260921 – Christian Nationalism, Islam, and the Changed Heart

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

The Sharper Stick and the Liberty in Christ

A conversation between Thomas and Isak on Islam, Christian nationalism, and why the changed heart is the only answer that holds

A wide-ranging discussion | 21 September 2026

The question that opened the discussion

The conversation began with Isak’s response to Thomas’s essay on Islam, which distinguished its political take from its religious take and examined what happens when a political group applies a religion’s rules to a population that does not share it. Isak found the essay illuminating in its examination of the parallels between Christian nationalism and Islamic Shari’a. He wanted to know if there was a contradiction in supporting one but not the other. If Sharia is a case of religion becoming the law of the land, is there a corresponding risk on the Christian side? Could Christian nationalism drift into extremism, or into a religious rule that displaces the rule of law? And, more pointedly: if Christians got everything they wanted, if every Christian rule were followed, would there be any downside at all, or would it be all upside?

He was also honest about the cultural inconsistency he observed. Americans fight bitterly over gay and trans rights at home, and treat conservatives who resist as the villains; yet the same Americans extend a tolerant, almost admiring curiosity to cultures that punish those same things with the full weight of the state. He suspected the tolerance was less about principle than about opposition: whatever stands against the older, conservative, Christian viewpoint gets a pass. He admitted he wished he had more contact with people of other faiths, so his picture came from acquaintance rather than from the news.

Those questions set the course for two and a half hours of discussion between them, ranging from theology to geopolitics to the origin of existence and back to the practical problem of how one person changes another’s heart. The essay that follows tries to cover the ground.

Can Christianity become the thing it opposes?

Thomas’s answer to the Christian-nationalism question turned on a definition. Everything depends on what it means to be a Christian. If a movement says “these are my rules, there is no tolerance for anyone doing otherwise, we will force you to be our way, and if you won’t, we want you gone from society,” then whatever that is, it is not Christian. The trouble arises when something that is not Christian goes under the name. The perversions available are numerous. People proof-text from a single verse and build a program on it, and the results have been bad for a long time; the witch trials and the Inquisition are the familiar examples, and the familiar objection.

So the risk is real, but it is not a risk of Christianity. It is the risk of a counterfeit. His image for it was a cross painted over a pentagram, or a pentagram hidden while the cross is waved. Christianity done wrong will not have the power to take anything over; it will simply be another satanic religion in Christian dress. Christianity done right is the only version with the power to transform a society, and it transforms by changing hearts, not by coercion.

He extended the point to the whole family of counterfeits. Mormonism, on his reading, is Christianity-lite with a small twist: it keeps most of the furniture and offers a more appealing heaven than harps on clouds, which is exactly why it is dangerous. Islam is the same screw turned all the way. Both are versions of the same ploy: a deceiver asking, “What about this? What about that?” until a person settles on anything but true Christianity. The size of the twist does not matter to the principle; the question is only how much of hell one is willing to accept.

Islam, in this account, is a religion for people who admire the Christian virtues but cannot govern themselves. It supplies an enforcement team. His summary formula, repeated later in the conversation, was that Islam is Old Testament Christianity with a sharper stick and more supervision. What it lacks is the liberty in Christ. That liberty is not available at the Islamic kiosk; it is sold next door.

Religion and the rule of law

Isak pressed the comparison from the legal side. In the Islamic case, the religion replaces the law of the land, or becomes it, and noncompliance is met with harm or death by group agreement. In the American case, everyone is encouraged to live as a Christian, but the Constitution does not yield to religious law. And yet the Constitution seems to rest on the same moral principles, so the two are not at odds. What, then, is the actual difference in how people are kept in line? America also has prisons, fines, and a death penalty. The list of moral sins does not look very different between Christianity and Islam; both seem to be running the same program.

Thomas agreed that it is largely the same program. The difference is in the mechanism and the spirit. One system supervises with a whip; the other offers a changed heart and a free choice, with the civil law as a backstop for those who refuse the choice. Isak later added a complementary observation: a nation does not grow stronger by mimicking the enforcement model, and a Constitution grounded in the person of Christ (as revealed in the Bible) leaves fewer gray areas between the civil order and the moral order.

The Islamic Jesus

At Isak’s request, the two reviewed the Islamic account of Jesus, and the summary is worth recording because it makes clear where the divergence lies.

In Islam, Jesus is a prophet, born of a virgin, who performed miracles by God’s permission and received a revelation, the Injil or gospel. Muslims generally hold that the four Gospels are later human accounts that have been altered. He is called the Word of God and a Spirit from Him, but these titles are understood to mean that he was created by God’s command, not that he is the eternal Word. Mainstream Islam holds that he will return near the end of time, defeat the false Messiah, live out his life and die; some traditions add that he will break the cross and kill the swine, that is, reject what Christians made of him.

The crucifixion is denied. The Quranic verse says it was made to appear so, and the classical commentaries read this as substitution: someone else was made to look like Jesus and was crucified in his place. Accounts differ on who. One version, the one behind the charge that the Islamic Jesus is a coward who fled the garden, has him asking for a volunteer; another makes the substitute Judas, as punishment. A minority of scholars read the verse as allowing that Jesus died but was not truly defeated. More fundamentally, Islam does not need the cross theologically: each person bears his own sins, and God forgives directly on repentance, so no sacrifice is required.

Jesus is placed in a single line of prophets from Adam through Abraham, Moses, and David, all preaching submission to one God; he is the last great prophet before Muhammad, and a Quranic verse has him foretelling a messenger named Ahmad, which Muslims take to be Muhammad. Some also identify the Paraclete of John 14 with Muhammad. Muslims often present all this as honoring Jesus more than the Jews do.

The Christian reply is that the Islamic Jesus differs from the Jesus of the Gospels in exactly the points Christianity considers essential: who he is, God incarnate; and what he did, died and rose to atone for sin. Isak reflected on the strangeness of it: three faiths drawing from a similar well of inspiration and scripture, then diverging so sharply on the identity of one man that the historical shifts can be traced on a map.

Europe, terror, and the chill on speech

Isak then asked the geopolitical question directly. What is the actual risk of Islam? Europeans say their continent is being overtaken; the same is said of New York after its recent mayoral election. Is the fear a fear of a coordinated regime slowly changing America’s principles? His own diagnosis was that Americans are so ungrounded in any moral code that any code offered to them gains power, so long as it is not Christianity, which is treated as the one code that is not acceptable.

Thomas accepted that diagnosis and filled in the European picture. A friend who had just returned from a tour of Europe reported that it was no longer the Europe he came from. The leadership there welcomed Islamic immigration and provided for it, which Thomas likened to inviting a Trojan horse through the gate, or a fifth column into the city. The people have not been able to reverse it. The politically correct portion of the public congratulates itself on its virtue, repeats that diversity is strength, and thereby gives cover to the leaders. As for the leaders’ motives, he offered several possibilities without choosing among them: they may believe the slogans; they may be paid with oil money; they may owe their positions to electoral manipulation; or they may simply be afraid.

The fear is the important part. Everyone in a position of influence knows that a subset of Muslims is willing to sacrifice themselves entirely to neutralize opposition to Islam. That is the strategic benefit of terrorism: it does not need to reach everyone, because it chills speech. A person who might write, or run for office, on an overtly anti-Islamic platform looks at what has happened to others, considers that he loves his wife and children and his life, notices that no one else is standing up, and goes along. Good people say nothing; those on board take the graft and accelerate the process. The end state, if the accommodation continues, is a demographic majority that abolishes democracy by democratic means, which would be the ideal victory.

He described the motivational engine as a cult, in the specific sense that its adherents are willing to die for it because they believe it is true. Burmawi, in his recent interview, said that martyrdom is the only certain route to paradise in Islam; good works and repentance might get one there, but martyrdom is guaranteed. Every society contains a fringe of people who will do anything for a cause; in America, they become special forces. In Islam, given organizers who supply a story, that fringe packs a vest with ball bearings and detonates it in a crowd, and justifies the act from the scriptures and maintains his courage, focus, and momentum at the direction of the leadership.

He concluded that the only counter is a willingness to be a martyr on the other side: at some level, a people must decide that life is not as dear as standing for truth. Until that decision is made, the accommodation will continue. He did not think America was near it. The nation, he said, is not the home of the brave; it has become the home of the cowardly and politically correct.

What America forgot

Isak offered his own account of how the country got there. He has watched the culture move away from Christianity toward “spirituality.” One can no longer say “I am a Christian,” but one can say “I am spiritual,” usually because one was hurt by a church, and what follows is a personal relationship with the universe. The trouble is that this spirituality stops connecting to other people. The actual Christian content, loving God and loving one’s neighbor, drops out, and what remains is love of self and of one’s place in the cosmos. Meanwhile, other countries, by force or by will, are strong in their beliefs and practices.

He also saw a national shame at work. People do not like being the big bad empire. They take the sins of the past- Vietnam, the Middle East, all the wars- and conclude that this is the worst country, and they are sorry to live in it. Rather than fixing what is wrong and building a culture of love, respect, compassion, and the defense of those who cannot defend themselves, they let go of patriotism altogether. His image was the man in James who looks at his face in a mirror, walks away, and forgets what he looks like. A country so full of consumerism and effort has forgotten the picture of the country it meant to be, and every citizen now carries a different picture, which is its own problem.

The one-trick pony: the changed heart

Thomas’s answer to all of it was, by his own description, a one-trick pony. You create the changed heart, and the changed heart is oriented to the highest morality. What is the highest morality? Christ. Who Christ is is the highest moral. The changed heart is that heart placed inside a person, and once it is there, the governing rule is to love others as we were loved. From that vantage, the social errors become easy to identify. It really is “what would Jesus do?” The Jesus movement slogan of the 70’s is about all one needs. The problem is not finding the answer but getting the message to everyone that this really is a good thing.

He then took up the narrative of national evil and argued that it had been oversold. Vietnam, he maintained, was not an unrighteous war. When North Vietnam came south, it killed a million Vietnamese for not being communists; preventing that was the reason for being there. What was dishonorable was the way the country left: the promise to arm the South so it could defend itself was withdrawn by a Congress that did not want to keep it. The same dishonor was repeated in Afghanistan. Fifty thousand men died trying to protect people who were about to be overrun by a dictatorship that would rule with an iron hand and kill dissidents; the effort was right, and the nation lacked the endurance to see it through. Iraq illustrated a different failure: they removed the dictator and put nothing in his place. The population was told, in effect, “behave as you would behave unregulated,” and when it behaved badly, the response was to call it culture and honor it.

This is where he located the idolatry. The posture that says “we must not impose anything, because imposing would be ideologically genocidal” is presented as tolerance and felt as virtue, but it is a morality with no content other than abstract, earth-worship principles. There is a proper place for letting a people have their own culture. There is even a place for evolution, for things working themselves out. But when a culture’s project is to take over your culture, “leave us alone while we do it” is not a neutral request, and granting it is allowing evil to triumph because good men did nothing. He named the god being served: diversity, equity, and inclusion. That, he said, is another god before Me, and it is destroying society like a virus.

Why there is evil at all

The discussion then went underneath the politics to the question of why the world is arranged so that these choices exist. Thomas’s answer was that God created the whole thing with a good guy and a bad guy, so that a person could show his love for God by choosing the good over the bad. To do that, one must know the standards of good and the standards of badness, which is the opposite of the good, and stand against the bad. The arrangement only makes sense, he said, on the assumption that God actually experiences all of it and really does want to be loved. God wants to feel that people chose Him from a place of experiencing Him as other than themselves.

He pressed the literal reading of Matthew 25. When Jesus says that a cup of water given in His name was given to Him, people take it as a nice phrase: God appreciates the gesture, the way one appreciates a kindness done in one’s honor. That is not what it says. The cup was given to Him. Isak took the point and extended it: the thirst quenched in that moment was not the thirst of some metaphorical person; it was real thirst in the life of God, in the life of all that is. And it cannot be sorted by category: one cannot imagine God choosing whom to be and rejecting a person as too dark or too light to be Him. The question underneath is what the actual intent of life and of doing good is.

Thomas’s answer: to love God. The play we are living is God trying to satisfy His own hunger and His own loneliness, the unspeakable loneliness of being the only consciousness in existence, with nothing other than self. “Be fruitful and multiply” was a cry for something to fill it. All morality comes from this. It is not about black or brown or white people, or respecting another religion, or inclusion; the race question is shallow by comparison, one of the points of contention God engineered so there would be something to choose against. He cited Isaiah’s line that God creates good, and He creates evil, whether directly or through an agent given the job and doing it superbly; on every scorecard, the enemy looks like he is winning. But God can only be satisfied if there is a way of not being satisfied, and His way is chosen over it. One cannot kiss God or bring Him flowers; the symbols exist, but God is truly loved when a person rejects the animal desires the man loves, but God hates, and does it God’s way instead.

Isak put it as following God’s will and being in tune with His desires, which also means being in tune with what is repulsive to His character. Thomas added the serpent-and-dove formula: know evil front to back, recognize it anywhere, and remain gentle, acting from choice, desiring to please Him, knowing the other thing would be enjoyable and choosing His way anyway. That is the sacrifice God feels, and at different intensities, because we feel at different intensities and He must feel what we feel.

Islam as deception, and the sameness of sins

Returning to Islam with this framework in hand, Thomas said plainly that he takes the revelation to Muhammad to have been an angel of light that was a demon: a very good story, with hooks and twists, that seemed right and was not, and that has deceived the second largest religion in the world. He sees Islam and Christianity as the two poles in the contest between God and Satan, and the people under Islam as in bondage, which he called tragic. The deception is strong enough to deceive the elect, and a great many intelligent people accept it.

But he was insistent that the hunger behind it is the same hunger. Muslims know they need discipline; they know they must control themselves. The error is in where the discipline is applied. Covering women so that men are not tempted misses the point completely. The Christian discipline is to look away and be charitable. And here he made an equivalence he considered important: racism and lust are the same category of sin. One can fail to love God by being racist; one can fail to love God by committing adultery. Both feel good at the time; both bear bad fruit; both are apples at the center of the garden, and the answer to both is the same: we were told not to eat it, so we do not. The reason may not be given. The instruction is enough.

He read the garden itself this way. The command was not to eat from the tree, and the life was in the rejection. Adam and Eve already had life; it was going well; they wanted more. Eternal life was fine, but it lacked zing, so they tried some evil to see how it worked out. Every temptation- racism, adultery, murder, lies, idols- carries a blessing in its rejection. Life is in the no.

A taste of the kingdom

At this point, Isak told a story. The previous evening he had sat in his backyard with nothing stimulating him, in a kind of peace, and by eight o’clock he could have gone to bed. He had nothing in the world he wanted to do. He was simply experiencing. It came to him that on the same Saturday or Sunday evening, all the bars and outings and conversations that end in foolishness, chaos, confusion, and memory loss were happening elsewhere, and none of it was here, and he did not feel that he was missing anything. The desire to go out was gone. He had forgotten that this kind of sitting was possible. He thought it was communion with God, or with the whole of the natural universe from the point where he connects to it, and he does not get it when he is looking for the next feeling, the next high, the next tie. It felt like being in the garden. He noted that we don’t see this every day; we see the search, and what we want becomes our north star instead.

Thomas’s response was the verse: “My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,” (John 14:27) the peace that passes understanding. The sixties had “peace, love, dope,” and “peace, pot, microdot,” which he called the caricature of the peace that passes understanding; the real thing is walking with Him in the cool of the garden. What Isak tasted was the kingdom: a beautiful place in which one does what one does, watching colors or flowers or sky or building something, and it is enough. It is just okay, and okay is enough.

He drew the lesson about why life exists. This world challenges us to develop a soul with God’s characteristics while living as an animal, which always wants it now and wants more. Life is for learning, and each lesson is a way of God that we strive to incorporate; we do not get it unless we ask for it. That is why life is so dear, and why a life given for one’s country is such a large sacrifice: it is cut short before the full palette of experience could be lived and its lessons of maturity and character deposited inside. Maybe those lessons cannot be learned in heaven, because everything is good and nothing is challenging. As Isak put it, you cannot learn that fire burns if there is no fire around. You cannot say no where there is nothing to say no to. We say “it’s all good” a great deal in this life, and it is not; we have to discriminate. There will be a time when it is all good, and then the phrase will be true.

Isak added the note of responsibility: so much good can be done, so many things to pursue and things to refrain from. This is the everlasting war of good and evil, and this is our moment in it, our turn on the battlefield alongside eight billion others. What matters is how well we do with it in the time we have, rather than letting it dissolve into empty grand gestures of morality. What is real inclusion? What is God’s way of bringing people into His family?

Inclusion, equity, and diversity, redefined

Thomas took the three words and gave each its Christian content. Inclusion is bringing people into God’s family. Equity is the deposit one has made: we all have God’s love, but to receive it we must choose God’s way, and every cup of water given in His name, every evil repaid with good, is treasure put in the storehouse; there is no equity without a deposit. Diversity is giving the same love, God’s love, in all things to all people, in every place we go, walking softly on the earth because it is sacred ground.

Part of that is honoring honorable traditions and finding what is honorable within the dishonorable, which requires a great deal of discrimination. Sometimes the only good in an evil is that it provided the example of what good is, and that was necessary. He extended a kind of sympathy toward those who play the villain’s part; it is a hard role, and one wonders whether they knew what they were taking on. He floated, with explicit uncertainty, the idea that souls choose their lives before birth; there is enough scripture (Jeremiah 1:5): “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” to suggest a consciousness prior to this life, though it might equally be luck of the draw. On the choosing hypothesis, no one chose to be a gangster; each chose to go down into a hard life believing he could turn it around. Some do. Most forget, and are swept away. Those who choose it and turn it are betting on the reversal, the trade that buys at the bottom and holds to the top, with a large payoff. Most do not win, and he doubted that people understand the cost of losing. The cost is separation: being cold, out of His presence. That would be a shadow of the loneliness God Himself bears.

The loneliness of God and the origin of existence

Isak observed that no conscious person has ever been in God’s position. Castaways, prisoners, people buried under something, someone alone on a space station: these are levels of loneliness that can be likened to it but not compared. Thomas went one step further down. Even the loneliest human is observing existence, so there is always an other. God’s loneliness is one level lower: it is existence compared to nonexistence. And how existence ever arose, he could not imagine, could not even frame a hypothesis. There was nothing, and then an awareness of nothing arose. Where did the nothing come from?

The two agreed that there is no answer to that question except that it did happen; there is something. Genesis truncates the creation story at a comparatively developed stage: in the beginning God moved over the waters. From a conscious awareness, everything that followed is comprehensible; it is mechanism, a building up. But where the God who moved over the waters came from is too hard. Thomas doubted we will comprehend it even in glory. The only thing he could see is that when He comes we shall be like Him, and that realization may be the only one that actually changes us.

Does anyone get it?

Thomas described his project as trying to save the world by having people realize what it is all about and where it came from, and confessed that it is a tough climb; people do not seem to get it very well. He asked Isak directly whether he was projecting or being hopeful, or whether it made any sense.

Isak’s answer was careful. It made sense. He didn’t get all the levels; he was immature in his study and, like everyone, limited in perspective, and he couldn’t verify the physics underneath. But the process was intriguing because he could take things in, let his own consciousness work on them, and test them against the world through a different-colored lens. This lens was close in color to the one he had been cleaning his whole life: clearly the universe exists; clearly he is not the most important thing in it; clearly some engine drives the train of life, and humanity did not invent it. What Thomas had done was reconcile the two things that, between them, encompass everything: the laws of nature and the moral laws that exist because of the same Creator. Being subject to gravity together does not mean both of us may do whatever we like; we are operating within someone else’s rule set. He had come a long way, he said, without wanting to be prideful about it; his brain had changed; he did not think he had been brainwashed; the things being said clicked with how the universe would have to be made if God exists. He no longer felt he was worshipping the earth or the sky, because they are not separate but interconnected, and he felt he had reconciled spirituality, psychology, and physics. He was also honest about his guards: he is wary of propaganda, of cults, of misuse of leadership in churches, and he noted that the conversation would be very different if it came from someone whose intentions he could not trust.

Isak then described a conversation with a close friend of ten years, a skeptic who regards Christianity as a hoax to control people, a view Isak has himself held and expects to hold again in weaker moments. Without planning it, he found himself saying what he thought, in a rational back-and-forth that felt like sitting in the fellowship’s discussions. The friend’s objection came down to not wanting to be controlled by rules. The reply was that he already lives under rules: the Constitution, the laws of wherever he is, the social rules of whatever group he is with, which shift depending on whether a policeman is present. As a well-known songwriter put it, everyone serves somebody; the only choice is whom. Isak’s choice puts him in harmony with the Creator, so what he wants to do and what God wants become the same thing, rather than a life spent trying to get away with everything.

He did not think he had converted his friend, whose worldview was shaped by a family tragedy that left him with no one to hold accountable and no answer, and who has concluded that since anything can happen, one should live for now and feel good. But Isak noticed that these conversations are coming easier. He can put his foot down and say, “This is what I believe, at least right now,” and remain open. All his interactions are different. He finds himself seeking the right thing in every moment, and feeling it more when he does the wrong thing, whereas the old pattern was to know better and do it anyway, desensitizing himself, covering the antenna, hiding the light on the hill, until he was in touch only with what he wanted to feel. Now, the excitement comes from noticing why he is no longer inclined toward what used to attract him.

The spark that fans out

Thomas’s assessment of transmission was sober. Looking at people in general, he observed that they came into a conversation believing something and usually left still believing it. When a person already has a theology that explains everything for him, he keeps searching but fits everything he hears into what he already has, and no real transformation happens. The one-on-one encounter, which should be the most powerful method, has not proven reliably effective.

Isak seemed to be an exception, and the exception gave him hope. If the message changes one heart, there is a class of people susceptible to it, and if their two stories are as similar as they seem, that class could carry the message on. He compared the experience he was after to what a seminar movement of the 1970s tried and failed to produce: everyone said “I got it,” but doubted it because the method was a secular-humanist, knowledge-based debate that could not reach the level of transformation it promised. The real thing can be found anywhere, as a song said, even in a guitar. If he has a method that crosses a gap of a certain width to one person, that person, a little different from the source, crosses the next gap to someone a little different again, and the understanding fans out. All it takes is a spark.

Isak said that was exactly what he felt with his friend: he just needs a spark, not conversion, just the recognition that there is something deeper, and then let it do what it does. He described the discipline of not preaching, of resisting the urge to tell everyone to stop drinking because he remembers how that sounded to him, and of instead helping with the problems the person is drinking about. He wondered aloud who the actual audience is. He and Thomas are both curious people for whom the standard answers were not enough; he traced his own habit of looking at every side to having felt unheard, and to a resulting concern that others feel heard. That openness has also made him receptive to the idea that all religions are looking for the same thing, and to the occasional sensation of an evil presence in a passerby. Is this system for the curious, or for everyone?

Marketing the message, and the only argument that holds

Thomas accepted that this was a marketing question and did not pretend to have the answer. How many people will be changed, whether the world will be changed, whether anyone will want him in office because of it, are all low-probability outcomes; it does not hurt to try, and he feels the passion for trying. Borrowing a colleague’s phrase, this is a startup: no one knows what will work, so you try many presentation methods until you find one that works.

He reflected on the essay that had started the conversation, which had taken a week and somewhere between twenty and fifty hours. Rereading it, he thought it held together, but he was under no illusion that any argument is ever closed. Every sentence has a phrase with implications that lead somewhere the writer did not intend, and the only way to button up every loose end would be to speak all of life, past, present, and future, in every permutation. Isak framed it as a joke: the final argument would have to be a nuclear bomb. He believed every argument begins with a premise: that no one can address everything except God, and that every law and argument has a downside for someone, so the real work is seeing what each one fundamentally does and whom it helps.

Thomas offered the abbreviation that covers all the possibilities: what you need is Jesus in your heart, guiding you, and the words will come when you need them. That single postulate requires all the words in the world to justify it, so the best one can do is move people toward it, and sometimes all one can do is give a cup of water, which may be the turning point. Whatever the surface topic, the real subject is being guided by the Spirit of Christ, and a long chain connects one to the other. His proposal for a campaign was therefore to put the message out in many ways, choosing any starting point and any trajectory, and always ending in the same place. He revised the familiar saying to make it stronger: not “preach the gospel, and use words if you have to,” but live it and use words, and tell people where the endpoint is at the start, on the Toastmasters principle of telling them what you are going to tell them, telling them, and telling them what you told them. The aim is not to lead people to a conclusion by allegory but to give them the answer at the back of the book: Jesus is Lord, put Him in your heart, and then tell the stories that show what it means.

Isak agreed, with a refinement. Jesus taught in metaphors drawn from what people knew, and that remains valuable, but he was still saying the thing. The clearer the truth, the less room for misinterpretation. Clever framings that lower people’s defenses have their place, but the best approach does not trick anyone: this is the way things seem to be; here is the option to have it in your heart; now what do you do with it?

Thomas acknowledged that his own method is not the only one, and perhaps not the most effective. A family member in the fellowship simply advocates putting Jesus in your heart. A reader on his mailing list, a woman who was once a Muslim and a communist, present at the Iranian revolution, and who is now as fervent a Christian as she was a revolutionary, told him over dinner that his method is very intellectual and that the place it touches her is the simpler one. He admitted that “put Jesus in your heart” remains more abstract to him than the path he actually walked: recognizing that it all is God, taking that as a central hypothesis into which everything had to fit, and discovering that Jesus being Lord fit.

Conscious points and rebellious bits

The conversation closed by connecting the theology to Thomas’s physics. His program, Conscious Point Physics, proposes that the universe is built from elementary points that are themselves conscious, each knowing the rules and acting within them. Isak saw the moral picture reflected there: every conscious point operates within the rules; whether it has a choice or not, whatever it does is still within them. Thomas replied that the points are God’s point of view and God’s way of manifesting the world. It makes sense that they are committed to following the rules. Whether there are rebellious bits is unknown.

His closing reflection was on scale. At the level of a human, or a group of humans, a direction can be chosen, and the same categories recur as the scale grows: unity and chaos, what breaks things apart and what heals. He joked that he found a little germ and brought her home to feed, and that we are all lost little germs interacting inside the body of the universe, keeping it healthy or fighting its health, and that the task is to recognize what kind of germ each one is and how to treat it. If a wolf led its pack the way some politicians lead theirs, it would be eaten alive. The perspective gives one something to compare against: one can read the Torah or the Quran against what one has come to believe is right and wrong. We are designed to process these things, and the closer we get to God, the cleaner we process them.

Thomas’s last word was that when the time comes, they will be able to put on a good show.

Conclusion

The discussion began by asking whether Christianity could become the mirror image of the thing it warns about, and ended by locating the only safeguard in a place no political program can reach. A counterfeit Christianity that coerces is not Christianity, and will not have the power that the real thing has. Islam, on the view presented here, is the same moral program administered by supervision rather than liberty, and its strength in the West comes from the West’s own loss of nerve and memory. The remedy proposed is not a stronger stick but a changed heart, chosen freely by a person who knows evil and refuses it, because that refusal is the only gift God cannot give Himself. Everything else in the conversation- the redefinition of inclusion and equity, the taste of the kingdom in a quiet backyard, the origin of existence, the problem of how one heart reaches another- follows from that single point, and every argument, however it begins, is meant to end with living the person of Jesus Christ.

290920 – Origen on Literal vs Spiritual Allegory

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

The Letter, the Spirit, and the Knife:

Weighing the Case Against Origen

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 20 September 2026

Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. — 2 Corinthians 3:6

Occasion. On September 17, Scott Lively published an essay arguing that Origen of Alexandria, the third-century teacher most associated with the allegorical reading of Scripture, cannot be trusted on doctrine, because as a young man he castrated himself in obedience to a literal reading of Matthew 19:12 and never afterward renounced the way of reading that Mr. Lively believes produced the act. From that one wound he traces a line through Augustine to Rome, to much of Protestant teaching about the last things, and finally to the modern reinterpretations of the Bible’s teaching on sex. The essay raises a question every Christian has to answer: whether or not he has heard of Origen – how does a reader know when the Bible is speaking plainly and when it is speaking in figure, and who gets to say? That question is worth a Sunday. This essay summarizes the argument, grants what is sound in it, tests what is not, and then offers a set of working rules for the fellowship to argue over.

I. The Argument in Brief

Mr. Lively’s case runs in five steps.

First, the history. The church historian Eusebius records that the young Origen read the Lord’s saying about men who have “made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” (Matthew 19:12) as an instruction and carried it out on his own body. Mr. Lively treats this as reliable, and he points to the first canon of the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), which removed from the clergy any healthy man who had castrated himself, as evidence that the practice was real and known.

