A Journey of Discovery Out of Tradition and Into Coherence
Introduction: The Moment One Becomes a Heretic
There are moments in a long season of study when the ground shifts beneath you. Mine came unexpectedly, after seventeen years of study of biblical literature, theology, and the history of Christian doctrine. I realized, with a mixture of surprise and clarity, that I had become a heretic.
Not an atheist, nor even a skeptic of God — my faith, in fact, was stronger than ever — but a heretic in the eyes of the organized church. I had come to believe things about Jesus, Israel, Scripture, and salvation that diverged sharply from sanctioned, largely 4th and 5th century, doctrines. The divergence was not the result of rebellion or novelty-seeking. It was the cumulative effect of years of reading, questioning, and discovering that the traditional story simply did not cohere with the biblical text, the historical evidence, or the moral logic of God’s own stated aims.
This paper recounts the sequence of topics, discoveries, and realizations that gradually drew me away from traditional Christian belief and toward what I now consider a more faithful, coherent, and biblically grounded understanding of God, Jesus, and the human vocation. The journey was incremental, each step building on the previous, each insight illuminating the next. None of the topics alone would have made me a heretic. But together they formed a new picture — one that compared with the traditional, was more impactful, at least as biblically strong, and far more coherent.
What follows is not a polemic for its own sake. It is an attempt to describe, seriously and clearly, how one arrives at theological conclusions that differ from orthodoxy not because one rejects Scripture, but because one takes Scripture — and God — more seriously than the tradition may have done.
The Early Cracks: Discipleship and the All-or-Nothing Call
My earliest readings in Christian spirituality were not controversial. Dallas Willard, Brother Lawrence, Bonhoeffer, Frank Laubach — writers who emphasized the lived reality of discipleship, the daily practice of faithfulness, the call to orient one’s entire life toward God[i]. Their message was simple but uncompromising: faithfulness is not partial. One either lives toward God or one does not. One either seeks the Kingdom or one seeks oneself. I had not been taught this. Few have.
This all-or-nothing call struck me with force. It exposed the superficiality of the “faith as assent” model I had inherited. It made clear that discipleship was not a matter of believing the right doctrines but of living the right life — a life shaped by love of God and neighbor, humility, service, and moral integrity. Predictably, perhaps, I was struck by the seeming practical impossibility of such a life. This was the first crack in the edifice of my traditional theology, though I did not recognize it as such at the time.
The more I read, the more I saw that the traditional Christian message — “saved by grace through faith” understood as mental assent to Christ’s atoning death — bore literally no resemblance to the call to discipleship found in Jesus’s own teaching. These early spiritual writers were certainly not heretics. But their message lay outside the assumptions of today’s mainline Christianity and planted the seeds for the later recognition that the traditional soteriology—promising heaven after death—has little in common with the biblical model, which is concerned with the emergence of transformed life rather than post‑mortem destination.[ii].
Encountering the Tanakh: A God Against the System
The God of the Shema vs. the Priestly God
My next major realization came from reading the Tanakh closely, especially the narratives and the prophets. I began to see a stark distinction between the God portrayed in much of the Torah[iii] and the God proclaimed by the prophets (e.g., Deut 6:4-5). The priestly texts depict a God who demands sacrifices, ritual purity, and ceremonial precision. The prophets depict a God who rejects sacrifices, condemns rote ritualism, and demands justice, mercy, humility, and covenantal faithfulness through obedience to his moral and ethical covenant law[iv].
The contrast was not subtle. It was jarring. The prophetic God explicitly declares that he does not want sacrifices or offerings[v], that he desires obedience, justice, and love. Yet the Levitical priestly Torah is saturated with sacrificial regulations and the virtual absence of any moral awareness. The tension between these portrayals raised a question that would become central: if God himself rejects the sacrificial system, why does the Torah present it as divinely mandated?
