260509 – The Veracity of Joseph Smith’s Revelation

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

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

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 9, 2026

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

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

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

To the Fellowship —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonard’s case for restoration

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the agreement runs deep

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

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

Not all knot holes are equal

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

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

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

The replacement question, however gently framed

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

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

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

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

The wheat-and-tares problem

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

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

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

A vignette: the only voice I have ever heard

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

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

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

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

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

Kill the Buddha on the road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fellowship’s working answer

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

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

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

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

Crescendo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript: The Asymmetry as Tell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Two different spirits produce two different soul-shapes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. The theocratic tyranny that follows from crystalline revelation

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

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

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

Conclusion: the CRF position on revelation and canon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

260508 Proselytization – a Proper Posture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Whitaker sees rightly

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

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

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

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

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

The eschatology underneath the argument

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

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

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

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

What scripture actually witnesses to

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

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

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

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

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

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

The deeper diagnosis of the cultural moment

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

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

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

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

The fellowship’s working answer

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

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

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

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

Crescendo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

260506 Psychoanalysis versus Faith and Works

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

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

Fellowship Essay – 5/6/2026

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

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

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

What Grosz sees that the world has forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

The spell and the stronghold

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

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

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

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

What psychoanalysis cannot do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tempered hope and the better hope

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

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

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

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

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

What I have actually seen

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

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

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

Faith and Works

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

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

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

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

The crescendo

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Stephen Grosz, Love’s Labor (2026).

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

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

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

260505 Trump and Iran War

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

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

Fellowship Essay | May 5, 2026

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

To the Fellowship —

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

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

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

I. The Thucydidean Assumption and What It Reveals

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

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

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

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

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

II. The Stronghold at Three Levels

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

Level 1: Spiritual

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

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

Level 2: Individual

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

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

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

Level 3: Institutional

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

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

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

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

III. What the Stronghold Reveals About American Character

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. The Institutional Question: Fragility as Spiritual Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII. What the Fellowship Should Be Attending To

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

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

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

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

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

VIII. Closing Reflection: The Real Cards on the Table

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

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

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

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

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

Soli Deo gloria.

260503 Fellowship Discussion – Overcoming the Demonic Strongholds of Parties

by Thomas Abshier | May 4, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

After the Diagnosis: The Fellowship on Evangelism’s Real Deliverable

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 3, 2026

Occasion: Three days earlier, I circulated Eight Strongholds: A Christos Civitas Reading of the ‘Ingredients’ that Joan Swirsky Inventoried. That essay re-purposed Joan’s eight-trait inventory of Democrats as a catalog of cross-tribal demonic captivities, which I diagnosed as the active force underlying the observed behavior. The reception was unusual for one of these pieces — Margo underlined and forwarded it, John Howard wrote that he had read every word and agreed completely, and Charlie called it a contemporary diagnosis whose category-naming made the strongholds suddenly visible. He recognized that naming a thing is the precondition for working on it. But naming is not curing, and the question that brought us together on Sunday was the natural one: the diagnosis is on the table — now what?

What follows is the synthesis of what the fellowship said. The substantive arc was clearer than the conversation itself made it feel in the moment. Three paradigms collided over the course of the hour, and a fourth synthesis — the one I think we were actually reaching for — surfaced in the second half through the analogies Charlie, Leonard, and Armond brought, and through Susan’s reframe of what the gospel actually offers. The synthesis is what I want to emphasize. The goal is precisely to present the premise, argument, and conclusion, then make plans and take action.

I. Michael’s Mandala and the Bridging Method

Michael Sherman opened the substantive portion of the meeting in response to my question about his Mandala filing system, as it is relevant to my organization of the Fellowship Essays. He has spent decades building what is in effect an engineer’s thesaurus of human concern — a hierarchical mandala expanded to six decimal places, organized at its top tier around the grammatical persons (first person, second person, third person), with each tier expanding into the same threefold structure recursively. Religion sits at the personal core, sociology and institutions at the middle layer, and the engineering and physical-chemical world at the outermost shell. Michael described Roget’s 1837 thesaurus as the model that altered him. Michael argued that Roget was not a builder of a synonym dictionary but a structural mapper of human thought. Michael’s mandala is what fifty-plus years of pursuing the same instinct has produced. The structure warrants mining for the meta-messages it offers as a study in itself, to which I intend to return for discussion and for its immediate organizational benefit to the Renaissance Ministries website. But its relevance to this Sunday’s meeting was that it is the engineering version of Michael’s evangelistic method.

