Course 3: The Deal
Diploma Program · Course 3 · 3 Credits
Almost every modern American Christian has inherited a particular picture of how a person becomes saved. The picture has a scene attached to it: the music goes quiet, every head is bowed, every eye is closed, and the believer prays a short prayer asking Jesus into their heart. The picture is so familiar that most readers assume it is what the New Testament describes. It is not. The form is two hundred years old. The vocabulary is three hundred years old. Underneath the soft devotional English is a precise legal Greek vocabulary that describes a transaction larger than the one your church language is built to carry.
This course teaches you how to read past the soft surface and recover the legal substance. It walks through the modern history of the altar call, then takes the New Testament words that describe what salvation actually is — redemption, justification, propitiation, adoption, reconciliation — and shows what each one was carrying before the rendering into English softened it. It restores the agency to where the text places it: not in the believer's decision, but in God's already-completed legal action of which the believer is a named beneficiary.
How this course is structured. Course 3 is built around one textbook and three assignments. You read The Deal first. Then you complete Assignment 1, which asks you to perform the restoration move the book has been teaching you on a piece of inherited Christian language about salvation. 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 restoration move outside of Christianity entirely, find a precise technical vocabulary that has been softened in popular reception until the precision is hard to find, and walk through it with the diagnostic questions the sheet provides. Three credits. Three assignments. One sustained way of learning to read past the softened English back to what was actually being said.
The Textbook
The Deal
Seven chapters, one sustained move: behind the soft devotional English of modern salvation language is a precise legal Greek vocabulary describing a transaction the popular picture does not carry. The book opens with the modern history of the altar call, then walks through the New Testament's actual transactional words one by one, and ends with the deed that has already been filed.
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 Deed You Did Not Sign
Read the textbook. Choose one of three worked scenarios from the soft language of modern salvation, and perform the restoration that walks the agency back from the believer's decision to God's already-completed legal action. 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.
Telling Your Friend What Was Already Done
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 Sanded-Off Vocabulary in the Wild
The final assignment. Take the restoration move the book uses across all seven of its chapters and apply it somewhere the author did not. Somewhere outside of Christianity entirely. Find a precise technical vocabulary in the wild that has been sanded smooth in popular reception, walk it through the diagnostic questions, and produce the paper, the video, and the response.