Reader's Note

This book is not neutral.

It takes positions, several of them substantial. That the Bible’s central movement is downward, not upward. That the New Testament fulfills the Old rather than replacing it. That Revelation is a first-century document, written to a first-century audience, describing events that were, for them, about to occur. That ecclesial authority in the New Testament resides in the gathered people under Christ, not in a priestly office, a hierarchical structure, or an institutional claim.

These are not novel positions. Each has been held, at different times and in different combinations, by serious readers of the text. But they are not the positions most church-going readers will have been taught. Some of them will run directly against what the reader was told the Bible said. That is the point. This book is in part an account of what I found when I stopped reading the Bible through the filter of what I had been told it said.

I do not claim every detail here is flawless. I have spent thirty-plus years reading the text, the original languages, the church fathers, the great systematic theologians of the Reformed tradition, and I still expect to be wrong somewhere. The question is how to find out.

My standard is the text.

If a reader (pastor, scholar, institution, or anyone who has lived with scripture carefully) can meet the argument on the text, can show where the Hebrew or the Greek or the canonical flow says something different from what I have said it says, I want to hear it. That is the only kind of disagreement that can correct a theological claim.

If the disagreement is this contradicts my tradition or the institution has never read it this way, that is not yet a challenge to the reading. It is a statement about where the disagreement lives. Tradition is worth knowing. Tradition is not the same as the text.

Read carefully. Disagree carefully. Bring the challenge back to the text.

I stand by what is written here until someone meets it there.