This was not merely a theological puzzle. It was a sign that the Torah was not a unified divine revelation but a composite work reflecting different theological agendas — some priestly, some prophetic and narrative. The prophets were not critiquing the people for misusing sacrifices; they were critiquing the very idea that sacrifices were the path to God, or faithfulness to him. This realization destabilized the traditional view of the Torah as a single, Mosaic, divinely dictated text.
The People Without Scripture: Israel’s Narrative Distance
A second realization emerged from observing the behavior and role of Israel in the narratives. The people rarely seemed aware of the content of the covenantal texts. They did not act like a people who knew the Torah. They did not respond to its laws, its warnings, or its promises. Instead, they only sometimes responded when prophets confronted them directly. The narratives depict a population that is largely ignorant of the written texts that were purported to govern their lives beginning at Sinai.
This oddity bothered me for years. Why does Israel seem so uninvolved in the textual world of the Torah? Why do they repeatedly violate laws they should have not only known, but esteemed? Why do they never cite the Torah, appeal to it, or show familiarity with its content? (A corollary question begging for answer was: “Why doesn’t other extra-biblical literature of the first and most of the second Temple period mention it either?”)
The answer came from the work of scholars such as Michael Satlow[vi] and Yonatan Adler[vii], who argue — based on extensive historical and textual evidence — that the people of Israel did not know the contents of the Torah for most of their history. Those scrolls were the product of elite scribes, and were not public documents, let alone authoritative ones. There is no evidence of widespread Torah observance before the Hasmonean period. Public Torah reading appears only in the very late Second Temple era, and synagogue reading becomes normative only in the first century AD.
This strong claim explains the narrative oddities perfectly. The people were not ignoring the Torah; they did not know it. The scribes wrote the texts, preserved them, and shaped them, but the people lived by oral traditions, stories, and prophetic proclamations in the face of their historical cultural patterns. The Hebrew Bible implicitly asserts this bipartite distribution of knowledge: scribes knew the texts; the people did not, a not unexpected condition in the face of the illiteracy of the majority and the expense of producing scroll copies to distribute among them.
This realization was not more important than others, but it was decisive in understanding the nature of the biblical text. It meant that the Torah was not a record of ancient events but a late literary construction of a tiny set of literate scribes projecting theological ideals backward into Israel’s past.
The Documentary Hypothesis and the Nature of Torah
The Documentary Hypothesis confirmed what the narrative evidence suggested. The Torah is not a single work but a compilation of multiple sources — priestly, prophetic, narrative — woven together over centuries[viii]. Its language, style, and vocabulary reflect different periods of Hebrew writing. But its composition and redaction occurred between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC, long after the events it describes.
The conclusion was obvious: Moses did not write the Torah. The historical figure of Moses did not “write” any of it, as he is portrayed as dying in the 15th century BC. The Torah is a literary construction by later scribes seeking to articulate Israel’s identity, covenant, and history. The detailed dialogues between God, Moses, Aaron, and others are not historical transcripts but theological narratives[ix].
This realization did not destroy the value of the Torah. It simply clarified its nature. It is not a literal history but a theological composition. And if it is not literal history, then its sacrificial laws are not literal divine commands recalled from a thousand years previous. They are priestly projections of a system God himself rejected according to his prophets.
The Collapse of Mosaic Literalism
Late Composition and Priestly Interests
Once the late composition of the Torah became clear, the priestly interests embedded in it became unmistakable. The sacrificial system, the purity laws, the centrality of the Temple — all served the interests of the elite priestly class. The prophets denounced these practices, yet the priestly texts present them as divine mandates.
If God rejected sacrifices, why would he command them? The answer is simple: he didn’t. The priestly authors did. The Levitical Torah reflects their worldview, not God’s. This does not make the Torah worthless. It makes it human — a record of multiple sources’ attempts to portray their God masterfully integrated into essentially a single narrative, not a dictation from God (though it isn’t hard to see his hand all throughout).
The Moses Scroll and the Non‑Levitical Covenant
The discovery of the so-called Moses Scroll[x] (a.k.a Shapira Scroll) added a supportive backdrop to my developing picture of the Torah. Whether authentic or not, its literary and physical characteristics resembled early Hebrew texts and some Qumran scrolls. More importantly, it contains none of the Levitical sacrificial laws. Its content aligns with the non-priestly theology of Deuteronomy (absent its Law Code).
