The Faith Once Delivered — Installment Six of Seven
My Own Long War
A Personal Accounting: Zeal, Error, and the Cost of Fighting With the Wrong Weapons
A Series for FirstSentencePerspective.com
Estimated reading time: 13–16 minutes
In five installments we have covered the full landscape: the Pascha in its original Hebraic power, the Nicene severance, the documented reality of the fertility nemesis, the fabricated mythology of the myth merchants, and the mechanism by which folk custom displaces theological substance — along with what the sincere celebrant actually deserves to hear. This installment is different in register. This one is personal. The previous five were about the history. This one is about what that history has done to one man who has spent decades fighting it — sometimes rightly, often badly, and always with more certainty than the evidence warranted.
"I have been the zealot tearing down the decorated tree. I have been the sincere believer weaving theological meaning into the very symbols I once condemned. I have used Hislop's arguments without knowing they were Hislop's. I have called my own informed outrage discernment. This installment is my honest accounting — because the people I am asking to examine themselves deserve to see me examine myself first."
I. The Making of a Religious Zealot
Every zealot has an origin story. Mine is not unique in its structure, though the particulars are my own. It begins with a genuine encounter with the living God — an encounter that reoriented everything, that made the scriptures suddenly, urgently alive, that produced in me a hunger for truth and a corresponding impatience with everything that seemed to obstruct it. That hunger was a gift. What I did with it was not always wise.
When you discover that the faith you received has been significantly shaped by forces other than the scripture — by Constantine's politics, by medieval folk custom, by 19th-century commercialization — the initial response is righteous indignation. And the righteous indignation is not wrong. It is the correct response to a real situation. The prophets felt it. Elijah felt it, sitting under the broom tree after Carmel, declaring that he alone was left. Jeremiah felt it, watching the women knead cakes for the Queen of Heaven in the streets of Jerusalem.
The problem is not the indignation. The problem is what indignation does when it is fed rather than informed. And there is no shortage of feeding material. The internet is an ecosystem perfectly designed to nourish righteous indignation on half-truths. Every spring, the Ishtar-equals-Easter meme circulates. Every December, the Babylon Connection argument resurfaces. Every time, it arrives dressed in scholarly confidence and patriotic urgency — and every time, it feeds the indignation without requiring it to do the hard work of actual investigation.
I shared those memes. I heralded those arguments. Not because I was dishonest — I believed them. But because I had confused the intensity of my conviction with the quality of my evidence. I had mistaken zeal for discernment. And the people sitting in front of me were shaped by my certainty rather than by the truth, which meant that when the arguments were eventually dismantled by a careful questioning, the faith I had built on them was shaken along with the arguments. That is not a minor failure. That is a serious one.
"I had confused the intensity of my conviction with the quality of my evidence. I had mistaken zeal for discernment. When the arguments were eventually dismantled, the faith I had built on them shook along with them. That is not a minor failure."
II. The Equal and Opposite Error
The zealot phase, if it has any honest self-examination in it, eventually runs into the limits of its own arguments. You discover that Ishtar does not equal Easter. You discover that Grimm invented the sacred hare. You discover that the Easter Bunny is a 17th-century German folk custom, not an ancient Babylonian fertility symbol. And if you are not careful, that discovery produces not correction but capitulation — the swing from one error to its mirror image.
I made that swing. Having been inaccurate about the pagan origins, I very nearly concluded I had been wrong about the concern itself. I began, with considerable theological creativity, to assign Christian meaning to the cultural apparatus I had previously condemned. The egg became the sealed tomb. The emerging chick became the resurrection. The spring flowers became the new creation of 2 Cor. 5:17. I was, as I told myself and my audience, "redeeming the culture." I was taking the pagan symbols and filling them with Christian content, in the tradition of Gregory the Great, in the spirit of incarnational theology.
There is a real principle behind this impulse — the same principle that moved Paul to quote Aratus at the Areopagus, [1] the same principle that led the early church to use the Greek philosophical vocabulary of logos and hypostasis in its Christology. The Word does become flesh. Christianity does wear cultural clothing. These are not errors.
