Assignment 1 of 3

Course 3, Assignment 1 of 3

The Deed You Did Not Sign

What You Are About To Do

This is the first of three assignments in Course 3. You are about to read the course textbook, The Deal, pick one of three worked scenarios presented later in this sheet, and perform on the page the restoration 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 seven chapters walking a single argument: the salvation you inherited arrived in soft devotional English, and underneath the soft English is a precise legal Greek vocabulary that describes a transaction larger than the one your church language is built to carry. 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 Deal, before you begin work on this assignment. All seven chapters. Do not skip the ones that look like they are about something you already know.

The book is seven chapters walking through one sustained move: before you can see what your salvation actually is, you have to learn to read the New Testament's Greek as the legal language it actually was. Chapter 1 names the problem using the altar call, a modern American form whose history is shorter than most believers realize and whose vocabulary is smaller than what the New Testament uses. Chapter 2 takes the strongest secular critique of Christianity, the protection-racket charge, and shows that the New Testament's actual account of who is running the world right now answers the critique in a way the altar-call vocabulary cannot. Chapter 3 walks back to Genesis and names the original arrangement: stewardship, delegated authority, covenant. Chapter 4 names what happened in the garden: not just a moral failure but a legal transfer, executed when the humans accepted an offer from a party with no standing to make one. Chapter 5 opens a single sentence Paul wrote, Colossians 1:13, and shows that with the technical Greek restored, the sentence is a deed of transfer. Chapter 6 shows that the order Paul writes the cross in (transfer first, forgiveness second) reorders the way the cross itself should be read. Chapter 7 inventories the seven legal words the New Testament uses for the believer's new situation: bought, redeemed, adopted, sealed, citizen, heir, justified. By the end of the inventory, the deed is in front of you in one place.

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 5 through 7 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

In Course 1 you learned to perform a close-read on a passage that had been glossed in popular preaching. In Course 2 you learned to sort an inherited Christian claim into faith, packaging, and residue. Those moves were a close-read and a sort. The move you are about to practice in Course 3 is different. It is not a close-read and it is not a sort. It is a restoration of agency.

Every scenario in this assignment turns on the same hidden inversion. The popular picture of salvation makes the believer the one performing the saving move. You ask Jesus into your heart. You accept Him as your personal Savior. You invite. You respond. You do something that, until you do it, has not been done. The salvation event, in this picture, is something the believer enacts on God.

The text has it the other way around. The deed has already been executed. The legal action was performed at the cross, ratified at the ascension, implemented at Pentecost, before any modern believer was born. The captives were already extracted. The cheirographon was already canceled. The relocation was already filed. The Father has already performed the huiothesia. The Spirit has already been poured out. The believer's part is not to perform a transaction that has not happened. The believer's part is to consent, by the act the New Testament calls homologeo, to being added as a named party to a transaction already legally complete.

That is the inversion. The popular picture: the believer is the agent and God is the recipient of the believer's act. The text: God is the agent and the believer is the named party in God's act.

Your job in this assignment is to perform that restoration on one of three iconic Christian inheritances, in your own voice, 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 walks one inherited claim from the popular agency picture back to the legal agency picture, in their own words, on a specific scenario, has done the course.

The restoration move is what the book does in Chapter 5 with the verbs of Colossians 1:13 and what it does in Chapter 7 with the seven legal words. It asks you, when you come to a piece of inherited Christian language about salvation, to find the agency inversion inside it. To name what the popular picture has the believer doing. To name what the New Testament's actual legal vocabulary has God doing. And to walk the agency from the first place to the second. When you do that, a consistent thing happens. A claim you had held as a description of something you did to God turns out to be a description of something God did, of which you are a named beneficiary, and you can see which is which, and you did not see this before.

The three scenarios below correct the sequence at three different points along the deed. The first corrects the sequence at the moment of entry. The second corrects the sequence at the cross itself. The third corrects the sequence at the resulting status. Each scenario shows you the move on that point so you can see how it works. Pick one. Then write your paper on the same point, in your own voice.

The Three Scenarios

Scenario 1: "I Asked Jesus Into My Heart"

The frame as you have carried it

You learned the prayer in Sunday school, or at a youth retreat, or kneeling beside a bed, or in a church gym at a summer camp. The piano was playing. The lights were low. The pastor said no one was watching. You repeated the words. Lord Jesus, I know I am a sinner. I believe You died for my sins and rose again. I ask You to come into my heart. I accept You as my personal Lord and Savior. Amen.

Something happened in that moment. You felt it. You marked the date on the back of a Bible. You told your parents. You told a counselor. You filled out a card. You got a Gospel of John.

