Michael J. Lilly Podcast

Preachers for Hire

Today’s church pulpits often feel more like corporate seminar stages than sacred spaces. Many focus on polish, production, and engaging speakers. We look for someone who can keep an audience’s attention, share three relatable points, and finish on time. This focus has led to what could be called the “preacher for hire” industry. When a church loses its main teacher, it rarely looks within. Instead, they use search committees, post job ads, and review resumes and preaching samples. Often, they hire charismatic outsiders who stay for a while before leaving for better opportunities. When churches choose professional speakers instead of developing their own teachers, they break the important biblical link between teaching and local elder leadership. This shows a shift toward a more secular leadership style, moving away from the apostolic model. Hired Hands vs. Local Servants The main issue with professional preachers is their lack of a close connection with their congregations. A hired speaker may give a good sermon, but they don’t know the people. They’re out of touch with the congregation’s real struggles and victories. Teaching without real relationships often becomes just sharing information. Real spiritual growth needs a teacher who knows the people well and works under the guidance of elders. To be fair, a hired hand can sometimes connect with people over time. But typically, by the time that connection begins, the situation devolves into one of three common scenarios. First, the connection becomes a cliquey or cultish following that sows deep division, often pitting the preacher’s loyal fans against local elders. Second, the preacher maintains shallow, manufactured relationships to feign interest and keep their job secure. Third, just as relational roots begin to take hold, the preacher decides to move on to a better or bigger platform. Jesus issues a serious warning about spiritual leaders who treat the local church as nothing more than a job rather than a family. He said, “The hired worker, who isn’t a shepherd and doesn’t own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and abandons the sheep and runs away. He flees because he’s a hired worker and doesn’t care about the sheep” (John 10:12-13). When the pulpit is separate from the people, the church becomes more like a show for consumers. The congregation turns into a passive audience, judging each sermon by how entertaining it is. Instead of being a family cared for by local leaders who know them, people just rate the performance. Apostolic vs. Post-Reformation Models To address this disconnect, we must look back at the apostolic deposit and test ourselves against it. The New Testament model for church leadership is organic, localized, and relational. Leaders weren’t recruited from external staffing agencies. They were identified, tested, and raised within the local community. The apostles laid out two distinct, local roles. The elders serve as the actual shepherds who oversee the flock. The deacons serve the congregation under the elders’ oversight. Peter writes directly to these local shepherds: “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, watching over them not under compulsion but willingly according to God, not for dishonest gain but eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:2-3). The apostles never taught that there should be a special office just for a “preacher” or “minister.” Making the minister a separate leader is not part of the biblical framework for church structure. In the Scriptures, those who preach and teach are deacons or laypeople who serve under the elders; the keyword being “serve,” not “rule.” There’s a glaring hypocrisy within traditions like the Churches of Christ to which I belong. We take issue with the practice of elevating a “Pastor” or a “Bishop” to rule over a local congregation. We proudly claim to have a plurality of elders instead. Yet by importing a hired “Minister” who serves as the primary spiritual authority, delivers all public teaching, and serves as the professional face of the church, we’ve functionally created the exact same unbiblical office. We just slapped a different title on the office door. How did we drift from this structure? In the COC context, it’s a holdover from Reformation traditions leading to the Restorationist movement. The Reformation brought necessary reforms and valid critiques against the Roman church, but in this area, it reinforced the institutionalization of the clergy. By making the sermon the central aspect of worship, Reformers replaced the Catholic priest with the Protestant academic. The pulpit became a lecture hall for professionals; the pastoral role became a corporate job. Today’s secular “church leadership” mirrors Fortune 500 companies: the church as a franchise, people as consumers, the preacher as CEO or content creator. Sent, Not Hired Every time I’ve seen this critique raised, it’s never failed that defenders of the modern minister system have inevitably pointed to biblical figures like Paul, Timothy, or Titus as examples of traveling preachers. But this conflates two fundamentally different roles. These men did not sign a contract to be hired by a congregation