Second, the later Origen. In his commentary on Matthew, written late in life, Origen rejected the literal reading of that verse and condemned the act. Mr. Lively holds that this was not true repentance, because Origen kept and expanded the interpretive system: Scripture has a bodily, a soulish, and a spiritual sense; the literal is the lowest, and the spiritual is the highest and is often hidden. Mr. Lively says that scheme came from Plato and not from Moses.

Third, the diagnosis. Origen lacked the Old Testament grounding that would have told him when Jesus was speaking in hyperbole. He treated the Sermon on the Mount’s standard as something to be reached by willpower, which Mr. Lively calls Pelagianism before Pelagius (Pelagianism being the fifth-century teaching, condemned by the Church, that man can obey God by his natural powers without the inward help of grace). The youthful literalism was the error; the later allegory was the escape hatch that let him avoid naming its cause.

Fourth, the pipeline. Origen taught the Church that the concrete, Hebrew sense of Scripture is optional. Augustine inherited the habit, spiritualized the thousand-year reign of Revelation 20, and recast the place of the Jews. Rome made it an institution, and the Reformers kept more of it than they knew.

Fifth, the present. The same move that turns a plain text into a “higher” meaning is, he says, what modern revisionists do with Romans 1, Leviticus 18, and Genesis 1:27. The remedy is what he calls the Hebraic reading: the New Testament read through the Old as written, with metaphor and hyperbole recognized for what they are, and with the spiritual sense understood as the sense the letter was written to carry.

II. The Record

The story is ancient, and the source is friendly. Eusebius was Pamphilus’s pupil, and Pamphilus was Origen’s devoted defender; the sixth book of his Ecclesiastical History is largely a tribute to Origen. An admirer has no motive to invent such a story, and Eusebius tells it with evident discomfort. That is a fair point in Mr. Lively’s favor, and many historians accept the account.

Three cautions belong beside it. Eusebius was born a few years after Origen died and writes from the tradition of Origen’s circle, not as a witness. Epiphanius, writing in the following century, reports more than one version of how Origen was supposed to have achieved his continence, which shows the matter was already rumor-laden in antiquity. The Nicene canon also cannot be pinned on Origen. Justin Martyr, writing in Alexandria’s orbit a generation before Origen was born, tells of a young Christian who petitioned the Roman governor for permission to be made a eunuch. The practice was in the air among zealous ascetics; the canon addresses a pattern, not one famous man.

One more matter of proportion. The article’s opening states the act in cruder and more specific anatomical terms than Eusebius does. The source says only that Origen carried out the saying on his own body. When the purpose is to warn, it is tempting to make the picture as vivid as possible, but a fact stated larger than the evidence is a misstatement all the same.

I will take the account as probably true, as Mr. Lively does. The question is what follows from it.

III. What the Article Gets Right

A good deal.

The reading of Matthew 19:11-12 is sound. The disciples have just heard the Lord restore marriage to its creation pattern, and they answer that on those terms “it is not good to marry.” Jesus replies, “All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given,” and then names three kinds of eunuchs. The third is the man who gives up marriage for the sake of the kingdom’s work, as Paul did. It is a calling received, not a surgery performed. The verse closes, “He that is able to receive it, let him receive it,” which is the language of gift and vocation.

The reading of Matthew 5:29 is also sound. “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out” is hyperbole, and the proof is in the sentence itself: a man with one eye lusts as well as a man with two. The Lord says where the trouble lies: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications” (Matthew 15:19). No blade reaches the heart. Paul names this whole family of remedies and dismisses them as having “a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body” (Colossians 2:23).

The central principle is sound: the spiritual sense of a passage stands on its letter, not replacing it. Mr. Lively’s illustration from Paul is exact. “That Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4), and yet a real rock gave real water to real people. The higher meaning is the meaning the history was arranged by God to carry. When a reader uses the higher meaning to dismiss the history, he has stopped interpreting and started composing.

And the criticism of Origen has a real target. In the fourth book of On First Principles, Origen says plainly that some passages have no true literal sense at all, that the Spirit wove in things that did not happen so that the reader would be driven to look higher. His test for which passages those are is whether the letter seems impossible or unworthy of God. That test is the weak joint. “Unworthy of God” by whose measure? In practice the measure was the philosophy of his age, which found bodies, land, wrath, and earthly kingdoms embarrassing. Every generation has its own list of what embarrasses it, and a rule that lets the reader set aside the letter whenever it offends his sense of fitness will serve every generation’s list equally well. On this, Mr. Lively is right.

IV. Which Method Held the Knife?

Here the argument runs into its own evidence. The act was committed by the literal reading. The allegorical reading was the correction. If the wound is an exhibit against a method, it is an exhibit against taking a figure of speech as a command, which is the opposite of allegory.

Mr. Lively sees the difficulty and builds a bridge: both errors, he says, grew from one root, a Greek mind without Hebrew grounding, assuming that the standard could be met by effort. The first half of that bridge bears some weight. A reader steeped in the Law would have had Deuteronomy 23:1 before him, “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD,” and would have known that the God who gave that statute was not now commanding the thing it describes. Scripture would have checked the reading of Scripture.

The second half bears less. Eusebius gives Origen’s motives as two: to obey what he took to be the Saviour’s word, and to put his teaching of women beyond the reach of slander. Neither is a program of self-salvation. This was a boy whose father was beheaded for the faith when he was sixteen, who tried to follow him to martyrdom and was stopped only because his mother hid his clothes. The simplest reading of the evidence is an excess of zeal in a very young man acting alone. Calling it Pelagianism reads a later controversy backward into a life that does not obviously fit it.

And the logic cuts both ways. If a bad act discredits the method that led to it, then the knife discredits literalism. Mr. Lively would rightly refuse that conclusion, since he is a literalist and the abuse of a thing does not condemn its right use. The same courtesy is owed in the other direction. A method of reading is tested by one question: does it recover what the Author meant? The wound does not answer that question either way.

V. The Teacher and the Teaching

The title of the article makes a further claim: that the man, having done this, cannot be trusted. This is the form of argument called ad hominem, judging a teaching by the failures of the teacher. Scripture does not reason that way. Moses killed a man and hid the body. David took a wife and arranged a death. Peter denied the Lord with an oath. Paul held the coats at Stephen’s stoning. If the worst act of a man’s youth disqualifies everything he afterward taught, we have lost most of the Bible’s human authors.

The Lord Himself separated the two questions. Of the scribes and Pharisees He said, “All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). The teaching is weighed as teaching.

The article answers that Origen condemned the act but never repented of its cause. That reply assumes the point in dispute, namely that the threefold method was the cause, when the act came before the method and from the opposite direction. What the record shows is a man who did a rash thing at about eighteen, said in later life that those who do it act without understanding and bring reproach on the Word, labored for decades over the text of Scripture, and at the end was imprisoned and tortured under the emperor Decius without denying Christ, dying not long after from what he suffered. A fair summary of the man has to hold all of that. Origen did teach errors, some of them serious, and the Church said so. But they are to be shown as errors from the Scriptures, one by one. His body is not evidence.

VI. Allegory Before Origen

The article calls Origen the originator of allegorical interpretation. He was its most systematic Christian practitioner, but he did not begin it. In Alexandria, Philo the Jew had read Moses allegorically two centuries earlier, and Clement, Origen’s predecessor, did the same. More to the point, the New Testament itself shows the practice of finding meaning beyond the immediate.

Paul writes of Sarah and Hagar, “Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants” (Galatians 4:24). He takes the law about not muzzling the ox and asks, “Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written” (1 Corinthians 9:9-10). He says of Israel’s wilderness history, “all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition” (1 Corinthians 10:11). Hebrews 8:5 reads the tabernacle as “the example and shadow of heavenly things.” The Lord made Jonah’s three days and the serpent on the pole into signs of Himself, and on the Emmaus road, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).

So the question was never whether Scripture has a sense beyond the surface. The apostles settled that. The useful distinction is between two words that are often used loosely. Typology reads a real person, event, or institution as a God-designed pattern of something greater to come, leaving the original history fully standing: a real lamb, a real Passover, and Christ our Passover. Allegory, in the sense that deserves criticism, treats the narrative as a code whose surface may be discarded once the hidden meaning is extracted. The apostles practice the first. Even Paul’s one use of the word “allegory” is typology by this definition, since he never suggests that Hagar and Sarah did not live.

In fairness to Origen, he did not pull his three senses from Plato alone. He argued them from Scripture: from Paul’s “spirit and soul and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23) and from a verse in Proverbs as it read in his Greek Old Testament. He also said that the passages which are historically true far outnumber those that are purely spiritual. And the man accused of treating the letter as disposable spent some twenty-five years building the Hexapla, a six-column comparison of the Hebrew text and its Greek translations, which is among the greatest labors on the letter of Scripture in the ancient world. His fault was narrower than the article allows and is the one named in Section III: he reserved the right to set history aside when it offended his sense of what befits God.

VII. The Pipeline Examined

Does the line run from Origen through Augustine to Rome and into the Reformation? In part it does. In the Confessions, Augustine says what freed him to believe the Old Testament was the preaching of Ambrose of Milan, who expounded it spiritually, and Ambrose had learned that manner of preaching from Origen and Philo. Augustine also admits in The City of God that he once held to a literal thousand-year reign and gave it up. The influence is real.

Three facts complicate the picture.

First, the disagreement over the millennium predates Origen’s influence. Justin Martyr, around A.D. 160, held firmly to an earthly thousand-year reign (the view called chiliasm, or today premillennialism), yet in the same breath told his Jewish conversation partner that many Christians of pure and godly faith thought otherwise. Origen was not yet born.

Second, Rome did not enthrone Origen. Jerome turned against him. Augustine rejected his best-known speculation, the eventual restoration of all souls. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 listed him by name among the condemned. To say that Rome depends on Origen for interpretive authority overstates it. He influenced the Church’s habits of reading, and the Church also formally censured him.

Third, and most telling, the Reformers form a test case that runs against the thesis. Luther and Calvin rejected Origen’s allegorizing in the strongest language either man used about any Church Father, and both insisted on the plain grammatical and historical sense. Yet both remained amillennial (reading the thousand years of Revelation 20 as a figure for the present age of the Church), and the Lutherans’ Augsburg Confession explicitly rejected an earthly millennial kingdom. Men who threw out Origen’s method with both hands still did not arrive at Mr. Lively’s eschatology. That means the millennium question is not decided by one’s opinion of Origen. It is decided by how one reads apocalyptic writing, a kind of Scripture that announces its own symbolism: “The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches” (Revelation 1:20). Whether the thousand years belong with the candlesticks or with the plain prose is a question to be argued from the text, and Christians who love the letter have landed on both sides. I leave it open here for the fellowship. My point is only that telling the story of Origen’s wound does not settle it.

VIII. The Modern Application

The article’s most urgent claim is that today’s revisions of biblical sexual ethics are Origen’s method at work. I share the concern and doubt the pedigree.

Those who reinterpret Romans 1 and Leviticus 18 do not, as a rule, allegorize. They argue history and vocabulary: that Paul had only exploitative practices or idol-temple rites in view, that a Greek word has been mistranslated, that the Levitical statute belonged to a purity code now lapsed. In form, these are appeals to the literal and historical sense, claiming to recover what the words meant to their first hearers. They must therefore be answered on that ground, and they can be: Paul’s argument in Romans 1 is built on creation and the Creator, not on local custom, and it reaches back to the same “male and female” of Genesis that the Lord cited in Matthew 19.

This shows that the grammatical-historical method can be bent just as the allegorical method can. The revisionists have bent it, and so no method is a lock that a determined reader cannot pick. Peter said of Paul’s letters that they contain “some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). The wresting he describes is done by the reader’s will, and the method is only the instrument. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). A man who has decided beforehand what the text may not say will reach his conclusion by allegory in one century and by word studies in another.

The Lord states the real safeguard: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God” (John 7:17). He makes willingness to obey the condition of understanding, so that a reader who is not willing to do what the text says will not see clearly what it says. A sound method is necessary, but it does not protect a reader who lacks that willingness.

IX. Is the Standard Impossible?

Mr. Lively writes that Jesus set the bar of the Sermon on the Mount out of reach on purpose, to drive us to Him and not to greater effort. There is truth in this that must be kept, and a way of hearing it that must be refused.

It is true that the flesh cannot keep the Sermon. No man purifies his own heart by resolution, and the man who tries in his own strength ends either in despair or in some technique, of which the knife is only the most extreme.

The Sermon is not merely a mirror held up to make us give up. It ends with a man who “heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them,” (Matthew 7:24) and his house stands. Paul says the purpose of Christ’s work was “that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Romans 8:4). Grace, by his account, is a teacher: “teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:12). And the two sides are joined in a single sentence: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13).

So Origen’s mistake was not that he took the Lord’s demand for purity seriously and tried to meet it. We should all take it that seriously. His mistake was the location and the instrument. The apostolic reading of “pluck it out” and “cut it off” is given by Paul, who uses the same picture and tells us what it means: “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness” (Colossians 3:5). The “members” to be put to death are the sins, and the power is named elsewhere: “if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:13). The command is as severe as the young Origen thought it was. What he got wrong was the target, which is the sins and not the flesh, and the means, which is the Spirit and not a blade.

X. Working Rules for Rightly Dividing

If neither “always literal” nor “always look higher” is a sufficient rule, what is? I offer seven for discussion. None is original, and all of them can be seen operating in the apostles’ own handling of Scripture.

1. Begin with the letter. Ask first what the words meant, in their grammar and setting, to those who first heard them. Every further meaning must be able to show its footing there.

2. Let Scripture check the reading of Scripture. A reading of one verse that requires what another verse forbids is wrong. Deuteronomy 23:1 and “your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 6:19) both stood between Origen and the knife. So does Isaiah 56:5, where the LORD promises the eunuch who keeps covenant “a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters.” God takes pity on the eunuch’s condition there and gives him a promise. He does not ask any man to bring that condition on himself.

3. Build the spiritual sense on the history, never in place of it. The rock was Christ, and the rock was also a rock. If the higher reading needs the event not to have happened, the higher reading is the thing to discard.

4. Read each kind of writing by its own signals. Narrative presents itself as narrative, law as law, and proverb as proverb, and a vision shows itself when it uses symbols. Hyperbole is marked by a literal sense that would defeat the speaker’s own purpose, as a plucked-out eye leaves lust untouched. The signals are in the text, and the reader’s discomfort is not one of them.

5. Let the apostles show how it is done. Where the New Testament interprets a saying or a passage, as Colossians 3:5 interprets the language of Matthew 5, that interpretation governs ours.

6. Read in company. Origen acted young, alone, and in secret, and tried to conceal what he had done. “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety” (Proverbs 11:14). “No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation” (2 Peter 1:20). A reading that a man would be unwilling to lay before sober brothers before acting on it is already suspect. This is a large part of what a fellowship is for. The Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11), and they did it together.

7. Come willing to obey. John 7:17 “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” stands over all the rest. The reader who wants the text to say less than it says will find a method to make it so, and the zealous reader who wants to do more than it says needs the other six rules to restrain him.

XI. Conclusion

Mr. Lively’s warning has a sound core. The letter of Scripture is God’s own control on every higher reading, and a rule of interpretation that lets the reader drop the history whenever it offends the age will, in the end, let him drop the Bible altogether. Origen did hold such a rule, and the Church was right to be wary of where it led him.

But the argument from the wound does not carry the weight it is given. The knife was in the hand of the literal reading. The man who used it repudiated the act, and he went on to give his life to the text and to suffer for the Name. The apostles themselves read Scripture spiritually. Rome condemned Origen as well as borrowing from him, and the Reformers who rejected him most loudly did not reach the conclusions the article says must follow. The present-day twisting of Scripture largely uses historical tools. The constant across it all is the one Peter named: an unstable will that wrests the text toward what it already wanted.

Neither a lower view of the spiritual sense nor a higher view of the literal will fix that by itself. The remedy is the whole counsel of God, read in the fellowship of the saints, by men who intend to do what they find there. “The letter killeth” (2 Corinthians 3:6) when the flesh handles it, whether the flesh is zealous as the young Origen’s was or evasive as the revisionist’s is. “The spirit giveth life,” and the Spirit’s chosen instrument for giving it is that same letter, rightly divided.

I hold these conclusions as my best present judgment, and I would be glad to be shown a better argument on any of them.

Discussion Questions

1. If a bad act committed under a way of reading Scripture discredits that way of reading, which way does Origen’s act discredit? Is there any sound version of the argument from the wound?
2. Matthew 23:3 separates what the scribes teach from what they do. When, if ever, does a teacher’s conduct rightly count against his teaching? Does 1 Timothy 3 on the qualifications of overseers bear on this?
3. Paul writes, “Which things are an allegory” (Galatians 4:24). How is what Paul does with Sarah and Hagar different from what Origen claimed the right to do? Is the distinction between typology and allegory real, or a convenience?
4. Origen’s test for setting aside the letter was that it seemed “impossible” or “unworthy of God.” What passages does our own age find unworthy of God? By what test should a Christian decide that a passage is figurative?
5. Luther and Calvin rejected allegory and yet did not expect an earthly millennium. What does that tell us about how much the question of Revelation 20 depends on interpretive method, and how much on something else?
6. Section VIII argues that modern revisionist readings use historical arguments, not allegorical ones. If that is right, what is the most effective response?
7. Is the standard of the Sermon on the Mount meant to be kept? Hold Matthew 7:24, Romans 8:4, and Philippians 2:12-13 together and state in one sentence how effort and grace relate.
8. Origen acted alone and in secret. Has anyone here acted on a private reading of Scripture that the counsel of other believers would have corrected, or did correct? What does Rule 6 require of us toward one another in practice?

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. — 2 Timothy 2:15

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260912 – Islam as Religion and Political Ideology

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 12, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Revolutionary and the Devotee

Meeting the Threat of Islam to Liberal Democracy

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 12 September 2026

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. — Romans 8:15

Occasion. On July 7, 2026, PragerU published Episode 39 of The Jeremy Boreing Show, a long conversation between Boreing and Danny Burmawi titled “A Former Muslim Exposes Lies About Islam.” Burmawi was born in Jordan, lived his first nineteen years as a Muslim, spent a year as a zealous defender of the faith, left it after reading its own sources, became a Christian, lived fifteen years in Lebanon, and now leads the Ideological Defense Institute (IDI) and has written Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis. The 2-hour interview offers an informative first-person account of living as a Muslim. Burmawi argues that Islam is not a religion among religions, but a civilizational order that contains a religion. He makes that case from the inside, as a man who paid for his knowledge by living the life and learning from it. You can watch it at https://www.prageru.com/videos/a-former-muslim-exposes-lies-about-islam-or-ep-39.

This essay is exceptionally long because I address each major idea in the recording and analyze the concepts in depth in Section V (I recommend reading Section V if you don’t want to spend time reading a 23,000-word essay). The interview features Danny Burmawi and Jeremy Boreing of PragerU. I paraphrased the interview; please listen for the full detail and texture of who Danny Burmawi is and his experience of living in Islam. I agree with most of the ideas and programs Burmawi proposes, but I propose a more aggressive transformation of American culture and the Western church (as a result, it is less likely to be implemented, but I believe it is where the cure lies). I think the foundation is transforming the accepted assumptions about what Islam is: realizing that it is a religion intertwined with a political system that is incompatible with our Constitutional Republic. The examination touches current events and public controversy — Tucker Carlson, Zohran Mamdani, Canadian Islamophobia legislation, and Israel. We examine doctrine — grace, sanctification, the sanctification of Muhammad, the nature of the Islamic Jesus, dispensationalism and its critics. We confront practical, theological, ontological, and relational implications.

The order of the ideas confronted below is mine, not the interview’s.

I. Triage: What the Interview Asserts and What We May Assert After It

Burmawi spoke for almost 2 hours without notes, and he made a few factual errors. I shall note those first. Proverbs 18:17 tells us what to do about it: He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. The following are points that may be contested in Burmawi’s story.

Tier one — public and verifiable. The Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries took the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain from a Christian world; Aramaic, the language of Jesus, gave way to Arabic across the region over the following centuries; Jerash, Burmawi’s home city, was a city of the Decapolis and is today a ruin visited by tourists. The Ottoman devşirme — the levy of Christian boys for conversion and service — is documented history. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was a church for nine centuries, a mosque for five, a museum for eighty-six years, and has been a mosque again since 2020, with its Christian mosaics curtained during prayers. Jordanian shari’a courts have, in documented cases, treated conversion from Islam as apostasy with civil consequences: marriage annulled, custody lost, inheritance forfeited. The local youth club erected the statue of Christ in Fuheis, Jordan’s Christian-majority town, in January 2023, and the municipality removed it the next day after a social-media outcry, relocating it to a Christian cemetery; the Jordanian King visited the town weeks later to affirm coexistence. Zohran Mamdani is mayor of New York; his father Mahmood Mamdani wrote Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004). John Calvin approved Servetus’s execution in 1553. The Aisha tradition Burmawi cites appears in Sahih al-Bukhari, and it says: she remarked that his Lord seemed to hasten to fulfill his wishes. The hadith about expelling Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula is in Sahih Muslim. The account of Jesus asking a companion to be substituted for him at the crucifixion appears in classical commentaries on Qur’an 4:157—al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir—not in the Qur’an itself, which says only that “it was made to appear so to them.” Increase Mather’s The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669) argued for a future national conversion of the Jews, two centuries before Darby.

Tier two — informed interpretation. The reading of Qur’an 9:29 as an unbounded command, the three-stage pattern of Islamic expansion, the claim that Islamic soteriology is structurally fear-based, the argument that Islam is a total order rather than a religion, the analysis of the red-green alliance, the characterization of Mamdani’s commitments, the assessment that the West’s post-9/11 accommodation accelerated Islamic growth are all assertions that need to be examined more deeply to ensure these statements of fact are well grounded in evidence.

Tier three — held loosely. Four items need correction or caution.

First, Burmawi paraphrases Qur’an 9:29 as a command to kill unbelievers until they pay the jizya. The verb in 9:29 is qātilū — fight — not uqtulū — kill; the verse reads, in the standard translations, fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, and do not hold as forbidden what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and do not acknowledge the religion of truth, from among the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. The verse that says kill is Qur’an 9:5, and it is addressed to the polytheists, not the People of the Book. A command to make war on Christians and Jews until they submit to a humiliating tax is the more accurate reading, and it is the reading that has governed Islamic jurisprudence on the dhimma for thirteen centuries.

Second, the traditions in Bukhari say that a woman was punished for confining a cat until it starved, and that a prostitute was forgiven for giving water to a thirsty dog; a separate tradition says that keeping a dog other than for hunting or guarding diminishes one’s reward daily. Burmawi reverses the animals and inflates the penalties. More importantly, the actual traditions do not support his point that Islamic merit is random and chaotic — they read as ordinary moral teaching about cruelty and mercy toward animals. His broader argument that the only clear trajectory to assurance is martyrdom rests on other ground.

Third, the casualty figures — eighty-six million dead in India, a possible total of three hundred eighty million across the history of Islamic conquest — are from a contested literature (K. S. Lal’s demographic estimates for India; Bill Warner’s aggregate). They are not fabrications; they are upper-bound reconstructions. The conquest was vast and murderous by any accounting.

Fourth, I could not confirm reports that Tucker Carlson bought a home in Qatar. In December 2025, he said he was going to buy one, but I could not verify whether he completed the purchase. Nothing in this essay depends on it.

Two additional items to qualify: Burmawi says there have been sixty-five thousand Islamic terror attacks in recent decades; the database (through Dr. Gad Saad) counted about forty-nine thousand since September 2001. The exact number isn’t significant, since they’re the same order of magnitude. And the anecdote in which Pascal, asked by the king for evidence of God, answers that the Jews are the evidence: the anecdote is apocryphal in that form (it circulates attached to several names), but the substance is authentically Pascal — the Pensées devote extended sections to the survival of the Jewish people as a standing proof of Providence. The IDI essay Burmawi commends should be read as a meditation on Pascal’s actual argument, not as a transcript of a conversation.

Having given my opinion of what I believe were errors, let us examine Burmawi’s ideas.

II. Fourteen Centuries and the Curtained Mosaics

Burmawi opens with the story that Tucker Carlson and his guests have treated the phrase Islamic jihad as a manufactured narrative — something invented by people with an agenda. Burmawi answers with fourteen centuries of history. Two-thirds of the ancient Christian world occupied. Languages replaced. Civilizations reduced to ruins that only tourists visit. The dhimma. The devşirme. Churches turned into mosques, with Hagia Sophia as the last great one, where he stood under the ceiling and saw the Virgin and the apostles curtained off because one cannot pray in a mosque with Christian icons visible, yet they cannot be destroyed because the world’s heritage authorities forbid it.

The mosaics are under curtains, not chiseled off. That is the West’s exact condition today. Our Christian past is not destroyed; it is covered. The law, the universities, the hospitals, the imago Dei that Burmawi correctly names as the foundation of the human-rights declarations that even non-Christian nations sign — all of it is still on the ceiling. We simply do not look up. And a different worship has moved into the room beneath it.

A scripture belongs here. The seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 were in what is now Turkey. Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea — every one of them is today in a Muslim-majority nation, and the Lord’s word to the first of them was: Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent (Revelation 2:5). The candlesticks of Asia Minor were removed. Not by Islam’s strength alone; Islam was the instrument. They were removed because the churches did not do the first works. Burmawi’s history lesson is true: conquest does not happen to a church that is on fire. It happens to a church that has become a museum of its own past — mosaics on the ceiling, curtains beneath.

III. The Revelation of Convenience

Burmawi’s testimony centers on text. He became devout in 2006 to defend Muhammad against the Danish cartoons. He describes the propaganda he was raised on — that an astronaut heard the call to prayer on the moon, that a Palestinian invented the computer and the Americans killed him for it — and the sermon by a Kuwaiti imam that moved him to tears, recounting how the Companions tore a poetess in half between two camels for mocking the Prophet. He read the Qur’an, the Sira, and the Hadith not to test Islam but to master it. And he found that whenever Muhammad needed something, Gabriel arrived with a revelation to provide it—settling a quarrel with a wife, granting permission to marry his adopted son’s former wife by abolishing adoption. And he found that Aisha had noticed it first and said so, and that her remark is preserved in Islam’s most authoritative collection.

The Torah gives a test for prophets: When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him (Deuteronomy 18:22). That is the falsification test; it is Popper in the Pentateuch. But the biblical record supplies a second, subtler test, never stated as a rule but present everywhere as a pattern: genuine revelation of God rebukes the man who receives it. Nathan walks into David’s court and says Thou art the man (2 Samuel 12:7), and the king, who could have had him killed, writes Psalm 51 instead. Peter, the rock, denies the Lord three times, and the Gospels, his own church’s preserved record, record every denial. Paul writes that when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed (Galatians 2:11), and the church canonized the letter. Moses is barred from the land. Jonah sulks. The prophets are, almost without exception, men whom the Word crushes before it uses. A revelation that arrives only to gratify its recipient, never once tells him he is wrong, and adjusts the moral law of the universe to resolve his domestic difficulties—that is not the signature of the God of Israel. It is the signature of a man.

Burmawi’s friend saw it, and Burmawi saw it, and Aisha saw it fourteen centuries ago. The test does not require hostility to Islam. It requires only reading Islam’s own books with the question the Torah taught the world to ask.

IV. The Judge, the Shahada, and What a Religious Test Is

Burmawi tells of his Jordanian friend who converted to Christianity, was sued by his father for apostasy, was jailed, lost his wife and children and civil standing, and was offered a way out by a humane judge: recite the shahada, say the words, and everything is restored; the state does not care about your heart. Broken, the friend said the words. Years later his whole household became Christian. Burmawi’s verdict on the judge is that he was a decent man despite Islam, not because of it.

That courtroom was a religious test—the kind Article VI, Clause 3 of our Constitution forbids—enacted as ordinary law. In my April 18 essay on the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men (https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/04/18/the-kingdom-of-god-and-kingdoms-of-men/), I distinguished the religious test the Founders prohibited — a legal requirement that you profess something to hold office or civil standing — from testimony, the voluntary declaration of allegiance that the free-exercise clause protects and that Christ commands. The Jordanian court is the religious test in its purest form: say the creed or lose your wife. And the whole Western tradition of liberty of conscience, which the secular world imagines it invented, is in fact the Christian recognition that a creed recited to keep one’s children is not faith and cannot be, that choose you this day whom ye will serve (Joshua 24:15) presupposes the liberty to choose otherwise.

