(This is going to be a series I periodically update, within this post. I will critique common blunders within Christian circles. Each entry will be headed with a quote in italics. The most recent entry will be at the top, in reverse chronological order. Note that this is not for the faint of heart.)

“Only Jesus can help you.”


It’s as if when we’re deluded, we never know it, such that our feeling of truth for delusions is as confident (equally confident and confident in kind) for real insights. All we can do is familiarize ourselves with our delusions and errors. We must go under truth and reality and know our form of experience if we are to lovingly purge ourselves of the destructive tendencies which ravage. The rest is not ours.

To deny the feasibility of an individual to change in this way is to believe that self-reflection is inherently divorced from the rest of the world. To say someone cannot sustain themselves is impractical and not really true. Nothing can take care of itself. We would all die without the water cycle [being clean]. But that fact of interdependence doesn’t mean that the animals don’t go looking for their food, or the plants don’t go growing up to the sun just because they aren’t nuclear power generators in themselves. There’s no utility in the avoiding words relating to acting on your own behalf. There is literally nothing in the universe that is independent of anything else. To be allergic to words like “self-care” or concepts like “meditation” or “effort” is to perpetuate innocent fears over failure and a tyrranical paranoia of a non-existent certitude (if certitude doesn’t exist, then why should you need it?). At the end of the day, it’s just downright discouraging to tell someone that they shouldn’t think of being able to care for themselves. The problem in self-care is in the thinking that the self is removed from the outside world. Reformed protestants make a whole enterprise over maintaining this division. Self-care is possible in the reality that even the self by itself is with otherness. Of course, this can get grueling, and others often can help us in ways we can’t help ourselves. But our having weaknesses doesn’t make us incapable of helping ourselves.

It’s ridiculous (I’m mostly speaking to Reformed Protestants now) to jam into people’s minds that they need to think on the Savior in the moment to do anything good. That’s not how real life happens. That’s not even how the apostle Paul describes it. Paul never says, “Think about Jesus being in control whenever you’re doing anything so that you can feel capable and not scared of messing anything up.” That is a reliance on an idea, and that idea is easily toppled. Erecting that idea every time it falls does not change the fact that it falls down over and over. A true thing does not need to be raised every morning with magic words from a beautiful gold-lined book. To find your root, you have to go beyond relying on ideas to live your life.

Paul asserts that the spiritual renewal of every moment is by grace, not by the presence or absence of human effort. Insofar as grace is grace, it is unnecessary to build or tear down. He treats the question of leaning toward outward effort (works) or inward effort (faith) as being beside the point. That question doesn’t resolve your problems, although it gives Christians plenty to think about in their free time. Paul intended his theology to change your life, not to comprise your life. Paul says, “Pray without ceasing.” The human person finds their center in living in the continuum of all life, all substance in the universe. The love that permeates all things permeates even our spiritually unreflective aspects. There is truth and good in this world, and we just need to [do it]/[look for it].

Our life of spiritual renewal is one of freedom: we can implement different methods to do good things. There is a time to build, and a time to tear down. There is a person who builds, there is a person who tears down. There is a time to think, and a time to act. There is a person who thinks, and a person who acts. There are whole assortments of combinations in between. Life is first and foremost a great freedom. We do not begin our lives in debt, but learn this debt as soon as we come to believe that our mother’s breast is the true nature of the world. We do not have inalienable, God-given rights, not even as per the Constitution. Our life is not necessary. And yet, we have needs and are needed. But there is nothing guaranteeing our existence but the gift of every free moment. Everything is gift. I’m not saying now endebt yourself to the idea of Jesus. That’s debt! Nothing is endebted to nothing. Grace means you’re free.


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“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)


     What many people understand this verse to mean is that Christ and Christianity is the absolutely only way to God, and that God is angry about anything not obsessive-compulsive about Christ. However, to reinterpret this verse with a pluralist lens, i.e. that you don’t have to be a Christian to find God, is rather unscrupulous, unfaithful to the text and to the speaker. It doesn’t take a Christian to read this to say, “You must follow Christ to find God,” and to say so quite clearly. The problem is that the mind of a Christian is not necessarily a Christian mind.

