Your Kingdom Come
What If This Is True?
Note: This is best read after checking out the other parts of my blog.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
First, I want to start with how grateful I am for the Church. I have been a Christian since I was young, and I have learned so much from the Church. I have learned so much from pastors, Christian family, and Christian friends, all of whom deeply love God and follow Jesus.
I would never be where I am today without these people—their teaching, their prayers, their love, their examples, their encouragement, and all the ways they have genuinely revealed God to me. I am deeply grateful for them. I am deeply grateful for the Church. I am certain God is, and has always been, at work in His Church.
My favorite Bible verse is Psalm 27:4, which reads “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to seek him in his temple.” This Psalm was written by King David. I believe David’s “one thing” was God: knowing God, abiding in God, and gazing upon the beauty of God, seeking Him. I have always been inspired by this verse, and this verse has helped remind me what my number one priority should be: God. Loving God and seeking Him. This blog is a window into how I have been seeking God since spring 2022. I have been asking questions, specifically my four questions of “Who is God?”, “What is God’s plan for the world?”, “Who is Jesus?”, and “Who are Christians?”, seeking to understand and know God, and Jesus, in a deeper way. I never expected that my study of these questions would lead me outside historic Christian orthodoxy in several significant areas. But I have tried to trust God’s Word and seek the Spirit’s guidance as I study. Of course, most people disagree with the conclusions I have on this blog. I welcome thoughtful feedback. That being said, my conclusions have not, from my perspective, drawn me farther from God, but into a deeper love for and understanding of God, Jesus, and who Christians are meant to be. Despite the departure from orthodoxy in some areas, seeking God more deeply in His Word regarding each of these questions has resulted in deeper joy, peace, awe, and wonder. I do explain that throughout my website, but I will also explain that later in this letter.
All that being said, after writing everything on this website, while I believe the conclusions I have reached, it is still difficult for me to fully take in what they would mean if they are true. I wrestle with how so much of the Church could have been mistaken about things this significant for such a long time, if what I write is true. I wrestle with why God would allow His people to hold mistaken theology for so long, if what I write is true. I do not have answers to every question that raises.
But I trust God. I know I do not have to understand everything. I need to live faithfully according to the truth I believe I see in Scripture, while remaining willing to be corrected—and that is what I am trying to do. Paul writes that “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion” (Philippians 1:6). I believe that. I believe God is at work, loves me, and loves everyone else in the Church. He will complete the good work He has begun in us.
And I am convinced of something else: God cares deeply about truth. What we believe about God matters. Our theology can shape our worship, our lives, and the way we understand God, Jesus, ourselves, and one another.
That is one reason I have spent so much time studying and writing about these questions. I think correct theology is very important.
But Jesus himself tells us that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love one another.
Knowing all the right theology is not the greatest commandment.
Love is.
That tells me that theological truth matters, but getting every theological question exactly right is not the whole measure of faithfulness. I believe God cares profoundly about whether we sincerely seek Him, remain open to truth, love Him, and love one another faithfully with the light that we have been given.
Again, if my conclusions are right, I do not know why God has permitted His Church to misunderstand some things for so long. I am sure there are reasons I cannot see.
And through all of this, I am deeply grateful that the heart of what Jesus taught us has endured:
Follow him.
Love God.
Love one another.
That message has endured throughout Christianity. Through theological disagreements. Through divisions. Through human failures. Through reformations. Through centuries and cultures. Christians have continued to pray, worship, repent, forgive, serve, sacrifice, care for people in need, proclaim Jesus, read Scripture, and love God and their neighbors.
Praise God.
Whatever the Church has misunderstood, God has been at work in His Church.
That gives me tremendous hope as I ask the question at the heart of this letter:
What if this is true?
What if the Holy Spirit truly is God, personally distinct from the Father, and Scripture reveals Her as the feminine and maternal person of the one God—the divine Mother who gives life, brings forth God's children, teaches, comforts, guides, and dwells within them?
What if God's plan truly is the restoration of all things—so that His judgments ultimately serve His redemptive and restorative purposes, every enemy is finally overcome, all creation is reconciled and healed, and God becomes “all in all”?
