Assignment 1 of 3

Course 2, Assignment 1 of 3

The Frame You Inherited

What You Are About To Do

This is the first of three assignments in Course 2. You are about to read the course textbook, The Scope, pick one of three worked scenarios presented later in this sheet, and perform on the page the sorting move the book has been teaching you. You will produce a written paper of approximately one thousand to twelve hundred words and a recorded video of ten minutes, plus or minus two. Your instructor will then send you three challenge questions, which you will answer in a second recorded video.

The reading is substantial but manageable. The book is five chapters walking a single argument: the faith you inherited arrived wrapped in packaging, and some of what came in the wrapping is not the faith at all. The scenarios below are worked out in enough detail that a careful reader can follow what is happening and then perform the move themselves on the same claim. Plan to spend several sittings on the textbook before you turn to this sheet, and several more sittings on your own writing once you have picked the scenario you want to work with.

Your Reading

Read the entire book, The Scope, before you begin work on this assignment. All five chapters. Do not skip the ones that look like they are about something you already know.

The book is five chapters walking through one sustained move: before you can see the faith, you have to learn to see what arrived with it. Chapter 1 names the problem using Martin Luther, whose whole critique was that the Church of his day had started confusing its packaging for the faith. Chapter 2 takes a single doctrine that most Christians assume is biblical, the immortal soul, and shows that its shape came from Plato, not Scripture. Chapter 3 names what the traditions actually share, underneath their packaging. Chapter 4 gives you the architectural tools to read Scripture for its structure rather than its surface, the seven motifs. Chapter 5 shows the same move operating at the word level, collapsing the English word sin back into the five Greek words it is supposed to carry.

You are not being asked to agree with everything the book says. You are being asked to have read it carefully enough that you can work with the move it is teaching. The move is what you will demonstrate in this assignment. The specific arguments in Chapters 2 and 5 are illustrations of the move, not substitutes for having practiced it yourself.

When you have finished the book, return to this sheet and read the three scenarios below. Pick one. Then write your paper.

What This Assignment Is For

You have just read a book whose whole argument is that every Christian has inherited a frame, and the frame is not identical to the faith. The frame is how the faith arrived. It came from your family, your tradition, your church, the books you were given, the culture you grew up in. Inside the frame, some of what you received is the faith, shared across Christianity for two thousand years. Some is the particular packaging your tradition wraps the faith in, real and often good but not universal. And some is residue, material that came from elsewhere and got attached to the faith so tightly that people cannot tell it was ever separate.

Your job in this assignment is not to evaluate whether the book is right. Your job is to perform the sorting move the book has been teaching, on a worked example, so that the move enters you rather than staying on the page. A student who has read the book and says "that was interesting" has not done the course. A student who has read the book and then performs, on their own, what the book was showing them how to do, has done the course.

The sorting move is what the book does in Chapter 2 with the doctrine of the immortal soul and what it does in Chapter 5 with the five Greek words. It asks you, when you come to a claim you have inherited about Christianity, to sort what is in the claim into three categories. What is the faith. What is packaging that belongs to your particular tradition. What is residue from elsewhere. When you do that, a consistent thing happens. Claims you had held as Christian essentials turn out to contain genuine faith, genuine packaging, and genuine residue, and you can see which is which, and you did not see this before.

The three scenarios below are three well-known claims most Christians have inherited where this sort is possible. Each scenario shows you the move on that claim so you can see how it works. Pick one. Then write your paper on the same claim, in your own voice.

The Three Scenarios

Scenario 1: "You Have an Immortal Soul That Goes to Heaven When You Die"

The frame as you have carried it

You have heard it at funerals. "She is in heaven now." "He has gone to be with the Lord." "Her soul is at peace." You have seen it on sympathy cards. You have heard it in the bedtime prayer: "If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." You have seen it in movies where a character dies and appears shortly after as a glowing figure who walks through walls. You have heard preachers describe heaven as the place believers go when they die, and have heard some of those same preachers never mention resurrection at all.

The claim, stated plainly: every human being has an immortal soul. At death, the body dies but the soul lives on. The believer's soul goes to heaven. The unbeliever's soul goes to hell. The whole drama of Christian salvation is about the destination of your soul after your body is done with it.

This is one of the most widely held beliefs in modern Western Christianity. It is also almost entirely absent from Scripture in the form the gloss presents it.