The claim, stated plainly: salvation happens in the moment a person prays the sinner's prayer. The believer is the one who acts. The believer makes the decision. The believer extends the invitation. Jesus, on the receiving end, accepts the invitation and comes in. Until the prayer is said, the transaction has not happened. After the prayer is said, the believer is saved.

This is the dominant picture of salvation in modern American evangelicalism, and through American export, in much of the global church. It is also, as Chapter 1 of the book is at pains to show you, much smaller than what the New Testament actually describes.

What the frame contains in its original setting

Read Acts 2 carefully. The morning of Pentecost. Peter has finished his sermon. Three thousand people are standing in front of him, asking what they should do. Peter does not tell them to pray a private prayer. He does not tell them to invite Jesus into anything. He tells them to do three things. Repent. Be baptized. Receive the Spirit. The repenting is the believer changing direction. The baptizing is something done to the believer by someone else. The receiving of the Spirit is something the Spirit does. The believer's verbs are not transactional verbs. They are response verbs.

Read Acts 16. Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail. The jailer asks what he must do to be saved. Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved. The Greek for believe is pisteuson, not a passive intellectual assent but an active commitment, the verb you used when you trusted a general in battle or a doctor with a prescription. The jailer's response is not a private prayer. It is a sequence: belief, teaching, an act of care for the missionaries he had been guarding, and baptism, all in the same hour, with his whole household. The transaction has parts. The parts are visible. They happen on the same night.

Read Romans 10:9-10. The verse most altar-call pastors quote, the verse the sinner's prayer is built on. Paul says if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. The Greek for confess is homologeo, to say the same word. The confessor is not inventing the confession. The confessor is repeating it. The phrase being confessed, kyrios Iesous, was a public political claim against the Roman kyrios Kaisar. Paul's verse is not asking for a private invitation. It is asking for a public act of agreement, on the record, with what God has already said about the Son.

Read the book. Chapters 1, 5, and 7 do most of the heavy work. The book shows you that the salvation event in the New Testament is a legal transfer that has already been executed. The cross canceled the cheirographon. The resurrection proved the cancellation held. The ascension ratified the action in the heavenly court. Pentecost distributed the fruits to the new citizens. By the time any modern believer prays any modern prayer, the deed has already been signed, sealed, and filed. The believer's homologeo, the saying of the same word, is consent to inclusion in a transaction that was completed two thousand years before the believer was born.

The restoration performed

The Deal teaches you to read inherited Christian claims for the agency inversion inside them and walk the agency back to where the text actually places it. Run the restoration on this one.

In the popular picture, the believer is the agent. The believer asks. The believer invites. The believer accepts. The verbs are transactional. They are things the believer does to Jesus. Until the believer does them, the salvation has not happened. After the believer does them, the believer is saved. Jesus, in this picture, is the recipient of the believer's act. He waits. He hopes. He receives the invitation. He comes in.

In the text, the agent is God. The Father initiated the rescue at His own cost. The Son executed the legal action of the cross at the cost of His own blood. The Spirit is poured out as the down payment on what the Son has secured. The believer is not the one performing the transaction. The believer is the named party in the transaction. The believer's verbs are response verbs. Repent. Change direction. Be baptized. Be plunged. Confess. Say the same word. None of these is the believer doing something to God. All of them are the believer responding to something God has done.

The hand raised at the altar call is not nothing. It is a small visible signal that the believer has heard what was said and is consenting to be included. That signal is real. It just is not the transaction. The transaction was the cross, the resurrection, the ascension, and Pentecost, taken together, and it was completed before the gym was ever built. The hand-raising is the modern way of saying, yes, count me in.

Notice what changes when the agency moves. In the popular picture, salvation depends on the believer's act being correctly performed. If the prayer was insincere, if the words were wrong, if the feeling was absent, the transaction may not have gone through. The believer is responsible for the validity of the act. In the text, the act has already been validated by the One who performed it. The believer's job is consent, not performance. The validity is already on file.

What becomes visible

When the restoration lands, several things become visible.

The first is that the Tuesday-night doubt the book describes has a different shape. In the popular picture, the believer who sins on Tuesday wonders whether the prayer worked. Whether the invitation took. Whether the saving event held. The doubt is about the believer's own agency. Did I do it right. In the text, the believer who sins on Tuesday is in a different position. The deed is filed. The transfer is registered. Tuesday is a household matter inside the new jurisdiction, handled on the household's terms. The Tuesday sin does not reopen the case. The case was closed by Someone else.

