🪨 Five Stones for the Fourth: Liberating the Gospel from the Tyranny of Religion
“Notes from a Revolutionary Heart”
This weekend we mark Independence, not just from colonial rule, but for many of us, from the tyranny of toxic religion.
This is a different kind of revolution. Not one fought with muskets and militias, but with truth that sets free. Not against earthly kings, but against spiritual strongholds that have distorted the face of God and shackled the soul with fear, shame, and control.
I don’t mean the way of Jesus. I mean the layers of distortion that have wrapped themselves around His name. Fear-based doctrines. Power-wielding pulpits. Gospels that sound more like threats than invitations. These have left many exhausted, disillusioned, and longing for the Father they never really knew.
Enter theologian Michael Hardin.
In his bold and timely book, Liberating the Gospel from Christian Myth, Hardin acts as a modern David, bending down to the waters of Scripture to gather five smooth stones to sling against the towering Goliath of fundamentalism. With theological precision, he names five pillars of the fundamentalist-evangelical tradition that, though often cloaked in sincerity, have distorted our view of God and buried the beauty of the gospel beneath fear, shame, and control.
These stones are not hurled in hatred but in hope. Not in vengeance, but in vision.
A vision of the Father revealed by the Son.
A gospel not of wrath, but of reconciling love.
Hardin offers five stones from the living stream of Jesus' life and teaching:
🪨 Stone 1: The Bible is not the final word. Jesus is.
1. The Myth of Inerrancy
The Bible becomes a paper Pope, a flawless legal code. Not the story that reveals Christ, but a flat document used to defend contradictions and violence. Hardin reminds us: Jesus is the Word of God. Scripture points us to Him, not away from Him. We are invited to read Scripture through the lens of Jesus, not as a flat textbook but as a progressive revelation leading to the Word made flesh.
🪨 Stone 2: The cross is not divine child abuse, it is divine forgiveness.
2. Penal Substitutionary Atonement
Hardin dismantles the myth of a wrathful Father appeased by violence, and instead reveals a cruciform God who absorbed violence, He didn’t demand it. Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us. He came to change our mind about God. He reveals a Father who would rather die for His enemies than punish them. One who forgives freely and breaks the cycle of vengeance.
🪨 Stone 3: Love never fails, not even in death.
3. Eternal Conscious Torment
Hardin exposes the fear-based imagination of hell as inconsistent with the Abba of Jesus, who leaves the 99 for the one, again and again. Jesus didn’t dangle hell to scare us into heaven. He came to seek and save what was lost, and to reveal a Father whose mercy is not on a timer. Love casts out fear and demolishes the idea that God tortures forever those who don’t say the right prayer. He writes, The doctrine of ECT has been used by Christians quite effectively as a tool to keep the people in fear and the church in business. It is high time to burn that paper tiger doctrine of torment.
🪨 Stone 4: God's glory is not domination, but cruciform love.
4. A Theology of Glory
This myth defines victory by power and dominance. But Jesus is no Caesar in disguise. His glory is the Cross. His power is in surrender. He conquers not through domination, but by laying down His life. The kingdom He brings is upside-down, where the meek inherit the earth and greatness is found not by force, but through self-giving love.
🪨 Stone 5: Jesus didn’t come to fulfill sacrifice, He came to finish it.
5. Sacrificial Thinking
The myth that someone must die to make things right has shaped much of Western religion. But the gospel doesn’t demand sacrifice, it ends it. Jesus is the final lamb not to appease an angry God, but to expose the lie that God ever demanded sacrifice in the first place. He reveals a God who desires mercy, not sacrifice. In taking the place of an innocent victim, Jesus openly exposes the lie of scapegoating, revealing that our religious and cultural passions for sacrificing others are fundamentally at odds with the nonviolent character of God.
These five stones? They dismantle the religious Goliath still taunting many today. They don’t destroy faith, they liberate it. They don’t dismiss Scripture, they invite us to read it through the lens of Christ.
These are five stones slung with precision against the giant of toxic religion.
As I read Hardin’s work (I am only in Chapter One), I’m struck by how closely it mirrors the tension in John 8. Jesus, confronting the religious elite, says, “You do not know my Father.” Their response? Pick up stones. They clung to their theology but missed the Theos. When the embodiment of the Father stood before them, they picked up stones.
We still pick up stones, against mystery, against humility, against the disorienting beauty of a God who forgives from the cross.
But Jesus keeps bending down. Drawing grace in the dust. Writing a new story.
That is the tragedy of toxic religion: it offers certainty at the expense of truth. It crafts gods in our own image, then defends them with doctrine. It trades communion for control. It hides God behind sacrifice, certainty, and shame.
But Jesus didn’t come to endorse our constructs, He came to expose them. To stand in our blindness, our violence, our misunderstanding, and say:
“When you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father.”
Jesus enters that darkness, not to condemn, but to reveal.
To say: “This is what God is like. The Father and I are one.”
Today, I celebrate the gospel not as a set of propositions, but as the presence of a Person who reveals the Father. Jesus didn’t come to rubber-stamp our systems. He came to upend them. To heal our blind spots. To show us the God we thought we knew, but didn’t.
This is the independence I’m after.
Not freedom from restraint, but freedom from illusion.
Not liberty for self, but the liberation of love.
May today be a declaration of independence from any “god” who does not look like Jesus.
And a fierce, freeing allegiance to the One who does.
Let this day mark freedom not only from kings and empires,
but from the inner Goliaths of fear, shame, and distorted images of God that keep us afraid, divided, and numb.
Let the five stones fly.
With peace and provocation,
Jason
Heartsmith. Spiritual Coach. Fellow Revolutionary.