Afterword: The War After This One

The Sermon I Keep Finding

I did not go looking for it. It found me, the way everything finds you now, in a sidebar, in an autoplay, in a calm voice over slow music at one in the morning. And it preaches. It does not call itself a sermon, but it is one, and lately I keep hearing the same one no matter whose face is on the screen.

It goes like this. You are living in something like a simulation. This world is only one side of reality, and the other side is bigger, and that is where you really live. God is real, the voice says, but God is not a Person. God is consciousness itself, and you are a little piece of it. You have lived before and you will live again, and everything you do is measured and comes back around. And then the punchline, always the same punchline, said gently, like good news. Your name, your face, your family, none of that is really you. When the body dies, almost all of you is forgotten. You were a wave that rose for a moment out of the ocean, and the kindest thing that can happen to you is to fall back in.

And I want to tell you something about that sermon. It is going to win. Not everyone, but a great many, and the kind of people the church has spent a century failing to reach. It is going to be the great enemy of the faith long after you and I are in the ground. And the household of faith, as she stands right now, is not ready for it. She is not a little behind. She is armed for a war that is almost over and asleep to the one that is coming.

This is the afterword to a systematic theology, and it has one job. To tell you what I think this book is actually for. Not the war the church is fighting now. The one after this one.

The War We Trained For Is Ending

For about three hundred years the church has been fighting the atheist. We built our whole defense around him. We argued that there is a God and not just atoms, that the universe was designed and did not assemble itself, that mind cannot climb up out of dead matter on its own, that the tomb was really empty on the third day. Those were good arguments. I believe every one of them. We trained generations of apologists to make them, wrote the books, held the debates, built the ministries, and aimed the whole arsenal at one man: the confident unbeliever with his microscope, certain that matter is all there is.

And here is what almost nobody in the church has noticed. That war is nearly over, and the atheist is losing, and he is not losing to us. He is losing to the mystic. Plain materialism cannot feed a soul. It cannot tell a grieving mother where her child is. It cannot say why a sunset matters or why a promise should be kept. People feel the starvation of it, and they are walking away from it in droves. But they are not walking back to the church. They are walking into the fog.

So let us be honest about where the line has moved. The next great battle will not be over whether there is more than matter. The enemy who is coming already believes there is more than matter. He will nod along when you tell him the world is more than molecules. He will nod along when you say consciousness is the deepest thing there is. He agrees with you. And that agreement is exactly what makes him so dangerous, because the lie he carries looks, at a glance, like it is standing right next to the truth. It is not standing next to the truth. It is the oldest lie there is, and it has bought a new coat.

The Enemy Who Agrees With You

Here is the strange mercy and the strange danger of it. Against the atheist, Christianity looks completely different. Spirit against matter, God against no-god, the empty tomb against the rotting corpse. You could tell them apart in the dark. But against the mystic, a Christianity that has learned to say its own deepest thing looks almost identical to him. Both say the visible world is not the floor. Both say mind comes before matter. Both say this world is a kind of rendering of something deeper and truer. I spent this entire book arguing that everything that exists is a thought in the mind of God, and the man in the calm video will tell you that everything that exists is a thought in the mind of God, and for one dangerous second it will sound like we are saying the same thing.

We are not. The whole disagreement collapses onto a single joint, and everything hangs on it. Is the Mind a Person, or a fog. Does it have a name, or only a frequency. And when you die, are you kept, a particular soul known and loved and held forever, or are you dissolved, a drop poured back into an ocean that will not remember your face. That is the war. Not whether reality is mental. Everyone will grant that. Whether the Mind has a face, and whether you survive meeting it.

And the counterfeit that agrees with you about ninety-five percent of the floor is far more dangerous than the enemy who agreed with you about nothing. The atheist was a stranger at the door. The mystic is a forgery of the family portrait. He is harder to fight precisely because he has stolen your vocabulary, and he will use it back at you with a smile.

Why the Church Is Not Ready

Now I have to say the hard thing, and I say it because I love her. The church as she stands today is not equipped for this fight, and a great deal of the reason is her own fault.

Start with the obvious problem. Every weapon in her armory was forged for the atheist. Fine-tuning, the cosmological argument, the impossibility of mind from matter, the historical case for the resurrection laid before a man who denies the supernatural. Bring those to the mystic and watch them misfire, because he grants them before you finish the sentence. Yes, he says, the universe is fine-tuned, it is consciousness tuning itself. Yes, mind cannot come from matter, that is why mind is the floor and matter the dream. Yes, something survives death, you have lived a thousand times. He is not across the field from your arguments. He is standing behind them, having already conceded the ground they were built to take. An apologetic aimed at a man who has left the field hits nothing.

But that is the smaller problem. Here is the larger one, and it is the one that should frighten us. Much of the church already half-believes the mystic’s premise. She has preached for centuries a heaven of disembodied souls drifting in the clouds, an escape from this heavy flesh into pure spirit, the body as a cage and the soul as the prisoner waiting for parole. She has taught her own children that the real you is the spirit and the body is the temporary part, the part you shed. She has been embarrassed by matter, suspicious of the physical, eager for the day she floats free of it. And that, brethren, is not Christianity. That is Plato in a choir robe.

Do you see the trap she has built for herself? A church that has spent fifteen hundred years teaching you to despise your body will not have one leg to stand on when the mystic walks in and says, good, now despise it all the way, you were never really in it. She will have handed him half his sermon and called it her own piety. He says shed the body, and she has been saying shed the body. He says the particular self is an illusion to be transcended, and she has been singing about leaving this world behind. He does not have to argue her out of her faith. He only has to finish the sentence she started. The fog does not breach the wall. It seeps in through a door the church propped open herself, centuries ago, when she let Plato baptize her doctrine of the last things.