What if Jesus truly is the preexistent yet fully human Messiah and Son of God—the one whom God sent, anointed with the Holy Spirit, empowered, perfected through suffering and obedience, raised from the dead, and exalted as Lord—rather than God Himself?
What if, when Scripture says that Jesus is the firstborn among many brothers and sisters and that we will become like him, it means that God's children will truly share the same glorified, holy, incorruptible human life he possesses—sharing his inheritance and reign as his family, rather than remaining forever different from him in kind because he is God and we are not?
I believe these things are true.
But I also know that I am fallible.
I am not asking anyone to accept these conclusions simply because I have reached them. They should be tested carefully against Scripture, and if I have misunderstood Scripture, I want to be corrected.
At the same time, I understand some of the implications of these conclusions.
For many Christians, these would not be small adjustments around the edges of faith. They would require reconsidering doctrines many may have heard since childhood. They could affect words we have sung in worship, language we have used in prayer, sermons we have preached, books we have loved, and statements of faith we have affirmed.
And perhaps beneath all of those questions lies an even deeper one, one that I have really wrestled with given the conclusions I write about on this blog:
If the Church could have been mistaken about theology this important, where was God?
I believe the perfect God I know as Father—and as Mother through the Spirit—has always been with the Church from the beginning.
Loving us.
Caring for us.
Pointing us toward truth.
Teaching us how to love.
Drawing us to God.
I do not believe God would ever abandon the Church—or any one of His creations.
Christian history gives me hope. The Church has faced correction and reform before, and through all of it, God has remained faithful to His people. Christian history contains painful failures. It also contains extraordinary beauty. Christians have cared for the sick when others fled. They have fed the hungry, sheltered the poor, opposed injustice, forgiven enemies, crossed oceans to share the gospel, translated Scripture into thousands of languages, raised abandoned children, established schools and hospitals, endured persecution, and sometimes surrendered their lives rather than deny Christ. Countless Christians have sincerely loved God. Countless Christians have prayed, repented, served, sacrificed, and been transformed.
I believe the Holy Spirit has been present through all of this.
That does not require believing that every doctrine Christians inherited was correct.
Scripture gives us a clear category for God's people genuinely knowing and belonging to Him while still misunderstanding important things. Peter genuinely belonged to Jesus and could still misunderstand him. The Corinthian church genuinely belonged to God and still required serious correction. The churches addressed in Revelation belonged to Christ and were nevertheless told to repent. Throughout Scripture, God's people could possess real truth, genuinely experience His presence, and still have more to learn.
I recognize that what I am suggesting on this website would involve something much larger than any one of those examples. If my conclusions are true, some of the doctrines needing reconsideration have been held by much of the Church for many centuries. I do not want to minimize how significant that would be, and I do not pretend to fully understand why God would have allowed it.
But these biblical examples do give me reason to believe something important: God's faithfulness to His people has never depended upon our understanding everything perfectly.
God is extraordinarily patient and faithful.
He has always worked through imperfect people and imperfect communities—people who genuinely knew Him, loved Him, and understood much that was true while still having things to learn.
I believed Jesus was God for most of my life.
I do not look back on those years and conclude that I did not love God.
I did.
I wanted to obey Him.
I wanted to understand Scripture.
As I now understand it, I was mistaken about an important theological question.
But I trust that God knew my heart. He knew that I loved Him sincerely, even while I held beliefs about the Trinity and Jesus' deity that I now believe were mistaken.
My own experience has convinced me that sincere love for God and theological error can coexist. I loved God when I believed Jesus was God, and I know many Trinitarian Christians who deeply love God, Jesus, and Scripture today.
If these arguments raise questions for you, I simply ask you to test them carefully against Scripture.
And I welcome the same scrutiny of my own conclusions.
1. Who Is God? If the Holy Spirit Is Our Mother, We Have a Heavenly Mother
For many Christians, God has been understood and spoken of almost entirely in masculine terms.
Father.
King.
Those images are biblical and precious.
