How We Know What Words Mean

25 January 2009

For some years now, I have grappled with how to communicate certain things for which the proper words have all been co-opted.

By way of example, suppose you are giving foster care to a child from an abusive Christian home, whose father always said,  “Son, I love you, and that’s why I have to do this,” before he delivered the inevitable daily beating.  When you say “I love you” to the child, he cringes and shies away.  What do you do?  The words have been stolen from you; you must reclaim them.  The only way to reclaim them is through experience, carefully.  Over time, the child will learn that when you say those words, they mean something different — they mean what they ought to mean.

I have been grappling with other expressions, things like “Christian worldview,” “interpreting Scripture according to context,” “church,” “fellowship,” and the like.  I had reached the conclusion some time ago that more explanation was not the answer; I had first of all to deliver an experience that was qualitatively different from what people expected. Then when the explanations came out, people would understand what the words meant.

This has always made me uneasy.  I had a hard time making my peace with it, theologically.  It always seemed to me — no doubt because of my bapti-fundamentalist background — that I was making some sort of weird compromise that should not be made.

I have slowly made my peace with it, grappling with how God establishes the meaning of words through creation, how He teaches all theology through history (which is to say, experience), and so on.

About a week ago, I read something that summarizes and extends this trend in my thinking far better than I could have done.  Here it is:

Our words are often flabby and weak.  For the word to be passed on and to give life, it has to be made flesh.  When, along with your word, you give your flesh and blood to others, only then do your words mean something.  Words without flesh, which do not spring from life and do not share out our flesh which is broken and our blood which is shed, mean nothing.  This is why, at the Last Supper, the Lord summarized the mystery of His preaching by saying: “Take, eat my Body,” “Drink My Blood.”

Fortunate is the man who is broken in pieces and offered to others, who is poured out and given to others to drink.  When his time of trial comes, he will not be afraid.  He will have nothing to fear.  He will already have understood that, in the celebration of love, by grace man is broken and not divided, eaten and never consumed.  By grace he has become Christ, and so his life gives food and drink to his brother.  That is to say, he nourishes the other’s very existence and makes it grow.

(from Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church , translated by Elizabeth Briere  (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1984) 36.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Re-learning to Speak Biblically: Another Riddle

18 January 2009

I posed a riddle from Psalm 99 a while back.  In the course of my Greek class last fall, I came upon another one in 1 John 2:3-4:

Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.  He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in Him.

The thing Free Grace folk usually talk about here is the definition of knowing God — what does that mean?  Is he talking about eternal destiny, or is he talking about something else?

Let’s skip that very important question and talk about something even more basic, that often gets missed.  Whatever knowing God might be, is it achievable?  Knowing what the commandments are — and John is at some pains to make sure the more demanding aspects of the commandments remain uppermost in our minds — how could anyone ever claim that they know God?  And if they can’t claim it for themselves, how could they claim it for anyone else?  We all violate the commandments every day.

So then here’s the riddle: How can John say, just a few verses later in 2:12-14:

I write to you, little children,
Because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake.
I write to you, fathers,
Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young men,
Because you have overcome the wicked one.
I write to you, little children,
Because you have known the Father.
I have written to you, fathers,
Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.
I have written to you, young men,
Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you,
And you have overcome the wicked one.

He says to those he addresses, three times, that they have known (already!) God.  He says it twice to “fathers” and once to “little children.”  This is significant because he addresses his whole audience as little children in a number of other places in the epistle (see, for example, 2:18, and also the synonymous uses in 2:1, 28, 3:7, 18, 4:4, 5:21).

How can he say to his audience “If you keep God’s commandments, then you can say you know God” and then say to them, only a few sentences later “You have known God”?  Given human sinfulness, how can he do that?

We would not dare, most of us, to speak this way to one another.  And because we would not dare to speak biblically to one another, we will find ourselves compelled to speak in truncated ways that do not match the Scriptures.  The solution is to come to terms with speaking biblically.  And to do that, we must solve this riddle.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Competent to Counsel?

11 January 2009

Within the evangelical, Bible-believing, American church in the last four decades, an awful lot of things have happened which I fervently hope my grandchildren will have a hard time believing.  But among a truly embarrassing heap of incongruous strangenesses, there are a few that really stand out, and I’d like to talk about one of those.

Starting in the late sixties, our counselors — those specialists in explaining to us how people in disagreement can sit down and have a peaceable discussion like grown-ups — divided into two camps that were, for the most part, utterly incapable of peaceable dialogue.

Let me say that again: Our conflict resolution specialists could barely speak to one another, let alone resolve their intramural conflicts.

And these are the people who are supposed to help us get along with our in-laws.  “Tell it not in Gath…”

David Powlison unfolds half of the sad tale in Competent to Counsel? The History of a Conservative Protestant Biblical Counseling Movement.  As the title indicates, Powlison is writing a history of the biblical counseling movement, not a history of the debate between it and the evangelical psychotherapists. As far as the debate goes, this is hardly the whole story.  But thus far, it is the only serious, scholarly attempt to chronicle the biblical counseling movement — which is valuable in itself, and addresses the conflict from one side in any case.

Why does it matter?

Because if we want to avoid similar decades-long battles in other areas — like, say, over the exact content that one must believe to be saved — then it is helpful to see what our brothers have done wrong (and what they have done right) in past conflicts.

Just one example:  When Jay Adams began writing and speaking about counseling, he almost completely bypassed the evangelical psychotherapists and went straight for their constituents.  His message was “The Bible has the answers for problems in living; seek the answers there.  Don’t listen to these guys; they’re not basing their responses on the Bible, and in any case they are an illegitimate secular pastorate and their function needs to be returned to the church.”  (My paraphrase, but he was at least that blunt.)

Now, the response was predictable as sunrise: the psychotherapists fought back tooth and nail, or ignored him.

Adams had to know that was going to happen.  He seems to have made a decision that he was unlikely to win them over in any case, so he would take his argument to the broader church as fast as possible, using deliberately inflammatory rhetoric to make friends quickly where people agreed with him — at the cost of making enemies quickly among the psychotherapists.

Now, I think Adams had an important message, and the wider church needed to be brought into the discussion.  But the biblical standard for engaging fellow believers is “Consider one another in order to stir up love and good deeds….”  Instead, Adams chose a course of action practically guaranteed to maximize animosity and bad deeds among the evangelical psychotherapists, with predictable results that largely persist today.  While there are pockets of biblical counseling here and there, the evangelical world as a whole has weighed it and found it wanting.  The reasons for that state of affairs would fill a book, but it surely hasn’t helped that while bringing much biblical content to bear on problems in living, the movement simultaneously behaved unbiblically toward one group of fellow believers.

For those of you conversant with the present gospel spat, this ought to sound familiar.  Think we can learn anything from history?

6 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Books, Controversies, Doctrinal Inconsistencies, Meditations, Reviews | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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