Please note: This is part one of the review of Andrew Attwood’s book, “Jesus wants to train us to live his life”. Part two, “The Theology the Practices Demand,” is available here. The two pieces are designed to be read together, but they can also be read separately.

Introduction

Before this framework can place any practical demand on the reader, three things must shift. The first shift changes what kind of document the Gospels are. The second shift changes what kind of person Jesus is. The third shift changes what counts, for the reader, as a voice from outside the framework that might be drawn on to test it. Each shift, taken on its own, is a small adjustment. Taken together, they are the conditions under which everything that follows in the book becomes thinkable. The practices, the small-group structures, the leadership culture, the expectations placed on ordinary Christians: none of it can be examined in its own terms until those three prior adjustments have been made.

Nothing in what follows is abstract. Each of the three shifts has direct, practical consequence for how churches operate and how ordinary Christians are led. The companion piece in this review, The Theology the Practices Demand, documents what living inside those consequences does to the people formed by them. The work of this article is the prior question: what kind of object is the framework one would have to step inside in order to be so formed?

The book under review is Andrew Attwood’s Jesus Wants to Train Us to Live His Life. I do not believe it has a wide readership, and I say so not in disparagement. The ideas it contains are not new; they circulate far more widely than the book itself, passed verbally in vestries, church leadership meetings, and invitation-only huddles. Because they are usually transmitted verbally, they are difficult to engage with critically: they shift in the retelling, are qualified when challenged and reasserted when the challenge passes. A published book changes that. It commits the ideas to paper, in the author’s own words, where they can be examined and responded to fairly. To that end, this article treats the book as something concrete, though it should be understood throughout that what is being examined is the wider theological model undergirding a particular missional discipleship framework, of which this book is one articulation among several.

I write from within what is technically described as evangelical: from a Church of England framing in which Scripture is the primary source of authority, read within the historic creeds and the broad inheritance of the Christian tradition. I have no opposition to charismatic ministry, church planting, small communities, or the call to demanding discipleship. This is a review of the book’s arguments, not of its author’s character. My concern is with what the theological framework the book advances requires the reader to accept, and with what that accepting produces in the people who walk through it.

The three shifts can be set out precisely. Each contains a kernel of something true. Each, on its own, looks like a modest adjustment. Taken together they reshape what the reader holds in their hands when they open the New Testament, who they take to be at the centre of their faith, and what they count as a voice that can speak into the framework from outside it. By the time the practical demands arrive, they feel like inevitable conclusions rather than one author’s proposals.

The three shifts are:

The book states its core aim in Chapter 2, immediately after describing what Jesus accomplished on the cross:

“To make it possible, Jesus thoroughly dealt with sin at the cross so followers could freely enter his resurrection life as part of the new creation. Jesus took our place — separated from God on the cross — so that we could have what he had. His deepest desire for people was for them to be like him: Children who know, love and serve the Father. Forgiven and free people led by the Spirit. This is the main thesis of this book.”

Read on its own, that passage is recognisable as the faith: children who know and love the Father, forgiven and free people led by the Spirit. No Christian would take issue with the aspiration. The question this review pursues is what the book prescribes in order to arrive there, and what the reader must already have accepted before that prescription can feel like the natural path. The three sections that follow examine each of those prior acceptances in turn.

Pillar 1: The Reclassification of the Gospels: “Manuals of Practice”

The first of those prior acceptances concerns what kind of document the reader is being handed.

The book’s central claim is stated early and repeated often:

And:

On first reading, these statements sound reasonable, even exciting. But the more carefully you sit with them, the more you notice that a quiet substitution has taken place, and the terms on which you approach Scripture have shifted without your quite having agreed to it.

Consider what the word “manual” is doing. A manual is a specific kind of document: prescriptive, systematic, and replicable; it tells you what to do and how to do it, not why the thing is what it is or what living with it might mean.

Are they really like that? They are theological narratives: carefully structured accounts of who Jesus is, what God has done through him, and what this means for the world. They contain teaching, and they clearly show Jesus training the Twelve. They also include parables whose meanings are sometimes left ambiguous, actions unique to Jesus’ messianic vocation, and events (supremely the cross and resurrection) that are not “practices” to be replicated but saving acts to be received.

The Gospels are genuinely formative documents. Matthew’s five great discourses are carefully structured to shape a community’s life. Luke-Acts models what faithful mission looks like in practice. They change how people live. Their formative power works, though, precisely because they resist systematisation. They present Jesus in all his complexity: his refusal to fit expectations, his sovereign freedom, his unsettling habit of doing the opposite of what any programme would predict. A manual produces compliance. A formative narrative produces character. The Gospels form disciples not by supplying a method to replicate but by drawing the reader into an encounter with a person who cannot be reduced to one.

