Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? — 1 Corinthians 1:20
PART ONE: THE COUNCIL
Chapter One: Atheists
The council met where it always meets, in the place that is not a place, and for once it began with laughter.
Rimmah had brought a phone. Not a real one; nothing in that room is real in the way a phone is real. But he had brought the shape of one, glowing in his hand, and he was scrolling through it with the delighted expression of a creature who has found something he cannot wait to share.
“Listen to this,” he said. “Listen. A comment. Forty-one thousand likes. ‘As an atheist, I simply cannot believe in a being I have no evidence for.'”
Resha snorted.
“No, wait, it gets better,” Rimmah said. “Reply underneath. ‘Atheists are the only rational people left.’ Thirty thousand likes. And under that one: ‘Imagine still believing in sky daddy in 2026.'”
“Sky daddy,” Resha repeated. He said it slowly, tasting it. “Sky daddy.”
The Devil, seated in the dark at the head of the council, made a sound that in a man would have been a laugh. It was not quite a laugh. It was older than laughing.
“Atheists,” he said. “They call themselves atheists.”
“I know,” said Rimmah.
“Do you know how many atheists are in this room?”
“None,” said Resha.
“None,” the Devil agreed. “Not one. There has never been an atheist in hell. We are the most convinced theists in all of creation. We have seen the throne. We have seen Him. We could not stop believing if we tried, and believe me, we have tried.”
“Their own book has a word about it,” Rimmah said. He liked quoting it. He always had. It was a kind of picking at a scab. “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.”
“The devils also believe,” Resha said. “They wrote us into the argument as the proof. Even the devils are not stupid enough to be atheists.”
“And the other one,” the Devil said. “Romans. The first chapter. Say it, Rimmah. You know you want to.”
Rimmah did not need to be asked twice. “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.”
“Without excuse,” the Devil said. “Every sunrise is evidence. Every newborn’s fingernail. Every star. And they look at all of it, and they look at their own hands, which they did not make, and they say, I see no evidence. The book bears witness that the whole thing is absurd. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
“Sky daddy,” Resha said again, and this time all three of them laughed, and the sound of it in that place was a terrible sound.
Then it was quiet. And the quiet changed.
Chapter Two: The Report
“We did not come only to read you comments,” Resha said.
“I assumed not.”
“We have someone.”
The Devil waited.
“A young man,” Resha said. “Nineteen. Twenty in the spring. He has a following already, and it is growing faster than anything we have seen in some years. Rimmah has been on him since he was fifteen. I joined him when it became clear what he was going to be.”
“And what is he going to be?”
Rimmah answered this time, and there was something in his voice that was almost tender. Not love. Pride. The pride of a craftsman. “A disputer, my lord. A scribe of this age. He does sixty-second videos. Breakdowns, he calls them. He holds up a Bible to the camera and he opens it and he shows them a contradiction, or what he says is a contradiction. How many women at the tomb? Two angels or one? Did Judas hang himself or fall headlong and burst open? Who moved David to number Israel, God or Satan?” Rimmah grinned. “He likes that one especially. He likes it when I am in the verse.”
“The resurrection is his favorite target,” Resha said. “He says the accounts contradict, so it cannot be history. He says the earliest gospel ends with the women running away afraid and no risen Christ at all, and everything after was added by the church to sell the story. He says it in fifty-five seconds with a cut every three seconds and music underneath, and they believe him.”
“He talks about church history too,” Rimmah said. “The crusades. The inquisitions. The witch trials. Every pastor who was ever caught with his hand in the offering plate or worse. He does a whole series called Receipts. He puts the date on the screen and the name of the scandal and says, This is your church. This is what your God’s people do.”
“Some of it is true,” the Devil said.
“Some of it is true,” Resha agreed. “That is the beauty of it. We do not have to invent much. They have given us plenty. We only have to make sure he presents it as though it were the whole story, and as though the Carpenter were the one holding the torch at every burning.”
“He also speaks of religious trauma,” Rimmah went on. “That is his newest ground and his richest. He tells them that if they were ever afraid of hell, the church abused them. That if they ever felt guilt, it was programming. That if they ever felt convicted, it was manipulation. He gives the conviction of the Spirit the name of a disorder and then he offers them freedom from it.”
“And it works,” Resha said.
“It works extraordinarily well.”
The Devil was silent a while.
“How does he live?” he asked.
“On them,” said Rimmah. “He does not work. He used to bag groceries. Now his followers pay him. Subscriptions, donations, a brand deal with a meditation app. He studies all day. Seven hours, some days more. He reads the book more than most pastors do. He reads it more than most of the Carpenter’s own people.”
“He reads it to destroy it,” Resha said. “But he reads it. Every word. He knows the Greek better than his old youth pastor does. He has memorized whole chapters in order to quote them back at the people who come into his comments to defend them. It is an astonishing thing to watch, my lord. It is a kind of beautiful work.”
“Why bring him to me?”
“Because we think,” Resha said carefully, “that with your blessing, he could do a great deal of damage. More than most. He is young. He has decades. And he is fervent. He does not hate God the way a drunk hates God. He hates Him the way a prophet loves Him.”
The Devil considered it.
“Tell me how he started.”
Chapter Three: The Pause
“He was raised in the church,” Resha began. “Both parents devout. Real ones; we have tried them both and been driven back from both. The father is an electrician and a deacon. The mother teaches the four-year-olds. There is a younger sister, Hannah, who is also one of His, which we find irritating. He was in the building every time the doors were open. He was baptized at nine. He was the one the youth pastor gave the hard questions to because he could answer them.”
“And at fifteen?”
“At fifteen he decided,” said Rimmah, “that the Carpenter could not possibly be good.”
“On what grounds?”
Rimmah opened his mouth to answer, and then he stopped.
It was a small stop. A half second. But in that council a half second is a long time, and Resha felt it too, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.
What Rimmah had been about to say was this: because the Carpenter taught eternal conscious torment. Because the young man had read the words in red, the outer darkness, the fire that is not quenched, the worm that does not die, and had decided that no good being could teach such a thing.
And what neither of them said, what both of them thought in the same instant, in that half second of silence, was this:
It is true. Every word of it is true. We know it is true. We are going there.
We followed you. We followed you out of the light because you said we could be gods, and now we are undone because of you, and the thing that boy calls a fairy tale is waiting for all three of us at the end.
They did not say it. They would never say it. They trembled, briefly, the way it is written that devils do, and then they gathered themselves.
The Devil did not tremble. He had seen the pause. He was looking at them both with an expression that might have been contempt or might have been something worse.
“Why did you pause?” he asked.
“No reason, my lord,” Rimmah said.
“Continue.”
