Salvation Paradox

1. Name the condition that decides the outcome

I use soteriology for the architecture by which a tradition describes ultimate failure or fulfillment and the conditions relevant to those outcomes. The term lets us examine a requirement without assuming that different religions teach the same afterlife or use the same mechanism. An account of salvation, liberation, or judgment may give weight to belief, conduct, membership, sacramental participation, orientation, or some combination.

The soteriological criterion is the condition doing the sorting. A belief gate makes a specified conviction or assent state necessary, or treats its absence as sufficient or nearly sufficient for exclusion. The strongest form at issue here says that nonbelief alone warrants maximal condemnation, including in cases where a person has been exposed to the message but cannot sincerely accept it. [Definition 4.3] [Definition 4.4]

Chapter 4 introduces a familiar Christian formulation through this excerpt:

“Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already.”

John 3:18, as quoted in FMFG §4.1. [B]

This is a textual point of entry, not a complete theology inferred from one verse. A tradition may qualify the gate through conscience, grace, ignorance exceptions, or other conditions. Those qualifications matter because they determine what the actual criterion is. The argument examines the rule a system really defends, rather than assigning the same rule to every believer.

Qualifications such as an age of accountability, invincible ignorance, and inclusivist appeals to interior disposition answer different questions. They should not be flattened into one doctrine of salvation. What connects them to this inquiry is the need to explain how access, development, and responsibility qualify an apparently simple gate. The Fairness Clause examines the relevant tradition-specific conditions rather than assuming that every exception has the same scope. [2]

The difference between a preferred religious path and an exceptionless ground of condemnation is especially important. Someone may regard faith or worship as valuable without claiming that every failure to believe is culpable. The paradox concerns the additional claim that the belief state itself supplies a universally fair division under maximal stakes.

2. Access to a message is not the same as conviction

The Fairness Clause distinguishes epistemic access from normative capacity. Access means a realistic opportunity to encounter and understand the relevant content. Capacity concerns the ability and opportunity to respond under actual conditions. Hearing words is not automatically access in that morally relevant sense, and being given a command does not establish the capacity to comply. [2]

Even after someone understands the proposition, another question remains: does it appear true? Understanding a claim well enough to examine it does not logically guarantee accepting it. A person can recognize exactly what a doctrine asserts while finding the testimony unpersuasive, encountering credible counterevidence, or being unable to reconcile its claims.

This is the move from access to belief. Perception, memory, interpretation, trust, affect, evidence, and cognitive condition contribute to what a person finds credible. Saying that the message reached the person identifies part of that history. It does not complete the history or establish a culpable refusal at its end. [1, §§4.2–4.3]

The Finite Mind Constraint explains why any such judgment has to be available through a finite interface. The Human Interface Thesis follows the additional public route through testimony, language, transmission, and interpretation. Neither result declares all mediated beliefs false. They locate the actual evidence and assessment that a claim of responsibility must address. [3]

The same distinction applies to the tradition’s evidence about the person. An outward profession can be observed, but its relation to conviction has to be assessed. A repeated creed may express sincere belief, hope of becoming convinced, social conformity, or a response to pressure. The public performance alone does not make those states identical.

3. What deciding to believe can and cannot do

Suppose, as an illustration, that someone asks you to sincerely believe a proposition that presently appears false. You can say its words, picture a situation in which it holds, rehearse an argument for it, or act as though it were true. None of those performances, by itself, is the state of finding it true. A change in the evidence or in how you understand the evidence may change conviction. That is a different route from producing conviction by bare decision while everything relevant remains the same.

The at-will test isolates that difference. It asks whether belief can be formed directly on command in a state where its content does not appear credible. The source result is deliberately limited: there are propositions and epistemic states in which that direct act does not produce belief. It does not need the much stronger claim that no belief is voluntary in any possible sense. [Lemma 4.8]

Direct control and indirect influence

Direct doxastic control would make conviction available merely by deciding to believe. Indirect influence changes the conditions through which belief may later form. Reading, inquiry, attention, conversation, prayer, practice, and source selection can affect those conditions. Acknowledging their influence does not restore a universal guarantee that the demanded conviction will appear.

