Experiential Knowledge

9 September 2012

Naw, I don’t think life is a tragedy. Tragedy is something that can be explained by the professors. Life is the will of God and this cannot be defined by the professors; for which all thanksgiving.
-Flannery O’Connor, letter to Beverly Brunson, January 1, 1955

I remember talking with a roommate of mine in Bible college about our Spiritual Life class. He pointed out that 90% of what is taught in classes and books on the spiritual life is not actually anywhere in the Bible. Upon a little reflection, I agreed. We began to kick back and forth examples of things we’d heard that were nowhere in Scripture. I don’t remember most of them, but I vividly remember our contemptuous discussion of praying, “God, show me my sin” — a prayer we could find nowhere in the Bible. The real need, we felt, was to strip away that 90% — all the folklore that surrounded walking with God — and just stick to what it actually says in the Bible.

How silly we look in hindsight, all these years and miles later! Of course we should start there; that’s our foundation. And also of course, there are a tremendous number of superstitious fables grown up around the Christian life that actually serve to conceal biblical truth, and these weeds ought to be pulled out of the garden and burned before they cause any more trouble. But coming to understand how to apply that biblical foundation well is a skill at which we grow, and in growing, we pick up a great number of helpful hints and bits of folk wisdom.

God is a person, according to the Bible. Or three, if you like. How much of my know-how about living with my wife is written down anywhere? Much less than 1%, surely. Even if I set about to write it down, how much could I realistically write down? Maybe 5%, maybe? So despite my best efforts, 95% of my know-how about living with my wife will remain unwritten. It will come out, when it comes out at all, in a piece of advice to a friend in a particular situation: “Let it go, man. You’re not going to get anywhere with that right now.” Or “That’s a good question. Why don’t you ask her?” If my friend responds in that situation by saying, “Where is that in the Bible?” he’s going to miss some good advice.

So the astonishing thing is not that 90% of the advice about walking with God is not written anywhere in the Bible. What’s so very astonishing is that 10% of it is. It’s a testament to how much God wants us to know Him that we have so much guidance written down. But as with any other person, walking with God is an art. In the end, the know-how is experiential; we learn not by reading, but by doing it ourselves, and watching it done by others.

That “Show me my sin” prayer that my roommate and I so criticized? When a relationship is going sour and I need to come to grips with my own responsibility for it, asking God to expose my sins in the relationship so I can confess them and forsake them is a great idea. I am very glad that I have the freedom to do that, and I am delighted that He answers such prayers. I don’t need a specific verse to hang it on for it to be helpful.

I have heard “listening prayer” criticized on the grounds that there’s no Bible verse that says God speaks to us in prayer. That may be the case, but there’s certainly no verse that says God doesn’t speak to us when we pray, and when I come to God in prayer, ask my question, and then shut up and listen, well…He speaks to me. So there it is. Is this biblical? Well, yes. God did it with Abraham, didn’t He? Am I not a son of Abraham by faith, invited to share in the Triune fellowship by Jesus Himself through the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit? Why shouldn’t my prayer be a two-way conversation?

It happens all the time in Scripture that God speaks to people by a variety of means; there’s certainly nothing unbiblical about it. But as I coach someone in learning to listen to God’s voice, what I tell them will be a mix of biblical precedent and things I’ve gleaned from my own personal experience walking with God and hearing His voice myself. Mostly the latter, to be entirely honest.

Is there something wrong with that? Nope. “He who walks with the skilled will be skilled,” as the Good Book says, and I learned to hear God’s voice the same way — by being coached by people who had the skill. As I gain skill, I will coach others. This is the way God designed us to function in the Body of Christ.

Of course, if you think about it, it seems silly. Having given His inerrant and inspired Word, God then entrusts the task of teaching His people how to apply it to fallen, feeble, frail human beings. It’s amazing that it gets done, generation after generation. But that’s the mystery, isn’t it? The mechanism is us, and it looks like it will never work — but in spite of it all, Christ is building His Church into a glorious Bride without blemish or spot. A sensible, believable explanation for this eludes us — even the professors among us — but the fact of it is right there in front of us. In spite of all the good reasons that it should not be so, it is so. For which all thanksgiving.

