Things Hidden #4 - What I Believe

Greetings from Austin! I welcome the opportunity to bring to you the fourth post of Things Hidden! Episode #4 of the Things Hidden podcast is out now!

You can watch the YouTube by clicking the link here-

The script I wrote for Episode #4 can be found below. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, Episode #4 is the most important public writing and speaking I have ever done. The topics covered in #4 are the topics that I spent the most time researching. The topics I spent the most time praying about. Figuring out exactly what God was calling me to say about the topics covered in this episode was the single most important part of all of the work that’s gone in to Things Hidden.

I hope you find it helpful. Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments you might have.

If you want to follow along on socials too, they’re all linked here - https://linktr.ee/thingshidden

Be well.

- Travis

We ready? Let’s do this.

Welcome to Episode 4 of Things Hidden. Things Hidden is an exploration of the intersection of Faith and six factors that surround faith - Religion; Physics; Evolution; Consciousness; Philosophy; and Technological Innovation. The purpose of Things Hidden is to bring people into a closer relationship with God, and through that process coming into a closer relationship with God myself.

The first episode gave you the very basics - a bit about me, my background, some of my beliefs, what Things Hidden is, what Things Hidden is not, how Things Hidden happened, why Things Hidden happened and what to expect next.

The second episode I told you about how I’ve experienced God in my life. And how those experiences led me to this, talking to you about Things Hidden.

The third episode was a non-traditional Christian apologetic - unpacking some of my logic-driven views around why Jesus Christ and Christianity are so important, and so worthy of your time and attention.

If you haven’t listened to those first three episodes, I would strongly encourage you to do that before starting this one. We’re still at the very very beginning of Things Hidden, and Episode 1 is definitely the best place to start.

Today we will be unpacking some of my beliefs. Some of the specific aspects of my faith that collectively add up to my worldview of God. Before we get going, I just want to say again, like I did in the first episode. I don’t “know”. This is not about knowing. And my faith is dynamic. Able to be shifted. The idea that there is only one extremely narrow, specific way to grasp at the ungraspable does not make a lot of sense to me. 

And I strongly believe my views on this are from God. I know there are people that do not feel this way. They feel a faith should be definitionally rigid. It should be the one thing that is UNCHANGEABLE, more so than anything else. I don’t feel this way. I don’t feel God calling me to be this way. So my faith has shifted in my life and I expect it to continue shifting and evolving for the rest of my life. I pray every day for God’s guidance on this journey. And I feel that guidance. I feel it with me right now.

The overarching point I’m going to make here today is that I have question marks on major aspects of my faith. And I’m ok with having question marks in these spots. And maybe some or all of those question marks eventually get turned to answers that I am willing to affirm as a profession of faith. Or maybe they stay question marks. I’m not tied to either outcome. 

I don’t feel like having question marks on major aspects of my faith has prevented me from having a closer relationship with God. I’ve actually found it to be the opposite - instead of repeatedly trying to round peg/square hole my faith into doctrines and dogma that don’t make sense and don’t seem to be supported by historical evidence or critical scholarship, I can just say “I don’t know about that” or “I’m not sure I believe that”, and more fully bask in the light when standing in awe of the incomprehensibility of God.

If you’ve listened to any of the prior episodes, you know that my faith is Christ-centered, but also somewhat non-traditional. And there are some people that call themselves Christians that would say I’m not “allowed” to have question marks on some of the aspects of my faith that I do and still be considered a Christian. They might point to the Nicene creed as the Litmus test - if you don’t affirm all aspects of the Nicene creed, you’re not a Christian. I try not to get caught up in that. I also try not to attack anyone that feels this way. It’s not something I’m trying to fight over.  

Right out of the gate, it is important to keep in mind that there is nothing close to consensus about what EXACT set of beliefs make up Christianity. There are 45,000 denominations of Christianity. 45. Thousand. Granted, the very large majority only have very minor differences in belief. But it’s still true to say that there are more than a dozen major denominations of Christianity with significant differences on major aspects of faith. It’s good to keep that in mind when someone is telling you that you’re “doing it wrong”.

When it comes to the Bible, it is apparent that this is the most impactful document in human history. Let me say that again. It doesn’t matter what your belief system is or whether you have one at all. The Bible is the most impactful document in human history. That isn’t a profession of faith, that is an objective historical fact.

I resonate with the moniker of the Bible as “the living word of God”. It is living because God did not just historically speak to people through these words, although that is true. But God is speaking to us through these words today, thousands of years after they were written. The Bible is living because it actually does something - it comforts, it transforms, it motivates, it guides. The livingness of the Bible is seen in the lives that it has changed and the lives it continues to change today. The Bible is a firm foundation. You can read it, study it, learn from it and build a good life on that process. That’s REALLY REALLY important.

