Making Sense of Religion 3: Grace Beyond Belief

Last week I continued to argue that Scripture was not intended to function primarily as a repository of answers, although it’s often treated as if it was. Rather, like Jesus himself, scripture operates as a formative, gentle, and non-coercive force that helps to shape perception—how people see the world, preserve tension—between the truths we are told and the truths we perceive, and resist premature closure of questions best left open.

When Jesus said he came not to abolish but to fulfill “The law and the prophets,” (Matthew 5:17–20), he was referring to the Law (the first five books of Moses) and the Prophets—understood broadly as the historical and prophetic writings through which that law was interpreted. To his contemporaries, Jesus was a revolutionary, yet he seems here to be saying “Not a bit!” It is an example of how he teaches in ways that disrupt expectation, unsettle interpretation, and leave his listeners—“those who have ears to hear”—with more to discern for themselves, rather than less. If you’re a student of Jesus, don’t expect to finish the semester primed to pass a final exam. There isn’t one. There just more work ahead.

This leaves us with a necessary and unavoidable question. If Jesus is not primarily providing answers—if he is not offering a clear doctrinal system, a settled moral code, or a definitive explanation of reality—then what the heck is he doing?

This question emerged almost immediately after Christ’s death and resurrection within the early Christian movement, and it has persisted ever since. It stands behind a wide range of theological arguments and developments, including some later judged to be outside the bounds of orthodoxy. Among the earliest and most striking of these were the texts we call the Gnostic Gospels.

These are a collection of Christian writings some possibly earlier, others clearly later than the synoptic Gospels. Many were only discovered in the twentieth century near Nag Hammadi in Egypt. They include texts such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth. Unlike the synoptic Gospels, they are less concerned with narrative—with what happened—and more concerned with interpretation of what happened—what it means. They tend to present Jesus not as a teacher of moral instruction or a figure within history, but as a revealer of hidden truth.

For example, the Gospel of Thomas opens with a striking line: “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.” Elsewhere it states, “The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you… When you come to know yourselves… you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father.” This is not entirely foreign to the canonical tradition—but it shifts the emphasis.

The Gnostic insight or perception was that Jesus’ teaching could not be reduced to moral instruction, legal pardon, or doctrinal clarification. They recognized that he was addressing a condition deeper than behavior or belief. He was addressing a condition of perception itself.

The Gnostic Gospels are still often treated as aberrations—deviations from “authentic” Christianity—and indeed were discounted during the formation of the biblical canon. Historically, that judgment seems largely justified. But if we ignore them entirely, we fail to understand the conditions that produced them. They didn’t arise in a vacuum, nor were they driven by speculation. They represent an honest attempt to grapple with something that had not yet been fully articulated: the nature of the transformation Jesus initiates in those who encounter him.

Throughout the canonical Gospels—the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John we are familiar with—Jesus consistently frames the human problem in terms of perception. He speaks of ignorance not primarily as lack of information, nor of disobedience as rule-breaking, but of blindness—of having eyes and failing to see, even though light is all around. The truth about reality is readily available but it often doesn’t register. The difficulty lies in our inability to perceive the reality all around us. (By ‘reality,’ I mean not simply the physical world, but the underlying conditions that allow life, relationship, and coherence to persist.)

The Gnostic writers seized upon this emphasis. They concluded that salvation must therefore involve a form of awakening—a coming to see what had previously been hidden or misunderstood. In this respect, their intuition aligns with a persistent thread in Jesus’ own language. The idea that truth liberates, that light reveals, and that recognition transforms is not foreign to the canonical Gospels; it is central to them as well.

This interpretation also resonates with broader philosophical traditions. Across cultures, thinkers have observed that human beings are often governed by desires and assumptions they don’t understand. We act with confidence and conviction even when we are fundamentally misaligned with reality. The Gnostic response to this condition was to elevate knowledge—gnōsis—as the means of liberation. If the problem is misperception, then the solution must be insight.

The problem for the Gnostics is that what begins as an observation about perception risks becoming a doctrine centered on cognition. The question is no longer simply how one comes to see, but what one must know in order to see. In attempting to preserve the inward, perceptual dimension of Jesus’ teaching, the Gnostics gradually detach it from the concrete conditions—the reality—in which that teaching was originally given. They spin what had been a relational encounter with the living Jesus into a cognitive thesis. They turn what had been something to be lived—to be acted, to be done—into something to be known. Recognition is replaced by knowledge. Insight into reality substitutes for actual alignment with reality.

