Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women, Part 3: Does Gender Difference Make a Difference?

26 February 2012

The church at Corinth is justly famous for its problems, but it was also noteworthy for its gifts.  So richly gifted was the Corinthian church that Paul said they come short in no gift.  There’s all kinds of discussions we could have about the various differences between Corinth and the present milieu, but let’s start by trying to understand what was happening in the church then.  There’s a particularly rich vein of discussion centering around how the Corinthians were supposed to use the gift of prophecy, so we’ll focus our discussion there.  They had a number of prophets functioning in the Corinthian church — in fact, they were completely out of control, and part of Paul’s purpose in writing the epistle is to help restore a measure of order to their worship service.

So let’s take a little time to look what the practice of that particular gift was supposed to look like in the church.  The first stop is 1 Corinthians 11:1-16.  Again, lots of ink spilled on whether we need to do this head covering thing today, and for the moment, let’s bypass all that and focus on what Paul wanted the Corinthians to do.  It’s pretty simple, actually: men, when praying or prophesying, should uncover their heads; women, doing the same, should cover their heads.  Why?  As a sign of submission.

Let’s just sit with that for a moment.  Here we have a man and a woman.  Both are believers; both have the gift of prophecy; both have a word from the Lord to speak.  No problem with any of that; they can both speak, but Paul insists that the man uncover his head to do it.  Paul also insists that that the woman cover her head to exercise her gift.  This from the same guy that wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” to the Galatian churches earlier in his career.  Has he changed his mind?

Of course not.  Jesus is one with the Father; Jesus is not the Father.  The Father sent; the Son obeyed to the point of death; the Father raised and exalted Him.  Christian unity is trinitarian unity: real equality in value and glory, but not sameness in either identity or function.  The application here to men and women fits well with the internal logic of Pauline iconography; a husband represents Christ and a wife represents His Bride, the Church.

If we stop right there, we have something valuable already: Paul plainly teaches them that both men and women can (and should) pray and prophesy, but not in exactly the same way.  Which is to say, gender difference makes a difference in how the gift should be exercised in the Corinthian church.  It could also make a difference today, could it not?

But let’s keep walking with the Corinthian church a while, because there’s more to say.  A woman in the church of Corinth is certainly supposed to use her gift of prophecy for the benefit of the Body.  Does that mean she may prophesy in the church meeting?  There are two options here, and they have to do with how you understand 1 Cor. 11 and 14:31 as over against 1 Cor. 14:34-35.  The latter passage says,

Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says.  And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.

Let us begin, first of all, by discarding the notion that we cannot just stomp a foot, say “That’s not fair!” and disregard this portion of Scripture.  It’s there; God said it, and if you’ll pardon a note of philistine biblicism here, we’re just going to have to live with it.  God loves us, and He knows what He’s doing.  It will turn out, if we obey wisely, that this is a good thing, a glorious thing, and not some scourge to be borne until the Lord returns.

But how to obey? Of course, we have to consider how to map the Corinthian situation onto our own situation (and that’s coming, Gentle Reader, but first things first), but before we can do that, we still need to settle out what Paul was asking the Corinthians to do.

The problem is that we have a seeming contradiction.  Paul has already said, back in 1 Cor. 11, that women are to pray and prophesy with their heads covered, which means that he believes women should pray and prophesy.  He has also said, just a few verses earlier, that all can prophesy one by one, so that each one may learn and be encouraged.  So how are we to take it when, just a few verses later, he then says women are not to speak?  There are two basic positions that seem viable.

Option A is that women are supposed to exercise their gifts of prophecy within the church, but not within the church meeting proper.  This understanding has the virtue of a commendable simplicity, but it seems to leave a number of unanswered questions in the context.  Option B is that women are to prophesy in the church meeting just as men are, but they are not to take part in the judging of the prophecy that follows a prophet speaking.  This latter understanding seems to answer more questions in the context and follow the argument more closely, but at the same time feels a bit like a cop-out given the absolute-sounding statement in v.34.

Up to this point, I have felt that either understanding made equally good sense, and neither answered all my questions.  I have not been able to rule out one or the other.  If you’ll bear with me in an experiment, Gentle Reader, I want to undertake the project of exploring these two positions over the next few weeks and seeing if I can rule one or both of them out.  If we can do that, then we can consider how this might map onto the present day.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Community

11 December 2011

I recently had occasion to hear from a disaffected pastor who felt that my talk about “community” was an affectation, an unnecessary flirtation with a popular buzzword.  That furnished me with an occasion to think a little more deeply (and theopoetically) about why community has become a pillar of my practical theology.  Below you’ll find some of my ruminations; I hope they’re helpful to you.

One person is a rotten image of the Triune God.