What the frame contains in its original setting

Read 1 Corinthians 15. The entire chapter. Paul is writing to the church in Corinth, responding to believers who had started denying the resurrection of the dead. Paul's response is not that the soul continues on without needing resurrection. Paul's response is that if there is no resurrection, the whole Christian hope falls. "If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins." Paul does not offer the Corinthians the disembodied soul as a backup hope. He treats the loss of resurrection as the loss of everything.

The rest of the chapter describes the resurrection. A seed is sown. A body rises. The body that rises is different from the one that was sown, glorified, but it is still a body. "It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." Paul does not say the soul departs and the body is discarded. He says the body itself is transformed.

Read the end of the chapter. "We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet." The change happens at the trumpet, the end of the age. Not at death. At the resurrection. The believer who has died is "sleeping" until then, in Paul's language.

Read Revelation 21. John's vision is not of disembodied souls arriving in a heavenly realm. It is of a new heavens and a new earth, with the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven to the earth. "Look! God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them." The hope is divine presence with redeemed humanity, in a renewed creation, with resurrected bodies. Not escape from the earth. Restoration of it.

Read the book. Chapter 2 has done most of this work for you. The book shows that the immortal-soul picture was already foreign to the New Testament writers and was brought in from Plato by church fathers who had been trained in Greek philosophy before they became Christians. Plato had argued that the human soul was naturally immortal, trapped in the body like a prisoner in a cell, and at death returned to its proper home in the realm of the forms. The early church inherited this picture from Plato, baptized it with some Christian vocabulary, and wrapped it around a biblical hope that had a completely different shape. The soul, in Plato, is the important part and the body is the problem. In Scripture, the body is part of the person and will be raised.

The sorting performed

The Scope teaches you to sort the contents of an inherited claim into three categories. Run the sort on this one.

The faith, shared across Christianity for two thousand years, is that there is life beyond death, that the dead will be raised, that God does not abandon His people when they die, and that Jesus' own bodily resurrection is the pattern of what is coming for His people. Every major tradition holds this. Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican, Baptist, Pentecostal. The faith is the resurrection hope.

The packaging that belongs to particular traditions includes the specific ways each tradition talks about what happens between a believer's death and the resurrection at the end of the age. Catholic tradition has purgatory as a purifying state for some believers. Orthodox tradition has its own careful language about the departed. Protestant traditions often speak of an "intermediate state" where the believer is "with the Lord" awaiting resurrection. These are not foreign to the faith. They are different ways of filling in a space Scripture does not say much about. They are packaging. Real, legitimate, often thoughtful, but not the universal faith.

The residue is the claim that your soul is immortal by nature, that the main Christian hope is your soul going to heaven when you die, and that the body is something you are escaping from rather than something that will be raised. This is Plato dressed in Christian clothes. It is what Chapter 2 is showing you. It survived two thousand years inside the frame of Christianity because it sounded enough like the faith that nobody stopped to pull it out. But when you pull it out, a cleaner biblical hope is there underneath.

What becomes visible

When the sort lands, several things become visible.

The first is that the Christian hope is more robust than the gloss. The gloss says your soul goes somewhere when your body dies. The text says God raises the dead. The gloss leaves the body behind. The text redeems the body. The gloss makes the Christian hope compatible with a Platonic metaphysics. The text commits Christianity to the goodness of creation and the seriousness of embodiment.

The second is that funeral language becomes harder to say without qualification. "She is in heaven now" is not exactly wrong, in a traditional packaging, but it is not the center of what the Christian should say. The center is that she will be raised. The packaging puts the departed with the Lord in the intermediate state. The faith puts her in the resurrection at the last day. The residue is what makes people think the first is the whole story.

The third is the shape of the sorting move you just performed. You did not need Plato. You did not need a seminary degree. You needed to read what Scripture actually says about the Christian hope, notice that it is about resurrection and not disembodied existence, and recognize that a different picture, one with a different philosophical origin, has been sitting inside the frame of your inherited Christianity for so long that you had mistaken it for the faith. That is the sorting move. The gloss's survival depended on you never performing it. The moment you did, the frame came apart into its three categories.

Scenario 2: "Sin Is a List of Wrong Things You Did"

The frame as you have carried it

You learned it in Sunday school. You learned it if you grew up outside the church too, from the culture that learned it from the church. Sin is a category of bad acts. Lying, stealing, cheating, cruelty, the obvious things. Maybe, depending on your tradition, a longer list that included things like looking at the wrong pictures, saying the wrong words, drinking the wrong drinks, skipping the right meetings. You could commit sins. You could avoid them. Your spiritual life was largely a matter of the ratio. Fewer sins on your list, better standing. More sins on your list, worse.