When Jesus sends out the Twelve with instructions to “take nothing for the journey — no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt” (Luke 9:3), is this a standing instruction for all Christians? When he feeds five thousand with miraculous bread, is this a practice to be trained in? When he tells a particular rich young man to sell everything, is this a universal command? The answer to all of these is: it depends, and working out what it depends on requires careful, humble interpretation.

The book’s answer is that the reader should apply “common sense” to distinguish what Jesus did that we are meant to imitate from what belonged uniquely to his messianic ministry. This sounds disarmingly reasonable, but the reading that results is anything but common. It is a particular reading, shaped by particular commitments about which parts of Jesus’ life are replicable and which are not, and those commitments are never themselves defended. “Common sense” functions here as a rhetorical device that forecloses exactly the interpretive work that the question demands. What gets presented as the obvious reading of the text is in fact a specific interpretive tradition dressed in the clothes of common sense. This is the work that theologians call hermeneutics , and it cannot be skipped.

Narrative Ventriloquism

One mechanism the book uses to cement this foreclosure requires direct attention. In the introduction, the author prepares the reader for his method by stating he has included rewrites of Gospel and Acts stories, urging the reader to “consider the evidence” . This equation of imaginative, highly interpreted retellings with biblical evidence shapes how the text will be handled throughout.

Across several chapters, the book includes first-person imaginative retellings explicitly labelled ‘REWRITE’. In these sections, the framework’s own proprietary vocabulary is inserted directly into the mouths and minds of biblical characters. At Pentecost, Peter notes that “all of the coaching from Jesus… was clearly paying off” and that he “tried out the Good News on the crowd” . Matthew reflects that “I find that I learn best by simply doing what he says” , while concluding that Jesus “genuinely expects us to live as he lives” .

This is narrative ventriloquism . The author projects a modern, programmatic coaching framework into the minds of the Apostles, and then reads that same framework back out of the text as though the Scriptures themselves had supplied it. The loop is entirely closed. The Gospels are retold in the language of a training manual, and that language is then presented as the definitive proof that the Gospels are a training manual. Contextualising the gospel is something that has been done by many Christians over the centuries, by understanding how the gospel is relevant within different cultures in different times. Paul famously did this himself in Athens. However, these REWRITE sections are quite different, in that they are putting a specific interpretation INTO the gospels.

Speaking of interpretation, the word “manual” short-circuits that entire process. Manuals don’t require interpretation. They require compliance. This might sound like arguing over semantics. It is in fact a fundamental reclassification of the foundational documents of the Christian faith, carrying a practical consequence that is worth stating plainly: if the Gospels are manuals, then someone must interpret them, deciding what forms part of the manual and what does not. The “manual” framing presents this as straightforward, as though no interpretation is required. Fortunately for us, the foreword implies, the author has already done that hard work on our behalf. Yet manuals need trainers. Programmes need programme leaders. And whoever controls the interpretation of the “manual” controls what the manual demands of you.

From Manual to Highway Code

The book sharpens this claim further in Chapter 4, where the Gospels are compared not just to a manual but to the Highway Code. The comparison is worth pausing over, because the Highway Code is a different kind of document from a furniture assembly guide. A manual tells you how to do something. The Highway Code constitutes a legally binding code of conduct: tested for compliance, enforced under sanction, applied without exemption to everyone who uses the road, and authoritative not because you find it persuasive but because the law requires it. Attwood is not merely saying the Gospels contain useful instructions. He is saying they constitute a body of rules to be obeyed under authority. That shift matters: a manual can be consulted or set aside; a code cannot. And if the Gospels are a code, then someone must administer the test, assess the compliance, and determine what the code requires of you. The trainer the framework needs has now become, on the book’s own terms, something closer to an examiner. The question of who holds the examiner’s role (and what happens to those who fail) is not answered in this chapter. It does not need to be. The logic has already supplied the answer.

The Misuse of Scholarship

The book supports this reclassification by appealing to genuine scholarship, and here a pattern begins to emerge that will recur throughout the work. Scholars whose work carries genuine weight in the field are cited, and their conclusions used to support a claim their work does not make. The scholars cited argue that the Gospels are biography and testimony: genres concerned with revealing the character of their subject and witnessing to events. Ancient biographies did frequently include moral examples meant to inspire admiration and imitation; a biography containing moral examples is not the same thing as a procedural training guide. The scholarship is real. The conclusion drawn from it (that the Gospels are therefore “manuals”) is the author’s own interpretive leap, presented as though a scholarly consensus stands behind it. There is not one.

