Van Dorn and Moffitt have abandoned the safe harbor of confessional orthodoxy for the treacherous open sea of private speculation. Before a single one of their doctrinal errors is even examined, their entire project is disqualified by its flawed and unbiblical method.

Theological error does not arise from a vacuum. It is nearly always the product of a faulty hermeneutic, a flawed method of approaching and interpreting the sacred text. Before we can properly dissect the specific doctrinal errors of the “Reformed Fringe” podcast regarding the nature of God and Christ, we must first address the methodological poison from which these errors spring. Their entire project is built upon a foundation of anti-confessionalism, a self-conscious and prideful rejection of the historical, Spirit-guided consensus of the church in favor of a novel and supposedly “unbiased” reading of Scripture. The theological errors of “Reformed Fringe” are the direct result of a flawed hermeneutic that self-consciously rejects the authority of the church’s creeds and confessions—the “pattern of sound words”—in favor of a novel, individualistic approach to Scripture that inevitably leads to heresy.

The Rejection of Confessional Authority

The hosts of “Reformed Fringe” betray their methodological starting point in their very name and posture. Though they claim the title “Reformed,” their approach is anything but. The Reformed tradition has always been a confessional tradition, understanding that the Holy Spirit has not left the church in the dark for two millennia, only to now reveal the “true” meaning of Scripture to a few enlightened individuals. The great confessions, such as the Westminster Standards, are not placed above Scripture, but are received as faithful summaries of Scripture’s teaching, hammered out through intense, prayerful, and corporate study of the Word over generations. The confessions themselves establish this principle, stating that the “supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined…can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture” (WCF 1.10). They serve as subordinate standards and guardrails, protecting the church from the very sort of novel speculations that Van Dorn and Moffitt champion.

This anti-confessional bias is a hallmark of the “Naked Bible” theology popularized by the late Michael Heiser, whose influence on Van Dorn is explicitly acknowledged. This approach claims to read the Bible free from the “biases” of creedal and confessional constraints (see Flemming 2022). In practice, however, no one reads the Bible in a vacuum. By casting off the received wisdom of the church, one does not become unbiased; one simply becomes a slave to the biases of one’s own time, one’s own culture, and one’s own speculative imagination. They have exchanged the tested and proven consensus of the church catholic for a private interpretation heavily influenced by the pagan cosmologies of the Ancient Near East.

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