Written by Russ Johnson
If the Christian life feels like one more thing to get right, it’s not because you’re failing at it. It’s because somewhere along the way, the story about God got bent. To see how, we have to go back to the beginning.
Before there was light, before a single covenant or commandment, there was God. And God was not alone. Father, Son, and Spirit—an eternal circle of love and delight.
This is the fellowship we were made to share: “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.’” (Gen 1:26)
The writers of the Old Testament, like kids picking up breadcrumbs, saw hints of God’s togetherness. But humanity kept imagining God through the only lens we knew: independence. Power. Control.
We thought freedom meant standing apart, not living in dependence.
So God did what only love does. He came closer. He stepped into our story in the person of Jesus, to show us what we’d missed. Because, as Jesus said, “No one knows the Father except the Son.” (Matt 11:27)
In the words of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… The Word [Jesus] became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:1, 14)
The Greek word for “with” is pros — toward, face-to-face. Before time began, the Father and Son were turned toward each other in total delight, while the Spirit hovered like a rhythm of joy between them.
And when the Word took on flesh, we finally saw a:
Father who runs toward you, not away. (Luke 15:20)
Son who reconciles us to the Father, not the Father to us. (2 Cor 5:19)
Spirit who made his home in you. (John 14:17; 1 Cor 3:16)
That’s what the first Christians believed. And that belief hit a wall when the good news of Jesus ran into the Greek mind.
When Faith Met Philosophy
By the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the story of Jesus had spread into a world built on the ideas of Plato (428–348 BC) — the man who taught that reality was split in two: the perfect world of spirit “up there,” and the flawed one “down here.”
The Greek mind couldn’t handle mystery. They needed everything to fit neatly on a spreadsheet. Gods who were untouchable, unimpressed.
So when Christians came along saying, God became human, showed up in the person of Jesus, Greek thinkers nearly choked on their logic.
Impossible, they said. The perfect cannot mingle with the imperfect.
They loved Jesus’ ethics, but rejected His stated nature. A God who gets hungry? Sweats? Eats with humans? Bleeds? Not divine enough.
And in their unwillingness to let mystery have the mic, they reached for management.
Some early church thinkers, sincere folks like Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) and Origen (c. 185–254), tried to translate the gospel into language the philosophers respected.
But in the process, they planted a seed they never intended: a God with two sides. Holy and loving. Wrathful and merciful. Distant and near.
The split-God myth was born.
Jesus was no longer the full revelation of who God has always been; he became the gentle side of a two-faced deity. And that split in God has had a real impact:
Faith stopped being about trust in who Jesus is for us and started being about performance for God. Spirit and body got separated. And people stopped seeing God in the dirt and started chasing him in the clouds.
When Faith Fought Back
Then came Athanasius, the fiery leader from Alexandria, who refused to let the Greek mind rewrite the story Jesus told.
He said, no—Jesus isn’t God’s Plan B. He is the full revelation of who God’s always been. In his own words: “He became what we are, that He might make us what He is.” (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, §54)
The Council of Nicaea (325 AD) was basically a theological cage match over one question: Is Jesus truly equal with the Father?
A slick preacher named Arius said: no. “There was [a time] when he was not,” he argued. (Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians, I.5)
Arius thought Jesus was created, not eternal; the best representative of God, not of the same substance as God.
The debate ripped throughout the region as everything hinged on one Greek word, homoousios — of the same substance, versus homoiousios — of similar substance.
The difference of one iota, literally one letter, decided whether God has always been fully love, all the way down.
Because if Jesus isn’t “the exact representation of God’s being” (Heb 1:3), then maybe there’s still some shadow behind the smile. But if he is, then there’s no split, no hidden anger, no second face behind the Father. God really is who Jesus shows him to be: “love.” (1 John 4:16)
Thankfully, the early church sided with Athanasius, declaring that the Father, Son and Spirit are “of one substance.”
But even then, Greek philosophy was still whispering in the background — telling us that God must be more predictable than this. And honestly, people liked the sound of it.
Nothing feeds the human love for control like having a hand in how God moves in people’s lives.
So while the Nicene Creed was orthodox, the imagination of the people remained divided. Sure, they confessed one God in words, but worshiped two in practice. One loving. One angry.
When Faith Got Systematized
Within a century of Constantine embracing Christianity, things had drastically changed. Everyday leaders became professional clergy. Ordinary tables became temples. Conversations became sermons.
The movement Jesus started had become an institution. And like the gospel before it, a new doctrine would travel fast on Roman roads.
Enter Augustine (354–430 AD), whose idea of God as distant and separate from us was shaped first by the dualism of the Manichaeans, then by Plotinus and the Platonists.
Augustine imagined God as perfectly unchanging and pure, untouched by the mess. Not one who lives with us in it.
So he doubled down on the split. Humanity was born guilty, he said. Tainted by original sin. A corruption passed from Adam to every generation. (Confessions VII.21; City of God XIII.14–15)
God, he said, was angry by nature — his justice demanding a sacrifice. (City of God XXI.11; Enchiridion 33)
And Jesus?
The middleman who absorbs that wrath so the Father can stand to look at us again. It sounded brilliant. Logical. Manageable. But it looked more like the gods of Greece and Rome than the Father Jesus revealed.
The Father Jesus revealed doesn’t need convincing. He sent the Son to undo our distorted picture of him. The Spirit isn’t a prize for those who believe. He’s the presence of God within us, leading us to believe. That’s why the pull comes from within, not from a voice in the sky.
But with Augustine’s framework in place, the new institutionalized church made God’s presence conditional and our acceptance transactional. Salvation became a system to maintain, not a life to enjoy.
The split-God myth became a split-life myth.
Instead of seeing themselves as beloved, they saw themselves as bad. And instead of a faith that freed people from the endless project of self, they got a religion to perfect the self.
As the Catholic Church formed and grew powerful, these ideas spread with it, and so did its abuses. In the 1500s Reformation, Luther and Calvin exposed real corruption. But they didn’t dismantle the angry-God framework underneath it. They just tweaked the payment plan.
And here we are, still seeing God through the filters we inherited and telling stories that only confirm them.
There’s Another Way
Changing our minds about something we’ve always known isn’t easy. It can feel like losing our faith, our very sense of security.
We all have the same blind spot: mistaking what we’ve always seen for what’s always been.
It’s how Greek philosophy gets mistaken for the gospel. How a Roman institution passes for church. Why talk of grace is everywhere, but people living free are rare.
That’s why we created On A Lark.
It’s a free journey through the Scriptures that lets them say what they actually say. Sometimes that means looking beneath our modern translations to what the original writers meant. Always it means looking again at the Father Jesus revealed, and what it means to trust him.
Not to give you another set of beliefs to defend. But to invite you to see for yourself what may have been hiding in plain sight all along.
Come take another look.