2 Comments | Meditations, Mystical Union, Person/Proposition | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Mere Supernaturalism

12 August 2012

As I have discussed my transition away from cessationism with various people, it has become clear that there are actually two related issues entangled together. In my life, they came as a set, but there’s no reason why everybody’s experience would be the same as mine.

The first issue is the question of whether certain miraculous spiritual gifts ceased operating as individually vested gifts after the initial launch of the Church. This is the issue around cessationism proper. Many charismatics don’t understand this, and thus are confused when a cessationist professes to believe that miraculous healings still happen today, that God answers prayer today, and perhaps even that God can still speak through visions and dreams today. The issue in cessationism is not healings, but a particular person having the gift of healing; not someone hearing from God in a general sense, but a particular person having the gift of prophecy. (Generally. This distinction does not hold for tongues — every cessationist I know says it’s over and done with, period.) So with cessationism vs. continuationism, we’re talking about whether the Spirit continues to dispense all the biblically attested spiritual gifts in the present day.

The second issue, although related, is distinct from cessationism: the expectation that God will intervene supernaturally. From the Red Sea to the present day, God’s people have struggled with the temptation to forget that God intervenes in the world. We tend to think of this as a peculiarly modern temptation, but a quick look at the Exodus generation shows us this is not the case.

Hold that thought a moment.

***
In eschatology, the wide dividing line has typically been between premillennialists on the one hand, and post- and amillennialists on the other. That’s where the bright political fault lines have been drawn. I want to suggest that this is a mistake.

The lines ought to have been drawn between those who look to the future with hope and expectation, and those who look to the future with gloom and the spirit of Chicken Little. This is the difference that makes a difference. I’m an optimistic premil (or if you like, a dominion dispensationalist), and I have much more in common with a patient postmil than I do with either my doom-and-dystopia premil brethren or most amil folk.

This is not to say that the theological question of when Christ returns relative to the millennium is unimportant. I believe it is an important question, and one which Scripture plainly answers. What I am saying is simply that optimism or pessimism about the future is vastly more important. We who can look at the nations raging, laugh at them with Yahweh, and seek first God’s Kingdom and His righteousness on earth as it is in heaven — we are one breed. The Chicken Littles are something else, and whatever their doctrinal statements might say, their spirit of fear and their little pronouncements about “polishing the brass on a sinking ship” are not from God, because He doesn’t give that spirit or talk that way.

***
In similar fashion, I believe that in the battles over the charismatic movement, evangelical Christians drew the bright political line in the wrong place. I know folks who are charismatic in their theology, but day in and day out, expect no divine intervention in their lives. I also know charismatics who go to church, belt out a couple of paragraphs in tongues, and go home — but don’t pray with authority, don’t seek to hear from God, and don’t seek to minister to others in any supernatural way. By the same token, I know rock-ribbed cessationists who believe God speaks in dreams, pray for miracles, and trust Him to supernaturally order their affairs and relationships.

We drew the political line between those who practice all the biblically attested spiritual gifts today, and those who do not. However, the far more important issue is whether, on either side of that line, a person will seek to resolve his problems through doctrine alone, or whether in his daily practice he will also expect God to intervene supernaturally.

I’m open to suggestions for naming these positions, but for our present purposes, I’d like to call them doctrinalism and supernaturalism, respectively.

Two points of clarification. First, I’m talking about habits of practice, not talking points. I know lots of people who on paper, and when pressed will admit that it’s possible God would intervene miraculously today, but in practice, from day to day, they rely on doctrine alone, and they teach their followers to rely on doctrine alone. These people are doctrinalists, no matter what they say.
Second, I am not setting up an either-or situation here. It’s not either doctrine or supernatural intervention. I am talking about people who rely on doctrine alone versus those who look to doctrine, but also seek for God to intervene supernaturally in the present.