The chapter on the Gospel documents takes this further. Matthew’s Gospel is described as “explicitly designed as a story-form disciple-making manual” . Luke-Acts becomes “a two-piece instruction document” . Each Gospel is progressively narrowed from its actual richness (Matthew as the story of Israel’s fulfilment, Mark as the suffering Messiah, Luke as the Saviour of all peoples, John as the divine Word made flesh) into a single functional category: training material.

It is worth engaging with the strongest form of this claim. Some serious New Testament scholars do argue that Matthew in particular carries a more instructive, catechetical shape than the other Gospels: the five great discourses, the careful arrangement of teaching material. The observation is not a silly one. What those scholars do not say, and would not say, is that Matthew is therefore a “manual” in the sense this book requires. Their argument is that Matthew is catechetical in shape while remaining a theological narrative about Jesus, centred on his identity, death, and resurrection. The catechetical dimension sits inside the narrative; it does not replace it. The framework collapses that distinction, and in collapsing it loses precisely what makes Matthew Matthew.

The Instructor

The book’s preferred title for Jesus (instructor, kathēgētēs ) is drawn from Matthew 23:8–10, and the passage is worth reading in its context. Jesus has spent the chapter rebuking the Pharisees for their love of public honour and their accumulation of titled authority over others. He then says: “do not be called Rabbi, for you have one teacher… nor are you to be called instructor, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah.” The book reads this as validation for its trainer language: Jesus is the one Instructor, and the framework recovers that role for the contemporary church. On its plain reading, the passage is making the opposite argument. Jesus is not licensing the title of instructor-over-others. He is forbidding it. He is the one Instructor precisely so that no one else can claim that position among his followers. The title the book uses to establish Jesus as trainer is taken from the passage that explicitly refuses to extend that title to anyone who comes after him.

Does it really matter what we call them? It matters more than might first appear, because the label shapes what you expect of the text, and in time, how you relate to whoever is running the programme.

Attwood makes the destination of this logic explicit. In Chapter 5 he writes: “Our working definition of church must therefore always include the presence of Jesus… as our ongoing trainer / instructor / master.” The definition of our communities has been reorganised entirely around the training frame. This is not a critic’s inference about where the manual language leads. It is the book’s own conclusion.

Once the Gospels are a manual, the question of who can administer the manual presses immediately. The book does not draw this connection explicitly, but the two shifts operate together regardless: a manual whose life-model could not in principle be executed by a human being would not be a manual at all; it would be a narrative. For the framework’s first shift to lead anywhere, a second shift is required, this time at the level of who Jesus is. The chapter on Christology is where the second shift takes place.

Pillar 2: Jesus as Prototype

If the Gospels are a manual, the life they describe must be one that human beings can in principle reproduce. The framework therefore needs a Jesus whose life is not, in any operationally significant sense, beyond ordinary human reach. Chapter 2 supplies him.

The chapter states its conclusion plainly:

“It appears that he wanted to model a life that other humans could live. He wanted everyone to get to this base camp.”

And:

“His deepest desire for people was for them to be like him: Children who know, love and serve the Father. Forgiven and free people led by the Spirit. This is the main thesis of this book.”

There is something true here. Jesus does call people to follow him. The New Testament does speak of imitating Christ. Paul tells the Corinthians to imitate him as he imitates Christ. No serious Christian denies that Jesus’ life has implications for how his followers live. But “a life that other humans could live” is a stronger claim than following. It is a claim about the kind of life Jesus lived. To make that claim hold, the divine Son of the Gospels must become an attainable template: a prototype, a base camp, a first edition of what every Christian could become. And the question that immediately presses is whether the Gospels themselves will sit still while that reduction is performed.

What the Gospels Themselves Show

When Jesus stands in the synagogue at Nazareth, opens the scroll of Isaiah, and reads from Isaiah 61 (“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” ) and then sits down and says “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” the congregation does not hear a well-trained disciple announcing his readiness for mission. They hear the arrival of the one Isaiah was describing: the one who would inaugurate the great jubilee, break every chain, and usher in the age of God’s restoration. This is Yahweh’s own programme, announced in Yahweh’s own words, fulfilled in the person standing before them. The room goes very quiet for a reason.

The healings that follow carry the same weight. When the blind receive sight and the lame walk, when lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, when the dead are raised: these are not impressive acts of a Spirit-empowered healer operating at the edge of human capacity. They are the specific signs Isaiah 35 promised would mark the age of God’s personal arrival: the desert blooming, the ransomed returning, the ears of the deaf unstopped. When John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask “Are you the one who is to come?” Jesus answers in Isaiah’s own language. The answer is not “I am further along the same path.” The answer is: these things are happening because I am here.

