Recently a theological controversy that had been simmering in podcasts and blog articles for many months finally reached a painful, public climax. In the first week of November, ministries that had been respected pillars of the online Particular Baptist world fractured. Justin Perdue, citing profound theological disagreements, announced his resignation from Theocast.¹ Concurrently, the board of the Grace Reformed Network, a Particular Baptist association of churches, announced it had accepted the resignation of its vice president, Jon Moffitt, pointing to the same core dispute.²

The epicenter of this division was a body of doctrine, promulgated chiefly by Moffitt and his co-host Doug Van Dorn on the Reformed Fringe podcast. The public discourse has been, in my judgment, unfortunately obscured. Much attention has been fixed on the more sensational “Divine Council” worldview. Furthermore, some who support Van Dorn and Moffitt have painted their critics as uncharitable, mean-spirited, or engaged in a witch hunt. This combination of speculative cosmology and ad hominem defense has, in my observation, caused many to overlook or minimize the far more serious Christological concerns this essay seeks to highlight. The critics have rightly charged that this teaching “contradict[s] and/or compromise[s] historical, creedal, and confessional definitions of Christology and the doctrine of God.”³ Indeed, the primary theological source for this errant framework, Van Dorn’s 2015 paper “Passing the Impassible Impasse,” reveals the core of the problem.⁴ In it, the proponents have identified a truly legitimate theological impasse in the Old Testament. The solution they have constructed, however, appears to import the very logic of the hypostatic union and misapply it to the pre-incarnate Christophany: the Angel of the LORD.

Van Dorn has, in his online materials, denied the dangerous implications of this move, but he has failed to provide a coherent “third option.” This theological ambiguity leaves his followers vulnerable to a malformed Christology and impaled on the horns of a dangerous dilemma. This entire affair, I would suggest, is symptomatic of a broader danger in our day: a “Quest for Illegitimate Religious Gnosis,” which prizes novel, “hidden” knowledge over the sufficient “pattern of sound words” delivered in our confessions and through the ordinary means of grace.

The Legitimate Impasse and the Theopaschite Parallel

We must, as people committed to rigorous and charitable engagement, begin by acknowledging the valid problem Van Dorn identifies. Our confession, in full agreement with historic orthodoxy, defines God as “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions” (Westminster Confession of Faith [WCF] 2.1, 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith 2.1). This is the doctrine of divine simplicity and impassibility, which Van Dorn’s paper rightly affirms as applying to the Divine Essence or “Being of God.”⁵

The impasse, then, is the Old Testament narrative itself. We are confronted with numerous theophanies where the Angel of the LORD—whom Van Dorn identifies as the pre-incarnate second person of the Trinity⁶—appears in ways that seem to contradict this definition. This Angel “ate” with Abraham (Gen 18:8), “wrestled” with Jacob (Gen 32:24), and is associated with Yahweh, who expresses “grief” (Gen 6:6). How can a God “without body or parts” wrestle? How can a God “without . . . passions” grieve?

This is not a new problem. It is, in fact, the same fundamental problem the church faced in the fifth and sixth centuries regarding Christ’s work on the cross. The Scythian monks, in what became the Theopaschite controversy, insisted that the phrase “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh” must be affirmed to guard against Nestorianism.

The central question was: How can the impassible God suffer? The resolution, affirmed at the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553 AD),⁷ was a masterful application of the communicatio idiomatum (communication of properties), built upon the foundation of the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD). Chalcedon had established the non-negotiable boundaries: Christ is “one and the same Son . . . made known in two natures . . . without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”⁸ The Fifth Council, reaffirming this, insisted that the person of the Son, “One of the Trinity,” did indeed suffer. But how? He suffered only in the human nature that he had hypostatically united to his divine person. The suffering and passions were “located” in his assumed human nature, while his divine nature remained—and must remain—absolutely impassible.

This solution is the glory of orthodox Christology. It allows us to say, truly, that “God suffered,” without predicating that suffering to the divine essence (WCF 8.7).

The Misapplication of Chalcedonian Logic

Here is the crux of the present controversy. Van Dorn correctly understands this very Theopaschite solution.⁹ Then, facing the Old Testament impasse, he takes the precise logical structure of that solution and reapplies it to the pre-incarnate Angel of the LORD.

He argues that when the Old Testament speaks of God “grieving,” this is not the Divine Essence, but the person of the Son. He writes, “It is a reasonable conclusion that the person ‘regretting’ something here is the Angel of Yahweh.”¹⁰ But in what does this “grief” or “regret” inhere? The Fifth Council located the Son’s passions in the assumed human nature. Van Dorn, lacking a human nature for the pre-incarnate Son, posits a created, angelic one.

He argues that the Son, in the Old Testament, “comes in an angelic soma“¹¹ and “entered into his creation, thereby assuming whatever created properties came along with being an angel.”¹²

This is the central error. This “angelic soma” serves the exact same logical function as the human nature in the Chalcedonian and Theopaschite formulations. It provides a created, passible “place” for the impassible Son to experience passions. As Van Dorn concludes, “Since he had taken the form of an angel, it would almost be expected that the LORD here would be grieved, even while simultaneously the Godhead is not changed.”¹³ He has used the logic of the Fifth Council but illicitly swapped the “human nature” for an “angelic soma.”