But if the Holy Spirit is also truly God, and if Scripture's maternal and feminine language belongs particularly to Her, then our understanding of God becomes richer rather than poorer.
God is our Father.
And the Spirit from whom we are born is our Mother.
The One who comforts, teaches, gives wisdom, gives life, intercedes, guides, sanctifies, and dwells within God's children is not an impersonal force.
She is God.
That has profound implications for the Church.
Men and women together bear God’s image.
If the Holy Spirit is truly the feminine and maternal person of God, that gives me even more reason to take seriously the ways women reflect God and the gifts God has given them.
For me, this raises important questions about what implications, if any, sex should have for teaching, leadership, and the use of spiritual gifts in the Church.
If this is true, it is not bad news about God.
It is beautiful news about God.
We would not be discovering that God is less than we thought.
We would be discovering that our understanding of God still has room to become richer.
We would recognize that we have a Heavenly Mother.
We would have both a Father and Mother!
Praise God.
This conclusion has meant so much to me. I am so encouraged by seeing in Scripture that God is both Father and Mother. As a woman, this has been in particular encouraging to me. I have always known I was created in God’s image, but now I understand that in a way I did not before. I also find it incredibly beautiful that God is one, and that I can know God as both Father and Mother. I write about this elsewhere on my blog, but the primary fruit of the Spirit I have experienced as I have come to understand this is joy! I have experienced so much joy in knowing I have both a heavenly Father and a Mother.
I will say, I did not immediately experience joy. It took me some time, because considering God to be feminine was so off my map. At first, I thought thinking of God in a feminine way was off. But after months of studying and seeing the divine feminine in Scripture, my hesitation turned to joy.
2. What is God’s plan for the world? If God Saves Everyone, the Gospel Becomes Vastly More Hopeful—Not Less Serious
Universal restoration can sound off at first for many different reasons, one being because some have learned to associate the seriousness of sin with the possibility of endless punishment.
I do not believe the seriousness of sin depends upon that.
Sin is serious because it destroys people.
It damages relationships.
It enslaves.
It corrupts.
It produces suffering.
And Scripture teaches judgment.
I do not believe God's judgment should be minimized.
But judgment does not need to be endless in order to be real.
If universal restoration is true, God's final victory does not leave evil permanently undefeated within part of His creation.
God actually defeats it.
The violent become peaceful.
The proud become humble.
The cruel learn love.
The alienated are reconciled.
Victims receive justice and healing.
Sinners are transformed.
Every knee bows.
Every tongue confesses.
Every enemy is finally defeated.
And God becomes all in all.
That does not make repentance less urgent.
It makes God's purpose larger.
Christians still proclaim the gospel because reconciliation with God is good now.
Holiness is good now.
Freedom from sin is good now.
Knowing God is good now.
Participating in His kingdom is good now.
And judgment remains something we should not desire to experience unnecessarily.
Evangelism need not be driven by fear or panic.
It can be rooted deeply in love, hope, and the conviction that knowing God truly is life.
We can invite people into the life of God because it is genuinely life.
And for me, believing in God's ultimate restoration has allowed me to rest more deeply in Him and rejoice in the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21).
This conclusion, more than anything else that I have studied, has brought me so much peace—and joy. I have lived believing in eternal conscious torment for so long, and that has only brought me fear—and at times, panic. I tried to cope by just not thinking about the implications of that doctrine. But now! Oh, how my belief in God’s goodness has tremendously deepened! Wow. I now believe with deep confidence that God will save all. He loves all, and He will do it. I can rest in Him, and joyfully be a small part of what He is already doing to restore everything.
3. Who is Jesus? If Jesus Is Not God, We Do Not Lose Jesus
Perhaps this is one of the greatest fears these arguments can create.
If Jesus is not God, does Jesus become smaller?
I do not believe so, though the nature of his greatness changes.
For me, Jesus' greatness no longer rests on believing that he is eternally God. His greatness has become astonishing in a different way: as a genuinely human person, he became who he did, remained faithful to God, and gave his life for the world.
That is amazing to me.
And he is worthy of following.