The descriptor of the Bible as “God-breathed” also resonates with me. I’m not exactly sure what it means, but it’s a descriptor that fits when grasping at the ungraspable. The Bible is a gift from God as much as anything on this Earth is a gift from God. You can see God in a sunset, in a beautiful song, in the cosmos, in blooming flowers, in the birth of a child. And you can see God in the Bible. If the Bible didn’t come from God, I don’t know how anything could come from God. And yet. The Bible is still undoubtedly, distinctly, human.

Before we keep going, I want to give you two time-tested frameworks that have been instructive for me over the last few years. Maybe they’ll be helpful for you too.

First, there was an idea created in the late 1500’s by a theologian named Richard Hooker commonly referred to as the “Three Legged Stool”. The legs of the stool are Scripture, Tradition and Reason. Each of these three operate as complimentary authorities for doctrine and practice. The Anglican denomination of Christianity still abides by this three legged stool. John Wesley, founder of the Wesleyan denomination of Christianity in the 1700s came up with the “Weselyan Quadrilateral” - which is a fancy name for the three legged stool plus the fourth leg of Experience. This quadrilateral resonates deeply with me - scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. You can build a faith on that.       

The second framework is Pardes. When studying scripture, Jews have a term called Pardes which is an acronym for four Hebrew terms - pshat; remez; derash; and sod. Pshat is the surface level meaning of the scripture. Remez is the allegorical meaning. Derash is the comparative meaning, relative to other scriptures. And Sod is the secret, mystical meaning. PRDS. Pardes. It’s an 800 year old concept.

This is a really helpful framework for understanding how to engage with the Bible and it resonates with my own firsthand experience with the Bible. Furthermore, it speaks to the Bible being the LIVING word of God. This is a text that can give you four different layers of meaning in the same passage, depending on where you are in your life and your faith and your depth of study. That is amazing. You can build a faith on that.

In some ways, the Bible can be an INCREDIBLY straightforward book. The 10 commandments. Help the least of these. Trust in God. Real straightforward. In other ways, the Bible can be IMPOSSIBLY complex. To add to the complexity, you’re trying to reach back into a LONG time ago. For the New Testament, you’re reaching back 2,000 years ago. For the Old Testament, you’re reaching back 3-4-5,000 years ago. There’s honestly no telling how far back you’re reaching with Genesis. And then you have to acknowledge that these texts have been working for humanity EVER SINCE. Humans have been moving in huge ways. In SPECIES DEFINING ways. For THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Based off these texts. I can’t help but stand in awe of that. The idea these texts wouldn’t hold incredibly powerful truths? Having THAT as your base case? That’s ridiculous. That makes zero sense to me. 

So I just have to stand in awe of the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of the Bible. And there is a LONG, long tradition of doing exactly that - standing in awe of the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of the scriptures. I’m in good company there.

And so it is with that humility at the forefront. That I move forward with the examination and profession of my faith. I do not think the Bible is inerrant, I do not think the Bible is without contradictions, I do not think the Bible is free from the fingerprints of human intention and I do not think the Bible is clear in every instance. The Bible does not provide a clear cut answer to every question, every time, straightaway. If you’re not a Christian, you might be thinking “well, yeah, duh”. And if you are a fundamentalist Christian you might be calling me a heretic. And I’m not trying to fight you over that and if you get the sense this type of discussion is pulling you off your faith, stop listening. Seriously. I’m not trying to pull anyone off their faith.

But for the last few years, this has been a journey for me where things I thought were black and white turned out to be gray. Thought stuff was black and white. Turned out it was gray. And the size of the gray area. How many major aspects of faith, of the Bible, of God, of Jesus Christ, of salvation, of damnation. How many of those are actually… pretty gray. This gray area turned out to be much bigger than I had originally thought.

But THERE’S POWER in the gray. I don’t know how else to describe it. And it has been transformatively impactful for me to find the POWER OF GOD in the gray.

Within this gray area, there are many DEEP rabbit holes. The rabbit holes are deep and plentiful. I’ve put in maybe 1,000 or so hours on critical Biblical studies over the last few years. That is some, but it is not a lot. I have a masters degree in finance. I know about how much work it takes to get a masters degree. I’ve done about a master’s degree’s worth of work in critical Biblical studies, and mostly New Testament. But there are 75 year old men with PhD’s that have been at this for FIFTY YEARS and they have not come to definitive conclusions. Or they’ve come to conflicting conclusions. I’ll give you an example. How much critical scholarship do you think you can read on the Resurrection of Christ? I’ll ask that again. How much academia can you read on the Resurrection of Christ? It’s an impossibly large amount. And yet the resurrection remains a gray area. 