Again, I am not saying the cessationism question is unimportant. Not at all. I think the stakes are very high in that conversation. In the interests of full disclosure, let me just go ahead and spill the beans: I believe that most cessationists and most charismatics have one critical thing in common: an allergy to biblical discernment. I believe that the Church will not grow into health and maturity unless she employs all the biblically attested gifts (cessationists, I’m lookin’ at you), and she employs them with testing and discernment, as Scripture requires (charismatics, I’m lookin’ at you too), and all of that in the context of loving God enough to take His Word seriously and be visibly united with His people. So yeah, I think it’s an incredibly important issue.

However, supernaturalism/doctrinalism is a much more important issue. The question of whether God will intervene through the gift of healing is important, but the question of whether God will intervene at all is obviously an even more important question.

I would contend that in most ministry venues, supernaturalists — charismatic or not — are natural allies. Doctrinal statements can create a barrier where no biblically founded barrier exists, of course, but those who look for and appreciate God’s intervention can work together, if they’re allowed to — or if they simply choose to move forward no matter what their more sectarian brethren might prefer.

And then later, over a bottle of wine, they can argue over whether the miraculous healing they just prayed for, and received, was the result of the gift of healing, or whether it was simply an answer to prayer.

5 Comments | Ecclesiology, Meditations, Person/Proposition | 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

Mystical Union: The Only Alternative to Legalism

23 January 2011

In conversation with a couple of friends this week on these things, I happened more or less by accident on a truth that surprised me, and sharpens the mysticism issue for me a great deal.

Here’s how it happened: in discussing the ongoing person/proposition controversy, we were considering how poorly the Saving Proposition/Content Of Saving Faith positions fare when faced with the burden of addressing a person’s present experience of death.  However well they might do at addressing truths regarding the second death (not well, actually, but that’s another discussion), these positions utterly fail to bring God’s saving power to bear on death right now. Jesus came to save His people from their sins — not just from the Lake of Fire, but from drunkenness, adultery, theft, lying, murder, addiction, and so on.

An eternally secure heroin addict who will certainly go to heaven when he dies has not yet been saved from his sin.  No proposition suggested in the Content of Saving Faith debate will help him.  He needs more than propositions; he needs rescue.

If you insist on sticking to the truth-is-a-proposition approach, then you find yourself stuck in a two-tiered view of the Christian life, in which one needs this proposition to guarantee passage to heaven, and then those propositions to experience life here and now.  In principle, this is the Galatian heresy all over again, and as long as you confine yourself to thinking of truth in terms of propositions, it’s absolutely unavoidable.

Which is why you ought to consider the living Christ instead of just propositions about Him, however true.  A propositional view of receiving eternal life not only fails to meet the real human need for life now, it can’t help lapsing into legalism.  You can refer to a person in a proposition, but you can’t contain a person in a proposition, or transmit a relationship with a person via a proposition.  All you can contain and transmit in a proposition is an idea.  Living by ideas — even the most noble of ideas — is living by Law.  We already know how well that works, and anyhow if Sinai had been all we needed, whence Jesus?

The solution?  Actual relationship with the living Christ, which is to say, mystical union.  Either you live in real relationship with God or you’re just another legalist, living by ideas in your head.

75 Comments | Meditations, Mystical Union, Person/Proposition, Trinitarian Personalism | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Gordon Clark Refuted in Three Sentences

22 January 2011

Faith is trust/reliance/persuasion/belief — frame it how you will — in something which one holds to be truth.  All faith is propositional only if all truth is propositional.  But John 14:6 has already shown us that this is not true.

31 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, Person/Proposition, The Free Grace Food Fight, Trinitarian Personalism | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Mystical Union

16 January 2011

I’ve had several recent conversations that converged on the same basic truth.  It’s at once the very core of the Christian faith, and a drastically under-acknowledged and under-emphasized point in conservative circles.  I don’t even know how to talk about it without setting off alarm bells among my colleagues.

But this is the truth that underlies the person/proposition discussion, and it’s something we need to discuss directly.

Here it is: the core of the Christian life, the very center of it all, is mystical union with Christ.

Paul talks of this in Romans 6: we are buried with Christ in baptism that we might be raised with Him to walk in a new life.  He talks of it in Galatians 2: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”  It’s how unbelievers become converted, according to Romans 10: “How shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard?”  (Note, the Greek does not say “of whom” — Paul is asking how they can believe in Jesus if they haven’t heard Jesus.  Then he goes on to ask “How will they hear [Jesus] without a preacher?”  In the faithful preaching of the gospel, the unbeliever hears Christ.)

