The Altar of Authority: Unmasking Spiritual Abuse and Reclaiming Freedom

"All authority is of God."

They said it from the pulpit. They said it in the cell group. They said it when Ralph Good asked why he had to cut his beard, why he had to abandon his own calling to serve the pastor's vision, why questioning an elder meant inviting the judgment of God. To resist authority, he was told, was to resist God himself.

It nearly killed him.

The Altar of Authority is one man's account of what fear-based religion does to a person - and what happened when he finally opened the Bible for himself. After a childhood ruled by dread and a conversion in a rented room above a bar, Ralph Good spent years inside a church that used a single verse to keep him compliant. In the wreckage that followed, he did what no one expected: he examined every Greek word translated "authority" in Scripture, one verse at a time.

What he found was not what he had been taught. Jesus described the authority of this world as belonging to the ruler of darkness. Satan claimed it and offered it. Jesus refused it - and handed his followers something else entirely: the authority of a servant.

Part memoir, part word study, part invitation, this book draws the line between the authority Christ gave and the authority men claim in his name. It recovers the fear of God as reverent love rather than dread. And it ends where the author's own freedom took him: into a neighborhood held hostage by dealers who ruled by fear - the same weapon, in different hands - where refusing to bow transformed a community.

Includes a complete appendix examining every Greek term rendered "authority" in the New Testament, with Strong's references, for anyone who has ever been handed a verse and told to submit.

For readers of Redeeming Power, A Church Called Tov, and The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse.