A Commentary on the Absence of the High Calling

Michlaude Discipleship Project v2 — July 2026

The paper Regenerate, Not Degenerate makes claims from Scripture that are not novel. They are ancient. The divine council, the empty thrones, the children of light being conformed to the image of the Son from one degree of glory to the next, the iron in the fire, the branch staying near enough to the Vine that the life flows through it — none of this is new theology. The patristic writers named it theosis. The Eastern church has been saying it explicitly for fifteen centuries. Calvin built a robust union-with-Christ theology that points directly at it. The Westminster Confession speaks of renewal in the whole man after the image of God.

The tradition has carried this vision. It has not been lost.

What has been lost is the capacity to transmit it, and the institutional will to try. These are different failures and they compound each other, and the result is a church that holds correct doctrine about the transformation of the believer while producing congregations of people who have never heard what they actually are or why they were chosen. The diagnosis has several layers, and they need to be named separately before they can be addressed together.

I. The Catechetical Collapse

The Reformation era built a formation structure designed to produce disciples who knew what they were and why, over sustained time, with the whole community participating in the transmission. The Geneva Catechism. The Heidelberg. The Westminster Standards. These were not primarily academic instruments. They were formation structures — repeated, embodied, communal, designed to move doctrine from the head into the life over years, not sessions.

That structure has largely collapsed in evangelical Protestantism, and what replaced it was the weekly sermon and the Sunday school curriculum. Both are information-delivery instruments. Neither is a formation instrument. A sermon produces an informed person. Formation produces a disciple who has been changed by sustained encounter with the living God in the company of others being changed by the same encounter. The instruments are not interchangeable, and the church has been acting as though they are for several generations.

The consequences are predictable. A congregation formed primarily by weekly sermons will have a wide and shallow theological vocabulary. It will know the major doctrines in outline. It will be able to identify key Scriptures on major themes. What it will not have is the kind of deep-grained formation that comes from years of sustained, communal, embodied practice in the presence of others who are further along the road. That kind of formation requires time, structure, relationship, and repetition across years. The forty-five minute sermon on Sunday morning was never going to produce it, and the church that replaced catechesis with curricula has been asking the wrong instrument to do work it was not designed to do.

Theosis in particular cannot be transmitted by information. It can only be transmitted by formation. The knowing of John 17:3 is not a proposition to be assented to. It is a life to be lived, gradually, in the company of others living it, in sustained proximity to the One who pours it. A doctrine about abiding is not abiding. A sermon about the vine is not the vine. The church that has reduced formation to information delivery cannot teach theosis because theosis is precisely what information delivery cannot reach.