In the beginning, God saw that everything He made was good, except for one thing: a solitary person.  It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the person: the “not-good-ness” was very specific: “It is not good that man should be alone.”  God is three Persons; one person is not a good image.

The fix?  God puts the man in a death-like sleep, tears him in two, and fashions woman — the crown and glory of man — from his very flesh.  She is different from him, other than him, not-him.  And yet, what does he say?

“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.  She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.”

He sees her, and knows her for what she is.  She is his flesh — if you’ve seen her, you’ve seen him.  And then, you haven’t; they are different.

“Show us the Father,” Philip says to Jesus, “And it is sufficient for us.”

“He who has seen me,” Jesus replies, “has seen the Father.”  He later adds that He indwells the Father, and the Father indwells Him.  In big theological polysyllables, we call this perichoresis.  (That’s Greek for “dancing around,” by the way.)  In another author’s terms, “In Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”   This extends to the Church, and that’s only natural: we are the Body of Christ, of His flesh and of His bones, which is to say, His Bride.  And while He has ascended, the Body remains here on earth, a tangible witness to the Father.

A solitary person, no friends, no family contact, is a lousy image of God.  This is the image of the Trinity in the world: that we dwell in each other’s lives.  A lot.  In a husband and wife, this dancing around one another leads to nakedness and physical union, an intimacy so deep and glorious that it’s too dangerous to share with more than one person.  Too much glory can kill you.  On the other hand, that glory is also the ultimate picture of Christ and His church.

In other contexts, this dancing around leads to the shedding of masks and armor, so that we can see and love one another for who we are.  A different sort of nakedness, to be sure, but it’s still quite threatening, and we’re still tempted to start stitching fig leaves together.  Another person in my life is going to act like…well…not me.  He’s going to be himself.  In my life.  He might not like me; he might not do things like me.

That’s all true, and it’s my job to give him the freedom to do that, as a gift.  And to receive the same freedom from him, if he’s willing to offer it.  That mutual gift becomes a dance that lets us both be ourselves, in harmony, richer than we could be separately.  Sinners can’t do this naturally, but God never meant for us to be only natural; we were always meant to partake in the divine nature.  The dance depicts the Trinity, and the dance requires the presence and guidance of the Trinity, or it will never work.

When it does work…wow.  God has blessed me with this dance in a number of relationships, and I am rich beyond measure.  I can’t begin to express my gratitude adequately, but the very least I can do is name some names: my Sunday morning thinktank partners, Jim and Michele; my youth ministry partners, Joe and Becca; my “huddle,” Dave, Jody, Brad and Joe (again); my church family at The Dwelling Place, whose names are too numerous to list, but y’all know who you are; and saving the best for last, my Lady Wife, Kimberly.  I aspire to be the sort of blessing you have all been to me.

And you, gentle reader, wherever you may be: May God bless you with the same, and may you bless others with the same, that the world may know that the Father sent Jesus, and has loved us as He loved Jesus.

4 Comments | Ecclesiology, Meditations, Mystical Union, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Marks of a True Church

4 December 2011

When our fathers were expelled from the Church of Rome five hundred years ago, they had to reconsider what it meant to be a true church.  Since the first few centuries of the Church, they had been able to tell themselves that if they were in communion with the other churches (and then later, if they were in communion with the Pope), they were a true church.  Suddenly they found themselves cast out of the political organization they’d come to identify with the Church, and this forced them to re-confront the question: What is a true church?  How can you tell if you’re in one?

I’m not going to review the whole discussion here, but suffice it to say that over time, the Reformation fathers settled on an answer: the marks of a true church are faithful proclamation of the Word, faithful practice of the Sacraments, and church discipline (which protects the other two).   For quite a long while, “word, sacrament and discipline” were considered the marks of a true church throughout the Protestant world.  Even today, many Protestant churches consider these marks to be the core of their church activity.

As a result, a certain sort of superstition has grown up around the marks of a true church.  Many people believe that if a church is faithful to just maintain word, sacrament and discipline, then God will bless that church.  Unfortunately, in the world we actually live in, churches are regularly closing despite what they would consider their faithful preservation of word, sacrament, and discipline.  Something wrong there…

In my own tradition, the word/sacrament/discipline got boiled down to just word, which is to say, doctrinally sound teaching.  A similar superstition plagues us: if we will just maintain the teaching of sound doctrine, God will bless us, and the rest will come.  But in our tradition also churches are closing every day, despite having maintained the teaching of sound doctrine.

***

Scholars have often commented on the stance of the OT sage as a distinct vantage point, especially as distinct from Moses as lawgiver or the other prophets.  Where the prophetic stance begins with direct verbal or visionary revelation, the sage does not.  The sage observes God at work in the world, and the sorts of things that God tends to do, and draws conclusions.  In other words, the prophet starts with “Thus says the Lord…” and the sage starts with “How’s that working out for ya?”