So what do you do with that? The large majority of Christians don’t get bogged down in the gray area and don’t spend a lot of time down rabbit holes. And that’s fine. They let the institution of the church tell them what is black and white and they accept that and build their life on that and it’s a good life. And that is fine. It’s great. That process radically altered the course of human history for the last 2,000 years. It’s a good thing.

Things Hidden is in part an exploration of that gray area and those rabbit holes. I’ve been down some of those rabbit holes and I can share those findings and if you want to go deeper I can point you in the right direction. And what I have found is that there is good news in that gray area. There are deep truths in those rabbit holes. In my experience, it can be unanchoring, but God is there. And God may be there more clearly than you’ve ever experienced God before.

Back to the question marks from earlier. I have question marks about major aspects of Christianity. Those question marks come from critical scholarship of the Bible. When you look hard, you see contradictions. I could put together a slide deck and give a 90 minute presentation on the contradictions in the four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are telling approximately the same story about the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, but there are many discrepancies. It is an enormous field of study to examine these discrepancies. 

And so it seems that God moves in mysterious ways. And as it turns out, like with all truisms, this is a much deeper statement than it seems when people just say it in passing. God moves in ways that are inexplicable to us. Ways that seem messy. And this willingness to examine the Bible, in particular the New Testament, from a critical perspective, from a historical perspective. That’s mostly not a very old process. Some aspects of this critical examination go way back, but the large majority of this study has occurred in the last 125 years. So we have 2,000 years since Jesus died. 1600 years since Christianity really began proliferating, but only about 125 years that scholars have been looking critically at the body of text that exists to tell the story of Jesus Christ. Scholarship that is willing to wrestle with the messiness of these texts. 

What do I mean by messy? I’ll give you an example. The Virgin Birth narrative. Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin, miraculously given a baby by God via the Holy Spirit, and she birthed Jesus. The birth happened in a manger. No room at the inn. The whole deal. The entire Christmas story. That story is not included at all in the earliest Gospel account of Jesus’ life, the Gospel of Mark, and it’s not included in the latest Gospel account of Jesus’ life, the Gospel of John. No virgin birth at all in either of those. The apostle Paul, who wrote at least 7 books of the New Testament and wrote them earlier than any of the four gospels, also makes no mention of the virgin birth. The virgin birth story is only included in Matthew and Luke and there are plenty of discrepancies in the story between those two gospel accounts. To further complicate things, Matthew makes reference to the virgin birth of Jesus as fulfilling prophesy from the Old Testament book of Isaiah, written some 700 years before the birth of Jesus. But when you look at this verse in Isaiah 7:14, the word for “young woman” is mistranslated as “virgin” from Hebrew to Greek, and Matthew was using the Greek translation that had the mistranslated word.

As a reminder, nothing I’m saying here is primary research. I did not come up with these ideas on my own. I don’t know Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic and I really doubt I’m going to learn. But there is a stack of critical scholarship from domain experts that dissects these aspects of the virgin birth narrative in great detail. So upon logical examination, the strength of the case for the literalness of the virgin birth story gets called into question. It kinda seems like the virgin birth story was made up. That’s what I mean by messy.

I’ll give you another example. The four gospels, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John. Each one tells the story of Jesus Christ. Matthew, Mark and probably Luke are the earliest written gospels, probably written in 65-90 AD. And they are at least somewhat similar - Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic gospels. Synoptic meaning same. The gospel of John was the last one to be written, somewhere around 100 AD. John in a lot of ways is nothing like the synoptic gospels. 90% of the direct quotes from Jesus in the gospel of John are ONLY found in John and not in any of the other gospels.

And it’s not like the TYPES of things Jesus is saying in John are the same general TYPES of things He says in the other three gospels. It’s not like that at all. The way Jesus talks in John is nothing like He talks in the other three earlier gospels. If Jesus said all these things in John, why aren’t they recorded anywhere else? Why does Jesus talk SO differently in John than the other Gospels? It becomes a gray area. It kind of seems like Jesus didn’t actually say a lot of these things that are recorded in John.

Additionally, Jesus does many miracles throughout the four gospels, and most of the miracles are recorded in multiple gospels. But two of Jesus’ most well known miracles are only recorded in John. Jesus turning water into wine? Real famous. Only in John. Not anywhere else. Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead? Real famous. Only in John. Not anywhere else. Why weren’t these massive miracles with many supposed witnesses recorded anywhere else?