When Jesus tells a paralysed man that his sins are forgiven, the scribes are theologically correct to ask “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They have understood what is being claimed. Jesus responds not by correcting their logic but by demonstrating it: healing the man so they may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to do what only God does. When he stills the storm on the Sea of Galilee, the disciples’ terrified question (‘Who is this, that even the winds and the waves obey him?’ ) has an Old Testament answer that any synagogue-formed Jew would recognise instantly: Yahweh, who alone commands the sea (Psalm 107:29), who alone was present when the waters were given their boundaries (Job 38:8-11). When he claims, in the court of the Sanhedrin, that they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, he is invoking Daniel 7’s figure who receives dominion, glory, and a kingdom from the Ancient of Days himself, a claim so audacious that the high priest tears his robes.

Before Abraham was, he says, I am .

N.T. Wright, whose work Attwood himself cites approvingly, has argued at length that the Gospels present Jesus as enacting the return of Israel’s God to Zion: the new exodus, the long-promised arrival of the divine shepherd to gather the scattered flock, the inauguration of the kingdom that the prophets had announced in Israel’s own name and in God’s own person. The Twelve are not a small-group model. They are the reconstituted tribes of Israel, gathered around the one who embodies and enacts what Israel had been waiting for. When Jesus cleanses the temple, he is not reforming an institution. He is enacting Malachi 3:1: the Lord coming suddenly to his temple. Arriving, that is, at his own house.

This is what the Gospels contain. Not a prototype. Not a base camp. The testimony of people who watched the Creator of the world acting in person within his own creation: naming sins forgiven, commanding the sea, claiming a name no man can claim, healing it, rescuing it. To find a replicable training programme inside these documents is not to let them speak for themselves. It is to bring a prior commitment so heavy that it can absorb Luke 4 and emerge still talking about stages and competencies. The Gospels resist that reading at every turn. The framework needs Jesus to be a Spirit-empowered prototype. The Jesus the Gospels actually describe forgives sin, stills seas, and says I am.

The Reduction Performed

The book carries through that reduction across a handful of plainly stated sentences. They are worth reading in sequence, because the cumulative effect is what produces the framework’s foundation.

“Borrowing John Calvin’s explanation, we must assume that some of his eternal attributes were at that time ‘in repose’; temporarily paused.”

“God the Son was for that time not omnipresent; he was limited to a human body living in Israel. What may be more surprising was the self-limiting of his omniscience and omnipotence.”

“The teaching, many healings, exorcisms and miracles were not flowing out of Christ’s inherent divinity, rather they were initiated and empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit.”

That last sentence is the one to sit with. It is saying, in plain English, that Jesus’ teaching, his power, his miracles came not from his being God but from the Holy Spirit working through him as a human being. The divine nature is officially affirmed elsewhere in the chapter. In the actual ministry described here, it has been treated as inactive. What remains is a Spirit-empowered man, perfectly yielded: a first edition of what every Christian could become.

This is not a critique that needs to come from a liberal direction to land. The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (published by one of the most theologically conservative evangelical institutions in the world) has issued stark warnings about precisely this kind of formulation¹, in which the Spirit’s role in Jesus’ ministry is elevated to the point where his own active divine nature is sidelined. The early church, and the ecumenical creeds that followed, came to a settled mind on what is at stake when Jesus is treated as a Spirit-empowered human rather than the divine Son acting from his own eternal nature, and they wrote their conclusions into the historic confession of the church for reasons that were as pastoral as they were doctrinal. To question what Chapter 2 of this book is doing is not to depart from evangelical conviction. It is to stand with its centre.

The book cites Calvin and Owen in support of its position. Both are misused. Calvin’s actual theology insisted that Christ’s divine attributes remained fully operative throughout the incarnation, never paused or set in repose; the miracles of Jesus, in Calvin’s account, are the works of the divine Son acting through his human nature, not the works of a Spirit-empowered human acting alone. Owen did teach that the Spirit was the immediate agent of much of Christ’s earthly ministry, but he located the start of that ministry at the conception, not at Jesus’ baptism at Jordan as Attwood claims (presumably because the Holy Spirit indwelling since Jesus’ conception is not replicable), and he insisted under a Trinitarian principle that the Spirit’s work in Christ’s human nature was the form of the Son’s own divine action, not an alternative to it. The book lifts isolated sentences from both about the Spirit’s role and ignores the foundational commitments that, in their own systems, made those sentences mean something quite different. The historical authorities are cited; what they were arguing for is not engaged.

