About the Spider

Why “the Spider”?

The name was not my idea. From one modern pulpit, a preacher has prayed again and again for God to remove “the spider, and not just the cobwebs.” In his picture the cobwebs are disagreement, and the spider is the person who disagrees: the church member who asks how the sacraments became mere symbols, whether the early church baptized infants, or why a church that calls itself Protestant mocks Luther. He asked God for the “instant death” of such people.

I am one of those people. So I have taken the name, gladly, and without any bitterness toward the man who gave it. Two dossiers deal with it directly. The first asks whether a pulpit may pray for the death of those who disagree with it. The second asks what Scripture tells a teacher to do instead, and finds the answer is plain: answer the questions.

When James and John wanted fire to fall on those who would not receive Jesus, “he turned, and rebuked them.” A question deserves an answer, not a funeral.

Where I come from

• RaisedIn a creedal church, and baptized as an infant
• FromThe southern part of India
• LivingMost of my adult life in the United States
• TrainedIn engineering, which is where my studies and my work have been

I was raised in a creedal church and baptized as an infant. I grew up in the southern part of India, and I have lived most of my adult life in the United States. For some of those years I attended non-denominational churches.

At first I did not understand the differences between those churches and the one I grew up in, and I certainly did not understand the effect those differences have on a person’s life: on how he thinks of his baptism, of the Lord’s Supper, of his own assurance, and of the man in the pulpit. They seemed like matters of style. They are not.

So, slowly, I started digging. I read about the Reformation and about the Reformers themselves, in their own words, and then about what came before them and after them. I kept at it, on and off, for more than a decade.

What I learnt shocked me

What I found was not what I had assumed. Much of what I had been taught as plain, ancient, biblical Christianity turned out to be recent, and much of what I had been taught to dismiss as “dead tradition” turned out to be what the Church had confessed, almost everywhere, for fifteen hundred years. The Reformers I had heard quoted held views on baptism and the Supper that the churches quoting them now reject.

Above all, I came to see that the changes had quietly moved the centre of the message, from Christ to “me.”

From what God has done in Christ, given to me in his Word and sacraments, to what I must feel, decide, prove and keep up. And I saw how these subtle changes can be used to manipulate people: to make them anxious about their standing, dependent on one man’s word, afraid to ask questions, and quick to give without asking where the money goes. These dossiers are a good place to see what I mean:

I am not a theologian

I am not a theologian, or even remotely close to one. My studies and my work are in engineering. That is exactly why this site is built the way it is. An engineer does not ask you to trust his opinion; he shows you the drawings, the numbers and the test results, so that you can check the work yourself.

This site comes out of a passion to pass on what I learnt without making any claims of my own. The claims belong to the sources: the Scriptures, the early Christian writers, the creeds, the Reformers and the churches’ own documents, each quoted and dated so you can look it up. Artificial intelligence is what makes that possible for someone like me. It can gather and organise a great deal of primary material quickly, and so that nothing is hidden, the prompt behind every page is published on the page for you to read, change and run yourself.

And it is not my work alone. Others help, read drafts, catch mistakes and suggest topics, and many of the dossiers began as their questions. If you find an error, especially in a citation, please say so. It will be fixed.