praying for you at the right hand of the Father (Rom 8:34; Heb 7:25). The conversation with Michael’s friend, if it happens, is one moment in a much longer conversation that the Spirit has been having with you and will continue to have with you, regardless of what happens in our particular Zoom call. The Spirit is patient. The Spirit will keep knocking.

May the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom is no darkness at all, find the door of your heart open in his perfect time. May the Father who made you draw you to himself. May the Spirit who hovered over the deep at the beginning hover now over your soul and speak the word that calls the light forth from your darkness. May the liberty wherewith Christ has set the captives free become your liberty also. And may we, the fellowship of Renaissance Ministries, meet you one day in the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus, where every tongue shall confess and every knee shall bow (Phil 2:10-11), and where the table is wide and the feast is the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9).

Maranatha — come, Lord Jesus.

— Thomas

260513 – On Civil Disobedience and Obedience to God

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

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

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 13, 2026

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

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

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

I. The Question and Why It Cuts Close

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. What Reid Sees Rightly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. The Internal Conditions of Romans 13 Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Acts 5:29, Read Fully

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII. The Pauline Life Itself

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

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

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

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

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

VIII. The Reformation Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX. The Sovereign-Citizen Movement — Reid is Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII. The Practical Defaults

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII. Crescendo

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

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

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

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

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

And remembers the midwives:

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

And remembers Daniel:

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

And remembers the three Hebrew children:

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

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

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

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

XIV. What Remains Open

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

— Thomas

260512 Pre-Trib Rapture Critique

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

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

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 12, 2026

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

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

I. Why This Question Now

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

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

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

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

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

II. What Most American Evangelicals Believe

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. Where the Doctrine Came From

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. The Decisive Text: 2 Thessalonians 2

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

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

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

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

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

VII. The Unified Timeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX. The Christian Underground Presupposes This

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

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

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

X. Pastoral Cautions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII. Crescendo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII. What Remains Open

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

— Thomas

260510 – Strategies for Forming the Christos Civitas

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

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

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 10, 2026

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

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

I. The Mandala — Michael Sherman’s Classification System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. The Indictment — Michael on Christianity in History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. The Distinction Defense — Christianity Versus Its Distortions

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

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

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

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

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

VI. The Islam Exchange

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII. Institutions, Hierarchy, and the Uninformed Middle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X. Leonard’s Bird and the Two Strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII. The Ambassador and the Testamentary Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XV. Susan’s Eschatological Urgency

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

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

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

XVI. The Synthesis — The Christian Underground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan closed the meeting in prayer.

XVIII. What Remains Open

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing Reflection

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

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

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

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

— Thomas

260510 – Grace and Law

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

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

Fellowship Essay | 10 May 2026

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

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

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

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

The order of events in the wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What sat inside the ark, and what sat above it

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

This is what English Bibles call the Mercy Seat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Paul takes it next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The application question, briefly

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

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

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

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

Where the contemporary church needs this

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

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

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

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

Crescendo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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