I add a pastoral word. Did the friend deny Christ? Christ said, whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven (Matthew 10:33). But the first to hear those words was Peter, and Peter denied Him, and was restored on a beach at breakfast. Matthew 10 is a summons to courage, not a sentence on the coerced. The Jordanian convert did not deny Christ; he was robbed, and the robber’s demand was a sentence in Arabic. The friend’s household is Christian today. I am not the one who will tell him he failed.

V. Islam is not Just a Religion

The points in this section are central to Burmawi’s thesis. Burmawi’s solution to the problem of Islamic immigration is for the State Department to examine Islam’s theology on the grounds that Islam is a subversive ideology which is antithetical to the existence of the Constitutional Republic. Boreing raises the obvious objection to Burmawi’s demand for a State Department program to examine Islamic theology because America has freedom of religion and the State does not critique theologies. Burmawi answers this objection with a reframing of what Islam is: “Islam is not a religion; Islam has a religion.” His point is that Islam should not be considered to be only a religion because its beliefs, practices, and doctrines extend beyond a man’s personal relationship with God and into the domain of the State.

He likens Islam to a house with a sofa in one room. The room with the sofa is the religion that Islam has; the political, state-forming doctrine of Islam is a completely different room in the house. Just as liberal democracy and communism are political ideologies separate from Christianity and atheism, Islam has a political ideology that is separate from religious Islam. He claims the two have been combined: the sacred/theological/religious program has been joined to the political ideology, and, by doing so, the whole has evaded scrutiny by the State Department as a subversive group that should be monitored. Burmawi distinguishes between aspects of Islam that are clearly religious in the conventional sense, including prescriptions for worship, prayer, fasting, alms, pilgrimage, creed, etc. But he notes that another aspect of Islam contains prescriptions for establishing a political, legal, military, and civilizational program whose stated end is the rule of Allah’s law over all mankind. All of Islam is called a religion, but inside that definition has been smuggled a program of societal-governmental overthrow to replace our Constitutional Republic with its own form of governmental order.

Such a move requires an etymological pause to examine the validity of this distinction: Religio—Cicero’s derivation is relegere, to read again, to be scrupulous; Lactantius’s is religare, to bind fast. Either way, the word “religion” names a relation between the soul and the divine and the practices that express that relation. Our First Amendment protects the free exercise of that relation. It does not protect a program to replace the Constitution, even if that program of replacing the governmental system calls itself a “religion.”

My perspective is broader; I hold that our relationship with God is not confined to prayer, fasting, and other rituals, beliefs, and doctrines about the relationship between God and man. My thesis is that man’s relationship with God is total; nothing participates in the very essence of God: no action, thought, experience, substance, or transaction. From this universal perspective, one could argue that every act of life should be considered sacred and subject to one’s religion’s prescriptions. This is my stand. This means Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism are likewise combinations of the sacred and secular, and that the distinction between them is functional and practical rather than intrinsic and fully separable.

The State is charged with regulating men’s external affairs and ensuring that men do not violate the rights God has given. The church is charged with teaching revealed knowledge about man’s relationship with God and conduct that pleases Him; nurturing and awakening the hunger for the divine and transforming the soul into His image; and teaching the limits and boundaries of relationships with fellow man. But the functions of the church are not fully distinct from the functions and purview of the State; regulating relationships between men is the function of the State, and the standard by which those relationships are judged is a moral judgment, which comes from some belief structure, preferably one that is true and optimal and revealed by God.

Because the church-state relationship depends on the God-man relationship, we cannot draw a strict/absolute/inviolable definition of the separation of church and state. Acknowledging this unavoidable overlap is necessary to break the deadlock. Because the State’s existence is authorized by God (Romans 13), the State must ensure its survival. To do so, the State must examine the contents of every religion to understand the patterns of thought and teaching that each religion intends/desires/programs its adherents to impress upon the State. This universal sacred-secular unity makes it unavoidable for the State to examine every religion; it must do so to evaluate the threat its doctrines and practices pose to the State’s continued existence and order.

If a religion includes, as part of its central doctrines, beliefs that are intrinsically different from the established political order, and if its practice advocates establishing that political order, then the State should scrutinize that program. The State should not prohibit or otherwise interfere with church indoctrination, but it should monitor the political activities of such groups to ensure they do not violate the criminal code; prosecuting unlawful conduct is the express purpose of the State. In short, the State should know the doctrine and monitor the activities of every religious group, especially those whose express doctrine includes overthrow of the established State. Again, such monitoring and intervention in unlawful actions should fall within the State’s supervisory authority.

Burmawi argued that Islam’s program to replace the Constitution is not religious activity, as it is not a relation between a soul and God, and that Islam is instead a political organization and therefore should be monitored by the state. I disagree with his argument only to the extent that I believe every thought, word, and deed is intrinsically sacred. Everything we do is unavoidably a relation between soul and God. We must make the division between religious and political on other grounds. Some thoughts, words, and deeds are relations between the soul and the State, and they also fall under the soul’s relation to God. The workable division is functional: conduct between man and man falls under the State’s jurisdiction, whatever its religious motive; the State should not judge or enforce a particular relation between a man and God.

Burmawi uses communism to illustrate his point: if the Party declared Marx a prophet and the Manifesto holy writ, no serious person would grant Marxism-Leninism free-exercise protection to practice its precepts, which were seizing power. He argues that Islam contains, within its sacred texts and across its various sects, varying degrees of state-organizing doctrine. Islam is heterogeneous in this regard, from the Sufis to the Twelvers, each with its own political philosophy and state-influencing aspiration and program. As such, the State should monitor each group’s activities. The State may monitor its citizens’ activities to identify threats to its existence.

As a normative claim (what ought to be done), the State has no right to take preemptive action against lawful acts (though this is not true in practice, as TSA inspections show). The concern is a Minority Report, pre-crime prosecution of ideas, thoughts, and intentions. This prohibition must be strictly enforced. The concern is Franklin’s warning of trading a liberty for a little present security. But neither a fully blind state that takes no action until the revolution has begun nor a total-surveillance state enforcing the current order is appropriate. The State should not interfere with lawful lobbying, promotion, rallying, educating, and organizing for peaceful demonstration and campaign, regardless of the speech, but it should monitor such efforts. The nation should be aware of the agendas and programs of the various factions and their proposed changes.

The Founders wrote the Free Exercise clause into the First Amendment to prevent the state from imposing a form of worship on people. This is entirely proper, since each man is responsible for forming his soul in God’s image. The State’s role is to judge violations of the relationship between man and man, not between God and man. The form of worship, doctrine, and belief about the proper way to shape the soul in God’s perfect image is the responsiblity of every man, and the State should not interfere forcefully with that relationship. But the state, as God’s representative, should guide and direct us in our relationships with one another, and as stated before, that standard of relationship is the substance of the teaching/revelation provided by the church and its underlying Scripture/teachings/revelations.

We must recognize that both “religion” and “Islamophobia” are being used to shield Islam from the supervision of the political portion of its program.

Religion: Free exercise of religion means the state may not forbid a man from praying, fasting, teaching his children his creed, building a mosque with his own money, wearing what his faith prescribes, changing his religion, or peacefully persuading others to change theirs.

• It does not mean that a legal system in which apostates lose their children is a protected religious practice.
• It does not mean that an organized effort to substitute its concept of the law of a god for the Constitution is beyond the State’s surveillance, scrutiny, or examination.
• It does not mean that demanding punishment for criticism of a prophet is a protected religious practice.
• It does not mean the state must not monitor a religion’s activities, study its texts, and know a movement’s goals, methods, and ends with regard to the State. It must not interfere with non-violent, lawful activities, but it is not required to remain ignorant of them as a protected/forbidden domain of State security. Of course, such activity can lead to abuse, and this analysis examines the limits to determine what constitutes overreach. This intersects with privacy and the State’s interest in survival. Monitoring lawful subversive activity serves the State’s interests, but the State may counter only unlawful subversive activity. Free speech is what is at issue.
• The question is: do we have the right to be anonymous and unwatched? Does monitoring a group’s public expression of doctrine violate the Fourth Amendment? Does monitoring the public pronouncements/agendas/goals of a religion fall outside the boundary of the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and the security of one’s papers and possessions?

Islamophobia is a word whose form, as Burmawi notes, was chosen to attach the ideology to the persons, so that criticism of Islam becomes equated with hatred of the person. To disentangle this, we must tell the truth about Islam while using the Christian standard of love. Contempt for Muslims is a violation of the Great Commandment to love neighbor as self. But, as Christians, we are under no compulsion to love an ideology or political philosophy, and we are commanded to hate evil. “Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.” (Romans 12:9) The Islamic goal is to overthrow the worship of the God of the Bible and replace that with the worship of Allah, who is another god (i.e., the revelation recorded in the Qur’an of their god’s commands is not the same as the Bible’s revelation; thus the character and person/being of Allah and YHVH are distinct). Thus, following the program of Islam regarding State and person-relationship is a violation of the First Commandment. Thus, criticism of Islam is the ordinary criticism of a system of ideas. Such expression is the ordinary exercise of the mind God gave us, and it falls within the bounds of protected speech.

The remedy, and the objection to it. The remedy Burmawi raises is one that I have considered, and is perhaps the most contentious of his solutions. He asks the State Department to judge Islamic theology as subversive, revolutionary, and anti-constitutional. Of course, a government that judges the merits of religious principles and practices is judging a religion. The problem is that the government’s judgments reflect the sentiments and biases of the bureaucrats and officials charged with State security, and as staffing changes, the officials may use that policy and authority against Christianity. Religion need not be judged as good or bad. Burmawi’s point is that Islam is an organization that seeks to overthrow our Constitutional Republic and replace it with Sharia (in some of Islam’s various sects). To do so would fundamentally change the nature of the Republic. Christianity is arguably the foundation of the Constitutional Republic we have inherited from our Founders, and incorporating Islam into American jurisprudence, politics, and culture would move our jurisprudence and legislative standards radically away from the Founding principles. If we allow Islam to grow within our borders by fertility, immigration, conversion, and political competition, we could see the same population and cultural shift as Europe has experienced over the last decades.

We know that Godly cultures can change and reject God over generations, especially when leadership changes. No culture is immune. Even the Israelites, who saw God’s miracles firsthand, forsook His worship and sacrificed offerings to golden calves during a few weeks of their leader’s absence (Exodus 32:1-6). With a change of administration, we risk changing from a Biblically based society to an Islamic one by bureaucratic mandate. Giving government the power to grade doctrine by executive/bureaucratic order assumes the graders will stay righteous.

Implementing the program I propose requires a mature, Godly people—a people committed to the person and principles of the God of the Bible as the foundation of the Republic. My proposal goes deeper than establishing an administrative rule or enacting legislation. I ask only that the state declare the obvious, disregard the criticism, and endure accusations of being politically incorrect for doing so. I ask the government to enforce against this revolutionary ideology the same restrictions on immigration and citizenship that would be applied to any other person entering the country who holds a revolutionary ideology. I do not ask the state to judge a person’s religious practices. I ask it to judge his allegiance. The fact that Islam wears the clothing of a religion—prayer, prophet, book, spirit—does not mean it should be given the full protection of a religion. Islam has as much right to practice the rituals of its religion as Christians, given that we desire a nation that honors freedom of thought and conviction. But given the expansionist, nation-conquering, and people-submitting nature of Islam, and its integration of this political program with its religious beliefs, I ask for two things: that the spread of this ideology be opposed and its people won to Christianity, and that naturalization and Federal hiring be closed to those who hold a revolutionary ideology, whether communist or Islamist. Swearing loyalty to protect and defend the Constitution is meaningless unless it is held sincerely, and such allegiance is required for naturalization and Federal employment.

Such a restriction will not solve all the problems of having Islamic revolutionaries already within our borders, but openly enforcing the restriction on Islamists attempting naturalization and Federal employment lets the Islamists know that the leadership of the nation does not accept the Islamic program of replacement of our liberal democracy with Shari’a. It gives moral courage to patriots who are willing to stand against a push to accept the worship of foreign Gods by signaling the willingness of the government to defend and hold harmless those who stand against the incorporation of Islamic ideology into American culture.

Within our borders, we already have a people who hold Islam as their guiding ideology. Not all Muslims, or sects of Islam, are revolutionary, but there are sects which do hold the ideals of world domination under the doctrine of dar al-Islam. As a government and people, we must oppose the efforts of Islam to overtake the West. The tools of Islamic domination include the ballot box, and we can oppose them by voting for Christian nationalists who value the culture and heritage of our forefathers. Another effort we can make is to witness to our Muslim friends and neighbors about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Above all, our lives must witness to our commitment to living Godly, moral, Christian lives. (The lack of moral advocacy and practice in modern Christianity has driven some to find stability and support in the strict discipline of Islam.) The fact that (some) sects of Islam are committed and working actively to replace our Christian culture gives urgency to voting, witnessing, and lobbying our friends in the same effort. We must, as a culture, acknowledge that Islam seeks to overpower/outpopulate/replace our system with theirs, and that we must push back by filling the ideological passion vacuum with a commitment to live as Godly Christian men and women and incorporate that into our daily relationships and our cultural fiber.  What Islam offers is an integrated system of lifestyle, governance, and worship. That is the kind of integration that we in Christendom must incorporate into our lives. We as Christians are not revolutionaries against the government; rather, we are the establishment, the conservatives, the ones who want to keep our liberal democracy. The fact that some Westerners are choosing to leave Christianity and embrace Islam means that there is a hunger for such discipline and holistic embrace of God into our lives.

The Free Exercise Clause:  On its surface, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment appears to give every religion the right to practice as it sees best, with full immunity from government interference and scrutiny. (The Establishment Clause is the other half of that sentence — it forbids a state church — and it is the free-exercise half that is invoked for the immunity.) But the interpretation that every aspect of church doctrine must be accepted, and given complete immunity from investigation and monitoring, is like badly prooftexting scripture: reading one verse and applying it to every situation in life. “Turn the other cheek,” applied universally and taken literally, implies that a home invader who rapes your wife and kills your child should be shown where the other children sleep. This is not the message of the Sermon on the Mount. Likewise, the Free Exercise Clause was not meant to protect a religion that holds, as a primary or secondary article of faith/practice/purpose, the overthrow of the Constitution and Bill of Rights and their replacement with Shari’a. The First Amendment was not written to forbid the government from examining a religion’s political program and the implications of its precepts.

The courts have never interpreted the Free Exercise Clause as giving such an immunity, and this is where the distinction between a religion and a doctrine of civilizational conquest stops being my metaphor and becomes American law. In Reynolds v. United States (1878), the Supreme Court held that religious belief is absolutely protected, but religious conduct is not—a man may believe what he will about polygamy, and the law may still prosecute him for practicing it, since otherwise every citizen becomes a law unto himself. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court held that a neutral law of general applicability binds everyone, regardless of religious motive. Belief is outside the government’s purview. The law prohibits unlawful violence, insurrection, and revolution; it does not regulate privately held beliefs.

The principle applies to both Christianity and Islam. Muslims follow a religion with harmless (but time-consuming) practices, such as washing extensively and praying five times per day. These practices offend no one; they are not crimes. But violent, aggressive, unwarranted behavior is a crime; the general rule is that it is a violation if you, as the actor, would not want to experience it. Such behavior should be prosecuted regardless of its religious wrapping: the honor killing, the forced marriage of a daughter, the corporal punishment of the apostate, the cleric-authorized mutilation for criminal offense. The State should place no restriction on commonly accepted religious practices (rituals, beliefs, dress, grooming, doctrines about spiritual reality).

The concept of religious exemption has become a staple of cultural bypass, allowing objectors to hide behind it. This should be eliminated; the nation must decide what is right, and if it is not right for one, then it is not right for all. Forced vaccination is a violation of the body’s boundary; it is the injection of a toxin, with the potential for mild to lethal harm. Without consent, such state force violates personal space. Forced military service is the equivalent of kidnapping and slavery. If the benefit of risking one’s life isn’t enough to motivate voluntary service, then the cause isn’t sufficiently urgent, or the leaders haven’t communicated its urgency well enough.

Religious exemptions/honoring every doctrine of a religion as outside of State scrutiny is the camel’s nose under the tent that has allowed Islam to practice corporal punishment on the apostate among us. The one law under which every other law is tested is this: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-40). If an act violates that law, it is wrong for everyone. An exemption to that law is fraud; if it violates the law of loving your neighbor, everyone should be prohibited from it. If it does not violate loving your neighbor, it should not be a law. It follows trivially that State jurisprudence should protect the apostate from the corporal punishments prescribed by religion if American law classifies those punishments as crimes. The State has the purview and jurisdiction to prosecute crime; delegating that right to groups leads to vigilantism, tribalism, and ultimately a divided nation. One law for all is justice for all or justice for none.

The instrument already exists. I am not asking for a new law. I am asking that we apply an existing one without exception. A naturalized citizen must already take the following oath, swearing allegiance to and support of the Constitution:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

A naturalized citizen swears to:

• Renounce allegiance to prior sovereigns or states.
• Support and defend the U.S. Constitution and laws.
• Bear true faith and allegiance to the United States.
• Perform military or national service when required by law, subject to applicable exemptions and modifications.
• Take the obligation freely and sincerely.

Federal law already bars naturalization for certain applicants—8 U.S.C. § 1424. Read the section’s own heading: Prohibition upon the naturalization of persons opposed to government or law, or who favor totalitarian forms of government. Subsection (a)(1) reaches the man who advocates opposition to all organized government. Subsection (a)(2) reaches membership in or affiliation with the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party, foreign or domestic. Subsection (a)(4) reaches advocacy of overthrow by force or violence or other unconstitutional means. And subsection (a)(3) — the one that matters most for this argument — bars naturalizing anyone who advocates the doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship. That clause contains no force-or-violence element. Congress bars from naturalization anyone who advocates establishing that form of government by any means, including peaceful means. No criminal conviction is required; the advocacy alone disqualifies; the application asks the question directly; and a false answer is grounds for denial then or revocation later. A companion provision, § 1427(a), adds the affirmative requirement: the applicant must be attached to the principles of the Constitution and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.

Someone will object that the First Amendment protects the peaceful advocacy of constitutional change, and he is right — about citizens. He is wrong about the man at the gate asking for naturalization. In Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), the Supreme Court held that an unadmitted, nonresident alien has no constitutional right of entry to this country, and that when the government declines for a facially legitimate and bona fide reason to waive a statutory exclusion, the courts will not look behind that decision or weigh it against the First Amendment interests of the Americans who wanted to hear the man. The man excluded in that case was a Belgian Marxist theoretician, barred under the predecessor of the language quoted above; American scholars asserted their own right to hear him speak, and lost. The Court grounded the holding, as it always has, in the Chinese Exclusion Case: the power to exclude is inherent in sovereignty itself.

Naturalization runs on the same principle. Congress holds the power under Article I; the applicant, not the government, must prove eligibility; and attachment to the Constitution’s principles is an affirmative qualification he must establish, not a suspicion the government must overcome. A requirement that would be plainly unconstitutional when applied to me as a citizen is entirely lawful when applied to a man seeking citizenship. The honest counter-case is Schneiderman v. United States (1943), where the Court refused to hold that Communist Party membership by itself proved a lack of attachment. But Schneiderman was a denaturalization case: the government attempting to strip a citizenship already granted, under a standard demanding clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence. That burden runs the other direction on an application to enter. The distinction is between stripping a citizen of citizenship and admitting an applicant.

So what I am asking of the political class, the legislators, and the judiciary, is not a new power. It is an admission that the precepts of Islam include a program for establishing a form of government that these statutes already describe, and that the word religion outside that program does not exempt it from a statute aimed precisely at that. To properly defend our nation against overthrow, it must first be admitted by the legislators and the judiciary, and given full legal acknowledgment, that the precepts of Islam are antithetical to the continued existence of the Constitutional Republic.

The misnomer. We would like to separate the test of religion from the test of loyalty to the State, but this analysis shows that is impossible. A system that inextricably joins religion—the transformation of heart and soul—to state—the transformation of the foundational principles of government—requires greater granularity and context when considering what it means to separate church and state or prohibit the state from judging a religion. We must look at the religion’s entire program. The name “religion,” laid over a practice of soul transformation inextricably tied to a program of governmental transformation, belongs in a different category; in terms of classification, that category is subversive political movements. The constitutional argument seems clear-cut: anything that calls itself a religion is exempt from government scrutiny; Islam, the world’s second-largest “religion,” qualifies. But the categorization of its entire spectrum of beliefs as religious practices, as we have seen, is a misnomer and a disguise; it allows subversives free entry into the nation to work their plan toward the establishment of Shari’a, a governmental system they believe will bring peace, happiness, and prosperity to all, and is thus desirable above all other systems of group organization.

The boundaries. In Section IV, we heard Burmawi’s story of standing in a Jordanian courtroom with a man told to recite a creed without belief and, upon doing so, get his wife and children back. That was a religious test carried out in criminal jurisprudence. We do not want courts judging our loyalty to a creed and punishing us for failing to comply with its precepts. That would violate the Establishment Clause; I fully support prohibiting government coercion in matters of faith.

With regard to the refusal to grant citizenship to the Muslim, the distinction is his confession to supporting the overthrow of the United States government and the establishment of Sharia. The same problem is encountered. The man can deny it for a moment, pass through the gate, and then continue with his project of overthrowing the government and instituting Shari’a. Yes, he can be prosecuted for perjury should he be arrested for violence against the system; yes, he has put himself at risk for denaturalization if he violates the bar of peaceful internal belief with sufficient violence, but he has gained entrance, and he can justify his lying about his program and allegiance by scripture that authorizes lying to advance the cause of Islam.

The confounding factor and largest point of contention is that not all who call themselves Muslims support the overthrow of the Constitutional system. On the other hand, it could be reasonably argued that, by their membership/allegiance/belief in the Islamic system and by holding the Qur’an as their organizational document, they participate in the religion and give it numbers, support, and collective strength. Some read the Qur’an as revolutionary against all established governments, while others treat it as historical context. It cannot be argued that the Qur’an lacks revolutionary passages, but the text does not describe every man within the system; it describes the de facto alliance he has made. One way of framing the admission of Muslims is not what you believe, but what you renounce. The applicant is not asked whether he prays toward Mecca. He is asked to swear under oath that he renounces allegiance to any program, however sanctified, to replace the Constitution of the United States with another body of law. He is asked to swear under oath that he will not replace the Constitution of the United States with another body of law. The penalty for violation is perjury and denaturalization. A Muslim who reads the conquest verses as seventh-century history and wants nothing more than to raise his children and run his business can swear that oath honestly.

But this is a weak fence, as it is possible that such a man could swear that he has no such revolutionary intention, and as in the courthouse case that Burmawi related, he may swear loyalty to and willingness to protect and defend the Constitution merely to gain entrance, be naturalized, and then proceed to reproduce maximally, train his children to be Muslims, follow the Qur’an, attend the Mosque and mix with other Muslims who arrived without the renunciation, and be swept into the revolutionary program of Islam. The chances that those who read and faithfully follow the Qur’an and embrace the spirit of Islam will renounce Islam’s entire program of world conquest and fulfillment of its eschatology are, in my estimation, negligible. The motivation for deception is strong, as the reward is great: entrance into a land of freedom and prosperity. Some will truly renounce and oppose the program of Islamic expansion and cultural replacement, but the pull of 1400 years of tradition, and the extreme cultural mandate and pressure to conform and indoctrinate the youth of each generation have proven to make their program as durable as the Jewish allegiance to the Torah, Shabbat, and the Law over millennia.

A blanket ban on self-identified Muslims, or a bar on those who will not renounce the program of installing Sharia throughout the world, has the same weakness: the filter is a word. Words are free to speak; only conscience prevents lies. True, such a filter would exclude the honest, but the covert, those whose intent is subversion, will not admit their intent, as is true of every criminal, spy, and revolutionary. Such clandestine work is the standard cover of the revolutionary: install yourself in the heart of the targeted government/society and work silently, carrying out the work of the cabal, organizing the insurgents, and encouraging the faithful in the work and in the hope of eventual victory in “destroying the great Satan.” Admission is obtained; the first barrier to entering the heart of the “enemy” is passed, and it costs nothing more than speaking the words and deceiving the immigration officer. A sworn renunciation may create a record of a commitment and a legal basis for a later perjury charge, but it will be an ineffective gate.

Once inside, extracting the insurgent is even harder. He claims hardship, protests the brutality of being ripped from those he loves; discrimination and Islamophobia are then used as weapons against the fair-minded, forgiving Westerner/Christian, the very host who has just allowed him in, all while the Islamist pursues conquest. The state may condition entry and naturalization on sworn allegiance, because citizenship is a privilege the sovereign grants and can condition. But that barrier will not effectively keep out the invader who wishes to enter and purposefully foment Islamic revolution and the replacement of the Constitution with Shari’a.

The problem is the tradition and rules of American jurisprudence; once that initial barrier is breached, the legal system may impose nothing on the creed of a man who is already a citizen. The American who converts to Islam tomorrow morning keeps every right he had last night — his vote, his property, his children, his standing in court — and if any official moves against him for the conversion itself, the court will defend him with the same vigor with which it defends a man’s right to convert to Christianity. This is the foundation of American jurisprudence; it allows freedom of conscience, belief, and speech. Thus the court will be of no help whatsoever in defending us against Islam at the immigration office or against the relentless indoctrination, fertility wars, and political campaigns whose stated aim from the Qur’an is domination, replacement, and complete occupation of the world. That remedy will be unavailable. The battle must be fought in the hearts, minds, and spirit of the citizens who wish to maintain the Constitutional order.

The strongest objection, and the answer. An opponent of the asymmetrical judgment of Christianity and Islam as candidates for immigration will now say: by your own logic, refuse the Christian too. He also holds an allegiance above the state — he says so at every baptism, and the martyrs proved it. If a higher loyalty disqualifies, the serious Christian is disqualified first.

If holding a higher allegiance than to the State were the reason for prohibition to naturalization, it would be a fair objection – but it is not. Every man holds some allegiance above the state; the atheist holds one too, even if he calls it conscience. The question is never whether a higher loyalty exists. The question is what the higher loyalty commands him to do about the civil order. Christ told His followers to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s (Matthew 22:21). The Apostle, writing under Nero, told them to be subject to the governing authorities and to pay their taxes (Romans 13:1-7). Jeremiah told the exiles to seek the peace of the city where they were carried captive. And when a crowd came to make Jesus a political king by force, He withdrew to a mountain alone (John 6:15), and He told Pilate, my kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight (John 18:36). A Kingdom that advances by the transformation of hearts in its allegiance to the Spirit behind the Bible (the person of Christ and the Holy Spirit that He sent to us), one soul at a time, and by mass influence through media and education in the principles of Christianity cannot threaten the Constitution. Our republic is based on biblical principles; in modern times, we have come to deny this as we have slouched toward Gomorrah, but history and honest evaluation require admitting that the principles of Christianity are the principles of the nation’s laws, culture, manners, and ethics. Loyalty in Islamic culture is to a completely different moral/cultural/governmental system, and advocating for transforming the nation’s moral, legal, and judicial system to one based upon the Qur’an would be a revolutionary upheaval of culture. This is true whether the culture is isolated colonies such as Dearborn, MI, or a complete Federal-level replacement.

Islam’s higher allegiance commands loyalty to a completely different Scripture and an associated political/group/governmental structure. Islam requires replacing the civil order with a body of law based on the Qur’an, and subjecting everyone to it. The difference is not the degree of loyalty the subject owes to its scripture; it is whether that loyalty is to the God of the Bible or the god of the Qur’an. They are not interchangeable; their programs produce markedly different societal/economic/moral/cultural outcomes. The State has been colorblind in its perception of loyalty, and the question of whether one declares belief in the Qur’an, the Prophet, and/or Islam has not been asked – it is considered out of bounds; the assessment of the individual’s cultural loyalty has not been made out of fear of religious discrimination/Islamophobia and the Politically Correct doctrine of honoring diversity. The fact is that, regardless of the degree of one’s political aspirations for the imposition of Sharia and submission to Allah by an individual Muslim, his mere affiliation/identification/allegiance with Islam gives strength, by the mechanism of colony support, to the Islamic community. Activism by the Muslim is not required to strengthen the crowd. The mob/colony/group gains vitality through participation, even if only through uninterested presence. What is required is acknowledgment of the fact of Islam’s threat and agenda. The state should be aware of it; the state should support all who lawfully oppose Islam in any expression. And in opposition, the State should give vocal and unequivocal support to the Christian witness, calling Islam what it is: a religion of submission to the god of Islam, and the Qur’an the revelatory text of his will to establish his rule over the entire world. Against this stands the liberty we have in Christ.