and deliver weekly keynote addresses until they lose favor with the crowd and it becomes time to bring in a shiny new preacher. Biblically, evangelists and missionaries like Paul, Timothy, and Titus were commissioned by established elderships, sent out to preach the gospel in unreached areas, and plant new churches. Their ministry was outward-facing and temporary in any single location, centered on founding communities of believers. In contrast, local teachers and elders were raised up from within those very communities, tasked with ongoing teaching, spiritual care, and shepherding of the flock after the evangelist had moved on. This distinction is clear in passages such as 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, where qualifications for elders and deacons are based on their local reputation and established relationships. Evangelists were foundation-layers and planters, not permanent resident teachers. Their presence was temporary and functional. They laid a foundation, then left. Paul explains to Titus: “For this reason I left you in Crete, so you might set right what remains unfinished and appoint elders in every city, as I instructed” (Titus 1:5). The apostolic missionary aimed to work themselves out of a job. Once a church matured enough to produce leaders, the missionary appointed elders and deacons and moved on. Congregations were entrusted to their own leaders, not to a long-term “Pulpit Minister.” Cultivating Homegrown Teachers If we want strong churches, we need to stop depending on search committees to find the next leader. Church leaders should take charge of their own communities. Churches should focus on discipleship, finding and training faithful men from within to teach and lead. Mentoring takes time, but raising leaders from inside the church creates a solid foundation that lasts. As a practical first step, leaders can identify members who demonstrate spiritual maturity and invite them to participate in leadership apprenticeships or small-group teaching opportunities. Pairing less experienced members with seasoned elders or deacons for intentional mentorship will help develop their gifts. Regularly rotating teaching responsibilities in Bible studies or small gatherings will allow emerging leaders to grow in experience, confidence, and connection with the congregation. Church leaders should value character more than charisma. A local deacon may not have the smooth delivery or clever jokes of a professional speaker, but they care deeply for their church. They have shared in the same struggles, built trust, and know how to speak to their community’s needs. A healthy church doesn’t need a flashy presentation. It needs faithful elders and humble deacons who teach and care for the people. We desperately need modern “ministers” to become Scriptural deacons. Instead of occupying their own elevated office or acting as a higher class of Christian, they should adopt the biblical definition of a servant. They’re meant to work under local elders to teach and serve the flock, not to be the star of the show. Let’s abandon the secular, corporate models of church staffing and return to the beautiful, messy, and relational work of building up our own elders and deacons from within our own spiritual families. 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Divine Scales

It’s incredibly common in modern church culture to hear people say that “all sin is the same to God” or “sin is just sin.” It usually comes from the good intention of emphasizing that everyone needs grace. We want to level the playing field to show that nobody is beyond the need for salvation. While the motivation behind the phrase is understandable, the theology behind it is fundamentally flawed. Philosophically, the idea that all sins are equal actually originates not in Scripture but in ancient Stoicism. The Stoics taught a paradox that all moral failures were exactly equal because any failure was simply a departure from perfect reason. To them, missing the mark by an inch was the same as missing it by a mile. But biblical Christianity rejects this flattened view of morality. The reality is, there is in fact a distinction between the status of being a sinner and the degree of the sin committed. An analogy, if you’ll allow: * A single drop of poison makes a glass of water undrinkable. That speaks to its status. * Drinking a single drop of poison doesn’t have the same physical consequence as drinking a whole gallon. That speaks to the degree. While every sin ruptures our relationship with God and makes us guilty in some sense, the Scriptures and the historical practice of Christians over the last 2,000 years consistently demonstrate that sins differ in severity, guilt, and judgment according to intent, knowledge, and the harm they cause. Old Testament Witness The Old Testament sacrificial system wasn’t a blind bureaucracy. It was a relational framework that categorized sins by the posture of the human heart. God makes clear distinctions between a genuine mistake and calculated rebellion. We see this in the law regarding unintentional sin: “And if one soul sins unintentionally, he will bring a yearling female goat for a sin offering” (Numbers 15:27). A sin committed out of ignorance still