The claim, stated plainly: sin is a set of bad behaviors. A good Christian is someone whose list is short. Repentance is admitting items on the list. Confession is naming them. Grace is having them forgiven. The whole Christian life is organized around a moral ledger, and the ledger is basically what your tradition says it is.

What the frame contains in its original setting

Read Romans 7, slowly. Paul is writing to the believers in Rome. He is describing his own inner condition, as a man who has tried to follow the law and found himself unable to. "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing." Paul is not describing a list of sins he committed yesterday and can avoid today by trying harder. He is describing something deeper than a list. He is describing a condition. The gap between wanting to hit the mark and hitting it is what he names. The gap is not closed by better effort. The gap is what he is trying to explain exists at all.

Read Chapter 5 of The Scope. The book shows that the single English word sin is carrying at least five Greek words, each doing different work. Hamartia is missing the mark, the aim being off. Opheilema is debt, what the missed aim leaves behind. Anomia is lawlessness, the pattern the missed aim forms. Paraptoma is trespass, the stumble off the path. Poneros is evil, what the condition becomes when it hardens all the way through. These are not five synonyms. They are five faces of a single reality, and the reality is a built-in human condition.

Read Romans 5:12, where Paul says sin entered the world through one man. The picture is of a structural problem, not a catalog. Sin is something that humans are in, not just something humans do. The doing comes out of the being in.

The framework the New Testament is working with is not that sin is a list you want to keep short. The framework is that sin is a condition the human race is in, and the condition is structural, and it shows up in acts because the condition produces acts. Fixing the acts does not fix the condition. The condition requires a different kind of answer than trying harder.

The sorting performed

Run the sort on the inherited claim.

The faith, shared across Christianity, is that humans are in a condition we did not choose and cannot escape by effort, that this condition shows up in acts but is not identical to the acts, that every person is under it, and that Christ is the response to it. Every major tradition holds this. The particular language varies. The diagnosis is shared.

The packaging that belongs to particular traditions is all the concrete ways your specific community catalogs, confesses, and responds to sin. The Catholic confessional with its categories of mortal and venial. The Protestant altar call with its specific invitation. The Eastern Orthodox ascetical tradition with its precise naming of the passions. The revival tradition's personal testimony language. These are how traditions package the shared diagnosis into practice. They are not the faith, and they are not residue. They are the particular furniture your tradition has built to live with the diagnosis.

The residue is the flattening of sin into "bad behaviors on a list." It has at least two sources. The first is what Chapter 5 is showing you, the English translation history that collapsed five Greek words into one and lost the structural shape in the process. The second is Enlightenment moralism, which imported into Christianity a picture of the moral life as a behavior audit, and which still shapes how much of Western Christianity talks about sin. The residue makes sin manageable. The text makes sin fatal. The text is right, and the residue has been hiding that.

What becomes visible

The structural nature of the problem becomes visible. You cannot try harder out of a condition. Discipline cannot repair an aim. The gloss left you with homework you could never finish. The text leaves you with a diagnosis that requires a different kind of response than effort.

The Christian answer becomes intelligible in a way the gloss made it not. If sin is a list, the answer is a stricter list, better enforced. If sin is a condition, the answer has to reach the condition. The text's answer, which is Christ doing something structural, lands correctly against the text's diagnosis and lands oddly against the gloss's. The residue did not just misdescribe the problem. It also made the solution harder to see.

And again, the shape of the sorting move. You did not need Greek class. You needed to read Chapter 5 carefully, notice that the English word is carrying structural freight it was never designed for, and recognize that the moral-ledger picture you inherited is not the biblical picture. The structural picture was there the whole time. The English word had been covering it.

Scenario 3: "Reading the Bible Is About Finding Verses That Apply to You Today"

The frame as you have carried it

You have seen the verse-of-the-day on your phone. You have seen the devotional books with a verse at the top of each page and a short reflection underneath. You have been in a small group where someone said, "what I think this verse means to me is..." You have heard a friend say, "the Lord gave me this verse today." You have done the finger-drop method, opening the Bible randomly and reading whatever sentence your eye fell on. You have been told to memorize verses for hard moments, as a spiritual equivalent of first aid.

The claim, stated plainly: the Bible is a collection of sentences, and the goal of reading the Bible is to find the sentences that apply to your life today. The text is an archive of personal promises, warnings, and encouragements, and the reader's job is to find the ones that speak to their current situation. Private application is the point. Structural reading is for scholars.