The sage — even the inspired sage of the book of Proverbs — appeals to observation and experience.  See Prov. 24:30-34, 6:6-11, etc.  The sage catches things that the doctrine-wonk might miss, like: “Hey, guys?  This isn’t working.”  This is quite openly an appeal to experience, and if you have the doctrine-wonk turn of mind, you’ll object that everybody’s experience is different, and how can you really appeal to that?

The answer, of course, is “carefully.”  It is actually easier to decode God’s revelation in His Word than in His spoken World.  It’s easier to misread the World.  But for all that, the World is revelation, meant to be read and understood.  If it requires wisdom, then we will need to be wise.

***

Experimental science arose from ‘natural philosophy.’  One of the key points of departure between philosophy and science (as we now know it) is the willingness to go out and look.  Philosophy can be done from an armchair — if you know the basic nature of things, then you can arrive at all the conclusions you need by thinking through how they interact together, or so the natural philosophers once thought.  But they kept being wrong about the way the world actually worked.  The experimental scientists realized that there are lots of ways God could have made the world — if you want to know how He did make it, you have to go look.

***

The ‘marks of a true church’ approach to church ministry is like old-school natural philosophy; it revolves around sitting in a study and doing lots of thought experiments.  If we’re meeting the standards, then of course we’re doing it right, and of course God will bless our efforts.  The path of wisdom is a little more complex: it involves getting out into the world and seeing what God is, in fact, blessing.

It will turn out that the ‘marks of a true church’ approach is also bad doctrine, but that’s not really the point.  The point is that God reveals that it’s bad doctrine by not blessing it, and so the way you learn it’s bad doctrine by going out into God’s world and seeing that it doesn’t actually work.  What does?  Love.  Service.  Care for children, the poor, for orphans and widows and the defenseless.  Healing the sick; comforting the broken; hugging people who stink.  Getting out of the holy huddle and engaging the people who need Jesus most.

I’m not rejecting correct doctrine here; it’s important.  I think it’s important enough that I make time to design Bible curriculum for Christian middle school students, and to teach Greek and theology courses to Bible college and seminary students.  Nor am I rejecting the proper practice of the sacraments; in fact, I dare say I take a much higher view of the sacraments than the vast majority of you who will read this post.  And I’m certainly not denigrating church discipline.

What I am doing is observing that being the Body of Christ in the world involves a ministry profile that looks like Jesus.  If we don’t look like Jesus, then how dare we console ourselves because our teaching is good?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Tradition

13 November 2011

The Tradition is a building.  The foundations are set in stone, as they ought to be.  Some rooms are finished and decorated, for the moment.  We may redecorate, or even renovate them eventually, but not right now.  Others were finished, but someone left the windows open all winter.  There’s a lot of water damage, and it’s starting to leak into other parts of the house.  And there’s a nest of rattlesnakes that live under the bureau, and bats in the closet.  Need to do some serious work in there, pronto.  Other rooms are framed in, but there’s exposed wiring, sawdust and tools everywhere, the occasional hole in the floor.  You probably don’t want to let a kid in those rooms yet, at least not unattended.

***

Adding to the Tradition is part of the Tradition.  Always has been.  When Moses gave the Torah, the only music in the Tabernacle liturgy was somebody occasionally blowing a trumpet.  And not a Louis Armstrong trumpet, either — a shofar, a hollowed-out ram’s horn.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the shofar.  But there’s a reason nobody’s recording a whole CD of shofar music.  It’s not capable of a particularly broad range of musical expression.  Along comes David, and brings the Ark up to Jerusalem, where the Temple will one day be.  He makes musical instruments, writes psalms, and organizes the Levites to bring a service of musical worship that parallels the service of animal sacrifice in the Tabernacle.  There’s not two words about any of this in Torah, but David does it anyway, and when Solomon builds the Temple, the musical worship is included in the Temple as well as the animal sacrifice.

Scraping off accumulated barnacles is also part of the Tradition.  Jesus does this very forcefully in a number of ways, with His “You have heard it said…but I say unto you…” utterances, His parables, His miracles and actions.  But Jesus is not leading some sort of fundamentalist “Back to Torah!” movement.  When He cleanses the Temple, He drives out the bazaar in the court of the Gentiles, but He leaves the choristers and musicians alone.  He celebrates Hanukkah, too.  Some changes harmoniously build on and glorify the foundation that has been laid; others obscure and obstruct it.  Jesus differentiates between the two, as well He ought to, since He’s about to introduce some innovations of His own.