It also does not make those opportunities equally available. A person may have time, safety, education, and access to competing views. Another may face restricted information, fear attached to questioning, or serious costs for leaving an approved source. Even within one setting, people differ in what they understand, whom they can trust, and how prior experience affects that trust. The responsibility assessment has to follow those actual differences. [1, §4.3.2]

Some choices about inquiry can still be blameworthy under an applicable standard. Deliberately concealing evidence, deceiving another person, or negligently refusing a realistic opportunity are not made harmless by calling beliefs caused. But an accusation of that kind needs evidence of the particular action and its circumstances. The final absence of belief does not supply that evidence automatically.

Belief, profession, hope, and commitment therefore remain distinct. I may commit to investigating a claim without yet believing it, or hope it is true while recognizing that the evidence does not settle it. A system that asks for sincere conviction cannot treat every substitute performance as though the conviction has appeared. [6]

4. The history through which belief becomes available

The Birthplace Lottery names the contingent distribution of religious messages, institutions, languages, and interpretive frameworks. Doxastic luck carries the inquiry further into the influences on belief itself: social inheritance, education, the local credibility environment, trauma history, and information constraints. Here the term concerns the formation of a belief, not simply the separate problem of accidentally arriving at a true answer. [Definition 4.6]

These influences do not settle a doctrine’s truth by geography. A belief does not become false merely because it was inherited, and a conversion does not become irrational merely because it has social causes. The point concerns what a fair evaluator can assume about the person. Different routes into conviction cannot be treated as though each agent began with equal evidence and complete control over its uptake.

Chapter 4 cites Pew Research Center’s 2015 religious-landscape and switching reports as empirical context for social inheritance and patterned change. That discussion is a support for the role of unequal histories, not a new survey conducted here or a claim that affiliation statistics by themselves measure culpability. The chapter does not require a particular percentage, nor does correlation alone prove the entire philosophical argument. [P1] [P2]

The formal transfer to moral luck is conditional. When ultimate assignment depends on belief, and belief is significantly affected by factors outside full rational control, the assignment inherits sensitivity to those factors. The further claim that this is incompatible with a strict gate relies on the stated fairness commitment and on actual nonculpable cases. The dependence relation alone does not pronounce on every possible judgment. [Lemma 4.10]

5. Unreached and unconvinced: the relevant equivalence

Consider two cases described by the argument. One person never has fair access to the required message. Another encounters it but, through no-fault evidential or cognitive constraints, cannot form the required belief. The two histories are not identical. What they share is failure to satisfy the belief condition without the fault that would justify the condemnation being proposed.

That shared feature is the basis of the equivalence. The second person is not excused merely for being unconvinced. The relevant case is nonculpable nonbelief: the failure is not reasonably attributable to culpable refusal, negligence, or fault of will under the actual access and capacity conditions. The qualification is part of the argument, not an optional exception added afterward. [Definition 4.7]

A tradition that recognizes the first person’s limitation therefore needs a relevant reason for treating the second person’s no-fault limitation differently. Merely substituting “heard” for “never heard” does not establish that reason. The account must show how exposure became adequate access, how a response became realistically possible, and what fault is being attributed.

The Fairness Clause itself permits defeat or significant reduction of culpability, depending on the condition. The Salvation Paradox’s decisive counterexamples are the no-fault cases stated in its premises. I do not treat every limitation as full exoneration, and I do not treat the existence of those counterexamples as proof that everyone falls within the same class. [2]

6. The three revisions a strict gate faces

The tension combines three commitments: an ultimate outcome sorted by belief, fault-sensitive justice, and the existence of people who fail to believe without the relevant fault. Those commitments cannot all remain unchanged when nonbelief is treated as universally sufficient for maximal condemnation. The source theorem gives three routes of revision. [Theorem 4.11]

Expand excusal

The tradition can recognize nonculpable nonbelief among the excusing conditions, including relevant reached-but-unconvinced cases. This preserves the fairness commitment, but belief no longer operates as an exceptionless gate. The decisive distinction has to include the person’s responsibility rather than merely record the absence of assent.

Deepen the criterion

The tradition can make ultimate evaluation turn on conscience, sincerity, accessible moral response, orientation of will, or another fault-sensitive property beyond bare assent. Belief may still matter within that account. It cannot remain independently decisive in the same unqualified way without reintroducing the original conflict.

