I. Introduction: The Application of the Diagnostic
The prior white papers in this series have established three sets of resources. The first identified the marks by which a legitimate messenger of rebuke is recognized—divine commissioning, doctrinal continuity with the prior revealed word, costly faithfulness, structural independence from those rebuked, and self-effacement before the message. The second examined the characteristic response of covenant communities to such messengers and the persistent pattern by which contemporaries persecute the prophets whom subsequent generations honor. The third developed a typology of the religious corruptions that recurrently provoke prophetic rebuke—syncretism, mercenary religion, the substitution of ritual for righteousness, oppression of the vulnerable, false reassurance, doctrinal accommodation to power, the corruption of the teaching office, and religious self-confidence.
This paper takes the next analytical step. It applies the diagnostic categories to contemporary Christianity and identifies specific practices, arrangements, and patterns that, on a straightforward biblicist reading of the canonical text, would attract the same kind of rebuke that the prophets and apostles delivered to comparable conditions in their own day. The argument here is descriptive of canonical standards rather than prescriptive of remedies; the question is what Scripture itself, applied without selective filtering, says about practices that have become widespread or normalized in self-described Christian communities.
Several caveats are required at the outset. First, the analysis does not depend on or claim prophetic standing. The prior paper on the legitimate messenger made clear that diagnostic competence and prophetic standing are distinct. What follows is a faithful exposition of what the canonical text says, applied to recognizable contemporary practices, by someone with no special standing to deliver a public corrective word. Second, the analysis does not assume that any single contemporary community exhibits all the categories simultaneously, nor that the presence of one category implies the presence of others. The applications are made category by category, and readers will find that different communities are implicated at different points. Third, the analysis focuses on practices that are sufficiently widespread to constitute patterns rather than on isolated failures of individual communities, and it works from canonical principles rather than from tribal critiques that target one tradition while exempting another. The biblicist standard cuts in every direction it is honestly applied.
The argument proceeds through the eight categories developed in the prior paper, treating each as a lens through which contemporary practice can be examined.
II. The Syncretistic Inheritance
The most obvious application of the syncretism category to contemporary Christianity is the long-standing accommodation of pagan calendrical and ritual practices into the structure of Christian worship. The replacement of the appointed feasts of Leviticus 23—which the New Covenant texts continue to assume as the calendrical framework within which the apostolic generation operated—with a feast cycle drawn substantially from pre-Christian European and Mediterranean religious practice is the most consequential single instance.
The biblicist standard is straightforward. The appointed times that God Himself instituted as His feasts (Lev 23:2) are not presented in Scripture as Jewish ceremonies that lapsed with the New Covenant. Paul kept them, instructed Gentile Corinthians in their meaning (“Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast,” 1 Cor 5:7–8), timed his travels around them (Acts 20:6, 16; 1 Cor 16:8), and treated their typological structure as the framework within which the work of Christ is to be understood. The substitution of feasts whose names, dates, and characteristic practices derive from sources that the prophets explicitly denounced—the equinoctial fertility observances, the solstitial fire and tree rituals, the practices associated with the dying-and-rising vegetation deities of the surrounding cultures—would have been recognizable to Jeremiah or Hosea as the same pattern they confronted. The fact that the substitutions have been redirected nominally toward Christ does not alter the diagnostic; Jeroboam’s calves were also nominally redirected toward the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, and the redirection did not save them from prophetic denunciation.
The biblicist conclusion is that a Christianity which has retained the substance of the imported feasts, refused to keep the feasts the canon actually appoints, and developed a theological apparatus to justify the substitution stands in a position structurally analogous to the one Jeroboam’s establishment occupied. The redirection of the form does not sanctify the form; the form retains the marks of its origin, and the prophetic test of “to the law and to the testimony” (Isa 8:20) places the burden of proof on the imported practice rather than on the canonical one.
A second application of the syncretism category concerns the absorption of culturally dominant religious-political identities into Christian self-understanding. Where a community’s loyalties, language, symbols, and characteristic enthusiasms have become substantially indistinguishable from those of a national, ethnic, or partisan identity—where the cross is functionally subordinate to the flag, the catechism functionally subordinate to the platform, the gospel functionally subordinate to the cultural project—the syncretism is real even when it is not explicitly named. The prophetic literature treats this kind of fusion as one of the most dangerous forms of syncretism, because it operates without recognizing itself, and because the fused identity tends to be defended with the energy that ought to be reserved for the worship of God alone.