Of course it’s not as simple as “good accretions” versus “bad accretions” to the Tradition.  To everything there is a season: some accretions are glorious in their time, but not intended to be everlasting.  The Tabernacle gave way to the Temple.  Animal sacrifice gave way to the death and resurrection of the Messiah.  (The folks in charge of offering sacrifices were a little slow to take the hint, so about 40 years later God razed the Temple to the ground.  Hadrian constructed a temple to Jupiter some 40 years after that, God apparently preferring demon-worship on the Temple Mount over the emptiness of animal sacrifice after His Son’s death.)  The feast of the peace offering gave way to the feast of the Lord’s Table.  Sipping grape juice at that Table will give way to drinking new wine with Jesus in the Kingdom of His Father, as we hear Him declare the Father’s praises in our midst…but I’m getting carried away.  Back to the Tradition…

It’s a living Tradition, a succession of experiences and relationships mediated by the Holy Spirit.  Along the way, there are ordinations, baptisms, structures of civil and ecclesiastical government, and so on, but the succession of those things is a characteristic of the Tradition, not its backbone.  The Tradition is the life of the Church, the Body, the fullness of Christ, and is in turn perichoretically filled by the Holy Spirit.  It is the life God gives, manifested among men.  Think River Ecclesiology here — where the living water flows, the Tradition is alive. 

The Spirit inspired the Scriptures within that mighty stream of experiences and relationships: “Holy men spoke as they were borne along by the Holy Spirit.”  The Scriptures are part and parcel of the Tradition.  It’s a serious category mistake to talk about “Scripture and Tradition” as though the two were separate sources — no matter which one you want to have primacy.

Can the Tradition be wrong?  Of course.  If Christ is not risen, if Yahweh is not king above all gods, if the gods of the nations are not idols, then the Tradition is finally, fatally, irrevocably wrong.  But since Christ is risen, Yahweh is king above all gods, and all the gods of the nations are deaf and dumb idols…the Tradition is not wrong.

Praise Yahweh for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!

1 Comment | Ecclesiology, Meditations, The Tradition, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Maginot Lines

2 October 2011

At the close of The Great War, the French were determined never again to suffer an invasion from Germany.  To that end, they constructed a massive line of fortifications, naming it after then-minister of war, Andre Maginot.  It’s not necessarily a bad strategy.  Worked pretty well for China, once upon a time.  It was state-of-the-art all the way — cafeterias for the troops, air conditioning, underground railways to connect different fortifications, and a vast number of blockhouses, turrets, shelters and observation posts bristling with the latest in machine guns, grenade launchers, and artillery.  The Maginot Line would, in fact, have been very difficult to breach…

…so the Germans invaded the Low Countries instead, and then came down into France from the north, sweeping the entire country in days and completely avoiding the Maginot Line.

***

We are God’s people in exile.  “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.”  Despite the plain biblical revelation on this point, we persist in investing ourselves in the permanence of our Christian institutions–governments, cathedrals, seminaries, churches, mission agencies, charities and so on.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t build these things.  When the governors are Christians, they certainly ought to build a Christian government.  When the populace will furnish and fill a cathedral, they should build one.  When the church needs trained men and is incapable of training them as it ought to do, someone certainly ought to start a seminary.  When single churches can’t undertake the expense of funding a pioneering missionary on the other side of the world, a mission agency is a good idea.

But we can’t fool ourselves that we’re building something permanent with these structures.  The God-fearing governments of Christendom have given way to pagan states that acknowledge no god but themselves.  The great cathedrals, more often than not, stand empty, as do many of our large church buildings.  Most seminaries have managed to lose their effectiveness, often with in matter of a few generations.  Spirit-led mission efforts ossify and become self-serving bureaucracies that Spirit-led missionaries have to work around in order to fulfill the Great Commission.

All is mist, as the wise Preacher once said.

Having forgotten what it’s like to do without these things, we build new Christian political movements, new church buildings, new seminaries, new mission agencies.  Well-meaning Christian people scrimp and save and sacrifice to pour massive amounts of resources into these new institutions, constructed on the same principles as the old ones, and vulnerable to the same failings in the end.  History has not been kind to this strategy, but we have forgotten our earlier history, and don’t know what else to do.  Which is to say that when the enemy outflanks one Maginot Line, we build another.  And another.  And another.  The really awful part?  We have no continuing city to defend with all these fixed fortifications.

To everything there is a season, and this is not the season for building fortifications.  Defending Jerusalem is a nice thought, but unless the Lord guards the city, the watchmen watch in vain, and if you’re at Jeremiah’s point in the story rather than Hezekiah’s, the Lord isn’t interested in guard duty.  Christendom 1.0 was glorious, but in God’s providence it’s crumbling, and while Christendom 2.0 is rising, it will be a long time before we see more than foundations — far, far longer than I’ll live.  It’s Jeremiah time, and those who can’t see this harsh providence for what it is will die defending walls that can no longer even support their own weight, let alone protect anyone.