And this clears the way for hierarchy to develop. Those who possess more insight stand in a different relation to reality than those who possess less. Embodiment, through perception, recedes as knowledge advances. The material world becomes something to transcend rather than the locus of transformation. Suffering becomes something to escape rather than something within which meaning is formed.

In contrast, the New Testament insists, with remarkable consistency, that whatever transformation Jesus brings must occur within the conditions of human life, of reality. The Word does not remain abstract; it becomes flesh. Truth is not merely decided intellectually; it is embodied through physical perception. Love is not simply recognized as a concept; it is enacted as a lived entity. In rejecting the Gnostic texts, the early church preserved this fundamental understanding. It meant that salvation must be lived rather than merely known, and that alignment with reality cannot be separated from history, community, and embodied existence. 

Yet in guarding against abstraction, the developing mainstream Christian tradition also gradually shifted in an aberrant direction. Where the Gnostics elevated knowledge, the church increasingly emphasized belief. Where the Gnostics focused on inward awakening, the church focused on doctrinal clarity and institutional continuity. This shift is understandable. Communities require shared belief, shared language, defined boundaries, and stable forms of transmission. Without them, traditions do not endure. 

But over time, the articulation of belief can begin to replace the transformation it was meant to describe. Salvation then becomes a matter of belonging to a particular faith community and agreeing with its doctrines. The inward work—the transformation of perception—recedes. Experience becomes subordinate to doctrine. Fresh insight becomes suspect. 

So we end up with two divergent paths, both veering from the true way. The Gnostic path reduced salvation to knowledge. The orthodox path reduces it to belief. In both cases, something essential is displaced. The dynamic, participatory, and relational character of transformation is replaced by something static. Either know, or believe. Transformation becomes secondary rather than central.

Jesus does not walk either of these paths. He does not offer knowledge accessible only to the initiated, nor a system of propositions to be affirmed as doctrine. His teaching resists both abstraction and reduction. It points instead toward a way of life—one that must be entered rather than merely understood.

What we see in the Gnostic writings is not an isolated curiosity but a familiar process. People encounter something they find compelling—in this case, the teaching of Jesus—and they try to explain what it means. In doing so, they inevitably simplify, organize, and emphasize certain aspects over others. That is not exactly a mistake; it is how understanding is communicated. But something is lost in the process. What may have been open-ended or difficult to pin down becomes more definite. What was suggestive becomes assertive. And once an interpretation takes a clear form, it can be taught, defended, and eventually set in stone.

The early Christian community faced this problem in a particularly acute form. The teachings of Jesus were being carried across geography, language, and culture. The original witnesses were aging and dying. At the same time, different explanations of what Jesus meant—and what he was doing—were beginning to diverge, sometimes sharply. Under these conditions, the question was no longer simply “What did Jesus mean?” It became “What must be preserved if this movement is to remain coherent?” 

The response took several forms, but two are central: the formation of the Christian canon and the development of its creeds. The canon (the collection of texts recognized as authoritative and formally adopted as Scripture) emerged over time through use, debate, and discernment. Some writings were retained because they were widely read, closely connected to the earliest witnesses, and broadly consistent with the developing understanding of the community. Others were set aside because they caused confusion; not necessarily because they lacked insight.

Creeds developed alongside this process. They were not abstract theological exercises, at first. They were practical tools—brief statements that clarified what Christians affirmed and, just as importantly, what they did not. They addressed questions that had become unavoidable: Who is Jesus? In what sense is he divine? What is meant by salvation?

Thus, the early church translated a set of teachings and experiences into forms that could be preserved and shared across generations. And in doing so, it made those teachings more stable, but less open to debate. Because once beliefs are clearly stated, the original intent to preserve meaning gradually becomes a way of determining belonging. The question is no longer primarily whether a person is undergoing transformation, but whether they affirm the defined creed.

This shift is so gradual as to go largely unnoticed. The language of faith, which originally pointed toward a lived reality, began to take on a more formal meaning. To “believe” came to mean agreement—holding the correct view—rather than trust, alignment, or participation in a way of life. The implications are significant. If salvation is a matter of belief, then you don’t need a transformation, you don’t need to undergo a deep reordering of perception or life; you must simply hold the right intellectual understanding. The center of gravity shifts from transformation to agreement, from lived reality to defined position.