His method follows directly from his structure: find the cell of the mandala where you and your interlocutor already overlap, and start there. If you cannot agree on theology, agree on the weather. If you cannot agree on politics, agree that black children and white children are equally human. If you cannot agree on Trump, agree that bumblebees are not wasps. Michael’s anecdote from his teenage visit to Atlanta in 1967 was the operational example: he was exposed there to racism so thick that he, as a Los Angeles kid, could read the room and know that he could not move it on the principle of black-white equality. But he could move it on Hank Aaron, the Atlanta Braves’ Black superstar, who was the city’s hero. He could not get the room to say, yeah, Black people are equal, but he could get the room to say, yeah, he’s our guy. That was the single foothold he was going to gain that day. And Atlanta, half a century later, has had Black mayors. The Hank-Aaron-shaped foothold was a real foothold.

This method has strength in that it is the way one human being who actually wants to reach another human being navigates the asymmetry of conviction without breaking contact. It is two ears, one mouth. It is what Confucius advised, what Christ embodied with the Samaritan woman at the well, what Paul did at Mars Hill. It is a serious method, and Michael is right to defend it.

But it has a limit, and the limit is the engine of the disagreement that surfaced next.

II. The Force Differential — Why the Bridging Method Cannot, By Itself, Carry the Weight

The “Eight Strongholds” essay did not specify the institutional context in which the strongholds operate. The fellowship discussion forced that context onto the table. My monologue — which Susan and Michael both noted for its framing in metaphors of dominance, war, and force — was substantively this: the strongholds are not free-floating in a balanced cultural medium. One side of the political-cultural divide is currently operating with what amounts to institutional irresistible force. The Liberals/Progressives/Democratic Party control the legacy media’s framing function, control significant portions of academic credentialing, control the regulatory state’s discretion, and control the funding circuits that determine which voices acquire amplification. The Khrushchev formulation, ” We will bury you,” is not an exaggeration of the operational posture; it is, allowing for translation, the operational posture itself. There is no symmetric desire on the Christian/Conservative/Natural Law side to bury anyone. The asymmetry is real.

Against an organized (overtly and/or de facto) force committed to imposing an ideology/agenda/behavior-set, which is willing to use relational asymmetry (uncaring unfairness, deception, and violence), an un-resisted-by-equal-force opposition will be rolled. This is a physical fact, not a partisan complaint. The question is: what does an equal and opposite force look like for those of us who hold the Christos position? Should we respond to institutional capture with our own institutional capture, and to state coercion with private coercion?

My provocative formulation — I am here to take you over; I am going to take you over with love — was deliberately chosen to expose this. Michael flagged the verb “take over” in the prescription. Nobody wants to be taken over; say “enjoin.” He is right about the rhetoric. The verb “take over” is not what one says to one’s actual interlocutor. But underneath the rhetoric, the substantive point that needed to be on the table was this: whatever force we bring must be of a magnitude commensurate with the force currently in motion. The bridging method, as the primary national strategy, is too slow to counter this force differential. Hank Aaron in 1967 worked because the institutional force was, while ugly, not consolidated against deliberate counter-action; the law and the broader culture were already moving toward respect for all races as equally human and loved by God. The current configuration is not symmetric in that way. The institutional force is consolidated and is moving against the conservative, Christian nationalist, Make America Godly Again position we hold.

The bridging method of relational commonality — establishing rapport before confrontation and ultimately toward change — is necessary but insufficient on its own. It is necessary at the interpersonal level, where every individual conversion is genuinely won foothold-by-foothold. It is insufficient at the civilizational level, where what is required is something that scales fast enough to alter the sociological climate. What is needed is a state change, a universally adopted personal and interpersonal paradigm of loving God and neighbor as self. It is this framing that will overcome the anti-Christ agenda and establish the Christos Civitas and its Kingdom Culture. And the question becomes: what is the something?

III. Susan’s Reframe — The Gospel Is Itself the Radical Force

Susan stopped the disagreement before it could harden by reframing what that necessary radical force actually is. The reframe is the breakthrough of the meeting, and I want to fix it carefully.

The radical force is not Michael’s bridging, nor is it my “war waged with love.” The radical force is the gospel itself, which, when actually received, takes a person over. Not metaphorically. Actually. The believer is filled with the love of God, with peace, with joy, with a re-ordering of desire that consumes what was there before. They no longer want to live the way they lived before. The change is visible from the outside of the person. Family members see it. Friends see it. The change spreads not because the changed person argued anyone into anything, but because what they have become is observably different, and that difference is the witness.

Susan’s example was the brutal national leader whose believing wife prayed and fasted for him for years. This man was a killer, and by ordinary measure beyond reach. He was changed overnight. I will not adjudicate the empirical claims of that case (Susan was relating a testimony she had heard, not vouching for every detail). What matters is the category the example names: there exists a class of transformation in which the person is not negotiated with, not bridged to with common affinity, not converted by argument of consistency and logic — although these elements are almost certainly present to some degree — but is acted upon and transformed internally by the Holy Spirit at a depth that ordinary persuasion, example, and effort does not reach.