Reject or subordinate fairness

The tradition can retain the strict gate while denying that recognizable access, capacity, and fault constraints govern ultimate judgment. This is a possible declaration of the system’s priorities, but it abandons the justice commitment the argument was testing. The power to assign an outcome cannot serve as proof that the outcome is fair under constraints the system has set aside.

These are not predictions that every community will formally choose one slogan. They locate what changes in an attempted resolution, and more than one change can occur together. The result does not identify which soteriology is true. It makes the commitments of each response explicit.

7. Formal derivation

The following sequence is the Chapter 4 derivation from Finite Mind, Finite God. It separates definitions, modest belief-control lemmas, the main conditional result, and its corollaries. Its claim of fault-sensitive justice and its nonculpable-case premise remain explicit.

Source references. The main theorem is 4.11 in the source’s formal sequence, although §4.6 refers to it as 4.7. The source also renders some definition and lemma references with the generic word “Theorem.” References here identify the actual numbered objects: the Fairness Clause and Birthplace Lottery are Definitions 3.7 and 3.8, and the cross-tradition anchor is Chapter 3. The statements and proof arguments below retain their source wording apart from this reference-label and typographic normalization. [1] [2]

Definitions 4.2–4.7

Lemmas 4.8–4.10

Theorem 4.11

The theorem attacks the universal maximally punitive rule in its final sentence. A tradition already applying genuine exceptions has changed that rule. The existence of nonculpable cases is an explicit premise, not something inferred merely from the definition of nonculpable nonbelief.

Corollaries 4.12–4.13

8. What the strongest replies change

I read a reply by asking what it preserves and what it changes, not by treating every theological qualification as an evasion. Chapter 4 examines four familiar responses. Their textual anchors are presented as the chapter’s excerpts, not as a complete account of the texts’ interpretive histories. [1, §4.7]

“God judges the heart”

“The Lord looks on the heart.”

1 Samuel 16:7, as quoted in FMFG §4.7.1. [B]

“They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts.”

Romans 2:15, as quoted in the same discussion. [B]

When the decisive concern is sincerity, conscience, or responsiveness to what was genuinely available, the criterion has deepened beyond bare assent. That can preserve moral seriousness without treating every absence of belief as rebellion. The tradition still has to explain what those properties mean and how any remaining belief requirement relates to them. Invoking the heart cannot both replace the simple gate and leave that gate exceptionlessly decisive.

“Nonbelief is always culpable”

“Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.”

Romans 1:19–20, the wording quoted in FMFG §4.7.2. This excerpt follows the King James Version; FMFG’s accompanying citation names NRSVue, whose wording differs. The excerpt and its source attribution are distinguished here rather than treating the two translations as identical.

A claim of knowing suppression can concern real fault, but it needs its actual conditions established. The fact that a text can be invoked for suppression does not independently show that every unconvinced person had adequate access, adequate capacity, and the relevant fault. A universal assertion must also account for the exceptions the tradition accepts. The source permits culpable cases while rejecting their use as an automatic description of every nonbeliever.

“Faith is a gift”

“By grace you have been saved through faith … it is the gift of God.”

Ephesians 2:8, as quoted in FMFG §4.7.3. [B]

Chapter 4 considers a reply that treats faith as granted rather than simply chosen. On that reading, an account of allocation has entered the argument: what is given, to whom, and how could failure to receive it establish fault? When responsibility still constrains the outcome, the criterion must account for the recipient’s circumstances. When it does not, the justice commitment has changed. The excerpt alone does not settle every interpretation of grace, faith, or gift.

“Divine judgment exceeds human understanding”

“My thoughts are not your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8, as quoted in FMFG §4.7.4. [B]

An appeal to mystery can leave an unknown unknown. It cannot use recognizable fairness to justify a gate while making every application of that fairness inaccessible to examination. When the reply says that divine standards may be wholly beyond human moral assessment, it no longer supplies the original kind of intelligible justice defense. This marks the changed claim; it does not turn incomplete knowledge of the divine into proof that no divine reality exists.

9. How I examine a belief-gated demand

The argument gives me a way to examine a demand without beginning by classifying its speaker or its recipient as good or bad. I follow the actual condition, the finite route into conviction, and the responsibility that could support the proposed outcome.

