The Theological DNA of This Book

• The Father — the Author
• Christ — the Author who stepped into the story
• The Holy Spirit — the firmware
• Bob — the bricks
• Greg — the friendship
• Angie — the anchor & covenant companion
• Cole — the humility
• Eileen — the tenderness lived
• Nick — the encouragement
• Wayne and Carole — the foundation
• The facilitators — the forum
• The PG community — the saints
• Joyce — the simplicity
• Mick and Darlene — the faithfulness
• Dickmann — the chapel
• Hein — the dismissal
• Drew and Melinda / The Jackson saints — the gospel lived
• Byrd — the pulpit
• Tate — the warmth
• The Ashland saints — the welcome
• Erkel / Zens / Reisinger — the body / covenants
• Fortner — the abolition
• Clark — the logic
• Gill — the scholarship
• Spurgeon — the heart
• Swindoll — the grammar
• Luther — the bravery

Bob Higby. His writings and his friendship have been the greatest influence on my life that I have ever had. I will always be grateful to the Lord for putting him in my path. God used Bob mightily to teach me and make me who I am. This book would not be possible without his theological DNA. I named the system. He gave me the pieces.

Greg Winegar. My greatest friend. Greg found my website in 2005, became a member of the forum, and we have talked nearly every day since. He has encouraged me, challenged me, and given of himself in ways I could never repay. He designed the cover of this book, and when I asked if I could acknowledge him publicly, he said, “Sure, whatever you want to do.” That is who Greg is. Unselfish. Giving. Deserving of far more than I could ever give him in return.

Angie. My wife. Thirty-four years. My covenant companion. My anchor, my conscience, my everything. She gave me Cole. She gave me the glass. She gave me the love that makes Ephesians 5:25 feel less like a command and more like an obvious joy. Dying for her would not feel like a sacrifice. It would feel like Tuesday. The covenant companion doctrine in Appendix A6 is not theory. It is her. What the Author has joined together, not even death will part.

Cole. My son. The one this book is written for. He gave me humility the tribe never could. He gave me patience I didn’t know I had. He taught me grace is bigger than my camp, and then he made me write it down. The love I have for him is the love that taught me the Father’s love for the Son from the inside. If this book reaches one reader with the widest arms of Chapter 30, I hope it is him. When I look at him, I see me, and more than me. I would die for him gladly, and I will see him at the feast.

Eileen Beckett. A contributor to Pristine Grace and a dear friend who encouraged me for many years. She was the only female author on the website, and she will always be featured there, because she was graceful and kind and tender in ways that most people only talk about. There is a chapter in this book about tenderness. Eileen lived it. She passed away from cancer, and I miss her greatly. I will never forget her.

Nick Lovins. A dear friend who has encouraged me for many years. He has been a source of inspiration, and I love him.

Wayne and Carole Kraft. My parents. They have always supported me and gave me the basis for my theological framework from the time I was a child. My mother always encouraged me to read the Scriptures and to stand up and speak for what was right, even if nobody else was. She still encourages me now. She is someone I will always look up to. It is this early teaching that has enabled me to finally publish this book. My father has supported me in all of my endeavors. I love them dearly.

The facilitators of predestinarian.net. A team of people who helped keep the forum running for many years and helped keep me on the straight and narrow. Their contribution to the development of this theology cannot be measured.

The Pristine Grace community. For nearly three decades I have received thousands of messages from the saints scattered all over the world, and their words have been encouraging. This book is for them as much as it is for me.

Joyce Coleman. My mother-in-law. She was like a mother to me, and I loved her intensely. She helped teach me that faith is simple. I miss her, and I look forward to being reunited with her in the new reality.

Aaron Coleman. My father-in-law. He passed in March of 2023. He raised the woman who became my wife, and every good thing in her has roots that go back to him. I am grateful for the man he was and for the daughter he gave me.

Mick and Darlene Coleman. Mick has passed, but his memory lives on in the family he built. And Darlene taught me what it means to love and care for those around you. She is the most faithful person I have ever met.

Mike Dickmann. Thank you for making Grace Baptist Chapel available. I miss the fellowship there, and I appreciate the way those believers attended their meetings — participatory, body-driven, the ekklesia in practice. Grace Baptist Chapel was also the environment I needed in order to learn from Bob. It was there that Bob showed up after he found my website, and the first real in-person years of the theological partnership that became this book took place under Mike’s roof. The chapel was the room the Author authored for the work to begin.