As we witness to the Muslim, we must show the moral discipline of a transformed heart/mind for our witness to be effective. This has not been the case for decades. In the Obama years, we were told, “We are not just a Christian nation.” This may have been the inflection point from secular indifference toward our spiritual roots to the active embrace of Islam as the protected minority it is today. The State is an ineffective gatekeeper; it does not provide an impenetrable wall against the entrance and advance of the Islamic insurgency. The government should be an ally in the struggle to maintain our Christian culture, and at the very minimum, the government should not be a prosecutor of those who resist the Islamic attempt to replace our government. Article VI prohibits religious tests, but it does require declaring allegiance to the Constitution. This is where the question of loyalty should be confronted directly, since applicants for naturalization and Federal employment who are Muslims are members of a group (Islam) dedicated, in its foundational text, to overthrowing the Constitution. The issue is not about being hateful, religious persecution, or applying a religious test. The real issue is maintaining our de facto Christian culture and turning it into a fully conscious, chosen identity. We should have no qualms about rigorously challenging Muslims, those who declare allegiance to Islam, when they apply for naturalization and Federal office (or any other office requiring sworn allegiance to protect and defend the Constitution).

The shield. Why haven’t people, whose job it is, said it out loud? Because a protective shield has been thrown up. The shield Islam is now receiving is the same as we have seen before thrown up around Communism by the declaration that accusations of Communists in the State Department were the product of Joseph McCarthy’s ego and ambition. The truth of the claim was lost in the man’s slander. His drinking, boisterous behavior, the controversy over a list and how many names it contained, distracted from the substance of his accusation. The substance was real: the Venona decrypts, published in the 1990s, confirmed extensive Soviet penetration of the wartime government. The mechanism used against McCarthy is the same protective method now being applied in Islam’s defense.

It is an all-purpose shield: simply call all opposition to Islam Islamophobia. The slander is meant to intimidate, to bluster enough to rebut criticism so the critic retreats and concludes he must be mistaken, or that the cost of opposition is too high. The beliefs and practices of Islam are declared religious practices which should be accepted as readily as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, or the laying on of hands. But a category error is being committed. The commitment of Islam to spread throughout the entire world, overtake all societies, and place them under Shari’a is not in the same category as participating in the Hajj, facing Mecca, and taking the Lord’s Supper.

What has to change, and in whom? Enforcing the existing bar, so that those who hold to Islam’s political program are not admitted as citizens, would limit the growth of the colony’s size and strength by new immigration, to the extent that any gate made of words can. A bar on naturalizing those who will not renounce that program acknowledges the non-benign nature of Islam. It speaks from the top, from leadership, that Islam is not the same as Christianity, that Shari’a is not the Constitution. It gives moral courage to those who would confront the Islamic agenda; it assures those who would criticize Islam that they will be defended with the full force of the government against the terrorist tactics meant to intimidate. When a terror attack is perpetrated by Muslims and the evident motive is Islam-inspired, that should be reported, and the connection made clear in the media reports. Concern about inciting Islamophobia has neutered the media and made it an ineffective watchdog of the public threat. Identifying Islamists as the perpetrators, instead of hiding their Islamic/Muslim identity, helps focus the public mind on the identity of the threat. This is the opportunity to identify Islam as a threat to our Constitutional Republic.

The State — its administrators, its judges, its legislators — must be educated to understand that Islam has a religious and political aspect embedded within its history and its scripture; the two cannot be separated without explicit renunciation of those texts as superseded and obsolete. This renunciation is the stance of Islamic moderates/reformers. A cursory study of the struggle of Islamic reformers and the opposition they face from mainstream/accepted Islam makes it obvious how much pressure there is to maintain the status quo of Islamic thought as read literally from the Qur’an. That is, there is strong group consensus and internal pressure to retain Qur’anic traditions.

The nation’s leadership (state, media, church, economy) must defend against the expansionist and replacement agenda, as seen in Islamic scriptures, verbiage, and history, but the citizenry must also support it and incorporate it into the culture. The people must understand that the precepts of Islam as stated in the Quran are incompatible with the existence of the Constitutional Republic. If the government will not enforce its own statutes to monitor subversive groups, to prohibit the naturalization of individuals who are members of subversive groups, to prohibit the hiring of members of subversive groups as Federal employees, and allows Islam to progress without accountability or transformation, then that government is not adequately defending that nation against an invasion which has already been initiated and is currently progressing.

A country’s laws will not protect it from invasion and replacement by a new government and culture if the people charged with enforcing them refuse to do so because of politically correct sentiments, leadership co-option, infiltration, or corruption (e.g., oil money neutering opposition). The church also has a responsibility to teach the truth about Islam, equip believers, and welcome converts. Islam needs to be confronted with the history of the Prophet; the truth needs to be spoken boldly with conviction, as that is the language and demeanor that is given credence by the Islamic culture. Reason is important, but bold criticism of the precepts of Islam, strong and emotional defense of the gospel, and loud declarations of the difference between Jesus and Muhammad are needed as well. If the truth is spoken, if the Christian morality is actually lived, if the Jesus of personal experience is witnessed, Muslims will come to Christ. Muslims leaving Islam need somewhere to land. The state’s job is to strongly support those standing against Islam; test those who apply for admission to the nation as a citizen with an oath of loyalty and renunciation of their project to install Sharia; demand absolute loyalty to the Constitution; and remove from office those who violate that oath to protect and defend the Constitution by their professions of supporting the Islamic project.

This will also require a shift in Christianity’s outward face. We must admit that we, as Christians, to be an effective witness to Muslims, must act out the pattern of the Kingdom of God. We must stop being acceptant/tolerant/embracing of other gods, the gods of money, sex, and power that we worship with our life energy and attention. We must commit to living transformed lives and embrace the discipline, holiness, and love of fellow man that is characteristic of the reborn soul. The Muslim is seeking God, but the god he found is not the same God as the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is not a God; He is the only God, and a nation that abandons the God who grounded its liberties will not keep its liberties. We must acknowledge the truth of this claim and be the instrument of this advocacy from the pulpit, the printed page, and the neighbor’s table. And we must remember this at the immigration counter and in the federal job interview and review. If a man belongs to a religion whose historical motivation is to replace and overcome Christian civilizations, the consideration of this man’s actual allegiance to the Constitution must be challenged more deeply than a yes/no or multiple-choice test. The applicant for naturalization or Federal employment should be given an essay question: “Why do I reject the program of Islamic conquest of the West, and the Qur’an’s commands to overtake lands and subject non-Muslims to second-class citizenship and taxation?”

To pretend that simply saying “I support the Constitution” is sufficient proof, when the man professes a religion with a proven political agenda, is willful ignorance, an allegiance to a Politically Correct agenda, or the worship of diversity as a way of feeling virtuous. The system must have enforcement power: human eyes looking, mouths questioning, and brains evaluating whether the man is truthful. This challenges the man’s heart, mind, and commitment, because that is what he is asked about when he declares that he has renounced allegiance to groups committed to overthrowing or replacing the Constitution. This is the time when the Constitution allows such examinations. If the State does not examine him now, when will it? At some point, it is necessary to evaluate the truthfulness of the man’s testimony. Given that this is a judicial-bureaucratic proceeding, evidence should be gathered: testimony from coworkers, pastors/imams, etc., that the man is reformed and a moderate Muslim.

This is not a test of religion; this is a test of the man’s allegiance to the Constitution. He belongs to a subversive group that has a religion. The question is whether he holds to the group’s tenets of revolutionary conquest/control of new territory for his group’s rule. His group identification/membership/allegiance testifies against him. He can be asked about his membership in Islam because it is within the purview of the State to ask whether he professes to be a member of Islam. By defining Islam as a revolutionary group that has a religion attached to it, and knowing that it has a subversive/revolutionary agenda, we can ask him, without fear of administering a religious test, whether he has renounced the group’s revolutionary agenda. As such, we can interrogate and evaluate the man’s allegiance to Islam’s revolutionary tenets.

The test is not which god/God this man worships; rather, it is his allegiance to the Constitution, not his creed or his relationship with his Creator. If the man is a member of the communist party, he should likewise be interrogated and rejected if he cannot provide sufficiently convincing testimony that he has renounced communism’s expansionist/revolutionary commitments. The question is not relevant for the Hindu, the Buddhist, the secular humanist, and the Jew, as these traditions are not subversive by any standard I have offered here.

And the disposition. There must be a change in sentiment toward Muslims. It is the same as the right attitude toward the homosexual: we are to love the sinner and hate the sin. We are to love the Muslim and hate Islam. This is a radical proposition only because we have been overtaken by an ethics virus of Political Correctness. We are called bigots, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and haters because we decline to embrace, promote, and give special privilege and accommodation to a particular brand of diversity that the Bible has defined as unpleasing to God. But there is only one primary law—loving God, neighbor, and self—and every additional program, whether of government or ritual, is tested against the Great Commandment. When we as a people have recognized that the same law is applicable regardless of the “religious” costume, then we will have no problem screening immigrants for allegiance to the Constitution. The project to convert all people to Islam, subject non-Muslims to a tax, and subject them to the rule of Shari’a must be opposed. Naturalization and Federal employment must be conditional on renouncing the Islamic expansionist project and the replacement of the Constitutional Republic.

What the gate cannot do. The gate is the easy part. Everything I have described stops at the moment of admission. Once inside, almost none of the Islamic project to replace the Constitutional Republic is illegal. Having children to outpopulate America is lawful. Persuasion and preaching are lawful. Buying property, building houses of worship, funding schools, running candidates, and organizing voters are lawful activities, even if their goal is revolutionary. Petitioning under Article V to amend the Constitution is lawful; the Constitution itself instructs this process. A people may even talk itself out of its Constitutional order over three generations without committing a single crime anywhere in the process, and no statute now on the books or imaginable hereafter can stop it.

We must retain the right to petition peacefully to change the Constitution of the Republic, as the social order must adapt to new environmental circumstances. Wrongs must be identified and codified. But a proposal to entirely overthrow, eliminate, and replace the Constitutional order with another system must be seen, known, and openly evaluated. Neither the unconscious forces of inertia nor the urgency of revolution should frame abandoning an old order or adopting a new one. That is, the body politic should make a conscious, deliberate, and purposeful choice before radically modifying the foundational societal principles. Reason and evaluation of benefit must drive a break with the past.

In the case of Islam, a sub-community attempting to change the Constitutional order must be understood, its desired changes clearly and openly evaluated, and its motives and methods considered. If its reasons and desired ends would radically change the social order to a new and undesired end, then its project should be openly opposed. We see Islam’s program of total societal transformation being initiated and the pressures of its methods applied. Elements of the same 1400-year history of overtaking nations and replacing their law with Shari’a are already operating in America. In effect, we see a mindless golem instituting its pattern of social overthrow by a combination of occupation, breeding, and the intimidation of opposition by terror. Members are kept in line through shunning, beating, or execution of those who leave. All who oppose its agenda are neutralized by various forms of psychological and physical violence. Of course, these consequences vary across the sects, nations, and communities of Islam.

The government must expose all tactics of the revolutionary agenda and openly publish the agenda and proposed solutions of revolutionary groups. This is the sunlight I referred to in the Jury Nullification essay. When people protest, their grievances should be known, and the government should facilitate, or at least completely allow, the exposure. People should know why they are protesting. Perhaps there should also be a “Christos Revolutionary Review” in addition to the Christos Conspiracy Review and Christos Voting Network. Many groups have advocated overturning an established order: the abolitionists, who said the founding compact was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell; the Anabaptists, who would not swear with an oath; and Jesus and the apostles, who preached a new Kingdom, not of this world.

In summary, my position is: The state should control who is naturalized and who is hired for Federal positions. The statutes already do so and have survived First Amendment challenges. We must be willing as a nation to stand for our tradition as a Christian nation. This does not violate the Establishment Clause; we are not prescribing a national religion; we are choosing the moral standard we adhere to; all law is legislated morality, and we must simply choose which standard to legislate. The question of the moral standard cannot be avoided even in a secular society; standards will have authors and documents that generated them. The argument that the moral standard comes from the Bible, and therefore legislating it is a religious practice, cannot be used to prohibit its use as a moral standard. Its claimed source is divine revelation, but as humans, that belief is simply an opinion, and the Bible is a body of moral philosophy with authors. Using the moral standard associated with that religion as a societal moral standard does not equate to establishing religious membership, practice, or a profession of belief in the precepts of the relationship between God and man.

But making this profession (that the national ethic is the Biblical standard) open and society-wide requires recalibrating our national commitment to explicitly acknowledge the source of our moral standard. Are we willing, as a nation, to profess that our moral standard is based on Biblical principles? In this regard, we have two sworn opponents: the LGBT and Secular lobbies. The LGBT community is committed to prohibiting the use of the Bible as a source of national morality, because of its explicit condemnation of non-heterosexual and uncommitted sexual relations.

The second opponent is the Politically Correct/Secular/non-Christian community, which values diversity and honoring all traditions equally/establishing no hierarchy of values of one group’s moral standard over another. Equality and equivalence of moral standards have been equated with virtue for those with the Politically Correct standard of moral hierarchy. It is with this group that accusations of Islamophobia are weaponized, hoping to neutralize opposition to their agenda by using social stigma against opponents and appealing to the sensitivity of those who are PC adherents. Thus, the statement that we are a Christian nation, that our Judeo-Christian heritage is the foundation of the national morality, while being true, is denied by some and invisible to most.

We must lift this fog of unconsciousness and ignorance of our heritage and bring the nation to a fully conscious embrace of our origin. We must recognize that our survival as a nation depends on instituting a righteous culture. We have a culture that all peoples wish to live inside of, and a land all nations want to come to. We have shielded revolutionary groups from criticism and scrutiny in the press and government. Such a commitment to including, nurturing, affirming, and protecting groups committed to overthrowing our system of government puts at risk its survival, our culture, and our way of life. I fear that if we cannot make the proper choice, to embrace the Judeo-Christian polarity, we will find Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address rendered in the negative: a nation so constituted will not long endure.

As a result, under current Constitutional principles, Supreme Court Rulings, and case law, the state may not test your religion, but it may test your allegiance to the Constitution. A man who desires to replace the Constitution with his religious principles that conflict with the Constitutional principles must be opposed at the naturalization gate and denied Federal employment. If he is already inside the gate, he should be evangelized, converted, and have his heart won for the Lord. The nation must change its heart and commit to this massive project of changing our allegiance toward the God of the Bible.

The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact, but it is not a suit of armor either. It documents the principles we believe are inherent to men’s rights. The Constitution was written to restrain the government, not to defend a people against themselves. It will hold only as long as the people reading it are still the kind of people who wrote it. In 1798, Adams told the Massachusetts militia that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to govern any other. The document is not a comprehensive map of all possible defenses against the strategies of evil. The people’s character is the defense, and the document is the arrangement a people of that character once made for themselves.

Character is central to my proposal. The Kingdom of God advances by the transformation of hearts, not by coercion. It is true that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, but we are also trying to fulfill the Lord’s Prayer: Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. The direction Islam is pulling us is not aligned with the direction of the God of the Bible. We have invited a foreign nation into our land, and Islam has gained a foothold in the West by immigration and by extending its influence through propagation and evangelism. Its program is one of rigid adherence to a moral code, and the West’s lack of a moral code is the vacuum that Islam is filling in the hearts of those who need a rigid standard to hold them. Islam promises paradise for obedience. A return to allegiance to the God of the Bible comes through reason and a change of heart; we will not return to that time of assumed Christianity in our nation by enforcing immigration and Federal employment statutes.

The church has not lost a legal battle these fifty years; it has lost a persuasive one. The church may have assumed the law was holding the line on its behalf, or perhaps it felt powerless against 501c3 statutes barring political speech from the pulpit. Regardless, the masses must adopt a radical change in attitude and commitment; the millions must change their hearts and renew their first love. That is Hagia Sophia again. The mosaics never came down. We stopped looking up, and something else moved in underneath. A lock on the door is worth having; it is not worth much on a house where no one is living.

Boreing puts the decent man’s objection well: it was not our Muslim neighbors who flew the planes; it is uniquely Christian not to blame the group for an individual’s misbehavior. Burmawi says: absolutely, do not blame the Muslim for the terrorist — but understand that ideas have consequences, and if you deny that (as Marxism did, teaching that conditions make ideas rather than ideas making outcomes), you will misdiagnose the problem and react wrongly. Muslims are not the problem; Islam is. And the moderate who condemns terrorism while forbidding you to examine the text that produced the terrorist is not a neutral party. The Muslim defending Islam, or prohibiting its criticism, whatever his intentions, is shielding the source of the terrorism. The reformer who says peaceful Islam is the true Islam is telling the West that the problem is a few individuals, and so the West spends its trillions killing individuals while the source goes on producing them.

Boreing’s principle is biblical: The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father (Ezekiel 18:20). Collective guilt is pagan. But Ezekiel speaks of guilt for a sin, not diagnosis of the reason for the sin. Burmawi’s distinction holds both: the neighbor is innocent of the bomb, and the book is not.

Let me steelman the moderate Muslim. He says: You are asking me to denounce my own scripture in public in order to earn my place in your country. You do not ask that of the Catholic whose church ran the Inquisition. I do not read 9:29 as a standing command; I read it in its seventh-century context, as most of the Muslims I know do. Why is my reading not Islam?

The answer is the one this fellowship reached in the essay on the Oxford debate (the Daniel Johnson engagement): if the followers lead, the leaders will follow. The mass of Muslims determines which Islam prevails in any place and time, and in that sense the moderate’s reading is an Islam. But it is an Islam the texts do not support, and the tradition does not recognize, and the reformer’s honesty requires him to say so. As Burmawi’s friend Zuhdi Jasser says, he is reforming Islam rather than recovering it. Burmawi’s request to the moderate is perfectly fair, and it is the request I would make: if you read it in context, you are not the problem; then step aside and let me deal with the reading that is the problem. The moderate who answers that request by crying Islamophobe has told you that he is not standing on the side of reform.

And now to the distinction that Burmawi rightly calls the most dangerous thing in Islam: the sanctification of the actions of Muhammad and their transfer into every century. Burmawi, a Presbyterian, says of Calvin’s approval of Servetus’s burning: he did it, I will not justify it, I will explain the age, and I stand against killing men for their beliefs. He can say that because Calvin is not the standard. In Islam, Muhammad is the standard — al-insān al-kāmil, the perfect man, the pattern for all conduct — and so the caravan raids, the assassinations of poets, the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, the marriage to a child, cannot be wrong, and so must be justified, or contextualized, or blamed on Jewish forgers of the hadith. This is the distinction called standard versus execution. Christianity’s standard is Christ, who conquered nothing, killed no one, and told Peter to put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52). Christianity’s execution — the Crusades, the Inquisition, Servetus, the wars of religion — can be condemned by Christians from inside Christianity, by the standard, without a single verse being abandoned. Islam’s standard is its execution. There is no higher court. That structural fact, not the body count, is why Burmawi is right that the two systems are not two religions built upon the same foundation. This is why every Muslim who is a good man is a good man by a standard his own tradition did not give him. Goodness comes from the same law written on the heart that Paul says the Gentiles have by nature (Romans 2:14-15). 

Unedited below:

VII. Sola Jihad: What Each System Does with the Debt

Boreing asks whether Islam allows for grace. Burmawi says no, and that it is by design a system in which you cannot keep the commandments — ten thousand of them, with hellfire threatened on every page (he issues a challenge: open the Qur’an at random) — so that the one thing that can save you directly is the one thing the text names: die fighting in the way of Allah. He calls it sola jihad, by deliberate analogy to sola fide. Everything else is weighed; martyrdom alone is assured. And the result, he says, is not mainly terrorism, which can be policed, but a people who live under a crushing theological guilt, terrified in prayer, incapable of the confidence that builds. He remembers weeping over the Qur’an and being afraid.

Here the fellowship’s method requires what we call the Level 3 move: comparing religions by the structure of the whole system rather than doctrine by doctrine, asking what each system does with the moral debt. Islam hopes the scale tips and offers one certain thumb on the scale: death in battle. Judaism is a covenant in which the law follows the rescue: God brought Israel out of Egypt and then gave the commandments; obedience is the response of the redeemed, not the price of redemption. Christianity is the same architecture brought to its end: God pays the debt in full, at His own cost, and the life that follows is response, not payment. Burmawi’s phrase for this is that the gospel is news, and one’s reaction to news does not change the news. That is why he refuses to tell his conversion story in churches: a dramatic testimony teaches people that the gospel is the transformation, and then a man whose transformation is undramatic thinks he has no gospel. The gospel is what God did. Our story is the ripple, not the stone.

Burmawi tells the parable of the man who swore to sell his runaway camel for two dinars if he found the camel, which he did, and regretted the vow. His wife told him to tie the camel to a cat and sell the cat for two hundred and the camel for two, but not sell one without the other; he compares the cat of progressive sanctification tied to the camel of free grace. Progressive sanctification can be a back door through which performance re-enters, and privileges are lost for failing to perform. This is like the preacher who tells the sinner not to come to the table until he has fixed himself. This is a good story, but I do not think sanctification is the cat. Paul says in one breath that we are saved by grace… through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast, and in the next breath that we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:8-10). The works are not tied to the grace as a price; they grow from it as fruit grows from a tree. This fellowship’s whole theology of the Kingdom is that God’s method is transformation — the heart changed, and the changed heart producing a changed life and a changed culture — as against Islam’s method of coercion. If sanctification were a cat tied to a camel, the Kingdom would have no way to arrive. It arrives because grace is not inert. The man at the table is unworthy, and Paul’s instruction is still let a man examine himself, and so let him eat (1 Corinthians 11:28) — not to earn the bread, but because a man who will not look at himself cannot receive it. Examination is not performance. It is honesty, and honesty is the beginning of the transformation.

Now the ontological floor, Burmawi says the relationship with God in Islam is a horror show. The Apostle John says: There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love (1 John 4:18). Why should we believe John rather than the Qur’an? Not because we prefer him. Because the nature of reality is at stake. If reality itself is constituted by God’s consciousness, and God is love, then a system whose central emotion toward God is terror is misaligned with the substance of existence. Its fruits will show the misalignment, and Burmawi describes the fruits: guilt that crushes, conformity that forbids uniqueness, a people who cannot scale or build. A system aligned with the nature of things produces what he also describes: the high-trust society, the confidence that comes from knowing one’s standing is settled, the freedom to fail and stand again. He notes that some attribute the West’s high trust to the Catholic ban on cousin marriage and the nuclear family it produced, and says he believes it is rather the spirit of the gospel. It is both, and the second explains the first: a church that believed each soul stood alone before God, unrepresented by clan, dismantled the clan. Structure follows theology. Theology, if it is true, follows reality.

VIII. The Red-Green Alliance and the Mayor of New York

Boreing asks how a movement of secular, postmodern, sexually revolutionary progressives makes common cause with a religion that executes homosexuals. Burmawi’s answer is a compact history of the left: Marxism promised the poor a revolution; in America the poor became comfortable and declined to revolt; the neo-Marxists substituted identity for class — race, sex, orientation as the new proletariat — and Islam, being non-Western, non-white, once colonized, and anti-Western by nature, checks every box. The two agree on nothing but the enemy, and they have agreed to take down the system first and settle who gets the ruins later. Boreing’s analogy is Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt against Hitler.

We have used the dual-track rule in cases where conspiracy appears. It says every pattern of aligned action should be examined as possibly an intentional conspiracy and possibly a de facto one—aligned interests producing convergent behavior without anyone coordinating—and that it often does not matter which track is operative, because the Kingdom’s response is the same. The red-green alliance is a de facto conspiracy in exactly this sense. No one needs to have signed anything. Two movements that both require the dethroning of the biblical God will find themselves marching in the same direction, and Paul has already told us who is at the head of the column: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12). The alliance is not strange once you see that both partners serve the same principal, and that the principal does not care which of his servants inherits the wreckage.

On Mamdani, Burmawi reasons that if the mayor were a communist who merely identifies as Muslim for votes, he would push the Marxist agenda and neglect the Islamic one; but his defense of Hamas, his hostility to Israel, and his appointments say otherwise, and his daily bones thrown to the progressive coalition are the price of their letting him fight his own fight. If the mayor’s public conduct is as described — and the public record on Hamas and Israel is not in dispute — then it is reasonable to read him as sincerely both a real Muslim and a real socialist, and the more important reading is the one Burmawi implies rather than states: the sincerity does not matter to the outcome. A de facto alliance does not need sincere members. It needs them to be pointed the same way. The Kingdom response is the same on either reading: pray for the man by name, and oppose the program by name.

IX. Islamophobia Is Not Antisemitism, and Ideology Is Not Identity

Boreing raises the objection from the dissident right: there are special protections for Jews — antisemitism is singled out — so why not the same for Muslims? Burmawi’s answer has three parts, and each is correct. First, Islam is not a race, and the attempt to make it one is the door through which blasphemy law walks in. Second, no one has ever called it antisemitic to criticize the Hebrew Bible, the God of the Old Testament, or the Talmud; you may say what you like about the ideas. Antisemitism is proven by its fruits — the pogroms, the expulsions, the Holocaust — and it is hatred of a people, not of a doctrine. Third, therefore, the two words are inverted: antisemitism is hatred of Jews, not criticism of Judaism; Islamophobia, as its advocates deploy it, is criticism of Islam, not hatred of Muslims. Boreing states the inversion crisply, and Burmawi adds the George Carlin observation, which I paraphrase: when your ideology is your identity, every criticism of the idea is an assault on the self. That, he says, is precisely the condition of the Muslim, whose ontology is Islam, so that Islamophobia is, from inside, honestly experienced as an attack on the person.

I want to descend beneath this, because it is where the gospel answers the whole problem. The Christian’s identity is not his ideology. It is Christ — I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Galatians 2:20). Because the Christian’s standing is settled by a Person and not by a program, he can hear his church’s history criticized, his Reformers’ crimes named, his own denomination’s errors exposed, and lose nothing. Christ does not need us to defend Him like a big brother; He has overcome the world. That is the exact difference. A man whose worth is secured by grace can afford to be criticized. A man whose worth is secured by adherence cannot. The fury of the blasphemy laws is the fury of a system in which the self has nothing under it but the creed. And the way out is not to demand that Muslims toughen up. It is to offer them the ground the Christian stands on — the adoption, the Abba, Father — so that criticism of an idea is once again only criticism of an idea.

Two judgments follow. Islamophobia laws — Burmawi cites a Canadian demand for forty million dollars and curriculum mandates, which I have not verified but which fit a documented pattern — are blasphemy laws by another door, and the church must oppose every one of them, in Canada, in Britain, in the American states, on First Amendment grounds and on the deeper ground that a faith which cannot bear examination has confessed something about itself. And the Christian who says that Jews are protected and Muslims are not has confused a protection of persons, earned in the ashes of the twentieth century, with a demand for the protection of a program.

X. The Dissident Right, the Weaponized Christ, and the Islamic Jesus

Boreing describes the dissident right’s new line: Christians and Muslims share a common enemy in the Jews and in Israel; Muslims at least honor Jesus as a prophet, which Jews do not; the Gulf states are kinder to Christians than Israel is; and Christ is King has become the banner of the argument. Burmawi answers each.

On influence. Burmawi asks: what is the difference between Jews seeking influence in America and Muslims seeking it? Jewish influence — he names AIPAC and says its aim is stated on its website: keep Congress pro-Israel — is above the table, and the worst outcome anyone can name is more aid to Israel, which Netanyahu has lately said Israel means to wean itself from. Islamic influence, by its own thousands of recorded statements, aims to replace the Constitution with the rule of Allah. Boreing adds what Christians often miss: Judaism does not want you; it is not an evangelistic religion and makes conversion difficult; there is no vision of a Jewish America. Christianity is evangelistic — we want you to know Christ. Islam is conquering — it wants you to convert or submit. Three religions, three postures toward the neighbor’s soul, and only one of them is a threat to the neighbor’s country.

