The Corner

Words to Know

Managed — steered by an organization into wanting what it needs you to want.

Doctrine — an official teaching of a church.

Institution — an organization with property, income, officers and rules to protect.

First, here is what I am not asking.

I am not asking you to leave your church.

I have spent five units taking things apart, and I will not end by telling you to be alone. Alone is not better. Half the good in this book was done by small groups of ordinary people who kept showing up for each other.

If the people in that building feed the hungry in your town, go, and help them do it.

I am asking for something harder than leaving, which is staying without being managed.

Second, here is what you are allowed to do.

You are allowed to keep the parts that are mine and put down the parts that are not.

Nobody has to give you permission for this. That is the entire content of Lesson 1. The real word was printed in your own Bible the whole time, and nobody needed to hide it, because nobody expected you to look.

You looked. That is done now. It cannot be undone.

Third, here are the eight things.

If you want the whole of what I taught, stripped of twenty centuries of additions, here it is. You can hold it in your hand.

And every one of the eight has a reference beside it, because I have spent this whole book telling you to check things, and it would be a poor joke to give you my own list with nothing to open.

1. Forgive what people owe you. Money included. Money especially. That is the prayer — forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12; and the parable of the servant forgiven a huge debt who jails a man over a small one, Matthew 18:23–35).

2. Eat with the wrong people. Not serve them from behind a table. Sit down at the same table, in public, where you can be seen doing it. That is what the complaint against me was about: he eats with tax collectors and sinners (Mark 2:15–17; Luke 15:1–2).

3. Do not screen anybody. Not once, in the whole record, did I ask if somebody deserved it. And in the one scene I described where people are finally sorted, the test is six physical acts and nothing else (Matthew 25:31–46).

4. Be seen with the untouchable. There is somebody in your town that nobody else will stand beside. Stand next to them, in daylight, where it costs you something. A man with a skin disease asked me if I was willing. I reached out and touched him, which was the one thing nobody did (Mark 1:40–42).

5. Ask people what they want. Then listen to the answer. Most people have not been asked anything in years. A blind man was shouting by the road and the crowd told him to shut up, and the question I asked him was what do you want me to do for you (Mark 10:51).

6. Do it quietly. I told people to keep it to themselves, over and over — do not sound a trumpet, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing (Matthew 6:1–4). If your giving has an audience, you have already been paid.

7. Do not carry a weapon in my name. Not a real one, not a rhetorical one. Put it away. When one of my own men drew a blade to defend me, on the worst night of my life, I told him: put your sword back in its place (Matthew 26:52).

8. Say out loud who is causing the harm. The prophets I was raised on did not only feed people. They named the men in charge. I spent an entire afternoon doing it in public, in the Temple courts, to the most respected religious authorities in my country, by name and to their faces (Matthew 23; Luke 11:37–52). That is the half nobody preaches, and it is the half that gets you in trouble, and it was most of my job.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

There is no ninth item about believing the correct doctrine, because I never gave you one.

Fourth, here is the corner.

You are going to find, if you start doing those eight things, that you cannot say most of this out loud in your church.

You will not be thrown out. But it will make people uncomfortable, and you will feel it, and you will learn to hold it quietly.

That is what it has always been like. That is Francis before they built him a basilica. That is the Beguines in their houses. That is Woolman walking so no horse and no boy would be driven for him. That is four Quakers in 1688 whose own meeting took eighty-eight years to agree with them.

You will be in a corner of a room, doing the actual thing, while the front of the room does something else.

That corner is the church. It always was. It is the only part of it I have ever recognized.

Fifth, and last, here is the question this whole book was written to answer.

I have not asked you to stop worshipping.

I have asked you, for two hundred pages, to look carefully at what you have been worshipping, and to notice how much of it has a date and an author.

So here is the list again, with the year, and with the lesson where you will find the evidence. Go back and check any of them.

The payment God — that he could not forgive you until a death had been arranged — was written by Anselm in 1098, in exile, out of the honor-and-debt law of Norman France. (Lesson 19.)

The flag — the cross carried into a battle and then onto the coins and the standards — arrived in 312. (Lesson 36, and Lesson 18 for how the emperor took over.)