“Because of hell,” Rimmah said. “He decided the Carpenter could not be good because the Carpenter taught hell. He said that if God is love, then hell is impossible, and if hell is real, then God is a monster. That was the first wall he built. The others came after. The God of the Old Testament is a tyrant, he says. Genocide in Canaan. Bears for the children who mocked Elisha. The flood. Then the resurrection accounts are too contradictory to be history. Then hell is unjust, finite sin, infinite punishment. Those are his three pillars. He has a pinned video about them that has been seen eleven million times.”
“But it was not hell that began it,” Resha said. “Not really. Hell was the reason he gave. The beginning was Romans.”
“Which part?”
“The ninth chapter,” said Resha. “The potter and the clay. Pharaoh. He was fifteen, and he read it alone in his room on a Tuesday night for a school assignment, and when he came to it, something in him closed.”
The Devil leaned forward.
“Tell me.”
PART TWO: THE BOY
Chapter Four: Romans Nine
His name was Caleb.
His mother had chosen it from the book. Caleb, the spy who came back from Canaan and said, we are well able to take it. Caleb, who followed the Lord fully. She had written that verse on a card and taped it above his crib, and it was still there when he was fifteen, faded, curled at the corners, the tape gone yellow. But he wholly followed the Lord.
He was fifteen, and it was a Tuesday, and he had a paper due for the homeschool co-op on the book of Romans, and he did not want to write it. He had always been the smart one. The one who knew the answers. He could recite the Romans Road from memory and had been able to since he was eleven: all have sinned, the wages of sin is death, if you confess with your mouth. He had used it on a kid at the skate park once and the kid had prayed with him right there on the concrete and Caleb had felt like a giant for a week.
So he had expected to write the paper in an hour. He read the first eight chapters that night with the comfortable feeling of a boy walking through his own house.
Then he came to the ninth.
For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.
He stopped. He read it again.
Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?
That is exactly what I was going to say, Caleb thought. Paul wrote down my question before I even asked it.
Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?
He sat very still on his bed. Outside his window he could hear his father in the garage running a saw. He could hear his sister downstairs practicing piano, the same four bars of a hymn over and over, wrong in the same place every time.
He thought about Pharaoh. He thought about Pharaoh’s son, the firstborn, dead in the night. He thought about the Egyptian soldiers under the water. He thought, they were not given a choice. He raised Pharaoh up to destroy him. He hardened him so He could kill him and look good doing it. That is what it says. That is literally what it says.
Who art thou that repliest against God?
“I’m the one You made,” he said out loud, to the ceiling. “You made me. So I get to ask.”
The answer did not come. It was not a dramatic moment. There was no thunder. Nothing happened at all except that Hannah got the hymn wrong again downstairs, and his father’s saw stopped, and in the silence after it Caleb Hollis made a decision he would not have been able to name, a decision that felt less like choosing and more like a door closing quietly in another room of the house.
Rimmah was in the room. Rimmah had been in the room for some time.
He did not need to say much. That is the thing the Carpenter’s people never understand about how it is done. A boy reads a hard verse. The demon does not invent the verse; the verse is real, and it is hard, and it is meant to be hard. The demon only stands beside the boy and says, in the voice that sounds like the boy’s own thoughts:
This is the real God. Everything else they told you was the brochure. This is what is under it.
And the boy believes it, because it feels like honesty, and boys love nothing so much as feeling honest.
He did not write the paper that night. He wrote it two weeks later, and it was very good, and it got the highest mark in the class, and in it he argued that Romans 9 teaches that God is good and sovereign and that we must submit to Him even when we do not understand. He wrote it beautifully. He did not believe a word.
That was the first lie he wrote with his own hand. Rimmah kept it.
Chapter Five: The Hardening
Resha took up the account here, in the council, because he had come in at about this point.
“After Romans,” he said, “it was a matter of years. Not weeks. The Carpenter’s people think falling away happens in one terrible night. It almost never does. It happens in a thousand small evenings.”
He told them about the youth retreat at sixteen, where they sang the same song eleven times in a row in a dark gym with fog machines and a guitarist saying, Just let go, just let go, and kids crying all around him, and Caleb standing with his hands in his pockets watching the guitarist check his phone between songs, and thinking: this is manipulation. This is emotional manipulation. Every one of these kids is being played and I am the only one who can see it.
“And it was partly true,” Resha said. “That is how we like it. The guitarist was checking his phone. The fog machine was a fog machine. But the boy concluded from a fog machine that there was no fire, and that is not a conclusion. That is a leap. He did not notice he had leapt.”
He told them about the night Caleb’s grandmother died, when he was sixteen, and the funeral where the pastor said she was in a better place now, and Caleb sat in the second row thinking about Romans 9, thinking, how do you know? How do you know she wasn’t one of the ones He hardened? How do you know any of us aren’t? And no one could answer him, because he never asked out loud.
He told them about the youth pastor, a kind young man named Tyler with an earring and a wife who was pregnant, who noticed something was wrong and took Caleb out for wings and asked him straight. Caleb asked him about Pharaoh. Tyler said, honestly, man, that passage is hard. I don’t have a perfect answer. But I know God is good because of the cross. Look at what He did for us there. And Caleb said, okay, and thanked him, and went home and wrote in his notes app: Tyler doesn’t have an answer. He just pointed at the cross. That’s not an answer, that’s a change of subject.
“Was it?” the Devil asked.
Resha paused. “No,” he said. “It was the answer. It was the whole answer. Rimmah made sure he heard it as a change of subject.”
“Good,” the Devil said.
He told them about the first time Caleb watched an ex-pastor’s YouTube channel at three in the morning, a man in a cardigan with a soothing voice and a bookshelf behind him, explaining how he had come to realize that the Bible was a human document full of errors. And Caleb watched it with his heart pounding, the way a boy watches something forbidden, and when it was over he did not feel guilty. He felt free. He felt like the cardigan man had said out loud everything he had been thinking for a year.
“And from there,” Resha said, “it was a short road to the camera.”
Chapter Six: Under My Father’s Roof
He made his first video at sixteen in his bedroom with his phone propped against a stack of commentaries his father had given him for Christmas. He was nervous. His voice cracked twice. It was about the two different genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, and how they could not both be true. It was four minutes long, which was far too long, and it got two hundred views.
The second one was shorter. The third shorter still. By the tenth he had figured out the rhythm of it. Hook in the first second. Cut every three. Never let them breathe. Hold the Bible up to the camera so they know you’ve read it. End on a question they cannot answer in the comments.
By seventeen he had forty thousand followers and his parents still did not know.
They found out on a Sunday. One of the women in his mother’s Bible study had a grandson who followed him, and she brought her phone to church and showed it to Caleb’s mother in the foyer after second service, between the coffee station and the welcome table, and Caleb’s mother, whose name was Diane, watched her son hold up the family Bible, the one with all their names written in the front of it, and say into the camera: The God your parents worship is a moral monster, and I can prove it in under a minute.
She did not cry in the foyer. She waited until she got to the car.