The second is that the prayer itself becomes intelligible in a way it had not been. The prayer is not the saving act. The prayer is the named party's yes. The yes is real and is required, in the way a beneficiary's signature on an inheritance disbursement is required. But the yes is not what makes the inheritance exist. The inheritance exists because the testator made it and the diatheke activated when the testator died. The yes is the named party stepping forward to receive what is already theirs.

The third is the shape of the restoration move you just performed. You did not need a Greek dictionary. You needed to read what Paul actually wrote, notice that the verbs are doing work the soft English versions hide, and recognize that a different agency picture, one in which God is the actor and the believer is the named party, has been sitting underneath your inherited language the whole time. The popular picture's survival depended on you never noticing the verbs. The moment you read the verbs, the agency moved.

Scenario 2: "Jesus Died for My Sins, So I Am Forgiven"

The frame as you have carried it

You heard it preached every Sunday of your life if you grew up in church. You heard it on Christian radio. You read it on the cover of the Gospel tract someone slipped into your hand outside a stadium. Jesus died for my sins. The whole structure of the gospel, in this telling, is a transaction in which Jesus pays your debt to God, and the result is that you are forgiven.

The shape of the claim, stated plainly: you sinned. Your sin created guilt. Your guilt created a debt to God. God could not forgive you without payment. Jesus paid the debt by dying on the cross. Therefore your sins are forgiven. Forgiveness is the headline. Forgiveness is the point. The cross is the place where forgiveness was purchased.

This is the standard evangelistic presentation. It is not wrong. Pieces of it are in the text. But, as Chapters 5 and 6 of the book are at pains to show, the order is reversed. Paul does not write the gospel in this order. Paul writes it in the opposite order. And the difference matters, because the standard presentation puts the believer in a posture the text does not put the believer in.

What the frame contains in its original setting

Read Colossians 1:13-14, slowly, with the technical Greek the book opens for you. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Notice the order. Delivered (errysato, dragged out by force, breaking a grip). Transferred (metestesen, the administrative word for governmental relocation of a population). Then the relative clause: in whom we have redemption, and hanging off of redemption, in apposition, the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness is grammatically downstream of the transfer. The transfer is the main clause. The forgiveness is what the transfer produces from the believer's side.

Read Colossians 2:13-14, where Paul writes the cross itself. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross. Three actions, in this order. God made alive. The forgiving happens as part of the making-alive (charisamenos, a participle that ties the forgiveness to the making-alive temporally). The cancellation of the cheirographon is the mechanism (exaleipsas, another participle, naming how the making-alive was made possible). The cross is the act of cancellation.

Read the book. Chapter 6 does the work. The cross is not the forgiveness. The cross is the legal instrument that cancels the cheirographon, the handwritten IOU that the accuser held against the human race. Once the cheirographon is canceled, the accuser has no legal standing. Once the accuser has no legal standing, the believer can be extracted from his jurisdiction. Once extracted, relocated. Once relocated, the old charges no longer apply. The forgiveness is real. The forgiveness is also third in the sequence. The cancellation is first. The transfer is second. The forgiveness is third, as the consequence of the first two.

The restoration performed

Run the restoration on this claim.

In the popular picture, the believer is at the center of the transaction. I sinned. I have a debt. My guilt is the problem. Jesus' death is God's solution to my problem. The cross is, in this telling, primarily a private transaction between the believer and God about the believer's feelings of guilt. The verbs around the believer are felt verbs. I feel guilty. I feel forgiven. I feel saved. The cross's success is measured by the believer's interior weather.

In the text, the cross is a public legal action with cosmic consequences. The cheirographon against the human race was canceled. The rulers and authorities were stripped (apekdusamenos) of their equipment. They were led in reverse triumphal procession (thriambeusas). The legal claim that held the world in the accuser's grip was discharged. The believer is included in this action as one of the named beneficiaries, but the action is not primarily about the believer. The action is the disarming of an opposing legal party and the extraction of captives from the jurisdiction that party held.

The forgiveness is real. The forgiveness reaches the believer. The Tuesday sin is forgiven, the Wednesday sin is forgiven, the morning sin is forgiven before the believer is awake to confess it. But the forgiveness is not the cross's purpose. The forgiveness is what the cross's purpose looks like from inside the new jurisdiction. The purpose is the transfer. The transfer was accomplished by the legal cancellation of the cheirographon. The cancellation was accomplished by the cross. The forgiveness flows out of all three, downstream, into the believer's daily life, where it is experienced as the steady ground that the popular picture had asked the believer to generate by feeling correctly.