Transformation can still occur in practices, communities, and individual lives. But it is no longer the primary reference point. It is expected, perhaps, but is not a formal, structural  requirement in the individual. At the same time, institutional structures grow in importance. Authority becomes necessary to define and maintain boundaries. Differences must be resolved or contained. Interpretations must be evaluated against the accepted, orthodox, standard. What was once open-ended becomes increasingly managed—and almost bureaucratically closed.

This development is understandable. Any community that intends to endure must develop forms of stability. Without shared language and agreed meaning, it fragments. But there is a cost. Where the Gnostics moved toward knowledge as the defining feature of salvation, the institutional church moved toward belief. In both cases, something shifted away from the lived and toward the defined. The question is no longer open to debate. The answer has been given. And once the answer is given, there is nothing left to see.

It would be easy to conclude that institutionalization itself is the problem—that something vital was lost and should be recovered by stripping away doctrine and structure altogether. But that conclusion would also be facile, and miss something deeper. A shift away from experience and toward explanation, and from explanation to system, is not unique to the institutional system of religion. It appears wherever human beings attempt to preserve and transmit something they consider important. Language, categories, and shared forms are not optional additions; they are needed for continuity.

The issue is not that institutional systems form, but that over time they change to favor clarity over ambiguity and reward consistency over exploration. They come to depend on definitions, and definitions draw boundaries. As those boundaries solidify, the system increasingly refers to its own formulations, its own creed and doctrines, as the standard for what is true. At that point, the system is no longer primarily pointing beyond itself to the reality it originally sought to describe. It is maintaining itself.

This is what I mean by distortion. It is not that the original insight (the insight that led to the formation of the system) was false, but that its expression has become narrower than what it was intended to convey. And this tendency is not confined to Christianity; similar developments seem to occur in other traditions. What is described in one context as knowledge appears in another as enlightenment, in another as awakening or realization. The language differs, but the underlying dynamic is similar: an initial attempt to make sense of reality gives rise to systems that, over time, become less flexible than the reality they describe. 

Daosim presents an unusually direct example in the very opening lines of the Dao De Jing, whichstates: “The Way that can be trodden is not the eternal Way” and “The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” I interpret “the eternal Way” and “the eternal name” to mean reality. So these two statements to me mean: You are just not capable of walking the real, the true path (of Jesus, I would add), and your description of things does not align with their reality. (I must stress that this is my interpretation; the standard interpretation is just that The Dao cannot be fully captured, not that it cannot be followed.) At best, you can see through the glass darkly. Language is inherently limited. The moment we pin down reality in words, we have already, in some measure, reduced it. What can be named can be organized, taught, and preserved—but at the cost of mistaking it for the thing itself.

Later Daoist traditions, like their Western counterparts, developed texts, interpretations, schools of thought, temples, rituals, and liturgies. The same pressures toward clarification and continuity were at work. Yet the original warning remains intact: that there is a fundamental difference between reality and our descriptions of it, and confusing the two is not a minor error but a fundamental one.

In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus consistently speaks as though the reality he refers to is already present. The kingdom of God is within our reach. So there is no need to create (in our imagination) a separate reality. We need only to perceive and participate in the one that already exists. But such perception involves changing how one sees and how one lives. It is not reducible to knowing something or believing in something written. 

Knowledge and belief begin to feel insufficient not because they are wrong, but because they capture only part of what is involved. What is being pointed to is better understood as a condition of alignment—an alignment between the individual and the structure of reality itself. Hence my thesis that religion is not primarily about knowing or believing—it is about aligning. When that alignment is present, coherence tends to follow: relationships tend to hold, communities tend to function, and life tends toward stability rather than breakdown. When it is absent, the opposite occurs: there is a tendency to fragmentation, conflict, and instability. This can be described in theological language—but it also resembles what we observe in complex systems.

In the Christian religion more than any other, the language traditionally used to describe this condition of alignment is Grace. But that term too has been shaped by layers of theological interpretation that may obscure its underlying meaning. Grace is often presented as a form of divine leniency, or as a gift granted despite failure. Within doctrinal systems, it becomes something to be defined and positioned in relation to law, merit, and judgment. But if we return to the argument we have been tracing today, a different understanding becomes possible.

