Chapter Three — The Vine

Drawn from Vol VII: The Sons of God, The Vine Is the Path, The Companion, Regenerate, Not Degenerate

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener... Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

— John 15:1, 4–5 (NET)

If the knowing is the life and the empty hand is the posture, the vine is how the life actually reaches you. The corpus calls John 15 the house. One of the larger volumes says it in a sentence that sets the proportions for the whole project: "The most important thing is John 15. Everything else is the view from the window. John 15 is the house." The cosmic scope of the writings, the council and the ages and the ancient texts, is all view from the window. The house is a branch staying on a vine.

The essay on direct access puts the claim as a short chain: "The vine is the path. Direct access is the reality. Abiding is the work. Theosis is the goal." Its argument starts with the temple veil. At the death of Jesus the veil is torn from top to bottom, and the essay's complaint about the church is that it has gone on living as if the veil were still hanging: "The veil is torn. But we are living as if it still stands." Access to the Father is through the Son, by the indwelling Spirit, and it is direct. The essay then examines systems that put something between the disciple and God. It names two kinds: systems of intermediaries on one side, and interpretive grids that must be mastered before the text can be read on the other. Its charge against both is that they cultivate dependence on the vinedresser's apparatus instead of on the vine. The essay's characterizations of particular traditions are its own arguments and not findings, and the essay acknowledges that it relies on counsel and tested authority itself. But the question it puts to any structure is a good one, and it is the one this book will keep asking: does this open access, or does it mediate it?

Direct access is not a technique. The Companion makes the point from the Spirit's side. The Spirit is not a gift waiting on a further experience; He is God Himself present in every believer from the moment of faith. The volume names three "distances" that teaching has laid between the believer and the Spirit: the Spirit located in the text alone, the Spirit located in a few specially gifted people, and the Spirit located behind a second door that has to be opened by a separate experience. Each distance, the volume says, is "a separation in expectation only." The practical conclusion is easily the most useful sentence in the book: "Your awareness does not increase His presence; He is constant. What awareness changes is you — your capacity to receive what He is always already giving. The practice is not access. The practice is noticing." And, later, from the same volume: "There was no second door. There was only the long sweet discovery of what was behind the first."

Noticing has a shape. The direct-access essay gives it three words: Ask, Wait, Move. Ask is plain, specific petition. Wait is listening, through Scripture, through the counsel of other believers, through circumstances, and through the peace of Christ, all of it tested against Scripture and against what God has shown of His own character. Move is obedient action without waiting for absolute certainty, while staying open to correction. The essay says these are "movements you cycle through repeatedly, moment by moment," and not steps you complete. The Companion supplies a small practice for the middle of a working day: a sentence said inwardly, in the middle of the task, repeated when remembered, without self-reproach on the days you forget. There is no technique here, the volume says, and no shortcut.

The vine also changes the question a disciple asks of himself. The essay on regeneration replaces the sin-management question, how holy am I becoming, with another: "Theosis asks a different question. Not: how holy am I becoming? But: how near am I?" The branch does not manage its output. "The branch does not strain to make grapes." The same volume is careful about what this does and does not mean. It does not say a believer never stumbles. It says "The sign of regeneration is not the absence of stumbling. It is that sin no longer owns the schedule." And it draws on John 13 for a diagnostic: the person who has been bathed does not need a second bath, only the washing of feet on the road. A disciple who keeps re-bathing is doubting a cleansing that held. A disciple who refuses the towel is refusing road care he needs.

The vine is also the measure. The direct-access essay puts three questions to any teaching, any authority, and any practice, and the corpus asks them everywhere: does this lead me closer to God or further from Him? Does it drive me toward abiding in the vine, or does it create dependence on the vinedresser? Does it open access or mediate it? And then the line that makes the project's standard explicit: "If an idea does not drive you toward abiding, it is not true in the way that matters." The Theology Grader that Part Four describes carries the same test under a different name, the Drive-to-Abide test. It is the one question the whole apparatus is built to ask.

The essay ends with an instruction that refuses to be a conclusion. "A book cannot teach you to know God. Only God can, by His own life poured in from the inside, by His Spirit." And then, to the reader of the essay: "So here is the final word: stop reading. Put this down. Go into your inner room. Close the door." Take it as given to the reader of this book as well. The chapters that follow are worth reading only if they send you back there.