Christian Agape as Horizontal and Vertical Love, Not Doctrine
The scaffold mistaken for the cathedral.
Christianity's core is not a set of beliefs but a dual movement of love — horizontal communion with other people and vertical relationship with an infinite that delights in your flourishing. Doctrines, rituals, and theology are scaffolding for that participatory center, not the center itself.
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Jordan Hall - Rethinking Religion at the Edge of Collapse | Elevating Consciousness Podcast #57
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Jordan Hall is a serial tech entrepreneur and systems thinker who co-founded DivX Networks before shifting focus to civilizational-scale questions. He is a central architect of the Game B intellectual movement, which pro
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This perspective identifies agape as the structural center of Christianity and argues that it operates along two irreducible axes. The horizontal axis is communion: the sacred commitment to the lived reality of other persons, such that their suffering is not merely a moral concern but is ontologically woven into the fabric of the sacred itself. The vertical axis is a relationship with the infinite whose essential character is also agape — an infinite described by analogy to a non-narcissistic parent, one whose deepest joy is witnessing the child's full becoming. Together, these two dimensions constitute something structurally distinctive among the world's religious traditions.
The implications for practice are radical. Prayer, fasting, liturgy, the Eucharist — all are reframed as Scaffolding rather than substance. They exist to support the participatory reality of loving God and neighbor. Theology and doctrine are similarly downstream: they are tools that orient people toward the living center, not the center itself.
This constitutes a profound inversion of the dominant modern framing of religion as primarily propositional — a set of beliefs to which one assents or doesn't. The insight here is that Christianity, rightly understood, is fundamentally anti-ideological. Its core is participatory, relational, and enacted. When the institutional church collapses this into propositional tyranny — demanding doctrinal conformity as the primary marker of belonging — it commits a tragedy against its own essence, converting a living relational reality into the very kind of ideological structure that its center inherently resists.