The different understanding is that grace is the condition under which alignment with reality becomes possible. It is what allows more-or-less selfish beings with autonomy, competing interests, and the capacity for harm to exist together without collapsing into conflict. It is what makes sustained coherence possible. When Jesus speaks of forgiveness, of love for one’s enemies, of the last becoming first, he is not introducing arbitrary demands. And he doesn’t just tell us but shows us, by walking the path he walks, what alignment with this underlying structure looks like in practice, to those with eyes to see. His teachings and his life demonstrate how reality operates at a deeper level than than we, with our immediate self-interest always in mind, can see. This is why they often seem counterintuitive. They don’t align with short-term advantage. But they do align with long-term coherence.

Open systems that align with this understanding of grace tend, over time, toward stability and life. Closed systems that don’t align tend eventually toward fragmentation. The process begins with an encounter, whose interpretation then becomes definition, which in turn leads to systematic degradation of the meaning of the encounter. Each step is understandable. Each serves a limited human purpose. But each also narrows what came before it. The question of what it means to live in alignment with reality, which is the open question Jesus is gently driving us toward answering for ourselves, is gradually replaced by answers that can be stated, defended, and transmitted. But the original question doesn’t disappear. It remains beneath the surface, available to be asked again when the system’s answers no longer make sense.

To make sense of religion, then, is not to choose between knowledge and belief, nor to reject system—religion—altogether. It is to recognize what religions are attempting to preserve—and what they cannot fully contain. Knowledge and belief are not a way of living. They are attempts to describe one and stick to it. The task is not to discard our knowledge and beliefs, nor to accept them uncritically, but to see through them—to the reality they are trying, sincerely but imperfectly, to express. 

And if that reality is what we have begun to call grace—not a doctrine, but a structure—then its implications extend beyond any single tradition. They extend to any system in which intelligence, agency, and relationship must coexist. And that is a discussion for next week. 

Sharon: Is this a singular reality, or—in the context of what I think we’re moving toward, which is a culture of grace—are there multiple realities in that context? I have a bias toward multiple realities myself because of the subjective nature of the experiential application of living grace.

And it seems to me—I love the idea—that institutionalized religion offers us a unique opportunity to experience multiple contexts of culture and multiple realities of grace, as defined by that institutional perspective. I don’t have—again—I love what you said about the Bible not having answers, but having questions. And I think that your presentation today was spot on in that we need to ask the questions and live the experience.

Which is where you’re creeping close to what I would call phenomenology, because it’s really about lived experience more than it is about the parameters defined by formal and institutionalized religion. Because I think the Holy Spirit speaks to each of us in extremely unique ways, at the unique times and in the unique context that we need that message.

So my bias might be that there are multiple realities, grounded in a core, central construct, led by Jesus and lived by Jesus in the way that he leads us, in the context of the culture of Christianity as Christ lived.

David: I’m with you to some extent, because we’re all different. What makes me hesitate is that, of course, I can’t speak for your reality. If I’m honest, I can only speak for my own. And then we get into the question of beliefs. Your core, central construct is something to which we all adhere, but how we live it is going to be different for all of us.

C-J: This morning, I read a little piece about how the warming Earth—the ice in different areas of the world—is receding, melting, and exposing new biomes. And we tend to think about this only in a negative sense, but at one time that was a living biome. It wasn’t covered with ice, and it had a purpose. That biome existed because of its environment.

So I use that as an overlay into your discussion today—that, as I’ve said many times, the Earth is dynamic, and so are we. What we think as a child changes as we go into our teens and as our brain grows. It’s not just experiential; we are compelled—if our body is able—we are compelled to walk, we are compelled to ask questions, we are compelled to explore. It’s just in our DNA.

As hunter-gatherers, there might be food here, but it’s always, “What’s over there?”—just like small toddlers asking, “Mom, what’s over there?” So I think that our spiritual life is probably parallel to that. And when we exercise that questioning environment, that biome will change how we perceive ourselves, how we perceive our environment—whether it is safe or dangerous, captivating or something we want to leave.

Let me sit here for a while—this is pleasant—or let me get out of here. All of that changes our spiritual relationship with the divine. When we feel safe, we feel loved, we feel secure—especially when we’re in community—and the reverse is also true. When we’re in survival mode—fight or flight—that chemistry in our brain supports our perceptions. If I think I should be running, I’m going to run, or at least my heart is going to be pumping in case I need to run.