So where does that leave us?  It’s an interesting question.  We may have to find out as we go.

2 Comments | Chicken Bones, Ecclesiology, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Mystical Union: The Only Path to Maturity

30 January 2011

The posts on mystical union appear to have touched a nerve in the FG community.  Clearly this is an area that warrants much more investigation and discussion; I am much encouraged that we’re on the right track .  And so we continue…

In John 17:20-23, Jesus prays for all who believe in Him to be one: “I do not pray for these [eleven disciples] alone, but also for all those who will believe in Me through their word….”  Please note, Jesus is not asking for a loose alliance, but that we would be one “as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You….”  Jesus wants us to be one as the Trinity is one.

Is that even vaguely possible?

Of course not.  It would take a miracle.

And that’s exactly what Jesus prays for–a miracle: “…that they also may be one in Us.”  We cannot unite with each other apart from God; what we can do is be joined to the Trinity, and thereby be united to each other.

Jesus has a purpose in mind: “…that the world may believe that You sent Me.”  This tells us something about the unity He is praying for.  All believers are joined to Christ invisibly, but that is not the answer to Jesus’ prayer.  Jesus is praying for something that unbelievers can see, so that they might believe.

By what tools are we to be thus visibly united?  How do we do it?  “And the glory You gave Me, I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one.”  The Father gave glory to the Son, and the Son has given that glory to us.  By that glory we are to be united.

But what does it mean?

I’m having a hard time describing it here.  If you’ve seen Jesus’ glory revealed in two believers in the same place at the same time, then you’ve seen what he’s talking about, and the unity that inevitably flows from it.  If you haven’t, I’m not sure I can explain that particular miracle to you, except to say that when the glory shines forth, we recognize our mutual Friend Jesus in each other, and for His sake we love one another, and find ways to get along.  When our sins obstruct the glory, suspicion reigns, and there is no unity except the pseudo-unity that comes from having common enemies.

All this is not only an answer to Jesus’ prayer and a witness to the world; it is also necessary for our own spiritual growth: “I in them and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one….”  The path to perfection, to maturity, lies in the sort of unity that Jesus prays for.  One of the great sins of conservative evangelicalism is the presumption that division leads to greater purity, and thence to maturity.  It simply isn’t true; Jesus says that we will be made perfect in one.  Divided, the Body will never be mature.  (Now, this same Jesus taught us about church discipline and so on, so it’s not as though division never happens in an obedient church.  But although division may be necessary at a particular time, it is a setback, and we should treat it like one.)

And again, Jesus has a purpose in mind for the miracle He is praying for, and he expands on it here: “…that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as you have loved Me.”  Not only will the world see the sign and know that Jesus is who He says He is; our visible unity will also be a sign to them that God loves us, just as He loved Jesus.

Knowing this, they will want to be a part of us, the people on whom God pours out His love.  What a witness it would be!  What a witness it is, on those rare occasions when it happens to some degree!

The key to it all is “in Us” in verse 21.  This is a miracle from top to bottom, and none of it is going to work if we are not united to the Trinity.  Only by being in the Father and the Son will we be able to unite with each other.

Conversely, if we find ourselves unable to unite with each other, what does that say about our relationship with the Father and the Son?

10 Comments | Controversies, Ecclesiology, Meditations, Mystical Union, Person/Proposition | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Father Hatred and the Loss of Beauty in Worship

9 January 2011

Beauty is hard work.  Being good enough to produce something like Handel’s Messiah requires years of training, apprenticeship, and dedication.  The actual creation of it requires a great deal of work.  And even all that is not enough — schooling and hard work can’t put in what God left out.  If the talent isn’t there, then there will be no great work of art, no matter how dedicated the artist might be.

Not everybody is a Handel.  Maybe one or two in a generation are so talented — and not all of them have access to good training, or work as hard as Handel did.  So it becomes very important, if we are to have beauty, that we attend to our history.  If you only get the combination of hard work and talent that produces a Handel every two or three generations, and you want to have a lot of beautiful music, then you have to hoard it from your past.  There won’t be enough to go around in this generation alone — or any other generation.  Which is to say that in aesthetics and art as in everything else, “a good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,” and we must honor our fathers and mothers.

Now, imagine what happens if a generation arises which does not honor its fathers and mothers.  The rationalizations vary; perhaps they are sweeping away the barnacles of accrued affectation and getting back to the primal essence of the art.  Perhaps they are forsaking superstition and ignorance and advancing forward into the light of a scientific new day.  Perhaps they are simply seeking things to which they feel an intuitive connection, and abandoning the past as irrelevant.  Perhaps they have pronounced all their fathers might gain of them Corban… (we’ll come back to that thought.)