A third application concerns the importation of practices, vocabularies, and conceptual frameworks from contemporary spiritual movements that lack canonical warrant—therapeutic spiritualities reframed as discipleship, generic religious mysticisms relabeled as contemplative prayer, prosperity teachings borrowed from the metaphysical movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, manifestational practices traceable to specific revivalist innovations rather than to apostolic instruction. Each of these requires examination on its own merits, and not all importations are equally problematic, but the general pattern of incorporating practices whose pedigree lies outside the canonical witness is the same pattern that the prophets identified as syncretism.
III. The Monetization of Religious Office
The category of mercenary religion finds extensive contemporary application. The prophetic indictments examined in the prior paper—Micah’s denunciation of the priests who teach for hire and the prophets who divine for money, Ezekiel’s denunciation of shepherds who feed themselves rather than the flock, Malachi’s denunciation of priests who would not shut the doors for nothing, Jesus Christ’s cleansing of the temple from those who had made it a den of thieves—identify a pattern that contemporary Christianity displays in several developed forms.
The most visible form is the prosperity teaching enterprise, in which the monetization of the teaching office has been raised to a developed system. The arrangement transfers wealth from audiences, often disproportionately drawn from the economically vulnerable, to teachers whose own accumulation is presented as evidence of the doctrine being taught. The structural inversion is precise: where Ezekiel’s shepherds fed themselves on the sheep, the prosperity teachers feed themselves on those most in need of genuine shepherding, and they justify the consumption with theological constructions that make the consumption itself a sign of divine blessing. Paul’s warning against those who suppose “that gain is godliness” (1 Tim 6:5) is not generic; it identifies the precise inversion that prosperity teaching institutionalizes.
A less obvious but more pervasive form is the structural dependence of teachers, pastors, and religious institutions on the goodwill of those whose conduct or doctrine ought to be confronted. Where a teacher’s continued employment depends on not offending major donors, where a denominational institution’s funding depends on not displeasing the political constituencies of its members, where a publishing platform’s commercial viability depends on not alienating the audience whose purchases sustain it, the structural conditions of mercenary religion are in place even when no individual is consciously corrupting his message. The pressures bend the message over time toward what the patrons can tolerate, and the cumulative effect is a teaching tradition systematically muted on the points where the canonical witness would most threaten the structural arrangements that sustain the teaching.
A third form is the general commercialization of Christian publishing, conferencing, and broadcasting in ways that produce a market-driven pressure on what is taught and how. The book that will not sell does not get published; the conference speaker who will not draw an audience does not get invited; the broadcast that loses listeners gets canceled. Over time, the market selects for content that audiences are willing to consume, which is not necessarily the content the canonical text is most concerned to deliver. The prophets’ message would not have done well in such a market, and the structural pressure of contemporary Christian commerce against prophetic content is one of the under-discussed features of the present religious landscape.
A fourth form is the leveraging of religious office for political and economic access. The figure of the religious leader whose influence with political authorities is itself a commodity—who is consulted, photographed, and platformed by those seeking the imprimatur of religious legitimacy, and whose own access depends on continued usefulness to the political project—repeats the pattern that Amos identified at Bethel, where the priestly office was structurally subordinate to “the king’s chapel” (Amos 7:13). The accommodations required to sustain the access tend to be precisely the accommodations that would have provoked prophetic rebuke in any prior age.
IV. The Substitution of Ritual and Activity for Righteousness
The category of ritual substitution applies to contemporary Christianity in modified form, since the cultic apparatus of the prophetic period has no exact contemporary equivalent. But the underlying pattern—the use of religious activity as a substitute for the conduct the activity was supposed to express—has clear contemporary expressions.
The most direct application concerns the use of attendance, participation, and devotional consumption as substitutes for the obedience that the canonical text actually requires. A community in which Sunday attendance (or even biblical Sabbath observance), small group participation, devotional reading, and similar activities are vigorous, but in which the underlying conduct—the integrity of business dealings, the treatment of employees and dependents, the use of speech, the patterns of consumption, the relationship to civil authorities, the response to the vulnerable—is indistinguishable from the surrounding culture, is in the position Isaiah described. The activity is being offered as the offering, and the offering is being treated as the discharge of the obligation, while the obligation itself remains unmet. Isaiah’s “Bring no more vain oblations” (Isa 1:13) addresses precisely this substitution.