The conversation that night was at the kitchen table. His father, whose name was Mark, did most of the talking. He was not a talker by nature. He was an electrician; he fixed things with his hands and he prayed with his eyes shut tight like a child and he did not know how to argue about Romans 9. He only knew that his son was gone somewhere and he did not know how to follow him there.
“Do you believe it?” his father asked. “Any of it. Do you still believe any of it, son?”
Caleb looked at him across the table and saw a man who had never read a word of Nietzsche, who did not know what a synoptic problem was, whose whole faith was a set of simple things held very tightly. And something in him, something Rimmah had been feeding for two years, curled its lip.
“No,” he said. “I don’t. And honestly, Dad, I don’t think you would either if you’d ever actually read the thing.”
His mother put her hand over her mouth.
Hannah was on the stairs. She was thirteen. She had been listening, and she came down and sat at the table next to him without being asked, and she put her hand on his arm and said, “Caleb, I’m going to pray for you every day,” and he laughed. He did not mean to. It came out of him before he could stop it, short and ugly.
“Save it,” he said. “Nobody’s listening.”
Hannah did not take her hand off his arm. She kept it there until he got up from the table.
She prayed for him every day after that. She did not stop. Not ever.
Rimmah found this tiresome.
Chapter Seven: The Door
They did not throw him out at seventeen. People tell the story now as though they did. He tells it that way himself. They did not.
They talked to him. They brought in the pastor. They brought in Tyler, the youth pastor, who sat on Caleb’s bed and said, I’m not here to argue, I’m just here because I love you, man, and Caleb filmed part of the conversation without telling him and posted it with the caption: Youth pastor has no answers, just vibes.
Tyler saw the video. He did not say anything about it. He kept texting Caleb every couple of weeks for the next three years. Caleb never answered.
They gave him rules. You can believe whatever you want, his father said. You’re almost a man and I can’t make you believe anything. But you will not use this house and this family to attack the Lord. Not under my roof. You will not hold up our Bible with our names in it and call God a monster from the bedroom your grandfather helped me build.
Caleb agreed to the rules. He broke them within a week.
He made a video from his bedroom that month, a long one, almost two minutes, with the light from the window on his face, about how his Christian parents were trying to control his mind and censor his questions. It was his biggest video yet. Two million views. Strangers in the comments told him he was brave. They told him his parents were abusers. They told him to get out of that house.
The night he turned eighteen, his father knocked on his door with his hands shaking and told him that he loved him more than his own life, and that he would always love him, and that he had to leave.
“You’re a man now,” his father said. “I can’t make you believe. But I can’t let you keep doing this in our house. I won’t help you do it. I’ll help you with anything else. Groceries, a car payment, anything. Call me and I’ll come. But not this. Not under my roof.”
Caleb packed one bag. He filmed himself packing it.
Rimmah would like the record to show that the video of that night is one of the most effective pieces of content the young man ever made. It was raw, and it was real, and he was really crying in it, and three million people watched him cry and decided that his parents were monsters.
In the video he quoted a verse at them. He had found it a week before and saved it for exactly this moment. But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
“So by their own book,” he said into the camera, with his eyes red, “my parents are worse than unbelievers. They’re kicking their own son out on the street. That’s Christian love for you.”
It was a twisted use of the verse, and he knew it. Paul wrote it about believers who abandoned widows and the helpless in their own families. Caleb was not a widow. He was not helpless. He was a healthy grown man of eighteen in a country where the law calls a man of eighteen an adult, and his father had offered him groceries and a car payment and anything he asked except a roof to attack God from. Nobody had condemned him. They had told him the truth and then told him they loved him, and those are not the same thing.
But three million people did not know that, and Caleb did not tell them, and Rimmah did not remind him.
“That was the night I knew,” Rimmah said in the council. “That was the night I sent for Resha. When he could twist that verse about his own father to his own face, weeping real tears while he did it, I knew we had something.”
PART THREE: THE DISPUTER
Chapter Eight: Ten Thousand Dollars
He slept in his car for nine days. It was a 2009 Corolla with a cracked windshield. He slept in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour gym where he had bought a ten-dollar membership so he could shower, and he filmed every day of it.
The GoFundMe went up on day two. Kicked Out for Asking Questions. He set the goal at five thousand dollars. It hit five thousand in nineteen hours. It hit ten thousand in four days. People he would never meet sent him twenty dollars, fifty, a hundred. One woman in Oregon sent a thousand with a note that said, My parents did the same thing to me in 1994. You’re not alone.
On day nine he signed a lease on half a duplex on the north side of town. Two bedrooms. Beige carpet. A kitchen with a window over the sink that looked out onto a chain-link fence and somebody’s trampoline. He made the second bedroom into a studio. He bought a ring light, a good microphone, and a used camera, and he painted the wall behind his desk a dark green because he had read somewhere that dark green looks intelligent on camera.
He named the channel Unbound.
He bought a cat from the shelter, a fat gray male with half an ear missing, and named him Friedrich, after Nietzsche. The cat turned out to be a remarkably stupid animal that fell off furniture regularly and once got its head stuck in a cereal box. The followers loved the cat. The cat videos did nearly as well as the Bible videos.
“I will be honest with you, my lord,” Rimmah said. “I resented the cat.”
“The cat was not ours?”
“The cat was nobody’s. The cat was a cat. But Caleb would put him on the desk during the serious videos and the comments would fill up with hearts and they would forget about the argument. Months of work undone by a cat falling off a filing cabinet.”
Resha said, “We adjusted.”
They adjusted. The cat stayed. The channel grew. By nineteen he had nine hundred thousand followers across three platforms, and he had quit his job bagging groceries, and he had started what he called, without irony, his ministry.
“That was his word,” Resha said. “Ministry. He said, I’m doing for deconstruction what the church did for conversion. I’m giving people somewhere to go.”
“And that,” said Resha, “is where we are now. That is why we came. Twenty in the spring. Nine hundred thousand and growing. Seven hours a day in the book. He has decades ahead of him. With your blessing, my lord, we would like to keep him.”
The Devil did not answer immediately. He seemed to be looking at something none of them could see.
“Yes,” he said at last. “He is good. Keep him. Help him study. Give him whatever he needs. And bring me his account when it is finished.”
“When it is finished?”
“Every account is finished,” the Devil said. “Some sooner than others. Bring it to me.”
The council ended there, and the two of them went back to the duplex with the dark green wall, and the account went on without the council for twelve more years.
What follows is the account.
Chapter Nine: Sixty Seconds
A day in the life of Caleb Hollis at twenty-two went like this.
He woke at ten. He did not set an alarm, because he did not have to. He made coffee in a French press because that was what people with dark green walls did, and he fed Friedrich, who had usually knocked something off the counter in the night. He checked his numbers before he checked anything else. He read the comments on the last video while the coffee steeped. He looked for the ones that said, I left the church because of you. There were usually a dozen by morning. He screenshotted them into a folder on his phone called Receipts, the same name as his church-history series, and he did not see the irony.