requires atonement because God is holy, but the required sacrifice is less costly. It acknowledges human frailty without destroying the person. On the other hand, willful and defiant rebellion carries a distinctly heavier weight and a fundamentally different consequence. The very next passage outlines this severity: “And the soul, whoever acts with a hand of arrogance, whether he is native-born or a foreigner, this one provokes God; and that soul will be cut off from among his people” (Numbers 15:30). To sin with a “hand of arrogance” is to act with premeditated defiance. For such a rebellion, there is no routine sacrifice offered; only severance from the community. God’s own law proves that the severity of the sin is connected to the sinner’s intent. God’s justice is proportional. New Testament Witness If anyone was going to flatten morality into a single standard, we might expect it to be Jesus. Yet, we see the exact opposite in his teaching. He actively calibrates the divine scales to show that certain offenses matter far more than others. Jesus explicitly uses comparative language when discussing the law: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). He mocks the religious elite for obsessing over microscopic infractions while ignoring bigger moral failures. To God, neglecting justice and mercy is infinitely heavier on the scales than failing to tithe garden herbs. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this specific verse, taught that while all sin is an offense against God, the punishment and severity vary wildly. He noted that Christ is showing us how God judges our actions not just by the rule broken, but by the intent and the specific harm caused. Jesus also teaches that a person’s awareness of God’s will directly impacts the severity of their judgment: “And that slave who knew the will of his master and did not prepare or act according to his will, will be beaten with many blows. But the one who did not know, yet did things worthy of blows, will be beaten with few blows” (Luke 12:47-48). Accountability scales with revelation. A person who sins in ignorance will face judgment, but the believer who knows the Master’s will and intentionally disobeys will face a far more severe consequence. Later, during his trial, Jesus clarifies to Pilate that guilt isn’t distributed equally among those involved in his crucifixion. He tells the Roman governor: “Jesus answered him, ‘You would have no authority against me at all, unless it had been given to you from above; because of this, the one handing me over to you has a greater sin’” (John 19:11). Pilate was a cowardly pragmatist sentencing an innocent man to die, which was terribly sinful, while the religious leaders were intentional orchestrators of the execution. Jesus looks at two groups participating in the same event and declares one to have a “greater sin.” The apostles carried this teaching forward, recognizing that certain sins give rise to distinct spiritual realities and require different pastoral responses. The Apostle John explicitly divides sins into two categories regarding their outcome: “If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he will ask, and God will give life to him, to those who are sinning not unto death. There is a sin unto death; I do not say that he should ask concerning that” (1 John 5:16). Different spiritual realities require different approaches. James also warns that those who teach will be judged with greater strictness: “Do not become many teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive a greater judgment” (James 3:1). Actions have weighted consequences based on a person’s position and influence. A leader leading people astray carries more weight than someone struggling with a personal sin. Early Church Practice and Ancient Canons The historical record shows that Christians have always recognized that not all sins are created equal, a belief deeply embedded in early church practice. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the bishops explicitly codified degrees of guilt into canon law. In Canon 11, they established distinct canonical penalties for those who denied the faith. They carefully distinguished between those who lapsed under extreme coercion or torture and those who fell away without any compulsion at all, assigning much heavier penances to the willful betrayals. Canon 12, dealing with Christians who returned to the pagan military, the council instructed bishops to adjust the length of penance based on the person’s inward intent, fear, and sorrow. St. Basil’s canonical letters clearly demonstrate the same framework. He prescribed vastly different periods of repentance and exclusion from the Eucharist based on the severity of the sin. For example, he made strict, measured distinctions between intentional murder and involuntary manslaughter. The Council of Constantinople in 381 AD demonstrates that the early church even saw degrees of severity in false teaching. Canon 7 outlined that certain heretics needed to be rebaptized to re-enter the church, while others, whose errors were deemed less severe, only required chrismation. Canon 102 of the Quinisext Council in 692 AD explicitly instructs bishops to weigh the “quality of the