Dear Jon and Doug,
Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
I am writing this letter in response to your recent public statements regarding the theological concerns that have been raised by my articles and by others in the church. Jon, I want to begin by commending you for your stated willingness to receive the counsel of your elders and friends. It is a mark of humility, and a necessary grace for any man, especially a pastor, to be under the loving authority of his church. In a world of theological lone wolves, this is an encouraging sign.
However, it is in the spirit of Galatians 6:1—which calls us to restore a brother caught in a transgression with gentleness, all while keeping watch over our own hearts—that I must write to you both. It is because you are brothers in Christ that I feel compelled by both fraternal concern and a love for the truth to express why your public statements, while perhaps well-intentioned, are profoundly unsatisfying and fail to address the core substance of the issue at hand. They function not as a clarification, but as a dismissal—a polite request for everyone to “move along, nothing to see here.” But brothers, there is something to see here. The theological claims you both have made are not minor points of semantic difference; they touch upon the very nature of God and Christ, and they require a response of far greater substance than an apology for a “lack of clarity.”
The issue at hand is one of substance, not of style.
Jon, your letter, and Doug, your full endorsement of it, frames the problem as one of poor communication. You wrote, “Please forgive me for my lack of clarity in speaking on matters related to the doctrine of God,” and “I see how my words came across as error to some, and I take responsibility for that.”[1] This is a classic case of what is sometimes called a “non-apology.” It apologizes for how your words were perceived (“came across as error”) rather than for the substance of the words themselves. But the concerns that have been raised are not about your tone or rhetorical polish. They are about the specific, public, and on-the-record theological assertions you have made.
For example, Doug, when you state that the word Elohim “is not an incommunicable attribute that only one entity possesses. It’s a communicable attribute that all kinds of entities could possess,”[2] this is not a “lack of clarity.” It is an explicit theological assertion. It is your unambiguous claim that God and angels share are in a common class, a claim that stands in direct opposition to the catholic and confessional understanding of the Creator-creature distinction.
And Jon, when you use the incarnation as an analogy to argue that there is a “commonality” between the uncreated Elohim and created elohim,[3] this is not an “unclear” statement. It is a precise, though profoundly flawed, theological argument that collapses the very distinction the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union was formulated to protect.
These are not slips of the tongue or poorly chosen phrases. They are the consistent, repeated, foundational tenets of the theological system you both have been promoting, a system borrowed directly from the work of Michael Heiser. To attribute the resulting controversy to a mere “lack of clarity” is for you to fundamentally misrepresent the nature of the concerns. While we can acknowledge that you may not have intended to teach what you did, the fact remains that you did so. Our objection is to the public substance of those statements, not your private intentions; until a sufficient clarification or a full retraction is made, we are left with no choice but to take your words at face value according to their plain meaning.
An affirmation of orthodoxy is not a retraction of error.
The core of your response is an appeal to your own stated orthodoxy. You wrote, “I remain fully committed to our confession of faith and to the clear teaching of Scripture concerning the one true God and His Son, Jesus Christ.”¹ I am thankful to hear this. However, a simple affirmation of a confession does not magically resolve the direct contradictions between the specific statements you both have made and the content of that confession.
You cannot, with integrity, claim to be fully committed to your confession—the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith—while simultaneously teaching that Elohim is a communicable attribute. This is a prima facie contradiction of your own stated standard. Chapter 2, Article 1 of the 1689 Confession defines God not by a shared attribute, but by His unique essence: “The Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of himself, infinite in being and perfection… whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but himself.” Your teaching takes the very name that points to this unique, infinite, and incomprehensible being and reduces it to a generic, “communicable” title for a class of creatures, a class in which you place the one true God as merely the supreme member. This is a fundamental violation of the first and most basic article of your own confession’s Theology Proper. You cannot claim to uphold the church’s historic Christology while promoting a view of the pre-incarnate Christ that places Him in the same ontological category as created angels—a position directly contradicted by the clear teaching of Scripture.[4] To do so is to render your confessional subscription meaningless.
An apology for being “unclear” is not a retraction. It is an evasion. A retraction would sound something like this: “I previously stated that Elohim is a communicable attribute. I now understand that this is contrary to the biblical and confessional witness to the unique, incommunicable essence of God, and I therefore retract that statement.” That would be a genuine clarification. That would be a substantive response. What you have offered, thus far, is not.
This leads to the crucial question your statements have left unanswered: Do you still believe and affirm the specific, substantive theological claims you have made in your podcast episodes?
Jon and Doug, do you still believe that Elohim is a title for a class of spiritual beings, of which Yahweh is merely the supreme member? Do you still believe that the nachash in Genesis 3 was not a serpent, but a “shining one”? Do you still believe that the pre-incarnate Son, the Angel of the Lord, is an elohim in the same categorical sense as created angels?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are a genuine plea for clarity. If you no longer hold to these positions, then I praise God for it, but a specific and public retraction is necessary for the health of the church and the integrity of your own ministries. If you do still hold to these positions, then your claim to be “fully committed” to your confession is what remains profoundly unclear.
Brothers, I am not your enemy for telling you the truth. My aim in this series has not been to score points in a theological debate, but to contend earnestly for the faith. The issues at stake are not “fringe”; they are central to the Christian understanding of who God is. I therefore extend to you both a sincere invitation to engage in a direct, substantive, and moderated public dialogue. Let us set aside the unsatisfying realm of public statements and letters and discuss these specific theological claims with Scripture and the confessions open before us. Let us, for the good of the church and the glory of our one and only God, seek genuine clarity together.
Affectionately in Christ,
Tony Arsenal
[1] Jon Moffitt, “Open Letter on My Theological Commitments,” 19 September 2025, https://www.jonmoffitt.com/post/open-letter-on-my-theological-commitments.
[2] Doug Van Dorn and Jon Moffitt, “The History of the Word ‘God,’” Reformed Fringe, 24 August 2025, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reformed-fringe/id1673785890?i=1000723422818, 11:15.
[3] Ibid., 13:58
[4] The author of Hebrews makes this point with surgical precision: “For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham” (Heb 2:16 ESV). The verb used, ἐπιλαμβάνομαι, denotes a taking hold or an assumption. The apostolic witness is that the Son assumed a human nature, and explicitly not an angelic one, for the work of redemption.