If you took Course 1, you have already encountered this frame in miniature. The close-read of Jeremiah 29:11, or of any of the other passages, was resistance to exactly this habit. The habit extracts a verse from its setting and reads it as a personal message. The close-read puts the verse back in its setting and reads it as what it actually was. Course 1 taught you to do this on specific passages. Course 2 asks you to see the whole frame the habit is coming out of.

What the frame contains in its original setting

Read the Bible as the thing it actually is. It is a library. Sixty-six books, forty authors, more than a thousand years of composition, written in three languages, in multiple genres, addressed to specific communities, collected across centuries.

Chapter 4 of The Scope is doing the work here. The book argues that Scripture has structural motifs that run across it, seven of them, and that these motifs are what the Bible is actually organized around. Causal descent. Artisan craftsmanship. Emanation. Chaos combat. Speech. Cosmic temple. All in all. The motifs are how the text hangs together. They are not what a verse-of-the-day app is interested in, because a verse-of-the-day app is interested in sentences, not structures.

Read what Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3. "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." Paul is addressing a student of Scripture. He is describing the usefulness of the whole. He is not offering a verse-hunting method. He is describing a text that forms a person across all of it, over time, through careful reading.

Read how Jesus reads Scripture. On the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, He explains Himself to two disciples by starting "with Moses and all the Prophets" and interpreting "in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." He does not hand them a verse. He walks them through the structure. The resurrection reveals what the whole text had been doing the whole time.

The sorting performed

Run the sort on this claim.

The faith, shared across Christianity, is that Scripture is God's word to His people, that it has authority, that it addresses readers across time, that God speaks through it, and that it is meant to be read, studied, memorized, meditated on, and lived. Every major tradition holds this. Catholics and Orthodox with their lectionaries. Protestants with their study Bibles. The common ground is enormous. The Bible is not a scholars' book, and no tradition treats it that way.

The packaging is all the specific reading practices each tradition has developed. The Catholic and Orthodox lectionary cycles that read the whole church through Scripture in specific patterns. Lectio Divina's slow meditative reading. The Protestant quiet time, the daily devotional, the inductive study method, the verse-memorization tradition. Each of these is a way a tradition has taught its members to encounter the text. These are real and often good. They are packaging.

The residue is the picture that the Bible is fundamentally a generator of personalized sentences. It has at least three sources. The first is the gloss habit itself, which Course 1 has already taught you to see. The second is modern individualism, which treats the reader as the center of the text and the text as a service to the reader. The third is consumer culture, which has trained people to expect content that is relevant to them personally, produced for them specifically, delivered in bite-sized form. The verse-of-the-day app is a product of all three. It is not the faith. It is residue from elsewhere, wrapped around a real practice of Scripture reading until the real practice is hard to find.

What becomes visible

The Bible rewards a different kind of reading than the frame had led you to expect. The motifs of Chapter 4 are not exotic scholarly tools. They are what the text is made of. A reader who sees them is reading what is there. A reader who is hunting for personalized sentences is reading past them.

Personal application is not eliminated. It becomes downstream. When you read the text for what it is saying, across its structures, personal application flows out of genuine encounter with the text rather than being the primary goal. The person who has spent years reading the Bible structurally has far more material to draw on personally than the person who has been collecting verses. The residue had promised a shortcut to personal meaning that produced less personal meaning than the slower reading would have produced.

The gloss habit from Course 1 is revealed as a symptom of the frame from Course 2. A student who has performed both moves now sees the connection. The verse-hunting frame produces the glossed-passage habit. The structural reading dissolves both. Course 1 was training you to see one result of the frame. Course 2 is training you to see the frame itself.

What You Will Produce

The Paper

A written paper of approximately one thousand to twelve hundred words, in three parts. Pick one of the three scenarios above. The three parts are the same for whichever scenario you pick.

Part 1: What You Were Told. Write, in concrete terms, what you had been taught about this claim before you encountered the sort in this assignment. Not what you "believed" in some private sense. What you had been told. The sermons you remember, the Sunday school lessons, the things family members said, the devotional books, the music lyrics, the funeral services. Put your inheritance on the page specifically. If your inheritance was vague, say that. If it was contested across the people who raised you, describe the contest. If you inherited something particular that the scenario did not capture, name what you inherited. The point is to put your specific frame on the page so that the next two parts have something concrete to work against. Honesty is the standard. Roughly one third of the paper.