Rick Hein, John Lanferman, Sam Poe, and Bryan Mowrey. Of Jubilee Church in St. Louis, Missouri. Rick, John, and Sam were the three elders who removed me from the assembly. As Rick delivered the verdict, he said to me: “One day, you will look back on this moment, and come to thank me.” The removal was painful at the time. It was also the environment I needed in order to learn. Being cast out of one body taught me that the institution is not the covenant, and the same lesson later became the architecture of Chapter 23 and the diagnosis of Appendix N. These three men were the mechanism whether they knew it or not. Bryan was my small group leader at Jubilee. He handed me John Piper’s What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism after a small group meeting, and that paper set the fire that became this book. When the removal came, Bryan pleaded with me in my living room, prayed with me, and begged me to repent. I refused. He walked away. I still love him. I still miss him. The paper he handed me is underneath every page that follows. And the people of Jubilee Church, whose participatory worship shaped me in ways I have carried for twenty-five years, are in the architecture of Chapter 23 and in the song “Every One of You” on Sweet Release. The ekklesia I glimpsed in those meetings was a gift. And today, in print, I answer the line Rick left me standing in that doorway with: You were right, brother.

Drew and Melinda Dietz, and the people of Sovereign Grace Church in Jackson, Missouri. Thank you for being warm and kind, and for demonstrating the Gospel in your daily lives. The way you carried one another through the tragedy of Brother Joe Terrell’s death was a picture of what the body of Christ is supposed to be. Grief did not fracture you. Christ held you, and you held each other. I am grateful for your example and for your friendship.

Jim Byrd. Pastor of 13th Street Baptist Church. After I moved to Ashland from St. Louis, Jim gave me access to his pulpit for a few years, and he allowed me to build speaking skills I would not have developed any other way. The time was short. The platform was withdrawn before I had finished growing into it. I treasure those moments anyway. I am grateful for the runway. The platform the Lord has given me fits the work He has given me to do.

Frank Tate. Pastor of Hurricane Road Grace Church. One of the kindest brethren I have ever met. Frank welcomed me the way Scripture says to welcome a stranger, and his warmth was a gift in a season that needed it. I am grateful for his hospitality and for the example of pastoral warmth he lives out.

The people of 13th Street Baptist Church and Hurricane Road Grace Church. You welcomed my family and me into your assemblies with warmth and kindness I will carry the rest of my life. Your gifts of hospitality have made a difference I cannot fully measure. You fed us, you prayed for us, you shook my hand at the door. That is the ekklesia in practice, and I thank you for it.

Darryl Erkel. His various articles on pristinegrace.org shaped my ecclesiology more than any other single influence. The participatory model in Chapter 23 is the ecclesiology he articulated, and I have held it for twenty-six years. I owe him a debt I cannot repay.

Jon Zens. His periodical Searching Together walked alongside Erkel’s work in reshaping my ecclesiology. Zens recovered the participatory ekklesia of the New Testament for readers who had only ever seen the clergy-laity model, and his patient faithfulness in print across decades was load-bearing for me. Chapter 23 stands on what he recovered as well.

John Reisinger. His periodical Sound of Grace was the bridge I walked from Dispensationalism into New Covenant Theology and eventually into Bob’s Modified Covenant Theology. Reisinger articulated the discontinuity between the old and new covenants with a precision Dispensationalism lacked, and his patient teaching in print opened the door for the covenantal framework this book renders. I named MCT. Reisinger’s bridge made the naming possible.

Don Fortner. Fortner helped me see clearly that the law was fully abolished. He preached the end of the law with a pastoral clarity most sovereign grace men never reach. No tripartite division. No third use. No new law reinstated in covenant dress. The believer is dead to the law, and Christ is the rule (Romans 7:4, 2 Corinthians 5:14). Fortner held this without bitterness, and his voice was the voice that finally let me stop straining for a standard Christ had already fulfilled on my behalf. Chapter 20 carries his fingerprint. Appendix A3 carries his work on prevenient grace. He freed me from a law that was never mine to carry.

Gordon Clark. His logic. Clark taught me that all reasoning is circular and the question is not “can you prove your axiom?” but “which axiom accounts for reality?” He was a presuppositionalist who started with the Bible and derived everything through logic. His method was right, even where his conclusions weren’t. Clark showed me that theology is not a collection of independent doctrines. It is a system. And a system has a starting point. Chapter 25 owes its existence to him.

John Gill. His scholarship and his justification from eternity. Gill held the doctrine more than two hundred years before I was born, and he held it with a precision the Reformed world has never matched. The eternal justification of Chapter 15 is Gill’s theology rendered in the vocabulary of this book. He saw the timelessness of God’s decree when most of his contemporaries were still arguing about the order of events in time. I stand on his shoulders.

Charles Spurgeon. His heart. I don’t agree with his theology. He held common grace, a general call, and a Calvinism broader than anything in this book. But that man had a pastoral heart that most sovereign grace men will never touch. He wept over sinners. He loved the people in front of him without making them pass a test first. And when I finally wrote Chapter 30, it was his heart beating underneath it. Not his theology. His heart. The warmth that refuses to let precision become cruelty.

Charles Swindoll. I grew up listening to him in the car because my mom was a big Swindoll listener. I didn’t know it at the time, but the Lord was using that man’s tender voice to set my boot parameters before I could name what was happening. I don’t agree with his theology. But the tenderness I heard in that man’s preaching is embedded deep in my firmware, and it beats underneath Chapter 30 to this day. The warmth that refuses to let precision become cruelty. That was the piece I was missing, and Swindoll was one of the men God used to install it.