A more recent application concerns the substitution of expressive religious experience for the conduct the experience is presumed to evidence. The pattern is identifiable across multiple traditions: the production of intense emotional states in worship contexts, the cultivation of moments of self-described encounter with God, the consumption of testimonial and inspirational content, all functioning as the index of spiritual health while the conduct of the participants in their ordinary lives remains substantially uncorrected. The risen Christ’s letter to Sardis—”thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead” (Rev 3:1)—identifies the pattern. The reputation, the activity, the appearances are in good order; the underlying reality is not. The risen Christ’s letter to Ephesus—”thou hast left thy first love” (Rev 2:4)—addresses a related but distinct version, in which the doctrinal vigilance is intact but the fundamental relational orientation has been hollowed out.
A third application concerns the substitution of cause-based or campaign-based activity for the disciplined personal righteousness that Scripture treats as foundational. The pattern is one in which large-scale political, social, or cultural advocacy functions as the principal expression of Christian identity, while the more demanding work of personal honesty, sexual integrity, financial restraint, and patient love within concrete relationships is allowed to atrophy. The prophets’ insistence that the offering must be offered by people whose lives match it (Isa 1:16–17) applies; the public cause cannot substitute for the private conduct, and the energy poured into the former does not compensate for the neglect of the latter.
V. The Treatment of the Vulnerable
The biblicist application of the prophets’ denunciation of the oppression of the vulnerable to contemporary Christianity is a particularly complex matter, because contemporary Christian communities differ significantly in their patterns and because the canonical categories—the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the poor—have to be applied carefully rather than mechanically to contemporary conditions.
Several specific patterns can be identified with confidence.
The treatment of those who have been wounded by religious institutions themselves—abuse survivors, those who have left after experiencing systematic mistreatment, those whose questions or testimony have been suppressed in the interest of institutional reputation—is one of the most widespread contemporary failures. The pattern recurs across traditions: the institution’s reputational interest is prioritized over the welfare of the wounded, the wounded are characterized as bitter or disloyal when they testify to what was done to them, and the resources of the community are deployed to defend the institution rather than to repair the harm. The prophetic literature treats this kind of institutional self-protection at the expense of the vulnerable as among the most serious forms of oppression, and the contemporary frequency of the pattern is substantial enough to warrant its identification as a category requiring rebuke.
The economic treatment of those who labor for Christian institutions—pastoral staff, support staff, missionaries, school employees, ministry workers—is another widespread pattern. Where wages are systematically suppressed under the rationale of ministry calling, where workers are denied the protections that secular employment would afford, where the institution’s financial difficulties are persistently translated into the workers’ financial precariousness rather than into the leadership’s accountability, the pattern that James denounced (“Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth,” James 5:4) is in operation. The use of religious framing to justify economic arrangements that secular ethics would identify as exploitative is the precise inversion that the prophets identified.
The treatment of the materially poor by communities that have substantial means is a third pattern. Where Christian communities have organized their lives around the comforts and consumptions of their members and where the relief of material need is treated as an occasional charitable activity rather than as a constitutive feature of community life, the canonical pattern has been inverted. The early church in Jerusalem held its property in common to such an extent that “neither was there any among them that lacked” (Acts 4:34); James’s epistle takes for granted that real Christian communities will be marked by visible attention to those in need (James 1:27; 2:1–7); John’s first epistle makes the question diagnostic of regeneration (“whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” 1 John 3:17). Communities whose financial flows are directed substantially toward facility, programming, and staff costs while the visible material needs of their own members and their immediate neighbors go unaddressed exhibit a pattern that the canonical witness does not recognize as health.
A fourth pattern concerns the treatment of the stranger—those outside the community who arrive in need, including migrants, refugees, and the displaced. The canonical instruction to love the stranger because Israel was once a stranger in Egypt (Lev 19:33–34; Deut 10:19) is not a contingent ethical preference but a covenantal obligation tied to God’s prior dealings with His own people. Communities that have substituted political or cultural anxieties about strangers for the canonical posture toward them, or that have allowed the political construction of strangers as threats to override the canonical instruction concerning their treatment, have departed from the standard at a particularly serious point.
VI. The Industry of Reassurance
The category of false reassurance has become, in contemporary Christianity, something close to an industry. The pattern Jeremiah and Ezekiel denounced—the systematic delivery of comforting messages to communities that ought to be alarmed—is now sustained by structural arrangements substantially more sophisticated than those of the prophetic period.