sin” and the sinner’s disposition. The canon states that not all spiritual illnesses are the same, and they require different degrees of spiritual medicine. Measuring the weight of a sin wasn’t just a theological theory for the early church; it was standard pastoral practice. The Justice and Mercy of True Proportionality From the logic of natural law to the explicit teachings of Jesus, the Apostles, and the historic Church Fathers, the verdict is consistent: All sin separates us from God, but not all sin is created equal. If we teach that all sin is the exact same, we inadvertently make God out to be an unjust judge who lacks the nuance to distinguish between a momentary lapse in judgment and premeditated evil. It also breeds pastoral disaster, as flattening sin leads tender consciences to despair over minor flaws while allowing hardened sinners to justify grave wickedness under the excuse that “nobody is perfect.” We must rely completely on Christ’s grace for our salvation. But we must also pursue wisdom in how we live, knowing that our specific choices, our intent, and our influence carry real significance in the eyes of a perfectly just God. 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Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Problem

Have you ever noticed how similar Matthew, Mark, and Luke are? They share a tremendous amount of material, often word-for-word. Scholars call this the “Synoptic Problem,” and they have debated for centuries about how to explain this close literary relationship. If you take a New Testament seminary class, chances are you will probably be introduced to the standard academic answer: a hypothetical document called “Q” (from the German word Quelle, meaning “source”). Scholars use Q to explain the material shared by Matthew and Luke that is not found in Mark. While Q is incredibly popular in academic circles, the more historically and biblically sound explanation is that the Gospel authors relied on widely circulated oral traditions that the early churches simply knew. We actually don’t need a lost written document to explain the shared material in the Synoptic Gospels. The Roots of Q: The Reformation and German Higher Criticism To understand the origins of the Q theory, it helps to trace its roots to the theological shifts of the sixteenth century. The Q hypothesis is fundamentally a product of German textual criticism. This movement is intrinsically tied to Martin Luther and the early Reformers. When the Reformers broke from the historic church, they didn’t just challenge papal authority; they exhibited a startling arrogance in trying to redefine the biblical canon that had been received and universally accepted by the Christian faithful for centuries. Luther famously questioned the apostolic authority of books like James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, while simultaneously moving the Deuterocanonical books into a separate “Apocryphal” index (which is also a complete misnomer that we’re still unfortunately dealing with today). Luther’s arrogance effectively stripped away the validity of historical Christian witnesses. By deciding that the received biblical canon of the early church was subject to the private scrutiny of individual scholars, the Reformers inadvertently laid the groundwork for the modern critical era. They established a precedent that the traditional understanding of the Bible could, and should, be dismantled. Fast forward to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this spirit of independent academic skepticism blossomed fully into German “Higher Criticism.” Scholars operating in this environment no longer viewed the Gospels through the reverent lens of early church witnesses. Instead, they treated the texts as mere literary puzzles to be dissected. It was in this cold, hyper-analytical climate that German philosopher and theologian Christian Hermann Weisse formally proposed the Two-Source Hypothesis in 1838, arguing that Matthew and Luke relied on Mark and a second, now-lost document, later dubbed Q. To put it plainly: Q is not a historical discovery. It was born out of a critical tradition that had long since abandoned the authority of the church’s living memory. The Flaws and Biases of the Q Hypothesis The biggest problem with the Q hypothesis is the complete lack of physical evidence. Again, simply put, Q is entirely hypothetical. We haven’t found a single manuscript, fragment, or historical reference to it anywhere in early church history. Q is primarily a formulation created by academics who view history through a strict literary lens and frankly don’t believe oral tradition is a valid or reliable method of historical preservation. The Q theory rests on a major assumption we could call the “written requirement fallacy.” It assumes that for Matthew and Luke to share exact sayings of Jesus, they had to be copying from a written text. This completely ignores the robust nature of memory in ancient cultures. As the classical scholar Milman Parry demonstrated in his groundbreaking studies of Homeric poetry, ancient societies routinely transmitted vast, complex narratives with incredible accuracy, without relying on written texts. Simply put, if humans don’t need perfectly preserved