Notice the agency once more. In the popular picture, the cross is a private transaction whose effectiveness depends partly on the believer's reception of it. The believer's feelings about the cross are part of the cross's force. In the text, the cross is a legal action whose effectiveness is settled by the action itself. The verdict is delivered. The paperwork is filed. The believer's feelings about the cross can rise and fall on a Tuesday and the verdict will not change.

What becomes visible

When the restoration lands, several things become visible.

The first is that the cross becomes larger than the believer's guilt. The guilt is real. The guilt is addressed. But the guilt is addressed as part of a larger operation, and the larger operation includes a courtroom, an opposing party, a canceled document, a procession of disarmed powers. The cross has cosmic and legal dimensions that the popular reading had collapsed into a private emotional event. When you put the cosmic and legal dimensions back, the cross looks like what Paul actually wrote, which is something far more public and far more strange than the soft English version made room for.

The second is that the believer's posture changes. In the popular picture, the believer's job is to maintain the right feelings about the cross so that the cross's benefits keep applying. This is exhausting and is one of the reasons many believers, after years of altar-call Christianity, drift into a low-grade chronic anxiety about whether the saving event held. In the text, the believer's posture is that of a named party in a completed legal action. The action does not need the named party to keep generating it. The named party only needs to know what jurisdiction they are now in and live like a citizen of it.

The third is the shape of the restoration move you just performed. You did not need a seminary class. You needed to read what Paul actually wrote, in the order he wrote it, with the technical Greek the book opens for you, and notice that the order has been quietly reversed in popular preaching. The popular order puts forgiveness first because forgiveness is what the believer feels. The text puts transfer first because transfer is what God did. Reading the order Paul actually wrote restores the agency to the One who acted, and downstream of that, restores the believer to the right posture, which is consent to inclusion, not performance of the saving act.

Scenario 3: "I Am a Child of God"

The frame as you have carried it

You sang it as a child. I am a child of God, He's called me by His name. You heard it preached at small group. You read it in greeting cards. You saw it on church bulletin covers and on bumper stickers and on jewelry. The phrase has the warmth of family language. Child of God. It calls to mind the soft shoulders of a parent. It calls to mind being loved.

The claim, stated plainly: when you become a Christian, you become a child of God. This is your new identity. It is who you are. The relationship is familial, warm, intimate, secure. God is your Father. You are His child. Whatever else is true about your life, this is true: you are loved, you are wanted, you are home.

This is one of the most pastorally important claims in modern Christianity. It is also, in the soft English form, smaller than what Paul wrote. Paul did not pick a soft warm word. He picked a Roman legal procedure. Recovering what Paul picked does not remove the warmth. It puts the warmth on a foundation the popular language did not have room for.

What the frame contains in its original setting

Read Romans 8:15-17 carefully. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by Him we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.

The Greek word translated adoption to sonship is huiothesia. It is a compound: huios, son, plus thesia, placement. Son-placement. The word is not warm. The word is procedural. In the Roman world, huiothesia was a formal legal procedure, performed by the paterfamilias, the head of the household, in front of witnesses, with documents, registered with the local authorities. Once complete, the adopted person had full legal standing as a son. He took the family name. He had legal rights in family matters. He inherited from the father on the same terms as any biological son.

The Roman emperors used huiothesia to designate their successors. Julius Caesar adopted Octavian. Octavian, who became Augustus, became emperor on that basis. Augustus adopted Tiberius. Through most of the first century, the throne of Rome passed by huiothesia. When Paul writes the word to the Roman church, his readers hear imperial succession. They hear court documents. They hear the paterfamilias speaking the legal formula. They do not hear daddy.

Read what Paul does with it. The adopted person is the object of the procedure, not the author of it. The paterfamilias performs the huiothesia. The adopted person does not adopt himself into the family. The Spirit, Paul says, brought about the adoption. The agency is not the believer's. The agency is the Spirit's, working on behalf of the Father.

Read what comes with the procedure. The adopted person becomes an heir. The Greek word is kleronomos, root of kleronomia, the legal estate. Peter calls it imperishable, undefiled, unfading. The estate is reserved. It is held in heaven. Its value cannot be reduced by external claims. None of this is metaphor. Paul and Peter are using the actual estate-planning vocabulary of the first-century legal world.

Read 1 John 3:1. See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The Greek for given is dedoken, perfect tense: an action completed in the past whose result is still in place. The Father has given. The status has been conferred. The believer is a child of God because the Father performed an action.

The restoration performed

Run the restoration on this claim.