1. Name the gate. State the required proposition, performance, membership, or orientation, and the consequence attached to failure. Distinguish something regarded as valuable from something claimed to be an exceptionless basis of condemnation. A mixed criterion needs its actual components identified.
2. Apply the at-will distinction. Ask whether sincere belief, outward profession, or a voluntary action is required. Consider whether the demanded conviction can be produced while the person’s evidence and assessment remain unchanged. An action that may affect later belief must not be misdescribed as a guaranteed belief switch.
3. Apply the Fairness Clause. Examine realistic access, comprehension, capacity, opportunity, and the alleged fault. Distinguish no-fault limitation from established negligence, and mitigation from complete excuse. Adequate access and capacity are not themselves proof of guilt.
4. Trace the actual interface. Identify the testimony, language, interpretation, trust, and social conditions through which the claim arrived. Consider the institution’s contribution to restricted inquiry or pressured profession. The proposed divine origin does not remove that route from the assessment.
5. Name the revision being made. Does the account excuse nonculpable cases, deepen the criterion, or reject the fairness constraint? State the resulting rule plainly. Do not announce a universal gate and then rely on unacknowledged exceptions to defend it.

For an illustrative case, consider a person who has studied a doctrine, understands what it asks, and still finds its central claim unconvincing. Merely calling that person “reached” does not decide responsibility. The evaluator has to examine the evidence, the opportunities for inquiry, the person’s handling of them, and the capacities actually present. A finding of deception would be a further case-specific finding. A finding of sincere no-fault nonconviction would be a different one.

This also places a demand on the community. Creating safer access, allowing questions, distinguishing assent from compliance, and making room for correction can change the conditions of inquiry. None guarantees the community’s preferred answer. A claim of fairness has to remain meaningful when honest examination does not produce that answer. [6]

10. What remains after the simple gate

The conclusion is not that truth, responsibility, or religious practice disappears. It removes an unsupported shortcut from a person’s belief state to maximal blame. Inquiry, honesty, conscience, care, and the consequences of actions still require attention. A tradition may retain qualified roles for belief and practice, but those roles must fit the responsibility account it claims.

ERP secures the occurrence of the assessment; Tripp’s Prison explains its frame-internal character and the possibility of warranted shared structure through comparison and correction. Neither turns every sincere belief into truth, and neither derives the fairness commitment from the fact that the belief occurs. [4]

The Contingency Guillotine examines whether moral force can be independent of every constitutive valuer. The Salvation Paradox instead tests a system’s own stated conditions of fault-sensitive justice. Those arguments connect, but their premises are not interchangeable. A divine valuation is not automatically an all-valuer-independent moral fact, and the existence of an interpreter is not by itself the constitutive argument about moral force. [5]

Deterministic Moral Forces retains causal agency, answerability, learning, repair, and protection under its own premises. Caused belief does not make inquiry causally idle. Changing evidence, opportunities, or the conditions of understanding can change what follows. What it does not supply is an uncaused source of conviction or a justification for suffering merely because a demanded belief failed to appear.

The Omnibenevolence Misappraisal Theorem applies the connected distinction to negative judgments about God: correctness, mistake, and fault have separate burdens. Here the focus is the belief gate. In both applications, default guilt must not replace the account of the person. The arguments do not grant universal innocence or infer that a theological assertion is true simply because a tradition affirms it.

Chapter 4 also connects criterion deepening to the Primacy Test: when conscience and responsiveness to accessible reality actually govern a conflict with a doctrinal list, the operative authority is not bare textual compliance. This is a practical diagnostic in the discussion, not an additional numbered theorem in the sequence reproduced above. It points toward the next question, developed in Religion as Translation: how finite traditions give different forms to common existential pressures without becoming identical to what they represent. [1, §4.8]

In Existential Ground, the same distinction returns in The Right to Think Without Fear. Fear may be a real consequence of a threat without becoming evidence for its truth. Honest doubt can remain honest while a person preserves hope, reverence, community, or a commitment to further inquiry. None of those requires manufacturing a conviction that is not actually present. [6]

11. Questions and clarifications

12. Terms used here

These local definitions keep the argument readable on its own. The linked source markers identify the formal statement or book passage supporting each use.