Whatever the justification, the result is the same.  Failure to honor one’s fathers and mothers leads to being cut off from the benefits of their wisdom.  Forsaking the law of your father is not a good idea.  In the matter of beauty, the results are particularly bad.  The lessons of the past are forgotten and must be rediscovered, and the accumulated treasure of the past is ignored.  The result is inevitably a great deal of ugliness, and the loss of an ability to tell that it’s ugliness.  The best rock opera of the nineties may turn out to just be a trifle less terrible than a field of weak contenders.  Without the accumulated treasure of the past, there’s little basis for comparison.

This is what has happened in worship.  When we think of the “worship wars” today, we think of the battle that started in the 1970s and really didn’t go mainstream until the 80s and 90s — shall we sing praise choruses, or hymns?  The folks who argued for choruses, and against hymns, felt that they were casting off the dead hand of almost two millennia of orthodusty and revitalizing the church.  The folks who argued for preserving the hymns felt that they were guarding a great trove of wisdom and glorious worship, stretching back to the dawn of the church.  They were both wrong.

They were wrong because mostly, the hymns at issue were 19th-century revival songs that were, in their day, the music of a similar revolution.  Before that, most churches had a strong continuity in their worship and music with the preceding 1800 years of church history.  The great revivals of the 19th century, along with various good effects, also succumbed to the sin of contempt for the established church, and therefore for their fathers in the faith and the accumulated wisdom and beauty of the generations who went before them.

The result, as we’ve been discussing, was a good deal of ugliness.  In time, people noticed that it was ugly, shallow and unhelpful, and began to do something else — and the result was the present ‘worship wars,’ a revolution against the revolution.  (Not, please notice, a counter-revolution.  That would imply undoing the sins of the past, and what we got instead was more of the same.)

Which is to say that, having discovered that sin didn’t work, we decided to try compounding it rather than repenting of it.  We needed to admit that the first revolution was a sin, that we had forsaken the wisdom of our fathers.  We needed to begin to honor our fathers again.  This we did not do, and many of us still have not.

The result, predictably again, is much ugliness, and a goodly number of ridiculous spectacles.  A guy whose faith has been sustained by numerous Calvary Chapel messages about how the locust-scorpions of Revelation 9 are helicopters and the end is near — this guy is tormented by concern that his Lutheran friend is not being “fed” in his supposedly dry liturgical service.  The Lutheran fellow, for his part, visits his friend’s church once and is permanently put off Bible studies.  Jeepers.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: Description, Prescription, and the Role of Gratitude

12 December 2010

In a preceding post I mentioned gratitude as a factor in my use of the creeds, and in discussions with friends and colleagues it has become clear to me that this requires a little elaboration.

First of all, a couple of thoughts about the nature of gratitude in general.  Gratitude is not just about warm feelings in your chest.  Gratitude is about what you do.  If your parents raised you, fed you, clothed you, loved you, and you always felt warmly toward them for these things, but you treated them badly and never once gave any indication that you were aware of how much they’d done for you, are you grateful?  No, not really.  Suppose a friend rebukes you for your ingratitude, and you protest that of course you feel warmly about all your parents have done for you.  Wouldn’t your friend be perfectly right to say “So what?”

Of course he would.  That warm feeling is not an all-purpose moral solvent that cleanses whatever you decide to to.  If you take for granted all your parents have given you, and then protest that of course you’re grateful — by which you mean that you have warm feelings toward them — this is just to say that you are only grateful where it doesn’t matter.  Gratitude that is not meaningfully incarnated is not gratitude at all; it’s just cheap sentimentality.

With reference to the early creeds,  I am grateful to those men who went before me, for their many sacrifices and their great struggle.  Even more, I am grateful to Christ for giving such evangelists, pastors and teachers to His Church.  But if this is to be more than a sticky sentiment, a warm feeling in my chest when someone says “Nicea” or “Chalcedon,” then I need to incarnate this gratitude in a way that matters.

These creeds are the weapons our fathers used in their war against heresy.  This is simply a matter of history; it is as God Providentially arranged for it to be, and we must show gratitude for the way God actually preserved His church, not the way we wish He’d done it. So we must celebrate these key aspects of the faith which our fathers so ably defended, and do so in a manner respectful of God’s design in history — which is to say, respectful of what actually happened and what they actually said.  Therefore, an aspect of this celebration will inevitably be the public reading, or the corporate saying, of the creeds.  And so we find once again that “descriptive vs. prescriptive” fails us as a useful way of categorizing.  The creeds are not just descriptions of what the church believed at one point in her history; they are also — in the fashion just described — prescriptions that govern aspects of our present practice.