To add to the complications, there is the famous story in John of the adulterous woman about to get stoned for her sin. Jesus tells the men about to stone her - “he among you who is without sin, cast the first stone”. Real famous story. Turns out, it’s not in the earliest manuscript copies of John. Looks like it was added in some time later, probably hundreds of years later. And John has another complication like this - the last chapter of John, John 21. It looks like it wasn’t part of the original manuscript. It looks like it was added later, probably more than a century later.

So here’s where it gets messy. But this is where Things are Hidden. Christmas CHANGED THE WORLD. The gospel of John CHANGED THE WORLD. It is impossible to overstate the impact that these stories have had on humanity. You are sitting here today BECAUSE of Christmas. Sit with that. Be with that. WE’RE HERE AS A SPECIES BECAUSE OF THE CHRISTMAS STORY. That’s how powerful it is. 

John 3:16 says that “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. Most famous verse in the New Testament, maybe the whole Bible. You are sitting here today BECAUSE that was written. Sit with that. Be with that. WE’RE HERE AS A SPECIES BECAUSE JOHN 3:16 WAS WRITTEN. That’s how powerful it is.

Think about that verse. People don’t even know what it means. I don’t. You don’t. No one does. What do you mean by God. What do you mean by loved. What do you mean by gave. What do you mean by one and only son. What do you mean by believe. What do you mean by not perish? What do you mean by eternal life? People don’t even know what it means and yet it’s the most impactful written declaration in human history.

Think about it. Think about how powerful this is. Even an atheist scholar would have to agree with what I just said. The atheist would agree that people don’t agree on what John 3:16 means and the atheist would agree it’s the most impactful statement in human history. THAT’S HOW POWERFUL THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS CHRIST ARE. The life and teachings of Jesus Christ were so impactful that humanity literally reoriented the concept of TIME around Him. You know - the year 2025. What happened two thousand and twenty five years ago? THAT’S how powerful Jesus Christ has been. 

Two of the most impactful stories in human history, Christmas and the Gospel of John. And yet, the Christmas story may not have literally happened. And many of the things written in the gospel of John may not have literally happened. So what do you do with that?

It is not an exaggeration to say, that when you go looking, the New Testament is full of things like this. Call them whatever you want - discrepancies, contradictions, scribal errors, pseudopigrapha, gray areas, oopsies. You can call them whatever you want but there’s like 50 of them in the New Testament when you go looking.   

Depending on your vantage point and your priors, this can be unanchoring. What we can say with confidence is that, assuming the Bible is God-breathed, which I do, then God was ok with the story being pretty messy. The story of Christ is not even remotely close to clean and straightforward. So this gets into a question about God’s causality - how is it that God moves in this world? Because Jesus Christ is objectively the most important entity in human history and if you’re a Christian, He is also the Son of God, equal parts man and God, and the savior of humanity.

So you would think. If there was EVER a time where God would step in and make sure a story gets told REAL clean, it would be THIS story. And yet that is just not what we see with the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. So I can’t help but contemplate the nature of God within this context. Many apologists would push back on my characterization of the New Testament as messy. They would say it’s not messy. I’ve listened to a fair amount of this type of apologetic - frankly I do not find it compelling relative to the rest of the fact patterns. Much of this sort of apologetic ends up relying on a testament of faith - and that is totally ok and I love that for them and I wish them the very best in that and if they want to talk to me about it, I’m happy to listen. But Things Hidden is an exploration of the line where faith meets fact. And I don’t feel called by God to have that line drawn for me exactly where some apologist or some denomination of Christianity has their line drawn. I’m running the ramp of reason before taking the leap of faith and I’m getting specific about what the ramp is made out of and what the space right after the ramp looks like.

And so at this point, a framework emerges that addresses literalness- For everything in the Bible you can ask - Did it literally happen? Did something very similar literally happen? Did multiple things literally happen and then you’re reading an amalgamation of those multiple literal events? Is what you’re reading a metaphor or motif for a deeper, nonliteral truth? Is it fiction presented as fact? Is it myth that was never meant to be construed as fact? And I understand this can be an unanchoring process for some people that have a certain version of faith. And if you’re not feeling it you can forget about it or turn this podcast off or do whatever you feel led to do. I’m not trying to shove any of this down anyone’s throat. But in my experience, through study, this is the framework that naturally emerges for me.    

