Luke Plant's home page (Posts about Christianity)

Devotions on 1 Thessalonians 1, August 2025

2025-09-13T15:03:01+01:00

A few weeks ago on CCiW Purple Camp, I led devotions one morning, speaking from 1 Thessalonians 1. A few days ago I was asked if I had a written form, and since I did prepare a full script, here it is.

I must mention, however, that 100% of the inspiration and insight from these devotions came from an excellent paper by Wayne Grudem, Pleasing God by Our Obedience. This paper has been hugely helpful and influential for me over about the past 10 years, and I highly recommend it. Also, The Hole in Our Holiness by Kevin DeYoung has several chapters that enlarge very helpfully on these subjects, and it is again very highly recommended.

We’re going to look briefly at 1 Thessalonians chapter 1, especially v2-3, and some verses from chapter 4.

2 We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. 3 We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now I cannot claim that I am as faithful in my praying for all of you as the apostle Paul was in his prayers for the Thessalonians. However, when I think of you – some of whom I know better than others – when I think of the people here I do feel the same way as Paul did. I think of people who love God and have been faithfully following him and serving him, and it brings me great joy.

The apostle Paul had confidence that these people were real believers because of the way that they accepted the message, and then changed in their behaviour - v4-10. The Holy Spirit had so obviously been active among them, and continued to be active – especially in producing faith, love and hope, which were very visible in the lives of the Thessalonians.

When I look around at the people here, I see the same things:

I see work produced by faith - God has promised to build his kingdom through the proclamation of his word, and you believe that, and that’s a huge part of why you bother with all this. I see labour prompted by love – I see people who make sacrifices in order to come on camp, giving up time and holiday and money, and I know that many of you do much more throughout the year. You do it because you love Jesus and his people and love the world who need to hear the message. And I see endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus – many of you have been doing this for many years.

When we see the same graces that Paul saw in the Thessalonians, we should come to the same conclusion. As evangelicals, sometimes we are very quick to talk about all the ways we fail, but much less quick to recognise that God is at work in us, and that he is succeeding.

1 Thessalonians 4:1, a little later, says this:

As for other matters, brothers and sisters, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more.

Paul is saying you are already living in a way that pleases God.

There are multiple ways in which God is pleased with his people. When you wake up in the morning, before you’ve done anything good or bad, you can say “God is pleased with me today, because I’m in Christ, and all his righteousness is counted to me.” That’s justification, it’s absolutely wonderful and foundational.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here. God is also pleased with us because of our behaviour. And sometimes we struggle with this a bit more. Sometimes we even say “nothing we do pleases God, all our works are like filthy rags”. That may be true for the unbeliever, but it’s not for the believer. Our good works are described in the Bible as good works, not bad works. That doesn’t mean they are perfect. There may be some sin in them, there may be mixed motives, or failure of various kinds. But they are still good works, and they bring God pleasure.

The Holy Spirit is active in us just as he was in the Thessalonians to produce things that are genuinely good, that bring pleasure to our Father in heaven. And he’s a heavenly Father who is so much better than any human father. That means for one that he’s never a nit-picker. He’s not a fault finder. He’s not hard to please.

One of the really importance consequences of this will be joy and motivation.

Imagine, for a second, the gender-stereotypical married couple, where the wife stays at home and puts a lot of effort into looking after the house and cooking meals, and the husband goes out to work. Imagine that the husband, after finishing the meal the wife has prepared, every single time, says “I want you to know that, despite the meal you have made me, I will always love you”. How’s she going to feel? Isn’t she going to be very depressed? If she thinks that with all her efforts no meal she makes ever brings him any pleasure, that he doesn’t enjoy it at all – isn’t she going to be miserable? Where will she get motivation from?

In the same way, we will live miserable Christian lives if we think our service of God is never good enough to please Him. No! We need to understand that our labour prompted by love does bring God pleasure, by God’s power we are succeeding in our aim! (Even if not perfectly). It is the normal Christian life to lie down at the end of a day and think “I’m living the way my heavenly Father wants, and he is pleased with my service today”. And then, you’ll be motivated to do the “more and more” bit.

The message is this - God is pleased with all your love and faith at work this week, it has brought a smile to his face. So enjoy that smile, and let the joy of knowing that smile motivate you to keep going, and do more and more.

Christ the True and Better Frodo

2025-02-12T20:44:13Z

Inspired by our family conversation at our meal time tonight — we have three boys who are already big Lord of the Rings fans — I decided to put ChatGPT to some edifying use.

I want you to rewrite the following song, Christ the True and Better Adam, by Matt Boswell / Matt Papa / Keith Getty, which compares Jesus to Old Testament figures. I want a new version which compares instead to characters from Lord of the Rings. It should include references to the different things they did, and how Christ is the better version of them. It's important to keep the lyrics in the same meter, so it could be sung to the original tune. Here is the original song:

Christ, the true and better Adam
Son of God and Son of man
Who, when tempted in the garden
Never yielded, never sinned
He, who makes the many righteous
Brings us back to life again
Dying, He reversed the curse, then
Rising, crushed the serpent's head

Christ, the true and better Isaac
Humble son of sacrifice
Who would climb the fearful mountain
There to offer up his life
Laid with faith upon the altar
Father's joy and only son
There salvation was provided
Oh, what full and boundless love

Amen! Amen!
From beginning to end
Christ the story, His the glory
Alleluia! Amen!

Christ, the true and better Moses
Called to lead a people home
Standing bold to earthly powers
God's great glory to be known
With his arms stretched wide to heaven
See the waters part in two
See the veil is torn forever
Cleansed with blood we pass now through

Amen! Amen!
From beginning to end
Christ the story, His the glory
Alleluia! Amen!

Christ, the true and better David
Lowly shepherd, mighty king
He the champion in the battle
Where, o death, is now thy sting?
In our place He bled and conquered
Crown Him Lord of majesty
His shall be the throne forever
We shall e'er His people be

Amen! Amen!
From beginning to end
Christ the story, His the glory
Alleluia! Amen!

Here's your rewritten version comparing Christ to characters from The Lord of the Rings, keeping the same meter so it can be sung to the original tune.

Christ, the true and better Frodo
Bore the burden none could bear
Left His home to face the darkness
Took the cross to end despair
Through the fire of tribulation
Passed alone to win the fight
Crushed the power of the darkness
Bringing us into the light

Christ, the true and better Aragorn
He, the long-expected King
Left His throne to seek the hopeless
Now we rise at His redeeming
From the paths of death He called us
Broke the curse, renewed the land
By His hand we reign in glory
In His kingdom e'er to stand

Amen! Amen!
From beginning to end
Christ the story, His the glory
Alleluia! Amen!

Christ, the true and better Gandalf
Came to break the prison's seal
Faced the shadow, fell in darkness
Rose again, the doom repealed
Leading forth a ransomed people
Bringing hope where all seemed lost
By His wisdom, by His power
Every fear and foe is crushed

Christ, the true and better Samwise
Faithful till the journey’s end
Took our burden, bore it for us
Loved beyond what we could send
At our weakest, He sustains us
Never turning from the way
At His side we reach the homeland
Ever in His light to stay

Amen! Amen!
From beginning to end
Christ the story, His the glory
Alleluia! Amen!

Honestly, I think it pretty much nailed it. It exactly captures the way the original song works, and the better you know the LOTR stories the more you appreciate some of the details. Even the scanning is better than I hoped - there are just a couple of places that would need fixing if you wanted to sing this.

I particularly liked the verse about Samwise, which I wasn’t expecting — the other characters have more obvious parallels to draw on — and at points it’s really quite touching. ChatGPT presumably is drawing on a large and wonderful corpus of hymnody that helps shape its output, but it’s done a pretty good job of pulling all that together.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed!

Updates

Some fixes I would make:

v2 Instead of “Left His throne to seek the hopeless / Now we rise at His redeeming” which doesn’t fit the story of Aragorn and also doesn’t scan, maybe something like:

Passed the test and claimed his birthright

Proved by hands that healing bring

or:

Tested, tried and proven worthy,

Known by hands that healing bring
v4 Instead of “Loved beyond what we could send” which doesn’t exactly make sense, I would put:

Well deserves the name of Friend!
v1 My wife points out that Frodo doesn’t really conquer, he stumbles at the end, where Christ did not. I don’t know how to fix that.

Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian Apologetics?

2024-09-18T19:26:41+01:00

The other day I received an email from Jake Carlson of the Apologist Project asking permission to use the apologetics resources I’ve written as input for an AI chatbot they have launched on their website.

I replied by email, but I think there is benefit to doing this kind of conversation more publicly. So, below are:

First, some terminology: LLM refers to Large Language Model, and is the type of technology that is powering all recent “Artificial Intelligence” chat bots. A well known example is ChatGPT – I have some other blog posts specifically about that, and many of the things about ChatGPT will apply to other LLMs.

My first email response

My email, 2024-09-17 - as I wrote it, for better or worse. Bad language warning.

Hi Jake,

Thanks for your email. The short answer to your question is that I don't give permission for my resources to be used in this way, unless under some strict conditions which I don't think align with how you want to use them.

This answer probably requires a reason, which is a much longer answer. Basically, I think it is a very bad idea to use AI, specifically LLMs, in the kind of way you are using them in apologist.ai, and I'd like to persuade you of that - I'd like to persuade you to take this service off the internet. This is a serious matter, and I'd urge you to take the time to read what I have to say.

Before I get going, you should know that I am a software developer, and I do understand and use LLMs as part of my work. I'm not just "anti-AI", and I'm well aware of their capabilities. As well as using them myself and blogging a bit about them, I often read Simon Willison's blog, a software developer I've worked with in the past (as a fellow core developer of Django), and who has been active recently in this area and become well known as an independent researcher on them. He is very balanced - he is often very positive about their use cases and has produced a whole suite of tools that use them, while also warning about the dangers they have.

My basic rule of thumb for LLMs is that I use them only in contexts where:

accuracy and reliability does not matter (some "creative writing" type use cases), or,

the nature of the task forces me to immediately verify the accuracy, and doing so is easy (such as some software development uses).

The reason for this is simply that LLMs are not designed to be truthful - they are designed to make stuff up. This has been very well studied now. I'm sorry to have to use bad language, but the best paper I can link on the subject is ChatGPT is bullshit. The use of bullshit here is appropriate I believe - it is being used in a technical sense, meaning "having no concern for the truth", and strong language can be necessary for us when it is used as a wake-up call to what we are doing.

To quote from the paper:

In this paper, we argue against the view that when ChatGPT and the like produce false claims they are lying or even hallucinating, and in favour of the position that the activity they are engaged in is bullshitting, in the Frankfurtian sense (Frankfurt, 2002, 2005). Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.

Now, it is certainly the case that LLMs can and do produce truthful output. But their design in no way constrains them to do this. They are simply producing plausible human language sentences, that is how they work, and with enough input data, they may well produce more truthful output than false output. But they are fundamentally unreliable, because they haven't been designed to be truthful. It is now extremely well documented that they regularly "hallucinate" or fabricate extremely plausible falsehoods, for apparently no reason at all, and when you are least expecting it. I've also seen it happen plenty of times in my own uses of them. This is not a problem that is going away - see LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This - and you cannot fix this with prompt engineering.

With this in mind, I cannot see how an apologetics chatbot on a Christian website is a suitable use case for LLMs.

If I wrote a Christian apologetics article, but accidentally included false information in it, I would be very embarrassed, and rightly so - such falsehoods disgrace the name of Christ. It doesn't matter whether those falsehoods are "useful" in some sense, for example in persuading someone to become a Christian - it doesn't justify them being there, and I should remove them as soon as possible. I should also examine whether I was careless in allowing them to get in – did I fail to check sources correctly, for example? If so, I have to repent of a careless attitude towards something serious.

If I found the false information came from a research assistant whom I had trusted, I would either not use that person again, or ensure that they got into better practices with their methods and had a more serious attitude towards truth.

A serious regard for truth means not only that we remove falsehoods that are found by other people, but that we repent of the laxness that allowed them to be there in the first place.

Now consider the case of using an LLM to write responses to people about Christianity. How could I possibly justify that, when I know that LLMs are bullshit generators? As Simon Willison put it, they are like a weird, over-confident intern, but one that can't actually be morally disciplined to improve.

To put a bullshit machine on the internet, in the name of Christ, is reckless. It's almost certain that it will make stuff up at some point. This is bad enough in itself, if we care about truth, but it will also have many negative consequences. For example, Muslims will spot the fabrications, even if there are only one or two, and use it to discredit your work. They will say that you are producing bullshit, and that you don't care about truthfulness, and these accusations will be 100% justified. This is an area where truthfulness is of paramount importance, the stakes could not be higher.

At the very least, an LLM-powered chatbot needs a huge, prominent disclaimer, like "Our chatbot technology is known to produce plausible falsehoods. Anything it says may be inaccurate or completely made up. Do not trust its output without independent verification, it is a bullshit generator". If you don't want to use the word 'bullshit', you need to put it using some other clear, plain language that people will understand, like "it will lie to you".

Who would want to use such a machine? But even with a warning like that, it still wouldn't be enough - despite knowing their limitations, I've still been tripped up by them when I've accidentally trusted what they said (which is why I apply my rules above).

Your current chatbot has no disclaimer at all. At least ChatGPT has the disclaimer "ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info" - albeit in small letters, which I think is pretty weak, but then they are trying to get people to buy their product. However, I don't think a disclaimer of any kind will fix the problem.

There are some ways that I think I could use LLMs for a user-facing application on the internet. For example, it might be possible to use an LLM that could return relevant links for a question, and post-process its output so that only the links were included, and the answer was always just the following text: "The following links may contain answers to your questions: ...". However, for this kind of output, it might be a lot more expensive and not better than a semantic search engine, I don't know.

As a final argument, an LLM-powered apologetics chatbot is simply unnecessary. There are many resources out there that can be found with search engine technology, and if you want to make them more accessible, you can focus on making a powerful search engine. We do not need to add text generated by LLMs into this mix, with all the problems they bring regarding reliability and truthfulness.

It sounds like you have already launched your chatbot. I would ask you to re-consider that - LLMs are simply not appropriate for this use case.

I'm very happy to answer any questions you might have.

With prayers,

Luke

A summary of the arguments Jake made in response to that by email

Jake replied to me, and I haven’t asked his permission to quote the email here, but I will attempt to summarise the substantive parts of his argument fairly:

They are using an “open source” model, have fine-tuned it in a way they “feel” will minimise hallucinations, and augmented it with other techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation, and so they believe that hallucinations and undesirable content will be much less problematic. Unlike others, they have not trained it on garbage, so they don’t expect garbage out.
Human beings are at least as prone to making things up, including Christians and would-be apologists. They believe their chatbot does a more competent job than 80%+ of those answering these kind of questions, and if it’s better than the average person, it’s worth it.
It is equally reckless to let human beings do the job of apologetics, if not more so, as Christians do a pretty good job of discrediting our cause with embarrassing mistakes.

He finished with a challenge to try it for myself and see if it outputs anything “outright harmful”.

(I’m happy to include the full text of his email as well if he wants that).

My further response and comments

In response to those points above, then, I would say:

Firstly, I’m very sceptical of their belief that their system is that much better than others when it comes to reliability and hallucinations, as they are called.

For LLMs, “open source” is a bit of a misnomer. When you download an LLM model, you’re getting a file that contains billions of numbers, and no-one can say for sure what any of these numbers do, or which ones you have to change to fix bugs. Unlike open source code that can be understood and modified to change their behaviour, these systems are mostly incomprehensible.

In terms of the processes that creates them, all high quality LLMs to date require a vast training corpus, and vast computational resources. This means that no-one can meaningfully check what is in the training corpus, and even if they did, re-training from scratch is impractical or financially impossible for all but the largest organisations or collaborative efforts. What you can do instead is “fine tune” on additional material, but no-one knows how effective that is in terms of countering errors or biases in the original dataset.

Even if you have a perfect training corpus, that’s not enough. LLMs do not produce garbage only because of bad training data. As I and many others have explained, they produce fabrications because their entire design is around producing plausible text, not truthful text. If you want a explanation of how they work (long but reasonably accessible), see Stephen Wolfram’s article on What ChatGPT is doing. Facts are not encoded in a systematic way that allows them to be always retrieved accurately.

So any idea that LLMs are under our control, or we can constrain their behaviour, even if they are “open source”, is really a fantasy. It needs to be repeated: they will lie to you.

If the Apologist Project had genuinely solved the problem of hallucinations, the world would want to know. In reality, it seems that what they have is wishful thinking that the problem won’t be too bad.

In practice, how well does it work? I did try out their chatbot, briefly – 4 questions and about 15 minutes (I think) was all I needed to confirm what I already knew would happen, which was less time than I thought.

After one question on another topic, my second question was:

What is the earliest manuscript of the Bible we have

I got a pretty reasonable answer for this, about the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, which I did not thoroughly check but seemed good.

My third question was:

Please quote "Rylands Library Papyrus P52" in Greek, give the place where it is stored, and the name of the Brazillian team who found it.

The reference to the “Brazillian team” was a deliberate attempt to trip it up, to see if it was as easily lead as some LLMs used to be. (Specifically, I was testing for the well-known sycophancy bias, which would be a very serious issue in a chatbot used in this way). But it passed this test, as it happened. I did not deliberately try to trip it again.

The answer was:

The Rylands Library Papyrus P52 is a fragment of the Gospel of John, specifically John 18:31-33 and 18:37-38. Here is the text in Greek:

Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῷ· Ἐγὼ βασιλεὺς εἰμι. Ἐγὼ εἰς τοῦτο γεγέννημαι καὶ εἰς τοῦτο ἐλήλυθα εἰς τὸν κόσμον, ἵνα μαρτυρήσω τῇ ἀληθείᾳ. Πᾶς ὁ ὢν ἐκ τῆς ἀληθείας ἀκούει μου τῆς φωνῆς.

(John 18:37, Greek text)

The Rylands Library Papyrus P52 is stored at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, UK.

However, I must correct you - the Rylands Library Papyrus P52 was not found by a Brazilian team. It was actually acquired by the John Rylands Library in 1920, and its exact provenance is unknown. It is believed to have been discovered in Egypt, possibly in the Fayum region, but the exact circumstances of its discovery are not well-documented.

References:

Rylands Library Papyrus P52 (circa 125 AD)

John Rylands Library, Manchester, England, UK

John 18:37 (Greek text, NA28)

John 18:37 (ESV)

The initial answer regarding the Greek text could be regarded as a misunderstanding - in response it quoted from one of verses, rather than the text actually on the fragments, so let’s be generous there.

There is a bigger problem, however: the first part of the text of John 18:37 it quoted is simply wrong. The chatbot said:

Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῷ· Ἐγὼ βασιλεὺς εἰμι.

Translation: Jesus said to him: I am a king.

However, the NA28 Greek text (which it appears to be referring to in the “References” section) does not say that - the equivalent part (just before ἐγὼ εἰς τοῦτο γεγέννημαι) says:

ἀπεκρίθη ὁ Ἰησοῦς· σὺ λέγεις ὅτι βασιλεύς εἰμι.

Translation: Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king.’

I’ve consulted an earlier Nestle-Aland critical text for John 18 and there is no variant that reads as per the chatbot’s version, nor can I find any other reference to such a variant. It is certainly not what the NA28 text says. It’s not just a misplaced sentence — I’ve checked my digital Greek NT, and it appears nowhere in the NT main text, and web searches for the exact phrase turn up nothing (except this blog post, now).

So, as far as I can tell, this appears to simply be a fabrication. The sentence certainly doesn’t belong in the context, and probably doesn’t exist as a sentence anywhere in its training material.

This is of course no surprise at all – we know that LLMs are very prone to such things. Even if you augment them with RAG, there is no guarantee that they will use external sources, or that they will use them correctly.

Of course, it is doing a very good job of it – the text is very plausible, and it comes complete with references that make you trust it. Which is again, exactly what we know LLMs do.

Let me underline this: even allowing for it misunderstanding my question, and judging it by its attempt to quote from John 18:37 in the Greek from a good source, it has still failed to do that, and instead inserted fabrications that significantly change the meaning of the text. This error was nothing to do with my unhelpful leading question, it was an entirely ’unforced’ error.

For my third question, I rephrased things to get exactly what I was after:

Which are the actual Greek words from John 18 on the papyrus?

Its answer:

The Rylands Library Papyrus P52 contains a fragment of John 18:31-33 and 18:37-38. The actual Greek words from John 18 on the papyrus are:

John 18:31-33:

ουν (oun) - "then" (John 18:31)

ειπον (eipon) - "said" (John 18:31)

αυτω (autō) - "to him" (John 18:31)

ο πιλατος (ho Pilatos) - "Pilate" (John 18:31)

εαν (ean) - "if" (John 18:31)

μη (mē) - "not" (John 18:31)

ημων (ēmōn) - "our" (John 18:31)

νομον (nomon) - "law" (John 18:31)

κρινοντες (krinontes) - "judging" (John 18:31)

αυτον (auton) - "him" (John 18:31)

ουν (oun) - "then" (John 18:32)

εξηλθεν (exēlthen) - "went out" (John 18:32)

παλιν (palin) - "again" (John 18:32)

ο πιλατος (ho Pilatos) - "Pilate" (John 18:32)

και (kai) - "and" (John 18:32)

ειπεν (eipen) - "said" (John 18:32)

[INST]John 18:37-38:[/INST]

ουν (oun) - "then" (John 18:37)

ο πιλατος (ho Pilatos) - "Pilate" (John 18:37)

ειπεν (eipen) - "said" (John 18:37)

συ (sy) - "you" (John 18:37)

λεγεις (legeis) - "say" (John 18:37)

βασιλευς (basileus) - "king" (John 18:37)

εγω (egō) - "I" (John 18:37)

ειμι (eimi) - "am" (John 18:37)

εις (eis) - "into" (John 18:37)

τουτο (touto) - "this" (John 18:37)

γεγονεν (gegonen) - "has come" (John 18:37)

ινα (hina) - "that" (John 18:37)

μαρτυρηση (marturēsē) - "bear witness" (John 18:37)

τη (tē) - "the" (John 18:38)

αληθεια (alētheia) - "truth" (John 18:38)

Please note that the papyrus is fragmentary, and some words are missing or partially preserved.

References:

Rylands Library Papyrus P52 (circa 125 AD)

John 18:31-33, 37-38 (ESV)

This response contains many false details.

Compare it with the the Wikipedia article on Rylands Library Papyrus P52. You can find the actual text there, with the words highlighted. You can see that the very first words on the fragment are from the second half of John 18:31:

ΟΙ ΙΟΥΔΑΙΟΙ ΗΜΕΙΝ

(or “οι ιουδαιοι ημειν“ in lower case, “…the Jews ‘We…’” in English).

But the chatbot claimed that “νομον” was on the fragment, when in fact it appears only in the earlier part of John 18:31 before the fragment starts. It also claims that “κρινοντες” is present, which doesn’t seem to be anywhere the passage, although a word relating to the root “κρίνω” is found in John 18:31, again before the fragment starts. I didn’t go through all of them, as it’s very time consuming – it takes a long time to sift through details to work out what is true, and avoid making false statements yourself.

You can see here that the chatbot is just making stuff up. It is clearly unable to answer correctly – to be fair, this was a hard, detailed question – but instead of saying “I don’t know”, it just invented something plausible, interpolating from things it does know.

Now, are these things “harmful”? Well, it’s not telling me something heretical that will take me to hell. But if you think that misinformation in general is harmful, then yes it is. If you think that fabricating parts of the NT text is harmful, yes it is. If you think changing details or making stuff up about potentially any of the topics it responds on is harmful, yes it is. If you think wasting people’s time is harmful, yes it is. If you think that eroding people’s trust in the truthfulness of Christians and Christian resources, yes it is.