It’s not just Paul, either.  Jesus talks of it in John 17: “I do not pray for these [the 11 disciples] alone, but for all who will believe in Me through their word, that they may all be one, as You, Father, are in Me and I in You….And the glory that You have given Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them and You in Me….”

I could go on with the proof texts, but you get the idea.

I figure I might as well out myself now: It’s taken me a long time to get to this point in my Christian life, but I’m now an unabashed mystic.  Actual contact with the living Christ is the sine qua non of the Christian faith, and if you haven’t got it, you haven’t got anything.  If you have got it, you can still be wrong about various factual matters — just like a man can be married to a woman for years and still not know the color of her toothbrush — but you have the relationship, and that’s what matters most.

Most of us know this instinctively.  When a friend or loved one dies, or you lose your job and you can’t pay the bills, or your child is sick in the hospital, hovering between life and death — all your theological knowledge (in itself) isn’t worth ten cents right then. What you need is comfort, the personal comfort of a God who is really there.  Certainly this can come through Scripture, but it’s not the ideas in the Scriptures that comfort you, but the God behind them, the One who says them to you.  You hear His voice, and it is in trusting Him, in clinging to Him, that you make it through.  If your Bible knowledge doesn’t help you toward that, you might as well have memorized the manual for your DVD player.

I remember once reading the testimony of a seminary professor who came to this realization when his child was ill.  I thought it was an amazing, thought-provoking article, and recommended it to a friend.  He was underwhelmed: “If he really believed what he taught, his theology ought to have been enough for him.”  Sadly, many of us think that way, even under really trying circumstances.  These are people who have managed to build the theological house of cards in their heads to the point that they can escape into it for hours, days if necessary, the way some socially awkward teenagers used to escape into D&D or an addict escapes into getting high for as long as possible.  Sadly, their theology is enough for them.  It is enough for them to think of the idea of God’s presence; they don’t actually need Him to be present.  These same people tend to be a bit devoid of human feeling, and have stilted, awkward relationships as a result of their preoccupation with their own fantasies.  If you’re going to be preoccupied with fantasies, I suppose theological truth is better than D&D — but not by a whole lot.  Preoccupation with your own fantasy — any fantasy — still inhibits loving God and your neighbors, and the fantasy still becomes an idol.

Unfortunately, people mistake this fantasy-worship for faith, just because the theological house of cards has a great deal of propositional truth in it.  The Pharisees had just as much propositional truth in their theological fantasies.  What they lacked was actual relationship with God — and the problem is as real in the church today as it ever was in first-century Judaism.

I recognize that a lot of the things that have happened under the banner of mysticism are wrong.  Conservatives are suspicious of anything with the label “mystical,” and not without reason.  But we can’t allow the various abuses to stop us from seeing the truth.  There is no substitute for actually walking with God.

Besides, the fact remains that we do need some word to describe the thing that the various proof texts above are talking about, the experience of actual contact with the living Christ.  Jesus and Paul are not just building theological castles in the air.  They are describing something that really happens, the real experience of actual Christians.  How are we to describe this?  Our fathers used the phrase “mystical union with Christ,” and if there’s a better term, I haven’t yet heard it.

15 Comments | Meditations, Mystical Union, Person/Proposition, Trinitarian Personalism | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“Endeavoring to Guard the Unity of the Spirit”

13 September 2009

It is a cherished dictum that as Christians, we are a community of faith and therefore our unity is based on doctrine.  In fact, this very thing came up in a recent comment thread on another post here.  I want to make it clear I’m not taking a shot at any of you who’ve discussed that matter here.  I do, however, want to address the way this concept is often applied in the Christian world.

There’s an element of truth in the dictum, of course.  But as generally applied, it is absolute bushwa, and if you can’t smell the reek of brimstone about it, then your spiritual sniffer needs a tune-up.