So. Is Christianity true? Christianity is realer than true. And it’s truer than real. Realer than true. And truer than real. The POWER of the scriptures outstrips the laboratory examination of their “reality”. The POWER is not in the presentation of court of law-level evidentiary evidence. The POWER is in diagnosing the human condition, triangulating that human condition towards the creator of all things, and providing a firm foundation upon which to live your life and build a flourishing society.

And we have the receipts to prove it. Remember back to Episode #3 and the Tom Holland approach. If you haven’t listened to that part in Episode 3, go back and listen to it. I’m going to reference “the Tom Holland approach” again and again so you might as well hear the proper definition of it.

Imagine if you could take every passage in the Bible - and see a historical record of all the good that had been done in the world in the name of that particular passage. And you’d have to net out the bad too - it’s only fair. But even then. IMAGINE how high that stack of good is.

We have the benefit of 2,000 years of hindsight to see what the fruits of the tree of Jesus Christ are. And the fruits are tremendous. So we know with hindsight that the scriptures have moved humanity to action that has greatly benefited our species and continues to do so today. In that way, the scriptures aren’t just ABOUT reality, they BECOME reality. A metaphor is more powerful than reality if the metaphor moves people to action in a way that reality would not have. A metaphor is more powerful than reality if the metaphor moves people to action in a way that reality would not have.

Which brings us to razzle dazzle, a term I mentioned in the first episode. I don’t mean it in a derogatory way at all. Razzle dazzle is a colloquialism for transmission mechanism. But it’s a transmission mechanism in the service of grasping at the ungraspable. 

We’ll come back to razzle dazzle as a transmission mechanism, but I want to hit on more of the basics of my beliefs first. I can set the stage by just saying that all serious scholarship agrees there was a Jewish man named Jesus who taught for several years and gathered a following. Jesus was crucified in 30 maybe 33 AD. And not long after he was crucified, some of his followers came to believe that he had been resurrected. This is the overwhelming consensus of scholarly views, supported by not just the Bible but other accounts outside of the Bible.

I believe Jesus taught a radical message that some Jews resonated deeply with. I believe some Jewish leaders became wary of his radical teachings and had the Romans crucify Jesus. I believe before, during and immediately after his death, a group of his followers came to believe that he was divine and fulfilled ancient Hebrew prophesies. I believe that in the ~300 years after Jesus’ death, dozens of different factions emerged that felt different ways about who Jesus was, what his relationship to God was, and what was going to happen in the future. These factions feuded for 300+ years and wrote many texts on the subject of Jesus Christ. The Christian movement overall grew consistently over this 300+ years. Over this period of time, the Roman Empire periodically persecuted and killed those that believed in Jesus Christ as a God. In 313, Constantine signed the edict of Milan, which allowed for the practice of Christianity. Over the following decades, through 10 different Roman emperors and 5 different Popes, different factions of Christianity battled it out in a deeply politicized process. In 380, the Edict of Thessalonica was signed, which established Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire.

It is not clear to me what Jesus thought His relationship to God was. It’s not clear to me that Jesus was walking around saying He was equal parts God and man. This might be a controversial statement to some, but if you exclude John for the reasons we talked about earlier, and then look in the other three gospels about what Jesus was saying about his existence in relation to God. It is not clear.

In this analysis, the idea of “we all have a little bit of God in each of us” comes in to play pretty quickly. And I do believe that. God is in all of us, always. And it’s totally fair to say Jesus had more God in Him than any other person or entity ever. That seems apparent, right? Who else would even be in the conversation? Gandhi? Muhammad? Mr. Rogers? No one has ever been closer to God than Jesus. Just look at the fruits of the tree of Christianity. So I have a question mark on whether Jesus was equal parts man and God and what exactly that means. My relationship with God is not predicated on having a firm answer there.

I don’t know how God conducts Himself in this universe. I don’t know if God enacts miracles the way they are literally described in the Bible. And I don’t know if God does that sort of thing today. There is an enormous stack of scholarship examining the miracles in the New Testament. It does seem pretty clear that Jesus was known during His life as a guy that did “signs and wonders”. But there’s a whole cultural context around that idea of signs and wonders, and there were other people around the same time that were also said to have done similar type of stuff. So I don’t know what to think about the miracles in the Bible.

What is a miracle anyway? If you wanted to take a quantum physics perspective on it, you could say a miracle is an outcome with an infinitesimally small likelihood of occurring according to the known laws of the universe. Your hand is never supposed to be able to just push straight through the middle of a heavy wood door like a ghost. But there is a state of quantum physics where that COULD happen. That likelihood is incredibly low. To the extent incredibly unlikely outcomes happen, are they evidence of an overarching hand that is manipulating the laws of physics?