Nothing in this critique denies the full reality of Jesus’ humanity. The historic Christian confession has always insisted that the incarnation was genuine: that Jesus grew in wisdom (Luke 2:52), did not know the hour of his return (Mark 13:32), was tempted in every way (Hebrews 4:15), and experienced hunger, grief, and death. The mystery of the incarnation is not that God appeared to be human while remaining untouched by human limitation. It is that the eternal Son lived a fully human life (with all the vulnerability that entails) without his divine nature being suspended. These two realities are held together, not traded off against each other. The concern with the framework under review is not that it takes Jesus’ humanity too seriously. It is that it secures his replicability by rendering his divine nature operationally inactive; and that is a very different kind of claim, with very different consequences for who can claim his authority.

What This Does to the Cross

Diminishing Jesus diminishes the atonement. The cross passage already quoted in the framing section rewards a second reading with this lens in place. The cross is “thoroughly dealt with sin… so that followers could freely enter his resurrection life.” The grammar is conditional throughout: “to make it possible,” “so that we could have what he had.” The cross removes the obstacle of sin. The goal the passage names (imitation, becoming like Jesus, living his life) is the “main thesis.” The atonement has not been denied. It has been repositioned as the enabling mechanism for a programme that exists to serve a different end.

In Chapter 2 the resurrection appears exactly once, and only as a qualitative descriptor for the life the disciple now gets to live: “resurrection life as part of the new creation.” The empty tomb as the hinge of history is not in view. Justification and imputed righteousness are absent from Chapter 2 entirely; the operative phrases are “forgiven and free” : the language of obstacle-clearance rather than of transferred standing before God. The cross produces a blank slate. The programme fills it.

In Chapter 5, Attwood states the replacement mechanism plainly: “Obedience-based discipleship is how Christians are transformed.” The cross has migrated from the centre of the solar system to the launch pad. What occupies the centre, in its place, is the disciple’s progressive acquisition of Christlike competencies under a trainer’s guidance. This is the book’s own stated theology, in its own words.

The Double Erasure of Gethsemane

The clearest textual proof of what the framework is doing comes at the place where Jesus is at his most human, in another of the book’s REWRITE sections, here applied to Luke 22.

The Gospels show Gethsemane as the night before the crucifixion in which Jesus is in agony so acute that he sweats blood, falling on his face, pleading with the Father to remove the cup. Luke gives us the trembling, bleeding, terrified man whose obedience is wrung from him through anguish. The picture is one of the great scandals of Christian faith and one of its great consolations: the eternal Son, in his human nature, bearing what no other human will ever bear, and not being spared the cost.

The book’s ‘REWRITE’ of Luke 22 cannot leave that picture standing. It provides Jesus with a different interior monologue: “It wasn’t affecting me of course; my Father and I are immune to the pathetic noises our enemy makes… I’ll let darkness reign, for now.”

The agony is gone. The pleading is gone. The blood is gone. The man on his face in the garden has been replaced by a serene operator overseeing a complex operation, untouched by the weight of what he is about to bear, filing the night in Gethsemane under controlled descent. What the Gospels present as the deepest disclosure of the incarnation has been overwritten as the strategic poise of a programme director.

This is the framework’s theological hinge in two single passages. To make Jesus replicable, his active divinity has to go. To keep him replicable when the Gospels show him bleeding and afraid, his raw humanity has to go too. The framework loses the active divinity of the Son of God, and it loses the genuine, suffering humanity of the man from Nazareth. What remains is a bulletproof strategist who is neither the Christ of the historic creeds nor the Christ of Luke’s account. This is what happens, on the page, when you force Jesus into a coaching paradigm. Two erasures, a few hundred words apart, working together. The figure that results fits the programme. The figure of the Gospels does not.

It would be possible, at this point, to retreat into systematic theology and argue across centuries about what Calvin meant by what and what the early councils were protecting against. The Gospels do not require it. The argument is settled at the door of the garden. The Jesus the framework needs is not the Jesus the Gospels supply.

The Ceiling and the Ladder

What hangs on this is not abstract, and it is not academic. It is the question of what kind of authority a contemporary church leader can, in principle, claim.

The historic Christian confession has always functioned, among other things, as a ceiling. To say that Jesus is the unique, eternal Son (fully God and fully man, two natures united in one person without confusion or division) places ground above every human leader’s head that cannot be reached. A leader may be Spirit-filled, gifted, wise, even Christlike in character. The qualitative difference between the divine Son and any human being means there is authority no leader can claim, obedience no leader can warrant, place no leader can occupy. The ceiling holds because the difference between Christ and his servants is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind.

Once Jesus is reduced to a Spirit-empowered prototype, the ceiling is gone. Not because anyone has formally removed it, but because the ground that held it in place has dissolved. A sufficiently Spirit-empowered leader now occupies the same structural position Jesus is described as occupying: a human being through whom the Spirit works, further along the same path, administering the same programme. The gap between Christ and the leader is no longer qualitative. It is quantitative. A gap of degree is not a ceiling. It is a ladder.