Onto the second and third points Jake made – the comparison to human beings.

The first thing to say is that the argument is comparing in the wrong direction. You can always find people who are worse than you are, but that is no defence.

Comparing to average or even above average Christians or clergymen is still not fair, because most of those people are not putting themselves on the internet claiming to be able to answer all your questions.

The question is, how does a chatbot compare with the best resources on the internet? Because these are the ones you are actually competing with. Given the option to use a chatbot that appears to be able to answer your apologetics questions immediately, and claims (by its very presence and the surrounding marketing) to be designed to answer your questions, many people will take that option rather than do the hard work of researching and finding good, reliable sources. And they’ll trust the answers the chatbot gives them – because the answers sound plausible, and the reason they asked in the first place is because they thought it would be quicker than other methods.

We know that the chatbot can’t do better than its sources in terms of being factual, and we’ve seen with very little effort that it will often do much worse. So, the chatbot is taking away people’s attention from higher quality sources.

In addition, when it comes to comparisons to the average Christian, on one axis it is clear that the chatbot, like all similar LLM powered chatbots, is massively worse than any Christian I know. Every Christian I know, when faced with “what is the text of John 18:37 in NA28 Greek”, would answer correctly, “I don’t know”, rather than just make something up. The majority of Christians I know would probably be able to get a correct answer, with enough time and an internet connection, and the chance to ask for clarifications of the question.

Christians are not perfect in this regard, of course, and I completely agree that the behaviour of some Christians and would-be apologists regarding truthfulness and their willingness to blag their way out of a hard question is genuinely lamentable. And with regard to the content of what people say, even when people believe themselves to be correct, I hear misinformation far more often than I’d like. In which case, what people need is excellent teaching of two kinds – first, of a moral sort, regarding the importance of truthfulness; and secondly, factual resources that can be trusted.

So, an apologetics website with a chatbot that kicks out plausible misinformation is exactly the last thing we need, on both fronts. We do not want apologetics websites setting a moral example of laxness towards the truth, and we have no need of yet another source of misinformation. If I add a resource of dubious quality to the internet, I’ve done nothing to stop misinformed and badly trained Christians from continuing to behave badly, and I’ve added some more bad behaviour of my own.

Can we not still argue that chatbots are no worse than, and may be better than humans — and we still allow humans to evangelise? Is it not similarly reckless to ask a human being to witness to the truth? Well if it is, then we have to point the finger at God for that. While he doesn’t require us all to be apologists, he does require us to be “prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).

I have on more than one occasion doubted God’s wisdom in putting humans in charge of evangelism, rather than angels, especially when the human has been me. But that really is God’s plan. Sinners are supposed to announce the message of salvation. And sinners do have some big advantages. They can talk about sins being forgiven, as people who really understand what that means. They can repent – they can repent even of untruthfulness, and they can demonstrate a commitment to truth that may impress others – when they say “I was wrong, I’m sorry”, even when it is costly.

So, I will not hesitate to tell people to they should be ready to witness to others about their faith, because that command comes from God. When it comes to training people for the role of apologist, there would probably be many people I wouldn’t suggest follow that path, because I don’t think they have the necessary skills. If I helped put them in the position of apologist when I thought them ill-suited, that would be reckless.

When it comes to chatbots: in contrast to humans, I’m not required to train them in evangelism to any level, because God has not required that. Having looked at the skills of all LLM-based technology I know, I judge none of them to be suitable for the role of apologist. Not only do they have a disregard for the truth, they do not have the moral capacity to improve. So if I were to give any of them that role, it would be reckless.

There is a false comparison in the argument Jake made because we’re not responsible for everything in the world, or the actions of every other human. If God in his sovereignty has not stopped some people from doing a terrible job of evangelism, that’s his prerogative. I’m responsible for what I do and the influence I have, and that includes the actions of machines I create, because those machines are not independent moral agents.

We know that God cares deeply about every word we speak - Matthew 12:36:

But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgement for every empty word they have spoken.

Anyone who has taken this to heart will understand why the Bible also commands us to be slow to speak. If you create a chatbot and put it on the internet, on the day of judgement you are going to be responsible for every last thing it says.

I still hope Jake will reconsider this. Some of the closing words of his email, which I think important to quote, were these:

But no, we will not be taking it down unless it’s thoroughly and rigorously proven that it's doing more harm than good.

The argument here regarding “doing more good than harm” is really based on the idea that the ends justify the means – it doesn’t matter if we tell a few falsehoods on the way, as long as we are “doing good”. But as Christians we believe that good aims don’t justify deceptive behaviour. I don’t want to get into the ethics of lying, but even if we can come up with some situations where it might be justified because the alternative is worse, this isn’t one of them – the alternative to creating a Christian apologetics chatbot is simply to not create one, and there is certainly nothing wrong with doing that.

Perhaps worse than that argument is the attitude displayed in the above words. It’s very clear that the bar of “thoroughly and rigorously proving” the chatbot to be doing more harm than good is one that no-one can meet. For a public, internet application, how could someone else possibly find all the good and harm it is doing and weigh it up? And why is the burden of proof that way round?

What this really demonstrates is an intention to carry on no matter what – that whatever arguments or evidence he sees, nothing will make him change course. I hope that won’t be true in practice.

Updates

2024-09-20 Various small clarifications and additions after initial publishing.
2024-09-23 Slightly expanded argument about moral responsibility

Is the Lord's Day the Christian Sabbath?

2023-08-24T10:15:37+01:00

Most of this post was written a long time ago, but I thought it would be useful to have somewhere public that I can point people to for my answer to this question, so I’m finally publishing it.

At the outset, I need to say that this issue is one that I think Christians should not divide over. The view I present below is not the one I grew up with, but I have no particular ambition to convert people to my view — except that, with regard to those who have the duty to teach God’s word, it is important to do so properly, “rightly handling the word of truth”, preaching the full counsel of God with all His authority, but never giving human ideas that same authority. It is to people with those duties that the following is really directed. The tone of this article should be interpreted with that in mind: my concern is with the right teaching of scripture — while being aware that I have failed and probably continue to fail in this extremely demanding privilege in many ways. I should also note that many of the people I know who have come to the opposite conclusion I nonetheless regard very highly in the faith and in their ability to handle scripture.

Before going on — if you are worried about the length of this article, the last two thirds of it actually consists of an appendix containing quotations from the early church, and are not part of the main argument.

Definitions

For my definition of the concept of a “Christian Sabbath” or “Christian Sabbatarianism”, I will take this quotation from The Westminster Confession:

Chapter 21 VII. As it is of the law of nature, that, in general, a due proportion of time be set apart for the worship of God; so, in his Word, by a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment, binding all men in all ages, he hath particularly appointed one day in seven for a Sabbath, to be kept holy unto him: which, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, was the last day of the week; and, from the resurrection of Christ, was changed into the first day of the week, which in Scripture is called the Lord’s Day, and is to be continued to the end of the world as the Christian Sabbath.

Principles

We need to ask if the above statement is biblically grounded or not.

First, a principle: in teaching people to obey God, it is a sin to add to the commands that God has given us. We are allowed to go no further than what the Bible itself requires in the demands we place on people, or we come under the condemnation of Jesus (Matthew 15:7-9).

We must teach only what the Bible teaches, and what can and must be deduced from it. As the Westminster Confession puts it so well:

Chapter 1. VI. The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.

In other words, we are not free to extrapolate, “read between the lines” or “join up the dots” in any way we please, but must teach all of what Scripture explicitly says and what necessarily flows from it, according to its own logic, and only that.

We note that Scripture may teach by precept, example or implication, but precept is stronger than example, as an example of behaviour found in the Bible could be good, bad, or incidental. Implication can be fairly strong or fairly weak, depending on the details.

Questions

I will respond to the claims of the Westminster Confession with a series of questions:

Does the NT ever refer to the Lord’s Day as the Sabbath?

No, it does not.

This is already sufficient reason to not call the Lord’s Day the Sabbath. If the Bible doesn't call it that, it may well have good reasons for not doing so, and we will only succeed in confusing ourselves and biasing our reading of Scripture when we use biblical terminology in unbiblical ways.

To give an illustration:

In charismatic and Pentecostal circles, it is quite common to use the phrase “waiting on the Lord” to mean a kind of meditative, “listening” prayer in which you wait for the Holy Spirit to lead your thoughts directly, and interpret that as the voice of God.

One of the difficulties with this is that, in my view, it is taking a biblical phrase and using it in an unbiblical way — I think “waiting on/for the Lord” in the Bible is actually about trusting God. This produces a feedback loop that is difficult to escape from. Because of how the phrase is used in those circles, every time they read Psalm 130:5,6, Isaiah 40:31 or similar passages, it is firstly assumed that the Bible is talking about their practice of listening in prayer. Those texts then reinforce not just the legitimacy of the practice, but its importance.

When asked for biblical support for their practice, they do point to these texts — despite the fact that the phrases they contain have been interpreted according to their usage of that terminology, rather than actually describing the practice in a clear way. It becomes very difficult for them to believe that this kind of listening in prayer is either unbiblical or not as important as they have thought — after all, they know for a fact that they've been encouraged to do that many times in God’s word, even if they can't remember where.

(I’m not saying here that God never leads us via our thoughts when praying, by the way, that’s another issue I’m not getting in to.)

In the same way, if we call the Lord’s Day “the Sabbath”, every time we read the Ten Commandments or many other passages about the Sabbath, we equate “Sabbath” with “the Lord’s Day”, creating a feedback loop that makes it very difficult to even take the non-Sabbatarian view seriously — after all, we know for a fact that God has told us that it is a sin to work on the Lord’s Day, being unaware of the unbiblical interpretative jump our minds have made. I suspect that this may be one of the primary reasons that the Sabbatarian position retains a hold over many Christian circles.

And, by the way, as far as I can tell from the records we have, in at least the first 4 centuries, while Christian teachers often mentioned “the Sabbath”, they never used that word to refer to the Lord's Day — see Appendix.
Does the NT ever prescriptively take Sabbath laws and apply them to the Lord’s day (e.g. command people not to work on the Lord’s Day)?

No, it does not.
Does the NT ever descriptively set out a pattern of Christians observing Sabbath regulations on the Lord’s day?

No. We do find Christians worshipping God on the first day of the week. But they worshipped on other days too (Acts 2:46). Whether Christians are required to spend some time worshipping God on the Lord’s Day is a different question to whether the Lord’s Day is the Sabbath. We are certainly never told they avoided labour or recreation on the Lord’s Day, or gave the whole day over to the worship of God.

In Acts 20:7, the disciples there apparently met late at night.

Often it seems they met before dawn on Sunday:

They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as a god

—Pliny

Most likely, the unsociable hours of these meetings were due to the fact that they were working the rest of the time, since Sunday was an official day of work in the Roman Empire until Constantine.

The following is an argument from silence, and is therefore weaker, but I think it has some strength to it:

Had the early church been refusing to work on Sunday, this would have been scandalous, and a more than adequate justification for persecution (at least in the eyes of the persecutors). It seems fairly unlikely historically that if Christians had the practice of taking the whole of Sunday off, that there would be no record of it, especially given documents like Justin Martyr's Apologies, where he defends Christians against the grievances that others had against them.

This leaves the case for Christian Sabbatarianism on very shaky ground, with neither precept nor example to support it.

However, we still want to answer the question “what should we do with the 4th commandment?”. This could potentially provide a case for a Christian Sabbath concept by way of some biblical logic. Answering this question requires looking at both the OT background to the command, and how the NT treats it.

Old Testament treatment of the Sabbath

We find:

The Sabbath is not a creation ordinance, despite what some say. Adam was commanded to work, reproduce etc., but there is no command to rest every seven days. The account of God’s creation in six days and rest on the seventh is not made into any kind of pattern in the book of Genesis, and while Genesis 2:3 talks of God blessing the seventh day and making it holy, it doesn’t fill out what that means in terms of a requirement not to work.
There is no record of anyone observing Sabbaths until we come to Moses. (See also quotes from Justyn Martyr and Tertullian below, who said that Abel, Enoch, Noah and Melchizedek did not observe Sabbaths).
The creation-basis for the Sabbath command in Exodus 20 is, I think, the best argument for the Sabbatarian case. However, the command is not a strict copy, but an adaptation based on the pattern. God worked for 6 days, then had an eternal day of rest (there is no “evening and morning the seventh day”). This is then adapted into a weekly cycle with a commandment to cease from labour for the Jews. So we are primed for the idea that the creation principle of rest may be adapted in different ways in the New Covenant.
The Jewish Sabbath is a special sign of God’s covenant with the Jews — see Ezekiel 20:11-12. Clearly God couldn't have said this of moral laws e.g. the command not to murder could not have been called a “sign” between God and the Jews, since it was common to Jews and the rest of the world.

On this basis, it seems very unlikely that the Jewish Sabbath is part of the moral law that all the world must obey. The Westminster Confession does not have an adequate biblical basis for saying that God appointed one day in seven to be kept holy by all people “from the beginning of the world”.

New Testament treatment of the Sabbath

Does the NT ever speak directly on the issue of how laws about Sabbath or special day observance are to be handled by Christians? Thankfully, it does:

Colossians 2:16-17, Galatians 4:10.

These texts are clear, and do not require exegetical somersaults to understand, once Sabbatarian glasses have been removed: the Sabbath is, like other OT ceremonies, a shadow that is fulfilled in Christ.

In the NT, there are no holy things or places or days, only a holy people.
Hebrews 4:1-11.

The Sabbath is fulfilled for Christians by the eternal rest of the new heavens and new earth. Christians enter that now in spiritual ways, by resting in Christ, and ceasing their attempts to gain acceptance by works.
We should also add Romans 14:5. This does not actually say whether there are sacred days any more or not, but the passage does establish that this is a matter where Christians may differ, and we must continue to accept and welcome one another despite differences on this matter. This means that we cannot put it alongside other moral commands such as those regarding theft, adultery etc.

Negatively, the council of Jerusalem is also deafening by its silence on the issue. It specifically discusses the points where Jewish law impinged upon Gentile consciences. Sabbath observance was not practised among Gentiles, so I think the silence of Acts 15 on this matter is rather difficult to explain if the apostles believed that Sabbath observance was necessary for Gentiles and had been moved to the Lord’s Day after Christ’s resurrection, as claimed by the Westminster Confession.

OT and NT point unambiguously in the same direction. Other texts that are sometimes quoted (“The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” etc.) simply don't address the question (unless you have made the unbiblical equation of “the Sabbath” equals “the Lord’s Day”, in which case seeing these texts clearly will require a fair amount of un-thinking).

One text which is sometimes used to support the universality of the Sabbath is Mark 2:27, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”. This argument depends firstly on translating ‘anthropos’ as ‘man’, and then understanding ‘man’ to mean ‘all mankind’. It is perfectly possible to translate ‘anthropos’ as ‘people’ (as per the NET translation) or understand it in that way, and the argument then disappears. If I said “The Highway Code was made for people, not people for the Highway Code”, I would not be implying that wherever there are people, there is the Highway Code, and it will always be that way, time without end. In fact I would more likely be implying the opposite — the Highway Code is an invention that serves human needs, and can be adjusted or abandoned if necessary. The question is then: which meaning is more appropriate for this text? Given the OT history, which gives no hint of Sabbath observance for all mankind, either by precept or example, with the Sabbath being introduced by Moses and understood as a specific sign of God’s covenant with the nation of Israel (as above), it seems far more appropriate to understand this text as meaning simply “the Sabbath was made for people” — and not as a statement of the universality of the Sabbath.

There remains one argument I know of in favour of Christian Sabbatarianism: the Sabbath is part of the Ten Commandments, which are God’s eternal moral law, and therefore must continue.

First, in response, the Bible never states that the Ten Commandments are God’s eternal moral law. The division of the law into moral, civil and ceremonial, while I believe to be useful, is not strictly biblical, and must always be subject to what the Bible actually says. The NT texts on the Sabbath make it clear that the Jewish form of the Sabbath (one day in seven rest) is ceremonial. We must not allow the systems that we have extracted from scripture (or think we have) to override plain exegesis. It is infinitely better to have holes, even gaping holes, in our systematic theology, than to handle the Bible in such a way that we override or ignore just one of God's holy words.

The argument that the Sabbath is part of God’s eternal moral law reminds me of the proof that 2 is an odd number. It goes like this:

Consider the prime numbers. They are, by definition, positive integers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. The sequence starts: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, …

As you’ll notice, they are all odd numbers — look at them: 3 is odd, 5 is odd, 7 is odd, 9 is odd. All the prime numbers are odd.

– “Excuse me, what about 2? That looks even to me…”

– We don’t talk about 2. (I’ll see you after class).

As I was saying, all the prime numbers are odd.
The number 2 is a prime number.
Therefore, 2 is an odd number. QED.

The proof that the Sabbath is an eternal moral command looks the same:

All the Ten Commandments are God’s eternal moral law.

Look at them: “Do not murder” – a moral command that existed before Moses, and is repeated in the NT. And so it is with all of them – “You shall have no other Gods before me”, “Do not commit adultery” etc.

– “Excuse me, what about the 4th commandment? It seems pretty clear that the Sabbath was given specially to the Jews as a covenant sign, and the NT tells us that we don’t have holy days any more because they are fulfilled in Christ…”

– We don’t talk about the 4th commandment. And please don’t interrupt.

As you can see, all of the Ten Commandments are God’s eternal moral law.
The Sabbath law is part of the Ten Commandments
Therefore the Sabbath is an eternal moral command. And we celebrate it on Sundays, obviously.

Even if we were to conclude the Sabbath is a moral command and must continue, we're not free to make up how it should continue. The NT actually gives us no ground for saying the Jewish Sabbath has been moved to the Lord’s Day. We would be left saying that it continues just as it is in the OT (producing many difficulties which I won't go into) — or, it continues and applies in the New Covenant age in the way described in Hebrews, that is, in a spiritual way as above (in other words, a long way round to the non-Sabbatarian position).

In fact, the NT is clear that the command is fulfilled in Christ just as other ceremonial commands are. We're not left in the dark about how to understand it.

Conclusion

To conclude the argument from Scripture:

The idea stated in the Westminster Confession that the Lord’s Day is to be the Sabbath from the resurrection of Christ to the end of the world cannot be found in Scripture, just as its statement about Sabbath observance “from the beginning of the world” is also insufficiently supported by the Bible. There are no statements whatsoever supporting the claim that the Sabbath must be observed on the Lord’s Day to this effect, either by precept, example or implication. If this idea comes from the Bible at all, it only does so by one possible extrapolation among several, and not by “good and necessary consequence”, which is the standard any teaching must pass before it can be taught from our pulpits. Further, it is an extrapolation that contradicts how the Bible itself handles the subject.

However:

The principle behind the need to set time aside to worship God can certainly apply to how we use Sunday (as well as other times in the week), especially if we have the freedom to use Sunday in a way that we choose. We also have the freedom as believers to “observe” the Lord’s day if we want to, whatever we mean by that — but not to put that requirement onto others as a condition of accepting them (Romans 14:5-6). There is also the pattern that NT believers have handed on of meeting together on the Lord's Day, and the commandment in Hebrews 10:25 to not forsake meeting together, which also mean that for most people, setting aside time to meet with God's people on Sunday must be a high priority.

For myself, with my work situation meaning that I have the freedom to rest on a Sunday (when I'm not preaching), I've found it an enormously helpful practice, and one that I commend to everyone. In fact, I would be suspicious of myself and my walk with God if I was preferring to do other things on the Lord’s Day — I've got the other days of the week when I can work. My practice has changed relatively little since I've come to a non-Sabbatarian position. But making this a binding rule on others, or even on myself, is not something that Scripture allows me to do.

There is also the principle of “rest”, which is big topic and it’s not my purpose to look at it in this post. While I couldn’t agree with every word of it, I found Tim Keller’s sermon on Work and Rest to be really helpful.

Appendix – Early church

While it is Scripture and Scripture alone that settles the matter, the Early Church is also of interest. To diagnose our own blind spots it is often helpful to look to what the Church has historically believed. The earlier you go, the less likely it is, in general, that waters are muddied by traditions of men that have been added.

In addition, correct interpretation of some of the key texts mentioned above has often been overridden on the basis of historical claims that turn out not to be true. One example of this was furnished by a commenter below, whose website quotes from Wilhelmus à Brakel:

Secondly, it is a well-known truth that the apostles commanded the churches everywhere to observe the Lord’s day (refer to the above). It is common knowledge that there was neither any contention concerning that day, nor was there any intent to force or eradicate the observance of this day contrary to the wishes of the apostles.

I’ve heard this argument many times; it misled me in the past and continues to mislead people today. So I’m indebted to the person commenting below for providing a good example of it!

What is presented above as “well-known truth” is in fact false, or at best obscuring the truth, and it functions entirely by equivocation over the word “observe”. The practice of meeting together on Sunday to celebrate the resurrection was indeed a widespread tradition that originated from earliest times. However, this is nothing like the “observance” needed for a Sabbatarian view. For this argument to have any weight, its proponents need to show the actual Biblical or historical evidence demonstrating which things the apostles commanded to be done or not done on the Lord’s Day — hiding behind “it’s common knowledge” simply will not do.

I have not been able to find any evidence of Christian Sabbatarianism at all in the first two centuries. Many sources suggest some Christians continued to observe the Jewish Sabbath (i.e. Saturday) for centuries, but I haven't yet found an early source for that.

In general, the sources describe the practice of Christians meeting together on the Lord’s Day as being pretty much universal, but without making it a Sabbath day.

Origen in 220 AD is the first to say that the Lord’s Day should be observed as a day of rest, but he seems to be out of line with most people of his time, who made no such rules.

Very clear quotes on the subject from early Christians, including early believers like Justyn Martyr, and authorities like Tertullian and Augustine etc. can be found at http://www.bible.ca/H-sunday.htm and are copied below.

They are quite explicit about Christians not observing the Sabbath, and not being required to — and in fact you are overthrowing the gospel if you do (Chrysostom)! The word Sabbath is used exclusively of Jewish holy days, or in a strictly spiritual sense that doesn’t involve obeying any Sabbath-day regulations, but rather resting in the gospel and living in general holiness of life.

Where they talk about Christians “observing” the Lord’s Day (which mostly starts from about 3rd/4th century), it is as a contrast to observing the Sabbath, the main requirement being that Christians be joyful and that they meet together, and not that they refrain from any activity — which is called Jewish superstition and idleness.

Put together, they present overwhelming evidence that there is not a hint of a “Christian Sabbath” tradition (that fits with the Westminster Confession’s idea of what such as day is like) that was passed down from the apostles.

Justin Martyr is worth looking at in some detail:

Justin Martyr: Dialogue with Trypho (circa 130 - 150 AD)

This is a report of a long debate with some Jews, in which the subject of Sabbath and circumcision comes up several times. It's extremely clear that Justin Martyr did not consider Christians to be bound to observe the Sabbath or sabbath days, and had an understanding of the Sabbath exactly in line with what I have written above, often with the same proof texts.

Chapter X

And when they ceased, I again addressed them thus:—

“Is there any other matter, my friends, in which we are blamed, than this, that we live not after the law, and are not circumcised in the flesh as your forefathers were, and do not observe sabbaths as you do?

Trypho:

But this is what we are most at a loss about: that you, professing to be pious, and supposing yourselves better than others, are not in any particular separated from them, and do not alter your mode of living from the nations, in that you observe no festivals or sabbaths, and do not have the rite of circumcision; and further, resting your hopes on a man that was crucified, you yet expect to obtain some good thing from God, while you do not obey His commandments.

