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.
The Loss of Corporate Imagination
The New Testament church understood itself as a body, a household, a temple under construction, a royal priesthood — corporate images every one. The calling described in Regenerate, Not Degenerate is not an individual calling to individual transformation. It is a corporate calling. The empty thrones of Psalm 82 were not vacated by one ancient being who refused. They were vacated by the whole council. The response God chose was not one person being elevated. It was a people being formed — a community of image-bearers formed from clay being made into the kind of beings who could carry the love the council refused to carry.
Theosis in its fullest form is not a solo project. The iron does not glow alone in the fire. The branch does not bear fruit in isolation from the vine and from every other branch on the vine. The formation of the Christian is intrinsically communal because the love being poured through the Christian is intrinsically relational — it requires a receiver, and the receiver requires the community.
Modern evangelical ecclesiology has lost this. The dominant model of the evangelical church is a collection of individuals on parallel personal journeys who gather weekly to receive content and then return to their individual lives. The pastoral relationship is primarily one-directional: the pastor speaks, the congregation receives. The small group is the most communal instrument remaining in most evangelical churches, and even the small group model tends toward relational support for individual journeys rather than genuine mutual formation in the communal life of God.
This is not a small gap. You cannot teach "we are being conformed to the image of the Son" as a corporate reality to a room of people who understand themselves as solo projects before God. The imaginative and structural framework required to hold that teaching is simply absent. Until the church recovers a genuinely corporate anthropology — understanding that the calling is to a people, that the formation happens in community, that the love being poured out is a community of branches giving to a world, not isolated individuals achieving personal transformation — it will not be able to transmit the high calling the tradition carries. The theology will sit in the books. The pew will remain uninformed about what it is.
The Gravitational Pull of the Frame
The church does not usually intend to teach a diminished vision of the Christian life. Classic Reformed sanctification theology intends the Spirit as the agent of transformation. That is the right intention. The problem is that a frame generates its own outcomes regardless of what the theology behind it intends, and the sanctification frame generates performance-monitoring even when the doctrine does not design it.
The question the sanctification frame most naturally produces is: how am I doing? Am I improving? The gaze moves inward to examine the state of the soul and upward toward the standard being reached for. These are honest questions, and in moderation they serve formation. But when they become the organizing questions of the Christian life, the sin record becomes the primary instrument of spiritual self-knowledge, and the natural response to a poor week is more rigorous effort. The cycle that exhausts people is the predictable outcome of a frame whose gravitational center is the self's moral condition rather than the proximity of the self to God.
The theosis question is different: not how am I doing, but how near am I? The gaze moves outward and toward God rather than inward and toward the self. The transformation follows from the nearness, the way fruit follows from the branch's connection to the vine, not from the branch's effort. Same Spirit. Same Christ. Different frame. And the difference in frame is what produces the difference in the life.
The church cannot easily change its frame mid-stream. The frame is embedded in the hymnody, the pastoral care structures, the small group curricula, the prayer language, the language of spiritual self-assessment. To change the frame requires not a different sermon but a different formation system, and most churches do not have the structural apparatus to produce one.
IV. The Institutional Incentive
The failure of the church to teach the high calling is not only structural and theological. Some of it is institutional, and the institutional dimension deserves honest naming.
Paul was precise about where he stood in 1 Corinthians 3: I planted, Apollos watered, God gave the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters are nothing. And Ephesians 4 is equally precise about the goal of the pastoral office: to equip the saints for the work of ministry until the congregation reaches mature manhood, needing the pastor less and less for its standing before God. The goal of the pastoral office, rightly understood, is its own progressive obsolescence as a mediating function — not the elimination of the pastor, but the elimination of dependency on the pastor for access to God.
A congregation formed on the high calling — knowing what it is, knowing who indwells it, walking in the indicative of what Christ has done, abiding in the Vine for the life that flows — does not need a weekly infusion of assurance from the pulpit. It needs the community, the Word, the table, the prayer, and the pastoral relationship as a fellow-traveler on the road rather than as a functional mediator between the people and God. That is a very different kind of church from the one most evangelical pastors were trained to build and lead.