In Ephesians 4:1-3, Paul writes:

Therefore I, the Lord’s prisoner, beg you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to guard the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

We guard the unity, but it is the Spirit who joins us to Christ, who baptizes us into His body, and therefore it is the Spirit who creates the unity we have.  We just guard what the Spirit has already created.

Or rather, we don’t.

We pretend that the basis of our unity is propositions on paper, and then divide endlessly over every jot and tittle in the paperwork.  And not only do we not regret such divisions, we respect them.  We respect them so highly that when people in ministry have a personality conflict, they often find a doctrinal difference, fight about that, and then divide, ostensibly over the doctrine — and this procedure effectively makes the whole sordid affair immune to criticism.

“We had some doctrinal differences,” they say.

We nod sagely.  “Well, the basis for our unity is doctrine.”  We shrug and pat them on the shoulder.  “What else could you do?”

Brimstone.

*****

What we’re missing here, of course, is God.  Specifically, we have a common family as children of the same Father, we share a common redemption through the same High Priest, His Son, and we are baptized into a common body by the same Holy Spirit.

And we somehow think that with a 20-cent Bic pen and a sheet of notebook paper, someone that we know is a brother can scrawl out a bad proposition and sign his name to it, and that will overrule the sovereign grace of the Triune God.

What could we be thinking?  I’ll tell you.  God tells us that He has created unity, but in our heart of hearts, we don’t believe Him.  We believe in the kind of unity we can document in triplicate.

We walk by sight, and not by faith — isn’t that what that verse said?

7 Comments | Meditations, Person/Proposition | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Retraining the Hair on the Back of the Deacon’s Neck, Part 2

16 August 2009

As I concluded my previous post, I could fairly hear the deacons in the audience shouting, “Just because the hair on the back of your neck stands up, how do you know it’s right?”

That’s a good question.  There has to be some norm, some standard by which to measure.

There is.  It’s called the Bible, and one of the things it teaches us is this: who the hearer is will determine what he hears.  If this sounds subjective to you, that’s because in a sense, it is.  But it’s entirely biblical: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” as Jesus often said.  This saying teaches us that there is such a thing as having ears to hear, and such a thing as not having ears to hear.  The person with ears and the person without ears are both standing in front of Jesus, and both hear the same parable…but only the one with ears to hear really hears it, after all. The same propositional content for both, but one understands and the other does not.

Nor is understanding, or failing to, the full range of outcomes.  The same content can convey two opposite messages to two different people, as Paul tells us:

Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place.  For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.  To the one we are the aroma of death leading to death, and to the other the aroma of life leading to life. And who is sufficient for these things?

We carry the gospel on our lips and in our lives, and this bespeaks death to those who are perishing, but life to those who are being saved.  It’s the same content, but different messages are received because the hearers are different.  This is obvious with a little reflection: “Yet I have set My King on My holy hill of Zion” is gospel to God’s people, but chains and a rod of iron to those who will not kiss the Son.

This is to say that there is no substitute for walking with God and being conformed to the image of His Son.  As we do this, we will find that He makes us able to see and hear what would otherwise be invisible and inaudible to us.  All of which returns us to the question: how will we know when this is happening?

Two blind men are standing on a hill, looking out at a sunset.  Suddenly, one of the blind men is healed entirely, and the sunset bursts in on him.  “I can see!  I can see!” he shouts.

“How do you know?” asks his still blind companion.

4 Comments | Meditations, Person/Proposition, Trinitarian Personalism | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Retraining the Hair on the Back of the Deacon’s Neck

9 August 2009

In 1999 Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho chose the theme “Poetic Ministry” for its annual minister’s conference.  The following is from the close of a talk entitled “Fruitful Labor,” delivered by Douglas Wilson at that conference (emphasis mine).*

…You will probably be accused at some point of advocating or compromising with postmodernism….You must guard yourself against any genuine relativism or postmodernism, but people will just oppose you and this is going to be a handy stick to beat you with….

And the reason for this – and this is why Christians get into legalisms, often times:  there’s the gnostic impulse in legalism, but there’s also the laziness impulse in legalism.  I cannot tell, by looking at a man, if he’s truly temperate.  I can look at him and say “is he temperate; is he balanced?”…I can’t tell by looking at him.  But I can tell if he’s got a can of Coors in his hand.  That’s easy.  So if I make a rule against drinking beer, then I can tell if he’s violating it, and I can tell if he’s violating it at a glance.  This is the lazy man’s way of identifying sin, of identifying a problem.   So if you’re looking for intemperance, you can’t tell that at a glance, so you make up an arbitrary and capricious rule.