     A proper lens for biblical interpretation relies upon a synergistic multiplicity of hermeneutical methods, and there are pros and cons to every combination of methods. Each denomination has their preferred combination. At the end of the day, we must ask the question, “Is our manner of analysis consistent with and sufficient for producing the behavior of Christ?” In order to answer this faithfully, one must recognize the unintentional bias of the religious elite in their pursuit of truth, the bias that led them to kill Jesus. It is easy to write off Pharisees and Sadducees as some kind of Trumpian trope for brutish pomposity, a class of people to which we ourselves do not belong. Such a narrow caricaturization is itself a Pharisaical act, demonstrating the degree of one’s own Pharisaical myopia. This heaping of burning coals on head, the spiraling regress that ensues from observing this, is necessary to experience to really get down to brass tax about knowing the truth about God. If one does not get the log out of their own eye, they will never, ever be able to get the speck out of their brother’s eye.

    This brings us to the question of why did Jesus die. It is a troubling question for anyone who considers it authentically, Christian or not. Jesus was at least a good man, killed by phonies and the people he tried to serve, heal, and speak truth to. To ask about Jesus’ passion is to wonder on the fate of every prophet and everything unorthodoxed. Jesus died from religious oversimplifications.

    Sweeping generalizations—who is going to heaven and who isn’t, for instance—are by nature sweeping over many details. Yet oversimplification is the default nature of incomplete conceptual understanding. Does this mean all conceptualization is false? No, because concepts got us to the moon. So, does that mean conceptualization is merely a useful tool and should be understood as not more than that? Perhaps. But I would like to assert that accepting the losses that accrue from conceptualization, as is fitting under the pragmatist view on conceptualization, falls short of something better. To hold to pragmatism results in one always questioning and criticizing themselves; it invites the snake to eat its own tail. This kind of mindset leads to a continually tripping over one’s own shoelaces or to the repression of insecurity. In the former, one is limited on the side of the world; in the latter, one is limited on the side of the self. This struggle is not necessary. Nor is it liberating, nor is it pleasant. It is pitiful that so many people succumb their minds to this swamp.

     This brings us to what I believe is the popularly uncrossed threshold of Christian hermeneutics, as well as the invariable critical leap for human reasoning in general. Now if Christ is the image of God and if his sacrifice is the means to end all brokenness, injustice, death, then the entropy produced by pragmatism shows the viewpoint falls short of the Christian ideal, and is contributing in some little way against the Christian ideal. If Christ was resurrected here on earth, not away in some heavenly domain, then an isentropic epistemology is not restricted to a post-mortem experience in heaven. Rather, to not step beyond skeptical pragmatism—which is the wisest option for anyone who really grapples with truth and lacks the means to transcend it—is to prevent the rational mind from finding freedom in a greater life by wallowing in its inherent dismality. Pragmatism is the purgatory of reasoning.

     All this Christian doctrine play is vision-painting and is not necessary to appreciate what I am about to say. Conceptualization is necessarily assertoric of reality, but it is not necessary to ascribe conceptualization as the complete cognitive experience. What this means is that it is possible to think in terms of sweeping generalizations and without using them dogmatically. It is possible to behave with the inevitable dogmatism of reasoning in parallel with the open-heartedness of love. In this way, the dogmatism of conceptualization is not the absolute holder of reality, and one who thinks so is no longer dogmatic at all. Such a frame is an isentropic epistemology.

     What this means for John 14:6 is that the absolute implied is not to be understood through a unilateral absolutism, lest one produce more destruction in the world through its simplification. And yet the statement is still assertoric of reality. See, the problem with what the Pharisees and Sadducees did to Jesus is that they fled from their epistemic insecurities: the Pharisees superstitiously turned back to dogmatic positivism, the Sadducees materialistically turned their heads down into dogmatic skepticism. In so doing, they held Jesus according to the simplicity of their mental ideals, and through their unaddressed duality (between mind and world) they rationally reduced his living reality unto death. But if one does not take the path of the Pharisee and instead uses this other frame, Christ is the locus of God and the good rather than the totality thereof. Christ is the nexus, not the plexus of God.