The most direct contemporary form is the reassurance that one’s standing before God is secured by an act of decision or affiliation independent of subsequent conduct. Where the message is that a one-time prayer, a one-time profession, or a one-time church membership has settled the question definitively and that no subsequent pattern of life can reopen it, the reassurance is more confident than the canonical witness warrants. The canonical witness is not unreliable on the security of those who genuinely belong to Christ, but it is also clear that the test of belonging is the conduct of life (“if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live,” Rom 8:13), and that there is a category of those who say “Lord, Lord” to whom the Lord will say “I never knew you” (Matt 7:21–23). The flattening of the canonical witness into an unconditional reassurance based on a past event is one of the principal contemporary forms of the pattern that Jeremiah denounced as healing the hurt of the people slightly.
A second form is the systematic minimization of the canonical warnings about judgment. Where the messages delivered to communities have settled into a register of affirmation, encouragement, and inspiration, with the canonical warnings about the seriousness of sin, the reality of judgment, and the cost of discipleship being treated as occasional and optional rather than as constitutive features of the canonical witness, the cumulative effect is a population that does not understand the gravity of its own situation. The prophets’ insistence that the people are in danger and must repent does not appear in this register because it cannot appear in this register without disrupting the structural arrangements that sustain the register’s commercial and pastoral viability.
A third form is the production of theological frameworks that absorb and neutralize the canonical demands. Where the canonical commands have been systematically reframed in ways that make them inoperative—where the requirements of discipleship are characterized as descriptions of a condition Christians are already in rather than as obligations they must meet, where the warnings against specific sins are absorbed into a generalized confidence in grace that does not distinguish between the regenerate and the unregenerate, where the prophetic and apostolic calls to costly faithfulness are translated into therapeutic frameworks of self-acceptance—the structural effect is the same as Jeremiah’s daubed wall. The wall is structurally unsound; the daubing conceals the unsoundness; the storm exposes the daubing.
A fourth form is the political reassurance that one’s preferred coalition is the side of God’s working in history, with the corollary reassurance that opposition to that coalition is opposition to God Himself. The pattern is identifiable across the political spectrum and is not the exclusive property of any single faction. Wherever a community has reached the point of confident identification of its political project with God’s purposes, such that the failures of the project cannot be acknowledged without theological revision, the conditions that produced the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day have been reproduced. The court prophets of Ahab were not, in their own self-understanding, partisan hacks; they were sincere believers in the alignment of their king’s project with God’s purposes, and they reported what they saw through that lens. Their contemporary equivalents operate by the same mechanism.
VII. The Bending of Doctrine to Constituency
The category of doctrinal accommodation to power applies broadly to contemporary Christianity, and it operates through several distinct mechanisms.
The most obvious is the accommodation of teaching to the political and cultural commitments of the constituencies that fund and populate the institutions doing the teaching. Where a teaching tradition has settled into reliable alignment with the political preferences of its donor base or congregational majority, on questions where the canonical witness would suggest a more independent or more uncomfortable position, the accommodation is in operation. The pattern recurs in different directions in different traditions—some accommodating to one set of cultural commitments, others to the opposite set, but each generating a teaching tradition substantially more aligned with its constituency than the canonical witness would warrant.
A second mechanism is the accommodation of teaching to the personal preferences of those whose continued presence sustains the institution. The teacher who systematically avoids the topics that would make his audience uncomfortable—the canonical instruction on sexual conduct, on the use of money, on speech, on civil authority, on whatever the audience least wants to hear—is engaged in the same accommodation that the four hundred prophets at Ahab’s court were engaged in. The selection may operate at the level of conscious calculation, or it may operate as a more diffuse pattern of inattention that the structural pressures produce over time, but its effect is the same: the audience receives a substantially edited version of the canonical witness, and the editing tracks what the audience wants to hear.
A third mechanism is the accommodation of doctrine to the moral and intellectual fashions of the broader culture, where the cultural prestige of certain conclusions makes their canonical resistance professionally costly. Where doctrines are silently shelved, or quietly reformulated, or kept in the background of teaching and preaching, because their public defense would be embarrassing or career-limiting in the relevant cultural contexts, the accommodation is operating. The fact that such accommodations are common does not alter the diagnostic; the prophets were equally critical of accommodations that were widely shared in their own day.