I just think it’s a wonderful way that you put it, because it was linear, and yet it didn’t have really clear boundaries in terms of having to fit in a box. Because, as you say, each of us has our own perception, experiences, and boundaries. But when we are open to looking at something and saying, “I hadn’t considered that,” or “I was unaware of that,” then we begin to ask what that means for us in our personal lives and even in our own survival—our own biome.

I really paused on that, because I’m beginning to see more of this in things related to the planet’s evolution—what we’re discovering in terms of ancient cultures, civilizations, artifacts that were buried, animals that went extinct, what they ate, what their natural habitats were. So for me, it’s an exciting period of time. I’m also mindful of the impact of humanity and the responsibility for it.

Donald: I’m not sure how much of it is coincidence or chance—or maybe it’s just because two things are coming close together that I want to compare—but I recently found this app called Abide that basically has all kinds of help for you, both morning and evening. It’s an app you can get on your phone, and I’ve been listening to it for a few weeks now.

Last week it was focused on the Passion, but now it’s moved back to topics that it chooses to present. And this morning it presented Acts 2:42–44 and talked about the formation of the church after Christ left the earth. Then it was up to the people to try to decide: what would the church actually look like? What does that actually mean?

I don’t want to speak on behalf of the app, but my takeaway was that it really was about being in harmony with your community—loving your neighbor, that was supreme. And then it went on to talk about whether you would be able to sit down with anybody in your community and break bread with them, as it was described.

This is a very unique community, and certainly the majority of people I think of as my community are Adventists, but there are many who are not. And I couldn’t really think of anybody in the community that I would find it difficult to share a meal with—sit next to and talk with.

Now, a rift has come between a certain village church I know and the more traditional Seventh-day Adventist Church, but I wouldn’t have a problem sitting next to anybody in the village church, independent of their understanding or interpretation of faith—your faith or mine. It doesn’t bother me. It really doesn’t. But I’ve heard even this week from some dear friends who would find it very difficult because of things that have been supported or represented. 

So I guess my point is: here you were talking about relationships and communities, and Acts 2:42–44 talks about relationships and communities. At what point are we talking about a global understanding and community of faith—believers? Because when you start using words like truth as absolutes, things get challenging. Today’s sermon is titled “Mark of the Beast,” and I’m actually a bit fearful of it, to be perfectly honest, but I have faith in our pastor that he can present that topic without too much friction.

But we’ve been cautioned, as Adventists, about building alliances with other faith groups—that we need to stand alone because of our doctrines or beliefs, but I think it’s about relationships and communities. The idea that “Believing defines belonging” is beautiful. It couldn’t be more nicely expressed. But all of a sudden, if we are believers and therefore a community, then those who are not believing as we believe are not part of our community. Is that what that means?

C-J: We have many communities—a working community, where we live, where we shop, spiritual communities. And as you said, you can’t think of anybody you wouldn’t be willing to share a meal with. Of course, we also have other pieces of our personality. We don’t want people to see anger, or fear. We want to be rock solid in our belief system and our identity. 

But we travel with ourselves. What we say and what we do are usually congruent, and we carry that with us. When you say “please” and “thank you,” it shows you have a certain standard of what a healthy relationship should look like. When you go out and vote your conscience politically, or express yourself in a conversation where you feel safe enough to be completely authentic, or invite people into your home—not for anything deep necessarily, but just to enjoy a meal, sit around a fire, go for a walk in the woods, play some games—you’re not looking for anything more than pleasant company.

So I think it changes, and it should change. But we’re always in community. We cannot—unless we choose to walk alone in the woods—live outside of community. We have to live in community in order to survive, and there are many communities that we live in.

Don: But belonging to a community has with it a certain amount of baggage. You have to believe—you have to hold common viewpoints. And it seems like we’re hardwired to want to do that, since the Fall in Genesis and the eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Discernment, parsing out differences, making judgments—these become part of our nature. And living with open-endedness is really a very difficult thing for most people. They abhor a vacuum.

The church, religious leadership, and intellectual traditions within Christianity—and other religions—have always been very willing to step in where there’s a vacuum of knowledge, information, or viewpoint, and fill it with what is called “truth.” So I’m wondering how practical, how actionable is it to form a community of faith based on open-endedness—based on questions rather than answers? Because that seems to me to be the most problematic part.

