The Move (2 of 2)

In June 2026, in a public Facebook group, this move appeared in real time. A post raised the light travel time problem — a physics problem that exists inside the young earth framework's own assumptions. Rather than engage the argument, the group admin disabled comments on the post. When the tradition cannot answer the question, the question gets removed. That is institutional fusion. That is not Sola Scriptura.

The algorithm serves the tradition.

There is a force in the current moment that makes all of this worse. Social media algorithms are designed to show you more of what you engage with. If you click on posts that confirm your tradition, the algorithm buries posts that challenge it. You see more of what you already believe and less of what would require examination. You are not being informed. You are being surrounded.

Add to that the conditioning of years of clickbait. We have been trained to click on alarming things. A post that says your tradition is right and the critics are dangerous gets more engagement than a post that says your tradition has a real problem worth examining. Outrage drives the algorithm. Confirmation rewards it.

The result looks like what happens at a buffet. You can go back every day and never touch a vegetable. You can read Scripture every day and never sit with the passages that challenge what your tradition requires. You load your plate with the verses that confirm what you already believe. You walk past the ones that don't. Over time you become certain your tradition is sound because everything you read confirms it. You have not examined the tradition. You have surrounded yourself with its defenders and called that discipleship.

That is not Sola Scriptura. That is pride wearing the armor of conviction. And the algorithm is glad to help.

The measure underneath the move.

There is a question that sits beneath the entire five-step move, and it is the question every case in the next chapter is finally measured against. It is not "is this tradition correct?" It is this: is this tradition producing the knowing of John 17:3, or has it become a substitute for it?

The traditions in this book are not dangerous because they are wrong about a date or a chart or a translation. Some of them may even be right. They are dangerous because of what they do to the person holding them — they offer the satisfaction of being correct in place of the labor of abiding. A man can spend twenty years defending the young earth and never once, in those twenty years, be driven by that tradition deeper into the present-tense knowing of Christ. The tradition gave him something to defend. It did not give him Christ. It stood where Christ belongs and accepted the devotion that was meant for Him.

This is why Matthew 7:22–23 hangs over this chapter. The people turned away had the activity, the orthodoxy, the powerful works. What they did not have was the knowing. Every tradition examined ahead has the capacity to become exactly that — a way of being busy in His name while the knowing goes unaddressed. Read the cases not to find out who is wrong. Read them to ask, of your own tradition: has this been carrying me toward the knowing, or has it been standing in for it?