If this category exists — and the fellowship’s combined testimony is that it does — then the answer to the force-differential question on which I was stuck is that we need individual transformation, a well-documented method of nurturing transformation, and the institutionalization of that spirit-based force. We need to create holy/Christ-based institutions (overtly or de facto) commensurate with the institutional force on the other side. But without individual transformation, they that labor to build the house without the Lord, labor in vain. Psalm 127:1. The foundation of any institutional or civilizational movement exerting force toward societal sanctification is individual transformation. The workers and leaders of any institution that will actually transform society into the Christos Civitas must themselves be transformed, living the principles and in the spirit of the Kingdom Culture. That transformation arises when the gospel itself is received and lived. The force of internal transformation resonates with, and is the foundation of, the institutional force that sanctifies government. The blood of the Lamb, the word of our testimony, and loving not our lives unto death is the force and program divinely established as the strategy with the transformational capacity to change a person at the level the strongholds operate. The strongholds are spiritual, and only a spiritual force can reach them.

Susan’s confession was important here, and I want to record it: she said that when she was an unbeliever, she held exactly the same view as Michael. Let’s find a set of rules everyone can agree on. Let’s figure this out, and everyone will be good to each other. She named what changed her mind: she had been disregarding the power of Satan. She did not, in her unbelief, believe in active evil. She believed everyone, given good rules and good information, would converge on goodness.

What she came to see, after conversion, was that there are spiritual forces acting through people whose alignment is not aligned with universal human reasonableness, fairness, and rapport. There are spiritual forces that tempt men to align with and act out their animal drives. The yielding and eventual commitment to flesh drives by individuals creates its own coalescence into animal-drive-based institutions, which enroll and enforce compliance with this worldview — this kingdom of darkness. We now live in such a world. To use the force-opposing-force metaphor, overcoming institutional power requires opposition with institutional power: in this case, the sanctified church, the society-wide holiness of a holy people. The method is personal sanctification, the testimony of personal witness, and the fearlessness to organize and oppose the personal insults and financial and reputational costs to establish the institutions, the movement, the counter-cultural revolution to establish a kingdom with no other king but King Jesus. Our faith rests not in the tools of flesh — of rapport, confrontation, and change. The rules-and-mutual-understanding strategy is structurally underpowered.

This is precisely the diagnosis of the Eight Strongholds essay. The strongholds are not bad opinions held by reasonable people who can be talked out of them. The strongholds are spiritual captivities that ride human beings. And spiritual captivities are not lifted by appeals to Hank Aaron.

IV. The Threefold Weapon — Revelation 12:11

When I asked what force the gospel deploys, Susan read Revelation 12:11 — And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. The verse names a three-part instrument.

1. The blood of the Lamb

This is the objective fact of Christ’s atonement. It is not something we generate; it is something that exists, prior to us, and that we appeal to. It is the power of the operation. Without it, the operation has no weight. The reconciliation of God and man is the prerequisite to anything else, and that reconciliation was accomplished at the Cross. We do not bring the power; we invoke the power.

2. The word of their testimony

This is what the changed person says about what was done in them. This is where evangelism is not optional. The blood is silent unless someone speaks. The testimony is the channel by which the power becomes locally available to the next person. Christians who do not speak — who hold the inward change but do not carry the word into anyone else’s life — have only half the instrument.

3. They loved not their lives unto the death

This is the costliness clause, and it deserves careful unpacking because five distinct things are happening within it.

*** What unopposable faith looks like. The efficacy of faith willing to stand firm, never backing down, even with the real threat of paying the highest cost, cannot be overcome except by total annihilation. Such a faith, when exercised, is unopposable. It will prevail. This is what manifesting the ultimate good for eternity will require. We are asking for the manifestation of the Kingdom culture, the rule and reign of Christ, which has no end. We are asking for a world fit for the King of Kings. We are asking Him to return and rule and reign. To make way for His return, we must clean, prepare, and make our home worthy of His presence. At the level of optics, a faith that costs nothing carries no force. This is partly because the watching world reads cost. Everyone knows that the universe is limited and requires conservation.  Nothing is free. Energy expended in one area requires not expending it in another. Faith is often considered a no-cost miraculous deliverance from bad situations. And while God desires that we live better lives free from oppression, evil, and disease, the medium we live in requires commitment and the sacrifice of one thing for another. We cannot obtain X without sacrificing Y to some degree. That sacrifice may be attention. Manifesting miracles may require that we do something. That doing may be a full-out wanting it. Such desire means we have sacrificed attention on all else and focused it on the object of manifestation. That may be the reality of what faith is. A faith willing to suffer at the individual level, multiplied by millions, cannot be overcome by even the threat or execution of death. That intensity of desire/pleading with bleeding cannot be silenced. This is the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane. It was important and effective. Perhaps He was praying not to be released from his sacrifice, but that His sacrifice would be effective.

