Theology and Reason are Dead! Trust Me.

What this is about

First, let us not answer a weak version of what he is saying, because the weak version is not what he means.

He is not saying he dislikes reading. He is saying something about where authority lives. You have a book about a person; the book is not the person, and the person is alive. If the living Christ says something this morning and a dead man’s paragraph says otherwise, why would you prefer the paragraph? And he has a hard text on his side. The people in the Gospels who knew the Scriptures best are the ones who do not recognise Jesus when he is standing in front of them. He says it to their faces: you search the Scriptures, and you will not come to me.

That is a serious argument, and this page grants a good deal of it before it disagrees with anything.

There is also a third view, which this page rejects at the start: that saying the creed accurately is the whole of religion. It is not, the Bible says it is not, and the old churches have said so as loudly as anyone. On that, the pastor is right and nobody serious disagrees with him.

The short answer

What does the old church actually deny?

Ten statements. For each, decide whether the historic church — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant alike — agrees with it or denies it. Commit before you are told. Most people find the list of things actually denied is much shorter than they expected.

0 of 10 answered.

“Jesus told me” — how would you know?

Grant the experience completely. This page has no way of assessing anyone’s inner life and does not try. Ask a different question, one that has nothing to do with whether it happened: how is the speaker identified?

The sentence contains a name, and in a sentence like that the name is not a label. It is a bundle of content. It says the voice belongs to one particular person — not another spirit, not a strong feeling, not an impressive stranger. And every scrap of what makes that person identifiable came from somewhere.

It came in four parts, and all four arrived in the same crate. Which books are Scripture — no book of the New Testament contains a list of the others, and the question took three centuries to settle. The words themselves — copied by hand in monasteries for fifteen hundred years before printing. The English — made by scholars doing exactly the reasoning he calls dead. And the account of who this person is — born of Mary, crucified, raised, one person, truly God and truly man. “Jesus” was a common name in the first century. That account is what makes it pick somebody out.

Which leaves something narrower than it first looks, and much harder to get round. He is free to say the church got things wrong. He is not free to say it got things so wrong that it could be thrown out wholesale — because the thing being thrown out is the van that delivered the name in his own sentence.

Where did that come from?

Seven steps, following one sentence — “Jesus told me to do this” — back to the equipment needed to say it. Commit to an answer at each step before the page tells you anything.

This has happened before, and we know how it goes

The position is not new, and it is not an escape from tradition. It is a tradition, with a documented history. Four episodes, all of them closed records, none of them compared to anybody living.

Phrygia, about 170. A man called Montanus and two prophetesses announced a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. The church’s objection is not what people assume: nobody said prophecy had ceased. The complaint was about the manner of the speech and the refusal to let anyone weigh it. One writer of the time argued simply that a prophet ought not to speak in a frenzy, because nobody can assess a frenzy.

Wittenberg, December 1521. Three men arrived from Zwickau claiming direct revelation rather than Scripture as their authority. Luther came out of hiding to preach against them. His word for that kind of man was Schwärmer — swarmers, as bees swarm.

Prague, November 1521. Their most serious advocate, Thomas Müntzer, put the case better than almost anyone has since: a man who does not hear the living word from the mouth of God, he wrote, “is nothing more than a dead thing”. And, at the end of the same document: Thomas Müntzer wishes to pray to no dumb God but to a speaking God. If the argument on this page cannot survive that version, it is not worth making.

Luther’s answer was not that God is silent. It was two things, and both are tests rather than claims about his own rank. First, order: God comes to us outwardly first, through the preached word and the sacraments, and inwardly after. Second — and this is the one that matters here — a true spirit would submit to being tested beforehand, as Christ did. His specific complaint was procedural: the man would not answer questions from two or three people in a room.

