This sub-domain concerns the actual relationship with Jesus as teacher of life and the structural obstacles that prevent it. Discipleship is apprenticeship, not assent; the Sermon on the Mount is curriculum, not law. Legalism and institutional substitution are the recurring mechanisms by which genuine formation gets replaced with compliance, producing people who follow rules rather than people who have become good. ## Concepts - [[Jesus]]: the central figure; currently present and available to anyone who calls, more effectively now than in his earthly life - [[Discipleship]]: active apprenticeship to Jesus as teacher of life; the ordinary content of Christian existence that institutional Christianity has largely abandoned - [[Sermon on the Mount]]: Jesus's central curriculum, routinely misread as impossible moral law rather than a real description of life available in the kingdom - [[Legalism]]: the structural failure that replaces transformation with compliance, and why it produces the opposite of what it intends