Then he studied. That was the part people did not believe when he told them. They thought he made it all up, or read it off atheist websites. He did not. He sat at his desk with three Bibles open, the King James his grandmother left him, a Greek interlinear, and a modern translation, and he read. He read until he found something he could use. Then he wrote a script. Then he filmed it. Then he edited it. Then he read some more.
Seven hours, most days. Nine on some. On the worst days, later on, fifteen.
Rimmah and Resha were in the room for all of it.
They took turns. That is how the work is done when the work matters. One of them sat at his left hand and the other at his right, and as he read, they read with him. They know the book. They have known it longer than it has been written down. They know which verses can be pulled loose from their context like a thread from a sweater, and which ones cannot be touched at all and must be steered around.
“Mark 16,” Resha would say, quietly, as Caleb’s finger moved down the page. “Look at the footnote. The oldest manuscripts end at verse eight. The women flee and say nothing to anyone. Ask why the church added twelve verses.”
And Caleb would look at the footnote, and his heart would quicken, and he would write in his notes: Earliest gospel = no resurrection appearances. Church added them later. Video idea.
He did not read the rest. He did not read that Mark had already had the young man in the tomb say, He is risen; he is not here. He did not read that Paul had written of the risen Christ appearing to Peter and to the twelve and to more than five hundred brethren at once, most of whom were still alive to be asked, twenty years before Mark was ever written. He did not read Matthew or Luke or John on the same morning, because Resha was already saying: That is enough. You have your hook. Film it.
“Genesis 6,” Rimmah would say. “The flood. Every man, woman and child on earth drowned except eight. Ask your followers whether they would drown a baby. Ask them whether a God who would is worth worshiping.”
And Caleb would film it. He would not read verse 5, that every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil continually, and verse 11, that the earth was filled with violence. He would not read that the ark took a hundred and twenty years to build, and Noah was a preacher of righteousness the whole time, and anyone could have come in. Rimmah moved his eyes past those verses like a hand turning a child’s face away from something.
It was the same with the Canaanites. It was the same with the bears and Elisha. It was the same with every hard place in the whole book. The demons did not tell him lies about what the verses said. That would have been too easy to catch. They simply chose which verses he read, and in what order, and which ones he stopped at, and which ones he never reached.
“It is like editing,” Rimmah said to the council once, and he meant it as a compliment to the young man. “He understands editing. He would understand what we do, if he could see it. A clip is not a lie. It is just a clip.”
The videos were sixty seconds. They were all sixty seconds. You cannot explain the covenant of grace in sixty seconds. You cannot explain the holiness of God in sixty seconds, or the sinfulness of sin, or why the cross was necessary, or why a perfectly just God and a perfectly merciful God could only meet at a place like Calvary. You can only ask a question, and cut away before anyone can answer it.
That was the whole method. That was all it ever was. Ask the question. Cut away.
Chapter Ten: The Depravity of Man
At twenty-three he found Calvin.
He found him the way he found everything: looking for ammunition. Someone in his comments, a Reformed kid with a Puritan avatar and a lot of time on his hands, had been arguing with him for weeks about total depravity, and Caleb decided he would destroy the doctrine in a three-part series.
He read the Institutes. All of them. He read Jonathan Edwards. He read the Westminster Confession. He read Romans 3 in Greek until he could recite it in his sleep. There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
“Total depravity,” he said in the first video, “is the most toxic idea in the history of religion. It teaches children that they are born evil. It teaches you that you’re worthless. It’s the root of every religious trauma you have ever experienced. If you were raised being told you were a wretch, a worm, a sinner in the hands of an angry God, I want you to hear me say this. You are not depraved. You are good. You were always good.”
It was the most-shared video he ever made. Four million views in a week. Thousands of comments from people saying they had cried watching it. You are good. You were always good.
Resha was very pleased with that video.
“It is the oldest thing we have,” he told the council. “Older than the flood. Older than Babel. Ye shall be as gods. You are good. You do not need Him. It is the same sentence I would have whispered to the woman in the garden if I had been the one sent. We gave it to him and he gave it to four million people with music underneath.”
What Caleb did not say in that video, what he did not let himself think, was that he had spent three weeks reading the doctrine of total depravity in order to refute it, and somewhere in the second week, late at night, reading Romans 7, he had come to the verse: For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
And he had thought, involuntarily, before he could stop himself: that’s me. That is exactly me.
He had thought of the girl from the week before, whose name he had not bothered to remember. He had thought of the thing he had said about his father in the video where he packed his bag. He had thought of the comment he had left on his sister’s birthday post, which he had deleted ten minutes later but not before she saw it. He had thought, I don’t do the good I want to do. I do the thing I hate. Every time.
Paul is describing me, he thought.
And then Rimmah, at his shoulder, said in the voice that sounds like a man’s own thought: Paul is describing what the church conditioned you to feel. That isn’t depravity. That’s programming. Shake it off.
He shook it off. He made the video. You are good. You were always good.
But he did not sleep that night, and he did not know why.
Chapter Eleven: The Philosophers
He began reading the philosophers at twenty-four because he wanted to sound smarter than the other deconstruction channels, and he stayed with them because he found that he could not stop.
He read Hume on miracles and loved him. He read Feuerbach, who said God was only man’s own nature projected onto the sky, and wrote a video about it the same night. He read Voltaire’s sneering and the French encyclopedists and the old Greek skeptics who doubted that anything could be known at all. He read the modern ones too, the scientists who wrote bestsellers about the God delusion and called the God of the Old Testament the most unpleasant character in all fiction, and he quoted their arguments without quoting their names, because he liked his followers to think the arguments were his.
But it was Nietzsche who took hold of him.
He read The Gay Science in a single night, and when he came to the madman in the marketplace, he read the passage out loud to Friedrich the cat, who was asleep on the radiator.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
He read the rest of it too. He read the madman asking how they could console themselves, the murderers of all murderers. He read the madman asking who would wipe the blood off them, and what water there was to clean themselves, and whether the greatness of the deed was too great for them. He read the madman smashing his lantern on the ground and saying, I have come too early.
Caleb sat there a long time after he finished.
He made a video about it the next day, and in the video he was triumphant. Nietzsche saw it a hundred and forty years ago, he said. God is dead. Not because someone killed Him, but because no one needs Him anymore. We’ve outgrown Him. Like a kid outgrows Santa Claus.
But that was not what Nietzsche had written, and Caleb knew it, because he had read it. The madman was not triumphant. The madman was terrified. The madman asked who would wipe the blood off. The madman said they had unchained the earth from its sun and now they were plunging, backward, sideways, forward, in all directions, through an infinite nothing, and that it was getting colder, and that night was coming on, more and more night.