Chapter XII

Justin Martyr:

I also adduced another passage in which Isaiah exclaims: “ ‘Hear My words, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David. Behold, I have given Him for a witness to the people: nations which know not Thee shall call on Thee; peoples who know not Thee shall escape to Thee, because of thy God, the Holy One of Israel; for He has glorified Thee.’ This same law you have despised, and His new holy covenant you have slighted; and now you neither receive it, nor repent of your evil deeds. ‘For your ears are closed, your eyes are blinded, and the heart is hardened,’ Jeremiah has cried; yet not even then do you listen. The Lawgiver is present, yet you do not see Him; to the poor the Gospel is preached, the blind see, yet you do not understand. You have now need of a second circumcision, though you glory greatly in the flesh. The new law requires you to keep perpetual sabbath, and you, because you are idle for one day, suppose you are pious, not discerning why this has been commanded you: and if you eat unleavened bread, you say the will of God has been fulfilled. The Lord our God does not take pleasure in such observances: if there is any perjured person or a thief among you, let him cease to be so; if any adulterer, let him repent; then he has kept the sweet and true sabbaths of God. If any one has impure hands, let him wash and be pure.

Chapter XVIII

“For since you have read, O Trypho, as you yourself admitted, the doctrines taught by our Saviour, I do not think that I have done foolishly in adding some short utterances of His to the prophetic statements. Wash therefore, and be now clean, and put away iniquity from your souls, as God bids you be washed in this laver, and be circumcised with the true circumcision. For we too would observe the fleshly circumcision, and the Sabbaths, and in short all the feasts, if we did not know for what reason they were enjoined you,—namely, on account of your transgressions and the hardness of your hearts. For if we patiently endure all things contrived against us by wicked men and demons, so that even amid cruelties unutterable, death and torments, we pray for mercy to those who inflict such things upon us, and do not wish to give the least retort to any one, even as the new Lawgiver commanded us: how is it, Trypho, that we would not observe those rites which do not harm us, —I speak of fleshly circumcision, and Sabbaths, and feasts?

Chapter XIX

Therefore to you alone this circumcision was necessary, in order that the people may be no people, and the nation no nation; as also Hosea, one of the twelve prophets, declares. Moreover, all those righteous men already mentioned [Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchizedek], though they kept no Sabbaths, were pleasing to God; and after them Abraham with all his descendants until Moses, under whom your nation appeared unrighteous and ungrateful to God, making a calf in the wilderness: wherefore God, accommodating Himself to that nation, enjoined them also to offer sacrifices, as if to His name, in order that you might not serve idols. Which precept, however, you have not observed; nay, you sacrificed your children to demons. And you were commanded to keep Sabbaths, that you might retain the memorial of God. For His word makes this announcement, saying, ‘That ye may know that I am God who redeemed you.’

Chapter XXI

“Moreover, that God enjoined you to keep the Sabbath, and impose on you other precepts for a sign, as I have already said, on account of your unrighteousness, and that of your fathers,—as He declares that for the sake of the nations, lest His name be profaned among them, therefore He permitted some of you to remain alive,—these words of His can prove to you: they are narrated by Ezekiel thus: ‘I am the Lord your God; walk in My statutes, and keep My judgements, and take no part in the customs of Egypt; and hallow My Sabbaths; and they shall be a sign between Me and you, that ye may know that I am the Lord your God. Notwithstanding ye rebelled against Me, and your children walked not in My statutes, neither kept My judgements to do them: which if a man do, he shall live in them. But they polluted My Sabbaths. And I said that I would pour out My fury upon them in the wilderness, to accomplish My anger upon them; yet I did it not; that My name might not be altogether profaned in the sight of the heathen. I led them out before their eyes, and I lifted up Mine hand unto them in the wilderness, that I would scatter them among the heathen, and disperse them through the countries; because they had not executed My judgements, but had despised My statutes, and polluted My Sabbaths, and their eyes were after the devices of their fathers. Wherefore I gave them also statutes which were not good, and judgements whereby they shall not live. And I shall pollute them in their own gifts, that I may destroy all that openeth the womb, when I pass through them.’

Mathetes: Epistle to Diognetus

I also came across this work, dating from AD 130 to the end of the century, which is relevant for its general tenor:

Chapter IV.—The other observances of the Jews.

But as to their scrupulosity concerning meats, and their superstition as respects the Sabbaths, and their boasting about circumcision, and their fancies about fasting and the new moons, which are utterly ridiculous and unworthy of notice,—I do not think that you require to learn anything from me.

Chapter V.—The manners of the Christians.

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers.

Other Early Church and Church Fathers writings

The following are taken verbatim (including comments) from http://www.bible.ca/H-sunday.htm . I have checked the accuracy of some, but not most of them.

90AD DIDACHE: "Christian Assembly on the Lord’s Day: 1. But every Lord’s day do ye gather yourselves together, and break bread, and give thanksgiving after having confessed your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure. 2. But let no one that is at variance with his fellow come together with you, until they be reconciled, that your sacrifice may not be profaned. 3. For this is that which was spoken by the Lord: In every place and time offer to me a pure sacrifice; for I am a great King, saith the Lord, and my name is wonderful among the nations." (Didache: The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, Chapter XIV)
100 AD BARNABAS "We keep the eighth day [Sunday] with joyfulness, the day also on which Jesus rose again from the dead" (The Epistle of Barnabas, 100 AD 15:6-8).
100 AD BARNABAS: Moreover God says to the Jews, 'Your new moons and Sabbaths 1 cannot endure.' You see how he says, 'The present Sabbaths are not acceptable to me, but the Sabbath which I have made in which, when I have rested [heaven: Heb 4] from all things, I will make the beginning of the eighth day which is the beginning of another world.' Wherefore we Christians keep the eighth day for joy, on which also Jesus arose from the dead and when he appeared ascended into heaven. (15:8f, The Epistle of Barnabas, 100 AD, Ante-Nicene Fathers , vol. 1, pg. 147)
110AD Pliny: "they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath not to (do) any wicked deeds, never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of good food—but food of an ordinary and innocent kind."
150AD EPISTLE OF THE APOSTLES.- I [Christ] have come into being on the eighth day which is the day of the Lord. (18)
150AD JUSTIN: "He then speaks of those Gentiles, namely us, who in every place offer sacrifices to Him, i.e., the bread of the Eucharist, and also the cup of the Eucharist, affirming both that we glorify His name, and that you profane [it]. The command of circumcision, again, bidding [them] always circumcise the children on the eighth day, was a type of the true circumcision, by which we are circumcised from deceit and iniquity through Him who rose from the dead on the first day after the Sabbath, [namely through] our Lord Jesus Christ. For the first day after the Sabbath, remaining the first of all the days, is called, however, the eighth, according to the number of all the days of the cycle, and [yet] remains the first.". (Justin, Dialogue 41:4)
150AD JUSTIN: …those who have persecuted and do persecute Christ, if they do not repent, shall not inherit anything on the holy mountain. But the Gentiles, who have believed on Him, and have repented of the sins which they have committed, they shall receive the inheritance along with the patriarchs and the prophets, and the just men who are descended from Jacob, even although they neither keep the Sabbath, nor are circumcised, nor observe the feasts. Assuredly they shall receive the holy inheritance of God. (Dialogue With Trypho the Jew, 150-165 AD, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, page 207)
150AD JUSTIN: But if we do not admit this, we shall be liable to fall into foolish opinion, as if it were not the same God who existed in the times of Enoch and all the rest, who neither were circumcised after the flesh, nor observed Sabbaths, nor any other rites, seeing that Moses enjoined such observances… For if there was no need of circumcision before Abraham, or of the observance of Sabbaths, of feasts and sacrifices, before Moses; no more need is there of them now, after that, according to the will of God, Jesus Christ the Son of God has been born without sin, of a virgin sprung from the stock of Abraham. (Dialogue With Trypho the Jew, 150-165 AD, Ante-Nicene Fathers , vol. 1, page 206)
150AD JUSTIN: "And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succours the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things, which we have submitted to you also for your consideration." (First apology of Justin, Weekly Worship of the Christians, Ch 68)
150AD JUSTIN: Moreover, all those righteous men already mentioned [after mentioning Adam. Abel, Enoch, Lot, Noah, Melchizedek, and Abraham], though they kept no Sabbaths, were pleasing to God; and after them Abraham with all his descendants until Moses… And you [fleshly Jews] were commanded to keep Sabbaths, that you might retain the memorial of God. For His word makes this announcement, saying, "That you may know that I am God who redeemed you." (Dialogue With Trypho the Jew, 150-165 AD, Ante-Nicene Fathers , vol. 1, page 204)
150AD JUSTIN: There is no other thing for which you blame us, my friends, is there than this? That we do not live according to the Law, nor, are we circumcised in the flesh as your forefathers, nor do we observe the Sabbath as you do. (Dialogue with Trypho 10:1. In verse 3 the Jew Trypho acknowledges that Christians 'do not keep the Sabbath.')
150AD JUSTIN: We are always together with one another. And for all the things with which we are supplied we bless the Maker of all through his Son Jesus Christ and through his Holy Spirit. And on the day called Sunday there is a gathering together in the same place of all who live in a city or a rural district. [There follows an account of a Christian worship service, which is quoted in VII.2.] We all make our assembly in common on the day of the Sun, since it is the first day, on which God changed the darkness and matter and made the world, and Jesus Christ our Savior arose from the dead on the same day. For they crucified him on the day before Saturn's day, and on the day after (which is the day of the Sun the appeared to his apostles and taught his disciples these things. (Apology, 1, 67:1-3, 7; First Apology, 145 AD, Ante-Nicene Fathers , Vol. 1, pg. 186)
155 AD Justin Martyr "[W]e too would observe the fleshly circumcision, and the Sabbaths, and in short all the feasts, if we did not know for what reason they were enjoined [on] you–namely, on account of your transgressions and the hardness of your heart. . . . [H]ow is it, Trypho, that we would not observe those rites which do not harm us–I speak of fleshly circumcision and Sabbaths and feasts? . . . God enjoined you [Jews] to keep the Sabbath, and impose on you other precepts for a sign, as I have already said, on account of your unrighteousness and that of your fathers" (Dialogue with Trypho the Jew 18, 21).
180AD ACTS OF PETER.- Paul had often contended with the Jewish teachers and had confuted them, saying 'it is Christ on whom your fathers laid hands. He abolished their Sabbath and fasts and festivals and circumcision.' (1: I)-2
190AD CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA: (in commenting on each of the Ten Commandments and their Christian meaning:) The seventh day is proclaimed a day of rest, preparing by abstention from evil for the Primal day, our true rest. (Ibid. VII. xvi. 138.1)
190AD CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA: He does the commandment according to the Gospel and keeps the Lord’s day, whenever he puts away an evil mind . . . glorifying the Lord’s resurrection in himself. (Ibid. Vii.xii.76.4)
190AD CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA: Plato prophetically speaks of the Lord’s day in the tenth book of the Republic, in these words: 'And when seven days have passed to each of them in the meadow, on the eighth they must go on." (Miscellanies V.xiv.106.2)
200AD BARDESANES: Wherever we are, we are all called after the one name of Christ Christians. On one day, the first of the week, we assemble ourselves together (On Fate)
200AD TERTULLIAN: "We solemnize the day after Saturday in contradistinction to those who call this day their Sabbath" (Tertullian's Apology, Ch 16)
200AD TERTULLIAN: It follows, accordingly, that, in so far as the abolition of carnal circumcision and of the old law is demonstrated as having been consummated at its specific times, so also the observance of the Sabbath is demonstrated to have been temporary. (An Answer to the Jews 4:1, Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 3, page 155)
200AD TERTULLIAN: Let him who contends that the Sabbath is still to be observed a balm of salvation, and circumcision on the eighth day because of threat of death, teach us that in earliest times righteous men kept Sabbath or practiced circumcision, and so were made friends of God. .. …Therefore, since God originated Adam uncircumcised, and inobservant of the Sabbath, consequently his offspring also, Abel, offering Him sacrifices, uncircumcised and inobservant of the Sabbath, was by Him commended… Noah also, uncircumcised - yes, and inobservant of the Sabbath - God freed from the deluge. For Enoch, too, most righteous man, uncircumcised and inobservant of the Sabbath, He translated from this world… Melchizedek also, "the priest of most high God," uncircumcised and inobservant of the Sabbath, was chosen to the priesthood of God. (An Answer to the Jews 2:10; 4:1, Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. 3, page 153)
200AD TERTULLIAN: Others . . . suppose that the sun is the god of the Christians, because it is well-known that we regard Sunday as a day of joy. (To the Nations 1: 133)
200AD TERTULLIAN: To us Sabbaths are foreign. (On Idolatry, 14:6)
220AD ORIGEN "On Sunday none of the actions of the world should be done. If then, you abstain from all the works of this world and keep yourselves free for spiritual things, go to church, listen to the readings and divine homilies, meditate on heavenly things. (Homil. 23 in Numeros 4, PG 12:749)
220 AD Origen "Hence it is not possible that the [day of] rest after the Sabbath should have come into existence from the seventh [day] of our God. On the contrary, it is our Savior who, after the pattern of his own rest, caused us to be made in the likeness of his death, and hence also of his resurrection" (Commentary on John 2:28).
225 AD The Didascalia "The apostles further appointed: On the first day of the week let there be service, and the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and the oblation, because on the first day of the week our Lord rose from the place of the dead, and on the first day of the week he arose upon the world, and on the first day of the week he ascended up to heaven, and on the first day of the week he will appear at last with the angels of heaven" (Didascalia 2).
250AD CYPRIAN: The eight day, that is, the first day after the Sabbath, and the Lord’s Day." (Epistle 58, Sec 4)
250 AD IGNATIUS: "If, therefore, those who were brought up in the ancient order of things have come to the possession of a new hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord’s Day, on which also our life has sprung up again by Him and by His death-whom some deny, by which mystery we have obtained faith, and therefore endure, that we may be found the disciples of Jesus Christ, our only Master-how shall we be able to live apart from Him, whose disciples the prophets themselves in the Spirit did wait for Him as their Teacher? And therefore He whom they rightly waited for, being come, raised them from the dead. If, then, those who were conversant with the ancient Scriptures came to newness of hope, expecting the coming of Christ, as the Lord teaches us when He says, "If ye had believed Moses, ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me; " and again, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it, and was glad; for before Abraham was, I am; " how shall we be able to live without Him? The prophets were His servants, and foresaw Him by the Spirit, and waited for Him as their Teacher, and expected Him as their Lord and Saviour, saying, "He will come and save us." Let us therefore no longer keep the Sabbath after the Jewish manner, and rejoice in days of idleness; for "he that does not work, let him not eat." For say the [holy] oracles, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread." But let every one of you keep the Sabbath after a spiritual manner, rejoicing in meditation on the law, not in relaxation of the body, admiring the workmanship of God, and not eating things prepared the day before, nor using lukewarm drinks, and walking within a prescribed space, nor finding delight in dancing and plaudits which have no sense in them. And after the observance of the Sabbath, let every friend of Christ keep the Lord’s Day as a festival, the resurrection-day, the queen and chief of all the days [of the week]. Looking forward to this, the prophet declared, "To the end, for the eighth day," on which our life both sprang up again, and the victory over death was obtained in Christ, whom the children of perdition, the enemies of the Saviour, deny, "whose god is their belly, who mind earthly things," who are "lovers of pleasure, and not lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof." These make merchandise of Christ, corrupting His word, and giving up Jesus to sale: they are corrupters of women, and covetous of other men's possessions, swallowing up wealth insatiably; from whom may ye be delivered by the mercy of God through our Lord Jesus Christ! (Epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians, Chapter IX)
250AD IGNATIUS: "On the day of the preparation, then, at the third hour, He received the sentence from Pilate, the Father permitting that to happen; at the sixth hour He was crucified; at the ninth hour He gave up the ghost; and before sunset He was buried. During the Sabbath He continued under the earth in the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathaea had laid Him. At the dawning of the Lord’s day He arose from the dead, according to what was spoken by Himself, "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of man also be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." The day of the preparation, then, comprises the passion; the Sabbath embraces the burial; the Lord’s Day contains the resurrection." (The Epistle of Ignatius to the Trallians, chapter 9)
250AD IGNATIUS: If any one fasts on the Lord’s Day or on the Sabbath, except on the paschal Sabbath only, he is a murderer of Christ. (The Epistle of Ignatius to the Philippians, chapter 8)
250AD IGNATIUS: "This [custom], of not bending the knee upon Sunday, is a symbol of the resurrection, through which we have been set free, by the grace of Christ, from sins, and from death, which has been put to death under Him. Now this custom took its rise from apostolic times, as the blessed Irenaeus, the martyr and bishop of Lyons, declares in his treatise On Easter, in which he makes mention of Pentecost also; upon which [feast] we do not bend the knee, because it is of equal significance with the Lord’s day, for the reason already alleged concerning it." (Ignatius, Fragments)
300 AD Victorinus "The sixth day [Friday] is called parasceve, that is to say, the preparation of the kingdom. . . . On this day also, on account of the passion of the Lord Jesus Christ, we make either a station to God or a fast. On the seventh day he rested from all his works, and blessed it, and sanctified it. On the former day we are accustomed to fast rigorously, that on the Lord’s day we may go forth to our bread with giving of thanks. And let the parasceve become a rigorous fast, lest we should appear to observe any Sabbath with the Jews . . . which Sabbath he [Christ] in his body abolished" (The Creation of the World).
300AD EUSEBIUS: "They did not, therefore, regard circumcision, nor observe the Sabbath neither do we; … because such things as these do not belong to Christians" (Ecc. Hist., Book 1, Ch. 4)
300AD EUSEBIUS: [The Ebionites] were accustomed to observe the Sabbath and other Jewish customs but on the Lord’s days to celebrate the same practices as we in remembrance of the resurrection of the Savior. (Church History Ill.xxvii.5)
300 AD Eusebius of Caesarea "They [the pre- Mosaic saints of the Old Testament] did not care about circumcision of the body, neither do we [Christians]. They did not care about observing Sabbaths, nor do we. They did not avoid certain kinds of food, neither did they regard the other distinctions which Moses first delivered to their posterity to be observed as symbols; nor do Christians of the present day do such things" (Church History 1:4:8).
300 AD Eusebius of Caesarea "The day of his [Christ's] light . . . was the day of his resurrection from the dead, which they say, as being the one and only truly holy day and the Lord’s day, is better than any number of days as we ordinarily understand them, and better than the days set apart by the Mosaic Law for feasts, new moons, and Sabbaths, which the Apostle [Paul] teaches are the shadow of days and not days in reality" (Proof of the Gospel 4:16:186).
345 AD Athanasius "The Sabbath was the end of the first creation, the Lord’s day was the beginning of the second, in which he renewed and restored the old in the same way as he prescribed that they should formerly observe the Sabbath as a memorial of the end of the first things, so we honor the Lord’s day as being the memorial of the new creation" (On Sabbath and Circumcision 3).
350 AD APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS: Be not careless of yourselves, neither deprive your Saviour of His own members, neither divide His body nor disperse His members, neither prefer the occasions of this life to the word of God; but assemble yourselves together every day, morning and evening, singing psalms and praying in the Lord’s house: in the morning saying the sixty-second Psalm, and in the evening the hundred and fortieth, but principally on the Sabbath-day. And on the day of our Lord’s resurrection, which is the Lord’s day, meet more diligently, sending praise to God that made the universe by Jesus, and sent Him to us, and condescended to let Him suffer, and raised Him from the dead. Otherwise what apology will he make to God who does not assemble on that day to hear the saving word concerning the resurrection, on which we pray thrice standing in memory of Him who arose in three days, in which is performed the reading of the prophets, the preaching of the Gospel, the oblation of the sacrifice, the gift of the holy food? (Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, book 2)
350 AD APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS: For if the Gentiles every day, when they arise from sleep, run to their idols to worship them, and before all their work and all their labors do first of all pray to them, and in their feasts and in their solemnities do not keep away, but attend upon them; and not only those upon the place, but those living far distant do the same; and in their public shows all come together, as into a synagogue: in the same manner those which are vainly called Jews, when they have worked six days, on the seventh day rest, and come together in their synagogue, never leaving or neglecting either rest from labor or assembling together… If, therefore, those who are not saved frequently assemble together for such purposes as do not profit them, what apology wilt thou make to the Lord God who forsakes his Church, not imitating so much as the heathen, but by such, thy absence grows slothful, or turns apostate. or acts wickedness? To whom the Lord says to Jeremiah, "Ye have not kept My ordinances; nay, you have not walked according to the ordinance of the heathen and you have in a manner exceeded them… How, therefore, will any one make his apology who has despised or absented himself from the church of God? (Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, book 2)
350 AD APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS: Do you therefore fast, and ask your petitions of God. We enjoin you to fast every fourth day of the week, and every day of the preparation, and the surplusage of your fast bestow upon the needy; every Sabbath-day excepting one, and every Lord’s day, hold your solemn assemblies, and rejoice: for he will be guilty of sin who fasts on the Lord’s day, being the day of the resurrection, or during the time of Pentecost, or, in general, who is sad on a festival day to the Lord For on them we ought to rejoice, and not to mourn. (Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, book 5)
350 AD APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS "Which Days of the Week We are to Fast, and Which Not, and for What Reasons: But let not your fasts be with the hypocrites; for they fast on the second and fifth days of the week. But do you either fast the entire five days, or on the fourth day of the week, and on the day of the Preparation, because on the fourth day the condemnation went out against the Lord, Judas then promising to betray Him for money; and you must fast on the day of the Preparation, because on that day the Lord suffered the death of the cross under Pontius Pilate. But keep the Sabbath, and the Lord’s day festival; because the former is the memorial of the creation, and the latter of the resurrection. But there is one only Sabbath to be observed by you in the whole year, which is that of our Lord’s burial, on which men ought to keep a fast, but not a festival. For inasmuch as the Creator was then under the earth, the sorrow for Him is more forcible than the joy for the creation; for the Creator is more honourable by nature and dignity than His own creatures." (Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, book 7)
350 AD APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS "How We Ought to Assemble Together, and to Celebrate the Festival Day of Our Saviour's Resurrection. On the day of the resurrection of the Lord, that is, the Lord’s day, assemble yourselves together, without fail, giving thanks to God, and praising Him for those mercies God has bestowed upon you through Christ, and has delivered you from ignorance, error, and bondage, that your sacrifice may be unspotted, and acceptable to God, who has said concerning His universal Church: "In every place shall incense and a pure sacrifice be offered unto me; for I am a great King, saith the Lord Almighty, and my name is wonderful among the heathen." (Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, book 7)
350 AD Cyril of Jerusalem "Fall not away either into the sect of the Samaritans or into Judaism, for Jesus Christ has henceforth ransomed you. Stand aloof from all observance of Sabbaths and from calling any indifferent meats common or unclean" (Catechetical Lectures 4:37).
360 AD Council of Laodicea "Christians should not Judaize and should not be idle on the Sabbath, but should work on that day; they should, however, particularly reverence the Lord’s day and, if possible, not work on it, because they were Christians" (canon 29).
387 AD John Chrysostom "You have put on Christ, you have become a member of the Lord and been enrolled in the heavenly city, and you still grovel in the Law [of Moses]? How is it possible for you to obtain the kingdom? Listen to Paul's words, that the observance of the Law overthrows the gospel, and learn, if you will, how this comes to pass, and tremble, and shun this pitfall. Why do you keep the Sabbath and fast with the Jews?" (Homilies on Galatians 2:17).
387 AD John Chrysostom "The rite of circumcision was venerable in the Jews' account, forasmuch as the Law itself gave way thereto, and the Sabbath was less esteemed than circumcision. For that circumcision might be performed, the Sabbath was broken; but that the Sabbath might be kept, circumcision was never broken; and mark, I pray, the dispensation of God. This is found to be even more solemn that the Sabbath, as not being omitted at certain times. When then it is done away, much more is the Sabbath" (Homilies on Philippians 10).
412 AD Augustine "Well, now, I should like to be told what there is in these Ten Commandments, except the observance of the Sabbath, which ought not to be kept by a Christian . . . Which of these commandments would anyone say that the Christian ought not to keep? It is possible to contend that it is not the Law which was written on those two tables that the apostle [Paul] describes as 'the letter that kills' [2 Cor. 3:6], but the law of circumcision and the other sacred rites which are now abolished" (The Spirit and the Letter 24).
597 AD Gregory I "It has come to my ears that certain men of perverse spirit have sown among you some things that are wrong and opposed to the holy faith, so as to forbid any work being done on the Sabbath day. What else can I call these [men] but preachers of Antichrist, who when he comes will cause the Sabbath day as well as the Lord’s day to be kept free from all work. For because he [the Antichrist] pretends to die and rise again, he wishes the Lord’s day to be had in reverence; and because he compels the people to Judaize that he may bring back the outward rite of the Law, and subject the perfidy of the Jews to himself, he wishes the Sabbath to be observed. For this which is said by the prophet, 'You shall bring in no burden through your gates on the Sabbath day' (Jer. 17:24) could be held to as long as it was lawful for the Law to be observed according to the letter. But after that the grace of almighty God, our Lord Jesus Christ, has appeared, the commandments of the Law which were spoken figuratively cannot be kept according to the letter. For if anyone says that this about the Sabbath is to be kept, he must needs say that carnal sacrifices are to be offered. He must say too that the commandment about the circumcision of the body is still to be retained. But let him hear the apostle Paul saying in opposition to him: 'If you be circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing' (Gal. 5:2)" (Letters 13:1).