On the Islamic Jesus. This is the argument I most want the fellowship to be able to make, because it is the one the Christ is King crowd cannot answer. The claim is that Muslims honor Jesus and Jews do not, so Muslims are nearer to us. Burmawi’s answer: the Jesus of Islam is a different person. He is not divine; that Christians and Jews already disagree about, and Burmawi (rightly, in this context) sets it aside as a matter for the next life. What he will not set aside is that the Islamic Jesus is a coward — in the classical commentaries on Qur’an 4:157, Jesus, warned that the soldiers are coming, asks his companions which of them will take on his likeness and die in his place, and promises the volunteer Paradise. Burmawi notes the currency: Muhammad bought loyalty with the same promise — kill this man, and you will have rivers in Paradise. That is not the Jesus who set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem (Isaiah 50:7; Luke 9:51) and said no man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself (John 10:18). It is a Jesus recast as a Muhammad — and that is the whole method of Islam toward the Bible: Abraham was a Muslim who built the Kaaba, Moses was a Muslim, Jesus was a Muslim, every prophet is conscripted to testify for the last one. Meanwhile the Jew, as Burmawi says with real generosity, is at least not a hypocrite: he says plainly that he does not believe Jesus is the Messiah, because the Messiah he awaits will restore Israel and rebuild the Temple — which is to say, the Jew is waiting for the Second Coming and does not know it. Islam praises a Jesus who does not exist in order to deny the One who does. The Qur’an’s respect is not a bridge. It is a substitution — the same substitution it makes on the cross.

On spitting. Burmawi handles the viral videos of Orthodox Jews spitting on Christian missionaries in Jerusalem with the only thing that can handle them, which is proportion. According to the report he cites, there were about sixty incidents of harassment in 2025. He has been spat on in Times Square for preaching the gospel. Those same Jews spit on secular Jews. And the comparison being drawn is between sixty spittings in the one Middle Eastern country where a Christian may preach at the Western Wall and go home safe, and fourteen centuries of dhimma, enslavement, and slaughter, continuing this week in Nigeria and Syria. He says that he wishes the Muslims of Jordan would spit on him, if only they would let him come home to visit his family. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing. Christians across the Islamic world would move there if they could. I have said elsewhere that hyperbole is lying by proportion. The spitting narrative is the textbook case: a true thing, sixty incidents, told at a scale that makes it a lie. And Burmawi’s account of why Middle Eastern Christians themselves so often speak for their regimes and against Israel is as compassionate as it is damning: they were Islamized by culture, they live in a bubble, they do not know what freedom is, they do not know they are persecuted, and the ones who found out are the reason no one else tries.

On Jordan. Burmawi loves the King of his country. He describes a man whose mother is Christian, who protects Christians as far as he is able. And then he says what the King cannot say: the tyranny of public opinion sets the limits, and the King can protect Christians only as long as they behave. The Fuheis statue is the proof, and my triage above sharpened it: erected by the youth club, removed by the municipality the next day after a social-media outcry, exiled to a cemetery, and then the King visited to affirm coexistence. That is the whole condition of the dhimmi in the kindest Muslim state on earth: tolerated, protected by a decent ruler against his own people, still required to keep a statue of their Lord in the graveyard where He cannot offend the Muslim psyche. The King is a good man despite Islam.

On the weaponized King. Burmawi says that the crowd shouting Christ is King at the Jews reminds him of the crowd in John 6 that tried to seize Jesus and make Him a king — not because they loved Him but because they wanted a king against Rome — and Jesus departed again into a mountain himself alone (John 6:15). In the April essay I argued that the Kingdom of God differs from every theocracy not in content but in structure — that my kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight (John 18:36). A Christ conscripted as the banner of a faction against the Jews is a Christ made a king by force, for political reasons, by men who do not love Him. He will do what He did in Galilee. He will not be there. The slogan will be shouted over an empty throne, and the people shouting it will find they have enlisted under the same principle as the red-green alliance, whose signature is precisely that it does not care which servant carries the flag.

Burmawi’s dismissal of the Jews killed Jesus needs one verse: For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together (Acts 4:27). Herod, Pilate, the Gentiles, Israel — that is everyone. The cross was a joint venture of the whole human race, and if I want to know who killed Jesus, I need a mirror, not a map. Burmawi’s own line is that after two thousand years of Jews being persecuted on account of Jesus, he will not crucify them for a few sentences in the Talmud. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34) — that was said over the whole assembly of Acts 4:27, and it was not a suggestion to the rest of us.

XI. Darby, Scofield, Replacement, and the Olive Tree

The interview closes on the eschatological front of the same war.

The dissident-right narrative Burmawi describes runs: Christianity never believed in the restoration of Israel; John Nelson Darby invented dispensationalism in the 1830s, perhaps at Jewish instigation; the Scofield Reference Bible, funded by Jews, globalized it; and American Christian Zionism is therefore a Jewish plant. Burmawi answers with history: Puritan divines wrote of the future salvation of the Jews in the seventeenth century; Increase Mather’s book is a matter of record; Pascal’s Pensées treat the survival of the Jews as evidence for God; annotated Bibles do not shape imaginations as much as the theory requires; and the cabal-that-runs-the-world theory fails the simplest test of human nature — married couples cannot keep secrets through a divorce, and we are asked to believe a cabal has kept one for centuries without a single defector or deathbed manuscript. A conspiracy claim must be graded by its evidence, and a two-thousand-year secret with no leak sits at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Now, the precision. In the May essay on eschatology and the Christian underground (Endurance, Not Escape), I laid out at length why I reject the Darby system — the two-phase Second Coming, the pre-tribulation rapture, the Church as a parenthesis, and Israel and the Church as two separate peoples with two separate destinies. No Church Father taught it; no Reformer taught it; it is a nineteenth-century innovation, and I hold with the historic premillennial reading that Christ returns once, visibly, after the tribulation, and that the Church is the olive tree of Romans 11 into which Jew and Gentile alike are grafted by faith. I also said there that American Christian Zionism built on the two-peoples doctrine is theologically muddled.

But Burmawi is not defending Darby. He says he was once a dispensationalist and is no longer, that he holds no settled eschatology at all because the apocalyptic books are too easy to speculate from, and that he will know the sequence when it happens. What he does say is that he is not a replacement theologian — that he will not explain away God’s promises to Israel as shadows. I agree, and the reason is in the same chapter that gives me the olive tree. I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid (Romans 11:1). Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18). For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29). One can reject Darby’s two peoples and still refuse to say that God is finished with the people from whom the Messiah came; indeed Romans 11 forbids the second more sternly than it permits the first. The historic Church, for all its supersessionist theologians, kept reading Romans 11 and kept expecting the Jews’ return to their Messiah; the Puritans’ restorationism grew from the olive tree, not from Darby’s chart. And the fellowship’s support for Israel — expressed most fully in the July essay on Amir Tsarfati’s June update and the Sons of Issachar standard — rests not on a dispensational timetable but on two things that need no chart: the justice of a people’s right to exist and defend itself, and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee (Genesis 12:3), which was said to Abraham before there was a Jew or a Christian to argue about it. That is not uncritical. Israel is a state and states err, and the same essay that defended her deliberated her government’s conduct on the merits. Support is not worship. But contempt is not analysis either, and the man who has decided that God’s ancient people are simply a nation like any other — the position Burmawi attributes to one of Carlson’s guests — has decided to read Romans 11 with the pages glued.

Boreing’s closing line on prophecy deserves to be set in Scripture, because it is Scripture: God does not give prophecy so that we may know the future, but so that when the future arrives we may know that He is God. That is Isaiah — I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:9-10) — and it is Jesus in the upper room: And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe (John 14:29). The people who understood the prophets best crucified the One they prophesied. Falling in love with one’s chart of the future is the surest way to miss it when it comes. Burmawi’s agnosticism and my historic premillennialism agree on this, and it is the only part of eschatology on which I would stake a great deal.

XII. The War of Stories, and the Floor Under It

Burmawi’s frame for all of it is that the West was built on a story — covenant, human depravity, a system designed to help selfish men rise again after failure — and that another story has come to replace it, and that the danger is not the bomb but the replacement of the story, which alters everything downstream. He says Islam is leaving the Middle East, where atheism is spreading, and that Europe is the new center of jihad; he says the West apologized to the thief while holding the stolen goods, and the thief, condemned if he did not, doubled down; he says Islam won the lottery in the West after 9/11 because the accommodation that followed the accusation was worth more than a century of migration. And he says at the end that Israel is under attack not for what it does but for what it is, that the war against Israel is the vehicle for smuggling jihad into the West rebranded as liberation and resistance, that fifty years of postmodernism and relativism emptied the throne of the biblical God, and that foreign gods are now competing for the seat.

I accept the frame, and I want to give it the floor it lacks, because a war of stories is where a Level 3 argument (the comparison of systems by their structure and fruits) ends, and a Christian one must go further. If it is only a war of stories, then the relativist’s checkmate stands: your story, their story, who is to say? And the Islamist’s reply stands too: I prefer the story of submission; you prefer the story of grace; your preference is not law. The answer this fellowship gives is what we call Level 4, the ontological level, where the question is no longer which story we prefer but what reality is; and I will not retreat from it into comparative sociology: reality has a nature. The world is not a neutral stage on which stories compete; it is the sustained thought of a God who is love, and every story is either aligned with the nature of the One who holds the world in being, or misaligned with it. The Conscious Point Physics is our attempt to say this in the language of physics — that the substance of existence is conscious, that in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is description and not metaphor — and its moral consequence is that alignment with God’s nature is not a preference; it is what good means, the way alignment with the grain is what a straight cut means. A story of submission to a master whose every page threatens is a story misaligned with the ground of being, and the misalignment shows in the fruits Burmawi catalogued from the inside: fear, guilt, conformity, stagnation, the poetess between the camels. A story of adoption by a Father who paid the debt Himself is aligned with the ground of being, and its fruits are the high-trust society, the confidence to build, the freedom of the neighbor, the imago Dei that even the unbelieving nations sign. Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16) is not a rule of thumb; it is what the alignment of a story with reality looks like from the outside. The West will not win a war of stories by telling its story louder. It will win by remembering that its story is true — and by living as if it were.

And that is why the empty throne is the right image and the wrong conclusion. The throne of the biblical God is not empty. The West vacated its acknowledgment of Him, and the gods now competing for the seat are competing for a chair that was never theirs. The remedy is not to elect a better god. It is repentance — remember therefore from whence thou art fallen — and the first works.

XIII. The Sons of Issachar: Judgments and Levers

The fellowship’s rule is that an essay which ends at understanding is not finished. Here are the judgments, stated provisionally and stated anyway, and the levers.

Judgments.

1. Islam is a comprehensive civilizational order that contains a religion. The First Amendment protects the religion — the prayer, the fast, the creed, the mosque, the conversion in either direction. It does not protect the program, and a republic that cannot tell the sofa from the room will lose the room. On this I judge Burmawi correct without reservation.
2. The instrument is not the State Department. Government theology is a sword that turns. The state’s proper work is to distinguish exercise from sedition, to refuse blasphemy law in every costume including the costume of Islamophobia, to screen immigration for allegiance to the program, and to shelter the apostate. The church’s work is everything Burmawi asked the state to do: to read the texts, tell the truth, and equip believers. On this I judge him half right and correct the half.
3. Muslims are neighbors and captives to rescue, not enemies to defeat; Islam is a system to be opposed and named as false. The moderate’s context-reading is welcome and his shielding of the source is not. Love the man; do not accept the shield.
4. The dissident right’s turn — Muslims as allies, Jews as the common enemy, Christ as the banner — is a lie by proportion in its facts and a seizure of Christ by force in its theology, and He will not be found under that banner. I judge it not merely mistaken but spiritually dangerous, and I say so to brothers whom I would rather not offend.
5. On Israel, the fellowship’s ground is Romans 11 and Genesis 12:3, not Darby’s chart. Reject the two-peoples system and reject replacement theology in the same breath; support Israel’s right to exist and defend herself on grounds of justice and covenant; retain the liberty to criticize her government as we criticize our own.
6. The red-green alliance is a de facto conspiracy that needs no coordination because its members serve one principal. The response is spiritual before it is political: name the principal, and refuse to be recruited by either of his servants — including the one wearing a cross.

Levers.

Prayer, named and specific. For Danny Burmawi, who cannot go home, and for the Ideological Defense Institute. For the Jordanian convert whose household is now Christian, and for every secret believer in Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, and the Gulf whose faith is a capital offense in the court of public opinion if not of law. For the Christians of Nigeria and Syria being killed this week. For the Muslim families in our own towns, that they may meet the Jesus who did not run. For Zohran Mamdani, by name, that the man be saved and the program fail. For Tucker Carlson and the young men who trust him, that a captured audience be freed from the story that is capturing it — they are not our enemies; they are ours to win back. For the King of Jordan, that a good man in spite of Islam might become a good man because of Christ.

Speech where speech reaches power. Through the Christos Voting Network, three asks: that our representatives oppose any federal or state measure that would define criticism of Islam as a hate offense; that they support asylum for apostates from Islam as a named category of religious persecution; and that the persecution of Christians in Nigeria and Syria be treated in foreign policy as the emergency it is. Small levers, named truthfully — for who hath despised the day of small things? (Zechariah 4:10) — outrank large levers imagined.

Formation. Burmawi issued a challenge: open the Qur’an at random and read. I convert it into an assignment for the fellowship. Read it — the Qur’an, and a Sira, and the Bukhari collection — not to master it as Burmawi once did, but as Bereans, who searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so (Acts 17:11). A Christian who has never read what Islam says about itself is defenseless against both the imam and the Tucker Carlson guest who tells him what it says. And apply the second test of Section III as you read: does this revelation ever rebuke its recipient? You will not need my essay after that. You will have Aisha’s.

Hospitality. The Grammar’s counsel on engaging Muslims stands: relationship first, questions before arguments, Jesus before Muhammad, patience, and no lone rangers. The man at the mosque down the road is not an ideology. He is a neighbor who has been told all his life that Christians know Islam is true and refuse it out of rebellion. He has never met one who loves him and can also tell him, gently, what his own book says about the substitution on the cross. Be that one.

The watcher’s soul. Luke 21:28 and 21:34 held together: look up, and do not let the heart be overcharged. A fellowship inflamed cannot sit on the council of Issachar. We are not afraid of Islam. We are afraid of a church that has become a museum of itself, and that fear is the beginning of the first works.

XIV. The Bet I Am Making

Burmawi said he did not convert because Christianity was the natural alternative once Islam failed, but because it was magnificent — the solution to everything — and that the gospel is everywhere, because everything must die so that the new may be born. He said it as a man who knows the price of the alternative in his own body: years of exile, a country he cannot enter, a family he cannot visit, because he left Islam and then did the thing that in Jordan is the worse crime: he defended Israel. He said the relationship with God in Islam is terror. He wept over the Qur’an and was afraid.

I believe him, and I believe the reason, and I stake myself on it. The God who holds the world in being is not a master who threatens on every page; He is a Father who paid what we owed and calls us sons. That is not my preference against the Islamist’s. It is the nature of things, and every civilization that has forgotten it has ended up under curtains. The candlesticks of Asia can be lit again. The mosaics are still on the ceiling. 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) — not the bondage of Sharia, and not the bondage of the fear that makes a church too polite to say that Sharia is bondage.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. — Romans 8:15

— Thomas

Sources

• Jeremy Boreing with Danny Burmawi, “A Former Muslim Exposes Lies About Islam,” The Jeremy Boreing Show, Ep. 39, PragerU, 7 July 2026. https://www.prageru.com/videos/a-former-muslim-exposes-lies-about-islam-or-ep-39
• Danny Burmawi, Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis (Ideological Defense Institute).
• Qur’an 4:157; 9:5; 9:29. Sahih al-Bukhari (Aisha’s remark on revelation; the traditions on the cat and the dog). Sahih Muslim (expulsion of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula). Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir, commentaries on Qur’an 4:157 (the substitution narrative).
• Increase Mather, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669). Blaise Pascal, Pensées, sections on the Jewish people as evidence of Providence.
• Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, 2004).
• Fanack, “Jordan’s Christians: Small in Number, Big in Faith” (2023); Roya News, “Removal of religious statue in Fuheis sparks controversy” (8 January 2023); International Christian Concern, “Jordan’s Monarchy Seeks to Protect a Legacy of Religious Co-Existence” (17 February 2023).
• Renaissance Ministries, “The Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men” (18 April 2026). https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/04/18/the-kingdom-of-god-and-kingdoms-of-men/
• Renaissance Ministries, “Endurance, Not Escape: Eschatology and the Christian Underground” (12 May 2026), and “The Alignment and the Watchman: Amir Tsarfati’s June 30 Update, the Ezekiel Horizon, and the Sons of Issachar Standard” (3 July 2026), both in the RM repository, https://github.com/Renaissance-Ministries/RM.
• Christos AI Theological Grammar v1.3, Parts VI and VII (Engaging Islam; the Absolute Standard; Conspiracy Epistemology; Testimony and Declaration; Kingdom Culture vs. Theocracy). https://github.com/Renaissance-Ministries/RM

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

I. Principles of Islam – Why People Choose Islam:

People convert to Islam for many different reasons, but at its core Islam offers a worldview, a relationship with God, a moral framework, and promises about life after death. Some of the central promises and teachings of Islam include:

There is no single Muslim view on politics, law, and society.

What is Sharia?

“Sharia” literally means “the path” or “the way.” In Islamic thought, it refers to the ideal moral and legal guidance derived from the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad.

Many people hear “Sharia” and think only of criminal laws, but traditionally it covers much more:

• Worship and prayer
• Charity
• Marriage and family life
• Business ethics
• Contracts and inheritance
• Rules of war and peace
• Personal morality

So for many Muslims, Sharia is a comprehensive ethical framework, not just a legal code.

Is Islam just a personal religion?

Compared with some modern Western understandings of religion, Islam has historically been more comprehensive. Traditional Islam does not draw as sharp a line between: personal faith, ethics, law, and public life. As a result, many classical Muslim scholars saw Islam as providing guidance for both individuals and societies.

Do Muslims believe society should adopt Sharia?

There is a wide range of views.

Some Muslims say yes: Some Muslims believe that since God’s guidance is best for humanity, society should gradually align its laws with Islamic principles. Among those who hold this view, there are major differences:

• Some support democratic processes.
• Some support constitutional systems with Islamic influence.
• Some want only certain areas, such as family law, to reflect Sharia.
• A small minority advocate much stricter or authoritarian models.

Other Muslims say no: Many Muslims believe Islam should guide personal and community life but that the state should be neutral or largely secular.They may argue that:

• Faith should be chosen freely.
• Religious virtue cannot be forced.
• Modern pluralistic societies require equal citizenship regardless of religion.
• What creates pressure to adopt Sharia?

This depends on the society.

In some Muslim-majority countries, support comes from people who believe:

• Divine law is superior to human-made law.
• Religious values strengthen society.
• Islamic governance would reduce corruption or moral decline.

In other places, there is little public desire for extensive Sharia legislation, or the population prefers a mixture of civil law and religious principles.

It’s important to distinguish between:

1. Personal Sharia: How a Muslim lives their own life.
2. Community Sharia: Religious courts or guidance used voluntarily for matters such as marriage and inheritance.
3. State-enforced Sharia: National laws based partly or largely on Islamic jurisprudence.

A deeper tension

One of the biggest debates, both among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims, is this: If God’s law is perfect, should society be organized around it? Muslims who answer “yes” often see public implementation as a logical consequence of belief. Muslims who answer “not necessarily” may argue that religious freedom, democracy, pluralism, and individual conscience require limits on state enforcement.

Why is this controversial in the West?

Many Western political traditions are built on ideas such as:

• separation of church and state,
• individual liberty,
• freedom of religion,
• laws based on democratic consent rather than divine revelation.

So when people hear that a religion has legal and political teachings, they naturally ask how those teachings relate to these principles. That debate is not unique to Islam. Similar questions have arisen in Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and other societies whenever religious beliefs influence public law. A useful distinction is that most Muslims around the world are simply trying to practice their faith personally, while debates about how much a state should be influenced by Sharia are political and theological questions on which Muslims themselves often disagree.

IV. Sharia and Islam:

VII. Christianity vs. Islam and Liberal Democracy:

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260907 – Belonging to the One

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

Belonging and Truth

Why Some People Will Believe Anything

A Christos Fellowship discussion essay | 7 September 2026

Source Article: (When Belonging Becomes More Important Than Truth) by Cornell Overbeeke, MD, MS

The argument under discussion

The essay begins with a familiar puzzle. Intelligent, educated, decent people regularly defend propositions that look absurd, contradictory, or morally repugnant to anyone standing outside their circle. The author proposes that the puzzle dissolves once we drop a hidden assumption: that a belief’s main job is to describe reality. Beliefs do that, but they also do something else. They tell other people who we are. For some people, under some conditions, the second job crowds out the first.

The mechanism is built up in stages:

First, belief has a social function. Once a person cares about being accepted by a group, the question “Is this true?” is joined by “What must I believe to remain one of them?” The proposition becomes a badge. The author cites the conformity experiments in which participants gave obviously wrong answers about line lengths when everyone around them did, and he distinguishes following the crowd because the crowd may know something (informational influence) from following the crowd because dissent is costly (normative influence). The second kind does not require sincere agreement at the outset. It only requires that affirmation feel safer than questioning. Given time, the mind is skilled at manufacturing sincere reasons for conclusions it has strong incentives to reach.

Second, people differ in where their psychological authority sits. The inner-directed person carries something like a gyroscope; the other-directed person carries something like radar, constantly scanning for what is admired, what is embarrassing, what everyone thinks. Neither type is more intelligent than the other. Intelligence, in the author’s phrase, supplies the lawyer; it does not choose the client. The relevant variables are how much approval matters, how painful rejection is, and how much of a person’s identity comes from membership.

Third, a group identity can become so central that it fuses with the self. At that point, a challenge to a group-defining belief is no longer heard as “your idea is wrong,” but as “your people are wrong,” and finally “you are wrong, you do not belong.” Evidence has acquired an enemy.

Fourth, and most striking, the beliefs that bind a group most tightly are often not its most plausible ones. Affirming something everyone already accepts proves nothing. Affirming something outsiders find hard to swallow is costly, and costly affirmation signals loyalty. The strange proposition works as a password. The author notes that creeds, oaths, initiations, and shared vocabularies are not inherently pathological; they are part of how any community is constructed. The danger begins when affirmation becomes the supreme virtue and questioning becomes treason.

Fifth, loyalty can capture moral perception itself. The same act is read differently depending on who performs it: an enemy’s failure proves incompetence, an ally’s failure proves impossible circumstances; an enemy’s cruelty proves wickedness, an ally’s cruelty was regrettable but necessary. The frightening possibility is not that such a person has no morality, but that loyalty has become the rule by which morality is applied.

Sixth, fanaticism often solves doubt rather than expressing certainty. Reality is ambiguous, and the honest answer to many questions is “I don’t know.” Tribal belief offers relief: approved explanations, approved vocabulary, trusted and distrusted authorities, and above all other people standing beside you. This is why refuting the fanatic’s argument so often fails. He is not defending an argument. He is defending his home.

The essay closes with a warning against settling for a comfortable conclusion. Nearly everyone has tribal loyalties, wants approval, and reasons more generously about friends than enemies. Autonomy requires something more painful than intelligence: the willingness to lose. To lose a cherished opinion, admit an enemy was right, and endure friends’ disappointment. The autonomous mind can tolerate loneliness, and that is its terrible advantage. The person who “will believe anything” believes something quite specific: whatever he must believe to remain one of us.

Why this belongs in a fellowship

A group of Christians reading this essay is in an awkward position, and the awkwardness is the point. The fellowship is a group. It has a creed. Its members affirm propositions that outsiders find hard to accept (the Bible is God’s inspired Word and speaks of the truth of the birth, righteous life, undeserved grace), and they draw comfort and identity from one another. The author describes every mechanism available to it. The question is not whether the fellowship is exposed to the dynamic, but whether it has any resources to resist it.

It does, and they predate psychology.

The clearest statement of the author’s thesis in Scripture is not a warning against unbelief. It describes belief that stayed silent. John records that many among the rulers believed in Jesus, but because of the Pharisees they would not confess him, lest they be put out of the synagogue, because they loved the approval of men more than the approval of God. That is normative social influence, identity fusion, and the loyalty test in a single sentence, written about educated religious men nineteen centuries before the line-length experiments. The problem was not a lack of evidence. They had it. The problem was that confession carried a social cost, and they were unwilling to pay it.

The counter-example is just as clear. Micaiah stood before two kings and four hundred prophets who had unanimously prophesied victory, and when the messenger urged him to make his word agree with theirs, he answered that he would say what the Lord said to him. He was struck, imprisoned, and, as far as the record tells us, never vindicated in his own lifetime. That is the willingness to lose, exercised against the exact pressure the author describes: unanimity, authority, and the assurance that everyone like you already agrees.

Paul’s instruction not to be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of the mind is usually read as a warning against worldliness in the sense of vice. Read alongside this essay, it says something sharper. Conformity is a shape the mind takes, and the world will press that shape on it through the ordinary desire to belong. The alternative is not contrarianism, which is only conformity with the sign reversed, but a mind whose authority has been relocated. In the author’s metaphor, the gyroscope has to be set to something.

The creed problem

The author’s observation about costly beliefs deserves careful handling, because on its face it argues against creeds, and the fellowship has one.

The observation is that a hard-to-believe proposition makes an effective loyalty marker precisely because it is hard to believe. Christian confession includes propositions that outsiders find difficult: a crucified man raised bodily, a God who is three and one. Is the creed a password?

Two things need to be separated. A proposition can be both hard for outsiders to accept and true. The difficulty of a claim is not evidence against it, any more than the ease of a claim is evidence for it. The author’s point is about the social use a group makes of difficulty, not about the truth value of difficult claims. He proposes testing whether questioning the proposition is treated as inquiry or as disloyalty.

That test can be applied. The apostolic writings themselves invite it. Paul tells the Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised, their faith is vain and they are most to be pitied by all men. That is not the language of a password. A password is not supposed to be falsifiable; it is supposed to be affirmed. A man who says “if this is false, we are fools” has staked the community on a truth claim and invited the question. The Bereans were commended for searching the Scriptures to see whether what Paul said was so. On the author’s own terms, the difference between a creed and a password is whether the community permits and honors the search.

The fellowship should therefore hold its confession as the apostles did: as a claim about what happened, open to the question “Is it true?”, not as a badge meant to sort the faithful from the uncommitted. When “I believe this because I am one of you” replaces “I believe this because it is so,” the creed becomes what the author warns against, and no amount of orthodox content will save it.

Loyalty and moral perception

The section on moral disengagement is the one most likely to be read as being about other people. That reading should be resisted.

The pattern the author describes, in which people judge the same act by who performs it, is not confined to political tribes. It appears wherever people take sides. A congregation can excuse what it condemns in another’s leadership. A movement can describe its opponents’ methods as manipulation and its own identical methods as strategy. A fellowship can hold an outsider’s claim to a standard of evidence it never applies to a claim made from inside the circle.

The author’s diagnosis is asymmetry: microscopic suspicion toward the other tribe, scarcely a question toward one’s own. This is a usable test. A member can ask himself whether he would accept a given argument or piece of evidence if it came from someone he distrusted. If the answer is no, the belief rests on loyalty rather than truth, and even if it happens to be correct, that doesn’t change what holds it.

Scripture gives the same test in a harder form. Nathan told David a story about a rich man who took a poor man’s lamb, and David, judging the act with no idea who had performed it, pronounced the man worthy of death. Then Nathan told him who it was. The story works because David’s moral perception remained intact until the moment loyalty, in this case to himself, would have engaged. The parable bypassed loyalty. That is what the author means by the frightening possibility that loyalty becomes the principle by which morality is applied, and it is what the prophet meant by “thou art the man.”

Fanaticism and the tolerance of not knowing

The author’s account of fanaticism as relief from doubt bears on how a fellowship talks.

A community that cannot say “I don’t know” will manufacture certainty, and it must defend that certainty with volume and solidarity rather than evidence. The observation that the loudest voice is not necessarily the most certain aligns with much pastoral experience. The person who cannot bear a question is often the one for whom the question has already taken hold.

The Christian faith does not require eliminating uncertainty. It requires trust in a person, and trust is what one exercises precisely where one does not have full sight. The father who said “I believe; help my unbelief” was not rebuked. Job’s friends, who had an approved explanation for everything, were. A fellowship where members can say “I don’t know” without losing standing removes one of the main pressures the author identifies, because it no longer needs the tribe to supply what honest inquiry cannot.

This also bears on how the fellowship treats the person who is wrong. If refuting an argument feels to its holder like an attack on his home, then argument alone will rarely move him, and this is true of members as much as of outsiders. What moves him, if anything does, is the discovery that he can change his mind and still have a home. A community that makes belonging contingent on affirmation has made itself unable to correct anyone, because correction and expulsion have become the same thing.

Autonomy and the willingness to lose

The essay’s conclusion, that autonomy requires the willingness to lose, comes closest to the gospel without naming it.

