when the pretense of ascent—functional reduction—occurs: with the prophets having abandoned the living God, churches and religious language morph into locations where God may have once been active, shaping people and their social realities, but in which God now lies dead, no longer a transformative reality, alive only as a topographic memory. The second ascent malfunction is idolatric substitution.9 Much in the Christian faith depends on properly identifying and discerning