“Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace.”

— St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies

Recently, a local Missoula business podcast had an episode titled “What is Truth?” Modernity feels like it’s fracturing. Truth was never lost. Humanity has grown bigger, flatter, busier, and advanced a lot in a short time. The world has been drowning in humanity’s access and global awareness, as well as its excess.

Both an Evangelical retreating into a tribal “Solo” Scriptura (just them, their Bible, and denominational interpretation), a Progressive into the fortress of “Lived Experience,” and many “sides” in the middle have embraced a kind of Autocentric Orthodoxy—a system where the individual functions as both the legislator and the subject of truth. While the hierarchy and enforcement of truth is vertical, top down, its reality and source is from the ground up.

Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, observed how the “rabble” (the general, mass population) was oppressive and needy in the 1800’s. Rome knew the mob was its source of power as well as its captive. The few leaders a group follows are a reflection of the collective, all stemming from individuals.

“Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The Shift From Local Tension to Standardized Order

To understand humanity’s gravitation towards dogmatic buffet lines, let’s contrast with how early Christianity functioned just before it became standardized. Archaeological and manuscript evidence of the first three centuries does not show a neat, sealed system, but a highly diverse movement navigating the friction of regional realities. Until it became bloody.

The Bodmer Papyri from the 3rd and 4th centuries in Egypt shows Christian scribes there didn’t just preserve the Gospel of John. They bound the biblical Book of Daniel alongside Book 6 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. They kept Greek comedies in the same library. Similarly, the Crosby-Schøyen Codex and Codex Sinaiticus included texts like the Shepherd of Hermas or the Epistle of Barnabas alongside what we now consider canonical scripture.

First century Christian practices were equally varied and localized. The elements of communion varied depending on the region. The Apostolic Tradition, an early Egyptian writing, historically attributed to Hippolytus of Rome around 215 AD, reveals a much more “sensory” and ritualistic practice. He notes the newly baptized drinking water, milk, and honey with the wine.

Some groups, known as Hydroparastatae or “Aquarians,” refused to use wine in the Eucharist, using only water instead. They were also called Encratites (“self-controlled“). Many of these followers were ascetics, practicing denial of the body, isolation, and communal living. Abstaining from wine in communion was somehow a threat to Christians’ livelihood in the Roman world, where wine was a staple.

This community wasn’t actively rebelling against Christ, but rather doing what everyone else was: working with what they had and knew, with the information available and the culture present. Many of these groups were reacting against the Dionysian wine-excess of Roman culture. They didn’t have the internet or a printing press, and most people were not literate or could not read Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, or whatever other local languages.

Then they drew the attention of Christians with too much time on their hands, and the “narcissism of small differences” became a salvation issue¹. In 250 AD, Cyprian of Carthage wrote letters arguing against such groups using only water. I’d just say he must not have been friends with a recovering alcoholic.

When the Christian faith and mythos were legalized and absorbed into the Roman structure, that dynamic objectively shifted. The “subjective” became defined and contained within walls with gatekeepers. The intimate, decentralized house church was largely replaced by the public basilica. Authority was centralized again. The messy, living dialectic between local practice and shared tradition was slowly formalized into a standardized system.

When an institution becomes large and codified, a natural human temptation, especially when the institution fails or feels oppressive, is to run as far away from the collective as possible.

“The crowd is untruth. There is no one who has more contempt for what it is to be a man than those who make it their business to be the leader of the crowd.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

Dialectical Integrity in Scripture

When a modern believer becomes overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information and questions, or burns out on institutionalism and political debates, the temptation might be to become a “Solo” thinker. It’s practically mystical: a faith in secret code, reading reality through a defined view, interpreting the news and “signs,” relying on an isolated tribes’ opinion for security to make it through the week, while going to them to experience the Divine “there.”

There’s a cacophony of possible labels, “isms,” and tribes to choose from, whether you’re a Christian or not. Atheists and a–gnostics are just as divided along the same kind of psychological fractures. Top-down, hierarchical truth, holding on to old assumptions, projecting our mortality into the distant future, and converting salvation into a disembodied evacuation of the soul is not far from Gnosticism², and both its cosmology and anthropology are still mystical.

Operating within a silo is not the pattern laid out in the New Testament. And, the solution to a rigid institution doesn’t have to be isolated individualism. It’s exchanging one god for another, and devils too.

Scripture works with narratives and transcends history and languages because, in part, it touches the human soul and psychology of our being. Neither a textbook nor a self-esteem manual, nor a prescription of the present reality, but rather a mirror and a history of God working. Systematic Theology cannot contain the systems Scripture actually uses. Narrative Theology respects the Text as it is, and invites both Soul and Truth, Science and Spirit to honestly engage with the Divine and manuscripts.