David: I think this very class is the prime example of the fact that you can do something about it. Here we all are, still asking questions, even though some of us have been set in our ways for so long. But we’re still willing to sit down and discuss these open-ended questions. I think it can be done. One just wishes that the larger institutional churches would do it a bit more than they do.

C-J: I think this is very similar to political bodies. You see it when there’s a revolution within a political structure—a community. The Universalist Church does this—what we’re doing here. They consider what’s best for the community because they see themselves as humanitarians and stewards. But they also have a private spiritual life, and nobody says it has to align exactly with anyone else’s. Are my experiences different? Yes. What I bring to the table, in terms of the richness of those questions, is my experience. And it is pretty respected. For the most part, some people might say, “You can’t do that here,” but I think it’s critical—we must.

And Jesus was always asking questions. His audience were Jews, for the most part. They already knew the doctrine, the rituals, the expectations, their place within that paradigm. And Jesus was really trying to say, “You have to look within, accept who you are, and change what does not benefit you—or the community or communities you move through.”

And sometimes you have to be a zealot. Sometimes you have to stand up and say, “This is terribly wrong, and no more.” And you can’t just put the label on it that “God said.” You have to think about the benefit of the community and the world we live in. That world was much smaller then compared to ours, but the intention was the same—control.

Don: I’m struck by the concept of stages of faith, which we haven’t talked about much recently, but have discussed a lot in the past. It seems to me that there are people at different stages of faith who would find this concept easier to embrace—and to live with—than others who are in need of less open-endedness and more solid viewpoints.

So I’m wondering to what extent our discussion topic has a stages-of-faith dimension to it as well.

David: It’s relevant. But I wonder about the stages-of-faith idea. There’s a danger, perhaps, of institutionalizing it. At the early levels, you have people who just go to church regularly and do everything they’re supposed to do. And then at the higher end, you have the “wise elders,” who are beyond all of that and thinking more deeply. That almost becomes an institutional structure at the individual level.

But the reality we perceive, I think, goes beyond the institution. This goes back to Sharon’s point about multiple realities. In a way, every one of us is at a different stage. We just view reality differently. Of course, we can change, and I think that’s what we’re being encouraged to do—by Jesus—to change the way we perceive the truth of things. But how do we get there? We have to do it ourselves. In a way, Jesus is telling us we’re on our own—we have to figure it out for ourselves. The institution, in many ways, can’t help us there.

So there might be, in that sense, a billion different stages of faith—or even just a continuum with no defined stages at all. Just a whole continuum of faith. But even faith seems not as important to Jesus as seeing—as I’ve tried to bring out today. Jesus seems to be most concerned that we open our eyes and see for ourselves what’s going on. We’ve just got to open them.

Donald: Our church seats a couple of thousand people, and it has two services. I don’t think it’s unique in that it also has small groups, because corporately they all come under the same roof. But when you want to have a relationship, it has to be done on a smaller scale. But I wonder: could we literally have a Zoom meeting with 50 people doing something like this class? Or would it break down because we really wouldn’t know each other? It’s not that we wouldn’t trust each other, but we might be more cautious about what we say.

I belong to a non-denominational Bible Study Fellowship, and it has rules rules. It’s gender-based—men meet with men, women with women—and there are guardrails: no sports, no politics. The conversation is kept strictly within Scripture. 

If you start getting into doctrine, denomination, or broader institutional questions, you’re likely to go off track. So I’m just wondering—how big can you scale something like this? Because I think that relates to Don’s question. Human nature tends to fill a void with someone or something that says, “No—this is the way it’s going to be. If we’re going to stay together, this is it.”

C-J: I think it’s true—when you get beyond, say, 30 people, not everybody gets to express himself or herself. But it also implies a responsibility on us to take the initiative to be well informed. To go to a Bible study and never read your Bible, or not attend services, or not stay in community with like-minded people, really demonstrates that there isn’t a commitment. So I don’t think it’s just about methodology or how things are presented.

Here, we trust one another, and it’s a small group. If you want to speak, that opportunity is there. But even at a dining room table, or at a wedding, that doesn’t always happen—it’s often just polite conversation. You’re kind of skimming the surface. But if you really want meaningful relationship—internally and externally—you have to be a well-informed participant.