What the blood purchased. The enemy — the kingdom of Satan, the ruler of this present world — will use all force to dominate, to win, to retain control for even one more day. But the tools of domination are available for the Kingdom of Heaven to overcome him. Every individual is important; every soul won for the Kingdom diminishes the population, the army of foot soldiers enforcing the Satanic hegemony on earth through its institutions and culture. The blood of the Lamb has freed the captive from his enforced subjugation to serve the Satanic regime, with its flesh drives and rewards, and real ownership of the soul by contract. The debt of Satanic soul ownership — incurred in return for the benefits of sin — was paid in advance by the suffering and death of a guiltless God-man. That debt-canceling payment is now available for redemption to all who call out for its application. All who long for freedom have this spiritual debt cancellation available to them.

What surrender obtains. The cost is total surrender to the will and Way of God — living in Christ, taking Him in internally, complete willing submission to the way of holiness. The debt of sin, the forced servitude to the Satanic regime, is broken in the individual who has accepted the “free” gift. But the cost of that free gift is total surrender to Christ ruling and reigning inside. The only benefit that may be reliably expected is His promise: I will never leave you nor forsake you, Hebrews 13:5. The ownership of the soul is freed from Satanic bondage.

What the freed captive does in the public square. The freed captive can now face the taunts of woke and politically correct culture. He is willing to endure the threat of cancellation, exclusion from employment, and even the threat of death before contributing to the support or progress of agendas and institutions inimical to the establishment of the Kingdom. The institutional forces of darkness depend upon fear and compliance, even if unwilling. When compliance is broken, the power of those institutions to enforce their hegemony evaporates. A person, family, church, city, state, nation, and world committed to the establishment of the Way of Christ — the embodied pattern of loving God, and neighbor as self — will overcome the world, and the Lord can return to a church without spot or blemish. The forces of hell will not prevail against His church because the price has been paid and remains always ready for actualization.

Why the institutional edifice rests on the surrendered heart. When the Kingdom culture establishes its own righteous governments and institutions, the continuity of society-level guidance and enforcement of Kingdom-level guardrails is established, and the framework for Godly personal and social behavior takes hold. But the entire edifice of the walls and laws of the Kingdom rests upon the surrendered heart, and the surrendered heart rests upon the real promise of a transformed heart, which is obtained through complete surrender. That surrender entails asking to be possessed, owned, and adopted into the family of God’s children. The power of that transformation depends upon the blood shed by Jesus Christ, and the acceptance of that blood as atonement, as payment for the debt of sin, as satisfaction for the Satanic claim on the soul. The freed captive is then made effective, an agent of societal transformation as he speaks his testimony and invites others into the same freedom, undeterred by the personal and institutional threats of insult and rejection, removal of sustenance, and death. Such a force of willing martyrs cannot be resisted on a personal or institutional level. With a commitment to assemble together, the natural formation of the sanctified Church — the body of believers, the Christos Civitas — is established.

Susan added Ephesians 6’s armor of God to the picture, with righteousness singled out: many in the contemporary church believe that belief alone is sufficient and that the requirement of righteous living has been somehow waived. The Eight Strongholds essay made the structural version of this point about institutions; Susan made the personal version about individual believers. The strongholds attack the unrighteous Christian as easily as they attack the unbeliever, because the unrighteous Christian has not actually closed the door. Righteousness is the door’s lock.

V. The Magic Lamp Critique — What We Cannot Promise

This is the hinge of the meeting, and I want to fix it before the rest of the synthesis can be assembled.

I have spent thirty years in clinical practice, mostly with Christian patients — many of them strong Christians. I have watched what happens when a Christian comes to Christ as one would come to a magic lamp — rub it, ask, receive. Pray for the marriage; pray for the cancer; pray for the prodigal child; pray for the financial deliverance. The empirical observation, made over thirty years and many hundreds of patients, is that the prayers, in the form they were prayed, were mostly not answered. Marriages were not saved by prayer; cancers ran their courses; prodigals stayed prodigal; finances did not turn. The occasional clear answer occurred and was beautiful. But the modal outcome was not delivered in the form requested.

I do not say this cynically. I say it as a thirty-year datum. And the pastoral implication is that we cannot evangelize on the basis of a deliverable we have not been given to deliver. If we tell the unbeliever or the nominal believer to ask Jesus, and He will fix this thing you are praying about, we are issuing a promissory note that the New Testament does not actually back, and that our own observation does not actually back. When the prayer is not answered as promised, the inquirer’s conclusion is not I prayed wrong but the salesman lied — and they go to another charlatan, another false religion, another answer-vendor — and they go more hardened against the gospel than they were before, because we taught them to expect what was never on offer.

This is the magic-lamp critique. It is not a critique of prayer. It is a critique of misrepresenting what prayer is for.