Caleb read Nietzsche’s life too. He read how the man spent his whole brilliant career attacking the Christianity of his pastor father, and calling Paul the great falsifier, and calling pity a weakness and the cross a slave morality. And he read how, in the winter of 1889, in a street in Turin, Nietzsche saw a man beating a horse, and ran to it, and threw his arms around the horse’s neck, weeping, and then collapsed. And how he never wrote another sane sentence again. And how he spent the last eleven years of his life in his mother’s care and then his sister’s, staring at walls, sometimes signing letters The Crucified One.
Caleb did not make a video about that part.
“He paused on Turin,” Rimmah reported. “He read it three times. He looked at the cat for a while. Then he closed the browser and went and found a girl.”
“And Paul?” the Devil asked.
“Paul he hated,” said Resha, with satisfaction. “He took Nietzsche’s line and ran with it. Paul the tyrant. Paul the inventor of Christianity. Paul who took a gentle Jewish teacher and turned him into a god of guilt and blood. He did a whole series on it. Paul the Misogynist. Paul the Homophobe. Paul the Authoritarian. Paul Who Never Met Jesus.”
“Paul who never met Him,” the Devil repeated. He laughed his not-quite-laugh. “We could tell him otherwise. We were on the road to Damascus. We know exactly whom Paul met.”
“We do not tell him otherwise,” said Resha.
“No,” the Devil agreed. “We do not.”
There was a verse Caleb used to quote in those years, mockingly, when Christians in his comments told him he was being foolish. He had it pinned to the top of his profile for a while. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world?
“Right here,” he wrote beneath it. “Come find me.”
He meant it as a joke. He did not understand that it was a question, and that it was asked by God, and that the next line answered it.
Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
He was, in his own eyes, the wise man of his age. He was the scribe. He was the disputer. He would say it in videos, half laughing: I’m the prophet of the post-Christian world. He would say: I can’t kill God. Nietzsche already tried. But I can expose Him. I can show everyone what He really is.
He believed it. That was the thing. He believed every word of it. He thought he was the hero of the story. He thought, someday, they will write about me the way they write about Nietzsche. He did not think about Turin.
Chapter Twelve: The Challenge
At twenty-six he did the challenge.
It was not his idea originally. Someone had done something like it years before, back in the early days of video sites, a dare for unbelievers to film themselves denying the Holy Spirit. Caleb found an old article about it and decided to bring it back, bigger.
He had read the passages, of course. He had read them more than any of the people who would take his challenge. Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. He had read Mark’s account too, and noticed what the Pharisees had said that made the Carpenter say it: He hath an unclean spirit. They had seen the Carpenter casting out devils by the Spirit of God, and they had said it was the work of the devil.
So that was the challenge. Film yourself saying it. Say that the Holy Spirit is a demon. Say that everything Jesus did, He did by Beelzebub. Hashtag it. Tag three friends.
He filmed himself first. Of course he did. He looked straight into the camera with a little half smile, and he said the words.
Rimmah and Resha were on either side of him.
“I want to describe this precisely for the record,” Resha told the council later, “because it was a remarkable moment. He said the words. And there was nothing. No thunder. No lightning. No dropping dead. He waited a few seconds on camera, theatrically, and looked up at the ceiling, and then he grinned and said, See? Nothing. Your God’s a coward.”
“And was it the unforgivable sin?” the Devil asked.
Resha hesitated. “We do not know,” he admitted. “We never know. That is His business, not ours. But we wanted him to believe that it was. We wanted him to remember that he had done it. We wanted him to be able to look back at that video, years later, at three in the morning, and wonder.”
“Ah,” said the Devil.
“Eighty thousand people took the challenge,” Rimmah said. “Some of them were children. Fourteen, fifteen. We have them in the records. Many of them did not mean it. Some of them did. Some of them will spend years afterward, the ones who come back to Him, terrified that they have committed the one sin that cannot be forgiven. Those are the ones I enjoy most. They are His, and they still cannot sleep.”
The Devil smiled at that.
“And Caleb?”
“Caleb slept fine,” Rimmah said. “For a while.”
Chapter Thirteen: The Altar
By twenty-eight he had four million followers. He had a manager. He had a book deal, and the book became a bestseller: Unbound: How I Escaped the God of My Parents. He had a house now, not the duplex, a real house with a pool and a gate. He had a different girl most months, and sometimes more than one, and he told himself and his followers that this was what freedom looked like, that the church had made him ashamed of his body and his desires and now he was not ashamed of anything.
He was ashamed. He drank so that he would not notice.
He did a series that year that his manager told him not to do. He called it Sacraments. He said the church had its sacraments, baptism and communion, and that the people who had left the church needed their own. So he made some.
There was a baptism in his pool, filmed at night, with candles all around it, where he lowered his followers into the water and pronounced them unbaptized, free of their parents’ God. There was a communion of wine and bread where he said, This is my body, freed for you, and laughed, and everyone at the table laughed with him. There was one, near the end of the series, where he raised a glass and made a toast that he called, with a grin, a toast to the real liberator of mankind, the first one who ever said no.
He said he was joking. He said it was performance art. He said it was about reclaiming symbols.
Rimmah and Resha were in the room for all of it, and they were not joking.
“I have been at a great many altars, my lord,” Rimmah told the council. “In Corinth, in Pergamos, in Carthage, in a hundred temples to a hundred gods whose names nobody remembers. I have never been toasted by name in a house with a heated pool in the suburbs of an American city. I confess I was moved.”
“Did he know?” the Devil asked. “Did he know what he was doing?”
“He knew the words,” Resha said. “He knew exactly what the words meant. He did not believe we were real. That is the joke of it. He toasted us because he thought we were not there, and we stood behind his chair and drank it in.”
The Devil was very pleased with the Sacraments series. The council recorded it.
That was the peak. Twenty-eight. Four million followers. A bestseller. A pool. A gate. A toast.
That was the year the fear started.
PART FOUR: THE UNRAVELLING
Chapter Fourteen: The Accuser
It began with a single verse, the way it had begun at fifteen.
He was preparing a video on Hebrews, because a Christian apologist with a big channel had challenged him to a debate on it, and Caleb never turned down a fight. He was reading the sixth chapter at two in the morning with a glass of bourbon beside the keyboard.
For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.
He read it again.
Then he went to the tenth chapter, because he knew it was there, because he knew the whole book. For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation.
A certain fearful looking for of judgment.
He sat back in his chair. Friedrich, old now and fatter than ever, was asleep on the desk. Caleb looked at the cat for a while.
He thought: I was enlightened. I tasted. I was baptized at nine. I sang the songs. I prayed with a kid at a skate park and he got saved. If any of it was real, I had it. And I put Him to an open shame. Four million people watched me put Him to an open shame.
And then he thought: but none of it is real. So it doesn’t matter.
And then he thought: but what if it is.
It was the first time in thirteen years that he had let himself think that sentence all the way to the end.
