This Is Not That: Backstory
Every Story Has A 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, delight, and laughter (Genesis 1–3).
This is the doctrine of the Trinity—not an idea to dissect, but the fellowship we were created to share in.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness’” (Genesis 1:26).
The writers of the Old Testament caught glimpses of this. Like kids picking up breadcrumbs, they 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 union.
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,” for “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30; 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—meaning toward or 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 doesn’t just show the way to God but says He is the Way (John 14:6).
Spirit who made His home in you, not in a temple (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, 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 rejected 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 to world that wants religion, they saw it as an angry God needing payment.
And that split in God has had a real impact:
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 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 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 4:16)—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, people 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 throughout the empire—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 with pews and altars 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 couldn’t quite see Him for who He actually is.
Raised on the philosophy of Plato and the Neoplatonists (especially Plotinus), Augustine imagined God as perfectly immovable and pure, unable to mingle in the mess. He couldn’t quite picture a God who was love all the way down.
So he doubled down on the split.
Humanity, he said, was born guilty—tainted by original sin, a corruption passed from Adam to every generation (seeConfessions 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 was in line with Greek mythology, not what Jesus actually revealed about God and humanity.
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 in us that led 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 someone who is 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, they 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 the name of “faithfulness.” 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: with people 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.
But changing our minds has never been easy. It’s not stubbornness so much as blindness. We all suffer from the same condition—egocentric myopia: the tendency to mistake what we’ve always seen for what’s always been.
So we keep imagining God through the filters we inherited—logic, control, independence—and then build formalized churches, doctrines, and stories that reflect those same ideas back at us.
And that’s how we ended up here—seeing God through a cracked lens, and calling the distortion normal.
The World We Lost
As we look through history, we see why we—and the world at large—struggle to find the freedom faith was meant to bring.
The God Jesus revealed can’t be found in the Greek mythology 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 or monetized—and that’s why institutions designed to preserve themselves can’t let that cat out of the bag. Doing so would mean people spending their time, energy, and money on being helpful neighbors.
So instead of trying to fix the past or what’s been labeled “church,” 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—one where:
People live free because they know they already belong.
Friendship, not fear, holds us together.
And 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.