639. Nothing in the Word conveys this concept of a faith that assigns us the merit of Christ. This is very clear from the fact that the church had no knowledge of such a faith before the Council of Nicaea introduced the idea of three divine persons from eternity. Once that belief was brought in and it pervaded the entire Christian world, every other concept of faith was sent away into the darkness.

Therefore any who read the Word now, and see anything resembling faith, the concept of assigning, or the merit of Christ, spontaneously fall into that concept and believe it to be the only interpretation. They are like someone who sees the writing on one page and stops there and never turns the page to see anything else in the book.

[2] They are like people who convince themselves that something is true even though it is actually false and who support that point alone. Such people come to see falsity as true and the truth as false. Eventually, when anyone speaks against that point of view, they clench their teeth and hiss, "You don't understand!" By then their whole mind is wrapped up in that belief and is covered with a callus so thick that it rejects as contradictory everything that is not in agreement with their so-called orthodox beliefs. Their memory is like a writing tablet covered with the words of that one dominant theological teaching; if any other thought comes along, their memory has no room to take it in, so they spit it out like foam from their mouth.

[3] For that matter, find convinced materialists (whether they believe that nature created itself or that God came into existence after nature or that nature and God are the same thing) and tell them that the truth is the opposite of what they think. Will they not look at you as someone deluded by the fables of the church elders, or else as a simplistic or thick-headed or demented person?

The same goes for all false concepts that persuasion and conviction have fixed in place. Such concepts eventually look like a painted rug fastened with an abundance of nails to a wall that was slapped together using old broken stones.