A fourth mechanism is the accommodation of doctrine to the requirements of preserving institutional unity in the face of internal disagreement. Where the canonical witness on contested questions is systematically muted in order to maintain a coalition that includes parties holding incompatible views, the muting itself is the accommodation. The canonical witness on these questions does not become unclear because contemporary parties disagree about it; the witness was given before the disagreement and is what the disagreement is about. The institutional choice to mute the witness for the sake of unity is an institutional choice with theological consequences, and it is the kind of choice the prophets denounced.
VIII. The Failure of the Teaching Office
The category of teaching corruption finds extensive contemporary application, in forms substantially more developed than those the prophets confronted.
Malachi’s charge of partiality in the law applies directly. Contemporary Christian teaching is, in large measure, partial in identifiable patterns. The portions of the canonical witness that align with the teaching tradition’s existing emphases receive disproportionate attention; the portions that do not are treated lightly or not at all. The cumulative effect, over generations, is the production of communities whose understanding of Scripture is shaped substantially by the partial selection rather than by the canonical whole, and whose capacity to recognize the partiality has been compromised by the very process that produced it.
The specific patterns of partiality vary by tradition. Some traditions emphasize personal piety while neglecting the canonical witness on social and economic justice; others do the inverse. Some traditions emphasize doctrinal precision while neglecting the canonical witness on personal conduct; others do the inverse. Some traditions emphasize the New Covenant texts while functionally relegating the Old Covenant texts to a status the canonical witness itself does not warrant. Some traditions emphasize portions of the apostolic witness that fit their existing commitments while treating other portions as cultural artifacts to be set aside. The directions of partiality differ; the underlying pattern of partial transmission of the canonical whole is widespread.
Hosea’s charge that the people are destroyed for lack of knowledge applies to the consequence. Contemporary Christian populations are, by historical standards, biblically illiterate to a substantial degree. The capacity to read the canonical text closely, to follow extended canonical arguments, to recognize canonical allusions, to distinguish canonical claims from cultural assumptions about canonical claims, is widely diminished. The diminishment is in part a consequence of the broader cultural decline of close textual reading, but it is also a consequence of teaching choices within Christian communities that have substituted easier formats for the more demanding work of canonical instruction. The result is a population that is theologically dependent on its teachers in a way that makes it unusually vulnerable to whatever direction the teachers happen to be moving, and a population whose capacity to test what its teachers say against the canonical standard has been compromised.
Ezekiel’s charge concerning prophets who say “Thus saith the Lord GOD” when the LORD has not spoken applies to the inverse pattern. Where teachers attribute to God positions, preferences, and purposes that the canonical text does not actually support—where personal opinion, cultural assumption, or partisan preference is presented as biblical teaching with the implicit authority of the canonical witness—the false attribution is the corruption. The pattern is widespread enough across contemporary Christian teaching to constitute a category of its own, and its danger lies in the construction of an alternative authority that competes with the genuine canonical witness while presenting itself as that witness.
The contemporary teaching office is also corrupted by the systematic replacement of canonical exposition with motivational, therapeutic, or applicational content that is loosely tethered to specific verses but that does not arise from sustained engagement with what the text actually says. The pattern is structurally analogous to the proof-texting traditions the Reformers criticized, but its contemporary form has become substantially more sophisticated, with the loose tethering often disguised by apparatus of seeming exegesis that does not survive close examination. The effect on hearers is comparable to the effect Malachi describes: the people are caused to stumble at the law, because what they are receiving as the law is not what the law actually says.
IX. The Confidence That Cannot Be Corrected
The category of religious self-confidence applies to contemporary Christianity with particular force, because contemporary Christian communities have developed unusually elaborate apparatus for sustaining confidence in the face of evidence that should call it into question.
The most pervasive form is the confidence of communities whose self-assessment is the inverse of the canonical assessment of their condition. The Laodicean letter remains the diagnostic. Communities that regard themselves as healthy because their attendance is high, their facilities are impressive, their programming is vigorous, and their reputational metrics are favorable—while their conduct exhibits the patterns the canonical witness identifies as marks of spiritual decline—are in the position the risen Christ addressed at Laodicea. The confidence is itself the obstacle to recognizing the condition, and the obstacle is reinforced by the very metrics that should be calling it into question, because the metrics measure what the community considers important rather than what the canonical witness considers important.