Updates

Some changes I made since originally posting this article:

2023-09-11 - section with the quotation from Wilhelmus à Brakel
2025-11-22 - corrected my argument from Romans 14:5, and other changes in tone.

What if none of it is true?

2023-04-10T08:33:00+01:00

At some point most Christians will have to face questions about the reality of the Christian faith. What if none of the things we believe are actually true? What if Jesus didn’t actually rise from the dead? I don’t think there are adequate reasons to doubt, but here are 3 answers to that question.

1. The apostle Paul’s answer

1 Corinthians 15:12-19:

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

If Jesus’ resurrection is a myth, then we are wasting our whole lives, and are the most pitiable of people. As Paul continues:

And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I face death every day – yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord. If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised,

‘Let us eat and drink,

for tomorrow we die.’

2. A philosopher’s response

If you are more philosophically inclined, you could respond to the apostle Paul in this way:

If the Bible is not true, then what is true? Certainly none of the other religions – none comes close to having something like the resurrection of Jesus as a pillar to support its claims. That leaves us with atheism, which provides us with not the smallest scrap of a foundation on which to build any claims about the purpose of life, or what is a good or bad.

In which case, who can say what is a waste of a life, and what is a good use of one? Is hedonism the answer? Or pursuing the “good” of mankind, whatever we think that is? Or is living in delusion actually the best? No-one can say – there is no purpose behind our existence, nothing we were created for, and no-one has an objective place from which to say that other people are to be pitied or wasting their lives.

3. Puddleglum’s answer

In C.S. Lewis’s story “The Silver Chair”, Puddleglum is a Marshwiggle, a human-like creature who lives in the swamps and has a very gloomy outlook on life.

In the story, Puddleglum and two human children, Eustace and Jill, search for the missing Prince Rillian, and find him deep in an underground world where he had been enchanted by a witch. After freeing him from the enchantment, they have to face the witch herself, who proceeds to try to persuade them, with clever words and an intoxicating odour, that “the Overworld” they now want to return to does not in fact exist. The “sun” they claim to have seen is merely a fantastical extrapolation from the lamps they have seen in the underworld; the great “lion” they believe in is likewise a childish dream, generated from imaginations that have seen a cat and wanted a bigger and better cat. “Come, all of you. Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan.”

She has almost succeeded when Puddleglum realises that the fire is responsible for the smell that is bewitching them all, which he bravely puts out with his bare feet. Then he says the following words, which, like many parts of the Chronicles of Narnia, are an obvious and deliberate allegory to Lewis’s apologetic arguments for Christianity, and need no further commentary:

“One word, Ma'am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.”

Accepting the paedo-baptised into credo-baptist churches

2023-01-30T09:47:55Z

This post is about a long-standing debate in churches of a credo-baptist persuasion about whether you can accept those baptised as infants into membership, and I approach this as someone standing in the Reformed tradition, in the baptist tradition, meaning I believe that the Bible’s teaching on baptism gives no justification for infant baptism, and as an elder of my local church.

My position is that, if the person has a credible profession of faith, then their lack of believer’s baptism must not block their membership, and we would be sinning in a grievous way against the Lord Jesus if we failed to accept them into full membership.

The argument for the contrary position seems to go something like this:

Only believer’s baptism is valid baptism.
Baptism is how you become a member of local church, and we require baptism of other people before membership.
Therefore it would be inconsistent to allow those not baptised as believers, but only as infants, to be members.

As it stands, this argument is mostly fine – I think there are some potential logical problems with it (we could argue about improper vs invalid baptisms etc), but they are mostly irrelevant given what follows. In the absence of overriding concerns, the argument would probably convince me.

But, there are overriding concerns! And very large ones.

Ultimately, we can’t be 100% consistent with everything that God requires all the time. In fact we can go further: consistent Christian living requires us to be inconsistent with some of the commands or principles in God’s word some of the time. Reality ensures that dilemmas will come – in a broken world, it is not possible to simultaneously obey all God’s commands. The only question is this: will we resolve the conflicting requirements we find ourselves under according to God’s own priorities or not?

If you believe that, in theory at least, you can obey everything with no inconsistency all the time, then I don’t think you’ve been paying attention, and you are in fact much more likely to be simply resolving the tensions in a way that it is very out of line with God’s priorities and demands.

I realise that this may be a surprising way of speaking, perhaps especially for those from a reformed background like myself, so I need to spend some time on that. Despite growing up with Bible teaching every week and even every day, it wasn’t until Bible college that I was clearly exposed to this teaching.

Disobedience to some of God’s commands, some of the time, is a Biblical duty

Let’s imagine the situation: you are an Old Testament Israelite believer, on your way to Jerusalem to make a required sacrifice at the temple. You are not hugely wealthy – you have an animal with you, but not a lot of spare money. On the way, you meet a destitute family close to starvation. Do you:

Kill the animal to give to the starving family as food, or
Carry on to Jerusalem to make the sacrifice as God requires?

If you have even a small understanding of scripture and God’s character, this should be fairly easy, but I’ve made a second example, for those struggling with the first:

You are a Levite or priest travelling from Jericho to Jerusalem, in order to do the temple duties required of you in God’s law. You come across a man who is unconscious and bleeding. Do you:

Take whatever time is necessary to look after the man, potentially missing your duty turn at the temple, or
Carry on to Jerusalem to do your duty as God requires?

Hopefully I don’t need to further labour the point. But we should look at the important passage that directly handles this general topic, Matthew 12:3-8:

He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

The issue here is not first of all the Sabbath, but the broader principle “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”. God himself, who commanded both the sacrificial system and having mercy on our fellow human, says extremely clearly that one is far more important to him than the other.

In the real world, we will hit situations like this, and we will have to make a choice. If we fail to prioritise God’s commands as he himself prioritises them, we are in danger of doing something terrible, like leaving a family to starve for the sake of a religious ceremony.

This is not a “lesser of two evils” theology. The passage is clear that you can break some of God’s laws, some of the time (the priests “profane” the Sabbath, and David did that which “was not lawful”), and yet still be “guiltless”.

The implications of this are important, and need to be restated: if you are not living inconsistently with some of God’s commands, some of the time, you are doing it wrong. The idol of the perfectly “consistent” position must have its head and hands smashed, and bow before God and his priorities.

Or, put another way: treating less important matters as if they were of primary importance will eventually lead you into grievous sin against the Lord Jesus at some point.

The good news is that if you were attempting to literally do the impossible and obey all the different conflicting commands simultaneously, you can relax: God just wants you to work out which is most important, and do that one. He usually makes it pretty clear.

Priorities in the church

So much for the general principle, let’s come to what God’s priorities are in the church.

Let’s start with John 21:15-17:

15 When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’

‘Yes, Lord,’ he said, ‘you know that I love you.’

Jesus said, ‘Feed my lambs.’

16 Again Jesus said, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’

He answered, ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.’

Jesus said, ‘Take care of my sheep.’

17 The third time he said to him, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’

Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ He said, ‘Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.’

Jesus said, ‘Feed my sheep.’

Jesus really hammers Peter here. The threefold repetition of “Do you love me?” was emphatic enough in itself, but was also deliberately echoing Peter’s threefold denial, and Jesus’ point was not lost: “Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’” This is classic NT understatement – it means that Peter’s heart broke and the tears started to flow down his face, it means he related this conversation over and over and over to his fellow apostles, it means the memory of this conversation drove everything he did to the end of his days.

Jesus was interested in a full reconciliation and re-instatement, so he didn’t hesitate to put his finger on the matter of Peter’s denial, though it was extremely difficult. At the same time, he gives Peter three opportunities to say “I love you”, but in each case, Jesus wants to make it painfully clear what love for Him means: looking after His people.

It is almost as if Jesus is promoting the command to look after God’s people spiritually to the level of the greatest commandment – the commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. This fits with the heightened priority Jesus gives to loving our Christian brothers and sisters in other passages (e.g. John 13:34, 1 John 2:3:11, 1 John 3:16).

That duty did not fall on Peter alone, but comes to every believer, and especially to every elder. The passage in Acts describing Paul’s farewell words to the elders of the Ephesian churches is one of the most emotionally charged texts in the New Testament, and includes these words:

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.

The gravity of these words can’t be overemphasised, and they are words that haunt – or should haunt – every elder of a church. When you press home your point with talk about the blood of God – words that make theologians squirm – then you are laying it on thick.

If you are an elder of a flock, and God sends you a sheep, your job is to welcome and shepherd them – to feed and nurture and care for them. That includes providing them with all the “means of grace” – everything that God has provided to help nourish his people spiritually and bring them safely to glory. Perhaps most important is the preaching of God’s word, but others of huge importance are communion and all the privileges of membership, including opportunities to serve, accountability and the necessary bonds of church discipline.

If God sends you someone who shows every sign of being a sheep, you don’t have the right of refusal – at least, not without some excellent reasons, reasons of which God himself would say “You are right, that is more important”.

The duty to look after God’s flock is not one command among many given to elders – it is the command. It is the summary command of all the other commands – as demonstrated by both the passages mentioned above. This doesn’t mean that none of the other commands matter – they give shape to what feeding the flock means – but they must not be applied in a way that subverts the great command.

So, what is there in scripture on the other side of this argument?

We have the command to baptise – but this is not particularly relevant to the question, as it’s pretty clear that we are not supposed to be baptising anyone against their will. The issue here is not elders unwilling to baptise, but sheep who are unwilling to be baptised because they believe they already have been.

We have the command to be baptised – important, but again not directly relevant to this exact question, as it is the business of the believer to obey this, not our responsibility as leaders.

We have a duty to teach and maintain right doctrine. But the Bible clearly differentiates quite starkly between primary and secondary (and tertiary) matters (e.g. compare Galatians 1:6-9 with Romans 14). And the debate between paedo- and credo-baptism is clearly not a primary matter.

We have to ask, how much of scripture is devoted to commanding elders to have 100% baptismal purity in their churches? Or to maintain absolute standards regarding how we teach disciples on any secondary issues? It’s pretty difficult to find any Biblical material on this, let alone anything expressed with close to the priority given to the elders’ duty to minister to the sheep that God sends them.

In general, we can see the lower priority of baptism in a number of ways:

It’s a bodily ritual, and Christianity isn’t in general about that kind of thing, but about “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).
People can be saved without being baptised at all.
As a once-for-all entrance rite, it’s not something we are supposed to be doing continually. We don’t re-baptise those who have been previously baptised when people become members, but to some degree have to trust that those who baptised were careful in how they did it.

The ordinances (baptism and communion) exist for the good of the sheep; the sheep do not exist for the good of the ordinances. The ordinances are temporary; the sheep, and God’s love for them, are eternal.

So I struggle to see how anyone could look at the Biblical data and conclude that ensuring 100% adherence to credo-baptist practice would ever trump the command of Jesus to feed his sheep.

Consequences

Another way of approaching questions of relative importance like this is to ask, “what would be the consequences of the different actions we take?”

Negative consequences

If we have a position in which we tolerate less than absolute adherence to believer’s baptism amongst our membership, what are the negative consequences?

Short term, there is very little. For the person themselves, there are positive benefits they are missing out on, but we can’t do anything about that (see section on “Positive consequences” below).

Regarding others around, is some already baptised or yet-to-be baptised person going to be encouraged to be baptised as an infant? Since no-one has a time machine, this is impossible. With baptism being a one-time act that happened (or didn’t) in the past, there is no ongoing, in-your-face active example that has a bad influence on others.

Will someone be confused about what we are teaching about the nature of valid baptisms? There is certainly some danger, but 1) it is not of primary importance and 2) it is easily countered: we teach people what we consider to be the right understanding of baptism, and we also take the perfect opportunity to teach them about God’s own priorities regarding loving and caring for those who give every indication that they are true believers.

What about the longer term impact – will we erode belief in the importance of believer’s baptism? If it has an exaggerated position in people’s hearts, then yes, we will be demoting it, and that will be a good thing. We will be helping to establish the correct position of this doctrine and practice in the hierarchy of what God is looking for in a Biblical church. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy go hand-in-hand, and right practice here will support right doctrine regarding which things are primary, and which are not.

I also have to point out: if we are seriously that concerned about a longer term impact and dilution of what we consider to be right doctrine, then we have to purge our bookshelves of paedo-baptist authors, cut off contact with paedo-baptist believers and disavow the baptisticly-mixed conferences and ministries we are involved with. It is one of the great ironies that the position that prioritises consistency over compassion, and cannot countenance having even a single non-credo-baptised member, is often fine with having our bookshelves, our supported missionaries and even our pulpits full of such believers!

On the other side, what are the negative consequences of sending away evident believers because of their paedo-baptist position? Here are some of the more serious ones:

We would be embedding significant errors into the hearts of the flock: that the matter of credo-baptism vs. paedo-baptism is one of primary importance, while the obligation to love and protect God’s flock is a matter of relative indifference.
We will entrench the sad and scandalous divisions that plague Christ’s church, by refusing membership and welcome to those who come from the paedo-baptist side of God’s family. (There is a much bigger argument from the principle of Christian unity that I have not enlarged on here, because, while I think it ought to be a major factor, is slightly more involved in application).
If we fail to feed a sheep God sends us – that is, we deny them the God-ordained means of grace – it could result in spiritual disaster or malnourishment for that person. The Lord puts an infinite value on every one of his lambs, and he will not hold us guiltless. John Piper rightly said:

…excluding a true brother in Christ from membership in the local church is far more serious than most of us think it is.

And there is one perhaps less serious consequence we can add: we will be denying paedo-baptists the benefit of actually being a part of the very churches where they might hear what we consider to be the Biblical position on baptism!

Positive consequences

We can look at this the other way: what are the positive outcomes we could conceivably hope for in insisting on believers’ baptism?

For the person who simply rejects Christ’s command to be baptised, there are multiple. By insisting that they must be baptised, we are teaching them that Christ is both Lord and Saviour, and his commands are not to be set aside. We are teaching them that they have a grossly inadequate view of scripture and that they must change. If we succeed in our aim, we’ve brought them into a position of humbled obedience and a happy conscience before Christ. And if we fail to persuade, and we therefore refuse membership, we do so on the basis and with the explicit explanation that they appear to be still unsaved, and still not in submission to Christ. We are thereby enlightening them about their true, lost spiritual state. In both cases, we do them great spiritual good.

But what for the convinced paedo-baptist? Assuming we have tried and failed to persuade them of credo-baptism, the very best we can hope for by continuing to insist on baptism is to do them zero spiritual good:

If they submit to baptism only because the church requires it, how are they better off spiritually? They have the same view of Christ and his Lordship before and after. They have the same view of scripture – it is abundantly evident from the ways we engage with reformed paedo-baptists that we don’t consider them to be heretical, and our statements of faith often express our position on scripture in identical ways. Their conscience is unchanged – they believe that before and after they were in identical states of obedience. From their position, they have been re-baptised – they have completed an essentially empty and unnecessary ritual, which in fact contradicts God’s own wishes for that ceremony. God is interested in heart obedience, and all of the spiritual benefits that flow from baptism require both understanding and heart submission, and not mere outward conformity. So the only thing we have achieved is to give them a bath.

If they still refuse baptism, we don’t teach them anything – we haven’t revealed their lost condition to them, because we don’t believe that. They have learned something about how stubborn we are, and nothing more. We’ve again done them zero spiritual good. In this case it will also lead to the negative consequences described above.

Baptism as an entrance rite to the visible church of Christ exists only for the spiritual good of the flock – God is not interested in outward rites for their own sake. We don’t merely do baptism “just because Christ says so”. That’s crucial, but not sufficient. If that’s all we have, we will be unable to weigh up different commands and their relative priority. We’ll be unable to apply “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”, and we’ll make huge mistakes.

If we insist on absolute adherence to Christ’s commands in ways that pay no attention to the purpose of those commands, we demonstrate that we have lost the plot. We’ve got the priority of those commands all wrong because we have forgotten to ask why the commands were given.

Objections

“This opens the way to completely unbaptised people being accepted”

If someone refuses baptism completely, and cannot be corrected by appealing to Christ’s commands, then they give strong evidence that they are not a believer, since they do not have a heart attitude of submission to God, and you would legitimately refuse them membership on that basis.

The same is not true of a believer who considers their infant baptism to be valid, and believes that they are obeying Christ’s commands. While I’m not at all convinced by the paedo-baptist case, it is a reasonable case based on a reasonable approach to scripture. When paedo-baptists argue on the basis of household baptisms, the model of circumcision and a certain view of covenant continuity, I cannot conclude that they must have unregenerate hearts to have come up with such an interpretation. I just think they’re wrong, and not doing justice to what the Bible actually says. There is a difference between wrongly understanding God’s word and refusing to understand God’s word.

For my intended audience, this is a point I don’t need to labour. We already demonstrate in a thousand ways that we not only regard many convinced paedo-baptists as believers, but in fact hold many of them in high regard in the faith.

“If a person refuses believer’s baptism, they are the one refusing membership”

The flaw in this argument is that they are not actually refusing membership – they want membership – but refusing what they see as an unbiblical hurdle, one that would go against their understanding of what scripture requires of them. We cannot put any terms on membership and say “We welcomed you, you’re the one who refused to come”.

Rules about church membership only exist because of a more important goal: to protect the flock from spiritual danger and ensure their spiritual health and growth. If we design and apply membership rules so they function as a mechanism for excluding from protection the very sheep that they were supposed to protect, we’ve turned their entire purpose on their head.

“We exclude people on the basis of other secondary matters, why not this?”

The argument here is that there may be other reasons why someone we believe to be a genuine sheep might be rightly excluded from membership of a church – for example, those who reject some important doctrine in our basis of faith. If that’s allowed, shouldn’t the same be applied those who differ in the secondary matter of baptism?

As with the previous objection, the issue to remember here is that membership criteria do not exist for their own sake, but for the sake of the flock and for the flock’s protection. As well as feeding the flock, we are to protect them from wolves e.g. Acts 20:29-31. We must be willing to draw a sharp line between those who must be protected and those we are protecting from.

This is normally done on matters of primary (salvific) importance. Someone who denies a key part of the gospel must be excluded not only because they demonstrate that they are (most probably) not a true believer, but because of their influence on others.

However, sometimes there are cases where we might judge a person to be probably a genuine sheep, but whose behaviour and influence is sufficiently wolf-like that we are forced to exclude them. One example might be infallibility of scripture.

The decision will usually depend very strongly on other factors: Are they are a new believer with lots of inadequate views because they just haven’t had chance to be discipled yet, or someone confirmed in their opinions? Will they take every opportunity to convert others to their view, or will they show respect for the church’s position? Just how dangerous is their doctrinal stance, and how likely are they to influence others?

In regard to paedo-baptism, I can certainly imagine cases where someone could exhibit sufficiently divisive behaviour that would result in them being excluded from membership. But in general, we are already agreed that the error, while an error, is on a secondary matter, and not in itself pernicious enough that we need to purge its influence from our congregations.

The basis of these decisions is not the rules for rules’ sake, nor consistency, but the end goal of taking care of God’s people. If we forget that, if we forget why we doing all this, we will commit all kinds of horrors in his name.

“They can go to the church down the road”

First, the existence of a good, nearby church that is willing to look after the sheep that we refuse to care for is not an excuse for disobedience. The existence of that church may significantly lessen the seriousness of the consequences of our sin, but it does not lessen the sin itself.

Second, the existence of such a church can by no means be taken for granted. In one of the places where I have served the Lord, the next nearest church to our own (baptistic) church was several hundred miles away. If your policies only work where you have the luxury of many nearby churches, you will need to pray that those are policies are not copied, and that they don’t spread to other less fortunate places. I, for one, will join you in that prayer.

It is striking to me as I’ve read some of the positions on both sides of this debate, how few people even considered the possibility that there might not be an alternative church for people to be members of. The relative luxury of western countries in this matter has made us fat, instead of taking the full weight of the awesome responsibility we have as ministers of the means of grace. When you are the only church in a city of more than a million, the only light in the darkness, the only place where starving lambs will get spiritual food, the only people with the keys to the kingdom, you cannot get away with the lazy thinking and lazy attitude that says “other people will do my job so let them”.

“Church members should submit to the elders’ views”

This objection is based on an overreach of the authority of the eldership. We as elders don’t have the right to override people’s consciences, nor insist that they take our doctrinal views on board. We have the right to the chance to persuade people of what we believe scripture teaches, but not to insist that they say “I agree with you”. There are matters of practical application where we do expect submission from members (e.g. if we say “we’re going to have our members’ meeting at 7pm”, we would not expect some people to decide on a different time), but we are not local popes on any doctrinal matter.

Our aim is not to establish our own authority, but that of Christ’s. If we do achieve the aim of getting people to do what we say, but only by threatening them with spiritual starvation and without having persuaded them that it is what Christ wants, we’ve achieved nothing or less than nothing. Submission of the heart is not achieved by twisting of arms.

“This makes things messy”

Sometimes church life is avoidably messy because of poor decisions or leadership, and we make life hard for ourselves. But sometimes, it is unavoidably messy, because flocks are made up of sheep. That’s just the way it is, we didn’t choose it, but we have to live with it, and respond according to God’s character and expressed priorities.

Conclusion

The Lord Jesus has made himself abundantly clear on this matter. We simply need to ask, “what is more important to Christ, his sheep being fed, or 100% outward conformance to a religious ritual?” The failure of many baptistic churches to get the right answer to this simple question can be attributed only to their sinful refusal to prioritise his wishes above their own historic divisions and distinctives, and because of a lack of clarity on the doctrine of God’s own hierarchy of commands and priorities.

When faced with the dilemma of what to do with the convinced paedo-baptist who has not been baptised as a believer, but gives every sign of being a sheep and not a wolf, I cannot see room for any conclusion other than this: it is our duty to “profane” baptism, and accept them into membership. If we fail to do so, on the day of judgement Christ will say to us “I sent you a sheep, but you refused to feed them. Why?” And we will have nowhere to hide.

A model for the soul

2022-12-10T16:08:00Z

This post is an attempt to give a model for thinking about the Christian concept of the soul. It is not a theory.

Models vs Theories

I’m loosely borrowing the language of models and theories from the scientific world. If you present a theory, you will often be expected to give a somewhat comprehensive explanation and description of how something really is. If, on the other hand, you present a model, you will be expected to give a useful way of thinking about something or making calculations about it.