What we are talking about here is God’s causality in this world. I get a strong sense that God’s causality is in this world, but we can’t begin to comprehend it. But we can try. Grasping at the ungraspable. 

So yes, things happen all the time that are probabilistically unlikely. Someone walks away from a bad car wreck. Someone’s heart stops and starts again. A family prays and a child’s illness is suddenly cured. Someone prays for a better life and gets a great new job. These things happen. Often. But people die in car wrecks. People’s hearts stop and they die. Kids get cancer and the whole church prays for them and they die. And people stuck in a rough spot in life will pray and then have their life get worse, not better. So I have a question mark on miracles in the Bible. My relationship with God is not predicated on having a firm answer there.

I don’t know what to think about what Jesus said about heaven and hell. Those terms, heaven and hell. They are INCREDIBLY loaded when you say them today. When you dig into what those concepts meant when Jesus was alive and preaching, it immediately becomes a gray area. It is clear that the concept of "apocalypticism", the idea that the world was ending VERY soon, this was a concept that had a lot of traction across the Jewish culture in Jesus’ day. There were apocalyptic rabbis that came before and after Jesus. You don’t know their names because their movements died out, relatively quickly. The Jesus movement obviously did not die out. But the ideas of heaven and hell as they are now thought of in modern mainstream Christianity did not emerge until hundreds of years after, and there was significant disagreement amongst early church fathers about the details of heaven and hell.

Jesus did talk a LOT about “the Kingdom”. He mentions the Kingdom over 100 times in the Gospels. There is a mountain of scholarship on this topic. What exactly Jesus meant when He referred to The Kingdom is not straightforward. It’s just not. But Jesus seems to say that a significant aspect of the Kingdom is already here on Earth now, or rather then, 2,000 years ago. It seems like Jesus was telling people the Kingdom was already here, not yet visible, but breaking into existence through love, humility and self-sacrifice. This concept resonates deeply with me - the Kingdom is already partially here. And it is within. Within each of us. And able to be shared amongst all of us. 

On heaven and hell though. I will say that it is obvious to me how the ideas of heaven and hell would serve as a foundational piece upon which to build a functional society that can drive human prosperity. The concept of eternal justice for deeds done in this life - this is a stunningly powerful idea. You can change the whole world off that. We did. We have the receipts for it. It is undeniable. But as for the literalness, I have a question mark on heaven and hell. And I take comfort that there has been significant evolution of, and a wide array of disagreement over the millennia about, heaven and hell. My relationship with God is not predicated on having a firm answer there.

There is a term in Christian jargon called “penal substitution atonement theory”. This is the idea that we are all sinners and thus deserve to die for our sins. But Jesus paid our penalty of death by dying on the cross in our place. And that we can believe in this “penal substitution” and by believing, we are wiped clean of our sins and can spend eternity in the presence of God in heaven. And if you don’t believe this, you spend an eternity in damnation, or at the least, your spirit is annihilated. This is penal substitution atonement theory. I do not believe this. I do not believe Jesus taught this. Paul taught something very similar, but Paul also thought the world was ending in his lifetime.

Again, similar to heaven and hell, it is obvious to me how the idea of penal substitution atonement theory would serve as a foundational piece upon which to build a functional society that can drive human prosperity. What I find most important about these ideas is the strength of their transmission mechanism. That’s the razzle dazzle. These have INCREDIBLY strong transmission mechanisms. Stunningly powerful. They are the kind of ideas that could radically alter the face of humanity in strongly positive ways. They have. We have the receipts.

Penal Substitution is one theory under the umbrella of “Atonement Theories”, of which there are several. The Atonement Theory that I most closely align with is called Moral Influence Theory. Moral Influence Theory came into popularity almost 1,000 years ago. Moral Influence Theory says the primary purpose of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection was not to pay a debt, satisfy divine justice, or defeat demonic powers, but to reveal God’s love in a way that morally transforms humanity. The atonement, in this view, is primarily relational and ethical rather than juridical or metaphysical. That resonates with me.

There is a related view to Moral Influence Theory called the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel came from a pastor named Walter Rauschenbush who ministered in Hell’s Kitchen a 100 years ago. The Social Gospel states that, quote “Jesus did not die to appease the wrath of God, but to reveal and bear the weight of the world’s sin—and to call us to overcome it.” Rauschenbusch said “The purpose of the atonement was not to change God, but to change humanity.” He expands this to say: “The atonement must be social as well as individual. It must set society right.” So this Social Gospel says Jesus is the exemplar and liberator, not a substitute sacrifice. The cross reveals what love and justice cost in a broken world. Jesus died because he confronted unjust power structures—not because God demanded satisfaction or punishment. That resonates with me.