But Gregory's own method, as Installment Two, How We Lost the Thread, argued, carries a risk that the biblical record names with precision. The Deuteronomic warning is not against wearing cultural clothing. It is against worshipping Yehoveh in the way the nations worship their gods. [2] The form is not neutral. The vessel shapes the water. When I placed Easter basket theology in front of my audience as a form of incarnational wisdom, I was, in practice, giving the folk custom theological legitimacy it had not earned and the feast's original substance had not been recovered. The decoration was now doubly established: first by folk tradition, and then by my endorsement. I had not redeemed the culture. I had given it a theological residence permit.
"I told myself I was redeeming the culture. What I was actually doing was giving the folk custom theological legitimacy it had not earned, while the feast's original substance remained unrecovered. I had not redeemed the culture. I had given it a theological residence permit."
III. The Information Diet of Fear
There is a pattern I have observed in myself and in every community of zealous reformers I have ever been part of — a pattern that deserves to be named honestly, because it is the mechanism by which righteous indignation becomes self-sustaining and self-sealing.
The pattern is this: we curate an information diet designed to feed and confirm our existing convictions. The books we read, the teachers we follow, the online communities we inhabit — we select for sources that share our alarm, our framework, our conclusions. And because our alarm is attached to real things — actual corruption, actual historical revisionism, actual catechetical failure — the information we consume is not entirely false. It is characteristically half-true. Enough truth to be credible. Enough fabrication to sustain the alarm beyond what the actual evidence warrants.
This is precisely the information ecosystem that Hislop's work created and that the internet has perfected. The Two Babylons is not entirely wrong. The church has absorbed pagan influences. Gregory's method did create problems. The Nicene severance did damage the feast. These are real. But Hislop's method — the reckless parallel-drawing, the undocumented connections, the confident assertion of Babylonian origins for everything — adds to those real truths a superstructure of fabrication that inflates the alarm far beyond the actual evidence.
And the inflated alarm is useful. It maintains community cohesion. It sustains a sense of prophetic identity — we are the ones who see what others refuse to see. It feeds the particular form of spiritual pride that Paul identified in the Corinthian church as more dangerous than any external corruption: the pride of superior knowledge. "Knowledge puffs up," Paul wrote, "but love builds up." [3] The inflated alarm is a form of puffing up. And I have been puffed up by it.
"We curate an information diet designed to feed and confirm our existing convictions. And because our alarm is attached to real things, the information is not entirely false. It is characteristically half-true. Enough truth to be credible. Enough fabrication to sustain the alarm beyond what the evidence warrants. That is the most dangerous information diet of all."
IV. Righteous Indignation as Idol
This is the hardest thing I have had to admit in the writing of this series: there came a point in my long engagement with these questions when my righteous indignation became its own form of idolatry.
Not because the indignation was directed at false targets — the corruption is real, as this series has documented. But because the indignation became self-sustaining. It very nearly became the point. The pleasure of the informed outrage, the satisfaction of the superior position, the community of the rightly alarmed — these things began to matter more than the recovery they were supposed to serve. I was fighting for the faith once delivered while actually fighting for my own position as its most vigilant defender. The cause was real. The motivation had become mixed in ways I was not examining.
The prophet Jonah is the biblical case study for this dynamic in the extreme. He went to Nineveh. He preached the judgment. The city repented. And he was furious. [4] Because Nineveh's repentance meant his indignation was no longer warranted. The cause had succeeded and he had lost his position. The anger that had powered his ministry was now unemployed. He sat under his booth east of the city and waited, hoping, for the destruction that would vindicate his alarm and restore his identity as the prophet of doom.
I have sat under that booth. Not hoping for destruction — but attached to the alarm in ways that made recovery feel, on some level, like a threat. Because if the church recovers — if the feast is restored, if the instructed returns, if the sincere celebrant is given what was taken from her — then the prophetic identity of the one who named the corruption loses some of its urgency. The prophet of recovery has a shorter shelf life than the prophet of warning. That is a small and honest thing to admit. But it is true.
Jude's call to contend for the faith once delivered is not a call to maintain a position of informed superiority. It is a call to fight — and fighting means the willingness to lose the argument that serves your identity in order to win the ground that serves the kingdom. The faith once delivered is not my property to curate. It belongs to the people Yehoveh is calling. My job is to hand it to them, accurately and without my fingerprints obscuring the text.
"The faith once delivered is not my property to curate. It belongs to the people Yehoveh is calling. My job is to hand it to them — accurately, without my fingerprints obscuring the text, and without my indignation standing between them and the feast they were meant to receive."
