Seven Parables For A Plastic Soul Part 5
The Fire - Why God Rejects Lukewarm Neutrality
Where scripture becomes seed, paradox becomes doorway, and story becomes surgery for the soul.
Seven weeks. Seven lessons. One nervous system reborn.
From Shared Strain to Shared Testing
If Part Four taught us how to carry weight together, this chapter explores what happens when that shared strain is tested.
The yoke teaches alignment. Fire reveals integrity.
Fire arrives to clarify. It exposes what can endure and what cannot.
Fire Is Not the Enemy
Fire is one of the most misunderstood images in scripture.
We associate it with destruction. But God uses it for revelation.
Fire doesn't create what is present. It reveals what already exists.
Gold shows itself as gold. Straw shows itself as straw.
Why “Lukewarm” Is Unsafe
Revelation 1 (3 in KJV) is often misunderstood.
God doesn't compare enthusiasm levels. He names a spiritual condition that resists change.
Lukewarmness feels peaceful because it avoids commitment. It avoids exposure. It avoids transformation.
Heat can refine. Cold honesty can be named and addressed.
Insulation blocks both.
Fire can work with tension. Fire can't penetrate avoidance.
A note on Laodicea
The “lukewarm” image in Revelation isn’t abstract or emotional, it’s geographic. Nearby Hierapolis was known for hot, mineral-rich springs used for healing. Colossae had cold, refreshing mountain water. Laodicea had neither. It's water arrived via aqueduct, tepid and unpleasant, good for nothing.
Jesus isn’t critiquing a lack of zeal. He’s naming a condition that has insulated itself from usefulness. Lukewarm water can’t heal and it can’t refresh. It avoids extremes, but in doing so, it avoids purpose.
Lukewarmness here signals spiritual self-sufficiency, a refusal to need, to risk, to be worked on. Calm can become numbness when it is built on avoidance.
The language of “spitting out” isn’t about being disgusted with people. It’s about rejection of a state that blocks refinement itself. Fire can work with heat or cold. It can’t work with insulation.
A small, real-life example of lukewarmness
This always reminds me of the vultures in The Jungle Book, the four Liverpool-accented birds perched on a dead tree, bored out of their minds, endlessly asking one another “What do you wanna do?” “I don’t know, what do you wanna do?” until finally one snaps, “Hey, now, don’t start that again!”
It’s funny because it’s familiar, and a little uncomfortable because it’s US!
Psychology sometimes calls this buck-passing or decision deferral, the habit of handing a choice back and forth to avoid tension. One small place I see it in my own marriage is dinner decisions, vacations or weekend plans. My husband and I will ping-pong the decision, “What do you want?” “I don’t know, what do you want?” It feels considerate, even loving. No one has to risk being wrong or disappointing the other.
But underneath, it can be a subtle refusal to step into even mild heat. We end up defaulting to the same safe option, or one of us goes along while a trace of resentment might settle in unnoticed.
Practicing something as simple as saying, “I want tacos tonight,” even when I only half-care, has been surprisingly freeing. It introduces a small (but honest) tension. He might counter with "Wendy’s". We might debate a little. We might actually connect instead of coasting in neutrality.
That tiny act of owning a preference keeps the nervous system engaged. It prevents numbness from settling in. A good relationship isn’t built on perfect agreement. It’s built by being willing to show up, speak, and stay present through the mild heat of difference.
I was talking with my daughter about this, and she said, “But sometimes I make a choice and regret it.”
I told her, “Yes. And you learned from it, right? That’s the point. A wrong choice still teaches you something. Neutrality teaches you nothing.”
I gave her a very real example from our own lives. Choosing ramen over a combo plate. Sitting there with your noodles while everyone else is eating sweet and sour chicken. Mild regret. Very educational. Next time, you choose differently.
Fire doesn’t mean every choice turns out well. It means the choice was real enough to teach you something.
Staying neutral would have meant never ordering anything at all, watching everyone else eat, and learning nothing except how to feel vaguely dissatisfied.
That is exactly the danger of lukewarmness. Not failure. Not even wrong turns. Just insulation from consequence, growth, and learning.
Also, ramen has its place. Just not when you actually wanted the combo plate. 😄
Why God Prefers Honest Tension Over Polite Agreement
Communities fracture when disagreement stays unspoken.
Just as fire exposes hidden weaknesses in metal, unspoken tension ferments into fracture unless brought into the open.
Polite agreement suppresses fear, resentment, grief and doubt. Suppressed tension doesn't disappear. It just ferments.
Fire brings these things into the open where they can be addressed.
This is why scripture repeatedly links fire with speech, prophecy and judgment. Judgment here means truth made visible.
Fire as a Nervous System Event
Fire corresponds to activation.
When tension is avoided, the nervous system freezes or dissociates. Growth stalls. A false calm takes hold.
When tension is engaged with safety, attention sharpens. Learning accelerates. Integration becomes possible.
Lukewarmness often feels calm. But underneath, it is numbness.
Fire and Neuroplasticity
The brain rewires when expectations fail and old maps no longer explain reality. Neuroscience calls this prediction error. (Already covered in part 3 of this series)
Spiritually, this moment is fire.