A second form is the confidence of communities that identify themselves as the faithful remnant in contrast to a declining surrounding Christianity. The pattern is not new; remnant identification has scriptural warrant in the right circumstances. But the contemporary form often functions as a form of self-confidence that absorbs prophetic warning rather than receiving it. The community knows that other communities are in decline; it does not seriously entertain the possibility that the same patterns are operating in its own life. The very identification as the remnant becomes the alibi against the canonical examination that the identification ought to invite. Elijah’s confidence that he was the only one left was corrected by God’s reminder of the seven thousand who had not bowed to Baal (1 Kings 19:18); the contemporary equivalent of Elijah’s confidence is rarely subjected to comparable correction.
A third form is the confidence of traditions that have settled into a posture of retrospective triumph over earlier theological errors, such that the resources for examining their own contemporary errors have been exhausted in the celebration of past corrections. The community knows what it stands against; it has rehearsed the reasons frequently. It does not know what it currently stands against because it has not done the harder work of asking. The result is a community well-equipped to fight the battles of previous generations and poorly equipped to recognize the battles of its own.
A fourth form is the confidence sustained by the structural management of internal critique. Where the institutional arrangements of a community are organized in ways that systematically suppress, marginalize, or expel internal voices that would call its self-assessment into question—where the social cost of internal critique is high enough that most members do not undertake it, and where those who do are treated as troublemakers rather than as resources—the confidence is sustained by institutional engineering rather than by underlying reality. The community is not as healthy as it appears; it has eliminated the voices that would be telling it so.
X. The Pattern of Persecution Repeated
The prior white papers documented the pattern by which legitimate corrective voices are persecuted by the generation to which they are sent and honored by subsequent generations. The category itself constitutes a contemporary diagnostic.
Contemporary Christian communities that vigorously honor the prophets, the apostles, the Reformers, the missionaries, and the corrective voices of previous generations are likely, by the canonical pattern, to be among the communities that would resist comparable voices in their own time. The honor paid to dead prophets is, by the canonical analysis, frequently a form of moral alibi rather than a sign of receptivity. The contemporary frequency with which Christian communities position themselves as the heirs of the persecuted faithful, and the corresponding rarity with which they recognize that their own institutional position now resembles that of the parties the persecuted faithful confronted, suggests that the pattern Jesus Christ identified in Matthew 23 is in active operation.
The diagnostic is uncomfortable, and its application to specific communities is correspondingly difficult. But the canonical witness does not allow the assumption that contemporary identification with the prophets is, in itself, evidence of fitness to receive contemporary prophets. The very confidence that one would have welcomed earlier prophets is, by the canonical analysis, presumptive evidence that one would not.
XI. Conclusion: The Honest Reception of the Diagnostic
The application of canonical diagnostic categories to contemporary Christianity produces results that are uncomfortable in every direction the application is honestly conducted. No contemporary tradition emerges unscathed. The traditions most confident of their own canonical fidelity are typically those whose self-confidence is itself diagnosable in the categories the prophets developed. The traditions most willing to acknowledge their failings on certain canonical points are typically those whose accommodations on other canonical points are most pronounced. The traditions most active in corrective denunciation of others are typically those whose blind spots concerning themselves are most resistant to internal recognition.
The biblicist standard does not allow this discomfort to be resolved by identifying a contemporary tradition that has it right and aligning with it. Such an identification would be itself an instance of the religious self-confidence that the canonical witness identifies as one of the principal obstacles to corrective hearing. The honest reception of the diagnostic is therefore necessarily self-implicating before it is corrective of others, and the order of application is consequential. The reader who comes to this analysis ready to apply it to communities other than his own has not yet received it.
The application most consistent with the canonical pattern is the application that begins with the reader’s own community, conducted with the recognition that the categories were developed for self-examination by communities claiming covenant standing, that they apply with particular force to communities most confident that they do not apply, and that the resistance the diagnostic generates within the reader’s own community is itself one of the predicted features of its operation. This application is what the canonical witness asks for, and it is what its honest reception requires.
The final word is the canonical word. The risen Christ’s letters to the seven churches end each address with the same formula: “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches” (Rev 2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). The formula assumes that the addresses will be heard by some and not by others, that the difference is a difference of receptivity rather than of intellectual capacity, and that those who hear will find in the letters not flattery but correction. Contemporary Christianity stands in the same position as the seven churches of Asia. The canonical word is available; the categories of diagnosis are clear; the application is straightforward when one is willing to make it. What remains is the hearing, and the hearing is the responsibility of those whose ears are not yet stopped.
