Bear with me here.
Daniel Oprean’s “Portraits of Deficient Discipleship” (Kairos, 2024) argues that Gospel Matthew 8:18–27 presents three kinds of failed or immature discipleship, each corrected by Jesus’s response.
Oprean reads Matthew 19–20 as discipleship without costs. The “enthusiastic scribe” volunteers to follow Jesus but misunderstands the teacher he’s addressing. His zeal lacks awareness of cost. Jesus’s lament about having “nowhere to lay his head,” Oprean says, reveals that true discipleship entails homelessness, marginalization, and suffering.
As an instance of discipleship without commitment (vv. 21–22), a second disciple hesitates. His request to bury his father provokes Jesus’s radical command: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Oprean takes this as divided loyalty, a failure of commitment even among genuine followers.
Finally comes discipleship without hardships (vv. 23–27). The boat-bound disciples obey but panic in the storm. Their fear shows lack of trust. Jesus rebukes their “little faith.” His calming of the sea becomes a paradigm of faith maturing only through trial.
Across these scenes, Matthew’s Jesus confronts enthusiasm without realism, religiosity without surrender, faith without endurance. Authentic discipleship, Oprean concludes, must include cost, commitment, and hardship.
Oprean’s essay is clear and perfectly conventional evangelical exegesis. The tripartite symmetry – cost, commitment, hardship – works neatly, though it imposes a moral taxonomy on what Matthew presents as narrative tension (a pale echo of Mark’s deeper ironies). Each scene may concern not moral failure but stages of revelation: curiosity, obedience, awe. By moralizing them, Oprean flattens Matthew’s literary dynamism and theological ambiguity for devotional ends.
His dependence on the standard commentators – Gundry, Keener, Bruner – keeps him in the well-worn groove. There’s no attention to Matthew’s redactional strategy, the eschatological charge of “Son of Man” in v. 20, or the symbolic link between the sea miracle and Israel’s deliverance. The piece is descriptive, not interpretive; homiletic rather than analytic. The unsettling portrait of discipleship becomes a sermon outline about piety instead of a crisis in perception.
Fair enough, you say – there’s nothing wrong with devotional writing. True. The problem is devotional writing costumed as analysis and published as scholarship. He isn’t interrogating the text. If he were, he’d ask: Why does Matthew place these episodes together? How does “Son of Man” invoke Danielic or apocalyptic motifs? What does the sea episode reveal about Jesus’s authority over creation itself? Instead, Oprean turns inward, toward exhortation.
It’s an odd hybrid genre – half sermon, half commentary – anchored in evangelical assumptions about the text’s unity and moral purpose. Critical possibilities are excluded from the start. There’s no discussion of redactional intent, no engagement with Second-Temple expectations of the huios tou anthrōpou, no awareness that “stilling the sea” echoes both Genesis and Exodus motifs of creation and deliverance.
This is scholarship only in the confessional sense of “biblical studies,” where the aim is to explain what discipleship should mean according to current theological norms. It’s homiletics, not analysis.
But my quarrel isn’t really with Oprean. He’s the symptom, not the cause. His paper stands for a broader phenomenon – pseudonymous scholarship: writing that borrows the visual grammar of academic work (citations, subheadings, DOIs, statistical jargon) while serving ideological ends.
You can find parallels across the sciences. In the early 2000s, string theory was on the altar. Articles in Foundations of Physics or in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics carried the trappings of rigor but were effectively apologias for the “beauty” of untestable theories. “Mathematical consistency,” we were told, “is experimental evidence.” The logic matches Oprean’s: inward coherence replaces external test.
Climate science has its mirror image in policy-driven venues like Energy & Environment or think-tank white papers formatted as peer-reviewed studies. They reproduce the scaffolding of scholarship while narrowing inquiry to confirm prior skepticism.
The rhetorical pattern is the same:
- Scholarly mimicry: heavy citation and technical diction confer legitimacy.
- Rhetorical closure: conclusions are known before the analysis begins.
- Audience reassurance: readers are not challenged but comforted.
- Boundary play: the work hovers between analysis and advocacy, critique and catechism.
This month’s Sage journal offers a case that makes Oprean look like Richard Feynman. “Dynamic Effect of Green Financing, Economic Development, Renewable Energy and Trade Facilitation on Environmental Sustainability in Developing and Developed Countries” by Usman Ali et al. exhibits the same performative scholarship. The surface polish of method and technical vocabulary hides an absence of real inquiry.
Written in the formal cadence of econometrics – Dynamic Fixed Effects, GEE, co-integration, Sargan tests – it brandishes its methods as credentials rather than arguments. No model specifications, variable definitions, or theoretical tensions appear. “Dynamic” and “robustness” are prestige words, not analytic ones.
Ali’s paper deploys three grand frameworks – Sustainable Development Theory, Innovation Theory, and the Environmental Kuznets Curve – as if piling them together produced insight. But these models conflict! The EKC’s inverted-U relationship between income and pollution is empirically shaky, and no attempt is made to reconcile contradictions. The gesture is interdisciplinary theater: breadth without synthesis.
At least Oprean’s homiletics are harmless. Ali’s conclusion doubles as policy: developed countries must integrate renewables – “science says so.” It’s a sermon in technocratic garb.
Across these domains, and unfortunately many others, we see the creeping genre of methodological theater: environmental-finance papers that treat regressions as theology; equations and robustness tests as icons of faith. The altar may change – from Galilee to global sustainability – but the liturgy is the same.
