Before You Continue

Stop here. Not to assess whether the argument was well-made. To ask whether it touched you.

What tradition on this list made you uncomfortable when you read it? Not intellectually uncomfortable. Personally uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth sitting with. It is either the Spirit showing you something or the tradition defending itself. Those two things feel similar from the inside. Only one of them drives you back to the Text with open hands.

When someone you respect reads the same passage and lands somewhere different from you, what happens in you? Not what do you think — what happens? If the answer is concern for them, sit with that. If the answer is anger, or the urgent need to correct them, or a felt threat to something you have been holding — sit with that longer. That response is the diagnostic. Not what you believe. What happens in you when it is not required of you.

Is there a tradition on this list you could not release without it feeling like you are releasing Scripture itself? Name it honestly. Then ask: did Scripture put it there, or did you? That is the question Sola Scriptura was designed to ask. It is far easier to apply to other people's traditions than to your own.

Have you required someone — a child, a student, a new believer, a fellow Christian who reads the same Bible you do — to hold a belief that goes beyond what Scripture plainly states? What did your response to their question reveal about what the belief had become in you?

When you last opened the passage your tradition rests on, did you come to find out what it says? Or to confirm what you already know it says?

What would it cost you to be wrong about the tradition you hold most tightly? If the answer is everything — if the tradition and your faith feel like the same thing when you press on them — then the tradition has taken the place only the Text belongs in. That is not a theological problem. It is a spiritual one. And it has a remedy. Poverty of spirit. The posture Jesus names at the opening of the Sermon on the Mount as the entry condition to everything the Kingdom offers. It is available right now, before you turn the page. You do not need to resolve the tradition first. You need to hold it differently.