About

Who I Am

The central argument of this book — that God has always been the one who comes down, that descent is the pattern, that divine initiative is the whole story — is not something I arrived at from the outside. It is what my own life looks like when I hold it up to the text.

Where I Started

I was raised Catholic. When I was a teenager, my parents converted to Presbyterianism. The doctrinal furniture changed; the institutional frame stayed roughly the same.

I did not come to faith through a pastor or a program. I came to it alone, at sixteen, reading The Pilgrim’s Progress. No altar call. No counselor in a side room. Just a book and a recognition — something in the text addressed something real. That moment established a pattern I have never been able to shake: the encounter happens where no institution is present.

The Calling I Deferred

I felt called to ministry as a teenager. I deferred it for decades.

In my thirties I undertook rigorous seminary study working towards pastoral ordination — Hebrew, Greek, Patristic sources, systematic theology. The work was serious and I took it seriously. Then my first marriage ended in divorce, and with it went any sense I had that I was qualified for what I had been moving toward. I stepped back. The calling stayed. I did not.

This book is written roughly twenty years after that deferral. Make of that what you will.

Living with MS

I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at twenty-eight.

The prognosis she offered — five years to a wheelchair, ten to death — did not materialize. More than twenty years have passed. I am still walking.

What happened in that interval was not institutional. No church was present. No pastor was relevant. God showed up in a way that had nothing to do with any of the frameworks I had been handed. That encounter is not peripheral to this book. It is one of the reasons I wrote it.

MS also shaped the writing. Sustained composition — holding a long argument across thousands of words — is one of the things the disease takes from you. Not all at once. In ways that compound. I used AI assistance to recover that range, and I have been transparent about it from the first page. The theology is mine. The argument is mine. The tool made it possible to get it down.

The Church and Me

I have been inside nearly every Protestant tradition. Vineyard, Crystal Cathedral, Saddleback, Assemblies of God, Church of Christ, Congregationalist, Lutheran, Orthodox Presbyterian, Reformed Presbyterian, Reformed Baptist. I have sought out Eastern Orthodox more than once. I have found disappointment across most of them — not because the people were bad, but because the institution, reliably, protected itself first.

I was excommunicated from one congregation. The stated reason was lack of transportation — I had missed too many Sundays. No one offered a ride.

During my divorce, the church sided against me. Not after investigation. Before it.

I have asked questions that unsettled credentialed pastors — men who had graduated seminary years before and were not accustomed to being questioned. The response, more than once, was irritation. A category error dressed as an answer. I stopped asking.

I am not telling these things to perform a wound. I am telling them because they are part of the record. And because the person I am writing for has a record too.

What Broke the Framework

The first crack appeared when I was a teenager, comparing the NIV and KJV on the nephilim passage in Genesis 6. One said “nephilim.” The other said “giants.” The translations disagreed in a way that could not both be right. I asked why. The answer I was given was not an answer. It was a redirect.

That moment established a pattern that has never stopped: the text dismantles the framework. Not because the text is unreliable, but because the frameworks built around it frequently are.

It kept happening. I discovered that the English word baptism is not a translation — it is a transliteration that papers over three distinct Greek words, each with a different meaning, collapsed into one English non-word that carries none of them. I found that the Hebrew word for atonement (kaphar) and the Hebrew word for the pitch that waterproofed Noah’s ark (kopher) share the same root: covering is the idea, not payment, not penalty. I learned that apocalypse — the name of the last book of the Bible — does not mean catastrophe or doomsday. It means uncovering. And I read the Great Commission in Greek and found that “go” is not a command. It is a participle. “As you are going” is the phrase — not a military deployment order, but a description of ordinary movement through life.

Each time, the text said something different from what I had been handed. The institution had a framework. The text had a different one.

Theologically, I came up in the Darby-Scofield tradition — dispensationalism, end-times charts, the whole Hal Lindsey-era apparatus. I no longer hold any of it. I moved to an amillennial post-tribulation position, and from there to what I would now describe as a wholly realized and consummated covenant theology. The arc was long. Every step was driven by the same pressure. As I put it to myself at the time: the weight of the text could no longer hold the fictional fantasy.

That question — what does the text actually say? — is the spine of this book.

Influences

The theologians who shaped my thinking most directly, and the writers who shaped how I think about prose, argument, and what it means to tell the truth:

Why This Book

The person this book addresses — Christian background, lost confidence in what was handed to them, still in the wreckage, looking for something that holds — that is not a demographic I identified from the outside. I identified it from the inside.

Someone once observed that going to church no more makes one a Christian than standing in a garage makes one a car. That line is what started this project. Not because it is clever — it is — but because it named something I had been carrying without a name for years.

Descent theology is not a thesis I landed on after surveying the options. It is what the whole record looks like when I read it honestly: the MS diagnosis, the divorce, the excommunication, the long deferral and the long return. In every case, the movement was God toward me. Not the other way around.

That is the book. That is why I finally wrote it.