The Third Discourseman
Who were ‘The Four Discoursemen’?
To begin with, we were just four young men in our early 20s, on the verge of exiting undergraduate days and entering the real world (which in reality meant two unpaid Christian training schemes and one PhD in intellectual history, but still, it felt pretty real at the time!). We had a dream – nay, a vision – of working together on something big. A vision mostly of spouting off and proclaiming to the world, or perhaps just to each other, our amazing insights and opinions. A mingling of bright and fertile minds, youthful over-ambition, a misplaced sense of our own importance, and a hope of making something that mattered. A feeling of discontent at the world around us, the pitfalls of modernity, the blind spots of Western progressivism, the shortcomings of low-church evangelicalism and anti-intellectual Christianity. A sense that we alone were sane in a world gone mad. All this may well have been amplified by pandemics and lockdowns, and the frustrations of being shut up indoors for months on end. There were murmurings of blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels. And during lockdown, over one fateful Zoom call, a plan was hatched. And the first thing that plan needed was a name.
I must confess that I was the one proposing most of the names, and that most of my proposals were not very serious. Whilst others suggested somewhat cumbersome and self-important titles like ‘Ecclesiopolis’, I came up with a stream of bad puns: ‘Bildad’s boys’, ‘Three paedos and a credo’ (named of course after our baptismal inclinations and nothing else, though now we’re all paedobaptists), ‘Psalty’, ‘Toxic Christianity’ (which did become a very short-lived podcast, with just one highly embarrassing and low quality episode), and so on.
One such suggestion was ‘The Four Discoursemen’, made because three of us had an in-joke with one of my flatmates about ‘discourse’. It turned out that discourse, despite being a key term in his Geography degree, was also a term that nobody understood. Lecturers would inform him that it was a ‘slippery concept’ that ‘meant different things to different people at different times’, and neither he nor any of his course mates seemed to have any idea what they were going on about. And so ‘discourse’ and ‘discourse analysis’ and things being ‘slippery concepts’ became a sort of running joke (one that, I promise, was much funnier in person and at the time than it feels as I’m typing about it now). And in theory writing blogs is a sort of discourse, and there were four of us, and ‘the four horsemen’ is technically a Christian reference (though admittedly one somewhat unrelated to blogging), and so maybe combining all of that into a slightly bizarre pun was the way to go? And so ‘The Four Discoursemen™’ was born. And I genuinely liked it as a name, and am probably the saddest to say farewell. But we’ll come to that later.
With the name decided, and WordPress paid for, a blog was born. And those early Four Discoursemen days were madness and magic. There was no king in Israel, and each of us blogged what was right in our own eyes. The articles spluttered out at random. Sometimes months would go by with nothing published. Sometimes we’d all publish in the same week. Titles ranged from ‘Conspiracy Theory or Common Sense’ (about the COVID vaccine, of course) to ‘The Unhelpful Taboo of Fascism’, from ‘Don’t Love Everyone’ to ‘Is Nominalism that Bad?’, and even (my personal favourite title) ‘Lego Movie 2 as Death of Masculinity’.
And there was something beautiful about the free-flowing ideas, the scattergun approach, the writing about whatever we cared about in that moment (even if we never thought about it again), the sometimes dubious quality of both the content and the prose, the clickbait titles trying desperately hard to rage against the machine, to push the limits, to be controversial and radical and new. And as we wrote, each man found his niche.
Most of the more controversial titles, it must be noted, came courtesy of the First Discourseman. Whether it was explaining why fascism wasn’t really that bad, or why the Lego Movie 2 really was that bad, he had an alt-right take for every occasion. Yet, when required, he could be as intellectually and literarily gifted as anyone, and produced noteworthy takes on politics and culture that no one could accuse of being boring or mainstream.
The Second Discourseman was more noble in stature, issuing forth free-flowing prose, poetry and hymnody inspired by tradition and the literary greats who had gone before him. A true conservative, in love with the ancient and the enduring, and eager to share that love with the world. His work always defied our expectations of what emotional and literary intelligence a mathematician was capable of.
I, the Third Discourseman was more modest in ambition, aiming for clearly structured and logical takes on God’s world and God’s Word, and the sort of emotional and literary intelligence you’d expect a mathematician to be capable of (though, every so often, I enjoyed a brief foray into biting satire, taking down worthy targets such as biblicists or Santa Claus). There was little contribution from the world of literature gone before, and little reading done beyond the Scriptures. Just one man and his Bible, as Luther would have wanted…
The Fourth Discourseman was more grand in scope, writing epic and esoteric, muti-part articles on weighty topics and intellectually challenging ideas. His work was informed by history (theological, intellectual and political), and brought some academic heft to the site. Each sentence was worth reading multiple times. This was fortunate, since most of them also had to be read multiple times to make any sense.