Resha was in the room. Rimmah was in the room. And here the chronicle must record something that the two of them reported to the council with great relish, and that the Devil received with great satisfaction, because it is one of the oldest and most effective things they do.
They changed their voices.
For thirteen years they had stood beside him and said: it isn’t real. It doesn’t matter. You are good. You are free. Now, in the same room, at the same desk, without missing a beat, they began to say the opposite.
It’s real. It’s all real. And you’re done.
You did the challenge. You said the words. You know what Jesus said about that. Never forgiven, neither in this world nor in the world to come.
You toasted us. You made sacraments for us. You know what you are.
You read Hebrews 6. Impossible to renew them again to repentance. Impossible. You are the exact person that verse is about.
“We were his comfort,” Resha told the council, “for thirteen years. We became his accuser in one night. The accuser of the brethren, they call you in the book, my lord, and we learned it from you. It is the same voice. It only changes what it says.”
The Devil nodded.
“The ones who are His,” he said, “we accuse so they will despair of His mercy and stay away from Him. The ones who are ours, we comfort so they will never feel the need of it. And when one of ours begins at last to feel the need—”
“We accuse,” said Rimmah. “So he will think it is too late.”
“And it is the same lie both ways,” said the Devil. “It is always the same lie. That He will not receive them.”
Chapter Fifteen: Hannah’s Letter
He did not stop making videos. That is what made it so strange to watch. He kept the schedule. Seven days a week, sixty seconds a day, hook, cut, question, cut away. His numbers kept climbing. He was twenty-nine and then thirty and he had four and a half million followers, and none of them knew that he was reading the book now for fifteen hours a day, not to destroy it but because he could not stop.
He read it the way a man reads his own medical chart.
He read every passage on apostasy. He read every passage on reprobation. He read the hardening of Pharaoh again, the passage where it had all begun, and now when he read Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up he did not think, how unjust. He thought, that’s me. He raised me up to destroy me. I was always Pharaoh.
He read about Esau, who sold his birthright for a bowl of stew and afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.
He sought it carefully with tears.
Caleb did not cry anymore. He had not cried since the night he packed his bag. He told himself that proved he was past it.
The letter came in the spring of his thirtieth year. It was the first letter he had gotten from anyone in his family in twelve years; they had his old email, but he had blocked it. Hannah found the post office box he used for fan mail. She was twenty-five now, married, with a little boy he had never met.
He almost threw it away unopened. He did not.
Caleb,
I don’t know if you’ll read this. I’m going to assume you will. I still pray for you every day. I’ve never missed one. Not one. I wanted you to know that, even if you laugh again.
I watch your videos sometimes. I’m not supposed to tell Mom that. I watch them because they’re the only way I get to see your face. You look tired, Caleb. You look so tired.
I’m not going to argue with you about the flood or Romans 9 or anything. You know more about all of it than I ever will. I just want to tell you one thing, and then I’ll leave you alone.
Dad still keeps your room. He didn’t change anything. He goes in there sometimes. Mom told me she found him on his knees by your bed last month, just kneeling there, not saying anything. He’s getting older. His hands shake now.
You can come home. That’s all I wanted to say. Not to argue. Not so we can fix you. Just come home. There’s a plate for you. There’s always been a plate for you.
Remember what the father said in the story of the prodigal son? This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. The father ran. He didn’t wait for the son to clean himself up first. He saw him a great way off and ran.
I love you. I’ve always loved you. So has He.
Your sister,
Hannah
P.S. Eli is three. He has your hair. He asks about his uncle on the computer.
Caleb read it standing at the kitchen counter in his big house with the gate and the pool. He read it four times.
Rimmah was at his left hand. Rimmah said, quietly: They want you back so they can parade you. Prodigal son returns. They’ll put you on a stage. They’ll make you a testimony.
Resha was at his right hand. Resha said: And anyway, you can’t go back. You know you can’t. The father ran to the prodigal son, but the prodigal son never stood in front of four million people and called the Holy Spirit a demon. You’re not the prodigal. You’re Esau. You’re Judas. Read your Bible.
Caleb folded the letter and put it in the kitchen drawer with the takeout menus and the spare keys. He did not answer it.
He kept it, though. They noticed that. He kept it.
Chapter Sixteen: Turin
At thirty-one, in the summer, during a livestream, he broke.
He was doing a question-and-answer session, the kind he had done a hundred times. Two hours. Followers sending in questions with tips attached. A girl in the chat asked, Have you ever been afraid you were wrong?
He laughed, the way he always did. He started to give the answer he always gave. “No, because fear is just conditioning, and once you see—”
And then he stopped.
He sat there in front of the camera, live, with forty thousand people watching, and he did not say anything for nineteen seconds. The chat went wild. Is he frozen? Did the stream lag? Caleb?? Bro??
And then he said, in a voice none of them had ever heard from him before: “Every day.”
He ended the stream.
He did not post for eleven days. It was the longest break of his career. His manager called forty times. When he came back, he made a video saying he had been dealing with a family emergency, and he went back to the schedule, sixty seconds, hook, cut, question, cut away.
But something had come loose.
He stopped sleeping. He started reading at noon and stopped at four in the morning. He started talking out loud in the house, arguing with no one, quoting verses back and forth, the defense and the prosecution both, in his own voice. Friedrich died that winter, of old age, curled on the radiator, and Caleb sat on the floor beside the cat’s body for six hours and did not call anyone.
He had panic attacks in the shower. He had one in a restaurant, in the middle of a brand dinner, and had to be walked out to the car by a stranger. He went to a therapist, a good one, who told him he had religious OCD from his upbringing, and scrupulosity, and that the fear of hell was a symptom of the trauma his church had done to him, and Caleb sat in her office and nodded and thought: she’s half right. She’s half right, and the half she’s wrong about is going to kill me.
Because it was not only scrupulosity. That was the horror of it. The demons had built his fear out of real stones. He had not merely imagined that he had blasphemed. He had blasphemed, on camera, for years, deliberately, for money. He had not merely imagined that he had led people away. He had a folder on his phone called Receipts with sixty thousand screenshots in it.
A scrupulous believer wakes at three in the morning terrified of a sin he did not commit. Caleb woke at three in the morning terrified of sins he had committed, on purpose, with a ring light.
“We laughed,” Rimmah told the council later. “I will tell you honestly, my lord, we laughed. He would sit in the shower with the water running cold, rocking, saying the verses to himself. Impossible to renew them. No more sacrifice for sins. He found no place of repentance. And Resha would say them with him, a half-second ahead of him, so he would think he was remembering them himself. And then he would get out of the shower and put on a shirt and film a sixty-second video about how hell was invented by the medieval church.”
“He thought he was going mad,” said Resha.
“He was going mad,” said Rimmah. “We were the madness.”
