The Question Behind Every Question

First in a series: Whose Word Is It? — Scripture, authority, and a generation looking elsewhere.

Something is happening on America’s college campuses, and it isn’t what anyone predicted.

At Kansas State University this past spring, over a hundred students entered the Catholic Church in a single season — and next year’s class of converts is already larger.¹ Dioceses across the country are reporting double-digit growth in adult conversions, with young adults leading the way.² Meanwhile, Orthodox parishes — tiny as that tradition is in America — have seen converts surge since the pandemic, most of them men in their twenties and thirties who weren’t raised anywhere near an icon.³⁴ Sociologists are writing about it. Major newspapers are writing about it. And the pattern holds from state schools to Bible colleges: young people raised in evangelical and restorationist churches are walking toward Rome and Constantinople.

And, it isn’t the disengaged kids making these moves. It’s the readers. The ones who took their Bibles seriously. The ones who asked the hard questions in Bible class and didn’t always get good answers. One Moody Bible Institute graduate has taken to calling it an evangelical brain drain — our most theologically hungry young people, leaving for traditions that claim to have kept what we discarded.⁵

I’m at the very beginning of researching why, and over the coming weeks I want to walk through where our Bible actually came from, why I remain convinced that Scripture alone holds final authority over the church, and why a generation of serious young Christians is drawn toward traditions that say otherwise. But before any of the history, we need to name the question beneath it all. Because every conversation you will ever have about Catholicism or Orthodoxy — about Mary, the pope, the saints, tradition, all of it — eventually walks itself back to a single question:

When God’s word and human authority disagree, which one gives way?

This is the foundational question. Rome answers that Scripture and the church’s teaching office stand together, and the church tells you what Scripture means. Orthodoxy answers that Scripture lives inside Holy Tradition and can’t rightly be read apart from it. And those of us who say “the Bible alone,” could we defend it? Could you defend it to a bright twenty-three-year-old who’s been watching Catholic apologists on YouTube and wants to know who decided what went into the Bible in the first place?

This is a matter of doctrine I've been weak on. I grew up in a time and place where nearly everyone around me — evangelicals mostly, with a few mainline folks in the mix — believed the Bible was totally sufficient as the standard of authority. We disagreed plenty on points of application, but the bedrock conviction was shared: the Bible is THE word of God. So it was easy to take that for granted, to operate on the assumption that we all agreed it was true. I also grew up in a religious background that focused intently on the first century — and then skipped most of the history until the 1800s, when the Restoration Movement took root in the British Isles and America. We tended to gloss over everything in between as "the falling away," and we didn't have many answers for questions about the in-between.

That’s what this series is for. And we’re not starting with a church council or a Reformation or Restoration Movement slogan. We’re starting with Jesus, because it turns out our Lord faced this exact question in public. And the way He answered wasn’t subtle.

A delegation from Jerusalem

In Mark 7, Pharisees and scribes come up from Jerusalem, an official inquiry, and catch Jesus’ disciples eating bread with unwashed hands. Mark pauses to explain the offense for his Gentile readers: the Pharisees don’t eat unless they ceremonially wash, “holding firmly to the tradition of the elders” (Mark 7:3).⁶ That phrase, the tradition of the elders, appears four times in thirteen verses. Mark wants you to see it.

This was a serious, centuries-deep body of oral teaching — interpretations, applications, fence-laws built around the Torah so that nobody would ever wander close enough to break it. The men who kept it weren’t villains. They were the most Bible-serious people in Israel, and they, with the most sincere of hearts, would have you told that the tradition protected the word of God.

Hold onto that. This story isn’t about bad men doing an obviously bad thing. It’s about devout men doing a subtle thing, and Jesus naming it.

They ask about handwashing. Jesus answers about authority. He reaches for Isaiah: “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. And in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Then He drives it home: “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men” (vv. 6–8).

Look at the two columns Jesus just built. Commandment of God on one side. Tradition of men on the other. He never says tradition is worthless — He says tradition is human, and the moment something human occupies the seat reserved for God’s commandment, worship itself goes hollow. A room full of moving lips and absent hearts.