There is an additional related concept called the Anonymous Christian. This concept came from Karl Rahner, one of the most famous Jesuit philosophical theologians of the 1900s. The concept of the Anonymous Christian describes someone who, without explicit knowledge of Christ, nevertheless accepts God’s grace implicitly through living lives of authentic love and truth. And they are saved because of it - because God’s salvific will operates universally. That resonates with me.

When it comes to Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the snake, the apple, and Original Sin. There is quite a broad spectrum of belief across Christianity. According to surveys, approximately half of US Christians believe “God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years”. So that gives you a data point to kind of work off of. There were quite a few stories LIKE Adam & Eve that preceded Genesis. So it kinda seems like Adam & Eve were a theological remix of existing Mesopotamian motifs. I’ve spent a fair amount of time chewing on Adam & Eve. As you can probably guess at this point, I don’t take the story literally or the timeline literally.

My guess is Adam and Eve and original sin marked the period of time where early hominids transitioned to a level of consciousness and raw neurological development where humans could contemplate God in a new way and also have control over their thoughts and actions to a degree where the nature of the relationship between humanity and God changes. That view resonates with me a lot.

Think about it. Homo Sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. We’ve had language for 100,000 years. So our exact species was roaming around for a hundred thousand years without LANGUAGE. What was God’s relationship with humanity like during that 100,000 years where we didn’t have language? Probably somewhere between God’s relationship with a chimpanzee and God’s relationship with us!

When I start to think about it like that, the traditional ideas of heaven and hell and penal substitution begin to lose probability for me. Like, when did the soul start having exposure to this decision that determines your eternal fate in paradise or torment? There were hundreds of thousands of years of cavemen-looking dudes and their souls got treated like chimpanzee souls, and then one day, one cavemen got just developed enough that his soul now has a choice to make. The whole construct kinda starts to fall apart for me. It makes me think there’s something else going on. 

To me, the beginning of Genesis marks the period where humans started having at least the glimmer of a choice in how to act. We don’t assign moral failings in nature. The bear isn’t a real jerk for eating the fish out of the river. The lion isn’t an asshole for chasing down and ravaging the gazelle. When the python constricts its prey and then swallows it whole, we don’t say “that snake is going to hell”. Let’s bring it to our closest ancestors. Chimpanzees. Sometimes they’ll eat other baby chimps. What moral failing do we assign to that? None at all. Nature is metal, right? So somewhere in our history, humans got to a point where we have the potential to shuck our natural tendencies and do different. Do better. Do the right thing. The moral thing.  And thus the nature of our relationship with God changed. That’s what I think Adam & Eve is about. 

This approach is also approximately how I think about Jesus Christ.

By the time Jesus came around, humanity had evolved enough and cooperated and advanced enough that they had developed to the point where humanity was ready for a more advanced type of relationship with God. And this in turn led to more cooperation and species advancement. It all happens under the banner of grasping at the ungraspable. The God described in the Old Testament, kinda gnarly right? Well, the Old Testament was written by the humans of that day grasping at the ungraspable in that day, which was a pretty gnarly existence overall. By the time Jesus came around, life was still pretty gnarly but Jesus emerged in the midst of the height of the greatest civilization in human history at that time - the Roman Empire. It’s fair to say that humanity had evolved a lot by 30 AD relative to say 3000 BC. And so, Jesus Christ fundamentally altered the nature of humanity’s relationship with God. And it worked really well! We have the receipts to prove it.

I believe the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the defining moment of human history. The singular most impactful event of all time. Even atheist historians would agree with this, although they would alter the statement by saying the BELIEF in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the singular most impactful event of all time. I have a question mark about what exactly happened with the resurrection. It is a gray area for me. The gospel accounts of the resurrection have numerous contradictions in them. The four gospel accounts tell the resurrection story different ways with different details. The historicity of the event of the resurrection is a topic of immense scholarship. The scholarship is inconclusive.

Every piece of historical evidence we have on what the very first followers of Christ thought about the resurrection of Jesus leads us to conclude that there was a wide range of views about this event. What exactly happened? What was the significance? Wide array of beliefs about this from the very very beginning. If you had a GoPro set up outside the tomb Jesus laid in - I don’t know what the GoPro would show on Easter morning.

But something happened. What was it? There is strong evidence to conclude that Jesus’ followers came to believe He was resurrected more or less immediately after His death. Some scholars try to paint the picture that this resurrection story and the belief in it emerged decades after Jesus’ death - I don’t find that evidence compelling. It looks to me like basically right after Jesus’ death, the idea of resurrection was around. So what IS that?