     If Christ dies by dogmatism, then what it means for him to be the way, the truth, and the life, the only way to God, is not that all things simplify down to him, that when you boil everything down it is actually Jesus Christ. No, that view is produced from the Pharisaical mindset. One must understand Christ’s words through a mind that has been crucified and resurrected from its Pharisaism. The mind of Christ says there is a world beyond the little vehicle of conceptualization we have, and yet we are to use it. Our conceptualization does not finally serve as an instrument of completing or equating to reality, but of giving names to it. The way to God, the truth of God, the life of God do not reduce to Christ—Christ is the name we give for the way, the truth, and the life. And yet by asserting himself in the way he did, for the Pharisee’s mind the way to God, the truth of God, and the life of God do in fact reduce to him, causing his death; his resurrection then follows. In this way, he has actually opened the gate for the Pharisaical mind to enter the kingdom of heaven.

     So, appreciating the meaning of John 14:6 is predicated on having a mind that is renewed in the Spirit. As the nexus of faith, Christ is the only way to God, and in that way all people who go to God go through Christ; they who go to God do not go to him through absolutism: they go to God through the lived experience which Christ is. They who go to God do not go the way of a reductive idealism, they go to God through the life of spirit, a life that suffers beneath the unaddressed dogmatism of ideals. And they who go the way of a reductive idealism, God even draws through his dying for them, by them, in order not to damn their idealistic minds but to resurrect them, buoyant with a new imagination of a world beyond the mind and a world within the mind.

To be a Christian is not to proclaim the dogma of Christ, but to happen upon the very footsteps of Christ, Christian or not. Christians do not have a monopoly on God. All they have is a name for what every seeker of God already shares. By acknowledging that name, it is not necessary to substitute what good one already has and enjoys, for Christ has already been substituted by the world and has thereby freed it from its debt to substitution. Rejoice! The world is not Christ; the world is not God; the light that is already yours is already Christian enough.

“On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.”


This one has a number of errors in it. It boils down to this being used as an excuse for furtive stubbornness. It is sung as part of an old hymn. When people sing this, it is often to conjure a Christly aura and use it to justify not having to change or address things outside our control. It is to calcify one’s shell against the world, to withhold the narrow though seemingly secure glow of internally possessed metaphysical ideals, in place of acknowledging unsensible things and incomprehensible experiences. By singing it in concert with others, it is easier to conjure the sense of solidity and ascribe it divine authority. The words serve as a logical lock and the singing is its key. Singing charges the ideas with deeply felt passions, especially the survival instinct, and by following a performative sequence performed to the air, no attention has to be given to underlying compulsive biases.

Moreover, the statement is doctrinally fraught, if understood without conditions. For one, if Christ is alive, then he too changes. The verse “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” is used as an excuse to avoid acknowledging anything not within one’s familiar context. Even if one’s familiar context is aligned with true biblical standards (supposedly, that is—why is it that everyone thinks they’re right, but you are actually right?), the motives underneath such Christian stubbornness are those of control rather than grace. Christ’s constancy is not what constancy appears to be.

Jesus himself was killed against his own will. If you say, “But Jesus did choose to die, he gave himself upon the cross,” then you must look to what he meant in saying, “Father, not my will but your will be done.” If you assert Jesus is God incarnate, then you must acknowledge that God did not get his way. To be alive is to be changing. And to change is to suffer. It is also to sing, for no unchanging thing can produce any noise through its larynx. Christ is not the solid rock in his substance, but in his life, his narrative arc. His story—incarnation (1), crucifixion (2), resurrection (3), ascension (4)—is a solid rock. It is universally encompassing: all things that take form (1) inevitably fail (2), can find new meaning (3), and in their renewed form can thence pass away without leaving a wake of chaos (4). If this is what you mean when you sing, “On Christ the solid rock I stand,” if what you mean regards information rather than a materialistic this or that, then your words will last the test of time. But if you sing these words in denial of change, you are blinding yourself to not only the true state of the world, but to God’s light himself.