The World Faith Forgot
Something’s Off
Faith was supposed to set us free, but somewhere along the way it got heavy. The more we try to get it right, the less it feels alive. We go through the motions—church, belief, activity—but the joy that once turned the world upside down feels like it’s gone missing.
So maybe the problem isn’t that we’ve lost faith—it’s that we’ve inherited a version too small for the God Jesus revealed.
The first followers of Jesus didn’t have stages or sermons or even statements of faith. They had tables. Bread, wine, stories, laughter, tears—people who’d seen the unthinkable and couldn’t shut up about it:
God looks like Jesus. Always has. Always will.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Jesus didn’t come to start a religion; He came to end the one humanity started—with the news of a:
Father who runs toward you, not away (Luke 15:20).
Son who doesn’t just show the way to God but shows He is the Way (John 14:6).
Spirit who makes its home in you, not in a temple (John 14:17; 1 Cor 3:16).
This is the doctrine of the Trinity—not an idea to dissect, but the reality we were made for: one God, perfectly united in love, drawing us into that same life. “I and the Father are one,” Jesus said (John 10:30). “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
In the words of the Apostle Paul, Jesus ”is the image of the invisible God… in him all things were created… and in him all things hold together” (Col 1:15-17). Hence, there’s a reason Genesis 1:26 reads, “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness’”
That’s what the early Church believed. And that belief hit a wall when the good news 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, physical one “down here.”
The Greek mind couldn’t handle mystery. They needed everything to fit neatly on a spreadsheet. They liked their gods untouchable, unmoved, and 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 hated His stated nature. A God who gets hungry? Sweats? Bleeds? Nope. Not divine enough.
And in their unwillingness to let mystery have the mic, they reached for management.
Some early church thinkers—smart, sincere folks like Justin Martyr (100–165), Tertullian (160–225), and Origen (185–254)—tried to translate the gospel into language the philosophers respected.
But in doing so, they imported a poison: the idea that God had 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. Instead of seeing the cross as love unveiled, they saw it as an angry God needing payment.
And that split in God led to a split in life:
Faith stopped being about trust and started being about performance. 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 Greeks rewrite the story.
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).
In other words, Arius thought Jesus was created, not eternal; the firstborn of creation, but 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 was fully love all the way down, or just pretending to be nice for a while.
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: “God is love” (1 John 4:8)—through and through.
Thankfully, the Church sided with Athanasius, declaring that the Father and Son 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, we liked the sound of it. Because nothing feeds the human love for control like a god we can diagram.
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; one for Sunday, one for judgment day.
And that’s when Rome saw its chance.
When Faith Met Power
If the Greek mind overthought it, the Roman Empire overbuilt it.
The movement Jesus started was spreading fast—poor people, freed slaves, women, workers—all living like they already belonged. No hierarchy, no temple, no king but Jesus.
It was beautiful. Dangerous, even. Because power hungry people can’t control a society that believes they’re already free.
So when the Roman Emperor Constantine (272–337 AD) legalized Christianity in 313 AD, it felt like a win. No more lions. No more hiding.
But within a few decades, the movement of grace that was spreading through unbranded friendships had been absorbed into the machinery of empire.
By 330 AD, Constantine had turned Christianity into the official religion of Rome. He swapped tables for thrones, and crosses for crowns.
Grace got franchised. Faith got institutionalized. And the Church, once a rebellious family, became a regulated hierarchy.
To make it more marketable, they borrowed from what worked.
Pagan worship temples became “churches.” Feasts for the gods became “holy days.” Even the sun god’s festival on December 25th—Sol Invictus—was repackaged as Christmas, celebrating the “Light of the World.”
Overnight, a movement built on friendship became an empire built on fear. And once this mislabeled idea of “church” held power, it had to protect it.
When Faith Got Systematized
Enter Augustine (354–430 AD)—a genius who was about Jesus, but struggled to see Him for He was due to Plato’s influence. He couldn’t imagine a God who was love all the way down.
So he doubled down on the split.
Humans, he said, are born guilty—broken by default.
God, he said, is angry by nature—disgusted with sin.
And Jesus? He’s the middleman, absorbing wrath so the Father can stand to look at us again.
It sounded brilliant. Logical. Manageable. But it was a million miles from what Jesus actually revealed about God, humanity, sin, and faith.
The Father Jesus spoke of didn’t need convincing; He was the One who sent the Son to undue our debilitating delusion of Him. The Spirit wasn’t a prize for those who believed; He was the presence of God that led us—and leads us—to believe.
But with Augustine’s framework in place, the Church made God’s presence conditional and our faith transactional. Salvation became a system to maintain, not a life to enjoy.
The split-God myth became a split-life faith.
Instead of living as one with God, people were told they needed to become something for Him. 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, we got a religion to perfect the self.
By the time of the Crusades (1095–1291), this thing masquerading as the “church” was literally murdering people in Jesus’ name. The Reformation (1500s) tried to fix what Catholicism created, but both sides kept the same angry-God framework—just tweaked the payment plan.
And now here we are: still building formalized churches, still selling spiritual improvement, still missing the punchline that started it all:
Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us.
He came to change our minds about God.
The World We Lost
As we look through history, we start to see why we—and the world at large—struggle to live in the freedom faith was meant to bring.
The God Jesus revealed can’t be found in the Greek philosophy being peddled as gospel or the Roman institutions masquerading as “church.”
Grace doesn’t sell to hearts obsessed with control. It can’t be managed, monetized, or measured—and that’s a problem for systems designed to preserve themselves.
So instead of trying to fix the past or rewrite the record, this series exists to uncover the original story that’s been hiding in plain sight.
Because when you move past all the religious noise to the truth, you start to see a different kind of world.
A world where people live free because they know they already belong.
A world where friendship, not fear, holds us together.
A world where the life of God spills into every ordinary thing.
That’s the world faith was always meant to create.
And we’re going to recover it—not by chasing something new, but by uncovering the grace that’s been here the whole time, buried beneath the systems that forgot it.