The One Thing This Book Is About (2 of 2)

The word translated dung is skubala. It is not a polite word. It means refuse, excrement, what you scrape off and throw away. Paul took the entire apparatus of religious knowledge and credential — the very thing every tradition in this book treats as essential — and called it garbage next to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. Ginōskō again. The credentials were not lesser. They were refuse, because they were not the knowing.

The early church proves the point from the other direction. They had no completed canon. No systematic theology. No catechism, no confession of faith, no study Bible with notes in the margin. What they had was the apostles, or people who had known the apostles, and the living encounter with the risen Christ. The thing every tradition in this book treats as indispensable, the first generation of Christians did not possess — and they knew Christ so well that they turned the Roman empire upside down and died singing.

Then the apparatus came. Some of it was good and necessary. But here is the pattern this book traces across twenty traditions: the apparatus built to transmit the knowing has a way of replacing the knowing. The Church of Rome placed its Magisterium between the believer and the Text. The Reformation tore that down — and then its heirs built rigorous catechisms and confessions that became, for many, a new layer of required knowledge standing between the believer and the direct encounter. A child learns the catechism and can recite flawless answers about God without ever being brought to know God. Same failure mode, different vocabulary. The structure meant to carry people to Christ becomes the thing they hold instead of Christ.

And this is where Paul's other warning lands with full force. He told Timothy to "have nothing to do with foolish and ignorant controversies, because you know they breed infighting" (2 Timothy 2:23). He told Titus to "avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, quarrels, and fights about the law, because they are useless and empty" (Titus 3:9). Genealogies — the very thing the Young Earth timeline is constructed from. Paul named it. The endless online arguments this book documents — Young Earth against old earth, King James against every other translation, pre-tribulation against partial preterism — are precisely the foolish controversies Paul said to refuse. Not because the questions never matter, but because the arguing has become a substitute for the loving, and the loving is the evidence of the knowing.

Which brings the whole thing back to where this book began. Jesus prayed, in the same chapter as John 17:3, for everyone who would believe in Him:

"that they will all be one, just as You, Father, are in Me and I am in You. I pray that they will be in Us, so that the world will believe that You sent Me." — John 17:21 (NET)

The unity and the knowing are the same prayer. Jesus tied the world's ability to believe directly to the visible oneness of those who know Him. And the disunity this book documents — Christians who cannot share a table because of a translation, a timeline, a chart — is not merely embarrassing. It is the precise thing Jesus prayed against, because it is the precise thing that makes the world unable to see that the Father sent the Son. The arguing over traditions is itself the evidence that the arguers have the knowledge and not the knowing. Because the knowing produces love, and love produces the oneness, and the oneness is what shows the world the truth of Christ.

So this is the book. One argument, illustrated twenty times. Knowledge about God is not the knowing of God. Paul called his credentials refuse next to it. The early church had the knowing without the apparatus. The apparatus, Catholic and Protestant alike, keeps replacing the knowing it was built to serve. And the cost is the disunity that blinds the world to Christ — the exact opposite of what John 17 was given to produce.

If you read this book to win your next argument, you have missed it entirely. Read it to find yourself among those whom Jesus knew, and to love the brother you were arguing with an hour ago. That is the only outcome this book is written to produce.