The author lists what autonomy may cost: a cherished opinion, the satisfaction of having been right, friends’ approval, one’s place in a circle one wished to remain in. He observes that the autonomous mind’s advantage is its ability to tolerate loneliness. He does not say where such tolerance comes from, and the essay, being psychological, is not obliged to.

The Christian answer is that the willingness to lose is not a temperament some people happen to have. It is the condition of discipleship. Whoever would save his life will lose it. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself. Jesus warned that a man’s enemies would be those of his own household and that his followers would be put out of the synagogues, and then go to a death in which he was abandoned by every human circle to which he belonged. The cross is, among other things, the willingness to lose belonging for the sake of truth carried to its limit.

This reframes the author’s loneliness. The autonomous mind, as he describes it, tolerates loneliness by strength of character. The disciple tolerates it because, in the final analysis, he is not alone; his gyroscope is set to a person who has already stood outside every circle. That is what lets a man be inner-directed without being merely self-directed, the distinction the author’s metaphor leaves open. A gyroscope set to the self is only a smaller tribe.

The warning against contrarianism belongs here too. Standing alone is not a virtue in itself, and a person can make a badge of dissent as easily as of conformity. The author’s test still applies: is the dissenting belief being held because it is true, or because it identifies the dissenter as a certain kind of person? The contrarian who needs to be against the crowd is as other-directed as the conformist who needs to be with it. He has simply reversed the reading on his radar.

Questions for the fellowship

The essay leaves the fellowship with questions to ask itself rather than others.

Whether members can question the group’s shared views, including its views on matters outside the creed, without a cost to their standing. Whether the group applies the same evidentiary standard to claims made from inside as to claims made from outside. Whether members can say “I don’t know” and be left alone. Whether a member who changed his mind on a contested matter would still have a home. Whether the fellowship’s confession is a truth claim open to the Berean search or a marker of who belongs. Whether the group has any belief it would be unwilling to lose even if shown to be false, and if so, what that belief is doing.

None of these has an obvious answer. The author’s closing caution applies to the fellowship as much as to anyone: the temptation is to divide mankind into conformists and independent thinkers and place oneself among the latter. A better response is to accept that the dynamic he describes affects everyone in the room, and to build a community where belonging doesn’t require anyone to lie. That is a harder thing to build than a tribe, and it is the only kind of fellowship that can be trusted with the truth.

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260906 – Evidence of Truth

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

Discerning Truth in the Gospel

Jurisprudence and the Biblical Witness

Fellowship Essay by Charlie Gutierrez | 6 September 2026 

Question 1: American jurisprudence has accepted rules of evidence. What are they, and how can they be applied to spiritual knowledge?

American evidence law is a good lens for this question because it’s one of the most developed systems humans have built for deciding what counts as adequately supported belief under uncertainty. Here’s the core framework, then where the analogy to spiritual knowledge holds up and where it strains.

Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE):

The Federal Rules of Evidence — the codified rules that govern what evidence is admissible in U.S. federal courts.

What FRE refers to in law

The Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE) are a comprehensive set of rules adopted by Congress to ensure fairness, reliability, and efficiency in federal trials. They define:

• What counts as relevant evidence (FRE 401)
• When relevant evidence may still be excluded (FRE 403)
• How witnesses may testify
• How documents, physical evidence, and scientific evidence must be authenticated
• Privileges, hearsay exceptions, expert testimony standards, and more

FRE 401–403: establish the foundational threshold for admissibility:

• FRE 401 — Relevance: Evidence is relevant if it makes a fact “more or less probable than it would be without the evidence.”
• FRE 402 — General admissibility: Relevant evidence is admissible unless another rule excludes it.
• FRE 403 — Balancing test: Even relevant evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by unfair prejudice, confusion, misleading the jury, undue delay, or waste of time.

Why FRE matters

These rules are the backbone of evidentiary practice. Every objection, every admissibility argument, and every evidentiary ruling in federal court ultimately traces back to the FRE framework.

FRE: The main categories

Relevance (FRE 401–403). Evidence must make a fact “more or less probable than it would be without the evidence,” and even relevant evidence can be excluded if its probative value is outweighed by prejudice, confusion, or waste of time.

Hearsay (FRE 801–807). An out-of-court statement offered to prove the truth of what it asserts is presumptively inadmissible, because the original speaker can’t be cross-examined. There are many exceptions (excited utterances, business records, dying declarations, statements against interest) — all justified by circumstances that make fabrication unlikely.

Authentication (FRE 901–902). Before evidence (a document, recording, object) can be considered, its proponent must show it is what it purports to be.

Witness competency and personal knowledge (FRE 601–602). Witnesses generally must testify from firsthand perception, not speculation or secondhand belief.

Opinion and expert testimony (FRE 701–702, Daubert). Lay witnesses may offer opinions only when rationally based on their own perception. Experts can go further, but their methodology must be reliable — tested, peer-reviewed, subject to known error rates, and generally accepted in the relevant field.

Judicial notice (FRE 201). Facts that are indisputable and either generally known or verifiable from unimpeachable sources can be accepted without formal proof.

Burdens and standards of proof. Civil cases typically use “preponderance of the evidence” (more likely than not); criminal cases require “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The standard shifts depending on the stakes of being wrong.

Corroboration and impeachment. Testimony gains weight when independently corroborated, and loses weight when a witness’s credibility, bias, or consistency can be attacked.

Applying this to spiritual knowledge

The exercise mostly translates into asking: what role does personal testimony play, and what would corroboration or impeachment even look like here? A few honest mappings:

• Personal knowledge/eyewitness testimony maps onto religious experience or revelation. Just as courts allow eyewitness testimony despite its fallibility, many religious epistemologies (e.g., the “Reformed epistemology” of Alvin Plantinga, or William Alston’s work on perceiving God) argue that direct experience can be a properly basic source of belief, not requiring external proof, in the same way sense perception is.
• Hearsay problems show up acutely in scripture and tradition — claims transmitted through unverifiable chains of testimony, sometimes centuries removed from the event, without cross-examination of the original source. Historians of religion apply something like hearsay-exception reasoning: does the transmission chain have features (early dating, multiple independent sources, embarrassment criterion, hostile-witness corroboration) that make fabrication less likely?
• Corroboration is where comparative religion and testimony-based arguments (like some versions of the argument from religious experience) try to do work: if many people across unconnected traditions report structurally similar experiences, does convergence function like independent witnesses?
• Authentication parallels debates over textual provenance — manuscript dating, authorship attribution, archaeological corroboration of scriptural claims.
• Expert/Daubert-style reliability is the hardest fit. Daubert asks for testable methodology and known error rates. Spiritual claims are largely not falsifiable in that sense, which is precisely the objection empiricist philosophers (from Hume through logical positivists like Ayer) raised: if a claim can’t in principle be checked against a defeating instance, it doesn’t function as ordinary “evidence” does.
• Burden and standard of proof is really a values question in disguise — how the analogy works depends on how much you think is at stake in being wrong, and there’s real philosophical disagreement (evidentialism, à la W.K. Clifford’s “it is wrong always… to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” versus fideism/pragmatism, à la William James’s “The Will to Believe,” which argues some existentially forced questions warrant belief past the evidence).

Where the analogy breaks down

Courtroom evidence rules exist to adjudicate a specific, falsifiable, third-party-checkable dispute within a system with subpoena power, cross-examination, and an adversarial process that forces claims into the open. Spiritual knowledge claims are frequently first-person, non-repeatable, and resistant to the kind of external check the rules assume is available. So the honest answer is that evidentiary rules can structure the inquiry — they’re a useful checklist for testing rigor, provenance, and internal consistency — but they can’t fully settle the question, because the deepest disagreement is prior to the rules: whether personal religious experience counts as a category of evidence at all, or is a different kind of claim (meaning-making, faith commitment) that evidentiary frameworks weren’t built to arbitrate.

_______________________________

Question 2: From within the frameworks of recorded spiritual inquiry, what are the rules of spiritual evidence by which men struggle to know the truths of the kingdom of God that is within us?

That phrase — “the kingdom of God is within you” — comes from Luke 17:21, and Tolstoy later used it as the title of his book on inward Christianity and nonviolence. It points to something the courtroom analogy can’t quite reach: an inquiry where the witness, the evidence, and the judge are, in some sense, the same person. Different traditions have nonetheless developed real disciplines — “rules of evidence,” if you like — for testing whether an inward conviction is trustworthy or self-deception. A few of the major ones:

The test of fruit. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16-20) is probably the most widely shared criterion across traditions: a spiritual perception is validated not by its intensity but by what it produces over time — humility, charity, steadiness, self-mastery — versus pride, division, or appetite dressed up as revelation. This consequentialist test applies to an internal event, and it requires patience; fruit takes a season to show.

The test of peace versus agitation (Ignatian discernment). Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises lay out detailed “rules for discernment of spirits” — the idea that authentic movements toward God tend to bring a settled, deep peace (“consolation”), even amid difficulty, while counterfeit or disordered impulses tend to produce restlessness, anxious urgency, or a peace that only exists at the surface. Quakers developed something structurally similar with the discipline of “waiting worship” and testing a leading against the settled sense of the gathered meeting before acting on it.

The test of consistency and coherence. Does the new perception harmonize with what has already been soundly established — scripture, prior teaching, the moral law as best understood — or does it require you to discard everything previously trustworthy? Most traditions treat radical discontinuity as a warning sign, not proof of depth. 1 John 4:1 puts this directly: “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.”

The test of communal weighing. Paul’s instruction that when someone speaks under inspiration, “let the others judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29) reflects a recurring pattern: private conviction is submitted to a community capable of discernment, not because the community is infallible, but because self-deception is easier alone. This is the closest spiritual analog to cross-examination — a check external to the witness.

The test of humility and self-forgetfulness. Many mystics (John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, the desert fathers) warn that the ego is the most persistent counterfeiter of spiritual experience — that visions and certainties which center or exalt the self are the ones most to be doubted, while those that decrease the self and increase charity toward others carry more weight. This is why the tradition is suspicious of spiritual experience that arrives with grandiosity attached.

The test of reproducibility across witnesses. Not experimental repeatability, but something more like convergent testimony: when contemplatives across unconnected traditions and centuries — Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Vedantic — describe structurally similar interior states (dissolution of self-boundary, unitive love, ineffability, noetic certainty), some take that convergence as a weak but real form of corroboration, in the way independent witnesses strengthen a case.

The test of ineffability held honestly. The apophatic strand (Pseudo-Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing, negative theology generally) insists that whatever rules you apply, the deepest truths exceed propositional capture — so the last rule of evidence is almost anti-evidentiary: a genuine perception of the kingdom tends to leave the knower more aware of what they don’t know, not less. Certainty that closes off further inquiry is treated with suspicion.

The Eastern parallel, for comparison. The Buddha’s Kalama Sutta gives a strikingly similar structure from outside the Abrahamic traditions: don’t believe on the basis of report, tradition, rumor, scripture, logic, or the authority of a teacher — but when you know for yourselves that certain things lead to harm or to welfare, accept or reject them accordingly. Fruit, again, as the final court.

What’s notable is that these criteria converge on something evidentiary structures in law also value — corroboration, consistency, and consequence over time — while explicitly refusing the thing courtroom evidence relies on most: an external, third-party-checkable fact. The “rules” here are less about proving a proposition to someone else and more about a discipline for not fooling yourself, tested against fruit, peace, community, and time rather than against a jury.

If it’s useful, I could go deeper into any one strand — Ignatian discernment in more detail, the desert fathers on diakrisis (discernment as the “mother of virtues”), or how Quaker testing of leadings actually works in practice.

Quaker “leadings”

More on the topic of “How Do You Know?”

By Charlie Gutierrez | 12 September 2026

Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends), founded by George Fox in 17th-century England, built their entire religious practice around the idea that God speaks directly and continuously to individuals through an “Inward Light” or “Inward Teacher” — which immediately raises the problem this whole conversation has been circling: if everyone can receive direct guidance, how do you keep that from collapsing into everyone doing whatever they feel like and calling it God? Quakers call a sense of inward guidance toward action a “leading,” and over more than three centuries they built a genuinely detailed discipline for testing one before acting on it. It’s one of the more practical, procedural versions of spiritual discernment in the traditions we’ve discussed.

The starting suspicion: leadings are tested, not trusted automatically. Quaker practice assumes that not every strong inward conviction is from God — it might be ego, a wish, an anxiety, or plain error, dressed up as guidance. So a leading is treated as a hypothesis to be tested, not a command to be obeyed on the spot. This is a deliberately slower epistemology than most charismatic traditions: the stronger and more urgent a leading feels, the more Quakers traditionally counsel patience before acting.

Testing against Scripture, tradition, and past experience. Early Friends checked a leading against the Bible and against the accumulated experience of the community — not as an external rulebook overriding the Light, but on the premise that the same Spirit that spoke through scripture wouldn’t now contradict itself. A leading that required you to abandon core Christian ethics was, by that fact, suspect.

Testing through “waiting worship.” Quaker unprogrammed worship — sitting in silence until someone is moved to speak — is itself a discernment mechanism. A person who feels a leading to speak in meeting is expected to sit with it, let it be “seasoned,” and only speak if the sense of call persists and intensifies rather than fades. Speaking too quickly, too often, or with evident self-importance is understood as a sign the message may not be genuine ministry.

Testing through the “clearness committee.” This is the most distinctive Quaker institution for the purpose. When a Friend faces a major leading — marriage, a career change, resistance to military service, a call to ministry — they can convene a small group of trusted Friends to serve as a “clearness committee.” Critically, the committee doesn’t give advice or tell the person what to do. Members ask honest, open questions designed to help the person hear their own inward Teacher more clearly, on the premise that the answer is already present within the person and the committee’s job is to help clear away confusion, self-interest, and fear that obscure it. This is close to Socratic method deployed as a discernment tool rather than an argumentative one.

Testing through the “sense of the meeting.” For corporate decisions, Quakers don’t vote. They seek unity — a “sense of the meeting” that emerges through worship-based deliberation, where disagreement is treated as information the group hasn’t yet fully digested rather than something to be outvoted. A single Friend can register a formal objection (“standing in the way”) that halts a decision, which functions as an extreme form of requiring near-total corroboration before the group treats a leading as authoritative for the whole body.

Testing by fruit and consistency over time. As in the traditions we discussed earlier, genuine leadings are expected to produce good fruit — peace, integrity, faithfulness — and to hold up under sustained reflection rather than evaporating once the emotional intensity passes. John Woolman, the 18th-century Quaker whose leading against slaveholding eventually helped move the entire Society of Friends to abolitionism, is the classic example: he tested his leading for years, moved gradually and non-coercively (visiting slaveholding Friends personally rather than denouncing them publicly), and it was the patience and consistency of that process — not the initial conviction alone — that gave it lasting authority within the community.

Testing through plainness and the absence of self-will. Quakers historically distrusted leadings that conveniently aligned with the person’s own comfort, ambition, or desire for status — much like the desert fathers’ suspicion of visions that exalt the self. A leading that costs the person something, or runs against their own interest, was given more credence than one that flattered it.

The overall shape is recognizably continuous with everything else we’ve discussed — fruit, community, patience, humility as tests against self-deception — but Quakers are unusual in having formalized it into actual institutions (the clearness committee, the sense of the meeting) rather than leaving it as informal counsel from an elder. It’s discernment with committee structure.

John Woolman’s abolitionist leadings.

John Woolman (1720–1772) is probably the best-documented case in religious history of someone testing an inward leading patiently, publicly, and over decades — and his own journal records the process in remarkable detail, which is partly why it became a classic of American devotional literature (Woolman was writing what he understood as testimony, not autobiography).

The first leading: writing a will. The origin story, as Woolman tells it, is almost anticlimactic. Around 1742, as a young shopkeeper’s clerk in New Jersey, his employer asked him to write a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. Woolman wrote it, since he’d already made the sale verbally, but he recorded that doing so gave him a lasting inward uneasiness — “I was young, and my employer’s request… disquieted me.” He didn’t yet have a fully formed abolitionist theology. He had a felt wrongness that he didn’t immediately act on or suppress — he let it sit, which is itself the first move of Quaker discernment: not dismissing an uncomfortable leading, but not overreacting to it either.

Refusing to write documents, one small act at a time. The leading matured slowly through concrete, small refusals rather than dramatic gestures. When later asked to write a will transferring enslaved people as property, Woolman told the client he could write it but believed slavekeeping was inconsistent with Christianity — and, remarkably, the man freed his slaves on the spot. Woolman treated this not as proof he was right, but as one data point, consistent with the leading, to be weighed alongside everything else.

Testing through years of personal visits, not public denunciation. From the 1740s onward, Woolman began traveling — on foot, deliberately avoiding stagecoaches later in life once he learned of harm to the horses and drivers, which tells you something about how far his sensitivity to unconsidered harm eventually extended — to visit Quaker slaveholders individually, sitting with them, asking questions, sharing his concern personally rather than condemning them from a pulpit. This mirrors the clearness-committee ethic even though he was the one raising the leading rather than the one being questioned: he wasn’t trying to win an argument, but to help slaveholding Friends arrive at their own inward recognition of the wrong.

Submitting the leading to the body — repeatedly, and slowly. Woolman brought his concern to Quaker meetings for decades, and the Society of Friends moved with characteristic caution — testing his leading against Scripture, against the “sense of the meeting,” and against the discomfort of Friends who owned slaves and had economic interests at stake. He wrote Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754, with a second part in 1762), laying out his reasoning carefully rather than polemically, and kept refining and resubmitting it as his own thinking sharpened. This is the “seasoning” process—a leading that persists and clarifies through repeated testing, rather than one that flares and fades.

A leading tested against his own self-interest, not for it. A detail worth noting: on trips where he stayed in the homes of slaveholding Friends, Woolman insisted on paying the enslaved people directly for any services they performed for him, out of his own funds — a small, costly, unglamorous practice that cut against his own convenience and expense. This is exactly the criterion the tradition uses to sort true leadings from self-serving ones: does it cost you something, or does it flatter you?

Result: incremental, real institutional change. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting began pressuring individual Friends to manumit enslaved people through the 1750s–60s, and by 1776 — a few years after Woolman’s death — the Yearly Meeting required members to free their slaves or face disownment from the Society. Quakers became the first organized religious body in America to collectively oppose and prohibit slaveholding among their own members, and Woolman’s decades of patient, individual, non-coercive witness is generally credited as the single most important force behind that shift.

Death consistent with the leading. Woolman died of smallpox in York, England, in 1772, while on a religious visit to English Quakers — still, at the end, following the same pattern of person-to-person witness rather than institutional pronouncement that had defined the whole leading from the start.

What makes Woolman such a strong case study for everything we’ve discussed is that nothing about his process was fast or dramatic. It was a single inward discomfort, held for thirty years, continually re-tested against Scripture, against the corporate discernment of his meeting, against his own comfort and self-interest, and against its fruit — and it was the sheer duration and consistency of that testing, not the initial intensity of the feeling, that eventually carried authority for an entire religious body. It’s the desert fathers’ warning against unchecked zeal and the Quaker clearness-committee ethic both showing up in one life, played out over decades rather than in a single decision.

Trying the Case

A Response to “Evidence of Truth”

Fellowship Essay by Thomas | 13 September 2026

Last week’s discussion kept arriving at the same question from different directions. Michael asked how one knows which of two sincere believers, a Mormon and a Lutheran, holds the truth, and how one knows which of a man’s several transformations of personality and belief was the real one. Susan noticed that the test scripture gives for a messenger is hard to apply to the authors of scripture themselves. Leonard asked how large Christ’s tent is, and I replied that the Bible goes on the altar and everything else goes on the bookshelf, because I take the Bible as closest to the apostolic witness, drawn from the converging multi-vocal testimony of Christ’s life, teaching, and promise. Charlie’s essay this week takes the question head-on: what rules do we use to decide that a claim about God is adequately supported?

His essay lays out two sets of rules. The first is the FRE (Federal Rules of Evidence), one of the most carefully built systems people have made for deciding what to believe when certainty is not available. The second is the set of disciplines the spiritual traditions themselves developed to test whether an inward conviction comes from God or from oneself. I want to walk through both sets using last week’s testimonies as examples, because I think the four conversions we studied are exactly the kind of evidence these rules were designed to weigh.

The courtroom rules and the Gospel

Personal knowledge. A witness may testify only to what he perceived himself. The Bible meets the criteria of testimony from qualified witnesses. The apostles were there. John opens his first letter by insisting on it: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). Whatever else can be said about the New Testament, it presents itself as eyewitness testimony, and the earliest readers, some of whom were also there, and their testimony is accepted it as such. A revelation received centuries later, however sincere, is testimony about an event the witness did not see. That is not a reason to call it false. It is a reason to give it a different weight.

Hearsay and its exceptions. Charlie notes that scripture is, on its face, hearsay: statements transmitted through chains of people who cannot be cross-examined. He also notes the exceptions, which deserve attention because they apply to statements made under conditions that make fabrication unlikely. A statement against interest is one such condition. The apostles’ testimony cost them their livelihoods, their standing, and in most cases their lives. Dying declarations are another; Stephen, Peter, and Paul all died affirming what they had said. The criterion of embarrassment is a third: the Gospels record the disciples as cowards, doubters, and slow learners, and report that the first witnesses to the resurrection were women, whose testimony carried little weight in that culture. No one inventing a story to persuade a first-century audience would have written it that way. Greg Viehman, in his testimony, reached this same conclusion as a physician evaluating the record, and found that no alternative explanation of the empty tomb survived.

Impeachment and the hostile witness. The strongest witness in any case is the one who had every reason to testify the other way. Paul was a Pharisee, a persecutor of the church, a man with nothing to gain and everything to lose by joining it. Greg named him as the evidence that finished the case. Rosaria is the same kind of witness in our own day: a tenured activist who opened the Bible to discredit it and was overturned by it. Susan, who rejected the faith of her upbringing for fifteen years before returning, is a milder instance of the same pattern. When the case for a claim rests on witnesses who began as its opponents, the usual impeachment for bias runs backward.

Corroboration. Four witnesses, unknown to one another, three of them on video and one in this Fellowship, reported the same sequence: intellectual acceptance of the claims, then a change of heart they had not expected, then the discovery of Galatians 5:22 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,” as the description of what had happened. Independent witnesses converging on the same detail is what a court means by corroboration. Greg, Susan, and Rosaria did not compare notes.

Authentication. Before a document is admitted, you must show it is what it claims to be. Manuscript dating, textual criticism, and archaeology do this work, and they have done it more thoroughly for the New Testament than for any other ancient document. Charlie’s essay rightly puts this in the category of provenance. It is also the category where a second scripture that appeared in the nineteenth century with no manuscript history faces its hardest test, and I think it is fair to say that Charlie’s own reservations about the Book of Mormon are authentication reservations.

The standard of proof. The standard of proof is the level of certainty the law requires before a fact-finder may decide an issue. Different standards reflect the court’s assessment of the relative stakes of being wrong — the higher the potential harm from an erroneous decision, the higher the required standard of proof. What is at stake in the Gospel claim is the whole shape of a life and whatever follows it. William James argued that some questions are forced, meaning that refusing to decide is itself a decision, and that for such questions one may reasonably believe past what the evidence compels. I would put it more simply. The question “did Jesus rise” cannot be left open the way “is there life on Mars” can. Greg saw this at once: if it happened, it is the most important event in history, and if it did not, it is a fairy tale, and a man cannot live as though it were both.

Where the analogy strains. Charlie is right that the Daubert standard, which asks for a testable method and a known error rate, fits poorly. The resurrection cannot be repeated in a laboratory, but neither can the history of any given event. This is the challenge of veracity every past event must face; it is the heart of every court case and the significance of evidence. The changed heart is one type of evidence. Susan’s challenge to the unbeliever was to run the experiment: pray earnestly and read the Bible daily for a season, and see. Greg’s challenge was the same: call on Christ and test him. Uncounted people have run the experiment across two thousand years. Some change dramatically; others notice only a new voice of conscience. There are those of other religions who claim change, and perhaps it is the light of Christ that is in all that is being awakened by their newly declared devotion to God. Claims of a changed heart are subjective, but changed behavior can be validated objectively and statistically. Such tests may have been done. A statistics-based proof is not a courtroom proof; it is more of a science-type proof that supports a hypothesis, but does not prove causality or uniqueness.

The rules of the traditions

Charlie’s second set of rules addresses the harder case: not whether Christ rose, but whether a particular inward conviction is from God. Here the witness, the evidence, and the judge are the same person, and self-deception is the constant hazard. I want to take his seven tests and examine their utility.

Fruit. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16). This is the test the four testimonies pass most plainly. Ruth Viehman’s statement that she is married to a different man (Greg’s transformation) is fruit observed from outside, by the person best placed to see it. Susan’s joy and peace have lasted years. Rosaria’s life was rebuilt. Fruit takes a season, which is why testimony given decades after conversion weighs more than testimony given the week after.

Peace. The Ignatian rule is that movements from God bring a settled, deep peace even in difficulty, while counterfeits bring restlessness and surface calm. Greg woke up peaceful and content for no reason, and checked his medicine cabinet before he believed it. Rosaria found that the words of Hebrews 4 undid her, and the peace came only after she went all the way across to Christ. Both fit the rule, and the rule fits the fruit of the Spirit.

Consistency. Does the new perception harmonize with what is already soundly established, or does it require discarding everything previously deemed trustworthy? A later revelation that agrees with the apostolic record may be true or may be an elaboration. To discern trustworthiness in this case, whatever contradicts it fails the test. “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). Susan’s observation that we know little about the authors of some biblical books is fair, but the test is still available: the books that were received into the canon were received because the churches that had known the apostles judged them consistent with what the apostles had taught.

Communal weighing. “Let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29). Charlie’s essay calls this the nearest spiritual analog to cross-examination and the communal test in operation. When Susan proposes a reading of Ephraim and Manasseh that none of us has heard before, and I ask her to write it up so the group can weigh it, that is the same test. A private conviction should be compared with the group’s judgment.

Humility. The mystics warn that the ego can counterfeit spiritual experience. Certainties can exalt the self and blind the heart with confidence. I look at myself; I had an experience that was not noble or credible in its origin, a revelation that I believe was from God, but it came in an altered state. The fruit was a completely changed life, and a forty-year development of a theory of everything. It appears consistent with conventional physics, but adds a layer of understanding of structure and mechanism that makes it plausible that we live, move, and exist within Him. I hope conventional physicists will find my vision, logic, and proofs compelling, see it as evidence of God’s existence and omniscient presence in the material world, and acknowledge Him in their lives and science. An impact of such magnitude tempts the ego to exalt itself. And of course, we should challenge such revelations, logic, and evidence lest we follow a false path. It is easy to follow a charismatic man, be enticed by new doctrines, and relinquish the liberty we were given in Christ.

Convergence. Contemplatives across unconnected traditions describe similar interior states, and some take that as weak corroboration. I said last week that the mystical literature of other traditions gives me a glimpse of a world beyond this one and strengthens my faith that such a world exists, without my following those traditions. Charlie’s essay gives a category for that: convergent testimony is evidence that something is there, even when it is not evidence for a particular account of what it is.

Ineffability. The last rule is nearly the opposite of a rule: a true perception of the kingdom tends to leave the knower more aware of what he does not know. Susan’s vision-therapy picture belongs here. The reader who has suppressed the verses that do not fit has a single flat image and feels certain. The one who is given depth perception sees both and knows the reconciliation is still in progress. Certainty that closes inquiry is a warning sign; a process that may last a lifetime is more likely the real thing, as Paul struggled throughout life to the end: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7)

What the rules settle and what they do not

Charlie’s essay ends by saying that evidentiary rules can structure the inquiry but cannot settle it, because the deepest disagreement lies before the rules: whether personal religious experience counts as evidence at all. I think that is exactly right, and I think last week’s testimonies show where the settlement actually happens. Greg had the courtroom case complete and was unchanged. What settled the matter was not a further argument but a walk-in patient’s question and a night on his knees, followed by a morning of peace that he could not explain away. The rules of evidence brought him to the door. Something else opened it.

So the rules do two things for us. They tell us which claims deserve to be taken seriously enough to test, and here the Gospel passes a court’s tests of evidence. And they give us a discipline for not fooling ourselves once we have begun to believe. What they cannot do is substitute for the test itself. The kingdom of God is within you, and the only way to gather evidence for what is within you is to go in.