Fire increases attention, loosens certainty, and makes new patterns possible. Avoidance insulates the system and preserves old wiring. Fire makes change possible by revealing what can endure.
Why Communities Fear Fire
Fire threatens what depends on silence.
- Hierarchy
- Reputation
- Control
- False unity
To avoid fire, communities often choose silence instead of honesty, rules instead of relationship, pruning instead of persuasion.
Pruning without fire doesn't purify. It amputates.
Fire asks harder questions:
- What is being protected?
- Who benefits from silence?
- What truth is being kept out to maintain order?
This warning against neutrality isn’t unique to scripture. It echoes through history wherever people have tried to name the cost of refusing to choose.
Dante and the Cost of Refusal
Dante places the most sobering image of neutrality at the threshold of Hell.
In Inferno, Canto III he encounters the souls who refused to choose. They lived without commitment, without risk, without allegiance.
They are rejected by both Heaven and Hell.
Their punishment is motion without meaning. They chase a blank banner that never rests, stung by insects, feeding worms at their feet.
Dante calls their refusal cowardice, not gentleness.
They would not stand for good or evil. They insulated themselves from fire!
Their tragedy is exclusion from transformation itself.
Scripture echoes this warning. Lukewarmness is not peace. It is refusal.
C.S. Lewis and the Modern Shape of Lukewarmness
C.S. Lewis warned about this same danger in The Abolition of Man, though he named it differently.
He wasn’t talking about religious apathy. He was talking about a culture that trains people to remain detached, noncommittal and safely ironic in the face of value itself.
Lewis argued that when we teach people to suspend judgment, to avoid strong commitments and to treat moral claim as “mere preference” we don’t produce tolerant souls. We produce what he famously called “men without chests.”
Lewis’ picture is blunt on purpose. A human being has:
- a head, the intellect that can analyze and explain
- a belly, the appetites that want comfort, control, and satisfaction
- a chest, the trained heart that can recognize goodness, love what is good, hate what is bad, and mediate between impulse and reason
When the chest is missing, people still have ideas and desires, but they lack the cultivated inner responses that make courage, loyalty, and sacrifice possible. They can critique everything, crave everything, and still feel unable to stand for anything.
In other words, people who know how to avoid fire.
Lewis saw this as a kind of abolition. Not destruction of the body but erosion of the inner organ that allows a person to stand between instinct and reason and chose what is worth risking themselves for.
That's the same danger scripture names as lukewarmness.
Not ignorance.
Not doubt
But a trained refusal to be claimed by anything that might cost us.
Fire forms the chest.
Neutrality dissolves it.
The Risk of Staying
Zion won't bet built through agreement. It may be built through shared exposure to refining heat.
A fire-held community stays present. It reasons together. It allows discomfort without expulsion. It trusts God to do the separating.
Babylon enforces sameness to avoid fire.
Zion survives fire through charity.
Practice
This week, notice where you prefer insulation.
- Where do you soften truth to avoid reaction?
- Where do you withdraw instead of speak?
- Where do you mistake calm for peace?
Ask yourself “What truth am I insulating myself from?”
Don't try to force heat. Simply stop avoiding it.
Maybe try one small act of owning a preference or speaking a truth you've been insulating. Notice what shift in your body and relationships
Summary
- Fire reveals what is real
- Lukewarm neutrality blocks transformation.
- Honest tension allows growth
- Avoidance preserve false peace.
- Zion is formed by people willing to remain present in refining heat
Transition to Part Six: The Forge
Fire reveals. The forge forms.
In the next part, we'll explore how to stay present under heat without collapsing or dominating, how to endure tension long enough for strength to take shape.
The forge is where what survives the fire becomes something new.
Musical interlude:
May our stories catch fire together and burn bright enough to catch God’s eye
For full transparency.... I did finish Dante’s Inferno and would absolutely recommend it but I leaned on commentary to really understand what was happening. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, but apparently “navigate medieval theology, politics and poetic symbolism without a guide” is a different tier of smart...
That said, the commentary didn’t d dilute the experience. Inferno rewards slow reading, context and help, (much like scripture does). The meaning isn’t lost by assistance, but revealed through it.
Reading Dante this way also made something else clear: much of modern Christian imagination around hell, judgment and moral order is downstream from Dante rather than directly from scripture. The influence is often less doctrinal and more cultural, a poetic architecture we inherited without even realizing it.
I noticed far fewer parallels with Restoration theology than with broader Christian frameworks, which was interesting in itself. Where Dante dramatizes the cost of refusal and neutrality through imagery, Lewis diagnoses it philosophically. He isn’t writing theology so much as naming how a culture trains people to avoid commitment, value, and courage altogether (men without chests)
Unlike Inferno, The Abolition of Man is short and very accessible. Not simple, but readable. I reread it twice in one day while preparing for this post, and it pairs remarkably well with the themes here. If you’re looking for a quick but weighty companion read, I’d start there.
Together, Dante and Lewis clarified the same warning from different centuries: refusing to choose or endure discomfort doesn’t preserve peace. It erodes the capacity for transformation
~ nerd rant over ~
This is very insightful! Thank you!
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