The book makes the substitution explicit. In Chapter 5: “Having the Holy Spirit was exactly like having Jesus, just not in the flesh.” On a familiar reading, the sentence sounds like ordinary Christian conviction: the Spirit continues Jesus’ presence in the world, Christians have always said something of the kind. But it slides past a distinction the New Testament holds carefully. Jesus says he will send the Spirit from the Father (John 15:26, 16:7). The Spirit’s role is not to deliver Jesus’ contents internally but to unite believers to the risen Christ himself: to draw them into living relationship with the Jesus who is now ascended, reigning at the Father’s right hand. The Spirit witnesses to Christ, glorifies Christ, binds believers to Christ. He does not stand in for Christ. Once the Spirit is treated as a substitute rather than a bond, the role previously unique to Christ becomes the role of whoever the Spirit most visibly appears to work through.

The reasons the church has held to a high view of Christ across two millennia are pastoral as much as doctrinal. The fifth-century definition of the historic Christian confession was not the work of bureaucrats protecting institutional turf. It was the work of pastors who had already watched, in real communities, what happens when Christ’s active divinity is set aside in order to make his life a workable template. They had seen the gap between Christ and sufficiently impressive leaders close. They had seen obedience flow toward human figures who claimed to operate where Christ operated. They wrote the boundary that protects the gospel from that distortion in precise, technical language because the cost of getting it wrong was not theoretical. It was congregations.

Defending the historic confession of Christ is not, in this context, an academic exercise. It is one of the principal mechanisms by which ordinary Christians are protected from leaders who would, with the best of intentions, occupy ground that belongs to Christ alone. The companion piece in this review documents what leaders operating without that ceiling are licensed to do. The point here is prior: the ceiling was lowered not through a dramatic denial of orthodox Christianity but through a series of plain sentences across one chapter of one book: sentences that, taken together, place the divine attributes “in repose,” locate the engine of Jesus’ ministry in the Spirit rather than in his being God, and produce a Christ whom a Spirit-empowered contemporary leader can, in principle, fully resemble.

Two shifts have now been described. The Gospels read as a manual to be administered. Jesus stands as a Spirit-empowered prototype whose life is in principle reproducible. With both shifts in place, the reader holds a manual that must be administered and a prototype whose life must be replicable, but has not yet been given a reason to doubt whether any of this is correct. What the third shift does is remove the resources by which the question might have been raised.

Pillar 3: Disqualify every external check

Chapter 8 of this book does something that deserves careful attention before any practical application is considered. In a sustained argument about why the church looks nothing like Jesus and the Twelve, the author attributes the historic, institutional shape of Christianity to what he calls “a key satanic strategy for centuries” : a sustained effort to turn the Jesus movement into a recognisable religion, keeping it “in a more controllable box.” This is not a criticism of specific abuses or particular corruptions. It is a structural diagnosis of the entire inherited form of the church, and it is applied without exception. The author states plainly: “From the Roman Catholics to the Liberal wing, from the theologically reformed to the most Charismatic, the same issues are glaring.”

Every tradition. Every stream. Two thousand years of accumulated theological reasoning, conciliar decision, pastoral experience, and lived Christian community: assessed, and found to be the product of a centuries-long satanic strategy.

How Reform Has Always Worked

The confidence of that claim is worth sitting with. Not to dismiss it reflexively: the church has always confessed that it stands under judgement, that its institutions are fallible, that the principalities and powers operate in the world including through religious structures. The New Testament says so. The Reformers said so. Anglican formularies say so. That much is orthodox territory. The question is whether what Attwood is doing belongs to that tradition of internal critique, or whether it is something categorically different.

Classical reform movements within Christianity have always engaged the tradition they criticised. The Reformers were patristics scholars. Luther’s argument was with Augustine as much as with Rome, and it was an argument conducted with close reading and detailed reasoning. Calvin built his Institutes on a thousand years of theological conversation. Wesley knew his church history. Owen has over 1000 pages writing about the Holy Spirit alone.  Even the more radical Reformation movements (the Anabaptists, the early Quakers) engaged the tradition they rejected, usually by arguing that it had departed from something it had previously held. They brought the tradition’s own resources to bear against the tradition’s failures. They knew why things had developed as they had, and they engaged that development on its own terms.