written texts to accurately pass on large, complex traditions, why would we assume God requires one to preserve His truth? The Validity and Biblical Precedent of Oral Tradition We have to remember that the church preceded the written text. Before the New Testament was codified in writing, the church operated primarily through the spoken word. As historian Jaroslav Pelikan points out, the oral Gospel existed as the authoritative norm long before the written Gospels were ever produced. The early Christian community didn’t desperately need a hypothetical written Q source because the living, spoken traditions of Jesus were already their primary, guiding authority. Unlike the skepticism of modern academics, the Bible explicitly affirms the transmission of oral traditions. We see this clearly in Paul’s letters. “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, whether by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15). The apostles placed the spoken word on the exact same authoritative level as their written letters. The early churches trusted what they heard from the apostolic witnesses. Of course, recognizing the power of oral tradition in the first century doesn’t diminish the vital role of Scripture today. In fact, we have a massive advantage now. We aren’t left guessing what the apostles taught through centuries of unwritten transmission. God purposefully guided the early church to crystallize that living, apostolic faith into the written text of the New Testament. The written Word doesn’t replace the original oral tradition; it permanently captures and preserves it. Having the Bible today gives us the incredible blessing of an objective, unchanging anchor that protects us from doctrinal drift while connecting us directly to the authentic faith of the early church. The point is that when the Gospel authors set out to write their accounts, they didn’t rely on a hidden Q document for the teachings of Jesus. Instead, they simply drew upon the rich, living oral traditions circulating at the time. As Danish scholar N. F. S. Grundtvig correctly identified, the early church was animated by the “Living Word,” which was the active, spoken confession of faith within the community. The Gospel teachings reflect the very words of Jesus that everyone in these early congregations already knew, recited, and lived by daily. However, this transmission process wasn’t merely the rote memorization of dry facts. As Pelikan observed in his earlier work, true tradition is the “living faith of the dead,” whereas traditionalism is the “dead faith of the living.” The early church wasn’t engaging in lifeless traditionalism. They passed down the teachings of Jesus dynamically as vital, life-giving truth, ensuring a highly accurate yet living preservation of the gospel. All this to say, we don’t need a hypothetical, unproven, undiscovered document to solve the Synoptic Problem. By rejecting the skeptical assumptions of modern textual criticism and embracing the reliable, biblically affirmed practice of oral tradition, we arrive at a much more natural explanation for how God inspired the Gospel authors to compose their accounts. Get full access to Test Everything at testeverything.substack.com/subscribe [https://testeverything.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Liturgical Life of the Text

In modern academia, especially at the pop-level or lower tiers of textual scholarship, there is a pervasive tendency to treat textual criticism as a purely empirical science. Scholars often attempt to isolate the “original text” by treating manuscripts as detached, clinical data points, much like a forensic scientist analyzing DNA. They approach the textual tradition looking for a mathematical reconstruction, believing that if they can just strip away the “corruptions,” they will find the pristine original. However, this approach is built upon what we might call the “Continuous Text Fallacy.” There is an underlying assumption in much of this scholarship that the biblical canon must fit perfectly into a nice, clean, uninterrupted, continuous text. They approach the New Testament with a modern, print-culture bias, expecting a static reference book. When these scholars find fluidity, modularity, or “floating” texts in the manuscript tradition, they immediately label them a corruption, an error, or a problem to be solved. But the historic church never demanded such rigidity. For early Christians, the text was a living, spoken reality. They were perfectly comfortable with liturgical selections and a text that breathed with the worship calendar. Manuscripts weren’t produced in a vacuum for private, silent study; they were produced by and for the church, primarily for public reading in the liturgy. The Apostle Paul himself commanded this practice, writing to Timothy: “Until I arrive, give your attention to the public reading, to exhortation, and to teaching” (1 Timothy 4:13). The New Testament canon and its textual variations can’t be understood purely through mechanical textual reconstruction. The canon isn’t a scientific discovery. Rather, it’s the inherited tradition of what the historical church formally received and actively read in its liturgical life. Tradition isn’t just a lens for