Scripture does its own thing, kind of like God and the Spirit. A term for the Scripture’s “model” might be Dialectical Integrity: the tension between individual revelation and collective verification. It’s the process of not sacrificing the sovereignty of the conscience, while also recognizing that a single ego isn’t the sole arbiter of truth.

It is in no small part why, as a nerd, an analytical mess, a recovering overthinker, and god-blessed “grateful alcoholic” now, that I am in love with studying it. Turn it 70X70 times over, dive into it, tear it apart, question everything if you want, but just don’t stop!

Lose yourself in it, and God will meet you there. Just don’t be surprised when you get what you asked for. I digress, though.

“We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.”

— Richard Rohr

Proliferating Apostolic Protocol Beyond Secret Codes

The New Testament text reflects this “negotiation” heavily:

• Paul’s Galatian Submission: Paul was protective of his individual calling, stating his gospel came by direct revelation. Yet, in Galatians 2, he writes about taking his revelation to Jerusalem to set it before the leaders of the church “in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain.” Even for Paul, a quintessential “Solo” thinker, internal certainty required external tethering.
• The Berean Triangulation: In Acts 17:11, the Bereans are commended not because they isolated themselves, but because they engaged in a dialectic. They received the new, apostolic message and immediately triangulated it against the existing Hebrew Scriptures. They didn’t just “feel” the truth; they measured it.
• Jerusalem’s Synthesis: Acts 15 is an ultimate stress test. The early church faced a massive conflict between the new “Solo” experiences of Peter and Paul with the Gentiles, and the established “Collective” customs of the Pharisees. Jerusalem didn’t fracture. Instead, it engaged the tension. James looked to the historical prophets, finding a precedent in Amos 9 that provided a framework for the new reality.
• The “Fourfold” Gospel: Acceptance of the four separate Gospels is another proof. When Tatian attempted to harmonize them into a single, contradiction-free narrative (the Diatessaron) in the 2nd century. For a while, it was popular, especially in the Syriac-speaking church. But ultimately, the broader church opted to keep the four distinct voices, choosing the tension of multiple perspectives over an artificially smoothed-out, authoritarian monologue.

“We mustn’t belittle scripture by bringing the world’s models of authority into it. We must let scripture be itself…”

— N.T. Wright

The Heresy of the “Solo”

When we look at the back half of the first 400 years of Christianity, the greatest threats were movements that tried to break the dialectic by eliminating possible competition. In response, many people fled to isolation and withdrew from the urban environments of Roman cities.

Different Montanistic traditions from the late 2nd century onward claimed direct, ecstatic possession by the Holy Spirit, speaking in the first person as with God. Different monasteries often would develop theologies similar to each other, the Greek Orthodox, and other non-Christian ascetic traditions. They believed their immediate, subjective experience superseded debated theology. It was mystical. And the Roman church often rejected it or attempted to reform it—not because they did not believe in the Spirit, but because the Montanists refused to submit their “internal” revelations to the “external” verification of dogma.

The same general instinct shows up inversely, within ascetic and monastic responses. Sometimes withdrawal was a necessary reaction to addiction, indulgence, and social chaos. Sometimes it was healthy and spiritual devotion. Yet, isolation can also become its own bubble and condition for existence. And, often, once monks become teachers, or the hermits become the authority, the danger is no longer excess of contact with the world but absence of correction from Rome.

In today’s time, isolating into bubbles is almost our default MO. Hermiticism, the modern male loneliness epidemic, and the rise of the manosphere have real overlaps (and inversely on the female “side” of things). I’m not saying they are the same thing, only that the resemblance is worth noticing. Squint, and you can see how the hermitic instinct is still tempting today.

The Fracture of Modern Dualism

When dialectical integrity is lost, we fall into the trap of false dichotomies. We’ve been handed an old Nature vs. Nurture debate—a complete illusion—and modern dualistic divides that humanity keeps flip-flopping between.

This fracturing forces the “mystical” into institutions and behind man-made authority. As two case studies, consider the language and doctrines of Calvinism and Charismatic/Pentecostalism. Both have co-opted Enlightenment/Eastern language into systems and doctrines unknowingly, commodifying and locking down the Divine behind dogmas, customs, and social codes³. One hides God behind a wall of “legal” justification, the other behind an “emotional” exceptionalism. It’s the first century again, with different actors, just noisier and more populated.

The human must integrate with reality to be whole. The answer to “what is truth?” should be you and me in communion with it.