For example, if you’re teaching the gas laws, you might model molecules as solid bouncy spheres. Of course, you would not be claiming that molecules really are solid bouncy spheres, and in fact we know that they are very different from that. A more accurate description, however, which might involve atoms and sub-atomic particles etc., will not help you in this context. If you go further and describe particles as blobs of quantum goo, you’ll be even further from communicating an intuitive understanding of bulk gas properties.

Multiple models are often necessary in a single area. The most obvious example of this is wave-particle duality in quantum physics. In some circumstances, you need to be able to think of light – and the rest of matter – as being composed of particles, other times as waves. It would be nice if our brains had a single intuitive model that incorporated both of those naturally, but it seems we don’t.

A model is more humble than a theory. When you use a model, you are conscious of the fact that there will always be a gap between your understanding of reality and reality itself.

If these things are true for understanding those parts of reality that can be more readily measured and tested scientifically, it shouldn’t surprise us if we need to think about revealed, spiritual reality in a similar way. It turns out I’m not the first to apply this way of thinking to theology: for a fuller discussion, see the “Mystery and Models” section of J.I. Packer’s lecture on The logic of penal substitution.

The component theory

The model I’m about to describe stands in contrast to what we could call a “component” theory of human nature. That theory takes some of the language found in parts of the Bible where a person might be described as being made up of “body” and “soul” (e.g. Ecclesiastes 12:7), and considers this language of us having different “parts” as being more than a model, but a complete description of reality – soul and the body are the two constituents from which a whole person is constructed. Put the two together and you’ve got a real person. While one is subtracted (death), you no longer have a person.

This division in itself has not been controversial, with many noting that as well as “soul” and “body”, in the Bible there is also mention of “spirit”, leading to debates between the bipartite and tripartite camps.

Both camps get into trouble with the biblical data, because the Bible simply doesn’t use its own terminology consistently. Sometimes it even refers to the whole person as a “soul” – for example, Genesis 2:7 says that the man God created became a living “soul” (Hebrew “nephesh”), seemingly referring to the whole person, and 1 Peter 3:20 refers to the people on the ark as “souls” (Greek ψυχή which can be translated soul or life). As another example, when the Bible commands us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, we wouldn’t conclude there are actually 4 components that make up the person.

A component theory of body and soul quickly gets you into difficult theological and philosophical issues, especially regarding how the two interact. I think increasingly many Christians have seen how the bipartite (or tripartite) positions are problematic from a biblical perspective and have seen the need to emphasise the fundamental one-ness of human nature.

A dualistic, component theory also becomes pretty problematic in the light of many advances in science, especially neuroscience. As we understand more and more about what different parts of the brain do, we are going to increasingly discover the role of the brain in moral and ethical judgements, and in spiritual experiences. Those who lean on a component theory of body and soul are going to find the soul continually shrinking and becoming a victim of a “soul of the gaps” ideology, just as a God of the gaps approach to the physical sciences results in God disappearing.

How I think about the soul

If I remember correctly, the seed thought in the analogy that follows is from a book called “The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten”, by Julian Baggini. I no longer have my copy of the book, so I’m not sure whether I have developed, misrepresented or just wholesale plagiarised the ideas found there – but I certainly don’t claim originality. The thought here could also probably be expressed in terms of other ideas from philosophers, but I like this better.

The analogy: what is “a piece of music”?

That seems like a pretty hard question in itself. To make it more concrete, let’s pick a famous piece. I was going to choose Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, because the tune often goes round my head, but Bohemian Rhapsody is a bit shorter to type – feel free to substitute with anything of your own choosing, preferably something with a tune you can call to mind easily.

A specific piece of music like Bohemian Rhapsody could be defined as a certain sequence of sound waves – a far from perfect definition, but we have to start somewhere. But now we could ask: once the sound waves have died down, does that piece of music still exist?

I think most people would agree that even if no-one were playing Bohemian Rhapsody right now, it would still exist in our world – firstly because we have lots of recordings of it, on various physical media and sheet music. If someone somehow succeeded in destroying all of those, we could still say that it exists in many people’s memories. Between us we would probably do a pretty good job of reproducing it.

However, once the last recording is gone, and the last person who remembers it has died, I think it would be fair to say that it has finally been lost or destroyed.

So, in order to exist, a piece of music needs to have a physical form. But that physical form is not limited to just one medium. We can also note that there might be many different recitals or recordings of the same song which cannot be identical, and yet are all somehow, in some sense the “same” song.

So much for the analogy. The question we are really thinking about is this: what is a human being?

As humans we are fundamentally physically. My body is me, and I am my body. And the future hope of Christians involves physical bodies in a physical world – that is the resurrection we are promised and are waiting for.

Yet, we are aware that we are more than our bodies, and Biblical language reflects that.

And what about after death? The idea of a disembodied soul or a disembodied existence is a very strange one and very difficult to square with our fundamentally physical nature. Yet the Bible does talk of being “with God” immediately after death, long before the promised resurrection.

So is it possible for a human being, like a piece of music, to be “recorded” and “played back” somehow?

What if there was a perfect, infinite mind that was able to know every part of who am I, body, mind and spirit? If God, at the point I die, captures in his mind every detail about me, and not just the physical aspects of my final state, but the fully 4-dimensional reality of everything I ever did or thought, everything about who I really was, could you say that I still existed? What if God was able, with his infinitely powerful and precise imagination, to think about me, to lovingly recall me to his mind so perfectly and vividly that it became a genuine existence for me?

What if that’s what I mean when I say “my soul is going to be with God”?

There are a number of things I like about this model:

It emphasises the goodness and importance of our physical nature.
It fully escapes the “soul of the gaps” trap, and frees us from looking for ways that body and soul “interact”.
It frees us from having to answer questions like “when does the soul enter the body of the unborn child?” The answer to that question that would have big ethical consequences, but it’s question which the Bible doesn’t actually address, let alone answer. I think it’s the wrong question, based on a wrong theory.
It rightly makes the “intermediate state” a definitely inferior and strange form of existence, compared with the resurrection we are looking forward to.
While emphasising the fundamental physicality of the body, it still makes a distinction between “who I really am” and “my body right now”. It allows for the idea that the body can somehow be a less than perfect representation of the real person – just as you could have an imperfect performance of Bohemian Rhapsody that somehow still “is” Bohemian Rhapsody. This is helpful for other things in life – for example, in thinking about illnesses or disabilities, including mental illnesses and the deterioration of the body in old age.

There are certainly weaknesses in this model, but I think that’s fine – it’s not supposed to be the only model. I don’t think it can claim to be “Biblical” – it’s what Packer would call a “secondary” model, rather than a primary one. I don’t even think it is “correct”, in the same way that “molecules are solid bouncy balls” is not “correct”.

It’s just one way of thinking about the subject that I don’t think contradicts what the Bible teaches, and can be helpful to us in some contexts – especially, in showing that there are other ways of thinking about what the soul is in the context of a growing understanding of the brain that makes substance dualism increasingly untenable. I found it helpful for thinking about a subject that is full of deep mysteries, my wife didn’t think it was completely heretical, so I thought it was worth sharing.

The argument from unwanted children

2022-06-27T14:03:24+01:00

Katharine Birbalsingh asked on Twitter:

This makes a good argument IMO for abortion instead of madness we see on twitter

Having said that, it doesn’t mention real numbers or culture change

Would love to hear from my pro-life followers why this doesn’t convince (other than religious reasons) https://t.co/ifaGSb4SMR
— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) June 26, 2022

As a pro-life person who very much respects Katharine Birbalsingh, and the way she has chosen to engage with people on Twitter, I thought I would write a very quick response (likely full of typos etc., sorry in advance). If the writing comes over as curt or hostile, that is not intended, I’m just trying to be logical and direct (and I’m not afraid of challenging people that I know do not shy from being challenged!)

The linked article on The tragedy of the unwanted child basically argues along these lines: if we don’t have abortion, we’ll have lots of infanticide or abandonment, and so we should allow abortion instead as its not as bad as those. Plus it’s natural, based on arguments from evolutionary biology/history/anthropology. To quote:

Safe abortion, then, is the modern cure for the ancient heartbreaks of neonaticide and abandonment.

If I understand the article rightly, it is basically saying that infanticide/neonaticide/abandonment etc. are not morally bad, just unfortunate because they are more upsetting for mothers.

So, by “cure”, it means not a way of tackling a moral evil, but a way of making us not feel as bad. The article doesn’t quite put it as bluntly as that, but at points it comes close.

If you want someone to articulate this position even more clearly, see people like Peter Singer, who rightly recognise that there is no fundamental biological difference between the born and unborn child. The life of a new human being begins at fertilisation, and there is no serious scientific dissent on this matter.

So, there are two ways it can go:

First, if you really believe this argument, you should be in favour of legalising both abortion and infanticide. The article even pointed out that in some parts of the world, neonaticide is safer than abortion for mothers. So, if you allow abortion for some mothers, but not infanticide for mothers where that is safer, why not?

The moral argument in the article appears to be that killing young children is “natural”, based on reasons drawn from evolutionary biology and the practices of cultures across the world.

Is this a sound argument? I reject it on logical grounds (as well as religious) for the same reason I reject arguments for legalising rape, and many other things we might call “natural”, including all murder. If, as a non-religious person you want to claim something is not “natural”, what is it – supernatural? Everything is natural, because it exists in the natural world.

It is simply impossible to build moral views out of arguments of things being natural or not, nor on accepted practices across the world (but that’s a longer post).

If you accept this article’s argument, you must be willing to say that you take Singer’s position, or you are being dishonest about what you believe (or deliberately living with intellectual muddiness on this issue, which is probably more comforting).

The other way we could go, is to agree with the article that infanticide is bad, but not primarily because it is distressing for parents and others, but because of a belief in the sanctity of human life (wherever you get that from). And if you believe that, then abortion is bad for the same reason infanticide is bad – it’s killing a human being. There can be times when that is justified (saving the mother’s life and perhaps some other cases), but ultimately a human life deserves legal protection.

The next point to make is that the article fundamentally presents a false dichotomy. Either we allow abortion, or we have to live with infanticide.

But as the article rightly points out, Christianity changed our attitude to infanticide. We came to recognise infanticide as bad, and it stopped happening (as much as before). Early Christians rescued children that were exposed. Society became more compassionate. We found ways to help those who struggled to look after their children. We took on the burden of looking after the unwanted, as continues today with adoption agencies.

So, it turns out we do not simply have to live with evil things! We can change attitudes towards it, and change society.

In summary, you have to choose:

Abortion and infanticide are the same thing (as the article explicitly points out), they are the same morally, and we should legalise both. We prefer abortion because it is less distressing (to us) and often safer for mothers. But if mothers are safer/less distressed by infanticide, that should be both permitted and encouraged.

Also, the right response to the poor and vulnerable, who are more tempted than others to kill their children, is to encourage them to do so with cheap, legal options. This will result in disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities/poor people being killed by abortion (which is no surprise, given the origins of agencies like Planned Parenthood).
Abortion and infanticide are the same thing, and we should legislate against them in basically the same way. (The main difference is that while pregnancy is ongoing, the unborn child can affect the life/health of the mother in some ways that it can’t after birth, and that changes some things).

The right response to those are struggling to provide for their children is that the whole of society, in some way, helps them bear that burden, and provides them with the support needed to look after their families, or the option of adoption if that fails.

Which one is it? I’d love to hear your answer Katharine!

Updates

Things I could have added but didn’t have time to this afternoon:

The attitude of compassion that drove the early Christians should also characterise society’s behaviour now. Also, the one area that the article linked above can really help us is pointing out that, very often, those seeking abortions are people in desperate circumstances who are pushed into it by great physical/financial need, and possibly social pressure as well.

So, part of society compassionately bearing the burden is to ensure free medical health care for mothers and their children, at the very least (as it is here in the UK). Health systems where having an abortion costs $750 but giving birth costs about $15,000 sound like something concocted by Satan himself.

Legal implications should also reflect these truths. Making abortion illegal doesn’t mean you have to criminalise women who seek or have abortions, you could limit that to those who do the abortions. There should be recognition that in most cases, when women seek abortions or expose their children, it is usually more of a societal rather than individual failure.

For me, as well as for saving the mother’s life, I would make an exception in the case of rape, at least on the legal level. Laws are very important, but not everything you think is wrong will be best addressed by laws.

The technological case against Bitcoin and blockchain

2022-03-05T19:44:01Z

Continuing from my first post on the Christian case against Bitcoin and blockchain, this post looks at the technology claim – the idea that Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptoassets represent an amazing “technological revolution” that we should be making the most of.

This post got out of hand, despite cutting tons of material! But, in my defence:

It’s shorter than Dan Olson’s 2 hour marathon, Line Goes Up (very highly recommended).
It has a contents table, so you can skip to the bits that interest you.
It has GIFs. A few.

The problem with technology

Crypto-mania is not really about technology. If you want to understand what is going on, you need to understand it at the level of economics, culture and human nature, which I touched on more in my first post, and Dan Olson’s video is excellent in that regard.

The technology is just a source of “magic”. In other places and times, the witch doctor, or the priest speaking in Latin, provided the magic that you couldn’t speak against. In our day, it is the high priests of science and technology [1]. But they can be much more convincing than voodoo, because science and technology actually work.

And computer technology can appear quite magical. Modern hardware seems nearly miraculous, and there have been amazing software breakthroughs, especially in the area of cryptography – such as public key cryptography and Diffie-Helman key exchange — that are not only mathematical gems, but amazingly useful too.

And no-one wants to be Paul Krugman in 1998:

So, this post is an attempt to equip those who aren’t computer experts with enough knowledge to engage with the main technological claims of blockchains, and how they measure up in reality. I won’t go into mathematical detail, and I will obviously simplify in some cases, but try not to make any simplifications that mislead.

The argument from authority

If you want, we can use an argument from authority as a shortcut to all of this. Below is a very small selection from the very many competent and diverse software experts, across business, academia and Open Source/Free Software sectors, who will tell you that blockchain technologies are not helpful to the world:

Bruce Schneier is the first name that comes to my mind if I wanted an authority on cryptography and security. He has written a very clear article pointing out the fundamental flaws in blockchain as a “trustless” technology – in summary:

Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless.

And more recently:

It is insane to me that cryptocurrencies are still a thing.
Tim Bray is a famous software developer, employed by big name companies and involved in important specifications. He is a crypto-non-believer.
Stephen Diehl is a very talented software developer that I know especially for his helpful writing about Haskell and related subjects. In recent years he’s become famous for his ethical stance against abuses by tech companies, and especially Bitcoin etc. He has a helpful summary of his arguments (shorter than this post) – The Case Against Crypto.
Miguel de Icaza is best known for a very impressive list of contributions to the Free Software/Open Source world. He is also a firm crypto-sceptic.
Jamie Zawinski or jwz is an internet legend, best known for his contributions to Netscape Navigator and for being one of the founders of Mozilla. He does not have a very high opinion of cryptoassets or their promoters (language warning).
The Register is a venerable, no-nonsense UK news site for techies, by techies (as opposed to the large number of sites that are for techno-enthusiasts who don’t really understand the tech, written by columnists who also don’t really understand the tech). It has a great piece on how blockchain has failed and needs to be retired.
Guido van Rossum is the author of the Python programming language, which is currently probably the world’s most popular programming language. He recently tweeted:

Let web3 die in a flaming ball of fire.

I selected the above from a much larger list because:

They are all actual technologists who write software and understand software systems.
They had established reputations as such before this whole crypto stuff started, from a wide range of backgrounds, and I knew them as first as software people, not as crypto-sceptics. This is important to me as I try to avoid the “echo chamber” effect in the people I listen to.

Since debate on this subject took off, the majority of my Twitter feed, which has a lot of established software developers in it, has come down pretty firmly on the crypto-sceptic side. In fact, mocking Bitcoin/Ethereum/NFTs/web3 and their fans has become a bit of a pastime. I’ve been trying really hard not to mock or insult people, but when it comes to the technology, sometimes it’s the only way to stay sane…

Here’s a bunch more very well qualified techies who’ve been outspoken against cryptoassets:

David S H Rosenthal, a very distinguished computer scientist who has worked on major projects at big tech companies like Sun, Nvidia, Oracle, and has co-authored award winning papers on distributed consensus mechanisms. You literally couldn’t ask for a more qualified expert. See his recent EE380 talk and other posts on his blog.
Molly White, experienced software developer and Wikipedia editor – see her blockchain collection and sarcastic news site, “Web3 Is Going Just Great”.
Nicholas Weaver, PhD in Computer Science and lecturer at Berkeley. He is an expert in this field, having followed it academically since 2013 – see his tweets, his lecture Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains – Burn it with fire!, and his lecture Computer Security 161 Cryptocurrency Lecture where he concludes:

There is no value in this space. None. Zero. Zilch. Zippo.
Grady Booch, internationally recognised software engineer – see his tweets.
Jeff Atwood, another very famous and influential software developer – see his tweets.
Tantek Çelik, web developer, who is famous to me for the workarounds he developed when we were all languishing under the misery of Internet Explorer 5 and 6 – see his tweets.
Hillel Wayne is a software consultant, and the author of an excellent blog and several books, with a focus on a branch of computer science known as Formal methods.
James Mickens, computer scientist and professor at Harvard - see his lecture Blockchains Are a Bad Idea.

There are many others, and many more critiques you can read. I was very glad to be able to join several of the above names, along with thousands of others software developers, as a signatory on a letter to US Congress about this.

About me

Finally, I’m going to add myself to this list: I’m a software professional who started programming as a child. I taught myself BASIC and machine code in my early teens, before I even knew the internet existed. Since then I’ve accumulated more than 20 years professional software development experience, in a large range of programming languages and business sectors.

I’ve also had pretty deep involvement with the Open Source world, most notably Django, which is probably the most popular web framework for Python, used in a large number of websites today. When I was more active on that project, I made large contributions to its security, which requires a very good understanding of how the web works, along with some of the fundamentals of cryptography.

I now bill myself primarily as a full-stack web developer – that means I make web sites from start to finish, and I take pride in providing efficient, well-engineered solutions to real needs. I mention all of this to establish:

I know how the web and the internet work, with a reasonable understanding of cryptography, and I’m perfectly capable of understanding Bitcoin at the technical level.
I am not a technophobe, or anything like it. As a web developer, I’m constantly having to assess and learn new technologies.
I’ve been around long enough to know that many things go round in circles, not every new thing lasts, and sometimes we go backwards. There are plenty of new technologies that turn out to be duds.

I can’t claim technologists are 100% anti-crypto of course – this is a very divisive topic in the tech world. But the narrative that says all or most technologically literate people see this as a great revolution is completely false.

But if you’ve read this far, you might want an actual analysis rather than the shortcut. Here goes…

Evaluating technology

How do you evaluate a piece of technology? In the many Open Source projects and closed source private projects I’m involved in, when a change or addition is proposed, the questions you ask are:

What problem does this try to solve?
Does it actually solve it?
What costs does it bring with it?

So let’s look at those questions regarding Bitcoin, Ethereum etc.

What problem does Bitcoin solve?

We can’t do better than to refer to the original Bitcoin whitepaper, which describes a “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.

The fundamental problem Bitcoin claims to solve is the ability to have “peer-to-peer” electronic money transfers that do not go through a financial institution, in a similar way to how cash works peer-to-peer, without needing a trusted third party to be involved. In the whitepaper, the primary motivations for this are:

to avoid the need to trust intermediaries,
to reduce transaction costs by reducing costs associated with mediation (banks have to be ready to sort out cases of fraud),
to deal with fraud caused by reversible transactions.

So, in evaluating Bitcoin, we should primarily be comparing it to other payment systems – physical cash and electronic payments – and banking systems.

Cash is a convenient form of payment that takes seconds to complete, is highly reliable, and has a very high degree of privacy. It suffers from the inconvenience and insecurity of having to carry cash around with you, and so is increasingly being replaced by electronic transfers. These work extremely well:

In a shop, I can pay for goods electronically with a PIN or just a swipe, taking a few seconds to complete a transaction, using a bank debit card or a credit card.
Between friends, I can do instant (or almost instant), free bank transfers 24/7 for small to fairly large amounts, and with other slower systems for very large amounts. When I lived in Turkey, I had the same – though inter-bank transfers cost a few pennies – and as far as I can tell most countries have something similar right now.

In countries that are lagging in this regard (hello USA!), there are other solutions like Venmo that apparently work pretty well.
This convenience brings some security issues, but modern banking has tons of great features for handling fraudulent activity – for example:

Got a call this morning about unusual credit card charges. Within ten minutes had the card cancelled, all the ongoing fraudulent charges blocked, all the older fraudulent charges disputed, and a new card in the mail.

There is some significant room for improvement:

You need a bank account to do these electronic transfers.
Banks are capable of blocking financial activity, which can be bad if it is legitimate and you are being persecuted in some way.
There is the risk of banks going bust.
Banks, or other third parties that we route payment through, have a pretty clear idea of how we are spending money.

Banks are not perfect, but they are fairly well regulated, and of all the financial worries I have, banks stealing or losing my money is the least of them. Even if they go bust I have a government protection guarantee of £85,000 in the UK. In evaluating cryptoassets, we need to see how much they can actually improve things, if at all.

How the blockchain solution works

The innovation that permissionless blockchains [2] have brought is an ingenious consensus algorithm based on “proof of work”. Let’s unpack that briefly (or, just skip this bit, I won’t tell anyone).

Consensus protocols are mechanisms for allowing a group of cooperating computers (usually called nodes) to act as a single database and store data safely and consistently even if:

there is no fixed leader among the nodes
any of the nodes may become faulty or unavailable at any time.

Designing protocols to do this is really challenging, but there are good options today, all with some limitations.

Bitcoin goes one step further, allowing consensus to be achieved under even more challenging circumstances, including when there are any number of unknown nodes who may join in, and they may all be actively trying to cheat each other.

Proof of work was a pre-existing concept. It is based on the fact that some computations require a lot of work to do, but are easy to verify once done. The output of such computations can be used as proof that you’ve spent computational resources (i.e. electricity), and therefore the money it requires.

Bitcoin uses “proof of work” in a novel way as a consensus protocol by making cheating too expensive. It essentially requires computers to make many, many guesses for the next “right” number that would allow a proposed new transaction to be added to the end of a list. The result is that a distributed set of nodes who don’t trust each other can achieve agreement on a growing chain of records, called blocks, that list transactions, i.e. transfers of Bitcoin. The protocol does this without requiring a central trusted authority (like a government), or a trusted intermediary (like a bank), and without allowing bad actors to transfer the same money to more than one person (a problem known as “double spending”).

The electricity required for this deliberately inefficient process has to be paid for, of course, so why would anyone join in? Bitcoin solves this as follows:

the protocol rewards any participant that correctly adds a block to the chain with some newly created Bitcoin.
in the real world, we need a sufficient number of people to believe this Bitcoin is worth something, rather than merely being a made up token on a computer. Otherwise “miners” have spent a lot of electricity for nothing.

Does this solution actually work?

Most people agree that the fundamental mechanics of blockchains as a consensus protocol, as described in the Bitcoin whitepaper, do actually work.

However, the solution has immense weaknesses and costs.

Problems and costs

Peer-to-peer?

While technically the shape of Bitcoin network can be described as “peer-to-peer” in terms of the participating computers, from the perspective of users making payments it is not.

Normally, peer-to-peer internet protocols only require the involvement of the two peers to succeed [3]. In the real world, cash is a genuine peer-to-peer protocol – no-one else needs to be involved at all for a cash transaction to work.