viewing the canon; it’s the very foundation of it. Artifacts of Worship To understand the canon, we have to look at the physical evidence of the manuscripts themselves. A massive portion of our surviving Greek New Testament evidence consists of lectionaries. Rather than being continuous narratives, these texts are ordered by the church calendar’s reading cycle. There are over 2,400 surviving Greek lectionary manuscripts, proving that the primary way early Christians encountered the text was through curated, liturgical worship. Even when we look at manuscripts that aren’t lectionaries, meaning the continuous-text manuscripts, they’re heavily marked for church use. Scribes and lectors added incipits (starting words to adapt a reading for the middle of a service) and telos marks (indicating exactly where a reading ends). They often included synaxaria and menologia, which are essentially index guides telling the reader which passage to read on which day of the year. The physical evidence proves the text was living and active in worship. The “textual tradition” is virtually synonymous with the “liturgical tradition.” Early Christian literature was primarily intended for public, liturgical reading, and this public reading practically drove the physical formatting of the manuscripts. Variations in the text often reflect the living, breathing, worshiping reality of the early church. It’s impossible to understate the impact that lectionaries had on the transmission of the text across the board. Without these lectionary manuscripts, our knowledge of the New Testament text would be significantly poorer today. Ultimately, God used the historical, worshiping church to preserve His word through the rhythmic life of the church. “Floating Texts” and Liturgical Adaptation There isn’t a better example of how pop-level academia misunderstands the tradition than the Pericope Adulterae: the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). Textual critics frequently highlight this as the ultimate example of a “floating text,” a problem piece of scripture that refuses to stay put. In various manuscripts, it’s found after John 7:52, after John 21:25, and even after Luke 21:38. I experienced this exact academic mindset firsthand during a seminary class on the Gospel of John. We were discussing this very passage, and a classmate bluntly suggested that we should simply remove the Pericope Adulterae, along with any other debated texts, from our Bibles altogether. When I pushed back against a sterile, mathematical approach to the canon, arguing instead for the text's historical reception and traditional use, my professor immediately came to that student’s defense. He actively tried to shut me down, insisting that rigid textual certainty must trump the church’s traditional reception. This interaction perfectly encapsulates how modern, detached scholarship views the text. They see the Pericope Adulterae merely as a “corruption” failing to fit a clean, continuous text. But we have to view it through the lens of liturgy. In the Greek church’s lectionary cycle, the Gospel of John was read continuously from Easter to Pentecost. The story of the adulteress, ending with Jesus’s declaration of mercy: “Neither do I pass judgment on you. Go your way, and from now on, sin no more” (John 8:11), interrupted the specific theological flow of the Pentecost readings. Therefore, it was sometimes skipped in the primary cycle and reserved for specific feast days honoring penitents or saints, like St. Pelagia. Its relocation in some manuscripts, like Family 13, where it’s placed after Luke 21:38, isn’t a random scribal error either. It fits perfectly into the Holy Week narrative and Lukan lectionary readings, dealing precisely with Jesus teaching in the temple and enduring controversies with the Pharisees. The text “floated” because the church was finding the most appropriate liturgical home for a tradition it thoroughly received and believed. Scribes were adapting the manuscript to fit the worship calendar rather than forcing it into a rigid, continuous mold. Lectionary reading cycles heavily influenced the transmission and placement of this text. The pericope's reception history and its mobility indicate it was a deeply ingrained tradition rather than a later interpolation. Canonicity = Liturgical Reception When we look back at the early church, the word “canon” (a standard or rule) regarding scripture practically boiled down to one question: What is authorized to be read aloud in the public assembly? Early canonical lists don’t speak of “inspired versus uninspired” in a vacuum. They speak in terms of church usage. For example, the Muratorian Fragment (late 2nd century) rejects certain books specifically by saying they “cannot be read publicly in the Church.” Later, the Council of Laodicea (c. 363 AD) explicitly decreed that only canonical books should be read in the church assembly. Pointing to councils like Laodicea isn’t about claiming the canon list had to be dogmatically declared from the top down. Rather, it simply demonstrates how the early church thought about what it meant to be “canon,” which was inherently tied to liturgical reception. This contrasts with the rigid criteria scholars try to retroactively