Course 2: The Scope
Diploma Program · Course 2 · 3 Credits
Every Christian inherited a frame, and the frame is not identical to the faith. Some of what arrived in your inheritance 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. Most readers have never been given the tools to tell which is which.
This course teaches you how to perform the sort. It opens with Martin Luther, whose whole critique was that the Church of his day had started confusing its packaging for the faith. It then takes a single doctrine most Christians assume is biblical, the immortal soul, and shows that its shape came from Plato rather than Scripture. It names the seven structural motifs of the biblical text. And it shows the same diagnostic move operating at the word level, where a single English word like sin has been carrying the freight of five different Greek words and losing the structural picture in the process.
How this course is structured. Course 2 is built around one textbook and three assignments. You read The Scope first. Then you complete Assignment 1, which asks you to perform the sorting move the book has been teaching you, on a claim about Christianity you had inherited. Assignment 2 asks you to explain what you have been studying to a friend, in the voice a real conversation would take. Assignment 3 asks you to take the same sorting move outside of Christianity entirely, find a tradition or practice in the wild where essence has been confused with packaging and residue, and walk through it with the diagnostic questions the sheet provides. Three credits. Three assignments. One sustained way of learning to sort the faith you inherited from the inheritance it arrived inside of.
The Textbook
The Scope
Five chapters, one sustained move: the faith you inherited arrived wrapped in packaging, and some of what came in the wrapping is not the faith at all. The book opens with Martin Luther, takes the immortal soul apart in Chapter 2, names what the traditions actually share underneath their packaging, walks through the seven structural motifs of Scripture, and closes with a chapter on the five Greek words that the single English word sin has been carrying.
The Three Assignments
Each assignment is a complete work package: the reading that precedes it, the structure of the work, and the specification for the paper and videos you produce. The three assignments build on each other. Assignment 1 gives you the move on the page. Assignment 2 gives you the move in conversation. Assignment 3 gives you the move outside of the domain the book worked in.
The Frame You Inherited
Read the textbook. Choose one of three worked scenarios — the immortal soul, sin as a list of bad behaviors, or the verse-of-the-day reading habit — and perform the three-category sort in your own voice. Produce a paper of roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words and a recorded video of ten minutes. Respond to three challenge questions in a second video.
Explain It to a Friend
The register changes. You are no longer writing to demonstrate a move to an instructor. You are writing as someone who has learned something and is telling another person what you have learned — a real friend, not a catechumen and not a skeptic. Roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words, a ten-minute video, and a challenge response.
The Transfer: Finding a Scope in the Wild
The final assignment. Take the sorting move the book uses across all five of its chapters and apply it somewhere the author did not. Somewhere outside of Christianity entirely. Find a tradition or practice in the wild where essence, packaging, and residue are all present and confused for each other, walk it through the diagnostic questions, and produce the paper, the video, and the response.