Restoring Apostolic Faith

Most people read Paul like he was speaking with a gentle hand on the shoulder. But if you slow down and listen in the language he actually wrote, you find something far more direct. His tone is urgent, sharp, sometimes even blistering with frustration and love woven so tightly together they’re almost indistinguishable. Yet in most modern pulpits, that urgency is softened twice—first by the limits of English, and then again by a sermon tone designed not to disturb anyone’s comfort. The result is a version of Paul who sounds calm, measured, and polite—a Paul who never existed. And when the tone of Scripture gets flattened, the force of Scripture goes with it.

Take Galatians 3:1.

English: “O foolish Galatians.”

Greek: Ō anóētoi Galátai — which is not “you silly geese.”

It’s closer to: “You idiots. Who convinced you to throw your salvation in the trash?”

The shock is the point. Paul meant for them to feel it. 

In fact in many places he was what we would call down right rude in his direct tone. 

Tone is not decoration. Tone is part of meaning. The apostles didn’t simply communicate ideas—they communicated urgency, warning, correction, comfort, rebuke, persuasion, and hope. The tone is how you know which is happening. When Paul raises his voice in the Greek, it matters. When he shifts to command language, it matters. When he breaks syntax because he’s emotional, it matters. Flatten the tone, and you change the force, which changes the effect, which eventually changes the beliefs. A gentle correction is not the same as an apostolic rebuke. A soft suggestion is not the same as a warning. When we read Paul like he’s always calm, always even, always “pastoral” in the modern sense—we remake him in our own emotional image. And that’s how doctrine drifts.

Somewhere along the way, the Church decided it was better to be liked than to be truthful. Pastors are told to keep the tone light, inviting, non-abrasive—because offense is bad for attendance and attendance is how we measure “health” now. So the pulpit becomes a customer-service desk: warm smiles, soft edges, and nothing sharp enough to snag. Paul didn’t preach like that. Jesus didn’t either. They loved people enough to confront them. Modern preaching, though, is built on the fear that someone might leave, get uncomfortable, or feel challenged. And when comfort becomes the goal, truth has to shrink to fit the room. The tone gets lowered, the words get rounded, and the Gospel loses its weight. Not because anyone meant to compromise—just because no one wants to be the one who sounds “too intense.”

I ran into this in a conversation with one of our associate pastors recently. I asked him why pastors smooth out Paul’s tone—why the sharpness, urgency, and weight get replaced with calm, soothing delivery. His answer was the kind of polished response you give when you don’t actually know: “We have to balance our limited teaching time with getting the message across without too much nuance.” And, “We can never know exactly what was said word-for-word, so we just focus on the message.” In other words—tone is optional. That’s not dishonesty. It’s training. He wasn’t trying to mislead me. He was repeating what the modern preaching environment formed in him: clarity is the enemy of efficiency, nuance is a luxury, and fidelity to the text is negotiable as long as the “overall message” survives. And that’s precisely the problem.

If you remove the tone, you change the theology. Paul’s letters aren’t just transferring information—they’re shaping the emotional posture of the church. The sharpness in Galatians is part of the warning: do not drift. The gentleness in 1 Thessalonians is part of the encouragement: hold fast, you’re doing well. The grief in 2 Corinthians is part of the plea: why are we still here? Flatten those differences and you preach a God who is always mildly approving, always calm, always politely disappointed but never grieved, never urgent, never blazing with love. You end up with a gospel that doesn’t confront idolatry, doesn’t expose self-deception, and doesn’t call anyone to die to themselves—because the voice that once called them to it has been muted for comfort.

So what do we do? We stop treating Scripture like it needs our help to be palatable. We recover tone by actually listening to the text the way it was written—not the way we’ve been trained to hear it. That means paying attention to the Greek when needed, yes—but more than that, it means letting Paul sound like Paul. Let him be sharp where he is sharp. Let him plead where he pleads. Let him hit the table when he hits the table. Stop sanding the edges off the apostles to fit the emotional expectations of a modern church that is allergic to conviction. Teachers don’t have to become scholars overnight. They just have to stop protecting the congregation from the Scriptures that were written to form them.

The apostles did not write to entertain us, soothe us, or maintain our comfort. They wrote to call us into a kingdom where our lives are not our own. If the tone of Scripture feels intense at times, it is because the stakes are real. The early church did not apologize for that. They didn’t dilute it. They didn’t round the corners. They let the Word stand as it came—sharp enough to divide soul and spirit, direct enough to expose the heart, and loving enough to command change. Our task is not to modernize the tone. Our task is to recover our ears. If Paul sounds too strong, the problem is not Paul. It is that we have forgotten what conviction is supposed to feel like.