This creates a profound Christological crisis, for it violates the very principle that makes the incarnation intelligible. As classic Reformed theology has always maintained, it was the person (or subsistence) of the Son who assumed a human nature (or substance). This human nature was anhypostatic—it had no personal subsistence of its own—but was “from the very first moment of conception . . . united with and incorporated in the person of the Son.”¹⁴ Van Dorn’s formulation, however, posits another created nature—an “angelic soma”—that is also assumed by the Son to serve as a vehicle for passibility. This is precisely the kind of “mingling” or “confusion” of natures that the church, as Herman Bavinck notes, rightly rejected in Eutychianism and Monophysitism.¹⁵

Van Dorn, in other writings, explicitly denies that this implies a hypostatic union with an angel, and he “categorically den[ies]” that Jesus has three natures (divine, angelic, human).¹⁶ We must take him at his word. But his denials do nothing to solve the logical problem he has created in his own primary paper. He has offered no “third option.” If the divine Son “assum[ed] . . . created properties” of an angel in such a way that he could experience passions in that form, how is this not a hypostatic union with a created angelic nature? And if it is not a union, but a “temporary manifestation,”¹⁷ how was it a “real entity” capable of passion and not merely a docetic illusion? If it is neither a hypostatic union nor a docetic illusion, how does it not represent change in the divine nature of the Son?

By failing to provide a coherent mechanism, Van Dorn leaves his followers with all the logical premises of a hypostatic union with an angel, even as he denies the conclusion. He has led them to the edge of a Christological precipice and offered no guard rail. The practical result is that his readers are left to misapply the logic of the hypostatic union, rendering the Son a strange chimera—a being of divine, angelic, and human properties, a tertium quid (third thing) that is neither God, angel, nor man.

The Quest for Illegitimate Religious Gnosis

Why is this happening? Why has a teaching with such profound Christological ambiguity gained such traction, to the point of fracturing ministries? I submit that it is a symptom of a deep pastoral sickness in our time, one which we might call the “Quest for Illegitimate Religious Gnosis.”

This is a play on R. Scott Clark’s apt phrases, the “Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty” and “Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience.”¹⁸ But this gnosis (the Greek word for “knowledge”) is a different, though related, temptation. It is a spiritual discontentment that finds the “pattern of sound words” (2 Tim 1:13) delivered in our catechisms and confessions to be insufficient, plain, or boring.

It is a desire for something more—a secret, hidden knowledge that the mainstream church has missed. This narrative is intoxicating. It frames its adherents as discoverers of a lost, truer version of Christianity. We see this in the Reformed Fringe movement’s emphasis on a “supernatural worldview” that, it is claimed, was deliberately “obscured” and “tampered with” by post-Christian rabbis who “deliberately altered texts.”¹⁹

This quest for novelty—for a fringy, sexy, and exciting cosmic war—is fundamentally rooted in a dissatisfaction with the ordinary means of grace. The simple, weekly preaching of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, and the life of prayer feel mundane compared to the esoteric depths of angelology, divine council-seating, and uncovering “what really happened at Babel.”

Our duty is clear. We must not shrink from difficult texts, and Van Dorn is correct to engage the impassibility impasse. But we must address these texts from within the robust, sufficient, and safe boundaries of our confessional heritage, not by constructing novel solutions that mirror ancient errors. We must, with precision and love, call our people away from this Quest for Illegitimate Religious Gnosis and back to the glorious, sufficient, and profound simplicity of the Christ revealed in the Scriptures and confessed by his church.

To those who have observed this controversy and feel a crisis of confidence setting in, let me offer a final word of encouragement. A crisis of confidence in fallible teachers must never be allowed to become a crisis of confidence in the all-sufficient Christ. These theological polemics are disorienting, but our foundation is not in novelty. The Quest for Illegitimate Religious Gnosis fails because it seeks comfort in what is hidden. The gospel, by contrast, gives abiding comfort in what is revealed. We do not need a mediator who manifested in a temporary “angelic soma.” We have a sufficient and glorious Mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ, “who, being the eternal Son of God, became man, and so was, and continueth to be, God and man in two distinct natures, and one person, for ever” (Westminster Shorter Catechism 21). He is our only comfort in life and in death. His person is not a chimera, and his work is not a secret. It is the solid, public, and all-sufficient foundation upon which our souls may rest.

Notes

1. Justin Perdue, “I Have Decided to Resign from Theocast,” @justin_perdue, X, November 1, 2025.
2. Justin Perdue, “We, the Other Members of the Board, Have Received and Accepted Jon Moffitt’s Resignation,” @justin_perdue, X, November 5, 2025.
3. Perdue, “We, the Other Members.”
4. Doug Van Dorn, “Passing the Impassible Impasse,” February 2015.
5. Van Dorn, “Passing the Impassible Impasse,” 3.
6. Van Dorn, “Passing the Impassible Impasse,” 14–17
7. For a summary of the historical debates leading to the Fifth Ecumenical Council, see “The Fifth Ecumenical Council,” in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 14:299–323.
8. The Definition of Faith of the Council of Chalcedon, 451 A.D., as cited in Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, vol. 3 (Baker, 2006), 55.
9. Van Dorn, “Passing the Impassible Impasse,” 5–6
10. Van Dorn, “Passing the Impassible Impasse,” 31.
11. Van Dorn, “Passing the Impassible Impasse,” 16.
12. Van Dorn, “Passing the Impassible Impasse,” 30; emphasis added.
13. Van Dorn,“Passing the Impassible Impasse,” 31.
14. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3 (Baker, 2006), 91.
15. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 87–88.
16. Doug Van Dorn, “My Orthodoxy: Affirmations and Denials Against Unaccountable Online Slander,” Douglas Van Dorn, November 7, 2025.
17. Van Dorn, “My Orthodoxy.”
18. See R Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession (P&R Publishing, 2008).
19. Doug Van Dorn, “The Son of God,” YouTube, November 3, 2025.

©Tony Arsenal. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Tony Arsenal

  

  Tony Arsenal holds Master of Arts degrees in Church History and Theology from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He co-hosts the Reformed Brotherhood Podcast and is a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church congregation. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife, Ashley, and their children.

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