apply today, which often don’t work and end up being highly subjective. To divorce textual scholarship from church tradition is an anachronism. We only know what the New Testament is because we know what the historic church prayed and read. The canon isn’t a table of contents imposed from outside; it’s the crystallized liturgical practice of the ancient church. “Traditional use” and “catholicity” (universal acceptance in church worship) were the true driving forces behind canonization. The Bible is a product of the historic church’s tradition and simply can’t be separated from it. The Living Text of the Church Pop-level academia’s attempt to blindly piece together the canon through mechanical textual criticism ignores the very mechanism that preserved the text: the church’s worship. They demand a rigid, continuous text that the ancient church never required and, quite frankly, wouldn’t have understood. Manuscript variations, like the floating Pericope Adulterae, aren’t just “errors” to be scrubbed away by cold science. They’re the fingerprints of the church using, reading, and preserving the text in its liturgical life. Ultimately, the text we have is the text that was received. Without the continuous stream of church tradition and liturgical practice, the concept of a “canon” ceases to exist entirely. Get full access to Test Everything at testeverything.substack.com/subscribe [https://testeverything.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Selective Silence

If you’ve spent any significant time in the pews of a traditional Church of Christ (COC), you know the rhythm of the calendar. Every December and every April, like clockwork, a familiar and predictable cadence echoes from the pulpit. It’s the season of the “anti-holiday” sermon. These sermons are built upon a specific, rigid interpretive framework historically championed by the COC: CENI (Command, Example, Necessary Inference) and a strict view of the Regulative Principle of Worship. The overarching motto of this hermeneutic is famous: “Speak where the Bible speaks, be silent where the Bible is silent.” In theory, this sounds like a noble pursuit of biblical purity. However, a glaring problem emerges when we see how this standard is applied in practice. This strict framework is aggressively applied to condemn the celebration of Easter and Christmas. Yet it’s completely abandoned when it comes to actual, explicit biblical commands that are culturally inconvenient for the modern church. While many COC preachers vehemently condemn the religious observance of Christmas and Easter based on the “silence” of scripture, their simultaneous dismissal of explicit commands (such as women’s headcoverings) alongside their ignorance of historical context exposes a deep hermeneutical hypocrisy and an inconsistent application of their own rules. The “Unspeakable” Holidays The traditional arguments against Christmas and Easter are well-worn. Preachers will argue that no specific day is authorized in scripture for celebrating Christ’s birth. They’ll insist that the Lord’s Supper, observed every Sunday, is the only authorized memorial of His death and resurrection. Therefore, observing a yearly religious holiday like Easter or Christmas is deemed a “sin,” a “tradition of men,” or “adding to the scripture.” This argument rests entirely on a demand for proof. “Give me book, chapter, and verse,” the preacher challenges. The logic dictates that if there’s no explicit command authorizing a practice, the practice is inherently forbidden by God’s silence. Yet, in their zeal to police the calendar, these same preachers routinely shirk the plain reading of the Apostle Paul’s instructions on Christian liberty regarding days. In Romans 14:5, Paul writes: “One person esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind.” There’s a staggering irony here. COC preachers will frequently (and often quite harshly) accuse other denominations of “ignoring the plain reading of the text” regarding topics like baptism or instrumental music. Yet, when faced with the plain, literal reading of Romans 14, which explicitly grants individual believers the liberty to observe special days to the Lord, they suddenly find ways to creatively explain it away or ignore it entirely. The Irony of Ignorance Compounding this scriptural blind spot is a frequent, glaring lack of historical education. Condemning these holidays often reveals just how uninformed many of these preachers are regarding the actual history of the Christian calendar. Instead of engaging with legitimate church history, pulpits are often used to attack straw men, repeating debunked internet myths about the pagan origins of these days, such as falsely linking Easter to the goddess Ishtar or Christmas to Nimrod. The core issue isn’t simply that they misjudge modern believers’ “intent” in celebrating. The issue is a fundamental lack of understanding of the historical reasons for the dates of these holidays and the actual reasons they’re celebrated. Many are entirely unaware of complex ancient historical realities, such as the early church’s nuanced methods for calculating the date of Pascha (Easter) alongside the Jewish Passover, or the early theological and historical reasoning early Christians utilized to date the incarnation and birth of Christ. Because they don’t know the actual historical facts behind the calendar, they substitute real church history with empty rhetoric and uncharitable assumptions. It’s perfectly acceptable for a preacher not to know everything about historical theology, the ancient Christian calendar, or Byzantine dating calculations. However, as the old adage goes: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” If one is factually uninformed about the actual origins and historical reasoning behind these holidays, they should refrain from commenting on them from the pulpit rather than aggressively condemning what they don’t understand. 