But how?  How will it work in practice?  We don’t have to say the Creeds weekly, but we can’t just ignore them, either.  Some churches may simply integrate the Creeds into their weekly worship.  Others may choose to do something quarterly, or integrate the Creeds into their doctrinal statements and new members’ classes.  Others still may designate one Sunday a year to celebrate these things.  After all, if we can manage to observe Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day to celebrate the warriors who have defended our country, why can’t we find room in the schedule for a day to celebrate the warriors of the Church, who defended our faith?  (And may I suggest the Feast of All Saints as a convenient time?)  There is no One Perfect Way to do this, but do it we must, somehow.

Now, am I saying that a man is in sin if he doesn’t say the Nicene Creed at least occasionally?  Not as such.  Saying the Creed is not directly required by Scripture, and so a man can walk with God and not say the Creed — at least in theory.  However, in actual practice, I find that among American evangelicals, our particular refusal to say the creed is the result of a sinful attitude on our part:  ingratitude, sectarianism and father-hatred that ill becomes Christians.

The wage of that particular sin is a particular sort of death.  If you insist on isolating yourself from other members of the Body in defiance of Eph. 4:3, God may give you your desire, but send leanness to your soul.  Cut off from the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit in past generations, cut off from the wisdom of your fathers, you will be reduced to whatever formulations you can dream up yourself, and you get only the counsel of your living friends — which is to say that you will be low-hanging fruit for the fads of the age, and your churches, your schools, your daily practice will fall victim to a pervasive silliness.  (Oh, wait — I just described modern evangelicalism, didn’t I?)

We are ungrateful, and God has given us over to our folly.  You want to know why, when you walk into a Christian “bookstore,” you can’t hardly find a Greek New Testament or even a decent devotional book, but there are crucifix pencil toppers and “God’s Gym” t-shirts in every size you can think of, including a little onesie for your newborn Christian soldier?  This is why.  Could it be any clearer that we need to repent?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: Generosity

28 November 2010

I need to say thank you to my good friends Dr. Steve Lewis and Joe Anderson, whose discussion and friendly disagreement over the use and meaning of the creeds inspired me to think more deeply and more clearly about these issues than I ever had in the past.  I’m grateful to you both.

In our theological community, nitpicking is considered the acme of theological skill.  I honed the skill from a very early age; I’m one of the heirs of a particular strain of southern fundamentalism, so I was raised to it.  I can, in all modesty, nitpick with the best of ‘em.   To be honest, the skill has served me very well in certain contexts.  It’s important at times to be exact, say what you mean to say, no more and no less, and to hear everything that others are saying — or, even more importantly, to hear what they’re not saying.

But…

But there are other times when it’s a weakness.  It can be a real problem when we’re trying to obey Ephesians 4:3 with living people, and I’ll save that discussion for another time.  But the trouble it causes the living doesn’t even hold a candle to the trouble it causes us when we’re dealing with the dead.  We read every historical formulation as though it were written yesterday, and criticize it for all the things it doesn’t say, all the things it says differently than we would say them.  We do not pay attention to the vital historical context in which the creeds were written, and therefore we do not notice the victories our fathers achieved.

What we ought to do is ask a different question.  Not, “Would I say it like this?” but “Did they succeed at addressing the problem before them in their day (not, notice, the problem before me, now)?”

For example, “Eternally begotten of the Father” in the Nicene Creed is hard to prove.  In Scripture, begetting seems to be discussed in the context of the Incarnation, and it’s not exegetically clear that it applies to the preincarnate Christ.  But what was the context?  The Nicene fathers were at war with the heresy of Arius, who said that Christ was not eternal, but “There was a time when He was not.”  “Eternally begotten of the Father” was the Nicene fathers’ way of clearly, unequivocally saying that the Arian claim was a lie.  For the need of the hour, it was a most effective tactic, imperfect as it may seem to us from our present vantage.  (Do you think you have a better solution to the problem?  Let’s say you’re right — so what?  Who couldn’t come up with a better answer, given a millennium and a half to think about it?  But the Nicene fathers didn’t have a millennium and a half.  Arius had to be refuted then; the sheep God committed to their care needed a solution then.)

Why did it matter?  As with all the early Christological controversies, what was at stake was nothing less than the very essence of the Christian faith: the promise that human beings can be partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4).  Jesus is the paradigm case: He shows that it is possible for full deity to really meet full humanity.  If His deity is diminished (as Arius would have had it) then what we struggling, sinful men partake of is not really the divine nature, but something less.  And if His humanity is diminished, then it is not possible for real human beings to partake of the divine nature — which is to say that we go over the same cliff by a different path.