This suggested that an early form of Israel’s covenantal tradition may have existed without its sacrificial system. The priestly Torah may have been a later accretion, not the original covenant. This possibility restored some credibility to the overarching biblical narrative: God adopts a people, disciplines them, redeems them, and seeks their faithfulness — all without requiring sacrifices. That shaft of daylight encouraged continued search.
A Nudge Back Toward Biblical Literalism
Quite unexpectedly I happened to encounter papers providing fascinating documentation of potential evidence for both the Patriarchs and Moses in Egypt[xi]. Information like this isn’t sufficient to overwhelm the mythological basis of the written scripture. But it certainly encourages a more measured treatment of it, one which allows room for a pervasive oral tradition that just might contain the kernel of Israel’s founding truth as the inspiration for the narratives.
Paul Reconsidered: The Gospel of Transformation
Jason Staples’ Reunification Thesis
The next major shift came from encountering Jason Staples’ interpretation of Paul[xii]. Staples argues that Paul’s gospel is not about individual salvation but about the reunification of Israel — both houses — through the transformation of the faithful by God’s Spirit. The northern tribes, exiled and assimilated, became “gentile-ized.” Their descendants are the “nations” promised for blessing to Abraham (Gen 22:18) and prophesied by Jacob to Joseph (Ge 48:19).
Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection inaugurated the New Covenant, pouring out God’s Spirit on those who seek after him. This Spirit transforms them into righteous children of God and citizens of his Kingdom. Staples reveals that Paul’s gospel is not “saved by grace through faith” understood as mental assent. It is salvation by transformation — leading lives of righteousness through the indwelling Spirit. (As I have written, this gospel bears virtually no relationship to the traditional “saved by grace through faith” messaging [as if our faith is what this phrase was referring to][xiii]).
Spirit-Indwelling as the Engine of Righteous Life
Romans 8:9–11 makes this explicit. Paul treats the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ as synonymous. The Spirit that indwelt Jesus (Lk 4:18/Is 61:1, Acts 10:38, Lk 4:1, Jn 3:34) indwells the faithful. This Spirit transforms their hearts and minds, making them righteous. Salvation is not a legal declaration but a moral transformation. Those who have the Spirit have life. Those who do not, do not belong to Christ.
This gospel teaches that God’s salvation of humanity is via their transformation to righteousness in this life through the work of Christ and God’s Spirit. Those that have the Spirit have life (Ro 8:9-11[xiv]) and so will be judged “righteous” on the last day.
This gospel makes Paul coherent for the first time. It aligns with the prophets, with Jesus’s teaching, and with God’s stated aims. It rejected the idea that righteousness is imputed rather than embodied. It makes salvation a matter of becoming like Christ rather than merely believing in Christ.
The Death of Jesus Reframed
Not a Sacrifice God Required
If God rejected Temple sacrifices, Jesus’s death could not be a sacrifice God required. The traditional doctrine of substitutionary atonement — that God demanded Jesus’s death to “pay” for our sins[xv] — collapses under the weight of the biblical evidence. God does not require anyone to die to achieve his goals. The prophets never teach this. Jesus never teaches this. Paul does not insist on it. But it is nevertheless fairly universally the accepted doctrine.
The Exemplar Model
God responded to Jesus’s desire to serve him with the perfect indwelling of his Spirit (Col 1:19), making him indistinguishable from God himself as housed in human biology[xvi]. Jesus’s primary mission was to both model and teach perfect faithfulness to God. No one had ever seen such a life before. His life demonstrated what covenantal righteousness looked like. His death was not a divine requirement but the result of human resistance to his message and the threat he posed to the elite-endorsed Temple system. And, this role of Exemplar (vs incarnate God) makes clear that each of us are called to aspire to and achieve some degree of the same life Jesus experienced. Our dying-to-self results in resurrection to Christlikeness, living out our charter (Gen 1:26 ) to be God’s images (tselem).