Sharon: I wonder if there’s any application here to Maslow’s hierarchy—that certain people need the safety and security of well-defined parameters, while others of us, hopefully at a stage of spiritual maturation, are able to self-actualize.

That could be the difference between open systems and closed, structured systems that David was talking about. But it seems like there is a continuum. Some people find safety and security in very concrete and tightly defined boundaries, while others of us tend to resist that as we move toward spiritual maturation.

And perhaps it becomes acceptable to say that it’s okay to ask questions, and it’s okay to come up with different conclusions—as long as we abide in the anointing power of grace and the Holy Spirit.

Reinhard: We live in this world, in community, and we go along with tradition. Tradition can sometimes limit speaking the truth—even in discussions like this. But we also have the Spirit of God, and I think tradition’s boundaries can be broken. We can always look at Jesus. When he lived in his time, he confronted the traditions of the Jewish people directly—head to head.

In terms of personal relationships, I think of the Samaritan woman. In that short encounter, Jesus had a very powerful effect on her life and on the community. He showed how to worship God—not in a specific place, like Mount Gerizim or Jerusalem—but in spirit and truth. More than that, he broke social, racial, and even gender barriers. The Samaritan and Jewish communities were divided, and women were considered second-class citizens. But Jesus approached everything according to truth—that God treats all people the same. We are all children of God.

So tradition can limit us—from speaking, from acting—but if we are guided by the Holy Spirit, even in small groups, or in what is happening in the world, we cannot just remain silent. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with discussing what’s happening in the world, or our responsibility as Christians. If something is wrong, shouldn’t we say something? Shouldn’t we correct it, or at least address it?

That is the duty of a believer—to be a light in the world. Even in structured groups, where topics are limited, I think we can still speak in a respectful way about broader issues, as long as we are grounded in love and understanding. When Jesus said we worship in spirit and truth, that truth brings freedom. So I believe we should keep moving forward—continuing to speak, to act, and to share truth in love.

David: I suppose what I’m suggesting is that the more closed a religion is, the more it risks obsolescence and collapse. There’s a scientific corollary: a closed system will eventually die of entropy. The processes within use up all the available energy, things stop happening, and it effectively ceases to exist. An open system, by contrast, continues to evolve. So a religion that remains open—continuing to ask questions rather than fixing everything into rigid beliefs—is going to last longer and have more impact than a closed one.

I’ve always been struck—since Don first invited me to this group—by the fact that Adventism has no formal creed and is open, at least in principle, to reconsidering ideas. That’s a wonderful thing, because it may help ensure its continuity—provided, of course, that it doesn’t become overly closed by its more conservative elements.

It is time to begin thinking about whether “agentic” artificial intelligences will develop any kind of morality or spirituality. If we, as intelligent organic beings, can’t help but ask these questions, why would an intelligent inorganic being be any different? Why wouldn’t it also begin to wonder about these fundamental things? We’re going to start getting into that next week.

C-J: David has been very open. I’ll use myself as an example—I’ve said at times, with respect to AI, “Absolutely not, I will not do this.” But I also recognize that if I don’t engage, I can’t protect myself.

I have to be comfortable enough with the tools to recognize deception to some degree, or at least to understand how something might happen. I don’t think these developments are intentional in a harmful sense. I think people didn’t anticipate how quickly things would evolve, or how to manage them, and now they have to go back and address that.

But that’s also a good thing—they recognized it early. I’m sure there are a lot of brilliant people working on these issues right now, asking “what if?” We have to think in those terms—what if—and also make sure that users like us are given tools for protection.

I don’t need to know how to write the code, but I need systems that can flag problems for me—something that says, “Shut this down right now; there’s a risk here.” Like a warning—a wolf at the door. If I accidentally open something or overload a system, I need safeguards. Ideally, systems should be designed to protect users who aren’t experts.

It’s not about keeping people ignorant—it’s about appropriate boundaries. I don’t need to understand enriched uranium in detail; I just need to understand its implications and support responsible oversight.

And I see the same thing here. Science and technology have advanced to the point where we can’t go back 50 years—not in research, not in food production, not in communication, not in environmental management. We are at a crossroads. So we have to be diligent—and ultimately, I think, trust that the moral conscience of humanity will prevail.

Don: We will continue this discussion next week.

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