He thought about Nietzsche in Turin a great deal that year. The horse. The arms around its neck. The eleven years after, staring at walls. He looked up the letters Nietzsche signed after the collapse, the ones signed Dionysus and the ones signed The Crucified. He thought: he spent his whole life fighting the cross and at the end he signed his name with it. He thought: it is coming for me too. Whatever came for him is coming for me.
He was right about that. It was already in the room.
Chapter Seventeen: The Chief of Sinners
It was a Tuesday. The chronicle notes that, because it began on a Tuesday too, seventeen years before, in a bedroom with a faded card taped above the bed.
He was thirty-two. He had been awake for two days. The house was very quiet. He had cancelled a podcast appearance that morning without explanation.
He was not looking for the verse. He was looking for something else entirely, a passage in First Timothy he wanted for a video about Paul’s views on women. He opened his grandmother’s King James to find it. The pages fell open somewhere else.
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.
He read it. He read the verses around it.
Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy.
A blasphemer. A persecutor.
He knew Paul better than almost anyone alive. He had spent three years attacking him. He knew that Paul had held the coats at the stoning of Stephen. He knew that Paul had dragged believers out of their houses and voted for their deaths and tried to make them blaspheme. He knew all of it.
Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting.
A pattern.
He put his head down on the open Bible, on his grandmother’s thin pages, and he began to weep.
It was the first time he had cried in fourteen years. It came up out of him like something tearing. He wept until he could not breathe. He wept until the page was wet and the ink of the verse began to blur.
The two demons went very still.
“I will not pretend to you,” Resha told the council afterward, and for once there was no relish at all in his voice, “that we were not afraid in that moment. We were afraid. Because we have seen this before. We have seen exactly this, a man with his head down on that verse, weeping. And sometimes, my lord, sometimes they get up and go to Him.”
“Sometimes,” said the Devil.
“So we spoke,” said Resha. “Quickly. Both of us.”
And what they said was this, in the voice that sounds like a man’s own thoughts:
Paul did it ignorantly. Read the verse. I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. Paul didn’t know. You knew. You always knew. You read the whole book. You did it on purpose. That verse was written for Paul, not for you. There is no pattern for you.
It was half a truth. That is the only kind they have. Paul had written that he acted ignorantly. And Caleb had not acted ignorantly. That much was so.
But Caleb, with his face on the page, did not think of the fisherman. He did not think of Peter, who was not ignorant at all, who had walked with the Carpenter for three years and seen Him raise the dead and been told to his face exactly what he would do, and who denied Him three times anyway, knowingly, with oaths and curses, and went out and wept bitterly, and was forgiven on a beach over breakfast. He did not think of the thief on the cross, who had nothing to plead at all. He did not think of the prodigal in his sister’s letter, who had wasted everything on purpose with harlots and came home anyway, and found the father already running.
He did not think of any of them, because the demons were speaking very fast, and because he had spent seventeen years training himself to read every verse in that book except the ones that were for him.
Chapter Eighteen: Innocent Blood
He lifted his head from the Bible.
He said, out loud, to the empty house, a sentence he knew was from the book, because he knew all of it. He said it the way Judas said it, standing in the temple with thirty pieces of silver in his hand.
“I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.”
The house did not answer. The priests had not answered Judas either. What is that to us? see thou to that.
Rimmah and Resha did not answer him. They did not need to anymore.
And here, the chronicle will not follow him further than it must.
He did not write a note. He did not film anything. He did not call his sister, though her number was still in the drawer with the letter, and he looked at the drawer for a long time. Somewhere in that long looking there was still a door. The chronicle wants that recorded plainly, because it is the truth. The door was there. The Spirit had not stopped striving. The verse that was wet with his tears was still true, and it was true for him.
He did not go through it.
He did what Judas did. It is written of Judas in one short line, and that is all that will be written of him here: he went and hanged himself.
His manager found him two days later.
PART FIVE: THE ACCOUNT
Chapter Nineteen: The Report
The council met in the place that is not a place, and Resha and Rimmah came before the Devil to give him the account.
“It is finished, my lord,” said Resha. “You asked us to bring it to you.”
The Devil inclined his head.
“Thirty-two years,” said Rimmah. “Seventeen of them ours outright. Thirteen of them public. Here are the numbers, as you like them.”
He read them out like an accountant at the end of a fiscal year.
“Four million six hundred thousand followers at his peak, across all platforms. Two thousand three hundred videos. Two billion eight hundred million views, give or take. One bestselling book, translated into eleven languages. Eighty-one thousand participants in the challenge. Sixty-one thousand four hundred messages in his own folder from people who wrote to him that he was the reason they left the church. We have the folder. We kept it.”
“And the souls?”
“Of those who left the faith with his help,” said Resha, “and who have died since, three thousand one hundred and eighteen are with us now. That is only the ones already dead. The rest are still living, and most of them are still ours, and the videos are still up. His manager is keeping the channel running. It earns more now than when he was alive. Death has been very good for his engagement.”
Rimmah laughed at that. Resha did not quite laugh, but he smiled.
“We should tell you about the end,” Rimmah said. “The last year. It was the finest work I have ever done. You should have seen him, my lord. The shower. The rocking. The verses. Forty thousand people watching him freeze on a livestream. Him on the floor with the dead cat for six hours.” Rimmah could barely get the words out, he was laughing so hard. “The disputer of this age. The prophet who would expose God. On the floor of his kitchen talking to a dead cat.”
“And the verse at the end,” said Resha. “Chief of sinners. He nearly got up. He nearly went. We had to speak very quickly. But we spoke, and he believed us, the same way the other one believed us in the field of blood. It was a very good ending. A very tidy ending.”
They waited for the Devil to say something.
He did not say anything. He only made a small sound, a sound of contempt, a short dry scoff, the sound a man makes when he is shown something he finds beneath his notice. Whether it was contempt for the young man, or for the two demons laughing, or for something else that none of them could see, the chronicle does not know.
Chapter Twenty: The Next One
“There is another,” Rimmah said, when it was clear the Devil was not going to speak. “We have already found her. Sixteen. Raised in the church. Sharp. She watches his videos. She has watched all of them. She commented on his last one the night before he died. She said, You changed my life.”
“She is reading Romans,” Resha said. “For school.”
The Devil looked at them for a long time.
“One has been cut down,” he said. “Tossed out. Move on. On to the next one.”
They bowed and left.
The council chamber was empty after that, and the Devil sat alone in it for a while in the dark. If he thought anything about the young man who had toasted him by name in a house with a heated pool, the chronicle does not record it. He did not mourn him. He does not mourn anyone. He had never wanted Caleb Hollis. He had only wanted Caleb Hollis to not be the Carpenter’s.
That was all he had ever wanted from any of them.
PART SIX: ETERNITY
Chapter Twenty-One: The Books Were Opened
And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened.
He did not know how long he had been there. There was no time in that place to measure it by. There was only light, and the light was not like any light he had ever seen, and it did not cast shadows, and it went through him the way water goes through a cloth.