Susan’s refinement of the deliverable was the second half of the breakthrough, and it is what I want every member of the fellowship to be able to articulate. The actual offer is not problem-resolution. The actual offer is Presence. The Father will be with you, in whatever the problem becomes. You will receive peace that the world cannot account for, in circumstances that ought to have produced terror. You will receive the strength to stand under what is unbearable. You will receive guidance — sometimes in flashes, mostly in steady incremental clarity — about the next step. You will receive a re-ordering of the desire that asked for the magic lamp in the first place — a re-ordering that often makes you, twenty years later, glad the prayer was not answered as you prayed it. The deliverable is not the outcome you specified. The deliverable is the Companion through whatever outcome arrives.

This is realistic. It is also, on its own terms, the highest deliverable on offer in the catalog of all human options. No other tradition, philosophy, therapy, or pharmaceutical claims this and produces it. The witness to it is empirical, and it is what the testimony of the changed person actually says when the changed person is being honest.

VI. The Mechanic, Not the Driver — Charlie’s Analogy

Charlie crystallized the same point in a single image that we can use as a meme for the fellowship to symbolize the faithful presence of God/Christ/Holy Spirit as a companion. In the early days of Indianapolis racing, every car carried two seats: one for the driver, one for the mechanic. A mechanical failure mid-race without an onboard mechanic was the end of the race. The mechanic did not make the race shorter, did not remove the potholes, did not eliminate the wrecks happening in front of you, did not make the competition less ferocious. The race was just as hard. But the mechanic kept the car going through the things that would otherwise have stopped it.

Christ as mechanic, not Christ as victory-machine. The race remains the race. The world remains the world. The strongholds named in the Eight Strongholds essay remain operational, sometimes more so once one is opposing them rather than under them. And the journey with Christ is immeasurably better than the journey without Him, because there is now a constant companion, a source of strength, a source of ideas and solutions and occasional miracles, sitting in the second seat through everything the race produces.

Leonard’s variation on the same image was his mother’s: we are not driving the bus; let the Lord drive the bus. Leonard’s father had retrofitted an old bus into an RV after his wife refused to camp in a tent again, and the family analogy from that retrofit was that a Christian is in the driver’s seat in cooperation, watching the Lord do the actual driving and learning the route by attention. The man in the mirror changes first; the world the man-in-the-mirror inhabits changes downstream. The Lord does not compel — our agency is not violated — and cooperation that is invited results in genuine cooperation.

These two analogies are saying the same thing as Susan’s Presence-versus-problem-solving distinction, in different idioms. The Christian life is not extraction from the conditions of the human predicament. The Christian life is fully accompanied passage through them, with a new will inside the person and a new Companion beside the person. That is the actual deliverable. That is what we are authorized to offer.

VII. The Lived Witness, Not the Argued Witness — Armond’s Contribution

Armond made the contribution that prevented the synthesis from collapsing into a teachable formula. He said, with characteristic frankness, that in his own life the only person to whom he had been able to communicate the Christos position with any success was his son — because the son was 100% willing to receive it. With everyone else — his mother, his brother, his sister — the message did not arrive in the form he sent it. And his conclusion is this: I am not giving you instructions. I am giving you a strategy. And the only way for you to know that the strategy works for you is to do it.

This is not relativism. The strategy is universal — repent, believe, be filled, walk in righteousness, be present to the Spirit. But the proof of the strategy is not transferable as a propositional argument. The proof is in the doing. Until you have run the experiment in your own life, you do not have the data, and no quantity of secondhand data will substitute for that. This is why the lived witness — what the changed person has become, observable by family and friends and neighbors — is the indispensable component. The argued witness, by itself, can only deliver one as far as the willingness to consider the argument; the lived witness is what produces the readiness to try the experiment, which is the only way the argument completes.

The implication is operational: we cannot substitute our own holiness for the work of evangelism. The holiness must be built first, in private, before the public witness has anything to display. The man in the mirror is the instrument. If the instrument is unrefined, the music will not carry. This is what Leonard kept circling back to — change ourselves first; the Lord then does His part — and it is the consistent New Testament pattern: the Sermon on the Mount is delivered to the disciples, not to the multitudes, and the multitudes only overhear it. The disciples were the instrument being formed.

VIII. The Tare Is the Spirit, Not the Person — Continuity with the Eight Strongholds Essay

Leonard raised the parable of the wheat and the tares, with the suggestion that we might be the angels — the messengers — who help separate the wheat from the tares in this age. Susan flagged the worry that this could slide into a Calvinist position in which some persons are constitutionally unreachable. The reframe I offered, and which I think the fellowship received, is the one already implicit in the Eight Strongholds essay.

The tare is not the person. The tare is the spirit that has the person. The wheat-and-tares operation, on this reading, is not a separation of people into reachable and unreachable categories. It is a separation of spirits from people. When a stronghold lifts off a person, what was the tare leaves and what was the wheat — the human being made in the image of God — remains. The harvest is the lifting of the spirits, and the wheat is what was always under the spirit.