That is why I say she is unprepared. Not a little unprepared. Aimed at the wrong enemy with the wrong weapons, and pre-infected with the very disease the new enemy spreads.

The Cure She Buried

And yet. Here is the turn, and it is the most important thing in this afterword, so hold still for it.

The church is not unprepared because she lacks the weapon. She is unprepared because she buried the one she has.

She owns the cure. She has owned it for two thousand years. It is sitting in her creeds, sung in her oldest hymns, confessed every time she says the words and was made man, and crucified, dead, and buried, and the third day He rose again. The single thing the fog cannot digest is the thing the church has had in her hand the whole time and set down to pick up Plato. The Incarnation. The bodily resurrection. A God who did not stay a fog, who became one particular Man, at one particular hour, in one particular body, in a town you can still find on a map. A Savior who came down instead of telling us to climb, who was made sin for people who are not divine, who finished it, and who rose, not as a glow or a vibration or a higher state of consciousness, but in a body, with the scars still in it, and ate a piece of broiled fish on the shore in front of His friends in the morning light. And He has that body still. He is a Man on a throne this very minute.

That is the weapon. And much of the church has let it rust, because a tradition busy escaping the body forgets the God who took one on and kept it. She does not need to invent a new apologetic for the war that is coming. She needs to remember the gospel she already confesses and stop being ashamed of its flesh. The recovery is not a discovery. It is a repentance.

I am not the only one who has seen the body problem. There are faithful men who have spent their lives fighting the disembodied-heaven distortion and preaching the resurrection of the body as the church’s actual hope. The raw material is there. It is buried, not gone. But it is buried deep, and the men with the shovels are few, and the fog is already at the windows.

Why You Cannot Fight a Yes With a No

There is one more reason the inherited frameworks will struggle in this fight, and it is the reason I labored over the floor of this book the way I did.

If you have built your Christianity on realism, on the assumption that matter is an independent substance sitting out there on its own, then when the mystic says mind is the floor, you are forced to tell him no. You have to argue against the claim that consciousness comes first, because your whole system says matter is its own thing standing on its own legs. And so you meet the most spiritually hungry generation in three hundred years at the door, and the first word out of your mouth is no, and it is a no the culture has already decided against. You are fighting on ground you have already lost.

But the floor of this book lets you say something the realist cannot. It lets you say yes. Yes, consciousness is the deepest thing. Yes, the world is more than molecules. Yes, this whole visible order is a rendering of something prior and truer. You are right about all of it. And then, having met him on his own ground and agreed with him about the thing he was sure no Christian would grant, you turn and name the One he left blank. The fog has a face. The Consciousness has a name. He was born in Bethlehem and He went to a cross and He is a Man forever. You do not slam the door on the mystic. You walk through the door he opened and you find Christ standing on the other side of it, where the mystic swore there was only mist.

That is the whole reason this book exists. Not to win the war the church is fighting. To hand the next generation a floor they can say yes from, so they are not stuck saying no to a world that has already stopped listening to no.

The Bone the Fog Chokes On

So how is the war after this one won? The same way every war of the faith was ever won. Not with a cleverer argument about consciousness. By Christ, and Him crucified. A real Person with a real name. A finished work no man can add to. An empty tomb, and a body on the shore eating fish in the morning.

You answer a face with a Face.

The whole machinery of the fog is about shedding the particular to melt back into the One. The body goes. The name goes. The self goes. And the risen Christ simply stands there, particular, physical, scarred, a Man and not a mist, and the lie cannot swallow Him. He is the bone it chokes on. He is the rock in the river that the whole current has to break around. A religion built on escaping matter cannot digest a God who became matter and stayed.

And watch the enemy, because he is not stupid and he rarely knocks on the front door. He will not always come as a new religion with a new name. He will come wearing our words. He will preach a cosmic Christ who is a state of mind and not a Man. He will speak of the divine spark in every person. He will offer you Christ-consciousness, a frequency you can tune to, a principle hiding inside you all along. Watch the joint every single time. If the Christ they hand you is a feeling, a vibration, a principle in here, and not a particular Man with a particular name who really died and really rose in a body that really ate fish, then it is not Christ. It is the serpent preaching his very first sermon over again. Ye shall be as gods. That is all it ever was. That is all it ever is. The promise that you, at the bottom, are God, is not the newest spirituality on the market. It is the oldest lie in the book, and it was already old when it was whispered in a garden.

Why I Buried This Here

I am under no illusion that this book will turn the tide in my lifetime. It probably will not turn it in my son’s. I wrote it for the generations not yet born, for the war they will fight when the one we are fighting now is a paragraph in a history book.

That is why a thousand pages of sovereign-grace doctrine end here, facing forward instead of back. Because I believe the day is coming when the atheist is a museum piece and the mystic owns the room, when consciousness-first is the air everyone breathes, and the church will look up from the war she trained for and find a new enemy who agrees with her about everything except the only things that matter. And on that day she will need a Christianity that can say yes to the floor and no to the fog in the same breath, that is not embarrassed by the body, that knows the Mind has a face and the face has scars. She will need to remember that the Author wrote Himself into the story as a particular Man and never wrote Himself back out.

I will most likely be long gone before the church discovers she needs this. And I am, truly, at peace with that. I did not write it to be read now. I wrote it to be waiting. Like a letter left in a drawer for a child who is not old enough yet to understand it, with instructions to open it when the trouble comes. The trouble is coming. And when it comes, the floor will be here, and the face will be here, and the fish will still be on the shore in the morning light.

He is not a mirage. And neither are you. He knew you by name before the foundation of the world, and He will know you by name, in the body, forever. No ocean is going to swallow that. The Author does not forget the ones He thought up on purpose.

Grace and Peace, Brandan