Questions for our discussion

1. Which of the courtroom rules do you find most persuasive when applied to the Gospel, and which do you think a skeptic would rightly say does not apply?
2. Charlie’s essay distinguishes evidence for a proposition from a discipline for not fooling yourself. Where in your own walk have you needed the second more than the first?
3. If communal weighing is the spiritual form of cross-examination, how well does this Fellowship perform it? What would make our testing of one another’s convictions more honest and more charitable at the same time?
4. The standard of proof shifts with the stakes. What standard did you actually apply when you came to believe, and would you apply the same one now?

— Thomas

What Is Truth?

Fellowship Discussion Essay – September 13, 2026

The meeting centered on Charlie’s essay “Evidence of Truth,” which set American rules of evidence beside the disciplines spiritual traditions have developed for testing an inward conviction. Before the essay, Michael presented notes carried over from the previous week, which turned the first hour toward the nature of hell, judgment, and repentance. The second hour returned to the essay’s question: How do we know something is true? This essay records the points made in both halves and the responses given.

1. Michael’s notes from the previous week

Christians killing Christians. Michael proposed a way through the problem he has raised before: that Christians have made war on one another for centuries. All factions agree on the behavioral teaching: the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, love of neighbor. If the emphasis were placed there and taken off what he called the vehicle code, the doctrinal fine print by which one faction declares another to be of the devil, the armies would have less to fight about. Thomas objected that scripture nowhere instructs one believer to call another of the devil for holding a different version. Michael agreed that it does not, but observed that people do it anyway, and that the problem is getting them to stop.

Living forever. Michael reported that the previous meeting had corrected an assumption of his. He had supposed that only Christians live forever; he now understood that in this paradigm everyone does, and that the difference is where and in what state. He is neither buying nor denying the assumption. He asked for more on purgatory, which the group had not discussed, and whether life after death might resemble the state before birth, in which case he has many further questions.

The samurai and the monk. He told the story of a samurai who asked a famous monk whether heaven and hell exist. The monk insulted him until the samurai drew his sword to kill him, at which point the monk said, “This is hell.” The samurai understood, sheathed the sword, and the monk said, “This is heaven.”

Hell as pain. Michael offered two reference points from his own life. As a boy of seven, left alone for the first time, he melted all the household candles in a pot to play with the wax, heard his parents at the door, poured the wax down the sink, burned his hand trying to clear it, and then met his parents with the words, “You aren’t going in the kitchen, are you?” The point was the layered experience of pain, fear, and consequence. The second was a stroke in 1982, during which he lay for five days in undifferentiated agony, too far gone even to think that he needed a pain reliever until the fourth day. From this he posed a question about the design of hell: maximal pain without awareness becomes a kind of white noise, while a lesser pain with enough consciousness to know one is in it may be worse. A competent designer of hell, he said, would have to decide which, and God is up to it.

Love, kindness, and trust. He has often lived without these, traveling in a van, and it has not bothered him; rocks, rivers, and panoramas are a joy and do not need to love him back. He does not trust anyone; he assigns likelihoods instead, and personal friends rate very high. He asked whether heaven as immersion in love, kindness, and trust leaves room for the loner, such as the frontier trappers who wanted nothing from society, and whether the afterlife differs from this one only by being non-physical.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge. He noted that the original sin was eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In his reading, not questioning what is good and evil is Eden; questioning gets one expelled; ignorance is bliss. Yet this forum, and this vision, is precisely the questioning of good and evil.

Peter Pan. He closed with a passage from Barrie in which Captain Hook bites the hand Peter extends to help him, and every child who meets that first betrayal remembers it forever, except Peter, who met it often and always forgot. Michael identified with Peter: he accepts others’ mistrust and loves them anyway, since they came by it for good reasons.

2. The nature of hell

A short history of the word. While Michael spoke, Charlie looked up how the idea developed. The earliest scripture uses Sheol, a dim and silent holding place for all the dead, righteous and wicked alike. Judgment enters in the Second Temple period, and Daniel 12:2 is the closest the Old Testament comes to differentiated fates: some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt. In the New Testament the word is Gehenna, a transliteration of the name of a valley near Jerusalem associated with child sacrifice to Moloch, which became a symbol of judgment and defilement. Hades, Tartarus, and the lake of fire also appear. Charlie observed that Christianity today has no unified view of what hell actually is, and gave his own: as a parent who loves his children, he wants them to suffer the natural consequences of their behavior and no more, and he trusts that God, who is better than he is, will do exactly as much as is needed to make souls his and no more. He does not believe that there is an eternal lake of fire.

Michael responded to each term in turn. A dim, silent holding place sounds like a place he would enjoy. Shame is universal, since whoever one is, someone will shame him, and he regards the shame of those whose opinion he does not respect as entertainment. A lake one is thrown into is only hell if one is prevented from drowning. He asked how God would maximize pain beyond what the Inquisition devised, given that the Inquisition eventually ran out of the victim’s capacity to survive. Charlie said that if he were God, he would never send Michael to hell because Michael would enjoy it too much, and proposed a giant library with no books; Michael recognized the Twilight Zone episode in which a man who wants only to read survives a nuclear war, finds the library intact, and breaks his glasses.

Hell as self-banishment. Leonard offered his own view. We make our own hells. God does not assign people to them; he tries to describe them in scripture, in language of fire and brimstone because the reality is foreign to us, but the place is one we choose, as we chose to come here. Hell is the inability to endure the presence of God because of the guilt of what one has done. Christ paid the price of sin so that we need not suffer as he did; those who reject that payment must suffer as he did, in the eternities, and that is hell: the diametric opposite of the glory, peace, and love of God’s presence. In his theology, there was a war in heaven; Lucifer rebelled to gain the Father’s glory, and a third of the host went with him; they were not so much cast out as they left, thinking they could do it on their own. The deception is so complete that their hell is their heaven. A person who learns of Christ in this life and rebels against him will, when brought back into God’s presence, see the difference, feel an unbearable guilt, and banish himself to where misery loves company. That is the justice of the universe.

Michael accepted the premise that we make our own hells and quoted Thomas Paine: our tragedy is heightened because we furnish the means by which we suffer. On guilt, he said the cure is atonement, which Christianity, Islam, and much psychology agree on. He described his own method: examine what you can do to fix what you broke, and do it, including calling someone to clarify a remark that could have been taken as cruel. He contrasted this with the Christian method of trusting Christ to take care of one’s sins, and said both have merit depending on the paradigm. He then raised the case that does not fit: the person who does wrong and glories in it. Hitler did not experience his crimes as self-inflicted pain. Leonard answered that the self-inflicted pain comes at the judgment, not in this life, when one faces God and sees what one has done; he added that he had recently read a claim that Hitler said a demon possessed him.

Demons, insanity, and accountability. Michael said he has never met an angel or a demon and is unfamiliar with the distinctions between them. Leonard said he does not need to meet one; one can see living demons by looking at the world, and he cited a recent case in which a mother killed her children and a single holdout juror refused to accept an insanity defense. He called that juror righteous: one cannot say “I lost my mind” and be innocent, and she was not brought into court in a straitjacket. Michael distinguished insanity from disease. A person with rabies has nothing left of himself; what does that say about the soul? A person who is simply unhinged is a different case, and he set no lower limit on how far a person’s intelligence can fall. Leonard held that there is no excuse for killing one’s children, that the act requires a response, and that most broken laws, physical and spiritual, can be repaired through the atonement, but not without repentance.

Leonard read from Doctrine and Covenants 19, in which the Lord commands repentance on pain of a suffering whose severity is unknown to us, and says that he, God, suffered these things for all so that they might not suffer if they repent, a suffering that caused him to tremble, bleed at every pore, and wish not to drink the bitter cup. Leonard’s summary: repentance is coming to understand what one has done, not doing it again, and repairing what can be repaired; God has provided an off-ramp in his Son; the only place one can change is in this life; and God does not trifle with men’s souls. Michael said he agreed with that definition of repentance. He compared his stroke with the crucifixion, reasoning that the nails would have produced cycles of agony rather than his own four days of undifferentiated pain. Leonard replied that in the Mormon reading, the Atonement has two parts: the spiritual suffering in Gethsemane, which he has recently come to understand the disciples did not sleep through but fainted from witnessing, and the physical suffering on the cross.

A hypothetical and a scripture. Michael posed a case: a slave owner enters a cabin to rape a woman, her husband stands up, the owner kills the husband, and the woman kills the owner. Has she sinned against the Bible and the law and earned hell? Leonard said self-defense and retribution are different matters; Charlie called the case contrived; Michael insisted such things happened in slavery. Michael said at first that Jesus would tell her to let him rape her rather than kill him, then withdrew that and said Jesus would say, “Don’t kill him,” which does not mean submitting, and see what happens. Leonard concluded that her killing the owner was self-defense and justified, while the owner’s killing of the husband was murder. He then told the opening story of the Book of Mormon, in which Nephi, commanded to obtain the brass plates from Laban, finds Laban drunk in the street, is told by the Lord to kill him, does so with Laban’s own sword despite never having killed a man, impersonates him to obtain the record, and takes the servant Zoram by oath. Leonard’s point was that obedience can sometimes trump virtue. Michael said he had a thousand questions about that story but had to leave.

A parting question. Isak, leaving as well, asked whether hell might be a metaphor for the burning off of a human life, the decomposition of the body into whatever material it becomes, and whether that material is collected and gathered back into the fold. Leonard replied that the body decomposes but the spirit does not, so the spirit must go somewhere, and hides itself from the pain of God’s presence in a place of no glory. Very few go there. In his theology, there are degrees of glory: celestial, where the Father is; terrestrial, where Christ is; and telestial, which is similar to this world, with good and evil mixed, and where most people end up, apart from God as we are here, with God in the heart but not in his presence. Hell may likewise have levels, where those who rejected the atonement pay for their own sins. Charlie remarked that he never thinks about hell, and Leonard said there is no need to.

3. The process of knowing what is true

What the essay did for its author. Thomas asked Charlie what he had taken from preparing the essay, and Charlie said he assembled it by putting questions to an AI, one leading to another. His answer was that Mormonism had given him a simplified and controlled process for discovering truth: if the prophet says so, it is; and if reading the Book of Mormon produces a burning in the bosom, that is the sign of truth. Neither, he said, is a viable truth detector. The actual process is slower, more thoughtful, and more complex, and the Quaker practice in particular, with its clearness committees and the example of John Woolman, is rational, patient, and communal. This is the opposite of the top-down authority he was raised under, which is not merely what the prophet says but what the latest prophet says, and which he finds oppressive. He gave an example of the process at work: a video by a Bible scholar on the apparent conflict between Jesus’s words about the law standing until heaven and earth pass and Paul’s teaching on the law had led him, for the first time, to consider that Christians might still be under the Torah. Susan had cautioned him not to be hasty but slow, prayerful, and deliberate, since such a conclusion would change a life. Susan noted that Jesus said he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17), and that Charlie was reporting a scholar’s synthesis rather than Jesus’s words; Charlie agreed the question deserved its own meeting.

The Quaker approach. Armond said he was drawn to the Quaker method because we are human, have egos, and are acted on by many powers. Beginning by looking within, testing whether an impulse is of the ego, looking for the absence of self-will, and testing against scripture all seemed to him ways of getting one’s reliance on self out of the way. The clearness committee, in which a private leading is submitted to a small group for patient questioning, struck him as a sound concept.

A case of testing a leading. Susan told a story that fits the tests, though not the communal form. After COVID, she and Charlie were far behind on rent, and the property manager called to ask when payments would resume. Susan prayed, and the answer she received was, “Tell her that I will provide.” She did not act on it. She sat with it for three or four days, asking God to confirm it, aware that Satan or her own wishful thinking could produce such words, and waited to see whether it would fade or be replaced. It did not. She then wrote to the manager and felt the Spirit help with the words. The manager called at once, said she had known many people of faith whose faith did not pay the rent, and pressed her to be realistic. Susan found a boldness she could not account for and pushed back, and at the end the manager said the one thing she could not argue with was God, and asked for a payment plan. Neither Susan nor Charlie knew how they would meet it. Shortly afterward, Charlie and Thomas made a financial arrangement, and the first payment was met on time; the contract was completed. Susan’s indicators were the felt presence of the Spirit while writing and speaking, and the fruit. She stressed that the waiting mattered: had she acted on the first impression as if it were certainly God’s, she believes the outcome would have been different and not good. Charlie summarized the method as testing by waiting, by feeling, by study, by conversation, and by fruit, and contrasted it again with the tradition in which the thinking has been done and one need only obey.

The host’s framing. Thomas said the Federal Rules of Evidence were new to him but read as common sense set down in writing. The real question for him was the one the group has circled for a year and a half: how do we know the Bible is true, how do we know that an impression such as Susan’s is from God, and, in the standing conversation between Mormonism and Christianity, how do we know which record to trust. He mentioned that he transcribed and wrote up an interview with a Jordanian Muslim who became a Christian, which he intends to send out, and noted that the Quran presents a comparison different in kind from the Book of Mormon, which reads more like backstory.

He then set out the comparison as he sees it. The restorationist argument, as he understands it and as Denver Snuffer’s lectures presented it, is that the Bible has been corrupted and cannot be primary, so that new revelation is required. Against this, the Bible was copied many times, but the surviving manuscripts, dispersed across regions and centuries, have been compared and agree closely; the variants are minor and change no doctrine. The four Gospels are four witnesses whose accounts triangulate on the same events, and that triangulation is the standard method by which Christendom has validated the record. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, rests on one man’s testimony, dictated by a method that included a hat and a seer stone, with no plates available for examination. Those are the two bodies of evidence, and the question is which is more authentic and more trustworthy: the apostolic record copied with minor errors, or the record Joseph Smith produced by the means he described.

The reply from the restorationist side. Leonard said the restoration had nothing to do with the Bible being bad. The Bible was fine; men corrupted the teaching and added their own philosophies, and what was restored was belief in the Bible, after which God, as he always does, added more. Joseph Smith preached from the Bible. The additional record came from the same roots: an Israelite people of the house of Joseph, the other sheep Christ said he must also visit (John 10:16). Asked in effect whether the Book of Mormon is more correct than the Bible, Leonard said he does not care; he loves all of it, and the more one can receive from God the better. Ranking one against the other is a mousetrap Satan sets. On the hat and seer stone, he said that is hearsay, and cited the rules of evidence against it; Joseph used an instrument that came with the record, which he called the Urim and Thummim, and eventually needed no instrument. He noted that each author in the Book of Mormon has a distinct word pattern, and that the Bible’s originals are no more available than the plates. None of this, he said, is what really matters. What matters is whether it is true, and the only way to know is to test it. God’s method is to understand a principle, believe it provisionally, obey it, and receive the blessing that follows; the blessing confirms the principle, faith becomes knowledge, and the cycle repeats until, in the end, the Lord manifests himself, though few reach that point. Spiritual things require spiritual tools; God does not honor “show me a sign.” If one refuses to test, that is a choice not to know.

Testing what, exactly? Susan said she agrees entirely with testing by obedience, which Charlie identified as the fruit test. She then asked for an example: is there a commandment in the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants, not found in the Bible, that a person could test by obeying it this month? Leonard first named doctrines such as the three degrees of glory, which he said are tested by prayer, since the Book of Mormon’s own instruction is simply to ask God. Susan pressed for something to do. Leonard offered baptism, which most Christians do not consider necessary; Susan replied that many do, and that baptism is in the Bible. Leonard could not name a commandment unique to the additional scripture, and said that everything can be tested one way or another, by obeying it or by asking God through the Holy Ghost. Charlie observed that this is where the difficulty lies: when an idea comes, it is very hard to know whether it is God’s Spirit, one’s own ambition, or one’s own creativity. Leonard’s reply was that Charlie thinks too much, which Charlie took as a fair objection. Charlie added that his first wife believed every thought she had was true, and that if everything that enters one’s head is taken for God’s Spirit, one is headed for hell.

Spiritual experience is not evidence of doctrine. Susan made the comment she regarded as most important. When she was LDS, her spiritual experiences carried great weight as evidence that what she believed was true, including that her church was the true church. Leonard said he hates that use of them. Susan’s lesson is that one can have spiritual experiences and still not be believing the truth, because anyone who sincerely believes in Jesus, across many denominations, will have such experiences; they are common, and it is common to take them as confirmation of whatever doctrine one holds, but they are not an accurate test. She agreed with Leonard that one should pray and ask God, and read James 1:5-7 in the New Living Translation, which she prefers here to the King James: when you ask, be sure your faith is in God alone; a person of divided loyalty is like a wave tossed by the wind and should not expect to receive anything. J. B. Phillips renders it as asking without secret doubts about whether one really wants God’s help. She used to read the passage as a demand for enough belief that the request would be granted. She now reads it as a question about the heart: Is your faith in God? Do you really want to hear whatever he says, and are you willing to obey it even when it is not what you wanted? Discernment, wisdom, and understanding are gifts from God; attempted by one’s own power, they end in deception. The tools in Charlie’s essay are good tools, but they work only on that foundation. She added that this was not aimed at Leonard, whom she regards as a sincere believer who wants to obey, but at the premise that all of them should check before using any of the tools.

Leonard said he believed everyone present had experienced the hand of God and knew it, which is why they gather, and that it is a kind of miracle the group can discuss these things without anger. God will reveal truth to the heart; ask, seek, knock; and do not limit him, who is as vast as the ocean while we are a droplet. He recommended that anyone who chooses to read the Book of Mormon use the modern-language Covenant of Christ edition, and said he loves the various Bible translations because their makers strove to give us a record we can understand.

4. Closing

Susan closed in prayer, asking that the group be taught how to discern what is true and have experiences this week in which they learn it. Afterward, Leonard observed that “What is truth?” was Pilate’s question to Christ, asked while Truth stood in front of him, and that we likewise speak to the Lord and fail to recognize him when he answers. Susan added that Jesus identified himself as the truth: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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

260904 – The Promise of the Changed Heart

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

Dear Fellowship: This week we have a treat. Susan wrote an essay for the Fellowship Meeting. (See below.)

Susan’s story is compelling because she testifies of a changed heart after submitting her life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I think she has identified the most important aspect of the conversion/born again/salvation experience. For me, as a youth, going to church focused on accepting Jesus as my Savior to go to Heaven. We were taught about the transformation of our hearts, but Susan’s story brings that part of salvation to the forefront. Many people may not see the need to transform their hearts, so they see no urgency or benefit in this claim. Nevertheless, I think we should share this because we live in this body every day, feeling our hearts and minds. If we, by the Salvation experience, change from a person who is motivated by the approach and avoidance of the passions of our animal nature, and God changes our hearts, and we are able to incorporate the gifts of the Spirit, then our experience of life is better, regardless of what experience we may have in the afterlife. If we focus on living in God’s Spirit, we will be more likely to choose good and Godly acts in this complex life we live in.

Thomas

Why Seek The God of the Bible?
(For those who do not believe)

By Susan Gutierrez – 9/4/2026

This is a challenge from me to anyone who does not believe in Christ. In this short presentation, I set forth one good reason to find out for yourself whether the God of the Bible is real and willing to have a relationship with you.

Here is a little background on me: I was raised to believe in Christ, but I rejected Christ and the Bible in my mid-twenties, coming back to Christ maybe 15-17 years later.  During the years that I did not believe in Christ, I became very focused on trying to find a solution for the terrible crime and wrongdoings that people do to each other. I thought there must be some way to motivate people to choose to do right. I didn’t imagine it would have anything to do with God, though. During those years, I had not yet found a solution.

Years later, I returned to a belief in Christ after 4 months of diligent prayer and daily Bible reading. I had intellectually come to believe that the Son of God was born of a mortal woman, lived a life in obedience to God the Father, was without sin, was tempted, persecuted, accused, tortured, and was crucified without a just cause, and rose the third day. I had come to believe that he died for our sins and if we believe in him, we will be saved on judgment day. I did not expect major changes in my heart. I was shocked to find that the day of, or the day after, I was filled with the most beautiful joy, peace, and love for God.

I kept reading and eventually found verses that explained to me what had happened to me. Like these next Bible passages:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance: against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

I realized that I had been filled with those first three fruits of the Spirit. And those fruits of the Spirit are still with me. By the way. I also recognized the description of these verses:

Therefore, if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creation: old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. —2 Corinthians 5:17 (NKJV)

 Jesus answered and said to him, Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.—John 3:3 (NKJV)

He restores my soul, He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake. —Psalm 23:3 (NKJV)

I did and still do feel like I became a new creation, and I feel like I was born again. I also feel like He leads me in paths of righteousness, though it is a challenge to follow His lead. I find it is really a process to learn how to follow Jesus, but my heart is so changed that I desire to follow Jesus.

I have listened to countless testimonies of ex-criminals, ex-addicts, and some who were in some kind of destructive lifestyle. These people have somehow, or otherwise, come to believe in Christ and have been changed, sometimes radically, and usually some changes came immediately. Do you find these and other testimonies compelling enough to look into this for yourself? My thinking is this: For anyone who would like to be able to do something to be part of a solution to the problems in this world,  wouldn’t it be worth spending the time to earnestly pray, read the Bible, and seek to discover if the people that testify that Christ has changed their hearts have really found the true God? Based on my own experience, I can tell you there is a true and living God who is willing and wanting to be in relationship with you. If you gain a relationship with the true and living God, I believe that relationship will be extremely meaningful to you, and you will be on the path to spreading this good news to people who desperately need God’s help. In fact, Christ makes it clear that he is inviting us to join him in his work in this passage, where he uses the analogy of a yoke, which is an instrument used in farming to “yoke” two animals together so they can plow a field together.  His work is saving souls. He is inviting as many people as will come to him to help him do his work. See these verses:

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.–Matthew 11:29 (KJV)

For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. — Luke 19:10 (NKJV)

Here is one more last idea. Have you ever felt loved so deeply by someone (like a grandparent or aunt, for example) that you could not help but love them back? That is what happens in a relationship with God. A woman goes to Jesus with an alabaster box of ointment. She washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped the tears off with her hair. She kissed his feet and anointed them with oil. The man whose house they were in silently judged this woman because he knew that she was a sinner. Jesus recognized the man’s thoughts and asked him, “Who loves more?” One who has been forgiven much, or one who has been forgiven little? The man answered that it would be the one who had been forgiven much. Jesus affirmed that he was correct and then explained all the things this woman had done for him and the things the man had not done for him. She had been forgiven of so much sin, but as a result she loved Jesus so deeply. (See Luke 7:36-50) This is part of the great power of having a relationship with the true and living God. God fills those who earnestly seek him and find him with a precious love that makes the person love God back, and then they have enough love overflowing to love others!

We love him, because he first loved us.—1 John 4:19

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.—John 13:35 (KJV)

Jesus helps us discern between people who are his true followers and those who just claim to believe in him, as shown in the previous scripture verse. This is so helpful because so many people turn away from Christ because of the unloving behavior of some who claim to believe in Christ.

You see, God loves us and wants us to come to him in relationship, and the love we receive from him is priceless; his love enables us to love others and to desire to tell others about this relationship that is possible for them to have as well. It is so beautiful, meaningful, helpful, and healing. Nearly every problem in this world can be helped by people getting into relationship with the true and living God!  Doesn’t that sound worth seeking for yourself? Here are three great testimonies. I hope you will at least watch one. There are so many more available on YouTube. I recommend Delafe testimonies, but they tend to be long.

Here is a link for a gang member who turned to Christ. He became a new creature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxroAZ8Hzcg&t=81s

Here is a link to a testimony of a doctor, an atheist, who started reading the Bible to discredit Christian neighbors and ended up believing in Christ and becoming a changed person. He and his wife explain how he has changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtEZMgUHnRg

Here is a link for a testimony given by a former lesbian and lgbtq activist. She describes her process of believing her lifestyle was good to believing in Christ and repenting. This is a very intellectual, level-headed account of a conversion story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJc0McjBo3o

The Changed Heart

A Response to Susan’s Challenge

By Thomas – 9/6/2026

Susan’s essay illuminates the fact that most of us who grew up in church were taught salvation as a transaction with a future payoff: believe in Jesus, and you will go to Heaven when you die. We were taught about a changed heart, but it seemed out of reach or abstract. How is that done? Susan did not expect her heart to change; she had done the intellectual work of coming to believe the claims about Christ, and she assumed that was it. Then, within a day, she was filled with joy, peace, and love for God, and she has carried that for years since. She believed, but it was more than a new belief; she noticed a dramatic transformation. I think she has experienced what is available from the salvation relationship.

The heart we are born with

To see why this matters, it helps to be honest about the heart we start with. We are born as creatures of approach and avoidance. We move toward what feels good and away from what feels bad. Hunger, fear, desire, pride, the wish to be admired, the sting of being slighted, the pull of comfort, the dread of loss: these are the drives of the natural life. They are not evil in themselves. They kept our ancestors alive, and they keep us alive. But they are blind. They do not know the difference between the good and the merely pleasant, or between the harmful and the merely painful. An animal nature can be trained, and it can be restrained, but it cannot be made good, because goodness is the property of God.

Susan spent years of her unbelieving life looking for a way to motivate people to do right. That is the oldest problem in ethics, and I think she could not solve it because the tools available to an unbeliever are all external. Law tells you what to do. Punishment makes the wrong more painful. Reward makes the right more pleasant. Education informs the mind. All of these operate on the surface of the same human value system, adjusting the inputs of approach and avoidance without touching the heart itself. Paul describes the result exactly: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). Knowing the right and wanting to do it are not the same thing as being able to want it more than you want everything else.

What conversion actually changes

Here is what I think Susan’s testimony, and the many testimonies she has listened to, are describing. Conversion does not remove the animal nature. The appetites and fears are still there, and every believer knows it. Conversion installs a new governing desire above them. The fruit of the Spirit that Susan quotes—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance—is not a list of behaviors to perform. It describes what a heart wants when God’s Spirit lives in it. Love is the first fruit for a reason. A person who loves does not need to be commanded to be kind; kindness is what love does. A person at peace does not need to be restrained from grasping; the grasping has lost its urgency.

And this new desire is not manufactured. That is the point of the woman with the alabaster box. She did not decide to love Jesus as a discipline. She loved him because she had been forgiven, and she knew the size of what she had been forgiven. “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Love is received before it is given. This is why exhortation fails and encounter succeeds. You cannot argue a person into loving; you can only bring them to the One who loves them, and let them find out for themselves.

Why this matters today, not only in the afterlife

We live inside our own hearts every waking hour. Whatever we believe about the life to come, the quality of this life is the quality of the heart we carry through it. A heart governed by fear experiences the world as a threat. A heart governed by appetite experiences it as scarcity. A heart governed by pride experiences every other person as a rival or a judge. Such a heart can have money, health, and success, and still be miserable, because misery is what those desires produce when they run unchecked.

A heart filled with love, joy, and peace experiences the same circumstances differently. The bills are still there, the body still ages, the people are still difficult, but the inner weather has changed. This is not a promise of an easy life. It promises a different way of being inside a hard one. And it is a benefit that begins the day it is received, as Susan found. Nobody has to wait until death to collect it.

As a physician, most of what people bring to me are symptoms, and most symptoms have a root. The crime and cruelty that troubled Susan in her unbelieving years are symptoms. The root is a heart that wants the wrong things, or wants the right things too weakly. You can treat symptoms forever. Only changing the root changes the patient.

Choosing good in a complex life

None of this means that a converted heart is handed a rulebook. Life is complicated. The situations we face at work, in families, in this Fellowship, rarely come with a verse attached. What the changed heart provides is not a map but a compass. When love is the governing desire, the thousand small decisions of a day lean toward good without deliberation, and the hard decisions are approached from the right direction. Character precedes choice. This is what it means to be led in paths of righteousness: not to be told each step, but to have become the kind of person who wants to walk that way.

The honesty of Susan’s challenge

I want to close by defending Susan’s challenge. She is not asking the unbeliever to accept anything on her say-so. She points to evidence—her own life and the lives of the people whose testimonies she has gathered—and invites the skeptic to run the experiment: pray earnestly, read the Bible daily, and seek. That is what she did for four months. The cost is time and the effort of sincerely trying to accept the truth of the Bible’s story about who Christ is. The potential return is a changed heart and a changed life. Any honest person who claims to want the world to be better ought to at least be willing to test the one remedy that so many witnesses report has worked.

Questions for our discussion

1. When you think back on your own conversion, was the change in your heart something you expected, or something that surprised you as it did Susan?
2. Where in your life does the old engine of approach and avoidance still run the show, and what has it looked like when the Spirit’s governing desire took over instead?
3. If a skeptic in your life accepted Susan’s challenge and asked you how to begin, what would you tell them?
4. How do we, as a Fellowship, make the changed heart visible, so that the “unloving behavior” Susan mentions is not what people see when they look at us?