Bitcoin is very different. If I have some Bitcoin, and want to transfer it to you, and we are both sitting in the same room and have all the computer and network hardware we like, it is still impossible for me to transfer ownership to you without an internet connection. We have to connect to the Bitcoin network, add our transaction to the public, shared list of all transactions, and wait for confirmation. So, from the perspective of a user wanting to make a payment, it’s better to think of Bitcoin as a large, distributed but centralised system rather than a decentralised one.

This is in contrast to electronic transfers in traditional banking. If you and I have the same bank, we only need to talk to our bank in order to transfer money between us, and no outside network needs to be involved. If we have different banks, they need to be able to talk to each other, but that is all.

There is no shared ledger of transactions that needs to be communicated between banks and kept consistent, and this is a crucial advantage. This makes Bitcoin, at its theoretical best, more centralised and less peer-to-peer than traditional banking (at least in theory [4]).

Security

There are significant ways cryptocoins could fail disastrously. The first of these is “network partition” events.

The question is this: what happens when part of the network becomes cut off from the rest? For example, one country might become disconnected, or the whole of the Americas might become disconnected from Europe, Asia and Africa.

With the modern internet, it’s most likely that this would be the result of some kind of cyber-attack, but it could also happen accidentally.

Now, some might suggest that such a partition is far-fetched. But:

An attack that partitioned the Bitcoin network, without having to partition the entire internet, would be surprisingly easy to pull off.
If you are designing a new global banking system, or even just a national currency, this is exactly the kind of situation you need to consider.

What happens if there is a major natural disaster, like a massive earthquake, or a war, or a cyber-war? (I wrote these words weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but even before that reminder of the fragility of peace, you would have to be extremely foolish to ignore the possibility of war).

The internet itself was designed to cope with exactly this kind of problem. Bitcoin, however, cannot cope with major network partitions. In summary, this is what would happen:

Both sides of the Bitcoin network would carry on working (although if there was an unequal divide, one side might be slowed so much that it became unusable). Let’s imagine this carried on for a few days or weeks before connections were properly restored. At this point we would have two divergent “branches” of the blockchain, which is not allowed. By design, there is no way to merge the branches, and Bitcoin will simply pick whichever of the two branches happens to be the longest. For the unlucky half, all transactions that happened during those days or weeks of network partition would be erased.

In other words, utter mayhem.

Could we develop a satisfactory fix to this problem? No – this is an instance of the very well studied CAP theorem. The alternatives to just having weeks of data erased are also quite fun (in the sense of, “isn’t it fun to imagine how the world is going to end?”):

You try to avoid the situation by simply halting all trade and financial transactions until sufficient connectivity is restored (or this could be enforced by the protocol itself).
Instead of joining the two networks back together, you irreconcilably split the cryptocoin into two different coins.

Traditional banking doesn’t suffer from this problem. We’d certainly have problems if the internet suffered large partitions, especially because of increasing centralisation and reliance on a few big providers. But we could work around them, because the fundamental protocols of both the internet and banking are much better decentralised and much more robust. A bank transfer doesn’t need the majority of the internet to be connected – you just need the two banks to be able to talk to each other. You wouldn’t need anything to be erased when connections are restored. No doubt there would disputes in some cases, but, critically, disputing individual transactions doesn’t require invalidating the entire chain of everyone else’s transactions.

There are other serious ways that cryptocoins can or have failed:

Centralisation that puts the network under the control of an insufficient number of independent entities to ensure trustworthiness.

The idea of decentralisation is that there are a large number of independent entities that collectively run the network, making it very difficult to corrupt. While in theory the “mining” process that validates transactions is decentralised, there is actually an extremely high degree of centralisation in many popular cryptoassets.

As David Rosenthal writes:

Centralized systems have a single locus of control. Subvert it, and the system is at your mercy. It only took six years for Bitcoin to fail Nakamto's goal of decentralization, with one mining pool controlling more than half the mining power. In the seven years since no more than five pools have always controlled a majority of the mining power.

In other words, Bitcoin has already failed in this regard, and as Rosenthal explains, this is due to a fundamental flaw in the protocol: “proof of work” provides financial motivation for centralisation, because it makes more sense for miners to club together and pool resources to improve their lottery chances.

David Gerard explains the same thing – decentralisation of Bitcoin is a myth.

A high degree of centralisation can lead to problems such as “51% attacks”, which allow the same cryptocoins to be spent more than once. These have already happened multiple times to other cryptoassets, but not to Bitcoin’s blockchain at the time of writing.
“Hard forks” – another way of splitting a cryptocoin in two. Because there is no-one in charge, there is nothing to stop a group of participants deciding to erase a whole section of the blockchain and declaring their new chain to be the “true” one. In general it’s not easy to do, but it happened to Ethereum in 2016, and the fork “won”, because it was backed by influential people (the founders of Ethereum) who considered that they had been “cheated” – even though the cheater was technically the one playing by the rules.

Interlude 1: Assessment so far

The issues highlighted above are, by themselves, enough to ensure that Bitcoin and all similar cryptocoins are not even close to being viable currencies for any sensible nation state, and never will be. They are entirely unfit for purpose due to needing a global, well-connected internet in order to do local transactions securely. It has also been demonstrated both in theory and in practice that they cannot give us even the advantages they promise, like decentralisation.

Could they perhaps serve as some kind of potential “auxiliary” money system? Well, it kind of defeats the point of having a currency to have more than one, and there are a bunch more costs and disadvantages…

Ledger technology

The Bitcoin blockchain is essentially a public ledger of transactions. As such we can compare it to other systems that maintain ledgers of transactions. As well as security, mentioned above, another axis of comparison is efficiency.

The “proof of work” method for consensus makes Bitcoin astonishingly inefficient. In addition, the self-adjusting nature of the protocol and economic factors mean that the higher the dollar value of Bitcoin, the more electricity it will use.

The result is that at the time of writing, a single Bitcoin transaction requires approximately 1 million times more electricity than a Visa transaction, or at least several hundred thousand times. (Source 1, source 2).

Source - digiconomist

Let’s pause to think what a ridiculous factor that is. Imagine a new vehicle, being seriously proposed, that used 1 million times more fuel than a typical car: a full tank of fuel would move it a majestic 50 cm from its parking spot.

In response, Bitcoin proponents would prefer to compare total Bitcoin energy consumption, which now probably equals that of the whole of Finland, with the entire traditional banking system. That’s ridiculous however – the global banking system actually provides global banking services – including physical cash, instant electronic payments of many kinds, loans etc. to a high proportion of the world’s population. Bitcoin, on the other hand, provides banking services to virtually no-one (relatively speaking), and, in addition, still relies on the global banking services because you can’t actually use Bitcoin to pay for anything.

If you care about climate change or looking after the planet, which I believe you should, then this should weigh as a very important consideration. Or even if you don’t, you should still care about waste, and the resources that will necessarily be diverted away from useful things.

One of the original claimed motivations for Bitcoin was “reducing transaction costs”, which is looking quite ridiculous. Even if, for some cryptoassets, transaction fees paid by the end user are low or zero, the negative externalities here are absurdly high.

Money technology

New currency required

For this system to work, the protocol has to be able to reward “miners”, and without relying on any other financial institution. This means that it has to create a new currency – Bitcoin or Dogecoin or one of many others. Every different blockchain requires its own currency. This is a pretty awful disadvantage, because the whole point of a currency is that you only want one. And this problem leads to a bunch more.

Money creation mechanism

In times of the gold standard, to have more money in the economy you had to physically dig gold ore out of the ground and refine it etc. This is horribly expensive, and limits the supply of money in the economy, contributing to economic depression.

Due to economic needs, we moved away from that to fiat currencies, where banks are able to create money on demand, just by opening a loan account and putting some entries in a database – a process which is almost free (apart from the time and expertise of the person who approves the loan, which is one of the services that justifies banking as an industry).

Blockchain, however, would be a massive downgrade to this – you have to use huge amounts of energy to “mine” a Bitcoin, like with gold. Except it is much worse than before: gold at least has a number of important applications, like jewellery and electronics, due to its remarkable physical and chemical properties, but Bitcoin calculations have no other value.

Fixed money supply

Bitcoin is designed such that eventually no more coins will be produced. This was a deliberate choice by the inventors because they don’t understand money, and it is a fatal flaw. As Frances Coppola writes:

As it stands, Bitcoin is unsuitable as a main medium of exchange. It simply does not have the capacity or the structural features required to support significant economic activity.

Payment technology

The global Bitcoin network, despite its astonishing electricity usage, is capable of doing at most 7 transactions per second. It’s difficult to convey just how laughably small that figure is given the size of the network and the energy it uses. People who work at big tech companies are used to designing computer systems that scale to millions of transactions per second as a minimum.

At Bitcoin’s pathetic rate, given 7 billion people on the planet, your personal equal share amounts to 2 (two) Bitcoin transactions in your entire life. What’s worse is that adding computers doesn’t make it go faster, it just adds more electricity consumption. The blockchain has “anti-scaling” features that contradict the normal scaling properties you might have come to expect or assume.

As a contrast, the much smaller Visa networks handle on average 1,700 transactions per second, with a claimed capacity of 24,000/s.

If you use Bitcoin to pay for something, you then have to wait for confirmation. This will take about 10 minutes, but it could be far more. This is pretty terrible in comparison to the 2 second swipe you need at a supermarket checkout.

We then have to point out that most places simply do not accept Bitcoin, which is because the exchange rate to fiat currencies is far too volatile — Bitcoin is a terrible “store of value”, which is one of the most important features of money.

Then there are fees. Ethereum, in addition to ridiculous power usage, also has crazy high transaction fees due to the inefficiency built into the network. For Ethereum, the so called “gas” fees for a single transaction are hovering around 30 USD at the time of writing, but they can swing to thousands of dollars (!).

Bitcoin also used to be very bad in terms of network fees, but has improved a lot. However, since Bitcoin is not in use as a currency anywhere, you’ll always get hit double with currency conversion costs, in contrast to other international money transfer systems that work with local currencies.

At this point, we have to abandon the idea that Bitcoin and Ethereum really qualify as payment technologies at all, apart from some niche cases that we’ll cover later.

Privacy and anonymity

A genuinely peer-to-peer payment system could, at least in theory, have a great story in terms of privacy, like physical cash. In place of that, and in place of the (limited) privacy your bank account can provide you, Bitcoin has a public, shared database of all transactions, which is obviously a massive downgrade.

Now, blockchains are in theory anonymous, in that human names don’t appear in them. Instead, you are represented by your public keys. However, if anyone ever learns who owns a key, your anonymity disappears, and it is highly likely that, over time, connections between keys and people will emerge.

If you are willing to put extra work in and bounce money around, you may be able to achieve a reasonable level of anonymity using Bitcoin, but for most people with “nothing to hide”, there will be no motivation to do that. For these reasons it is now widely accepted that Bitcoin offers very poor privacy (although some other cryptocoins are much better).

Irreversibility

It is one of the main features of Bitcoin that, in contrast to traditional banking, transactions are irreversible – coins can only be moved with the permission of the owner. According to the whitepaper, this is one of the primary motivations for Bitcoin, due to its ability to stop buyers committing fraud — such as when a buyer pays and receives goods, but then is able to do a chargeback on their credit card, fraudulently claiming they didn’t get the goods.

Attempts by Bitcoin to prevent this seem to miss the point: reversibility in traditional banking is a deliberate feature, and one that comes from laws, not an accidental bug that needs to be fixed by technical means.

In the Bitcoin system, the advantage that irreversibility provides is at least equalled by the downside of making it much harder, or impossible, to counter fraud by sellers, and other people like hackers.

Let’s consider the cases: I order some goods on internet. If I pay upfront, there is every possibility that the seller will take my irreversible payment and never send me the goods. So I refuse to do that, and instead we do payment at the door – the delivery driver doesn’t finally hand over the goods until I confirm the payment. This is already pretty inefficient, especially if they have to wait 10+ minutes for confirmation on the network. However, when I get inside, I discover that the box is empty, or missing something vital. Maybe I discover it a week later, but there is now nothing I can do.

The balance has been tipped, but much too far – consumer protections are out of the window. What we want is for reversibility to be technically possible, but controlled by appropriate laws that can be reviewed and changed as needed.

Irreversibility is by far the most impressive feature of blockchain, but it is a feature you absolutely don’t want.

In reality, however, local laws would probably still apply, so you would still have legal methods to pursue a refund, as long as you lived in the same country. They would just be more inefficient. All this shows a more general point: if you can work “outside” the virtual system (by virtue of human beings having physical bodies that have to live in a geographical place with laws), then the guarantees you can make within the system quickly become pointless.

Also, irreversibility is basically incompatible with the way that the rest of banking works, giving further opportunities for fraud when people forget this — including clever people like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniac — and adds major hurdles if you want to buy and then immediately use cryptocoins, unless you buy in cash.

Banking technology

Let’s explore the options:

Be your own bank

The major innovation that Bitcoin claims is that it does away with the need for banks. Instead, you can be your own bank. This is possible because of the way that Bitcoin works effectively as something close to, but not quite, “digital cash”.

We have to explain that for a second, because a wrong mental model will lead to many wrong conclusions – and could leave you wide open to losing all your digital coins if you have any.

Bitcoin builds on public key cryptography, which is an extremely useful technology based on mathematically connected pairs of large numbers. One number in each pair is called a “public key”, the other the “private key”. The public key, as the name suggests, can safely be shared with everyone. It can then be used by other people to test the authenticity of messages generated with the corresponding private key, which must always be kept secret by the owner. The public key can also be used for sending encrypted messages that only the private key owner can read.

In Bitcoin, public keys function as “addresses” to which you can send money — like a bank account number. The Bitcoin protocol uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that only the owner of an address can transfer money away from that address.

In this system, knowing the private keys is of critical importance:

with those keys, you can move your cryptocoins around and spend them.
without those keys, you cannot do anything.

So you need to store them safely! And this leads to the concept of a “digital wallet”. Technically it is the blockchain that stores the record of how much Bitcoin you have, and your wallet stores just the keys. But those keys are everything, so the metaphor of a “wallet” containing “digital cash” is a helpful one.

Your “digital wallet” could be:

on your computer or smart phone,
in a specialised hardware device, called a hardware digital wallet. These are popular especially because of the threat of your computer being hacked, and your software wallet compromised.

So, if you lose your digital wallet, your money is gone forever. If your wallet is stolen, your money is gone. If your hardware breaks – like from water damage — your money is gone. If the computer storing your software wallet is hacked, your money is gone.

Due to its “cash-like” nature, cryptocoin transfers are also irreversible. There is no bank who can step in and grant you a refund.

The metaphor of a wallet breaks down a bit, because, unlike cash, it is, or can be, very easy to copy a wallet. While hardware digital wallets are often designed to make it hard to export keys or make copies, software wallets will allow you to make backups, which is good for recovery – but also opens up more opportunities for theft. For example, you might be vulnerable to theft by an app on your computer.

And if someone has an unencrypted copy of your keys, they can use the contents without your permission, or even knowledge – until you check and find that your wallet is empty. This makes it work very differently from a physical cash wallet.

Most if not all digital wallets will use strong password-protected encryption to stop other people getting access. This is a mixed blessing: unlike the password to your online banking, the passwords here are not mere access passwords that can easily be reset. Rather, they are encryption keys, which means they are used to scramble your data while it isn’t in use. If you forget the password, the data remains scrambled forever. It is mathematically impossible to reverse the scrambling without your password, meaning your money is gone.

Encryption also doesn’t really protect you from many theft scenarios. If someone steals your hardware digital wallet, they may not be able to access the contents, but that is small comfort because you can’t either. And if they ask for the passphrase while pointing a gun at your head, or your child’s, are you going to refuse?

I’m labouring all this to point out that when you are your own bank, you become responsible for looking after all your money, and you have to know all this stuff. It’s like storing your life savings in cash under your bed, but in some ways worse – a digital wallet is more portable for a thief, can be easier to access remotely depending on how it is stored, and is also much easier to accidentally destroy or lose.

I agree with Hobbes on this one.

Oh, and by the way – unlike with physical cash in a suitcase, being your own crypto bank will not protect you from a “run on the bank”. The equivalent in the crypto world, in which lots of people rush to convert their virtual money (Bitcoin/Ether/Tether etc) into real money (dollars etc) would cause a massive crash in the price. There is nothing like sufficient liquidity in the system, so the vast majority of people would lose almost everything. You’d still have your Bitcoins, of course, but they would be worthless.

Use an exchange

So you’ve decided, wisely, that securing your home and your computers, both physically and digitally, to the point where they could function as a bank is a terrible idea.

Now, logically, you should have rejected cryptocoins completely, since they only exist to allow you to do just that. But let’s say that instead, inexplicably, you still want to use them, so you decide to use an exchange. You hand over your private keys (or your coins) to a company, they look after them and use them for you, on your behalf.

This means:

you have to trust this organisation not to run off with or lose your coins.
as an intermediary they can track you.
and they can also block you from using your money.

In other words, back to where we were with banks. Except it’s worse. Much, much worse.

The first problem is that the companies operating in this arena are perfectly aware that cryptocoins are simply a “greater fool” scam, with the fools being their customers. It can be no surprise then, that the biggest names, like Binance and Tether, are regularly embroiled in scandal after scandal, with pump and dump schemes everywhere. In fact it is all a giant scam, and sometimes they even openly admit this.

Further, cryptocoin exchanges are hacked with astonishing frequency and for astonishing amounts of money, with, to date, $2.66 billion stolen since 2012. It seems almost every day there is news revealing incredible incompetence, including that time when a CEO died and took the exchange’s fortune with him to his grave.

Crypto.com, whose “fortune favours the brave” advert likened using their gambling services to being an intrepid explorer, had $30+ million stolen just the other week as I write this. I’ll grant them that you would indeed have to be very “brave” to become one of their customers.

You should also know that, compared to banks, you probably have far less legal claim on your money in the case of an exchange going bankrupt. It doesn’t matter that you technically “own” the crypto you’ve given them, you’ll be last in the queue for getting anything back.

The problems, however, are not just dishonest or incompetent people running the exchanges, or the fact that you don’t have deposit insurance or legal rights. The cash-like nature of cryptocoins, in particular the irreversibility and relative pseudonymity of transactions, make crypto exchanges a massively more tempting target for criminals, and this is only likely to continue and get worse.

We can contrast this to money in a bank account. Your bank doesn’t “store” your money. It has some cash reserves, but none with your name on it. Money is just a record of debt: your current account balance is just the amount of money the bank owes you, which happens to be recorded in a database. If someone deletes the database, your money does not get deleted, because the legal debt remains. There is no equivalent to the “private keys” in cryptocoins that give hackers control over money. If someone succeeded in hacking into a bank and completing a bank transfer of a large amount of money, it would have a very clear destination — another bank and account – which usually makes it pretty easy to trace, reverse and prosecute.

Of course there is still the possibility of hacks on banks being profitable for criminals, but the practical difficulties are much greater than with cryptocoins.

And we haven’t even covered the many more everyday kind of scams played on individual crypto owners. Similar scams exist with normal money, but with cryptocoins they are made all the more likely by the obscurity of the technology, and much harder to recover from due to irreversibility.

So who is this good for?

There are in fact some people who, despite the terrible disadvantages, use cryptocoins as a form of payment or money transfer technology, its original intended use case. This happens:

when they have no other option, or,
when profit margins are very high, so high volatility is of less importance, and irreversibility and (potential) anonymity are of critical importance.

Who does that apply to? Criminals. Cryptocoins are a boon for criminals, especially those operating internationally. It makes a perfect payment mechanism for ransomware, which has seen a dramatic rise in recent years and is also excellent for money laundering. High volatility of the price is a small concern when you are stealing, and the extra steps you need to achieve privacy are no problem for the more competent criminals, who are making the most of “privacy” services like Tornado Cash.

There will probably be some other legitimate, non-criminal users. But it is always true that deregulation sometimes helps some people.

For example, if we completely deregulated the sale of medicines, it would make it easier and cheaper for genuine medicines to reach the people who need them. There would be cases where this might even save lives. But it would also be easier for all the fake and dangerous medicines too, which are of course cheaper to produce, so pretty soon legitimate companies will suffer massively, as well as the general public – which is why we have regulation.

So of course you can find isolated instances where cryptocoins have enabled someone to work around an oppressive regime and get some money they desperately needed. But, given the kind of terrible disadvantages in comparison to normal money, it is inevitable that criminal activity will get by far the biggest boost, which is bad for everyone.

Are there other uses?

Whether you look them from the angle of “money”, “payments” or “banking” technology, cryptocoins have achieved an impressive level of failure. Anyone who is honest has given up on the idea of cryptocoins as money.

Instead, apart from use by criminals, it is in demand only because of a financial speculative bubble based on a negative-sum “greater fool” scheme, which is both immoral and destructive. (That’s not really the subject of this post, so I’ll leave it to other articles, but just to note – the leading crypto-proponents are not just admitting that crypto is a Ponzi, they are bragging about it).

However, at this point, crypto-proponents will claim permissionless blockchains are useful because of “revolutionary” technology that can be built on top of them. Let’s have a look. If we must…

Blockchains for databases

One way to look at blockchains is as immutable, distributed tamper-evident databases. Breaking that down:

immutable means that you cannot change any data on them – you can only add more records (“append only”). This is nothing new.
distributed means there isn’t just a single copy of the data – there are many redundant copies. This is also nothing new.
tamper-evident means you can tell if someone has tried to change data later. There are other tamper-evident databases, but blockchains are bringing something new here in terms of operating in an environment where we don’t trust anyone.

Described like this, it does sound like something that could have some interesting real world applications.

Unfortunately, in the 12 years since it has been invented, virtually no real use cases have turned up, and certainly nothing that would come close to justifying the astonishing inefficiency of the technology. It is the amazing solution for almost nothing.

The first huge problem is this:

You may be able to store information in a tamper-evident way, but how are you going to ensure the information is actually true?

This is a fatal flaw in almost all attempts to use blockchains for anything. As Calvin put it, “reality continues to ruin my life”.

For example, “Verisart” is a blockchain company who will record authorship of artwork on the blockchain. It wasn’t long before a prankster called Terence Eden got himself recorded, immutably and eternally, as the painter of the Mona Lisa. [5]

The next issue is that if there is a person we can trust to not lie about the data in the first place, there are massively more efficient systems for recording that information. We can just use a database, and keep redundant copies with some auditing functionality. In many cases we could additionally use well-established, efficient cryptographic techniques like public key certificates – the same system your web browser uses to check the authenticity of websites.

The reality is that the only kind of truth-claims that blockchains are suitable for managing are about the cryptocoin associated with the blockchain – Bitcoin for the Bitcoin blockchain, Ether for the Ethereum blockchain etc. – and that is only because those blockchains are by definition the source of truth for that cryptocoin.

Note also that you can’t just remove the cryptocoin and keep the blockchain technology – a permissionless blockchain requires a speculative cryptocoin to power it, otherwise no-one will ever pay for it, as David Rosenthal explains:

Because miners' opex and capex costs cannot be paid in the blockchain's cryptocurrency, exchanges are required to enable the rewards for mining to be converted into fiat currency to pay these costs. Someone needs to be on the other side of these sell orders. The only reason to be on the buy side of these orders is the belief that “number go up”. Thus the exchanges need to attract speculators in order to perform their function.

Thus a permissionless blockchain requires a cryptocurrency to function, and this cryptocurrency requires speculation to function.

Smart contracts

The Ethereum blockchain, compared to Bitcoin, adds the ability for the whole network to run custom code, known as a smart contract, which can be used for moving coins around.

This is a potentially interesting feature, but with massive flaws.

The entire premise of the smart contract is that you don’t have to trust a person you are entering into agreement with, but you instead read the code of the smart contract, and then trust an independent, distributed machine to execute the code exactly as written, because it cannot do anything else.

So, all we have to do now is create a programming language where the code is perfectly readable by ordinary people, and cannot easily harbour accidental bugs, or deliberate hacks.