1 Corinthians 11 and Headcoverings The hypocrisy of the anti-holiday sermon comes into sharpest relief when contrasted with the deafening silence regarding explicit commands that the modern church simply ignores. Consider the Apostle Paul’s instructions regarding women’s headcoverings. Contrary to what some would have you believe, this isn’t some obscure reference to a strange cultural practice; it’s a sustained argument spanning multiple verses. Paul writes: “But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is one and the same as if her head were shaved. For if a woman is not covered, let her also be shorn. But if it is shameful for a woman to be shorn or shaved, let her be covered” (1 Corinthians 11:5-6). Notice how Paul justifies this command. He doesn’t root it in 1st-century Corinthian culture. Instead, he roots it in the created order of Adam and Eve (v. 8-9), the presence of the angels (v. 10), and the universal practice of the churches of God (v. 16). Despite this being a direct, multi-verse command backed by profound theological justification, the vast majority of COC preachers don’t bind it upon their congregations today. The reality in the pews is a sea of uncovered heads—and a pulpit that’s perfectly fine with it. Selective Contextualization This reveals a staggering double standard in how the Bible is read and applied. When dealing with holidays, preachers utilize a rigid, literalistic, “silence means forbidden” approach. Cultural context is entirely irrelevant; only the exact, literal text and the lack of a direct command matter. But when it comes to headcoverings, these same preachers suddenly become cultural scholars. They argue that the command was “just for that time,” that it was “based on local customs regarding temple prostitutes,” or that the veil merely “represented submission in that specific era,” and therefore, we don’t need to do it today. We must ask the core question: Why is the hermeneutic of cultural contextualization allowed to completely neutralize a direct, explicit command, but forbidden when considering the early church’s silence on annual festivals? And headcoverings are merely the tip of the iceberg. The exact same cultural dismissiveness is routinely applied to other explicit New Testament commands, such as greeting one another with a “holy kiss” (Romans 16:16) or men lifting “holy hands” in prayer (1 Timothy 2:8). We see this same avoidance regarding the commands for the laying on of hands—whether for the anointing of the sick with oil (James 5:14) or the formal ordination of the eldership (1 Timothy 4:14). Despite clear textual mandates, these practices are frequently explained away or quietly shelved. Why does this selective contextualization exist? It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that sectarian tradition has been elevated over truth. The anti-holiday stance serves a specific purpose: it maintains the COC’s distinct sectarian identity, separating them from the broader evangelical, Christian world. Conversely, enforcing headcoverings, holy kisses, or ceremonial anointing would make them look “weird” to modern society. The hermeneutic bends to serve the tradition and remain “palatable” to culture rather than accomplishing the stated goal of “doing Bible things in Bible ways.” Re-evaluating the Framework This inconsistent policing of the text perfectly mirrors the paradigm Jesus warned against when He rebuked the religious leaders of His day: “Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!” (Matthew 23:24). Intellectual and spiritual honesty requires consistency. If a preacher insists on strict, literal adherence without cultural nuance, demanding “book, chapter, and verse” for everything, then he must ban Easter and command the women in his congregation to wear veils, while ensuring the men lift their hands in prayer, greet each other with holy kisses, and actively practice the laying on of hands. However, if a preacher acknowledges that cultural context matters, allowing women to uncover their heads because cultural expressions of modesty and submission have changed, then he must also allow for the Christian freedom to celebrate Christ’s incarnation and resurrection in culturally meaningful ways today. We must return to the true nature of Christian liberty as outlined by the Apostle Paul: “So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths” (Colossians 2:16). Get full access to Test Everything at testeverything.substack.com/subscribe [https://testeverything.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]