The dependency model is not usually conscious. No faithful pastor sits down and decides to keep his congregation spiritually dependent in order to maintain institutional relevance. But the frame produces the dependency whether the pastor intends it or not. The sin-management cycle keeps the assurance flowing through the office. The congregation that cannot be certain of its standing before God without Sunday morning's word from the pulpit has quietly rebuilt the structure the Reformation dismantled, by a different mechanism and without intending it.
And the institution benefits from the dependency in ways that are easy to see from the outside and very difficult to see from the inside. Attendance, giving, engagement — all of these are correlated with the congregation's sense of need for what the institution provides. A congregation that knows what it is and walks in it confidently does not necessarily attend less or give less, but it relates to the institution differently — as a community of formation rather than a dispensary of spiritual assurance — and that relationship shift is experienced by many institutional leaders as a loss of something they cannot quite name.
The Protestant Allergy
The word theosis lands in many evangelical spaces like a grenade. The associations are immediate and not entirely irrational: anything that sounds like an image-bearer becoming God triggers the memory of the serpent's lie in Genesis 3 and the tower of Babel and every heretical tradition that has blurred the distinction between Creator and creation. The allergy is understandable.
But the allergy has cost the tradition something it cannot afford to lose. The careful distinction between theosis and apotheosis — participation by grace versus seizure by nature, the iron in the fire versus the iron claiming to be fire — is precisely the distinction the tradition needs to make, and the allergy has prevented it from being made. The result is that the evangelical church has a robust doctrine of the new birth and an underdeveloped doctrine of what the new birth is the beginning of. It can describe the entry condition in considerable detail. It struggles to describe the destination with anything approaching the precision the New Testament provides.
2 Peter 1:4 speaks of believers becoming partakers of the divine nature. That is not the language of moral improvement. It is ontological language — substance language, language about what is actually happening to the person in Christ at a level deeper than behavior. 2 Corinthians 3:18 describes being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. Romans 8:29 names the destination: conformed to the image of the Son. 1 John 3:2 says that when He appears we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is.
The tradition has these texts. It has not lost them. What it has done is domesticate them into behavioral language — we become more Christ-like in our conduct — which is true as far as it goes and falls well short of what the texts are actually claiming. The behavioral domestication is the allergy producing its outcome: a smaller vision of the transformation than the New Testament warrants, transmitted to a congregation that therefore has a smaller vision of what it is and what it is becoming.
The Market Dynamic
The evangelical church in the West operates in a market. Congregations choose among options. Pastors are aware that comfort preaching fills buildings and that discomfort preaching empties them. This is not a cynical observation — it is a structural reality that produces predictable outcomes regardless of what individual pastors intend.
The spiritual buffet the paper describes is not accidental. It is the market responding to demand. People in pain want comfort. People exhausted by the week want assurance. People carrying shame want forgiveness without the high calling that might make the shame worse. The institution that offers all of these without the accompanying indictment, without the poverty of spirit that the high calling requires, without the Gethsemane that the road goes through, will fill its seats. The institution that requires the full formation — the empty thrones, the divine council, the cost of the road — will attract the people who want the full thing and lose the people who came for the easier version.
This produces a long-term deformation of the tradition. Congregations are selected for their tolerance of comfortable portions. Pastors who survive in the market learn what those portions are. The formation system adjusts to the market's preferences, generation after generation, until the full vision is not exactly suppressed but simply absent — not taught, not transmitted, not available to the congregation that would receive it if it were offered, because the institution has stopped offering it and no longer has the personnel capable of teaching it.
This is not irreversible. But reversing it requires institutional courage of a kind that the market penalizes in the short term. The congregation that begins to receive the high calling in full will lose some members who came for comfort and gain others who were starving for the full thing and did not know it was available. The transition is uncomfortable. Most institutions choose not to make it.
The Enlightenment Inheritance
Behind all of the institutional and structural failures is a deeper epistemic failure that the Western church has been living inside for so long that it has stopped recognizing it as a choice.