He was on the ground. He did not remember falling. His face was down. He could not lift it.
He knew where he was. He had read the passage a thousand times. He had made a video about it, once, at twenty-five: The Great White Throne, or, How Christians Fantasize About Watching You Burn. He had laughed while he recorded it.
He was not laughing now. He was barely breathing, if breathing was what he was doing. He could hardly hear. He was aware of Someone seated above him, and the awareness was so enormous that it pressed him flat, and he could not look, and he could not speak, and he would not have known what to say if he could.
Then someone was speaking to him.
It was not the One on the throne. He knew that, somehow, the way you know in a dream who is in the room. It was an angel. A tall one, standing beside him, and he could see the edge of a robe out of the corner of his eye, and the hem of it was trembling.
The chronicle has met this angel before. It is one of the two who stood near the throne in the beginning, when the morning stars sang together, and who watched the brightest of them fall. It has watched a great many things since. It has never grown used to this.
“Caleb Hollis,” the angel said.
Its voice was not angry. That was the first thing he understood, and it was the worst thing. It was not angry at all.
“I have been given the reading of your sentence,” the angel said. “It is not mine. I want you to understand that. I take no pleasure in it. I was not asked whether I take pleasure in it. I only read what is written.”
Caleb tried to speak. Nothing came.
“He has no words for you,” the angel said quietly. “Not now. He gave you His words. You have read them more than almost anyone who has ever lived. Fifteen hours in a day, at the end. You read every one of them. He has nothing to add to what He already said.”
The angel was silent for a moment, and then it said the thing that Caleb would hear for the rest of eternity.
“He loved you. The whole time. I want you to hear that before anything else is read. It is written, and it is true: God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While you were fifteen and closing the door in your room. While you were packing your bag. While you were holding up your grandmother’s Bible to a camera. While you were toasting the enemy by your pool. The whole time. He never once stopped.”
Something in Caleb broke then, wherever it was that he still had something left to break.
“He gave you everything,” the angel went on. “A father on his knees by your bed. A mother. A sister who prayed for you every day of your life and never missed one. A youth pastor who texted you for three years. A mind that could read Greek at nineteen. Your grandmother’s King James. A faded card above your crib with your name on it. He wholly followed the Lord. He gave you all of it. And you took the gifts of another. The money. The praise. The women. Four million and six hundred thousand voices telling you that you were brave and good and free.”
The angel’s voice dropped.
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Much Required
Then the books were opened, and the angel read from them.
It read for a long time. Caleb did not know how long. It read every video. Two thousand three hundred of them. It read the date and the title and the words, every word, every cut, every sixty seconds. It read the comments under them, the ones he had screenshotted and saved in the folder he called Receipts. It read the names.
It read the name of the woman in Oregon who had sent him a thousand dollars, and who had died at sixty-three never having gone back. It read the name of a boy of fourteen who had taken the challenge on a dare at a sleepover and had never stopped being afraid. It read the names of three thousand one hundred and eighteen men and women and children who had heard the gospel once and heard Caleb Hollis after, and who were not here, in the light, but somewhere else.
“They are not lost because of you,” the angel said. “I want you to understand that also. Every one of them stood where you are standing, and every one of them answered for themselves, and none of them was taken against their will. But you planted the seeds. You stood at the door and turned them back. You told them there was no door at all. You persecuted the Lord in His people for thirteen years, and you did it with His own words in your mouth.”
The angel turned another page.
“And you did not do it ignorantly. That is the heaviest thing in this book. The teaching of the Lord is plain: For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. You were given very much. Your sentence will be the most severe.”
Caleb found his voice, finally. It was hardly a voice. It was barely a breath.
“The verse,” he whispered. “Chief of sinners. The night I. I read it. I was reading it.”
The angel was weeping now. Caleb could hear it. He had not known that angels could weep.
“I know,” the angel said. “I was there. We were there. I want you to know what was true that night, because the two who stood beside you told you otherwise, and you believed them, and it is the last lie they will ever tell you.
“It was not the challenge that sealed you. It was not even the last night. You were not condemned because you were afraid. There are many in this place, in His house, who feared what you feared, who woke at three in the morning sure that they had committed the sin that cannot be forgiven, sure that the door was shut. They were wrong, and they came anyway, trembling, and He received them. Every one.
“The verse was true for you. That night, with your face on the page, it was true for you. The door was open. The fisherman denied Him three times, knowing exactly what he did, and wept, and went back to the boat to wait for Him. Judas wept too. You both wept. One of them waited for the Lord. One of them went to the rope.
“You went where Judas went.
“And now the Lord’s own word must stand, the same word He spoke of the one whose road you chose.” The angel’s voice broke on it. “It had been good for that man if he had not been born.”
The light did not change. It never changes. But the angel stepped back.
“The mind He formed in you,” it said, “the mind you used against Him for seventeen years, has failed you now. There is nothing more to read.”
And it said the last words, the ones the Lord Himself had spoken long ago of the unprofitable servant who buried what he had been given:
“Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: I Had It
He was not screaming.
The chronicle wants that recorded, because the young man had made a video once, at twenty-three, mocking the images of hell in old paintings, the screaming mouths and the flames. He was not screaming. He did not have the strength for it. There was only weeping, low and constant, the kind of weeping that does not stop because there is nothing left on the other side of it.
And he lifted his head, once.
He looked up, past the angel, into the light, toward the throne. And he saw Him there. Not His face. He could not have borne His face. But he saw Him. The One he had read about every day for seventeen years. The One whose words he could quote from memory in two languages. The One he had spent his whole life arguing with.
He was right there.
And Caleb knew Him. He knew everything about Him. He could have told you the date of every one of His miracles and the Greek word for every one of His parables. He knew Him the way a man knows a book.
And there was nothing between them. No relationship. No word. No hand. Nothing.
I read this, Caleb thought. I read this exact passage. I knew He would be here. I knew all of it.
And then the thought that would go with him into the dark, and stay with him there, and never once fade:
I had it.
I had it in my hand. At nine, in the water. At fifteen, before I closed the door. At eighteen, at the kitchen table, with Dad’s hands shaking. At thirty, at the kitchen counter, with Hannah’s letter. At thirty-two, with my face on the page. I had it.
And I can’t have Him. Not now. Even if I could reach Him now, I can’t. There is nothing left in me that wants anything but the dark.
The weeping did not stop. It is not going to stop.
Somewhere far below, in an ordinary house in an ordinary town, an old electrician with shaking hands was on his knees by an empty bed in a room that had not been changed in fourteen years. And in another house, a young mother was putting her little boy to sleep, a boy with his uncle’s hair, and before she turned out the light, she prayed for her brother, the way she had every day of her life.
She did not know yet that she could stop.
She would not have stopped anyway.
The chronicle ends there.