Jesus remains the Christ.
The Son of God.
The Savior of the world.
The one whom God raised from the dead.
The one God has made Lord and Messiah.
The one through whom God judges the world.
The one seated at God's right hand.
The pioneer of our salvation.
Our High Priest.
Our King.
Our elder brother.
The one to whom God has given extraordinary authority.
And the one whom God intends us to become like.
Understanding Jesus as genuinely human does not make his life less extraordinary.
It makes what God accomplished in him astonishing.
Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered.
He grew.
He was tested.
He trusted God.
He obeyed.
He was made perfect.
He offered himself faithfully.
God raised him.
God exalted him.
And now the New Testament says that those who belong to Christ are being conformed to his image.
When I believed Jesus was the God-man, there remained for me an ultimate distance between what he was and what I could ever become.
Understanding him as fully human changed that.
His story now looks to me not only like something to praise God for, but like the pioneering human story Scripture says God's other children are being conformed to.
He is the pioneer.
The firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
The human being in whom we see where God intends humanity to go.
That is not a diminished Jesus.
It is an extraordinarily exalted view of what God has done through Jesus—and of what Scripture promises for God's other children.
Seeing Jesus as fully human has increased my awe of him, not lessened it. His faithfulness, obedience, suffering, and willingness to give his life now strike me in a way they did not before. Wow. This certainly has changed the way I see Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. It has also inspired me to pursue Christlikeness in a way I personally did not fully grasp before.
4. Who are Christians? Christians Will Truly Become Like Christ
While Christians have long affirmed that we will become like Christ, if Christ is fully human and not deity, the promise that we will be like him takes on new power and meaning for me.
Consider these promises:
“We shall be like him.”
“Conformed to the image of his Son.”
“Partakers of the divine nature.”
“Joint heirs with Christ.”
“Glorified with him.”
“Reigning with him.”
God forgives us and transforms us.
If Jesus is fully human rather than God, then Christ and those being conformed to his image are not separated forever by the difference between someone who is a God-man and brothers and sisters who are fully human without deity.
He is the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.
God is forming a family.
We will genuinely become like Christ in the extraordinary ways Scripture promises, while Jesus retains his unique role as Messiah, pioneer, firstborn, and Lord.
I now understand that in a way I never did when I thought he was the God-man.
This also raises the standard for me.
If Christ became who he was as a fully human person, that is what God calls me toward as well.
Not because I would ever share his unique role.
But because I am called to share his love for God and people, increasingly and ultimately fully, by God's grace.
So:
What If This Is True?
Then God is still God.
Jesus is still Lord and Messiah.
The Holy Spirit is still with us.
The gospel is still good news.
The dead will still be raised.
Christ will still return.
God will still judge evil.
God's children will still inherit His kingdom.
The Church still belongs to Christ.
God is still working all things for good for those who love Him (Romans 8:28).
And if these conclusions are true, God's purpose would be even more hopeful than I once understood it to be.
The story does not end with most of humanity eternally lost.
It ends with restoration.
It does not end with some human beings remaining forever broken.
It ends with the transformation of every person God created.
It ends with Christ surrounded by brothers and sisters made like him.
It does not end with our misunderstandings having the final word.
It ends with truth.
And ultimately it does not end with death, sin, division, theological confusion, or any other enemy.
It ends with God.
God all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:28)
So if my conclusions are wrong, I welcome Scriptural correction.
But if they are true, I hope they can be weighed carefully against Scripture, even where their implications are difficult.
The same God who has carried His people through centuries of faithfulness and failure is capable of correcting us still.
The same Spirit who has guided, comforted, taught, and transformed Christians throughout history has not abandoned us.
The same Jesus who faithfully followed God and became the pioneer of our salvation is still leading God's children forward.
And the God whose purpose is ultimately to restore His creation is more than capable of correcting and deepening the understanding of His Church—including mine.
That gives me tremendous hope.
Because God has always been faithful, and He always will be.
May God richly bless you, and may the Spirit lead us in all truth (John 16:13).
With love and hope in Christ,
A sister in Christ