John 17:3 defines eternal life as knowing the Father and the Son — not knowing about Them. The word is ginosko: the knowing of personal acquaintance, of sustained relationship, of being known and knowing back. This is not the knowing of propositional assent. It is the knowing of presence, of abiding, of the kind of familiarity you develop with a person you have been close to for years, whose voice you recognize across a room, whose grief you can read before they speak.
The Greek philosophical inheritance that shaped Western theology split knowing from being. The Enlightenment inheritance that shaped Western culture made propositional knowledge — correct information assented to — the primary category of knowing. The result is a Christianity in which the right beliefs are the primary spiritual achievement, and the devotional life exists to support the correctness of the beliefs rather than the other way around.
Theosis cannot be transmitted in this framework because theosis is participatory knowing — knowing by being in, abiding in, remaining near to, not by correctly describing from a distance. The branch does not know the vine by accurately identifying the vine's species and describing its characteristics. The branch knows the vine by being on it, by receiving the life that flows from it, by bearing the fruit that the life produces. The knowing is the abiding. They are not separate activities.
A church formed by Enlightenment epistemology — in which the primary spiritual activity is receiving correct information about God — cannot teach theosis because the frame makes theosis incoherent. If knowing is assenting to propositions, the idea of knowing God by remaining near Him in poverty of spirit is not a richer form of knowing. It is an inferior one, an experiential supplement to the real knowing that happened when the doctrine was correctly received and assented to. The frame inverts the order. And the inversion is so deeply embedded in evangelical culture that most congregations cannot see it.
What Recovery Requires
None of this is addressed by a new program. The failures described in this paper are structural, institutional, epistemic, and catechetical — each of them represents a choice the church made over time that has compounded with the others to produce a formation system that cannot transmit the high calling. Reversing them requires different structural commitments, not different content delivered by the same structures.
Formation must be distinguished from information delivery and treated as the primary task of the church. This means recovering the catechetical impulse — sustained, communal, repetitive, embodied transmission of the faith over years — and understanding that the weekly sermon serves formation without being formation itself. The sermon is one instrument. Formation requires the whole ecosystem: the long relationship, the mutual accountability, the sustained community of people who are genuinely watching one another be changed and naming what they see.
The corporate imagination must be recovered. The calling is to a people. The vine has many branches, and the branches are connected to one another as surely as they are connected to the vine. A formation system designed for individual transformation will not produce what God has in mind, because what God has in mind is a community bearing the love of God into a world starving for it — not isolated individuals achieving personal holiness on parallel tracks.
The language of theosis needs to be rehabilitated in Protestant spaces, carefully and with the apotheosis distinction made precisely every time it is made. Not because the word matters, but because the vision the word carries matters, and the vision has been missing from the formation of Protestant congregations at exactly the level where it would produce the most transformation. People need to know what they are becoming and why. The high calling, named plainly, is not intimidating to poverty of spirit. It is electrifying. The person who knows they are empty before God and hears that the empty space is exactly the shape of what God intends to pour — that person can receive the vision and walk in it. The person who has never heard the vision cannot walk in something they do not know exists.
And the question that governs all of it remains the same one the paper was built on. Is the congregation being driven back to John 15 to abide? Not to perform. Not to monitor. Not to improve sufficiently to warrant confidence in their own progress. To abide — to stay near enough to the Vine that the life flows, that the love pours, that the fruit appears the way fruit appears on a branch that has stayed on the vine.
That is not a program. It is a posture. And no institutional reform produces it. Only the Spirit does, from the inside, in the person who has finally stopped trying to generate from themselves what only the Vine can supply, and has simply, in poverty of spirit, remained.
The church that teaches that — that structures itself around producing people who know how to remain — will produce what God has always been trying to produce: children of light, growing in Christ, carrying the love the council refused to carry, filling the thrones that have been waiting since the morning stars sang.
It will not be a large church, necessarily. But it will be a bright one.
Michlaude Discipleship Project All of it is free. None of it is mine to sell. Soli Deo Gloria
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