Resurrection as Covenant Fulfillment
God raised Jesus because he perfectly served him and by so doing, fulfilled the requirement of the covenant (Lev 18:5). Resurrection is God’s act of glorification the righteous, not a payment. It demonstrates God’s plan for granting eternal life to the faithful. Jesus’s resurrection mysteriously inaugurates the New Covenant and the outpouring of God’s Spirit into those who desire him more than themselves.
The Nature of Jesus: Human, Spirit-Filled, Divine-by-Indwelling
Son of God as Covenant Servant
Jesus’s title “Son of God” does not imply ontological divinity as many assume. It reflects his role as God’s faithful servant, as in Psalm 82 and numerous other texts. Israel was called God’s son. Judges were called gods. The title reflects obedient service, not essence[xvii].
The Spirit as the Mode of Divine Presence
Jesus was human. God indwelt him perfectly (Jn 3:34). The Spirit’s presence in Jesus made him indistinguishable from God incarnate in action, character, and purpose. Jesus’s mission did not require metaphysical incarnation nor was that God’s plan for calling his humanity to himself. God used the example of a human to call humans. It required perfect indwelling. God can do through a Spirit-empowered man what he can do when embodied as that man. The two forms are indistinguishable in agency. Jesus himself never claimed deity (though his NT reporters did). Under the Spirit’s indwelling he claimed unity with God, as surely he perfectly experienced.
Doctrines Broken and Doctrines Preserved
This current understanding of Jesus breaks several traditional doctrines:
- Jesus’s preexistence as a divine person
- Substitutionary atonement
- Penal atonement
- The necessity of Christ’s death as payment/remission
- The Trinity as metaphysical ontology
But it preserves others:
- Salvation by God’s grace[xviii]
- The necessity of transformation
- The reality of the Spirit
- The authority of Scripture as God’s orchestrated narrative
- The vocation of the Church
- The sacraments
The result is not less Christian but more faithful to the biblical narrative.
What This Means for Scripture, God, and Salvation
Scripture is a human product orchestrated by God. Authors contributed their own “parts”. But God integrated them for his own “symphonic” purposes. It is not literal history but theological narrative. It seems we may have the Levitical Torah of ceremonial and sacrificial rules today simply to reveal the total futility of ritualism, whatever your religion, while the remainder of the Tanakh teaches the necessity of faithfulness.
God desires a family of righteous children. He does not unjustly declare them righteous by violating the foundational principle of justice – that each receives what he is due (2 Cor 5:10); rather, he transforms them. Salvation is not a legal theory but a moral reality.
Jesus is our Exemplar. His life shows what righteousness looks like in practice. His resurrection showed how God grants life to the righteous. His/God’s Spirit empowers the faithful to become like him.
This is salvation by transformation, not salvation by forensic decree.
Conclusion: A Path Leading to a Coherent Interpretation
Becoming a heretic was not a moment of rebellion but a moment of clarity. Each step in this journey — discipleship, the Tanakh, the Documentary Hypothesis, the Moses Scroll, Staples’ Paul, the Exemplar model — revealed a piece of a coherent theological system that makes sense of God, Scripture (especially the Torah and Paul), Jesus, and salvation[xix].