John Piper and R.C. Sproul. Piper’s What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism was placed in my hands by a friend after a small group meeting, and that paper set me down the road this book became. I do not agree with Piper’s infralapsarian Calvinism. Chapter 5 is my answer to that question. But his pastoral warmth shaped me in the same register Spurgeon and Swindoll did, and I am grateful for it. Sproul’s Reformation Study Bible was also formative. What I treasure most from Sproul is his example of love toward those who differ. He disagreed with other Christians openly and often and still spoke of them with respect and affection. That is a register this book has tried to carry, and Sproul was one of the men who modeled it for me.

Martin Luther. His bravery. I don’t share his sacramentalism or his view of the Lord’s Supper, and I’d argue with him on half of what he wrote. But the man nailed his conscience to a door in front of the most powerful institution on earth and said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Every Reformer since has been his son. Every man who ever refused to let an ecclesiastical machine dictate what he believed is in his debt. When the sovereign grace world labels me and the broader church labels me worse, I remember the monk with the hammer. The Reformation was not a building. It was a refusal. Luther taught me that institutional tyranny is broken not by strategy but by a single man unwilling to lie. That is the bravery underneath every chapter of this book.

Robert Brinsmead. His Present Truth magazine in the 1970s freed serious men from law-based religious traditions and set them on the road toward gospel clarity. Brinsmead did not influence me directly. But his early writing reached men whose clarity became part of the stream I drank from. The acknowledgment is owed at the level of generational inheritance. I commend his early work with gratitude.

John Robbins and the Trinity Foundation. Keepers of Gordon Clark’s voice. Without Robbins and Trinity, Clark’s work would have slipped into the margins after his death in 1985. Robbins republished the books, preserved the axiomatic presuppositional method, and carried Clark’s logic forward to the next generation. Chapter 25 of this book stands on Clark’s method. It stands also on Robbins’s labor to keep that method available. Robbins was also critical of me personally in earlier years, particularly of the self-authenticating canon position I develop in Chapter 26. He said so publicly. I have not changed my view, but his critique forced me to articulate it more carefully than I would have otherwise. I did not always agree with Robbins’s polemics, but I am grateful for the scholarship, the preservation, and the sharpening. The Trinity Foundation deserves credit the academy will not give it.

Marc Carpenter. Now deceased. His Outside the Camp ministry was the clearest public example I ever saw of how sovereign grace commitments can calcify into militant doctrinal gatekeeping. Watching his work taught me, by negative example, what not to become. I honor his sincerity and his conviction, even while I rejected the form his ministry took. The Author used him in my formation by making visible the posture I needed to avoid. I commend his memory to the One who judges all.

Andrew C. Bain and Nicholas Heath. The posture the previous paragraph names builds fences without doors. These are two men the fence claimed. I will not call them anyone’s casualties. I will name them as friends I have not forgotten. The book exists partly to give the next follower of the same posture what these two were not given. A door.

And to Milton Almeida, David Alvord, Kyle Baker, Donnie Bell, W.E. Best, David Bishop, Larry Brown, Geneva Burns, John Calvin, Andrew Carpenter, Monty Collier, Mary Covington, Bruce Crabtree, Chris Cunningham, Darryl Dunn, Cynthia Earnshaw, George Ella, Greg Elmquist, Travis Findley, Sean Gerety, Gabriel Gonzalez, Jeff Greer, Dan Higby, Ruth Higby, Tammi and Chip Holbrook, Roger Huckle, Renat Ilyasov, Tim James, James Johnson, Phil Johnson, Ray Johnson, Abe and Carol Keil, Ray Kickert, Joe Kinney, Mike Krall, Nicholas Laurienzo, Wendy Lester, Henry Mahan, Keith Mathis, Bill McDaniel, Glenn McGrew, Norman McGrew, Craig Miklosik, Conrad Murrell, John Newton, Todd Nibert, Scott O’Nanski, Crystal and Brady Osbourne, Bill Parker, John Pedersen, Paula Pendleton, Stanley Phillips, J.C. Philpot, Ian Potts, Scott Price, Nathan Rages, Cassie Reagan, Glenda Rodriguez, Julie Ruell, J.C. Ryle, Gary Shepard, Charles Shofstahl, Jason and Alissa Smith, Mikal Smith, Joe Terrell, Ivor Thomas, James Tippins, Brandon Tussey, Richard Warmack, Paul Washer, Norm Wells, John Wetzel, Chuck Wiese, Pam Winegar, and every person whose name should be here but isn’t — thank you.

Some of the names on this list are men I disagreed with deeply. Some preached against me from pulpits without ever picking up the phone. Some labeled me things I would never call myself. I include them because the Author put them in the filmstrip with me, and every one of them, whether they know it or not, contributed to the man who wrote this book. Iron sharpens iron. Even when the iron draws blood.

Grace and Peace, Brandan