The face — bearded, enthroned, haloed, in the arch above the altar — was fixed in the fourth century, out of imperial art, and finished off by a forged letter and a print shop in 1940. (Lesson 22.)

The treasury you can pay into, the store of surplus merit that a payment draws on, was declared papal doctrine in 1343 and was a going business by 1476. (Lesson 25.)

The screening of the poor — the deserving and the undeserving, the form and the inquiry — was written into English law in 1601, hardened in 1834, and taught to the churches by the charity organization movement from 1877. (Lesson 37.)

The evacuation — the removal of Christians before the end — was assembled by one ex-clergyman in a small British sect in the 1830s, and reached America by preaching tours, conferences, a reference Bible in 1909 and three million free books. (Lesson 34.)

And the word in your own prayer changed in 1526.

That one is not a guess and not a drift. In 1526 William Tyndale printed the first English New Testament made from the Greek, and at Matthew 6:12 he put trespasses where the Greek says debts. Then in 1549 Thomas Cranmer assembled the Book of Common Prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer in it followed Tyndale.

That is why you say one word and your Bible prints another, and why nobody ever told you there was a difference. It took one printer in 1526, one prayer book in 1549, and four hundred years of repetition. (Lesson 1.)

None of that is me. Every piece of it was added by somebody, in a specific year, usually for a reason involving money or an emperor or both.

And there is one more, which is not a doctrine but a habit, and is underneath all of them: the idea that somebody has to authorize this, that there is a license, and a chain, and a man at the front of it who holds it.

Valdes of Lyon is the cleanest example in the book, so take the dates with you. He was a rich merchant in France who gave his money away and started preaching in ordinary language. He went to Rome and asked permission. In 1179, at the council meeting there, his poverty was approved — and his preaching was permitted only where the local clergy chose to license it. The archbishop of Lyon did not, and threw him out of the city. He kept preaching anyway. And on 4 November 1184, at Verona, a papal document condemned his followers by name. (Lesson 24.)

He was not condemned for teaching anything false. Nobody produced an error. He was condemned for doing it without a license.

And what people noticed about me, according to your own Bible, was that I taught as somebody who had authority, and not as the scribes (Mark 1:22).

Nobody licensed me either.

Take all of it away and something is still standing there: a man from a village in an occupied country who ate with the wrong people, touched the untouchable, told the rich to give it away, said the debts should be cancelled, refused a weapon, and was killed by the state for it.

That you can follow. It does not require you to believe anything you have to force.

And if, when you have taken away everything with a date on it, the thing left standing is smaller than what you were given, I would ask you to consider that it is also the only part that was ever mine.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 25:31–46 and Micah 6:8.

You will find: six physical acts, and three requirements — do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. That is the whole examination, in both testaments, and neither list mentions a doctrine.

Then look up the eight, one at a time: Matthew 6:12 · Mark 2:15–17 · Matthew 25:31–46 · Mark 1:40–42 · Mark 10:51 · Matthew 6:1–4 · Matthew 26:52 · Matthew 23. It takes about twenty minutes. That is the whole of it.

The Short Version

• I am not telling you to leave. I am telling you to stay without being managed.
• The whole of what I taught fits on one page, in eight items, none of them a belief — and every one of them has a verse beside it now.
• Doing it will put you in a quiet corner of your own church. That corner is where the real thing has always lived.
• Nearly everything you were taught about me has a date and an author: 1098 (Lesson 19), 312 (Lesson 36), the fourth century (Lesson 22), 1343 (Lesson 25), 1601 (Lesson 37), the 1830s (Lesson 34), and 1526 — the year the word in your prayer changed (Lesson 1).
• Valdes was told in 1179 that he could preach only where the clergy licensed it, and his followers were condemned by name in 1184 — not for an error, but for preaching without permission. Nobody licensed me either.

Think About It

1. Of the eight items, which one could you begin this week — and which one frightens you?
2. When you submit to what is said from the front of your church, whose authority are you actually submitting to — and who gave them theirs? Follow that back as far as it goes. Write down where it stops.
3. Ask it plainly, and take your time: who have you been worshipping?