"There came a point when my righteous indignation became its own form of idolatry. Not because the targets were false. But because the indignation became self-sustaining. The pleasure of the informed outrage, the satisfaction of the superior position, the community of the rightly alarmed — these things began to matter more than the recovery they were supposed to serve."
V. What Honest Contending Actually Looks Like
So what does it look like to fight for the faith once delivered without the corrupting influences of inflated alarm, fabricated evidence, and self-serving indignation?
It looks like this series — imperfectly, but intentionally. It looks like naming the real corruption on actual primary-source evidence, without embellishment. It looks like dismantling the false arguments against the corruption with the same rigor applied to the corruption itself. It looks like addressing the sincere celebrant with the recovery she deserves rather than the condemnation she doesn't. It looks like turning the same critical lens on the reformer's community that the reformer turns on the institutional church.
It looks like what Jude actually wrote: "contend earnestly for the faith," [5] not "contend impressively," "contend loudly," "contend with the most alarming possible account of the enemy." Earnestly. The Greek word is epagonizomai — to struggle intensely, to agonize alongside. [6] The image is athletic, not rhetorical. It is the strain of genuine effort, not the performance of ‘superior knowledge.’
It looks like Elijah at the still small voice, after the wind and the earthquake and the fire — recognizing that the most powerful manifestation of Yehoveh in that moment was not the dramatic display but the quiet, demanding word. [7] The faith once delivered is not served by the loudest voice in the room. It is served by the most accurate one.
I am writing this installment as a public examination of conscience — not as a performance of humility, but because the people I am asking to sit with these uncomfortable histories deserve to see the author sitting with his own. The zealot who shared Hislop's arguments. The teacher who theologized the Easter basket. The prophet who sat under the booth east of Nineveh and waited for the vindication that was never coming. These are not other people. They are chapters of my own story.
And the story is not finished. Which is why there is an Installment Seven.
"The faith once delivered is not served by the loudest voice in the room. It is served by the most accurate one. Earnestly — epagonizomai — to agonize alongside. The image is athletic, not rhetorical. It is the strain of genuine effort, not the performance of ‘superior knowledge.’ "
Coming in Installment Seven: The Faith Once Delivered
Installment Seven is the charge. It is the answer to the question this series has been building toward since the first sentence: what does actual recovery and restoration look like?
Not the recovery of a particular worship style or calendar practice — though those have their place. The recovery of the standard. The recovery of the measuring line. The recovery of what Jude meant when he wrote that there is a faith that was delivered once, completely, to the saints — and that it is worth contending for with everything we have, because everything the people of Yehoveh need is in it.
The feast that was always there is still there. It has not been destroyed. The Exodus is still in the text. The Passover lamb is still in Ex. 12. The Pascha is still in Melito's sermon, still in Papyrus Bodmer XIII, still in the Seder table of every Jewish family that will observe it this spring. The thread was cut. It can be recovered. But recovery requires exactly the kind of honest, primary-source, emotionally disciplined, theologically serious contending that this series has been trying to model.
Come to Installment Seven. The best is last.
"The feast that was always there is still there. The Exodus is still in the text. The Passover lamb is still in Ex. 12. Melito's sermon still thunders in Papyrus Bodmer XIII. The thread was cut. It can be recovered. But recovery requires exactly the kind of honest, primary-source, emotionally disciplined contending that the faith once delivered has always demanded. Come to Installment Seven."
Footnotes
[1] Acts 17:28 (CSB): "For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also his offspring.'"
[2] Dt. 12:4 (CSB): "You must not worship the LORD your God in the way they worship their gods."
[3] 1 Cor. 8:1 (CSB): "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up."
[4] Jon. 4:1 (CSB): "Jonah was greatly displeased and became furious." The entire fourth chapter of Jonah is the biblical anatomy of righteous indignation become self-serving.
[5] Jude 3 (CSB): "contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all."
[6] The Greek epagonizomai (ἐπαγωνίζομαι) in Jude 3 is a hapax legomenon in the NT — it appears only here. The compound verb intensifies the agonizomai root (to struggle, to compete athletically), with the prefix ep- adding the sense of contending on behalf of something. See Frederick Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 356.
[7] 1 Kg. 19:11-12 (CSB): "Then a great and mighty wind tore the mountains apart... but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire there was a voice, a soft whisper."
— End of Installment Six —
FirstSentencePerspective.com
Installment Seven: "The Faith Once Delivered" — The Final Installment