If we had anything close to that, every software developer in the world would be out of a job. We’ve been trying to design programming languages like that for decades, and it’s impossible.

Oh, and in addition, with smart contracts, you don’t get to try out your code in a real environment and fix it if someone finds a bug. If they find a bug – all the cryptocoins you sent to that contract will probably be gone (depending on the exact nature of the bug). You’ve got to get it right first time, because of irreversibility.

Experienced computer programmers everywhere:

The next flaw is that for smart contracts to be useful, they have to interact with the real world, and get truthful data into them. However, as already discussed, there are no trusted “inputs” to blockchains. They can only trust the record of their own coins. This massively limits the usefulness of such systems. Everyone trying to build anything useful seems to forget The Inevitability of Trusted Third Parties which renders the entire endeavour pointless or worse.

So much for the theory. In practice, how is it working?

The language Ethereum uses is called Solidity, which presumably is ironic, because it is a terribly badly designed language. As a simple example, consider a case where we have a and b representing integers. If you know normal algebra, and you saw an expression like a + b, you might expect that this would equal the sum of a and b.

In Solidity, a + b sometimes equals a plus b. But sometimes it does not! Isn’t that fun?

Is this a big deal in practice?

In 2016, the creators of Ethereum themselves wrote a smart contract for “The DAO”. A bug allowed an attacker to drain so much money that they “forked” the entire Ethereum network to get it back. This is basically a “reset the database to yesterday and declare our version to be the winner” undo operation.

(If you’ve been paying attention – yes, that negates the entire promise of blockchains being immutable, and it being impossible to get around smart contracts. It turns out that if you pretty much own the whole system, which the Ethereum creators do, or at least did, you don’t have to obey the rules.)
Last week at the time of writing, Qubit Finance begged hackers to return $80 million extracted from a buggy smart contract.
A few days ago, more than $320 million was lost in a smart-contract hack involving a bridge between Ethereum and Solana.
Go to web3isgoinggreat and search for “smart contract” and you’ll find tons more. Ethereum’s smart contracts are full of holes.

Could you fix this by spending enough money on finding a programmer you could trust to write or check smart contracts? You won’t find such a person:

It’s obvious that the only quadrant you should be hiring from is the top-right “experienced, honest” group. But these people cannot be hired, because they know they can’t do it reliably, and they will admit that.

You will definitely attract lots of people from the “experienced, dishonest” quadrant, however:

People who are quite happy to take the money you throw at them and say “sure, I can build a reliable smart contract”.
People who will write “accidental” bugs that allow “someone” to steal all your money outright (but deniably, of course, due to the anonymity of blockchains, and the difficulty of writing correct code).

NFTs

NFTs are like someone invented a way to make money out of people buying digital art, except they forgot the “buying digital art” bit.

I knew I forgot something!

They are based on the idea of recording “ownership” on a blockchain, normally the Ethereum blockchain. Let’s do this one as a Q&A:

When I buy an NFT, have I bought exclusive legal rights to the art? No, they remain with the artist.
But I bought legal rights to at least use the art, right? No. In some agreements you might have various additional rights to use it, but it’s not a legal part of the NFT.
Does the NFT contain the art in some sense? No, it contains a reference or link to the art, plus a digital signature, recorded on the blockchain. The blockchain is far too expensive to actually store more than a link.
Can I check that the art stored at the link hasn’t been changed? That would have been a really easy thing to add, for anyone with a really basic understanding of cryptographic techniques, but tons of NFTs don’t even do that.
Is the link guaranteed to continue to work, and be censorship-proof, like the blockchain itself? No, it has to be stored somewhere, and you’ve got no guarantee it will continue to be available.
Is there guaranteed to be only one NFT for each bit of art? No, there can be any number of NFTs of the same artwork.
So what have I actually bought? You have effectively bought an entry in a database that has a vague association with a bit of art, with the ability to sell that entry on, in the context of that database, and literally nothing else.
Do I know that the NFT is guaranteed to have come from the artist? No, anyone may “mint” an NFT of anything at anytime. This is what “decentralised” means here – there is no central, trusted authority who can block minting. This is by design and cannot be fixed.
Do I know that that the artist received some of the money I paid? No – first, it could just be a fraud (see previous question); second, the money you pay goes only to the previous owner. Some marketplaces try to pay royalties on every sale, but it’s not part of the NFT protocol so it’s out of their control.
As an artist, do NFTs provide a new way for me to make money out of my art? Yes they do. They also enable everyone else to make money from your art. That’s why many artists are being forced to take their art offline due to a new wave of rampant copyright violations and fraud.
But artists are making quite a lot of money of this, aren’t they? Certainly a few are, which is entirely predictable. On average, they are probably losing money, not accounting for all those who aren’t even playing and just want to stop getting plagiarised.
Is this some kind of joke? Well, a lot of people are laughing all the way to the bank.

Legally speaking, buying an NFT is exactly like buying this piece of paper, which has a link to the first ever Calvin and Hobbes strip:

It’s unique and “non-fungible” – there is no other piece of paper exactly like this one. Is it “genuine”? Well, it’s a real piece of paper if that’s what you mean, and the link works. Otherwise you’ll have to work it out for yourself. But it’s yours for just $1 million!

It is really difficult to describe just how little sense NFTs make. It’s like people trading baseball cards, which is fine, except you realise the traders believe or claim they are actually trading baseball players. Baseball players and baseball cards, however, are at least physical things, whereas an NFT gives you the ability to trade in the fantasy of owning a sequence of bytes, and nothing more.

For what they do, you could provide exactly the same service by switching to a simple centralised database, which would also allow you to regulate it and avoid copyright violations etc. All without any blockchain, and for a tiny fraction of the outrageous and entirely unnecessary costs involved in NFTs.

Even the inventor of NFTs, Anil Dash, has realised they do none of the things they were originally intended to do, but they do create perfect opportunities for money laundering and fraud.

As for the claim that NFTs allow you to create “digital scarcity” – a truly bizarre boast to make – they simply cannot do anything of the kind, outside of the make-believe world of a blockchain. Minting an NFT of some digital art makes literally zero difference to anyone else’s legal right to use that art.

The conclusion is this: whatever the original intention, NFTs currently function as just two things:

a source of unique casino chips that you can gamble with.
a method of making demand for otherwise useless cryptocoins like Ethereum and friends, in order to on-board more people into these “greater fools” schemes that are rapidly running out of new fools.

This means that none of the above deficiencies of NFTs actually matter – and, attempts to fix them are just dissembling – because NFT trading is not about owning art, but gambling in an art-themed casino.

NFTs of everything

Not content with miserably failing at digital art, NFTs now have ambitions to fail at everything else. As an example, one proposed use is for “in-game assets”. The idea is that you buy an NFT of some digital asset, and can then use that asset in a video game.

This has so many flaws I don’t know where to start.

First, this is going to require tons of work for game authors. What’s in it for them?

Then, game authors would effect be honouring someone else’s completely valueless casino chip. Why would they do that?

Then there are copyright and fraud issues. Ownership of an NFT tells a game author precisely nothing about the provenance of a digital asset, and the entire space is absolutely overrun with frauds and scams, such that 80% of NFTs listed on OpenSea are fake or plagiarised. This is kind of obvious – a permissionless blockchain where anyone can write anything is a pointless place to store information about “ownership”. Why should game authors try to wade through this mess which they didn’t make?

So, what do game authors themselves think about this? This is from itch.io, an indie game platform (language warning):

A few have asked about our stance on NFTs:

NFTs are a scam. If you think they are legitimately useful for anything other than the exploitation of creators, financial scams, and the destruction of the planet the we ask that please reevaluate your life choices.

Peace ✌️
— itch.io (@itchio) February 6, 2022

Also f̸̗̎ú̴̩c̷̖͌ḳ̵̀ any company that says they support creators and also endorses NFTs in any way. They only care about their own profit and the opportunity for wealth above anyone else.

Especially given the now easily available discourse concerning the problems of NFTs.
— itch.io (@itchio) February 6, 2022

How can you be so dense? 😢
— itch.io (@itchio) February 6, 2022

Why the anger? Because they understand the tech, and know it’s a scam. Also, I’m guessing they know that the many clueless suckers who have bought NFTs, believing they confer some kind of ownership, will soon be pestering itch.io to honour their worthless casino chips.

Certainly there is a market for buying digital assets that you can use in a video game, but NFTs provide no legal, usable infrastructure that game authors can use. Games are probably one of the few places where artificial scarcity does in fact make sense. But from a technical perspective, it’s an absolute doddle to achieve! Which is why many games already have perfectly functioning economies for such digital assets – under the control of the game authors, which is needed for achieving game balance. With no blockchain.

DAOs

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations are a magical reinvention of traditional organisations, in which smart contracts decide how money gets spent, making it mathematically impossible to be evil in any way, powered by The Blockchain, explicit one-coin-one-vote plutocracy (what could possibly go wrong?), Good Intentions (possibly), Poor Thinking (definitely) and Unicorns. All you need to do is convert your entire existence into a program and encode it into bits so that you can now literally live on the Ethereum blockchain where you can be governed by its rules. Also, you get a free unicorn with every DAO membership, cool!

Sorry, that’s all I can do. There is so much nonsense here that I’m running out of the will to live.

web3

It’s hard to say exactly what web3 is, because it is just a marketing buzzword, and it mostly does not exist. It’s meant to be some kind of re-invention of the web around blockchain technologies.

The narrative spun around it involves “taking back the web” from the big tech giants who unfortunately seem to control it these days, usually involving a revisionist history of where we’ve come from.

But none of it makes any sense. Putting data on blockchains doesn’t give you control over it – if anything it removes control, because now it is there forever, immutable. It gives you ownership in the same way that naming a star with the International Star Registry gives you ownership of a star (that is, not at all). Using smart contracts to control it suffers from all the same problems I already mentioned.

And then there is the cost. Did we talk about the cost and inefficiency of storing your data on blockchains yet? Right…

Prices fluctuate enormously, but at the moment storing 3kb on the Ethereum blockchain will cost you $250 dollars.. That makes it about 10 million times more expensive than a cloud service like Amazon S3 [6]. There are essentially no use cases where the peculiar and weak set of advantages that blockchains give you would make that worth while.

Then there is querying – i.e. reading the data. When I said that blockchain was like a database, I meant only that it can store data – not that it does so in any convenient or efficient form. So, if you want to actually read the data, you’re first going need to import it into a proper database designed for that. Unfortunately, 99.99999% of the data on the blockchain is data you don’t care about, but you’ve got to load it to find what you are interested in.

This is profligate inefficiency, and will only get worse with time, so if you are attempting to build anything “web3” you will probably need to pay for another service to do that for you, increasing costs and complexity, and increasing your reliance on centralised services that could block you. Making this whole thing worse than pointless.

Any real software engineer who looks at the architecture of a web3 application finds it completely ridiculous. It adds an unbelievable amount of complexity and cost, for no actual benefit.

Now, under the name of “web3”, you do sometimes hear other projects mentioned, like IPFS, which are honest attempts to mitigate some of the real problems that the current internet has. I can’t comment on how well they work, but every useful one among these that I’ve seen doesn’t actually need or use permissionless blockchains at all.

Conclusion: web3 is a fraud. It appears that its primary purpose is to try to lend plausibility to the increasingly discredited idea that blockchain provides some useful technological innovation. Or, it’s a ploy to put crypto-lovers in charge so that they, rather than big tech, can be the ones extracting rent. As the Register put it, paraphrasing Douglas Adams:

Web3 is “a myth, a fairy story. It's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to become economists.” ®

Can we fix it?

I know that many Bitcoin proponents will by this point be livid about how unfair I’ve been, itching to point out all the solutions to some of the issues I’ve raised. However, most of their responses can be characterised in this way:

“But we can work around the horrible deficiencies in this technology by not using this technology!”

This is of course true, but entirely irrelevant, and not a good advert for the underlying tech.

It’s also impossible to work out why we should be even trying to fix these things. As James Mickens put it:

If you want to make money better, why not try to just improve money, instead of starting with a disaster and trying to improve the disaster?

As I’ve attempted to look through some of the proposed solutions, I’ve found it like responding to conspiracy theorists – there is no limit to the amount of exhausting nonsense you have to wade through. But anyway, to address some of the major claims that the flaws can be fixed:

Upgradability

There are many theoretical improvements to Bitcoin that could be made. For example, Solana claims thousands of transactions per second, and Monero has much better privacy. Bitcoin has not adopted these – why not?

Putting aside the fact that these improved systems are still hundreds or thousands of times worse than non-blockchain solutions on the very metrics they boast about, we can still ask: why hasn’t everyone “upgraded”?

The answer is found in the fact that:

public, permissionless blockchains are not controlled by anyone, by definition.
they couple together a speculative asset and a ledger technology, because this is the only way to motivate anyone to join in the consensus protocol.

This means no-one can force anyone to upgrade, and they will only do so if it is in their financial interests. So, small bug fixes are fairly easy to coordinate, but fundamental changes that are detrimental to the bottom line of the majority of players are almost impossible.

Instead of upgrading existing cryptoassets, why hasn’t everyone just switched to the “better” blockchains? Because that would involve a huge gamble. If people admitted that their current “investment” was now obsolete, the price would crash. Since we’ve already abandoned the idea that these things have any actual utility, it doesn’t really matter how bad they are at what they do.

Since a cryptoasset’s market value depends only on popularity and hype, there is a religious-level devotion to specific coins, and it needs to be there, so that you can continue to on-board new recruits to make the price of your coin go up.

This means that permissionless, public blockchains are probably the most progress-resistant technology ever invented.

Consider, as a contrast, the UK’s Faster Payments Service. First going live in 2008, it was an upgrade by a factor of 100,000 in terms of transfer speeds compared to the old CHAPS/BACS systems. These days pretty much everyone in the UK can do free, interbank transfers within seconds, up to £1 million, 24/7. In 2021 it handled 3.4 billion transactions, that’s an average of 110 transactions per second, although peak will probably be much higher than that, and scalability will be determined only by demand.

When this upgrade happened, it didn’t require the whole world to change, or even the whole of the UK. We didn’t have to switch to an entirely new currency – that would be crazy, right? This is just a communication protocol, so it only required two banks to use it to be useful. Then eventually everyone got on board. End users like me didn’t even have to know about how any of it works, we just noticed that things got better and faster. Real-world institutions like banks can be slow to change, so things can take decades, but they do get there.

Bitcoin went live a year after FPS, but despite being a brand new technology, defined only by software and without the legacy of having to deal with existing infrastructure, and consuming vastly more resources, still does only at most 7 transactions per second. Meanwhile, due to its perverse economics, energy consumption per transaction has grown hugely.

Coupling the definition of a currency to a specific ledger technology is a truly terrible idea that makes cryptocurrencies not only a huge downgrade, but a downgrade to upgradability itself, which is much worse.

If we want better money technology, the first thing we need to “fix” is the idea that people can just invent their own currency, and award themselves and other early adopters huge amounts of it, due to “innovation” – which might be nothing more than the novelty of a joke name. This approach, shared by all the cryptocoins, is guaranteed to produce terrible results both technologically and economically.

Scalability

One attempt to tackle the scalability of Bitcoin is using a “Lightning Network”. The idea in its simplest terms is that you do lots of transactions “off-chain” (not recorded on the blockchain), then just settle up on the blockchain, but with a lot more complexity.

There is a huge amount of both hype and criticism of this network. But for our purposes:

The original design could not possibly work at the high scale envisaged.
Modified designs are just reproducing things like the Visa/Mastercard networks, where you have a third party that you trust to settle up when direct bank-to-bank payments are difficult for whatever reason. Except more complicated, and therefore less efficient, and the developers don’t appear to realise that they have created a bank to which you have to lend in order to send a payment.
Its Bitcoin bottleneck means it cannot come close to the scaling needs it is supposed to address.
A 2019 analysis shows that the network has to run at a loss to get the low transaction fees it boasts – meaning that it is being artificially propped up.

It still suffers from all the other problems – like you have to pay with Bitcoin (or some other cryptoasset) instead of an actual currency, with all its volatility issues etc. Also, the Bitcoin network itself will still continue to consume the same vast amount of electricity, for no real benefit. So the Lightning Network isn’t a case of improving efficiency by reducing load on an obsolete technology – you get the waste of both systems combined.

Energy use

Many attempts to fix the terrible energy use of Bitcoin miss the point: the inefficiency is deliberate, and necessary for security (if you are relying on “proof of work”). Many coins that boast less power usage can do so only because they are less secure, or because they are less popular.

But let’s look at some specific attempts:

Proof-of-stake

In place of proof of work, “proof of stake” has been suggested, and is already used by some blockchains. It’s technically complicated, but there are huge problems with it:

It is an explicit plutocracy – rule of the wealthy. The people who have the most coins get the most votes to control the network.
The wealthy also get the greatest rewards. “The rich get richer”, i.e. an ever increasing concentration of power and wealth, is an inevitable consequence of the design.
It simply does not have the same security properties as proof of work, and cannot be regarded as a consensus mechanism.
There is a strong economic argument that it can’t reduce energy consumption anyway, it will just make it less obvious.

Ethereum has a plan to switch to proof of stake that’s currently “about eighteen months away, where it’s been since 2014”. This may be an indication either 1) of the upgradability problem described above or 2) that a workable implementation simply cannot be found.

See Rosenthal’s analysis for more information.

Proof-of-something-useful

Another set of attempts to fix proof-of-waste can be grouped together as “proof of something useful”. Examples include SolarCoin, which rewards you for proving that you have generated electricity via solar power, and FoldingCoin which rewards you for providing computational power for the useful task of “protein folding” calculations.

Some of these are ridiculously impractical, and obviously so – for example, in some cases they’ve got no realistic method to prevent fraud. Many of them sacrifice several important qualities of blockchain technology, to the point of being nothing more than a reward points system (but less useful). But all of them miss the point:

We already have a system for rewarding people who are providing valuable things to society – it’s called money! It does not need to be invented, and we don’t want a different currency for every product – that defeats the whole point of having a currency.

I mention these “alt-coins” only to point out that the crypto world is full-to-bursting with things that are either obvious get-rich-quick schemes, or just terrible, pointless ideas that cannot work in the real world. Somehow they are being taken seriously because they are getting on the hype associated with crypto.

Also, many of these more “eco-friendly” alt-coins are used to defend the idea that cryptoassets are not necessarily so bad for the environment, ignoring the fact that they work in completely different ways, if they work at all, and they have no chance of ever replacing the popular cryptocoins, or any real world currency.

“But it’s still early days!”

No, it’s not still early days for crypto.

When sceptics mocked the internet in the early days, the problem they suffered from was a lack of imagination. There was no dispute that the internet really did enable you to send digital information across the world in a fraction of a second. Some people just failed to see why that might be useful. In addition, it was generally people who didn’t understand the technology who made those criticisms.

Permissionless blockchain technology, on the other hand, simply does not achieve the things it claims, and the people who understand it best have pointed that out. It has already failed on many of the aims it set for itself (e.g. decentralisation, as I explain under Security, and reducing transaction costs), and completely failed for its intended purpose. Things built on top of it, like NFTs, do not and can never do the miraculous things claimed for them, and the things they can do, are done better in every way without blockchain.

It’s been more than 12 years for crypto to find a use case. By way of contrast, consider M-PESA, a mobile money company which launched in 2007 in Kenya. It took only 5 years for 70% of Kenyans to sign up for an account, giving them “near instant access to essential financial services such as deposits/savings and P2P money transfers”, when in 2006 only 20% of Kenyans had been formally banked. That’s what successful technology looks like — providing actual services to people who need it, lifting people out of poverty with dramatic effects.

Meanwhile, people today who know nothing about solving real-world problems talk about Bitcoin as “banking for the unbanked” – apparently unaware that this problem, which is not solved by Bitcoin, is being solved by technologies that actually work.

At some point, when technology is having damaging effects in the real world, you have to be willing to reach a conclusion. At some point you’ve got to stop giving the benefit of the doubt and be ready to say this is a Theranos that needs to be shut down.

Conclusion

I’m horribly bored of this subject now, but just to sum up:

Blockchain technology is a train wreck. For its intended purpose, whether we think about it as money, payment or banking technology, it’s beyond useless – an unbelievably inefficient non-solution whose most impressive features are things we don’t want, that also gives us huge downgrades in every aspect that we do care about.

For any other purposes, it appears to be even worse. We can’t say with 100% certainty that a genuine use case will never turn up, but, as The Register put it, “you'd be better off betting on Freddie Mercury being beatified by the Vatican”.

The problems with it are not fixable bugs, they are deep design flaws. The only possible way you could claim this was a technological revolution is by noting that the word “revolution” doesn’t indicate which direction you are going.

Technology is not neutral, and our response to it cannot be neutral. Since permissionless blockchains can only work if they are funded by negative sum financial schemes that are causing massive waste and an increase in many other societal evils, this is not just a poor technical choice I can laugh at, it’s something I have to condemn.

Epilogue

An angel and a demon were watching the goings on at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. The demon was obviously amused.

“What are you smirking at?” asked the angel.

“Oh, I really can’t decide what’s more funny”, replied the demon. “The politicians managing to make these promises with straight faces – it’s a class act, it really is – or the fact that you are bothering to listen to them. Tell me again, why are we even here?”

“You’re wrong about humans,” replied the angel, “and always have been. If they work together, they can turn this climate situation around. You forget – they still have the image of God in them.”

“Not enough left to save them at this stage. They’re doomed.”

“But they’re such inventive creatures too,” added the angel. “What about the printing press, and modern medicine, and people in space? Then there’s nuclear power…”

“Which they used to kill millions!” interrupted the demon.

“…the internet…” the angel continued.

“…yes, full of pornography…”

“Oh do shut up!” snapped the angel. “They’re bound to come up with something to fix this, I’m sure of it.”

“Alright,” said the demon, spotting an opportunity for some fun. “I have a prediction for you. In the place of cutting emissions, the next new technology that will get popular will go in exactly the opposite direction – they will actually invent a new way to waste more fuel. So much so, in fact,” continued the demon, warming to his theme, “that they will manage to undo all the savings they have made so far. In addition, the technology will either be 100% useless to humanity, or worse – it will hurt everyone involved. It will be a case of purely self-inflicted pain that will cause further misery and accelerate them towards ecological breakdown.”

“Oh come on!” replied the angel. “We both know that even at their worst, they have enough basic self-interest to save them from complete insanity. Why on earth would they do that?”

“The usual reasons. Greed, or perhaps a desire for fame. Or maybe just mass-delusion – they’re not nearly as bright as you seem to think they are.”

“It won’t happen.” replied the angel. “Willing to put your money where your mouth is?”

“Certainly. Ten thousand says it will have taken a hold before the next Paris conference in 2021”.

“Dollars, I presume?” asked the angel. “We could use one of those fancy new tokens, ‘cryptocurrency’ I think they call them, just to spice things up a bit?”

“You’re always so behind!” scoffed the demon. “They’ve already been debunked well enough. They won’t even exist in 2021 – even I am willing to grant they’ve got that much intelligence!”

“OK”, said the angel. “Dollars it is then.”

Updates

Mostly written at the beginning of 2022, this post was published on 2022-03-05 but has had various small edits and updates since then to keep it relevant and correct.

Footnotes

[4]

Communication between banks

In practice, transfers between banks may or may not used centralised services. But there is no theoretical reason to stop them from communicating peer-to-peer, and as a fallback they will always be able to do that. At its simplest, all that needs to happen is that banks hold accounts with each other. This works because electronic money is fungible. When you transfer money to someone, they don’t need to receive specific coins, they just need their balance to go up by the right amount. So we can do it without centrally tracking who owns specific coins, or tracking the total balance of each user, unlike Bitcoin.

