The Adversary's Fourth Confession: My Most Efficient Operation (1 of 3)

A Fourth Confessional Memo

Preface to the Fourth Confession

I want to be honest about how little work this one required.

The Islamic operation took centuries of preparation - careful theological architecture, five surgical excisions, the construction of a system beautiful enough to hold 1.8 billion souls without their noticing what was missing. The secular operation required sustained management of cultural conditions and the amplification of noise sufficient to prevent the deepest questions from being heard. The Jewish operation has been the longest-running and most personal campaign of my entire career.

This fourth operation required almost nothing.

I didn't build the stumbling blocks. The church built them. I didn't create the wounds. The institution created them. I didn't produce the intellectual overclaims, the pastoral abuses, the institutional gatekeeping, the misplaced certainties, the enabling compassion that prevents poverty of spirit. The church produced all of these from its own native materials - from its pride, its tribalism, its self-protection, and above all from its persistent confusion of human certainty with divine will.

All I had to do was make sure no one removed the stumbling blocks once they were in place. And occasionally, at the right moments, whisper the encouragement that kept the well-meaning believer from examining whether their certainty was actually warranted.

I. The Discovery That Changed Everything

I made a discovery approximately three centuries into the Christian era that I have been exploiting ever since. The discovery was this: the most effective way to keep people from Jesus is not to attack Jesus. It is to use people who sincerely love Jesus as the instrument of their own damage.

Persecution, I had discovered, was counterproductive. Martyrs produce faith. The blood of Christians really is the seed of the church - Tertullian said it, and he was right about that much before he lost his way. Direct opposition to the Gospel tends to force people to examine what they actually believe, and the examination tends to produce conviction rather than doubt.

But what if the obstacle were not external opposition but internal failure? What if the person who was seeking Jesus encountered not persecution but hypocrisy? Not a hostile argument but an institutional wound? Not a theological challenge that required engagement but a personal experience of rejection that made engagement feel impossible?

A person who is wounded by the church will not usually do what a person challenged by an intellectual argument does. They will not research. They will not investigate. They will not apply the methodology of Volumes III through V to examine their conclusion carefully. They will simply close. The wound becomes the answer. And the answer - "the church is full of hypocrites and I want nothing to do with it" - is a self-sealing conclusion that feels like intellectual honesty but functions as emotional self-protection. It cannot be argued with because it is not an argument. It is a decision made from pain.

My most efficient operation has never been an external attack on the church. It has been the management of the church's own tendency toward the very failures that drive people away from the Person the church exists to proclaim.

Theological note: Jesus anticipated this. In Matthew 18:6 He said:

"If anyone causes one of these little ones - those who believe in me - to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

-- Matthew 18:6 (NET)

The Adversary's fourth operation is precisely the manufacture and maintenance of millstones.

II. The Instruments I Found Ready to Hand

Let me describe the instruments I found already available within the church, requiring only modest encouragement to produce the damage I needed.

The first instrument: the conflation of interpretive tradition with divine command. Every generation of believers faces the challenge of distinguishing between what the scriptures actually require and what their particular tradition has concluded the scriptures require. This distinction is difficult to maintain because the tradition feels like faithfulness. It has the texture of reverence. When a community has believed something for generations, questioning it feels like betrayal rather than inquiry.

I found this particularly productive in the area of scientific questions. The young earth interpretation of Genesis was not the dominant view in the early church - Augustine in the fourth century explicitly argued that Genesis' days need not be literal twenty-four-hour periods. But by the twentieth century, a specific American evangelical community had elevated young earth creationism to the level of essential doctrine, making it a test of faithfulness rather than a legitimate interpretive question.

The result was precisely what I needed. An entire generation of young people raised in churches where the age of the earth was presented as a matter of orthodoxy. They went to universities. They studied geology, biology, cosmology. They found that the scientific evidence for an ancient universe was overwhelming and that their church's confident alternative had no credible scientific foundation. And they drew the conclusion I had been hoping for: if the church was that wrong about something that checkable, it was probably wrong about everything else too. Including Jesus.

The young earth creationist didn't intend to do that. They were trying to honor the scriptures. But by conflating their interpretation with the scriptures themselves, and by being more certain than the text warranted, they handed me a generation.

The second instrument: the use of correct doctrine as a weapon of exclusion. This one is my favorite. Because it requires the most sincerely orthodox believers to do the most damage. The person who confronts the LGBTQ+ individual with a list of biblical prohibitions before they have established a relationship, before they have demonstrated genuine love, before they have earned the trust that makes hard truth receivable - that person is right about the theology and devastating in the practice.