Then He gives them a case study. God said (and notice that in Jesus’ mouth, what “Moses said” and what God commands are the same thing): honor your father and your mother. But the tradition had developed a workaround called Corban: declare your assets a gift devoted to God, and you’re released from spending them on your aging parents. A vow, wrapped in devotion, deployed against the fifth commandment. Jesus’ verdict is in verse 13: you are “invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down; and you do many such things as that.”

Invalidating, which means to render void. The tradition built to guard the word was destroying it.

The concession nobody notices

Now here’s the principle that we observe from these verses, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

In the entire confrontation, the Pharisees never once respond, “But our tradition carries equal authority with Scripture, so Your argument fails.” They can’t. Everyone in that conversation (Jesus, the scribes, the listening crowd) already agrees that when a tradition conflicts with God's commandment, the tradition is the guilty party. Jesus’ whole argument assumes Scripture outranks tradition, and His opponents’ silence concedes the premise. Their failure wasn’t holding the wrong theory of authority. Their failure was violating the one they held.

So when I say that Scripture stands above every human authority (every council, every catechism, every creed, and yes, every cherished tradition we have within the Restoration Movement), I’m not quoting Martin Luther. I’m describing how the Son of God argued.

Grass and the forever-word

Seven centuries before that confrontation, Isaiah wrote to a people about to lose everything they could see. The Babylonians were coming to destroy the temple, throne, land, and the entire apparatus of their religion. God’s comfort to them is severe mercy: “All flesh is grass... The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:6–8). Institutions are grass. Empires are grass. Leaders, however godly, are grass. One thing in your world is not grass.

Peter quotes that very text and then adds: “And this is the word which was preached to you” (1 Peter 1:25). The forever-word isn’t sealed in heaven. It was preached to you. You hold it.

I bring this up because the traditions drawing our children are old, and when you’re twenty-five, old feels like forever. Incense feels eternal. Chant feels eternal. “Apostolic succession” sounds like an unbroken chain running back to Peter himself. But old is not forever. And over the next several articles, I’m going to trace how the eternal word came to us — who wrote it, who copied it, who recognized it, and why no institution on earth, however ancient, can honestly claim to have created it.

Next time we’ll start where the story really starts — not at a council in the fourth century, but inside the New Testament itself, where Peter is already calling Paul’s letters “Scripture” while the ink is barely dry. And along the way we’ll bury a myth almost everybody believes, about a council called Nicea and what it supposedly decided.

One last word. Every person in this article is somebody’s child. The hundred-plus at Kansas State, the young men filling Orthodox parishes past the fire code — behind each one there’s a kitchen table, and at that table, more often than you’d guess, a mother or father who raised that child on Scripture and now lies awake wondering what they missed. If that’s your table, this last word is for you.

Your child hasn’t rejected Jesus. They’ve reached conclusions about His church and His word that I’m convinced Scripture doesn’t support, and this series will say so plainly because the differences aren’t small. But where your child stands before God isn’t mine to declare, and carrying that verdict isn’t the burden He gave you. Judgment belongs to the Lord. The table and the door belong to you. Grieve honestly, just not as those who have no hope. Keep the conversation going. Keep the door open.

The grass withers. The flower fades. And the word of our God will outlast every fear you’re carrying.

1. https://www.romereports.com/en/2026/03/27/us-catholic-church-gen-z-conversion-boom-spilling-into-2027/

2. https://catholicreview.org/easter-boom-u-s-dioceses-say-rise-in-new-catholics-may-point-to-regional-revivals/

3. https://religionunplugged.com/news/crossroads-podcast-why-young-men-are-joining-masculine-orthodox-christianity

4. In a survey of converts in the Dallas area, 50% were former evangelicals, 25% former Catholics, and 25% truly "unchurched," including some neopagans. Orthodox leaders are now tracking a larger wave of young families, with the biggest growth in the Sun Belt and West, where numerous parishes are doubling and tripling in size. https://herald-zeitung.com/opinion/mattingly-churches-of-orthodoxy-now-face-waves-of-converts/article_4bd5197c-9dda-4dd3-85a2-90dfcd336672.html

5. "Help! All the Kids are Becoming Catholic/Orthodox"

6. Scripture quotations taken from the NASB 2020, © The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.