“The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.” Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 1975
The Multidisciplinarian 
Deficient Discipleship in Environmental Science
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Philosophy of Science on October 28, 2025
Bear with me here.
Daniel Oprean’s “Portraits of Deficient Discipleship” (Kairos, 2024) argues that Gospel Matthew 8:18–27 presents three kinds of failed or immature discipleship, each corrected by Jesus’s response.
Oprean reads Matthew 19–20 as discipleship without costs. The “enthusiastic scribe” volunteers to follow Jesus but misunderstands the teacher he’s addressing. His zeal lacks awareness of cost. Jesus’s lament about having “nowhere to lay his head,” Oprean says, reveals that true discipleship entails homelessness, marginalization, and suffering.
As an instance of discipleship without commitment (vv. 21–22), a second disciple hesitates. His request to bury his father provokes Jesus’s radical command: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Oprean takes this as divided loyalty, a failure of commitment even among genuine followers.
Finally comes discipleship without hardships (vv. 23–27). The boat-bound disciples obey but panic in the storm. Their fear shows lack of trust. Jesus rebukes their “little faith.” His calming of the sea becomes a paradigm of faith maturing only through trial.
Across these scenes, Matthew’s Jesus confronts enthusiasm without realism, religiosity without surrender, faith without endurance. Authentic discipleship, Oprean concludes, must include cost, commitment, and hardship.
Oprean’s essay is clear and perfectly conventional evangelical exegesis. The tripartite symmetry – cost, commitment, hardship – works neatly, though it imposes a moral taxonomy on what Matthew presents as narrative tension (a pale echo of Mark’s deeper ironies). Each scene may concern not moral failure but stages of revelation: curiosity, obedience, awe. By moralizing them, Oprean flattens Matthew’s literary dynamism and theological ambiguity for devotional ends.
His dependence on the standard commentators – Gundry, Keener, Bruner – keeps him in the well-worn groove. There’s no attention to Matthew’s redactional strategy, the eschatological charge of “Son of Man” in v. 20, or the symbolic link between the sea miracle and Israel’s deliverance. The piece is descriptive, not interpretive; homiletic rather than analytic. The unsettling portrait of discipleship becomes a sermon outline about piety instead of a crisis in perception.
Fair enough, you say – there’s nothing wrong with devotional writing. True. The problem is devotional writing costumed as analysis and published as scholarship. He isn’t interrogating the text. If he were, he’d ask: Why does Matthew place these episodes together? How does “Son of Man” invoke Danielic or apocalyptic motifs? What does the sea episode reveal about Jesus’s authority over creation itself? Instead, Oprean turns inward, toward exhortation.
It’s an odd hybrid genre – half sermon, half commentary – anchored in evangelical assumptions about the text’s unity and moral purpose. Critical possibilities are excluded from the start. There’s no discussion of redactional intent, no engagement with Second-Temple expectations of the huios tou anthrōpou, no awareness that “stilling the sea” echoes both Genesis and Exodus motifs of creation and deliverance.
This is scholarship only in the confessional sense of “biblical studies,” where the aim is to explain what discipleship should mean according to current theological norms. It’s homiletics, not analysis.
But my quarrel isn’t really with Oprean. He’s the symptom, not the cause. His paper stands for a broader phenomenon – pseudonymous scholarship: writing that borrows the visual grammar of academic work (citations, subheadings, DOIs, statistical jargon) while serving ideological ends.
You can find parallels across the sciences. In the early 2000s, string theory was on the altar. Articles in Foundations of Physics or in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics carried the trappings of rigor but were effectively apologias for the “beauty” of untestable theories. “Mathematical consistency,” we were told, “is experimental evidence.” The logic matches Oprean’s: inward coherence replaces external test.
Climate science has its mirror image in policy-driven venues like Energy & Environment or think-tank white papers formatted as peer-reviewed studies. They reproduce the scaffolding of scholarship while narrowing inquiry to confirm prior skepticism.
The rhetorical pattern is the same:
This month’s Sage journal offers a case that makes Oprean look like Richard Feynman. “Dynamic Effect of Green Financing, Economic Development, Renewable Energy and Trade Facilitation on Environmental Sustainability in Developing and Developed Countries” by Usman Ali et al. exhibits the same performative scholarship. The surface polish of method and technical vocabulary hides an absence of real inquiry.
Written in the formal cadence of econometrics – Dynamic Fixed Effects, GEE, co-integration, Sargan tests – it brandishes its methods as credentials rather than arguments. No model specifications, variable definitions, or theoretical tensions appear. “Dynamic” and “robustness” are prestige words, not analytic ones.
Ali’s paper deploys three grand frameworks – Sustainable Development Theory, Innovation Theory, and the Environmental Kuznets Curve – as if piling them together produced insight. But these models conflict! The EKC’s inverted-U relationship between income and pollution is empirically shaky, and no attempt is made to reconcile contradictions. The gesture is interdisciplinary theater: breadth without synthesis.
At least Oprean’s homiletics are harmless. Ali’s conclusion doubles as policy: developed countries must integrate renewables – “science says so.” It’s a sermon in technocratic garb.
Across these domains, and unfortunately many others, we see the creeping genre of methodological theater: environmental-finance papers that treat regressions as theology; equations and robustness tests as icons of faith. The altar may change – from Galilee to global sustainability – but the liturgy is the same.
“The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.” Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 1975
clean energy, energy policy, evangelism, Paul Feyerabend, pseudoscience, religion, science
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