Attwood does not do this. The 3rd and 4th century shift from home-based church to building-centred religion is described, attributed to satanic influence and Constantinian compromise, and set aside. The theological reasoning that produced Chalcedon is not engaged. The development of ordered ministry is not engaged. The liturgical tradition is not engaged. The Reformed insistence on preaching as the ordinary means of grace is not engaged. The charismatic tradition’s own internal debates about ecclesiology are not engaged. None of these traditions are examined on their own terms, weighed against Scripture, and found wanting. They are diagnosed as structurally compromised and bypassed.

The book frames its own project, in the Introduction, in self-consciously restorationist terms: a Josianic rediscovery, in the spirit of 2 Kings 22, where the high priest Hilkiah finds the Book of the Law in the temple and Josiah’s reforms follow. The analogy is worth taking seriously, because it does not quite carry what it is being asked to carry. Josiah was not dismissing the tradition he stood within. He was recovering what Israel itself had received and lost: the Mosaic covenant, within Israel’s own scriptural and covenantal life. The reform he led was the tradition turning back to its own deepest sources, on the tradition’s own terms. Attwood’s posture is different in kind. He is not recovering a tradition that has been forgotten within itself; he has diagnosed the entire post-apostolic tradition as the product of a satanic strategy and is offering his own framework in its place. The implied claim is a striking one: that two millennia of theological reasoning, conciliar deliberation, and lived Christian community have been so thoroughly compromised that the recovery point lies, instead, with a reading produced from within the late-twentieth-century missional stream. Whether that claim is intended in those terms or not, it is the claim the analogy commits the book to, and it is rather more confident than the Josiah comparison supports.

What the Bypass Costs

This matters directly for the Christological argument above. Chalcedon (whose pastoral origins were set out in the preceding section) addressed exactly the formulation this book employs. Bypassing it does not merely dismiss an institutional decision; it forecloses the accumulated reasoning that worked through this specific problem, at the moment the reader most needs access to it.

The same logic applies to the practices the book dismisses. Building-centred worship, ordered ministry, sacramental regularity, the shape of a Sunday service: these are not the residue of a satanic strategy to domesticate the church. They are theological responses to real theological problems: how to sustain faithful Christian community across generations; how to form children in the faith; how to prevent the community’s life from depending entirely on the charisma of a single leader; how to ensure that the word and sacraments remain accessible regardless of who is currently impressive in the pulpit. These practices have been refined and reformed across centuries, often by people who were more theologically serious and pastorally experienced than any contemporary discipleship methodology has yet produced. They deserve engagement, not dismissal.

A Tradition That Cannot See Itself

There is a deeper problem, though, and it runs beneath the spiritual warfare framing rather than within it.

Attwood’s claim is that he is reading the Gospels as they actually are, letting the texts speak for themselves, recovering what has been lost. I think this is a classic example of how it is impossible to read Scripture in a way devoid of one’s own tradition. The very framework he brings to the Gospels (his assumptions about what texts are for, what counts as evidence, how to weight narrative against epistle, what “replication” means as a category) is itself a tradition. It has named architects and a documented genealogy: the Vineyard movement under John Wimber, with its functional pneumatism and its model of ministry-as-empowerment; the apostolic-prophetic and missional reframings developed by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost; the discipleship-system codified by Mike Breen through the LifeShapes and Up-In-Out grids; and, in Britain, the network now carried forward by Kairos Connexion, the New Wine constituency, and the smaller 3DM-derivative churches that have inherited the architecture. The framework presents itself as the recovery of primitive Christianity. It is recognisably one particular stream within recent evangelicalism, with conferences, consultancies, training materials, and an inherited vocabulary of huddles, missional communities, “Family on Mission” and the rest. He cannot see it as a tradition because he has dismissed every other tradition as historically compromised. His own tradition has become invisible precisely because all the others have been marked as suspect. He is not reading the text afresh. He is reading the text through a tradition that does not know it is one.

This is non-trivial. Every exegetical step the book takes (the classification of the Gospels as manuals, the kenotic framework applied to Jesus’s earthly ministry, the six progressive aspects of discipleship, the diagnostic grids) comes loaded with prior commitments that belong to a particular stream of late twentieth-century charismatic missional thinking. These commitments were not derived from a fresh reading of the Gospels. They were in place before the reading began. The book then performs a reading that confirms them, and presents that reading as the recovery of what Scripture has always been saying. The framework validates itself through the very text it has already shaped the interpretation of. The text is but a mirror.

A single verse illustrates how the process works. Chapter 9 argues that the church displays God’s “manifold wisdom” to the principalities and powers by showcasing “how God chooses, saves, teaches and trains.” The verse is Ephesians 3:10. Paul’s “manifold wisdom” (the mystery hidden for ages and now revealed) is, in Wright’s reading and the wider scholarly consensus, the multi-ethnic unity of Jew and Gentile gathered into one body: the reconciliation of ancient enemies, sharing a common life in Christ, the social miracle that no human institution could have engineered. That is what defeats the powers. That is what Paul says the cosmos is watching. The framework reads the same verse and finds a showcase for its discipleship methodology.