This is the same logic that runs through the Eight Strongholds essay. The eight traits Joan inventoried — negativity, dependence, infantilization, anger, jealousy, victimhood, conceit, intolerance — are not properties of Democrats. They are not properties of Republicans either. They are spirits operative in the culture, riding whichever human host the institutional configuration of the moment offers them. Treat the host as the enemy and you have misidentified the enemy and you will lose the human being you were trying to save. Treat the spirit as the enemy and the human being is recoverable, because Christ already paid for them at the Cross and the tare can be made to leave by the authority of the Gospel, the testimony of the finished work of Christ’s suffering and death. Appropriation of that spiritual gift, the fruit of that finished transaction, depends upon the individual and his willingness to surrender the temporary thrills of the flesh for the eternal benefit of a life lived in the enjoyment of God’s peace, relationship, and sonship.

This is why the political theology of the Christos Civitas position is not coextensive with the political programs of either tribe. We recognize the greater alignment of one tribe over the other in its platform position, but we see the imperfect execution of that platform, and the powerlessness of people operating under the influence of ego — with its rewards and payoffs — can emasculate men who attempt Godly goal achievement when not empowered by the Holy Spirit’s guidance and without the solidity of living in the power of a transformed and redeemed heart. We are not enrolling people in a tribe. We are offering people the lifting of spirits that have ridden them across all tribes.

IX. The Acts Communism Question — A Necessary Digression

Charlie raised, as a side question worth marking for later development, the difficulty of distinguishing the Acts 2 community of goods from Marxist communism. The book of Acts shows believers selling property and pooling proceeds, distributed according to need. On its face, this looks like communism. The South American Jesuits’ social-justice theology has often read it that way. The young or theologically unformed Christian, encountering this text, has a hard time articulating where Acts 2 ends and where Marx begins.

I will not develop the full answer here — it deserves its own essay — but the operative distinction is clear and worth marking.

The Acts 2 sharing is voluntary, originating in the heart of the giver, drawn from souls in whom the Holy Spirit has already changed the desire-structure. The Marxist sharing is compulsory, originating in the threat-monopoly of the state, imposed on souls whose desire-structure has not changed and who would not, without the appearance of personal cost, have given. The two operations have, on the surface, similar economic flows. They have completely different moral structures, completely different effects on the giver’s soul, and completely different historical outcomes. Acts 2 produced the early church. Marxist communism produced the Holodomor, the Cambodian killing fields, the Cultural Revolution, and a mountain of corpses ninety million high. The difference between the two is precisely the difference Christ made in the giver.

Susan’s compressed scriptural answer was the right one: Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it (Psalm 127:1). When the Lord builds the house, the sharing is sustained; when the state attempts to build the house without the Lord, the sharing collapses into coercion and the coercion eventually devours the very people it claims to serve. Jamestown’s first failed colony — communist by charter, dying because no one would work for the abstract collective — is the workable miniature of the larger pattern. Once the Jamestown plots were privatized, the colony survived. The lesson is not that private property is sacred but that the unchanged human heart will not sustain the Acts 2 economy, and only the Holy Spirit changes the heart.

Marxist communism is, in this sense, exactly what Charlie called it: a counterfeit of the gospel. It mimics the economic surface of Acts 2 while reversing its moral substrate. There is a literature arguing that significant Satanic influences shaped Marx’s intellectual formation — work I have engaged in earlier essays and which the fellowship may want to take up directly — and the structural argument here does not strictly require that biographical claim to land. Satan does not invent; he inverts. Whatever the historical facts of Marx’s formation, the pattern of inversion is what makes the counterfeit dangerous. The closer the inversion to the original, the more easily it captures souls whose moral instinct is working but whose theological discernment has not yet matured. Acts 2 and Marxism share an economic surface — pooling of resources, distributed according to need — and reverse the moral substrate beneath it. The substrate difference is the whole difference, and missing it is how generations of well-meaning Christians have been recruited into theologies that share the gospel’s vocabulary while reversing its operation.

X. Pre-Trib Rapture and the Avoidability of Revelation’s Catastrophic Destruction

Two related questions surfaced near the end of the meeting and deserve marking, even if we did not fully resolve them. I want to state at the outset that what follows on both questions is a working position rather than a defended one. I hold these views provisionally, am aware that they cut against substantial portions of historic Christian eschatology, and offer them here for the fellowship’s continued engagement rather than as settled conclusions.

The first question is the pre-tribulation rapture. I think the pre-tribulation rapture is, on balance, an escapist philosophy. I do not think the church will be removed before the difficulties. I think the New Testament pattern — be ready, for ye know not the hour — implies wakefulness through the night, not extraction from the night. I think Christ returns to a bride without spot or blemish, and I am inclined to think the spotlessness is achieved not by the sudden cosmetic intervention of a rapture but by the church’s actual sanctification through the period of difficulty.