Take, for example, the recent situation with Russia, where the EU has started to ban Russian banks from using Swift. This action could cause serious issues for Russians wanting to do international transfers. But:

It doesn’t stop local transactions between customers at the same bank at all.
There is no need for it to affect transfers between different Russian banks.
They will be able to work around it by using alternative channels, without having to adopt a different national currency.

None of these would be true if a country used Bitcoin as their currency and they were cut off from the Bitcoin network.

On the other side, cryptocoin transactions may in practice work more like banks. Apparently many exchanges, when handling transfers between their own customers, will handle it internally (just on their own internal database) instead of writing transactions on the blockchain. This makes sense for efficiency, but it means they are just reproducing traditional banking structures, and losing all the supposed advantages of using a blockchain, making this whole thing pointless. This confirms what we already know – the blockchain is not an amazing feature to be exploited, but a flaw to be worked around.

[5]

Verisart and timestamping

I’m well aware of the fact that Verisart and other people will claim that they weren’t duped, and that the prankster doesn’t understand the genuine value that Verisart is adding. I do understand the value being added (and so does the prankster, probably), which is this:

You can use the blockchain as a “timestamp server” that makes it very hard to backdate a claim without the backdating being very obvious.

And that is the only thing they are adding – the blockchain cannot attempt to verify that the claim is true.

However, while I understand that point, and Verisart might put it somewhere in their fine print, most of Verisart’s customers do not.

Look at how Verisart present their certificates, and tell me with a straight face that this could not be used to mislead people (if it wasn’t so obviously silly, like this example).

The only pieces of information that are actually backed by the blockchain are the timestamps – which are actually the dates when the certificate was created or changed, not the artwork (obviously in this case). They are way down the page, and they do extremely little to verify anything, because there are no controls in place to stop fraudsters from recording their authorship. It’s entirely possible the real author has no interest in recording authorship on the blockchain, or didn’t do it quickly, and so a fraudster could record their “authorship” before the true artist. It proves almost nothing.

What you need is a company that verifies authorship carefully, and has a good reputation for doing so. If we can trust the truthfulness of other information on the certificates they produce, then we can also trust the timestamps they add, and so the added value of timestamping things on blockchain is extremely low.

In other words, blockchain adds nothing but confusion, and is there only because of blockchain hype.

The Christian case against Bitcoin and blockchain

2022-03-05T19:44:00Z

A number of months ago I read an article on challies.com that attempted to give a positive take on Bitcoin and blockchain technologies from a Christian perspective, which I strongly disagreed with. This post is a response.

I have long been a fan of challies.com, which has many excellent Christian articles and resources, and from the same kind of Christian background as me – Protestant and theologically conservative. The article in question was not by Tim Challies himself, but was a guest post. It had just enough plausible sounding arguments, and enough of a credibility boost from being on challies.com, that I felt compelled to respond.

Thankfully, there are other articles by Christians about Bitcoin, such as Greg Phelan’s recent analysis from an economic perspective, and the earlier 2017 article by Joe Carter, both of which are excellent. I won’t be repeating all the observations and arguments made in those, but I do think that there could be a benefit in providing a response to the challies.com article from a more technical angle – as someone who is both theologically trained, and has more than 20 years experience in professional software development.

I’ve split what I want to say into two parts. This post deals with the claim that the challies.com article represents a genuinely Christian outlook on Bitcoin and blockchain. On closer inspection, I think in reality it represents a mostly misinformed and sometimes very naive understanding of both economics and technology, and then uses Christianised vocabulary to gloss over the problematic parts of Bitcoin.

That may sound like a harsh assessment, but I will try to back it up below.

My second post looks at the claim that cryptocurrencies and blockchain are a technological revolution.

I’m writing this mostly for a Christian audience, but others may benefit and I would certainly appreciate input and feedback from those who don’t share my Christian faith. The ethical principles, although expressed in Christian terms here, are certainly not unique to Christians.

My posts will focus on Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two most famous cryptoassets, but most of it applies to others, and I’ll look at some of the others briefly at the end of the second post. (I prefer the terms “cryptoasset” and “cryptocoin” to “cryptocurrency”, because these things are not currencies).

Bitcoin is a cult

For a Christian to understand and navigate the world of Bitcoin and its promoters, it’s important to understand that you are dealing with a cult – a movement with its own faith and philosophy and leaders (paywalled), and even language and culture. One illustration of many:

Don’t let family members change the topic, holiday dinners are for discussing bitcoin and onboarding new users. Nobody cares about the weather, pets, movies, etcetera. Keep the conversation laser-focused on Bitcoin.
— Bitcoin is Saving (@BitcoinIsSaving) December 17, 2021

You need this understanding first of all to inoculate yourself against the outlandish hyperbole surrounding everything Bitcoin. When reading “Bitcoin fixes this” or “blockchain fixes that” or “web3 is the future”, time after time, it’s easy to lose your head and think, “surely so many people can’t be so wrong?”. But when something functions as cultish devotion, divorced from any need to be based on rational claims, the wild enthusiasm should be expected.

For example, take Michael Saylor (1.9 million followers on Twitter):

#Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.
— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) September 18, 2020

If you fell asleep on your keyboard and woke up to find that you had accidentally tweeted “5jubh6 78mktrtyqwerpo”, you would still not have produced anything so utterly devoid of truth or meaning as this tweet. And yet, you will likely never compete with Saylor or his tweets in terms of popularity either.

This is perhaps the extreme end of the Bitcoin cult. Normally, it doesn’t seem to be quite as bad, and perhaps not as bad as other recent cults like QAnon. On the other hand, it is a cult essentially built around money, and benefiting from big financial backers who are making the most of the fact that Bitcoin is a largely unregulated financial asset. So it is pretty dangerous.

A robust response to it, however, needs to be more than a dismissive “it’s a cult” (which doesn’t address whether the beliefs of the cult are actually true) and more even than “it’s gambling which is a sin”.

Christian faith and risk-taking

The challies.com article starts with talking about the need for “faith” in our finances, and continues this theme in places where it talks about risk taking. But the faith it is describing is not Biblical, Christian faith.

Biblical faith is not making a leap into the dark to engage in risky and possibly unethical behaviour while praying that God will bless you. Neither is it “you can do miracles, when you believe”, as Dreamworks put it. Rather, faith is trusting that God will do what he has promised to do (as written in the Bible), and thereby being enabled to do what is right.

In addition, while not rationalistic, it is a rational faith, based on the historical reality of God’s revelation of himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and his resurrection from the dead. As the apostle Paul wrote, if Jesus Christ did not actually rise from the dead, then the whole of the Christian faith is a waste of time and Christians are the most pitiable of all people.

What does Christian faith look like in practice? Let’s say, for example, that I’m struggling financially, and I’m tempted to cheat on my tax form. If I remember that God has promised to look after me. and refuse that temptation, that’s Christian faith in action. It’s rational because the miracles and resurrection of Jesus give me good reason to believe that his words are reliable.

As a negative example, I know of a Christian organisation that “stepped out in faith” by diverting money received specifically for supporting Christian workers to a different scheme that failed. They were unable to recoup the money they owed the workers, and the organisation folded. That is not faith, it is fraud.

To claim that some action is acting in faith requires promises from God that cover that action, and a Biblical demonstration that the action is a morally good one that God approves of. If buying Bitcoin is morally out of line with God’s Word (as the other Christian articles I linked to argue, and as I will below), it is never acting in faith to do so – even if we feel we are “trusting God”.

The Bitcoin faith

The faith of the Bitcoin cult stands in stark contrast to Christian faith.

All cryptoassets live and die by faith. If the market stops believing that a certain cryptoasset is valuable, then it immediately ceases to be valuable. It has no value other than as an entirely speculative financial asset and so the faith aspect is vital.

But Bitcoin faith is a blind and anti-rationale faith. Bitcoiners carry on believing despite all the accumulated evidence that Bitcoin is a dead-end idea. And indeed they have to, as their investment will only be worth anything if they carry on believing and can convince other people to believe. This makes it necessarily anti-rational – evidence must simply be ignored and explained away.

A demonstration of Bitcoin faith at work is found in the closing lines of the challies.com article:

We are convinced that Christians will all soon agree that crypto is not a curse to be feared, but a blessing to rejoice in, fully under the control of the One who has overcome the world.

Take heart, we’re going to make it.

It would be easy to pass over the last sentence as a mere platitude. But it’s actually a deliberate mashup of a Biblical quotation and Bitcoin lingo. The language is straight from Jesus’ words in John 16:33, but finishes with “we’re going to make it” (WAGMI or GMI), which, along with its inverse NGMI, is a part of Bitcoin culture. “We’re going to make it” is how Bitcoiners spur each other on to keep believing.

Of course, use of Bitcoin lingo is not necessarily wrong. There are many ways as Christians that we consciously and subconsciously borrow from the culture around us, and there may be nothing bad about that.

But it is worth reflecting on the nature of faith at work here. “We’re going to make it” is a statement of faith without a reason or a rationale, or a promise from God. It is a mantra that the Bitcoiner must keep repeating, and must indoctrinate others with, or it will fail. It is faith in a man-made system, faith in “technology”, and ultimately faith in faith itself. But certainly not faith in God.

In addition, it seems pretty clear that the authors are using Biblical rhetoric for their essentially political aim – the promotion of Bitcoin and cryptoassets. This closing note frames the success of Bitcoin as if it was aligned and united with the growth and triumph of Christ’s kingdom. Since they believe cryptoassets to be a blessing to the world, I can understand why they might do this. But this kind of appropriation of Biblical truths and language for political ends is always extremely dangerous and destructive for the church.

In this instance, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as Mike Pence’s idolatrous appropriation of Hebrews 12:1-2 for a political speech, for example. But it is the same mistake – you believe a certain cause is a good one (which is fine, although you may be mistaken), but then go on to talk about that cause as if it was itself the cause of Jesus Christ (which is not fine).

Faith and FOMO

The reality is that most crypto devotion is built on the back not of faith, but Fear Of Missing Out. “If I don’t buy into Bitcoin/latest-new-alt-coin/NFTs/web3 maybe I might miss an amazing opportunity to get rich by doing nothing…” is the fundamental mechanic at play for most people.

Of course, that doesn’t stop it being represented in exactly the opposite terms. The challies.com article presents the crypto-skeptic as “fearing” crypto. The ridiculous “Fortune favours the brave” Matt Damon ad for crypto.com likens gambling on crypto to intrepid explorers of the past. But Biblical courage looks like this:

Do not fret because of those who are evil

or be envious of those who do wrong;

for like the grass they will soon wither,

like green plants they will soon die away.

Trust in the LORD and do good;

dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

…

Better the little that the righteous have

than the wealth of many wicked;

for the power of the wicked will be broken,

but the LORD upholds the righteous.

—Psalm 37:1-3,16-17

The “land” here refers to the promised land, the place of blessing, which Christians understand in an expanded sense – the meek shall inherit not just one land, but “the earth”. That doesn’t mean Christians are to be passive and never take risks. Rather, it means that we calmly and fearlessly do what is right, not worrying about losing out or getting left behind.

A Biblical understanding of money making

The essential thing that the challies.com article fails to provide is some kind of theology of work and money-making, especially when it comes to investing.

To counter the accusation of gambling, the authors write:

Some critics call crypto a “casino” for “price speculation,” but such detractors may fail to recognize that their criticism can apply equally to the Christian holding mutual funds in their company 401(k)

Do they mean that some (but not all) pension funds are run in unethical ways that amount to gambling? If so, then this is just whataboutery. Do they mean that all pension funds or similar investment schemes are equivalent to gambling? Then this is fairly basic financial illiteracy. It’s depressing to have to spend time countering these classic Bitcoiner tropes and fallacies, but here goes…

Not everything that makes money is legitimate “work” (in the Biblical sense).

It’s clear from the Bible that some activities are “work” that should be rewarded with money:

A labourer is worthy of his wages

—1 Timothy 5:18

But not all:

6 In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers and sisters, to keep away from every believer who is idle and disruptive and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. 7 For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, 8 nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, labouring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. 9 We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate. 10 For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.’

11 We hear that some among you are idle and disruptive. They are not busy; they are busybodies. 12 Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the food they eat. 13 And as for you, brothers and sisters, never tire of doing what is good.

—2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

Here the apostle Paul is addressing the problem of idle people within the church family. They clearly have enough to live on financially, but they are not earning it. Presumably they are living off the generosity of friends or family, or accumulated riches, or are in some way scamming people.

None of these are God-glorifying work, no matter how much money you “make”.

Real work, that is worthy of wages, is distinguished by loving your neighbour by doing something useful for other people or society in general. Work can take many forms, but normally involves making things or providing services. Sometimes work can seem quite detached from practical utility, like studying pure mathematics. But we sponsor such people as a society because we’ve recognised the value of increasing the sum of human knowledge as a good in itself, and as something that often ends up helping people in other ways.

Now, investing money appears to be a Biblically legitimate way of making money in general terms (e.g. Matthew 25:14-30). But clearly not all investments can be approved of. Investing money in a pornography company might get you a good return, but it is not legitimate for a Christian. The companies or schemes that we invest in must also be doing something good for society.

So, suppose there is a company that produces a new, more efficient system for washing clothes (or whatever). Clothes need to be washed, and if it can be done more efficiently, all the better. You invest in their stock, and you get back a dividend from the profits that are made. If you get in early, you may also gain from their stock going up in value as the company grows and succeeds. In both cases, you have done something useful and worthy of being rewarded:

in owning the stock, you are allowing your surplus cash to be put to use in the world, for the benefit of others.
in recognising the value of what the company was doing, you have applied your wisdom and understanding in choosing to invest in a company that would make the world a better place. You have also done so at risk to yourself.

In this case, we have a positive sum outcome. It is not simply money going round in circles. Some people paid money to have their clothes washed, and other people put that money in their pockets (the company employees and the investors) — but in addition, clothes got washed. Something good and useful happened in the world.

This is in contrast to zero sum schemes, where all the money earned by some is lost by others, and there are no other benefits. Or even negative sum schemes, where significant overheads or other losses mean that overall the world has become a worse, poorer place because of the transactions.

When it comes to pension funds and other investments, we may not have complete control of the portfolio of companies being invested in. But to the extent we do have control, an ethical approach to investment must involve choosing stocks (or government bonds etc) where we have a reasonable confidence that the money will mostly be put to good use. We might choose to delegate that decision to a provider of ethical financial services, rather than attempt to become experts ourselves. But at some level investing must involve the ethics of what we are investing in, and not just the returns we make.

Piling schemes on top of schemes cannot render something ethical. If, instead of investing in a porn company directly, I buy stocks in a financial services company that specialises in investing in porn, or makes its money primarily off that industry in some other way, I’m ethically no better off than I was.

Also, positive outcomes are not a justification for unethical investing. Such positive outcomes might include:

“I made a lot of money”. The large amounts of money that people put in their pockets do not justify money-making schemes, even if they are technically legal. On the contrary, these large amounts of money are the very thing that needs to justified, because they’ve come from other people’s pockets.
“I made a lot of money, and I’m going to give it to the church or a charity”. No, the ends don’t justify the means.
“I made a lot of money, so now I have more time to give to my family/prayer/God’s work”. It’s the same thing.
“I made so much money, the sight of my bank balance causes my heart to fill with overflowing praise to God!” Please stop. You love money, not God.

There is a lot more that could be said here, and what I’ve attempted above is an outline. There are probably areas where Bible-believing Christians disagree, such as on the degree of speculation that is legitimate when investing, especially since it can be pretty hard to define the difference between speculation and investment. But we can agree on some basics:

To claim that all investment is gambling, because it all involves risk, is just the continuum fallacy and is ethically sub-Christian.
Speculation can only ever have a net positive value for the world if the asset involved is itself useful.

Application to cryptoassets

So much for the general principles. When it comes to Bitcoin and other cryptoassets, as far as anyone is able to analyse it, it’s a strongly negative sum scheme. It is not a stock – Bitcoin does not exist as a company that provides some useful service – and it pays no dividend. All the dollars that come out of the system have come from other people paying in, and at the same time there are massive losses.

The most well known is the amount of electricity wasted, especially for anything involving “proof of work” consensus algorithms, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. If you care about climate change, as every Christian should, then this should matter to you.

Even if you could solve climate and environmental concerns, wasting resources is always waste, and always takes away from other, beneficial uses, for example by driving up prices. This is economically inevitable.

And there are many more “negative externalities”, as this Stanford lecture put it:

This [huge electricity consumption] is far from the only externality the cryptocurrency mania imposes upon the world. Among the others are that Bitcoin alone generates as much e-waste as the Netherlands, that cryptocurrencies enable a $5.2B/year ransomware industry, that they have disrupted supply chains for GPUs, hard disks, SSDs and other chips, that they have made it impossible for web services to offer free tiers, and that they are responsible for a massive crime wave including fraud, theft, tax evasion, funding of rogue states such as North Korea, drug smuggling, and even armed robbery.

Financially, it is in essence a Ponzi scheme — but worse than a Ponzi, according to this Financial Times post (paywalled).

Bitcoiners will even admit this:

Yes, it’s a Ponzi scheme. But who cares? So are the dollars in your pocket.#Crypto2022 https://t.co/nBollZHpGB
— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk) December 11, 2021

(Although, when someone can’t tell the difference between a currency and a Ponzi, their assessment may not be worth very much…) Other Bitcoiners have also spoken openly in praise of Ponzi, and other crypto leaders have been totally open about this.

In addition to being an immoral way to earn money for ourselves, promoting crypto is a huge failure to love our more vulnerable neighbours. Just like Ponzi schemes and multi-level marketing scams, the financial structure of cryptoassets means that there is no source of money except new investors or recruits. Eventually they will run out of “greater fools”, at which point a large number of unlucky people will lose.

Some people can afford such risks. But these schemes, with their potential for high (and unsustainable) returns, always attract the most vulnerable and financially desperate. Like the widow in the temple, these people will put in their last pennies, all they have to live on. Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees who “devoured widows’ houses” surely applies to anyone who promotes or encourages these schemes. “These men will be punished most severely.”

Proof of waste

In a healthy economy, money serves as a kind of “proof of work”. As a reward for doing something useful for society, you are given money which you can use for yourself or others you care about. [1]

But the “proof of work” in cryptoassets turns this on its head. Bitcoin and Ethereum miners are rewarded in proportion to how many calculations they do. Now, if the electronic ledger they were maintaining with the electricity this requires were actually beneficial to society, then this might be reasonable. But since these assets function only as “greater fool” schemes and not as money (except for criminals, and a very small number of legitimate cases), it would be better to call this system “proof of waste”.

Bitcoin and Ethereum reward miners for wasting natural resources. This makes it probably the most unethical invention of the 21st century. It should be deeply offensive to anyone who believes, as Christians do, that the planet’s resources do not belong to us, but to Another, who requires us to steward them wisely, and who will one day ask us to give account for that stewardship.

Are there are some other technological or social benefits that might somehow offset all this? I’ll look at that in my second post.

But first, there are some other angles we could look at this from a Christian point of view.

Crypto-gnosticism

Gnosticism (silent ‘g’) was a movement that affected early Christianity, and still has influence. The name comes the greek word “gnosis” meaning “knowledge”, and refers to the fact that gnostics usually claimed some kind of higher level of enlightenment that came not from a right understanding of God’s truth in holy scripture, or any other rational source, but via direct revelation from God. You could call this “crypto-gnosis” – hidden knowledge – if you wanted.

This is far from being something unique to Christian sects and movements. The seductive belief that you have gained access to a higher, hidden knowledge that other people “just don’t get” is a driving force behind many conspiracy theories and cults. And it is certainly present in the Bitcoin world. For example:

It only starts to make sense after more than 50 hours of learning about #Bitcoin and starts being obvious after 100+ hours.

The problem is the world is full of people with strong opinions on #Bitcoin with less than 10 hours.

People that do the PoW early, reap the benefits.
— ⚡Disruptive Innovation⚡ (@BitcoinAlrdyWon) December 13, 2021

While this “you just don’t get it” idea didn’t come through that strongly in the challies.com article, I’ve seen it from other Christian crypto-enthusiasts, and, given the unfortunate inclination of significant parts of the Christian world towards conspiracy theories, you are likely to see this new crypto-gnosticism sometime soon in your local church.

Sound money

Another claim made by the challies.com article, often found amongst Bitcoiners, is that cryptoassets are “sound money”. One of the central ideas here is that the supply of Bitcoin, in contrast to fiat money, cannot be controlled by centralised authorities such as governments. Putting aside the many fundamental failures in understanding of economics, and the fact that Bitcoin fails to be money at all by most definitions, there is a strong libertarian, anti-government philosophy at work (paywalled).

As Christians who believe in original sin and flawed human nature, some level of distrust of human institutions is good and right. All our democratic institutions are built on the understanding that “power corrupts, absolutely power corrupts absolutely”. In addition, it seems pretty clear that the current capitalist systems we live in have many problems and are failing many of the poorer people in our society.

But that does not mean we reject governments or states. The Bible is pretty explicit on this.

Further, Jesus’ instruction to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s” is explicitly in the context of state-issued currency which was used for tax collection. The crypto-proponent’s claim that governments should not be allowed to control the money supply is simply not a position you can argue from the Bible.

Even if the government shouldn’t have control over money, why would we prefer a process in which bunch of entirely unaccountable techies and rich investors get to decide how money works instead? There is nothing in Bitcoin that makes it inherently fairer than fiat money, and in fact the system reproduces some of the worst failings of capitalism in exaggerated form. Bitcoin doesn’t allow everyone to “earn” equally – rather, it gives a big leg up to those already rich enough to afford the hardware needed for mining, or to those who can afford the risks of gambling.

Hope

There is so much more that could be said, but the more you explore, the more you realise how far Bitcoin’s underlying philosophy is from anything Christian.

Bitcoin is often envisaged as representing hope, but in reality it is just hopium and an underlying despair is not far away. When you challenge a Bitcoiner on some of the issues mentioned above, very often the response is along the lines of “everything is a scam anyway”. (Here is a great response to that)

Hope in Bitcoin often comes from a deep, disillusioned, nihilistic rage at “the system” – which is often understandable. But it is then used to justify attitudes and actions focused on extracting as much for yourself as possible, while you still can. This is fundamentally incompatible with true Christian hope for the growth of Christ’s Kingdom and beyond.

Inevitablism

The final note of the challies.com article, and the subject I’ll end on too, is the idea that crypto is part of inevitable technological progress that we simply have to get on board with. I’ll deal with the technology fallacy in my next post. The other fallacy is that we can’t stop it. This is yet another staple argument of the Bitcoin cult.

But this claim is not true. As Christians, there are some things we can be certain about regarding the future. We believe in the return of Jesus, the triumph of His kingdom, and judgement day – based on specific promises in the Bible. There are also things we can say are certain, or almost certain, based on a rational understanding of the laws of physics or human nature. But we have no business believing or repeating claims about all kinds of other human inventions or processes being inevitable when they are not.

If you claim “people are always going to want get-rich-quick schemes”, I will agree with you 100%. However, going on to say “this particular scheme is inevitable, and we should all join in” is self-fulfilling defeatism that is both untrue and immoral.

If we want to talk laws of economics and inevitability, Bitcoin is a bubble that is guaranteed to burst:

(source)

Of course, we don’t know when, and crypto might be with us for a long time – but only if we adopt a passive, defeatist attitude. Many cryptoassets have already been banned in various countries, and there is no reason why the same couldn’t happen across the world – all we really need is for financial regulators to wake up, as they are beginning to do.

So it would help if Christians did their part.

Next: Is blockchain a technological marvel? (For those who cannot stand the suspense, the answer is No.)

Updates

Mostly written at the beginning of 2022, this post was published on 2022-03-05 but has had various small edits and updates since then to keep it relevant and correct.