Believe it or not, we get “mother of God” (Theotokos if you prefer the Greek) in the Definition of Chalcedon in similar fashion, as a refutation of Nestorius, who was perfectly happy to say that Mary was the mother of Jesus, but would not say that she was the mother of Christ.  For Nestorius, “Christ” meant both the man Jesus and the divine Word, come together in one, and he would not affirm that the divine Word had a mother.  The fathers took this (correctly, I might add) as a flat denial of John 1:14, and a serious threat to the theological underpinnings of the promise of 2 Pet. 1:4.  As a result, they adopted the verbiage “mother of God” to unequivocally deny the errors of Nestorius — and it worked, beautifully.  They were defending the truth that Jesus is undiminished deity and undiminished humanity.  They succeeded; we reap the benefits of their success–and make no mistake, “mother of God” was the instrument of their success.

Can we improve upon the wording of the Nicene Creed, or the Definition of Chalcedon?  Perhaps so.  Ought we to evaluate them as though it were written last Tuesday by some evangelical pastor in Tucson?  Of course not.  What we ought to do is read them as a stunning and hard-won refutation of a pernicious heresy.  We ought to say them as celebrations of victory — they are the particular formulations by which, once upon a time, the core truths of the faith once delivered to all the saints were preserved so that we might hear them now.   The men who wrote them are our people, members of Christ’s church and part of the same Body in which we now find salvation; we are their brothers-in-arms, their spiritual children and heirs.

We ought to be generous enough with them not to subject their words to tests they weren’t designed to meet.  Nor should we Monday-morning quarterback them, as if they ought to have been omniscient and foreseen the loopholes that later generations found in their words, or the abuses to which their words were later put.  It is enough to ask of them that they handled — often heroically — the problems of their own day.  It is far too much to ask that they would also have anticipated ours; that’s our job, not theirs.  “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: Harmony and Unison

21 November 2010

As we saw in a preceding post, when the language of the Creed is biblical, we are not free to abandon it, even if the framers of the creed — or later users of it — would not understand that language in the same way we do.  We are not free to shy away from the way the Bible talks about things.

So what do we do?  Isn’t it dishonest to recite the Creed knowing that we don’t mean the same thing as some others do when they say the same words?

Two issues here: First of all, how come this kind of thing always seems to only work one way?  How come it’s me being dishonest, and not them?  Especially since — from where I’m standing, at least — I mean what Scripture means by it, and they don’t.  Hardly seems right.  How about this: I am honestly employing the language of Scripture, and they are betraying their principles by unlawfully importing to the biblical expressions meanings that God did not intend?

Second, and more important, we can disagree and still be one.  Christ only has one Body.  What actually unifies us is not our doctrinal statements, nor our creeds, but our common participation in Christ.  A difference on whether Christ descended into hellfire after His death simply isn’t enough to trump our common participation in Christ.  You can’t undo the cross with a pen and a sheet of paper.

Or to say it in the old way: We believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church.  We believe in the communion of saints.  Or in the even older way: “There is one Body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism; One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

When I go to, say, a GES conference, I find myself sharing an auditorium with many people with whom I disagree quite seriously, some of whom I would never allow to speak to a flock for which I am responsible.  In other circumstances, I find myself sharing a classroom or even a pulpit with someone I seriously disagree with.  And yet, we fellowship and worship together.  I recently became involved with a prayer effort in my community that puts me on the same team with a very broad range of folks.  And yet, we will continue to pray together.  Why?  Because Christ has united us.  They are my people, even if I don’t like it (I do, actually, but my likes and dislikes are irrelevant).

If a pen and paper can’t undo the work of the cross, neither can a clock or a calendar.

Back in 650 or 700, there were Christians.  Christ was building His church.  The gates of Hades were not prevailing against it.  These people said the Creed, and by those words they were expressing their belief in Jesus, the same Jesus I believe in.  They were joined to Him who is my Head; they were members of the Body in which I am also a member.  They still are; when I ascend the heavenly Zion on Sunday morning to worship before the mercy seat of the heavenly tabernacle, they are the “spirits of just men made perfect” about whom the author of Hebrews writes. I was baptized into the same Christ as they; I eat of the same bread, drink of the same wine, worship on the same holy mountain.  They were, and they are, my people, and if I cannot speak in unison with them on everything, I can still speak in harmony.

When I say the Creed, I am not trying to paper over the differences between us.  But I am claiming continuity with them.  I am in their debt, and I am grateful.  The Creed is their gift to me; they formulated it, spoke it, preserved it for me, and here it is: an adept summary of the Faith once delivered to all the saints, articulated as best they understood it, given to me, although I have done nothing to deserve or earn it.

They are my people.  When I say their creed, I am saying that I am in harmony with them, and because of that harmony, it is my creed too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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