Folk Theology: Gatekeepers

An essay part 2— Folk Theology

There's a scene worth imagining before we get to any of the men whose names carry this history. Roman soldiers, standing guard outside a tomb, spears in hand, making sure nothing gets out. That image is going to matter more than it seems right now. Hold onto it.

Because somewhere along the way, a Gospel that began as an open door became something guarded instead. Not maliciously. Not by villains twirling mustaches in the dark. By ordinary men, reaching for the best language their era gave them, trying to explain something too large for words — and building, brick by brick, a courtroom where a homecoming used to be.

It starts, as so much of this series does, with an emperor.

In the year 313, Constantine legalized Christianity. By 380, under Theodosius, it was no longer merely tolerated — it was the empire's official religion. In one long generation, the church went from being hunted to being handed the keys. Eusebius, the bishop who wrote Constantine's biography, records the emperor saying something remarkable at a banquet with church leaders: "You are bishops of those within the Church, but I have been appointed by God bishop of those outside." He didn't convert to the church's terms. He installed himself as its overseer. And from that point forward, the Gospel starts running on imperial logic instead of the other way around. That's not a metaphor. That's the actual moment the software changed.

Not long after, Augustine of Hippo picked up a mistranslated line from Romans 5 — a Latin rendering that made it sound like all humanity sinned "in" Adam, rather than as a consequence of Adam's fall — and built an entire anthropology on top of it. In his Handbook he describes the whole human race as "a mass under condemnation... wallowing in misery... paying the well-merited penalty of that impious rebellion." Every baby, on this reading, arrives already owing a debt it never personally incurred. Not sick. Not wounded. Guilty, from the very first breath.

Seven centuries later, Anselm of Canterbury took that guilt and gave it an accounting system. He lived in a feudal world where honor was currency, and offending a lord meant either repayment or punishment — there was no third option. He mapped that world directly onto God. "The honor taken away must be repaid, or punishment must follow," he wrote in Cur Deus Homo, "otherwise God will not be just to himself." Sin became an unpaid invoice. The cross became the payment. Grace became a transaction with very specific terms.

Then Calvin arrived, and where Anselm had built a balance sheet, Calvin built a decree. In his Institutes, he doesn't just say God allows some to be lost — he says God arranges it. "Individuals are born," he writes, "who are doomed from the womb to certain death, and are to glorify him by their destruction." Read that sentence twice. It says some people are created for the specific purpose of being destroyed, and that their destruction brings God glory. The Father's heart and the Son's mercy get quietly severed from each other. God becomes a sovereign administrator instead of a Father running down the road.

And then, in colonial America, Jonathan Edwards took all of that inherited architecture and turned it into a weapon aimed at the nervous system. "The God that holds you over the pit of hell," he preached, "much as one holds a spider... abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked... he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire." Conversion, in this framing, isn't a homecoming. It's a jailbreak from a God who is actively, personally repulsed by you.

Constantine. Augustine. Anselm. Calvin. Edwards. Empire, guilt, debt, decree, terror. Sixteen centuries, five men, one long, quiet remodel — and by the time it reaches us, it doesn't feel invented. It feels like it's just what the Bible says. That's the trick of it. Old and loud starts to feel the same as ancient and true.

Here's where it usually gets defended: a chart. You've probably seen some version of it — "Progressive" on one side, "Biblical" on the other, and only one column gets to keep the label. It's presented as ancient orthodoxy. It isn't. It's the modern armor these five centuries built, laminated and handed out as if it came down from Sinai.

So let's set the chart down and look at two stories instead — real texts, no borrowed customs, no invented details.

There's a man named Joshua in the book of Zechariah, standing before God in filthy clothes, with the Accuser standing right beside him, mid-sentence, listing every reason he doesn't belong there. And God doesn't argue the case. He doesn't even let the accusation finish. He simply says, "Take off his filthy clothes," and then, "I will clothe you with festive robes." No debt calculated. No satisfaction demanded. Just a robe, offered before the argument for or against him is even resolved.

And there's a son, in a story Jesus told, who rehearsed an entire confession on the walk home — a whole speech about not being worthy to be called a son anymore. He never gets to finish it. His father sees him from a long way off, while he's still just a shape on the horizon, and runs. "Quickly," the father says, "bring the best robe and put it on him." The robe comes before the apology lands. There's no courtroom in that scene at all.

There is, notably, one person left standing outside in that story — the older brother, arms crossed in the dark, refusing to come in. But look closely at what keeps him out. It isn't the father. The father comes out to him too, still pleading. What keeps him out is his own certainty that the wrong person is getting a party he didn't earn. The darkness in that story isn't a punishment God hands down. It's a door somebody refuses to walk through, with the light and the music right there on the other side the entire time.

That's worth sitting with. The Eastern church has always described God simply as Light — not a Being who occasionally withholds His love and calls the resulting absence "hell," but Light that never stops being offered. What we call darkness, in that framework, isn't God turning away. It's a soul that hasn't turned around yet.

Which brings us to the phrase that's been used to reinforce every one of these five men's systems: "many are called, but few are chosen." Calvin read "chosen" as a tiny, cosmic VIP list — a small number hand-picked for rescue while everyone else was, in his words, born doomed to glorify God through destruction. But the older, Hebraic sense of being chosen — eklektos — was never about a spatial evacuation plan. It was a vocation. An apprenticeship. You weren't chosen out of the world. You were chosen for it — handed a towel instead of a getaway boat.

Which brings us back to those soldiers guarding the tomb. That's what sixteen centuries of courtroom theology finally produces — people standing guard over a story that was never meant to be locked down in the first place, convinced that keeping watch is the same thing as being faithful. It never was. The stone was already rolled away. There was never anything to guard.

One more example, briefly, because it's the same pattern wearing modern clothes. In the 1830s, a man named John Nelson Darby began teaching something no church father, no medieval theologian, and no Reformer had ever taught in the previous eighteen centuries — that believers would be secretly removed from earth before a coming tribulation. It spread through a study Bible that sold millions of copies, then through a paperback in 1970 that outsold nearly every other nonfiction book of its decade, then through a series of novels and films most of us have actually seen. None of that makes it ancient. It makes it recent, successful, and very, very loud.

So here's the real question underneath all five centuries of this: how much of what we've been calling "just what the Bible says" is actually just old, and just loud? And if some of it turns out to be neither ancient nor true — is that something to grieve, or something to finally, quietly set down?

Take off the armor. It was never actually your size.