And as more and more blogs were published, this humble WordPress in which you currently find yourself matured into something we could be proud of, something special and unique and ours. Over the course of several years, a library of 95 articles (including this one) was built. And at least 40% of those are actually worth rereading. And so ‘The Four Discoursemen’ blog came to be what it is today. Not perfect. But special. What started off as a shared vision among four men in their early-twenties has become a reality.
But my fellow discoursemen were never quite convinced by the name ‘The Four Discoursemen’. Every so often, the idea of a rebrand was floated. It was suggested that we could start monetizing our WordPress, or try to be a bit more professional. And it was always felt that whilst the name ‘The Four Discoursemen’, was many things, professional was not one of them. It was an in-joke, basically meaningless to the wider world, just a silly pun. That’s part of why I liked it. Perhaps unlike the others, I never really dreamed of the blog being massive or world-changing. I was always hesitant to advertise anything that I wrote to anyone. I was happy writing what I felt like, and if the only people in the world who read it were my three friends, that was enough for me to feel like it had been worth writing. We were just four friends writing a blog together, and the name reflected this. ‘The Four Discoursemen’ is now the name of our group chat, and is often how we refer to each other in social settings, as a way of signifying ‘the four of us’.
But perhaps this proves the point. It has become too casual and comfortable. It is the name of a friends’ group chat, but not the name of a serious blog. And whether I dreamt of this or not, I do now believe in our product. Whilst we are not great bloggers yet, I believe that we have written some great blogs in the last few years. I think that the potential is there for us to build something that is genuinely influential and great, even if only to a relatively small number of people. And if we can even get that number into the thousands, rather than the tens, that presents an opportunity to do some good, and maybe even change some lives. Any success greater than that would be icing on the cake.
And so now, after many deliberations, just as we were a few years back during lockdown, we are once again on the verge of something new and exciting. But this also means that we’re at the end of something that was exciting in its own right. Today, we bid farewell to the Four Discoursemen. Not to those four men; they live and blog on in fairer pastures. Not to their dream of a shared literature to change the world; that dream is alive and well. Not even to the name, for they will forever be The Four Discoursemen, if only to each other. Whilst their WhatsApp group remains, the name lives on. But we bid farewell to this site and domain, to WordPress, and to this particular blog that we have built. It has served us well, but the consensus is that we have outgrown it. We published our first blog, ‘Green Conservatism, Green Christianity’ almost 4 years ago, in April 2021. Since then, we have done little to shake things up or remould ourselves. But now, we feel, is the time for change.The dream lives on, but it must do so somewhere else.
The plan is to rebrand as ‘Sacramentality’, to start writing under our real names (which may see a reduction in titles like ‘The Unhelpful Taboo of Fascism’, though you can never be sure with the First Discourseman), to move to Substack (which you can find here). We now have a fifth addition to the team, a manager (self-branded as ‘George Martin, but for you guys, not The Beatles’), who will undoubtedly bring some direction, order and professionalism. Hopefully all these changes will give our blog some much-needed oomph, without us losing too much of that original creative energy that made the early days so special. To find out what ‘Sacramentality’ means, and what we hope our new blog will stand for, you can read the first post on that site here, which is fittingly parallel to what you are reading now. One site’s farewell is another’s welcome.
If any of the blogs on this site have made you laugh or cry or think, if there has been any encouragement or comfort or challenge, if you feel like the ideas presented have made your mind a richer place, then please consider joining us on Substack, and continuing to read our output there. Sign up to our mailing list. We’d love to get started with a core of readers who will help us, encourage us, and critique us on this journey ahead. And we’d love for that core to include all those who were with us from the beginning, here on WordPress. Feel free to share the site to others you think may benefit from it as well. And if you’re the praying sort, please pray for us and our blog, that it would not be a waste of time, and that we would be able to do some good through it.
And with that, we bid farewell to ‘The Four Discoursemen’ WordPress, and offer you a warm welcome to ‘Sacramentality’ on Substack. We hope and pray that it will be worth the transition. We look forward to seeing you there.
The Four Discoursemen 