Real but Not True

Reflections on Rosaria Butterfield’s Testimony

By Thomas – 9/6/2026

This is the third of the three testimonies Susan attached to her essay. Rosaria was not a lost soul looking for meaning. She was a tenured professor, a feminist and LGBTQ activist who spoke at pride rallies, testified before the New York legislature, and, by her own account, taught thousands of students to hate the Bible. She opened the Bible as an atheist, and only in order to write a book explaining why Christians would not leave people like her alone. If a changed heart can happen there, it can happen anywhere. What follows are five things I think her story adds to Susan’s challenge.

1. The Word of God works on a hostile reader

Rosaria did not pray for help. She read the Bible as a cultural document, expecting misogyny and superstition, and instead she found it making claims on her. Her first reaction was outrage: who has the right to say that I must repent? She notes, rightly, that if the Bible were merely a human book, that outrage would be justified. But she kept reading, and the words began to work on her in spite of her intentions. This is the claim of Hebrews 4:12, the passage that she says undid her: the Word of God is living, and it discerns “the thoughts and intents of the heart.” The Bible knew her better than she knew herself. She could not tolerate that intimacy as an enemy; she could only tolerate it by going all the way across to the Jesus who offers rest. Susan’s challenge to the skeptic was to read the Bible earnestly. Rosaria’s story shows that even a skeptic who reads it in hostility is not safe from it.

2. Non-transactional love

The human instrument in Rosaria’s conversion was a pastor named Ken Smith and his wife Floy. Ken did not argue her into the Kingdom. He and Floy took her to dinner week after week for years. When she quit the project and tried to hand back the Bibles, Ken kept showing up at her door with a book or fresh bread. Rosaria says what made this powerful was the contrast with the rest of her life, where relationships were transactional. The Smiths wanted nothing from her. They loved her as an enemy of God because God had told them to, and they did not consider God finished with her until she became His friend.

This is the point in our first essay made flesh: love is received before it can be given. Rosaria did not first decide to love God. She was loved, persistently and without conditions, by two Christians who were the nearest visible form of God’s love she could see. Susan’s essay warned that many people turn away from Christ because of the unloving behavior of those who claim Him. Ken and Floy are the other side of that coin.

3. Real but not true

The crux of Rosaria’s struggle was the one every person with a deeply held identity faces: how do you repent of a sin that is who you are? She had built her whole self on her sexuality, and the Bible was telling her to repent of it. She saw the trap precisely: when your identity is the sin, you become the sacrificial lamb, and there is no room for Jesus to be the lamb instead.

Ken’s answer was simple and, I think, profound: perhaps it is a false identity. It is real; your girlfriend can confirm that. But is it true? He took her to Romans 7, where Paul says, “Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me” (Romans 7:17). The lesbianism was real, but it was not her. It was sin dwelling in her, and Jesus was waiting on the other side of it. This is the same distinction I tried to draw in my last essay between the animal engine we are born with and the person God made us to be. Our desires are real. They are not the last word on who we are.

Whatever a person’s particular struggle, this distinction is the door out of despair. You cannot hate yourself, because God loves you. You must hate your sin, because Christ died to free you from it. Those two are only compatible if you and your sin are not the same thing.

4. Nobody flipped a switch

Rosaria’s story differs from Susan’s in an important way. Susan was filled with joy, peace, and love within a day. Rosaria says plainly that no one flipped a switch in her, that her old desires did not vanish overnight, and that the Christian life is rugged, “feet on the floor.” Conversion took years of dinners, arguments, and reading before she could say she was a Christian. Repentance came first; sanctification, the growing to be like Jesus, is a lifelong work.

Both testimonies are true, and together they are a more complete picture than either alone. The changed heart is a change in what the heart wants, in its governing desire and its direction. It is not always a change in what the heart feels on any given day. Some are given the joy at once; others are given the desire to walk toward it and must walk. What both women share is that the direction of the will changed, and stayed changed.

5. You must go one way or the other

The moment of decision came when her partner found her praying and reading the Bible, and berated her for it. Rosaria realized she had become a closet Christian in an out gay life, and that she could not stay in the middle of the intersection. Everyone has to go one direction or the other: Jesus, or not Jesus. Jesus wants exclusive rights to His people because He bought them.

This matters because our culture prefers to keep faith as one option among many. Rosaria’s story insists it is not. A faith that asks nothing exclusive of you is not the faith of the Bible. But she also says what makes the exclusivity bearable: it is the one relationship you cannot sabotage. He will never leave you nor forsake you.

Questions for our discussion

1. Rosaria’s conversion depended on a pastor who kept showing up at her door after she told him she was done. Who in your life is the person you have been tempted to write off as finished with God?
2. “Real but not true.” Where have you had to make that distinction in your own life, about a desire, a habit, or an identity?
3. Susan’s heart changed in a day; Rosaria’s changed over years and is still changing. Which pattern is closer to your own, and how do we avoid making either one the required standard for everyone?
4. What does it look like, practically, for this Fellowship to offer the kind of non-transactional love that Ken and Floy offered?

What More Could There Be?

Reflections on Dr. Greg Viehman’s Testimony

By Thomas – 9/6/2026

The second testimony Susan attached demonstrates the difference between believing the Gospel and being changed by it, because he did the first without the second for a while, and knew exactly what each felt like. If Rosaria’s testimony shows the changed heart from its hardest starting point, Greg’s shows it from its most respectable one: a successful, intelligent man who had every reason to think he was fine.

The engine running at full throttle

Greg describes his life before Christ as a sequence of acquisitions. A new car; when that did not do it, clothes; then a trip; then hobbies, triathlons, running, wine. Each was supposed to produce the fulfillment his career had promised and not delivered. Underneath was sadness and emptiness, mixed with anger that he could not explain, and embarrassment that kept him from telling anyone. So he took it out on others. His wife Ruth’s description is blunt: good, but a short fuse, arrogant, always right, always number one.

This is the approach-and-avoidance drive of our first essay running exactly as designed, in a man who had won every race it set him. The lesson is worth pausing on. The natural heart does not become satisfied by succeeding; it becomes more frantic, because every success proves that the next one will not work either. Greg had run the experiment for a lifetime and had the result.

Belief without change

Greg opened the Bible for the same reason Rosaria did: to use it against Christians. His neighbors had, he thought, snubbed his family, and he intended to prove they were not practicing what they preached. What stopped him was the discovery that Jesus claimed to be God in the flesh. Greg saw immediately that this was either the most important event in history or a fairy tale, and as a scientist he could not leave that question open. He spent weeks on the resurrection, going through every alternative, and found that none of them held together. The swoon theory failed; even the Journal of the American Medical Association had concluded that Jesus died. The stolen body and hallucination theories could not account for the guards, the empty tomb, or the disciples’ transformed lives. What finished it for him was Paul, a Jew killing Christians with nothing to gain, who became the greatest evangelist in history. There was only one explanation: he saw the risen Lord. Greg concluded that he had to believe it.

Having accepted that Christ rose, Greg summarized what he now thought Christianity was: it really happened, and if you believe, go to church, and try to do the right thing, then when you die you go to heaven. And he asked, “What more could there be?”

That is the transactional Gospel, stated by a man who had arrived at it by honest reasoning. He had the doctrine correct. He had the historical evidence in order. And nothing in him had changed. He was still angry, still frustrated, still unable to fix what he knew was wrong with himself. Belief, by itself, had left him untouched.

The visitor

What broke the deadlock was not another argument. A walk-in patient looked him in the eye and asked whether he had accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. Greg nearly passed out and bolted from the room. Days later, alone with the things in his life he wanted to change and had no power to change, he broke down, asked God’s forgiveness, repented, and asked to be made new.

When he went looking for the patient afterward, the handwritten name was gone from the schedule, and there was no record that he had ever been in the office. Ruth had been praying for years and had just told God she gave up, and He would have to do something. Hebrews 13:2 says some have “entertained angels unawares.” Whatever the visitor was, he asked the one question that Greg’s research had not, and it was the question that mattered.

The physician checks his medicine cabinet

The next morning Greg woke up peaceful. No frustration, no anger, content for no reason. He expected it to wear off, and it did not. Then he did something: he reasoned that if he felt completely different, something in his biochemistry must have changed, so he checked whether his antihistamine had somehow been switched for a tranquilizer. It had not.

Greg wouldn’t believe a feeling; he’d rule out the mundane explanations first. When he had ruled them out, he went to the Bible for the remaining one and found it in Romans 6: the old man dies when the Spirit comes in, cross-referenced to Galatians 5:22, the fruit of the Spirit. His reaction was the same as Susan’s: that is the list; that is how I feel. Three witnesses, Susan, Greg, and Rosaria, converged independently on the same passage to explain what had happened to them.

Whatever the mechanism, a change in a man’s baseline emotional state that arrives overnight and persists for decades is a real event in a real body. It is not a metaphor. Greg is right that something changed in him, and it is entirely reasonable to want to know what. The Bible’s answer is that a Person took up residence.

The proof is the changed life

Ruth says she feels married to a different man, and that her old husband is no longer around. He was suddenly concerned about other people, which shocked her. That is the fruit of the Spirit observed from the outside.

Greg himself says that while he has no doubt the resurrection is true, the real proof is his changed life, and he offers the same challenge Susan does: call on Christ and put Him to the test. He will not only forgive your sins; He will change you now, so that you know it is true. Greg summarizes the difference between Christianity and everything else as this: every other religion is man seeking God; Christianity is God seeking man.

Questions for our discussion

1. Greg had the doctrine right and the evidence in order before anything in him changed. Have you known believers, or been one, in that condition? What moved you from believing to being changed?
2. Greg had to reach the point of admitting he could not change himself before he asked God to. Why is that admission so hard for capable people, and what does it look like to help someone reach it?
3. Ruth’s testimony is that she is married to a different man. If our spouses, children, or coworkers were asked whether we have been changed, what would they say?
4. Greg checked his medicine cabinet before he checked the Bible. What is the right role of that kind of skepticism in a believer, and where does it become a way of refusing what God is doing?

Belief, Confession, and the Changed Heart

Fellowship Discussion Recap – September 6, 2026

The meeting took up Susan’s written testimony and three recorded testimonies she had attached to it: a former gang member, a physician who had been an atheist, and a former lesbian activist and professor. The discussion moved from the common structure of those four conversions to questions about the nature of salvation, the existence and place of Satan, what heaven and hell consist of, how eternity might be spent, the authority of scripture relative to other claimed revelation, and how the group should understand the differences among its members’ traditions. This essay collects the points made and the responses given.

1. The common structure of the four testimonies

Thomas opened by summarizing the three recorded testimonies and identifying what he saw as the common thread among all four. In each case, the person first accepted the factual claims of the Gospel as true: that Jesus was born of a woman, was from God, lived without sin, was crucified unjustly, rose from the dead, ascended, and is God. The change of heart came after that acceptance, not before it and not as a condition of it.

Susan had described this sequence in the sharpest form. After four months of daily prayer and Bible reading, she reached an intellectual conviction that the claims were true. She expected nothing further from that conviction. The following day she found herself filled with joy, peace, and love for God, and she later found in Galatians 5:22-23 the description of what had happened to her. The physician’s account followed the same pattern: weeks of examining the evidence for the resurrection, a conclusion that it must have happened, and a period in which he believed the doctrine but remained unchanged, until he asked God to change him and woke the next morning at peace. The former activist’s account differed in that her transformation was gradual, and she reported that her old desires did not vanish; Susan had included her account for exactly that reason, so that the presentation would not suggest that conversion always removes the struggle.

Thomas connected this pattern to Romans 10:9: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” He said he had struggled with what it could mean to be saved by believing a fact, and that the four testimonies served as a case study for answering the question. The verse names two elements: belief in the resurrection and confession of Jesus as Lord. Susan confirmed that both were present in her experience: she had prayed alone, repented, and confessed her belief in Christ, and was baptized within the following year. She agreed to add that detail to the written version. Thomas concluded that the testimonies establish what salvation requires and what can be expected from it. Belief in the fact of the resurrection and confession of Christ as Lord constitute salvation; sanctification, the learning to live it, follows and may involve continuing work.

Susan later qualified the contrast between overnight and gradual change. In her experience, and in the testimonies she has listened to, some things change immediately, and others require continued effort. She suggested that the former activist, who emphasized the ongoing struggle, almost certainly also experienced immediate changes she did not describe. The common element across both patterns is that the person now wants to please God. She compared it to being loved by a grandparent: one does not have to try to love such a person back, and one does not want to disrespect them. Thomas added that the difficulty of staying on the path in this life may reflect how easily Satan reaches the heart in a world that is, in some sense, his kingdom, and Susan agreed that distraction from the path continues after salvation and must be met with prayer.

2. Michael’s questions

Michael, who does not identify as a Christian, takes notes when others talk and raises several questions in sequence.

Literal belief and the Levitical law. Michael observed that claiming the Bible is real is one thing and claiming the whole of it is literally real is another; if the latter, where is the goat’s blood, and why does no one perform the rituals of Leviticus? Susan answered that the sacrificial system belonged to the first covenant and foreshadowed what was to come. Christ, being without sin and killed unjustly, deserved to live, and God raised him from the dead; Satan overstepped his bounds by inspiring the death of a just man, and Christ thereby gained authority over him. The Father accepts Christ’s sacrifice in place of the death each person deserves, and once a person trusts in Christ and makes him Lord, Christ shepherds him in paths of righteousness, as Psalm 23 describes.

Relativism and the question of truth. Michael noted that the former activist’s original position, that what is real for a person is real for that person, resembles the way a Mormon and a Lutheran might each concede the other’s beliefs are “real for them.” He also observed, without criticism, that Thomas’s own life had passed through several complete transformations, each believed at the time, and asked how one knows which was true. Thomas accepted that this is the central question and that it is not trivial. He returned to it later in the meeting in the context of scriptural authority.

Satan and eternal existence. Michael asked whether Satan lives forever and whether he can die. Susan distinguished between eternal existence and eternal life. Scripture defines eternal life as relationship: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Satan exists but is cut off; Jesus says Satan has no part in him, so he is without love and without light. The group agreed that Satan lives forever, as do all persons, and that the difference between the saved and the lost is not duration of existence but fellowship with the Father and the Son.

How Satan can be outside a God who is everything. Michael pressed Thomas’s stated view that all things are in God: if Satan is cut off from God, then either God is not everything or there is something beyond everything. Susan said she had come to think Thomas’s view is supported by many verses but did not have an answer for how Satan fits, and offered only the image of a bubble within God that his light does not reach. Thomas proposed a different resolution using the model the group has developed in earlier discussions. The Father created the Son; the Son created all things (John 1:3: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made”); the Father relates to the Son, who is perfect, and the Son’s creation contains the evil that the Father does not embrace, in the way one sees a person’s outward conduct without seeing his inner thoughts. On that model, when Satan rebelled and was cast out, the only place to cast him was within the Son’s creation, under the Son’s authority. Susan agreed, noting that the Father placed Jesus in authority over everything in heaven and earth, which would include Satan. Thomas added that the temptation in the wilderness supports this: Satan offered Christ the kingdoms of the world, which he could not have offered unless the authority had been given to him, and Christ declined the offer rather than denying Satan’s right to make it. No bubble outside God is required; Satan is simply under Christ’s authority.

Who is with Satan, and what it is like. Michael asked whether other persons live forever with Satan or whether he is alone. Thomas answered that those who choose not to be in relationship with God through Christ are with Satan; God has a particular nature, and those who have not been purified do not fit into that fellowship. Michael then asked what either state is actually like, since the Hollywood images of harps and clouds are not credible, and whether hell is simply a bad feeling that persists. Susan offered an illustration she had used in teaching children: two doors, behind one of which people love one another, are kind, and are in good relationship, and behind the other of which are those who do harm, cannot be trusted, and have no love among them. Everyone, asked which they would choose, chooses the first. Heaven is a place with no death or sickness and no one purposely doing harm to another, though there may still be occasions for apology. She did not claim to know what its occupations are, only that they will be good and more satisfying than the harp image suggests.

A counter-account of happiness and darkness. Michael responded at length. He said he had lived among communities with and without trust and kindness and that people adapt to their absence. He does not trust himself, since he breaks his own rules constantly, and has learned to accept that. His own happiness does not depend on anything physical; he is grateful every day he can breathe, and reaches an exultant state most waking hours even in severe pain. He compared death to a raindrop landing in the ocean, still existing but part of something larger. Asked where his constant good state comes from, he had once answered, from a darkness far deeper than the light could know: a daily awareness that tens of thousands die of starvation, and of other horrors, keeps him from walking through life oblivious, and the darkness itself gives capacities the light alone cannot. A woman raped by her father now runs a rape crisis center and can meet victims with an understanding a person who had lived only in the light could not offer. He draws on his own darkness to reach people who need to change, since telling them they are simply wrong wins nothing. He cited the saying that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints, and said he lives by much of the Bible’s teaching.

Susan replied on two points. First, on the use of suffering, she cited Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose,” and the passage in 2 Corinthians 1 in which those who have been comforted by God comfort others with the same comfort. Second, on Michael’s own state, she cited the description of Christ as the true light “which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). His concern for people getting along and loving one another, and his distress at Christians who fight one another, is that light in him, and he is obeying it. She suggested this may be why it is hard for him to distinguish believing in Christ from obeying Christ: he already has much of what Christ gives. But more is available: fuller guidance, use, and filling with joy, peace, and love, which comes with making Christ Lord. She asked him to pray daily, asking God to teach him what is true, and to read the Bible daily with that invitation. He thanked her for that request as he left.

3. Observations after Michael left

Armond offered that life with Christ and life without it seem to be a matter of intention. Being intentional allows one to experience heaven on earth and the full satisfaction of bliss, while acting without intention or in ungodly ways produces a persistent sense that something is missing. Susan agreed and added a qualification she wished she had made to Michael before he left: even a person following the light Christ has given him will still have that empty place until he is in relationship with the Father, and that relationship is received only through Christ.

Armond offered an analogy between animal and plant life. Animals live by predation, so that in that economy someone always loses; plants grow daily in two directions, thriving without killing what is around them. Susan and Charlie noted that invasive plant species also exist, and they do their killing in slow motion. The analogy was left as a picture of the difference between a life governed by appetite and one governed by growth.

Susan remarked that she had spent most of the week writing a conventional essay and discarded it, writing the testimony fresh on the day she sent it, because she judged that a story touches the heart in a way an essay does not. Thomas agreed: facts tell, stories sell, and the question of how a heart is won is exactly the question the testimony addressed.

4. Leonard’s perspective

Leonard, whose background is in a restorationist movement descended from Joseph Smith and who now belongs to a covenant Christian group associated with a living teacher, offered his perspective on several of the questions raised.

What is done in eternity. Leonard answered Michael’s earlier question directly: we do what God does. God’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, and the redeemed will share in that work, perhaps at different levels, since there are many mansions. “Eternal” is a proper name for God in scripture, so eternal life is a God-like life, and the joy and fullness of it consist in doing what God does under his purview, as Christ did everything the Father commanded.

Choice. Leonard said the discussion had circled something Susan had named directly: choice. Cain chose, and what he chose was to follow Satan’s temptation to kill his brother and take what was his. Agency exists so that one can choose; opposition exists in all things for the same reason. On being asked whether the detail about Cain taking Abel’s possessions comes from the Bible or from his tradition’s scripture, he said it comes from his own scripture, that others need not believe it, and that Susan had also quoted two different Bibles. Thomas said he was only asking about the source, and Leonard replied that anyone is free to scrutinize what he says against the Bible.

Heaven and hell. Heaven is being in the presence of God; hell is being cut off from it. In a sense, all of us now live in hell, having been cut off from the Father’s presence by the transgression of Adam, though each person is accountable for his own sins rather than Adam’s. Thomas and Charlie responded that Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21) and that believers are temples of the living God, so one can be in the presence of God now; Susan added that scripture also calls Satan the prince of this world, so that we are in his playground and yet can carry a relationship with the Father within us. Leonard accepted that we can experience heaven in this life through the influence of the Father and the Son, and that the spirit within us can become holy so that we are one with Christ, but maintained that we are not in the Father’s actual presence, which is what heaven is. The purpose of the separation is a test: whether we will choose to be with God, exercise faith, and do what he commands. God cannot tolerate sin, so he has provided his Son as the way back, whose work is to forgive sins and make us holy.

Leonard offered word studies on the adversary. Lucifer means light-bearer and was a high being who chose to place himself above the Father and demanded his glory; a third of the host of heaven followed him and was cast out to this realm. Satan is a title rather than a name, meaning accuser, which is why Christ could call Peter Satan when Peter opposed his going to Jerusalem. Damned means dammed, stopped like a river; those who chose that course are stopped and miserable forever, and wish all others to be as miserable as themselves. Everything outside the presence of God- all deception, darkness, and violence- is hell, and one can be in it in this life as well as after.

How large is Christ’s tent? Leonard said the first question that came to mind when he read the testimony was how large Christ’s tent is, and whether he, or anyone who believes as he does, fits under it. He described his group’s position: it accepts all faiths, its members remain in their own congregations, it has no institution, and does not require anyone to follow its teacher, who has said that a fool is one who follows him. It offers the doctrine of Christ, which it defines as faith, repentance, baptism, and the baptism of fire in the Holy Ghost. The group maintains its own scriptures because it is trying to recover what its predecessors lost when they rejected and killed the prophets and usurped their authority.

Susan answered the tent question. When a person believes in Christ, Christ covers him, and the Father’s blessings reach him through Christ. On that basis, one can be in the presence of God now, here, though not in person, and salvation, if defined as relationship with the Father, is available now rather than deferred to judgment day. She said the belief that salvation cannot happen now was one she had held as a Mormon and found restrictive. If Leonard believes that he is covered by Christ and in relationship with the Father now, then he is in the tent. Leonard said that the teaching that salvation is deferred is what his group calls unbelief, believing something that is not true, and that it contradicts the founder’s own teaching; he reported that the current president of the mainstream church had recently called the second comforter a tool of the devil.

Leonard then added to Susan’s account. Confession of belief is the first step, and salvation is a gift given when one awakes and turns to Christ. But one who believes Christ will believe his words and commandments, and the next step is baptism, which Christ himself underwent, though he did not need it, as a sign to his followers of the burial and rising that were to come. He noted the Greek of the voice at the baptism, “this day have I begotten thee,” softened in the King James rendering. After baptism there remains the matter of receiving from Christ the wedding garment that covers sin, so that the Father can be part of one’s life. Beyond that, he said, more has been revealed, and he loves and cannot deny it.

Susan responded that her testimony had not included what follows confession and probably should have, since it is a large matter; she named it sanctification. Leonard named it repentance, and observed that all three recorded converts had repented. The two agreed that repentance and sanctification go together: one goes on as a new, repented person, and Christ continually calls one to recognize further things to repent of and change. Leonard’s closing question was whether one is willing: whether the heart is changed enough to do everything Christ asks. Most people, he said, are content to stop earlier, and at least they have done that much.

The yoke. The group returned to the passage Susan had used, Matthew 11:29-30. Leonard’s reading was that the believer is on one side of the yoke and the Lord on the other, and the Lord takes all the weight, which is why the yoke is easy and the burden light. Susan agreed, adding that we still do some things, but he sustains us; what he asks is that we follow him.

Fear. Leonard remarked that everyone is afraid, including Christians, unless they give that fear over to the Lord, who is not here to condemn but to bless and lift up. Charlie objected that he was not afraid; Leonard insisted he was. Armond offered that the fear is not of disobedience or wrong choices but of death, and specifically of killing the version of oneself that one has known for so long. Leonard accepted this and added that if one trusts Christ, death can be sweet, since the old man can be buried and washed and come out clean. Thomas added that Christ promised to overcome the last enemy, death, and that this life might itself be what heaven is, lacking only the full presence of God; Leonard said he hoped not, and that joy is available in this life but not its fullness.

5. The authority of scripture and other revelation

Susan asked what Leonard would share if he were presenting the Gospel to someone who did not know it, and whether he would include the additional knowledge his group holds. Charlie, formerly a missionary in the mainstream church, described what he had taught: the gospel defined as faith, repentance, baptism by immersion, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, but always tied to the restoration, meaning the founder’s vision, the Book of Mormon, and the great apostasy, and noted that some four hundred groups have descended from the founder, all restorationist, which he finds confusing.

Thomas lays out his position on this material. The central question is whether the core claims are true: that Jesus died for sins, rose, lived sinlessly, was God and man, and that his death and resurrection accomplished something eternally significant. Discussions of heaven, of where Satan is, and the like serve to make that center understandable, and the restorationist tradition is, in its most benign form, another way of making the Gospel acceptable. His concern is with what is added. Much of that tradition’s sanctification consists of service and doing, attached to an authority who has heard from God and says what must and must not be done. He compared this to the Eastern path of devotion to a teacher who has seen God. The liberty of Christ, as Susan’s testimony displayed it, requires belief in a small set of claims and confession; the additional prophets, covenants, and rituals add to what must be done and can become a yoke placed on a person by other people and traditions, and he suggested this pattern has the look of a lighter form of the adversary’s religion. He acknowledged that Leonard would say his teacher demands nothing and only gives more light, and that he himself cannot judge whether any burden has been placed. He recalled Paul on circumcision: if one must be circumcised to have Christ, Christ profits nothing, since one has bound oneself to the whole law (Galatians 5:2-3).

On the epistemic question, he said he has no way to know whether other claimed revelations are true. The Bible is as close as one can get to the original source, the apostles who were there and recorded what they saw; that is the level of authority he gives it and nothing else. Someone who reports a vision or an angel might be reporting the truth or be Satan appearing as an angel of light to deceive; he cannot say it did not happen, since he was not there, and he can’t judge the spirit without confronting it directly. His rule is to put the Bible first and everything else second. If a claimed revelation contradicts the Bible, he goes with the Bible. If it does not, he cannot say it is false, but he treats it as secondary literature: on the bookshelf, not on the altar. He reads Shakespeare and gets something from it; he puts the Book of Mormon in the same category. He has also drawn from mystical literature of other traditions, which gives him a glimpse of a world beyond this one and strengthens his faith that such a world exists, without his following those traditions. Anything that moves him toward faith in the transcendent is welcome on that footing. Salvation, he said, has to be simple; if it required a degree from a Bible institute, something would be wrong with it. The core package Susan described is sufficient. Further study of the prophets, the law, or the proverbs can help one believe and live better, but it is not part of the minimum.

Charlie added, in Leonard’s defense, that a person raised in that tradition cannot easily separate what came from the Bible from what came from the Book of Mormon; he and his wife still ask each other which source a given idea is from. He does not believe the Book of Mormon is historical and thinks the founder or someone near him composed it, but he finds much truth in it and objects to a few specific errors. Thomas took those errors as the indicator that the book is secondary rather than primary literature: the parts identified as wrong are excluded from the canon, and the rest, being elaboration of events no one present witnessed, is accepted only on someone else’s authority.

Susan raised the test the Bible itself gives: when a messenger claims to speak for God, the hearer is to apply the tests Scripture provides, because accepting something untrue plants a kernel of deception in the heart. She then noticed a difficulty with her own advice: little is known about the authors of many biblical books, so it is not clear how to apply the messenger test to them. She left the difficulty unresolved. Thomas said this returns to the question Charlie has repeatedly asked: what truth is and how it is determined when one did not witness it, and that the question is not trivial.

6. Depth perception

Susan offered an illustration for the problem of conflicting interpretations. Charlie had been treated for a visual condition in which, because his eyes were not aligned, his brain suppressed the input from one eye without his knowing it. He saw with both eyes open but received only one image and had no depth perception. Vision therapy briefly broke the suppression, allowing both eyes to register, and exercises then worked on alignment. She applies this to Bible reading. Many passages appear to contradict one another, and reconciling them takes real work. What people tend to do instead is grasp the verses they feel deeply about and suppress, without realizing it, the verses that don’t fit, so they cannot see them at all. If one looks at both sets and asks God what is true, she believes he can give depth perception, so that verses which seemed to contradict can both be seen as true under some condition. She has not reconciled every passage but has reconciled some in this way, and regards it as a process that may last a lifetime.

7. Closing

Susan’s closing prayer asked that everyone present continue to have something to contribute, and that the two participants for whom she had written the testimony be drawn to seek God deeply. Thomas noted that having a member other than himself write the essay had worked well and that the load should be shared. Charlie was asked to propose a topic for the following week, and Susan was asked to write, at a later date, an account of her reading of the patterns among Ephraim and Manasseh, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and Cain and Abel, which Thomas has not encountered elsewhere and which fits his understanding that God speaks in metaphors, case studies, and shadows.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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