Münster, 1534–35. Read this one carefully, because it is not representative and should never be used as a smear. Mainstream Anabaptists repudiated it, and the tradition that came from them is pacifist. But it is the clearest case of what the principle permits when nothing outside can correct it. Men claiming visions took a city. One prophesied, rode out, and was killed. His successor claimed visions of his own, crowned himself, and made polygamy compulsory. The city fell after a year-long siege; about three thousand people died. The point is not that private revelation leads there. It is that at every step, the only thing that could have stopped it was a standard outside the man doing it — and that was the first thing to go.

Kentucky, 1804. The most sympathetic case on the list. Six ministers dissolved their own presbytery, setting aside every creed, taking no name but Christian and no standard but the Bible. They were sincere and serious people with a real grievance. Within seven years, two of the six had joined the Shakers — a body organised around one woman’s revelations — and two had publicly recanted and gone back to the Presbyterian church. One held the line. A century later the movement founded to end division had itself divided; by 1968 there were three bodies where there had been one.

Who said this?

Six quotations, everyone long dead. Some are from men claiming a fresh word from God; some are from men insisting that such claims be tested. Several sound far more modern than they are.

The strongest case against this page

Stated properly, and conceded before it is answered. Two of these, in my view, cannot be answered and this page does not try.

• Dead religion is real and the Bible condemns it. “Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.” That is the risen Christ writing to a working church. Conceded entirely.
• Being right about the doctrine is not the same as knowing God. The men in John 5 were not careless readers. They were careful ones, and the care is what they hid behind. Conceded entirely.
• God does speak directly in the New Testament. Paul says his gospel came by revelation and was not taught to him. John writes of an anointing that teaches. Acts is structured by direct guidance. Any argument implying God went quiet has to explain all that away, and this page does not attempt it.
• The church has genuinely erred, sometimes disgracefully. Corruption, long silences in the face of evil, the persecution of people later vindicated. Suspicion of inherited religious authority is not paranoia; it has evidence behind it.
• Renewal has repeatedly come from the edges. Monastic reform, the Reformation, the Wesleys, the missionary movement. The vitality arrived from outside and the centre resisted it.

Here is what all of that establishes: that the church needs correcting. It does not establish that the church’s account of who Christ is should be thrown away — none of those five points was ever offered as an argument against it by the people who made them. And it does not establish that a claimed word needs no checking. Paul, who says his gospel came by revelation, went up to Jerusalem and laid it before the others. John, who wrote about the anointing that teaches, wrote “try the spirits” in the same short letter.

How would you know it was him?

The creeds are not a rival to that voice. They are the church’s long answer to the question of how we would know it was him — written by people who believed he was alive and speaking, in reply to other people who said the same, and who were right that he was alive and wrong about what he had said.

Check it yourself

Five things, all free, none of them long. If you do only one, do the last.

1. 1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book III, chapter 2. Ten minutes, free online. Written about the year 180. Read what his opponents said when he quoted Scripture at them, and check the date.
2. 2. 1 John 4 verses 1 to 6; 1 Corinthians 14 verses 26 to 33; Galatians 1 verses 6 to 12; Acts 17 verses 10 to 12; Deuteronomy 13 verses 1 to 5. Twenty minutes. Ask of each one: who does the testing, and against what.
3. 3. Thomas Müntzer’s Prague Manifesto (1521). Ten minutes, free in English. Read the other side in its own words, at its strongest, before you decide what you think of it.
4. 4. The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804), and then what became of the six men who signed it. Twenty minutes, free. The document is a page long. The sequel is the part worth knowing.
5. 5. One question, asked out loud. Do this one. Ask, privately and politely, as a real question and not as a test: if something taught here from the front were mistaken, what would we use to find that out, and who would be allowed to raise it? Whatever the answer, you will know something this afternoon that you did not know this morning — and you will also have learned what asking cost, which is the other half of the finding.

No living person is named as an example of anything argued against on this page, and no actual church, ministry or teacher is identified or assessed. Every historical figure named is deceased and quoted from a published source; every movement named is historical and its record closed. Every example of a pastor, a sermon or a conversation is made up by this page and labelled that way. The full dossier gives every citation, states what would prove the argument wrong, and publishes the prompt that produced it.