By Chapter 9, the framework has closed off every tradition-resourced response the reader might reach for. The book attributes their denominational heritage, whatever it is, to satanic strategy, without exception. Watch the timeline of what is being discarded without engagement. It throws away the charismatic movement. It dismisses the inheritance of classical evangelical theology. It bypasses the Reformers. It ignores Aquinas. It steps right over Augustine and the formal creeds of the early church. It sets aside two millennia of pastoral wisdom in favour of a reading it calls tradition-free, which is the most tradition-bound posture it takes.

But strip it back even further. Look past the councils, right back to the earliest possible three-word proclamation our first Christian brothers and sisters shared: Christ is Lord. Once the framework has finished its work (flattening the Saviour into a replicable prototype and fusing the trainer’s methodology with divine command), I am not even sure a reader of this book is left with the comfort of that foundational confession. The reader has nowhere to stand except inside the framework, and assessing what they are about to be asked is harder than it should be. That difficulty follows so predictably from the framework’s own logic that, whether by design or consequence, it serves the system’s survival perfectly.

What the Appendix Reveals

There is a final detail worth noting, because it confirms in a single textual gesture what the analysis above has had to argue at length. The book closes by directing readers to a list of resources for further engagement. Among them, in Appendix 11, are 3DM and Kairos Connexion: the named institutional carriers of the discipleship methodology the book has just presented as a tradition-free reading of the Gospels. The reader who has been told, across nine chapters, to set aside two millennia of accumulated Christian tradition is delivered, on the closing pages, to a particular network of churches with its own conferences, consultancies, training materials, and licensed practitioners. That delivery is, by definition, the operational meaning of any tradition. The framework that has dismissed all traditions has its own. It would be more candid simply to name it as such: to say, plainly, that this is one stream within recent charismatic evangelicalism, advancing a particular reading of the Gospels and inviting the reader to consider it. That kind of named, situated invitation belongs to the ordinary furniture of Christian conversation. Readers can weigh it, accept what is helpful, and decline what is not. What the book offers instead is the recovery of what every other tradition has missed, delivered through a network the reader is invited to join. The two are not the same kind of invitation.

Careful, tradition-resourced engagement with frameworks like this one matters as a pastoral act. This review is one contribution to that; the hope is that more will come from the wider church, from people with different vantage points, different relationships to these communities, and their own reasons to say, on the record, what they see.

By the close of the third shift, the framework’s conditions are in place.  

The Gospels read as manuals to be administered.

Jesus stands as a Spirit-empowered prototype whose life is in principle reproducible.  

The wider Christian tradition’s resources for assessment have become inadmissible at the door.  

None of these is presented as a controversial proposal. Each is offered as a recovery of something earlier and plainer than what the church has held. The concern of this article has been prior: that by the time the asks arrive, the theological tools that might have measured them have already been taken away.

Conclusion

I want to finish with my own experience.

I have been engaging with this book for some time now. When I first read it, my reaction was not primarily intellectual. It was discomfort. The language was recognisably biblical, and that was part of the difficulty. I could not immediately name what troubled me, only that the faith being described felt narrower, more managed, and more constricting than the life with God I had known. It felt less like an invitation into the freedom of the Spirit and more like being fitted for a particular way of doing church, one I would then be told was simply obedience to Jesus.

It has taken careful work to understand where that discomfort came from. These articles are, in the end, one man’s reading of one book and the framework behind it. I do not claim that every reader will feel what I felt, nor that every church using this language will produce the same harm. I welcome correction, challenge, and anything important I may have missed.

But I also want to write for those who may have had the same experience: who heard the language of discipleship, obedience, mission, family, training, and surrender, and found themselves unsettled without quite knowing why. My conclusion is that there is, within this framework, a form of bondage that can be difficult to see precisely because it speaks our language so well.

That is why I have written these pieces as a matter of Christian conscience: not to attack discipleship, not to dismiss demanding obedience, and not to deny the need for costly formation, but to defend the freedom Christ gives to ordinary believers from any system that would quietly place a custodian between them and Him.

Part two of this series explores the practical demands of the framework, and the theology that follows. It is available here: The Theology the Practices Demand.

References

About Daniel Caerwyn

Daniel Caerwyn is a pseudonym – an investigative writer exploring systemic causes of organisational dysfunction. He writes with commitment to the Church and compassion for those within it.

Expertise:

Spiritual Abuse High-Control Systems Leadership Dynamics Safeguarding Ecclesial Reform