And we know that Paul, a few years after Jesus’ death, had some kind of encounter with the spirit of Jesus that left him blind for a period and Paul was so impacted by this encounter that he went from persecuting Christians to founding the Christian religion and writing a good chunk of the New Testament. So what was THAT?

And we know that these personal encounters with Christ? That radically alter people’s lives? People never stopped reporting them. Straight through for the last 2,000 years. People keep having these experiences. They have them today. Every single day. Someone encounters Christ and it radically changes their life. WHAT IS THAT?

I won’t pretend to have an exact answer there but it’s definitely not nothing. It seems clear to me that with the resurrection we are in the realm of grasping at the ungraspable in the cosmic metaphysical. It’s THE ultimate all time #1 “supernatural” event. But there’s all kinds of other ones in that broad category.

And when it comes to that broad category of supernatural stuff, my gut reaction is it’s probably not all nothing. By supernatural stuff, I mean angels, demons, near death experiences, end of life experiences, bereavement visions, precognition, telepathy, remote viewing. These sorts of things. There’s a good chunk of documentation and also a decent amount of actual high quality studies in some of these areas. The overall evidence seems to me to be inconclusive. But, certainly leaves open the possibility of supernatural occurrences in some instances.

I mean, let’s just touch on bereavement visions for a second. This is an entire category of study because they’re so common. People die, and after they die, people report seeing visions of the deceased person. Usually it’s immediate family that report these visions. But when someone famous and beloved dies, reports of sightings after death sometimes skyrocket - most famously in modern times with Elvis. So is that what happened with the disciples? And Paul? And the countless other Christians over the last 2,000 years? Was all that bereavement visions? Does God move through bereavement visions?   

There are a handful of models in theoretical physics that imply the existence of at least one and potentially many dimensions that we don’t perceive as humans. There are many unanswered questions about those dimensions, what happens there, and how they interact with the three spacial and one temporal dimension that we experience as humans. All the “supernatural” stuff I just mentioned? I could see how those could be an approximation for some form of interdimensional interaction.

It really comes down to your belief in God and your belief about God’s causality in this world. Does God exist? Yes. Does God exist outside of spacetime? Yes. Outside of the dimensionality we experience as humans? Yes. Does God cause anything, ever, in this universe? Yes. Therefore, it would make sense that God could be moving in some way through these extra dimensions that we can’t perceive. Or at least can’t perceive yet… And these things we put in the supernatural bucket. I think sometimes these are just glimpses of what’s going on in those other dimensions.

I’ll leave you with this analogy. Imagine we live in something kind of like the Matrix. Like the movie the Matrix, but less dystopian. And imagine God is the architect of this Matrix. The all loving, all knowing, all powerful architect. And Jesus tells us in Matthew that - “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

What if Faith is humanity’s direct line to our Architect? Faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains because ALL IT TAKES IS A GLANCE THROUGH THE MATRIX from our Architect and mountains move. A glance through the Matrix in our direction. That’s all it would take to be the most impactful experience of your lifetime. Jesus was crucified and our Architect glanced through the Matrix at the disciples and they had an encounter with the spirit of Jesus. Paul was walking down the road to Damascus and our Architect GLANCED THROUGH THE MATRIX and Paul founded Christianity.

And that analogy resonates with me because this is how I have experienced God in my life. Just the tiniest little glimpses into the cosmic metaphysical. But then these moments end up being the most impactful of my life - experiencing just a glance through the Matrix. And I won’t pretend to understand why sometimes people get those glances through the Matrix from our Architect and sometimes they don’t. I don’t know. But I know it starts with Faith. Grasping at the ungraspable.

OK. That’s it. This was a discussion that could have been 4 hours or 40 hours. We touched very briefly on many topics that are incredibly deep and have SO much underneath the surface. I want to explicitly acknowledge that these topics were not even remotely close to sufficiently presented in regards to their depth. Over the coming months, we will dive into all of them in more detail. This was just meant to set the stage at the very beginning.

This was the last Episode on Faith - the center of Things Hidden. We did an intro episode and then three separate Episodes on Faith. And from here we’re moving on to each of the factors that surround Faith - Religion; Physics; Evolution; Consciousness; Philosophy; and Technological Innovation. The plan is to do one Episode for each of those factors - starting with Religion.

If you enjoyed this, hit like and subscribe. If you want to sign up for the blog, it’s in the description. If you’re looking for the online community, it’s coming soon. If you know someone that would be interested in Things Hidden, send this to them. I really appreciate your time, and I wish you the best.