The difficulty itself, on this reading, is required because of the forces arrayed against the Church and the threat of God’s inevitable victory. The Son will return to a pure Church. Whether by the Church’s gradual adoption of the Son’s transformation, or by the cataclysmic transformation Revelation describes, He will return to a bride made ready. The vision of John on the Isle of Patmos was true, real, and a battle that will occur in the heavenlies. Whether we play out that drama in the struggle of our individual lives as metaphor and microcosm, or whether the spiritual drama is played out writ large on the tapestry of the global human experience, either way the drama is real and will occur.

I contend — and here I am stating a working preference, not a defended dogma — that playing out the drama in our personal lives is deeper, yields more fruit, and is closer to the path desired by God, who desires that all be saved. Individual sanctification produces the same fruit, a pure church. The price is paid in a distributed way, rather than in bulk. The result is a granular sanctification, a deep holiness established in every heart who must individually renounce the works of Satan, accept the blood of the Lamb as payment for and initiation into the new life, enroll others in the cause, and do so while facing the personal cost of shunning, dismemberment from institutional approval, and the literal threat of life’s premature termination based upon taking a stand for God and His reign in personal and group lives.

I recognize this position will draw pushback from multiple quarters of historic Christian eschatology, and the pushback is not without weight. The pushback would say, fairly, that Revelation describes events on the heavenly register that are not simply allegorizable into personal struggle, and that the church’s final purification is consistently ascribed in the New Testament to Christ’s return rather than to the church’s own progressive work. I take those points seriously. What I am holding for now, subject to revision, is that the difference between distributed and bulk sanctification may be less ontological than it appears, and that the present-work imperative is the same either way.

The second question, raised by Charlie, is whether the book of Revelation is avoidable. My honest answer was: yes, that is my goal. I do not know if it is realistic. I am willing to be told it is not. But it is the goal I am working toward, because the alternative — to assume Revelation’s worst scenes are inevitable and to be merely passive ahead of them — is not, I think, the posture Christ asks of His church. The church is asked to occupy until I come (Luke 19:13), and occupation implies effective work in the present. Maybe the work succeeds enough to alter the trajectory. Maybe it does not. But the assumption that it cannot is a self-fulfilling assumption that authorizes the very passivity that ensures it cannot.

Susan’s qualifier on this was important. She read Revelation as showing that even with boils on their flesh, some will curse God — meaning that no quantity of present suffering will, by itself, produce universal repentance. There will be a class of persons whose hearts harden under any pressure. And — this is her important and — the persecution itself serves a purpose: God wants people who have chosen Him under conditions that made the choice costly, who have been tested and tried, and who have held.

The very structure of creation has insured that faith in, practice of, and spreading of the gospel that frees men from contractual enslavement to Satan will be resisted by the demonic realm, which is committed to retaining the benefits of feasting on the pain and death generated as consumable substance secondary to the willful commission of sin and its associated contractual possession.

I believe we were created for fellowship with God, to participate in His world as co-creators. In the process we are challenged to develop character and grow in our affinity, our relationship with God. The world was created with a polarity — God and not-God as the two poles of choice in every moment. As we develop maturity, we become more like Him, and when He comes fully in mature relationship, we will be like Him. This world provides the opportunity for relationship, testing, and maturation; the joy in each victory is felt both by Him and by us. The creation provides many axes of traversal, all of which provide the opportunity for relationship, maturation, and joy.

We are blessed to have been given the opportunity for incarnation. If we face great trial we will receive great reward, if we resist, if we maintain our testimony to the end. It is for such a time that we were born — whether at the end, middle, or beginning of His-story. Without challenge our character cannot mature. Without trial there is no story or victory. He has promised a world without end, a never-ending story, and we can rest in childlike appreciation of His mystery and care. Our existence is secure and we can rest in Him. A population of the saved, enrolling the unsaved, will eventually prevail and be the spotless bride, the Church, that He desires for His own.

So the difficulty of life — whether in the course of an ordinary life cycle or the end-times drama of a cataclysmic Tribulation — is not pure misfortune; it is also refining into purity. We can pray for less of it and we can work for less of it, and we should. But we should not be entirely scandalized when some quantity of it arrives, because the bride is being made ready for a mature relationship with the bridegroom, and maturity has an entry price.