Salvation Paradox

The conflict between a strict belief-gated ultimate outcome, fault-sensitive fairness, and actual cases of nonculpable nonbelief. Retaining fairness requires excusing those cases or deepening the criterion; retaining the strict gate requires rejecting the fairness constraint. [source]

Soteriology

A tradition’s account of ultimate failure or fulfillment and the conditions relevant to assigning persons to those outcomes. The formal definition here describes an evaluative architecture, not a finding that its promised outcomes exist. [source]

Soteriological criterion

A condition treated as necessary, sufficient, or decisively weighty for ultimate assignment. Belief, membership, sacramental status, practice, or orientation may play that role; the precise condition must be stated. [source]

Belief gate

A criterion requiring a specified belief or assent state. The argument’s strict target makes nonbelief by itself universally sufficient for maximal condemnation; qualified roles for belief must be assessed separately. [source]

Belief

Taking a proposition to be true through the evidence, interpretation, and cognitive condition available to a person. It is not identical to saying the proposition, hoping it is true, or acting as though it were true. [source]

Profession of belief

An utterance or public performance presenting someone as a believer. It can express sincere conviction, but it can also be strategic, mistaken, or coerced; control over the performance does not guarantee the conviction. [source]

Doxastic voluntarism

The view that belief can be voluntarily formed or abandoned. Definition 4.5 states the direct, at-will version being tested; indirect influence through inquiry is a different kind of control. [source]

Doxastic involuntarism

The claim that belief is typically responsive to what seems true under an agent’s evidence and cognitive state, rather than directly producible by mere decision in a wide class of cases. It does not deny every form of indirect influence. [source]

At-will test

The test of whether a person can sincerely form a belief by direct decision while remaining in an epistemic state in which its content does not appear credible. Speech, imagination, and pretense do not by themselves satisfy this test. [source]

Direct doxastic control

Immediate control over sincere conviction by deciding to believe, without first changing the evidential assessment or cognitive conditions through which the proposition appears true or false. A universal capacity of this kind is what the argument denies. [source]

Indirect influence

The ability to affect later belief through attention, inquiry, source selection, practice, and changes in one’s environment. Its availability and degree vary; it is not a guarantee of the demanded conviction. [source]

Nonculpable nonbelief

Nonbelief not reasonably attributable to culpable refusal, negligence, or fault of will, given the person’s access and capacity. The qualification concerns the relevant failure, not every action or feature of the person. [source]

Doxastic luck

Factors beyond full rational control that influence belief formation, such as social inheritance, language, education, credibility environments, trauma history, and information constraints. This use concerns the circumstances of belief formation, not merely accidentally arriving at a true answer. [source]

Moral luck

The dependence of an outcome-relevant moral evaluation on contingencies outside the agent’s control. Lemma 4.10 traces this dependence when an ultimate outcome is assigned through beliefs affected by doxastic luck. [source]

Birthplace Lottery

The contingent distribution of religious messages, institutions, languages, and interpretive frameworks across geography, history, and social environment. It identifies unequal starting conditions, not the truth or falsity of a tradition by birthplace. [source]

Fairness Clause

The conjunction of access and capacity conditions for a system that claims its judgments are just and sensitive to fault. This is a stated responsibility commitment, not a moral command derived from the occurrence of a thought. [source]

Epistemic access

A realistic opportunity to encounter and understand the relevant content in a way that can support responsibility. Mere proximity to words, repeated exposure, or coercive presentation is not automatically sufficient. [source]

Access Condition

The requirement that relevant absence of access defeat or significantly reduce culpability. Whether an actual case is excusing or mitigating depends on the responsibility account and the facts. [source]

Normative capacity

The relevant ability, opportunity, and psychological competence to comply under actual circumstances. Capacity includes cognitive, developmental, psychological, and situational limits, not only physical ability. [source]

Capacity Condition

The requirement that relevant absence of normative capacity defeat or significantly reduce culpability. A demand does not establish the capacity to meet it. [source]

Finite Mind Constraint

Any concept entertained by a finite mind must be presented within its own interface. A God-concept is therefore mediated; that fact alone establishes neither its truth nor the finitude of its referent. [source]

Human Interface Thesis

Public doctrinal authority is received, assessed, transmitted, and acted upon through human-interface artifacts and interpretation. Naming a source divine does not remove the public claim’s evidential route. [source]