In the popular picture, child of God is a relational identity the believer enters into by feeling it, claiming it, or believing it about themselves. The agency is the believer's. The believer rises to receive an identity by an act of personal affirmation. The relationship is real but is held in place by the believer's interior posture toward it.

In the text, child of God is a legal status conferred by an action the Father performed. The agency is the Father's. The believer did not adopt themselves. The believer was placed, by the paterfamilias, into the family with full standing as a son. The Spirit, sent into the believer at Pentecost and in every conversion since, is the witness in the heavenly court that the procedure is on file. Abba is not a feeling word. Abba is the household word a son uses inside the household to which he legally belongs. The believer says it because the believer is, by procedure, in the household.

Notice the agency once more. In the popular picture, child of God depends on the believer's claim. If the believer feels distant from God, the identity feels uncertain. If the believer is depressed, the identity feels far away. The identity is held in place by the believer's interior weather. In the text, child of God is held in place by the huiothesia document on file. The document does not change with the believer's mood. The believer's mood may change. The document does not.

The warmth is not removed by this. The warmth is given a foundation it did not have. Abba is real. The cry of Abba in Romans 8 is a real cry, made real by the Spirit, made possible by the huiothesia. The relationship is intimate and personal. It is also legal and procedural. The two are not in tension. The procedure is what makes the intimacy possible. The believer can call God Father in a household word because the believer is, by court order, in the household.

What becomes visible

When the restoration lands, several things become visible.

The first is that the believer's identity becomes more secure, not less, when the legal weight is restored. The popular picture was a warm picture, but the warmth was held in place by the believer's interior weather, which is not a stable surface. The legal picture rests the warmth on a different surface, which is the procedure performed by the Father, witnessed by the Spirit, registered in the heavenly court. The warmth is the same warmth. The foundation under it is firmer.

The second is that Abba becomes intelligible in a way it had not been. Abba is not the believer reaching toward God in a posture of intimacy the believer is generating. Abba is the household word that comes out of the believer because the believer is in the household. The Spirit testifies that this is so. The witness is in the court, on the record. Abba is the believer using the language of the room they are now legally in.

The third is the shape of the restoration move you just performed. You did not need a Roman law textbook. You needed to read what Paul actually wrote, notice that the warm English word adoption was carrying procedural Greek freight, and recognize that the agency in the procedure is the Father's, not the believer's. The popular picture's warmth was real. The popular picture's foundation was thin. The text gives you both the warmth and the foundation, and they go together.

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 restoration 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 songs you sang, the camp counselors, the tracts, the youth pastors, the conversion stories you heard, the funeral language. 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. 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 Restoration Performed. Walk through the restoration in your own voice. Name the agency inversion in the popular picture. Name what the popular picture has the believer doing. Name what the New Testament's actual legal vocabulary has God doing. And walk the agency from the first place to the second. 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 restoration, the actual motion of moving the agency from the believer to God, 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. Use the Greek the book gives you, because the Greek is doing the work, but explain what each Greek word is carrying so a reader who does not know the word can follow. Roughly one third of the paper.

Part 3: What the Restoration Showed. Write what became visible to you when the agency moved. 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 and your future practice. 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 restoration you performed, will ask you to extend the move to a piece of New Testament salvation language 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 restoration move the book is teaching across its chapters, and with the specific arguments the book makes in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 that are most relevant to the scenarios. Generic references to "the book" without concrete content is the failure mode.

Dimension 2: You performed the restoration, not just described it. You took the scenario you chose and walked the agency from the popular picture to the text's picture, in your own words, on the page. Paraphrasing the scenario or summarizing what the book said about the cross or adoption is not the assignment. The actual motion of restoring the agency, performed on a specific claim, is.

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 restoration to a piece of salvation language 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 restoration 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 Course 2 you learned to see the frame the gloss was sitting inside, and to sort the frame into faith, packaging, and residue. In this course you are learning a third thing, which is older and stranger than the first two. You are learning to read the New Testament's Greek as the legal language it actually was, and to recognize that what looks devotional on the surface of the English is technical underneath. The believer's salvation is a deed. The deed has been executed. The believer's part is to consent, by a public act called homologeo, to being added as a named party to a deed already on file.

You are not being asked to stop praying the prayer. You are not being asked to abandon the warmth of child of God. You are being asked to put the prayer back into its place as a yes, and the warmth back onto its foundation as a verdict. The prayer is not the saving act. The warmth is not the basis of the relationship. The saving act was the cross. The basis of the relationship is the huiothesia document on file. Both of those were put in place by Someone other than you, and you are the named beneficiary of what they accomplished.

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.