Hey everyone 👋,
I wrote in Christianity Makes Perfect Sense! about how some truths are deeply unfashionable, and how the discomfort a truth produces is often the surest sign that it is worth sitting with. This post is in that spirit. I want to talk about something that I have been turning over in my head for a long time, something that Christianity itself, read carefully and without the institutional filters, actually supports with a startling degree of directness. The title gives it away so I will not pretend there is a mystery: Jesus was right, and among the many things he was right about is this one, which most church hierarchies have buried so thoroughly that most Christians have never encountered it. He was right that you are, in some profound and irreducible sense, divine. That you carry within you something that the tradition calls godlike, that you are not merely a creature made to bow down and wait, but a being made from the same substance that the Gospel of John calls the Word, the very creative principle through which all things were made. I know how that sounds. I know it reads either as arrogance or as heresy depending on who you are. I am going to spend the rest of this post making the case that it is neither, that it is actually the oldest and most straightforward reading of the text, and that the institutions which suppressed it did so not because it was false but because it was dangerously empowering.