Part 2: The Sort Performed. Walk through the three-category sort in your own voice. This is not a paraphrase of the scenario above. You read the scenario. Your instructor read the scenario. Writing it back down is not the assignment. The assignment is to take the sorting move, the actual motion of naming what is the faith, what is packaging, and what is residue, and perform it on the page in the voice of someone who has just come to see the shape of what they had been carrying. Show the claim. Show the work. Use your own words. Roughly one third of the paper.

Part 3: What the Sort Showed. Write what became visible to you when the sorting landed. What in the claim that had felt obvious now feels different. What in your inheritance from Part 1 now reads differently. What you think you will carry forward from this scenario into your future reading. This part is personal. It should sound like you, not like the textbook. Roughly one third of the paper.

The Video

A recorded video of ten minutes, plus or minus two. You present the substance of your paper on camera, in your own voice, looking into the camera. You may use brief notes. You may not read from a script.

Ten minutes is enough time to walk through the three parts of your paper aloud. It is not enough time to ramble. Prepare. The video is not a summary of the paper. It is the substance of the paper delivered out loud, in the form it would take if you were telling someone about what you had just figured out. If the video and the paper sound like the same person, the voice is yours. If they sound like different people, the instructor will notice.

Your face must be visible throughout. The recording quality does not need to be professional but must be clear enough that your instructor can see you and hear you. Phone, webcam, tablet, all are acceptable.

The Challenge Response

After your instructor has reviewed your paper and your video, you will receive three challenge questions. The questions will probe your understanding of the sort you performed, will ask you to extend the sorting move to a claim your paper did not address, and may press on a place in your paper or video where your reasoning was unclear. The questions are not adversarial. They are diagnostic.

You respond to all three questions in a second recorded video, between three and six minutes total. Same format as the first: on camera, notes permitted, no script.

How This Will Be Evaluated

This assignment is graded pass / does not yet pass. The evaluation looks at the paper, the video, and the challenge response together, as a single body of work, against five dimensions.

Dimension 1: Evidence you read the book. Specific engagement with the sorting move the book is teaching across its chapters, and with the specific arguments the book makes in Chapters 2, 4, and 5 that are most relevant to the scenarios. Generic references to "the book" without concrete content is the failure mode.

Dimension 2: You performed the sort, not just described it. You took the scenario you chose and walked through the three-category sort yourself, in your own words, on the page. Paraphrasing the scenario or summarizing what the book said about packaging and residue is not the assignment.

Dimension 3: Honest disclosure of what you were told. Part 1 of your paper put your actual inheritance on the page, in concrete terms. A generic Part 1 that could have been written by anyone is the failure mode. The instructor is looking for a specific person disclosing a specific inheritance.

Dimension 4: The voice is yours. The video verifies this. The writing and the speaking sound like the same person, and that person sounds like they actually own the reasoning they are walking through. Reading continuously from a script on camera is the failure mode. Stumbling occasionally and recovering is fine. The instructor can tell the difference.

Dimension 5: Applied thinking in the challenge response. When the instructor asks you to extend the sorting move to a claim your paper did not address, you can do it. A student who installed the move can apply it to new material. A student who only performed it once, for the assignment, cannot.

A student passes when the body of work passes on all five dimensions. A student does not yet pass when one or more dimensions show a deficiency significant enough to indicate that the sorting move has not yet entered them. A student who does not yet pass receives written feedback identifying which dimensions need strengthening, and is invited to resubmit. The College's interest is in your formation, not in gatekeeping. There is no limit on the number of resubmissions. A student who arrives at genuine comprehension after three attempts has passed, and the number of attempts is not recorded in the evaluation.

A Closing Word

In Course 1 you learned to see a gloss on a passage. In this assignment you are learning to see something larger: the frame the gloss was sitting inside. The frame is what you inherited about Christianity without being told you were inheriting it. Some of what you inherited is the faith. Some is packaging. Some is residue from elsewhere. Until you can tell the three apart, the frame rules you. Once you can, you become a reader of your own inheritance rather than a transmitter of it.

You will not feel ready. That is the right feeling. The move you are practicing here will deepen across the rest of the diploma and, if you continue, across the Master of Christian Catechesis. The feeling of unreadiness is not evidence that you should not begin. It is evidence that you understand what you are beginning.

When you are ready, write your paper, record your video, and submit them together. Your challenge questions will follow.

Begin.