Epistemic interface

The structured means by which content becomes available to an agent, including presentational states, updates, and inference. It is not restricted to sensation and is not identical to everything the content represents. [source]

Token and tokening

A token is a concrete representational occurrence; tokening is its actual instantiation. The capacity to token a state does not mean it is already performed. A token’s occurrence is distinct from the truth of its content. [source]

Excusal expansion

Broadening the recognized excusing class to include nonculpable failures of the belief requirement, including relevant reached-but-unconvinced cases. This removes belief’s status as an exceptionless gate. [source]

Criterion deepening

Making ultimate evaluation turn on fault-sensitive properties beyond bare assent, such as conscience, sincerity, accessible moral response, or orientation of will. Any retained role for belief must fit those conditions. [source]

Fairness rejection

Rejecting or subordinating the recognizable access, capacity, and fault constraints in order to retain the strict gate. This is a change in the justice claim, not a demonstration that the gate satisfies the original constraints. [source]

13. Sources and connected reading

1. [1] Matthew Zejda, Finite Mind, Finite God, Chapter 4. “The Salvation Paradox: If Ignorance Excuses, Then So Must Nonbelief,” printed pp. 47–63; the formal derivation is §4.9, pp. 59–63. This chapter supplies the central argument, six textual excerpts, theological replies, and numbered sequence. FMFG book.
2. [2] Finite Mind, Finite God, Chapter 3. “The Fairness Clause,” printed pp. 32–46; Definitions 3.1–3.9, Theorem 3.13, and Corollary 3.14. Access and capacity can defeat or significantly reduce culpability. Fairness Clause.
3. [3] Finite Mind, Finite God, Chapters 1–2. Theorem 1.1 and Definition 1.3, printed pp. 11–14; Human Interface Thesis and Revelation Filter, Chapter 2, pp. 15–31. These establish the distinct general-interface and public-transmission constraints. Finite Mind Constraint · Human Interface Thesis.
4. [4] Matthew Tripp Zejda, Existential Logicism: A Logic-Based Engine for Navigating Reality. ERP, §2.5, printed pp. 19–26; Tripp’s Prison, §2.11, pp. 43–52, including the cross-frame structural-warrant and blueprint–carrier distinction. EL Engine.
5. [5] Existential Logicism: A Logic-Based Engine for Navigating Reality. Contingency Guillotine, §7.10, printed pp. 214–219; Deterministic Moral Forces, §8.4, pp. 234–246; Is–Ought Representation, §8.12, pp. 280–282. Their constitutive, causal, and evaluative premises remain distinct from this chapter’s internal fairness argument. CG · DMF.
6. [6] Matthew Tripp Zejda, Existential Ground, Chapter 17 and Appendix A. §§17.5–17.6 and §17.9, printed pp. 300–303 and 308–309; Appendix A.12.3, especially Proposition A.90, Definition A.91, and Theorem A.92, pp. 444–445. These develop the distinctions among belief, profession, indirect influence, and fault-sensitive judgment. Existential Ground book.

Works cited in FMFG Chapter 4

These are the chapter’s supporting references, retained with their source identities. They are not presented as seven newly conducted studies or a current survey of religious affiliation. The Romans 1 translation attribution is separately identified beside that excerpt.

• [DV] “Doxastic Voluntarism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Cited in FMFG’s bibliography under Edward N. Zalta, editor (2026).
• [P1] Pew Research Center (2015). America’s Changing Religious Landscape, May 12. Chapter 4 cites this historical report as empirical context, not as a present-day census.
• [P2] Pew Research Center (2015). Religious Switching and Intermarriage, May 12. Cited for the patterned character of religious inheritance and switching.
• [N] Thomas Nagel (1979). “Moral Luck.” In Mortal Questions, pp. 24–38. Cambridge University Press.
• [W] Bernard Williams (1981). “Moral Luck.” In Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, pp. 20–39. Cambridge University Press.
• [ML] “Moral Luck.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Cited in FMFG’s bibliography under Edward N. Zalta, editor (2026).
• [B] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (2021), as identified in FMFG’s bibliography. The Romans 1:19–20 wording discrepancy is identified beside the excerpt; no single excerpt is treated as an exhaustive interpretation of a tradition.

Definitions and wider connections