The traditional system, with its sacrificial metaphysics, legal imputation, and ontological Christology, is challenged under scrutiny. The alternative system — grounded in the prophets, in Jesus’s teaching, in Paul’s actual gospel — is faithful to and, I believe, more coherent and more aligned with God’s stated plans. I didn’t intend to become a heretic. I simply set out to understand God and his plan for us in terms that made logical sense while portraying him as glorified in working that plan (Is 43:7). Within limits, I believe I’ve been able to do that. The discoveries led here. And here, I believe, is closer t
[i] See “in Christ”? – A Pilgrim’s Search
[ii] Paul speaks incessantly of the power and work of the Spirit to his churches, something that had not registered with me in years of casually reading his texts. To see it for yourself, have a look at these excerpted verses of (mainly) Paul’s epistles describing it: Paul’s Thoughts on the Spirit – A Pilgrim’s Search
[iii] The “priestly” or “Levitical” Torah
[iv] See A Reassessment of the Source(s) and Authenticity of the Hebrew Bible – A Pilgrim’s Search
[v] See Did God Want a Temple, Sacrifices, or a Monarchy? – A Pilgrim’s Search
[vi] See Making Scrolls into The Bible – A Pilgrim’s Search
[vii] See The Origins of Judaism – A Pilgrim’s Search
[viii] See Who Wrote the Hebrew Bible? – A Pilgrim’s Search
[ix] I realize that most Jews take this veracity as a given. But, and this is important since, for anyone who has been indoctrinated by its repetition, they also assert that the Mishna (written in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD) faithfully reflects the so-called “Oral Torah” and its words spoken to Moses at Sinai by God (‘halakhah le-Moshe mi-Sinai”) but that Moses never wrote down, only passed on to future generations starting with Joshua. This is their belief despite the fact that from the 15th century BC to the 1st century AD is 1600 years. Sixteen centuries of oral “pass it on” had transmitted these “laws” of Moses perfectly. No errors. No omissions. Professed by the rabbis to be God’s words.
[x] See Moses’ Real Words? – A Pilgrim’s Search
[xi] Israel in Egypt, Moses in Egypt
[xii] If you’re not yet familiar with the work of Dr. Jason Staples, you should fix that. His is a revolutionary interpretation of Paul. Learning the Real Paul (and Unlearning What You’ve Been Taught
[xiii] See “subjective genitive” in The Law of Faith
[xiv] Commentary on Ro 8:9-11
“9 However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. 10 But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is [a]alive because of righteousness. 11 But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies [b]through His Spirit who dwells in you.”
Notice first that Paul treats the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ as interchangeable. It is a single Spirit. The Spirit of God (Jn 4:24) is the Spirit that indwelt Jesus of Nazareth making him the Christ.
The result of having that Spirit in you is “the spirit is alive because of righteousness”, meaning because of the Spirit. Here spirit is not capitalized alerting us that the translators, at least, think Paul’s talking about our native spirit, not God’s Spirit. In other words, our spirit is transformed by God’s Spirit leading to righteousness. Note: righteousness, not simply “forgiveness”. Then if the Spirit of God (the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead) dwells in you, then God (he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead) “will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” Here Paul is talking about our transformative spiritual resurrection to the Christ-life, not our “physical” resurrection on the last day. Everybody receives that. Not everybody, however, will be judged as faithful to God.
[xv] “Pay” whom?
[xvi] The authors of the Hebrew Bible knew of similar situations documented in their scriptures where some aspect of the faithful servant of God was animated by God. (e.g., Ex 4:12, Num 11:25, Jdg 5:10, etc.)
[xvii] Jesus here references Ps 82:6 in which judges are identified both as “gods” and as “sons of the Most High”. Jesus’s point in Jn 10:34 was that his identification as “Son of God” was no more than the identification of appointed judges as “gods” – simply ones in obedient service to God. Examples include Exodus 4:16,22-23, Deut 14:1, Hos 11:1, 2 Sam 7:14, Ps 2:7, Ps 82, Ps 89:26–27, Job 1:6–2:1, Gen 6:2, etc. The role of obedient servant of God being labelled his “son” is metaphorically related to the expectation of the obedience of a son in Israel to his father, especially the firstborn son.
[xviii] Staples consistently reminds us that in the 1st century AD, the idea of “grace” (5485. χάρις – charis) involved reciprocal gifts. God, in extending the χάρις of his Spirit to us, had every expectation that we would reciprocate our gift of faithfulness back to him. God’s grace was gracious. But it wasn’t without expectations.
[xix] A short essay like this can’t begin to capture the detail of the accumulating insights that collectively led to my current understanding. If you’re interested in those details on any particular topic, I encourage you to review the library at saludovencedores.com or https://substack.com/@pilgrimssearch.
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