XI. The Synthesis — What the Fellowship Said Actually Works

Pulling the threads together, here is what I think the fellowship reached, and what I want this essay to carry forward into the Christos Civitas working file:

1. The diagnosis stands. The cultural pathologies named in the Eight Strongholds essay are spirits, not opinions, and they ride hosts across both political tribes. They can manifest in different ways. Naming sin and attempting God’s way is not the same as rebellion against His way. Differences between tribes that hold diametrically opposed positions on Godliness cannot be declared as equivalent or matters of taste. Both the saved and the unsaved, the seeker of truth and the rebel against it, can be possessed by spirits that cause moral failure — but of different modes and characters. The diagnosis of spiritual stronghold eliminates the reasonable likelihood of dependably successful treatment by argument alone. A more spiritually powerful and effective strategy must be employed. Treating the pathology as the person loses the captured person.
2. Michael’s bridging method is necessary at the interpersonal level and insufficient at the civilizational level. Hank Aaron is real. The bumblebee landing on the hand is real. Foothold-by-foothold is the only way one human reaches another human across a deep difference. But foothold-by-foothold cannot, alone, alter the institutional force-gradient at the speed it needs altering.
3. The radical force adequate to the gradient is the gospel itself, received and lived. Not bridge-building. Not warfare. The gospel, when actually received, takes a person over by the love of God, changes them inside, and produces in them a witness that scales because it is visible and contagious in the way truth is contagious. The gospel is the only force in the human catalog with demonstrated power adequate to the strongholds, because the strongholds are spiritual and only a spiritual instrument reaches them.
4. The instrument named in Revelation 12:11 has three parts. The blood of the Lamb (objective power, prior to us, invoked). The word of their testimony (the spoken witness; without speech, the operation is half-finished). The willingness to lose everything rather than recant (without risking the cost the battle is not engaged, and the war cannot be won). All three. None of the three is optional.
5. The deliverable we promise is Presence, not problem-solving. The magic-lamp framing — pray and your circumstances will change — is a promise we are not authorized to make and an empirical disappointment we keep producing. The actual offer is the Companion through whatever the circumstances become. Charlie’s mechanic. Leonard’s bus driver. The race remains the race; the journey becomes immeasurably better. This is what we tell the inquirer, and it is realistic, and it is enough.
6. The instrument is the man in the mirror. Holiness comes first, in private. Lived witness comes from holiness. Spoken witness comes from lived witness. In that order. Reversing the order produces the lukewarm Christianity that has spent decades failing to convince anyone of anything because the watching world correctly reads it as not actually different.
7. Assembly is non-negotiable. Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together (Hebrews 10:25). The wolf goes after the straggler. We are designed as herd animals — I am the vine, ye are the branches (John 15:5) — and individual Christianity unmoored from a body of fellow witnesses burns out. This Sunday Zoom is one such body. There need to be many more.
8. The wheat-and-tares harvest is the lifting of spirits from people, not the sorting of people. The strongholds named in the Eight Strongholds essay are precisely the tares. The persons riding them are the wheat. The harvest is the rescue.

XII. What Remains Open

Several questions surfaced that the fellowship did not close, and that I want to mark for future sessions.

First, whether Revelation is avoidable, and what difference our answer makes to the urgency of the present work. I gave my answer; Susan gave a partial qualifier; Charlie’s question itself was the most important contribution and remains live.

Second, how individual transformation scales to civilizational transformation quickly enough to alter the institutional gradient. The synthesis says the gospel scales because the witness is contagious; the question is whether the contagion is fast enough against the counter-contagion currently running. My working position is this: I have faith that the witness prevails on God’s timeline; whether the timeline is quick enough to spare a generation the worst is the part I do not know, and the not-knowing is itself part of the costliness clause. We work as though the trajectory is alterable, because that is the posture occupy until I come requires; and we accept whatever timeline God permits, because the alternative is a presumption about His calendar that we are not authorized to make.

Third, the Acts-vs-Marx essay is owed. The distinction between voluntary giving from a changed heart and compulsory taking from an unchanged one is operationally crucial in an environment where significant portions of professed Christianity have absorbed the counterfeit without noticing.

Fourth, the pastoral apparatus around the magic-lamp critique needs development. We are saying we cannot promise problem-resolution; what exactly can we promise, in language an inquirer can hear, that does not sound like a downgrade? Susan’s Presence formulation is the right answer; the work is making it land.

Fifth, the forsake-not-assembly principle — what it looks like for those of us scattered across geography, in fellowships of six rather than sixty, with no local body that holds the Christos Civitas position in recognizable form. This Sunday Zoom is currently the answer for many of us, but the question of how to multiply such gatherings at a rate commensurate with the work is open.

These are the live items I am carrying into the next session.

Closing Reflection

Susan closed the meeting in prayer, and I want to record the substance of what she asked, because it is the right summary: help us to see how we can be effective; lead us and guide us in our relationship with You as individuals first, and then in how we share this gospel with others. The order matters. Relationship with the Lord first; sharing second. The instrument is formed before the work is done with the instrument. And then — and this is the part I keep coming back to — the work is done. It is not merely contemplated. It is not merely prayed about. It is done.

The Eight Strongholds essay named the disease. The May 3 fellowship discussion named the cure: the gospel itself, received and lived, witnessed in word and life, at the cost of everything if necessary, in the cooperative company of others doing the same. That is what we have. That is the whole inventory. The question for each of us this week is not whether the inventory is sufficient — it is — but whether we are putting the inventory to use.

Soli Deo gloria.