Wrestling Together

The internet proliferated the delusion of Information Parity. We think having access to data—Greek interlinear, archeology articles, Google Scholar, theological hot takes (if you’re like me)—is the same as having the wisdom or character to synthesize it, to be it. The early church had less data but stronger mechanisms for being it. We have infinite data, but avoid authentic relationships and being.

Retreating into “Private Interpretation” is an epistemological dead end. Orthodoxy (Orthos + Doxa) requires a trajectory. We cannot draw a straight line with only one point. If the Self is our only reference point, it is just a dot in space. We need the “Other”—history, community, and Scripture—to establish direction and a functional base of operation in the present.

The historical and scriptural precedent points toward a more honest path that requires returning to the sources—original languages, historical contexts, and Semitic roots—and an actual walk with the Source. It means maintaining the right to deep, individual inquiry, and the willingness to bring those findings into a larger dialogue. To be tested, held accountable, be wrong, and brave enough to live life in this unfolding world with others doing the same.

The human being does not become whole by splitting reality apart. The human being becomes whole by integration. It’s the deeper movement beneath sanctification, salvation, enlightenment, and union. Not perfection or escape, but integration—the fragmented self gathered back into communion with what is real.

The Endgame: Union without Erasure

Not all inner experiences are equally true, and not all collective systems are equally holy. The goal isn’t simply “consciousness expansion” in the abstract; it is discerned union. Truth isn’t contained in an individual or institution, but found in the tension that holds them accountable to each other.

• Sanctification = Integration of the fragmented self.
• Salvation = Restored participation in reality.
• Union = Becoming undivided without becoming flattened.

The telos (goal) is not to be absorbed into an impersonal blob, or to become the cookie-cutter image of a narcissistic god. Unity without erasure, love and truth, peace for humanity are the telos of Scriptures. “That they may be one, as we are one” is not about sameness, conformity, or enforcement: It’s an invitation to a coherent relational way of being. Difference remains, not fractures.

The biblical answer to Autocentric Orthodoxy is not another orthodoxy built around the collective ego. It is Communion.

Or, if you prefer the philosophical register: Participatory consciousness under truth.

Or, the theological register: the self being conformed into Christ through the Spirit, in and with the body, and our neighbor. To be one with the Father.

That is what the telos has been pulling towards.

Scripture’s spiritual substance has always been moving toward a shared reality, a shared being, and a shared participation in the Divine. To be aware, accept, trust, and love things as they are. This is what family, love, life, and truth were always about.

It’s a dance. The process is the point; the journey is the destination. Not self-sovereignty or crowd-sovereignty, but “us” in Christ, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).

“We must learn to read the world and the Word together. To isolate one is to eventually misunderstand both.”

— Peter Leithart

*Footnotes (& Leftovers)

1. This dynamic is also captured in the 2nd-century dispute over the Lenten fast. When the Roman church attempted to enforce a singular, standardized practice, Irenaeus of Lyons intervened, noting that the variety in the way Christians fasted served to confirm their shared reality. Irenaeus said, “The disagreement in the fast confirms the agreement in the faith.” He understood that unity wasn’t found in the erasure of differences, but in a coherent participation in the same Truth across space and time. ↩︎
2. Gnosticism here is in the narrow historical sense, not as a synonym for “mystical” or ancient debates. Gnostic movements were diverse, but a recurring pattern in the literature is salvation through gnosis—a kind of hidden or saving knowledge—often joined to strong dualism, asceticism, a devaluation of material creation, and in some forms a diminished account of Christ’s real bodily life. That is not ordinary Christian mysticism. The point is narrower: any theology can drift gnostic when inward certainty or esoteric knowledge becomes ego-authenticating and enforced rather than something tested against embodiment, community, and the historical claims of the Text. ↩︎
3. The comparison here is not genealogical but structural and functional: Calvinist and later Reformed language of assurance, inward testimony of the Spirit, and epistemic certainty of salvation, enlightenment (e.g., Calvin, Institutes; Westminster Confession) and Pentecostal/Charismatic language of presence, filling, fire, encounter, and Spirit-baptism both function as ways of stabilizing what is essentially ineffable spiritual experience into repeatable categories of “knowing.” In this sense, both traditions echo a broader cross-cultural pattern found in contemplative and “awakening” traditions, including various Eastern frameworks of enlightenment, where truth is not primarily externalized as doctrine alone but internalized as lived immediacy—either as cognitive certainty or embodied encounter. The key structural similarity is that both traditions create regulated forms of access to the divine: one through interior assurance, the other through somatic experience, each translating the mystical into an intelligible, culturally governed mode of knowing. ↩︎