Related to poetic ministry, there are many people—we might call them conservative, pro-Enlightenment Christians—who believe that the way to fight the left wing enlightenment — postmodernism — is by embracing the right wing enlightenment — various forms of conservatism, and so forth.  But we’re Christians; we should be operating in another category entirely.  Many people get sucked into the analytic tradition because it’s far easier to catch a bad logician than it is to catch a bad poet….  If you’re appealing to poetry, the biblical patterns and the biblical cadences of poetry, that is pretty slippery for a lot of people, and it would involve a lot of work distinguishing the right and the wrong and the wholesome and the unwholesome, and so forth and they just don’t want to do it, so they’ll just accuse you of postmodernism.

Third, if they finally see you, if they wake up in time, you will be understood by your enemies outside the church….and they will understand far more clearly than many of your friends—but your prayer should be that they will not understand, that they will not see you, until it’s far too late.

This is the dangerous territory we are going to have to enter, and there is no way to enter it by just learning a few propositions.  We are going to have to become different people, better people: people who can catch a bad poet.

this is another aspect of the personalism with which we are re-infusing our theology, and a very necessary one.  Not only is belief in the “saving message” belief in a Person, but it is also belief by a person, and this extends beyond the “saving message” to every act of interpretation.  Every interpretation is by a person, and it matters who that person is. If a reader is at all serious about allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture, he quickly discovers that there are some aspects that don’t lend themselves well to propositional analysis: symbols, types, and other such resonances.  When these resonances occur in a passage, a reader with literary skill catches them, and realizes that their presence in the passage is not an accident.

If that reader is also a skilled communicator — say, a good pastor — he can retell the passage in such a way as to highlight the resonances, and a lot of people who wouldn’t have caught the connections on their own will be able to see them with his help.  So he gets up and tells the story to his flock, and all across the auditorium, people get chills and the hair on the back of their neck stands up as they see the connection for the first time.

But what is that pastor to do when someone just doesn’t see it?  Suppose one of his deacons comes up to him after the sermon and says, “Pastor, I don’t think I understand what you were talking about today.  Could you explain it again?”  He does, and the man still just doesn’t see it: “Pastor, I hear what you’re saying, but it just sounds pretty thin to me.  How could you prove that the author really meant for us to see those connections, and interpret them as tying back to that earlier story?”

The answer is, he can’t, because what the deacon means by “prove” is approximately what Euclid meant by it, and stories don’t work like that.  There’s a subtle alignment, a sympathy with the author, that is called for here, and if you don’t have it, they you can’t see the thing well enough to see what the author wants you to see.  N. T. Wright** describes the problem like this:

One of the first insights I came to in the early stages of my doctoral work…was that when you hear yourself saying, ‘What Paul was really trying to say was…’ and then coming up with a sentence which only tangentially corresponds to what Paul actually wrote, it is time to think again.  When, however, you work to and fro, this way and that, probing a key technical term here, exploring a larger controlling narrative there, enquiring why Paul used this particular connecting word  between these two sentences, or that particular scriptural quotation at this point in the argument, and eventually you arrive at the position of saying, ‘Stand here; look at things in this light; keep in mind this great biblical theme, and then you will see that Paul has said exactly what he meant, neither more nor less’ — then you know that you are in business.

I’m not always a fan of Wright’s answers, but he’s describing the process very well indeed.  To bring it back to our struggling deacon, the problem isn’t that the deacon fails to understand the propositions of the argument; it’s that the hair on the back of his neck didn’t stand up when he heard the story told that way.  There’s no easy answer here; restating the argument isn’t going to help at all.

He’s already a good logician, but he needs to become a good poet.  This is less about training his mind than it is about training the hair on the back of his neck to stand up when it should — and that is going to take a lot of time, and a lot of work.

See Part 2 of this post.

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*For those of you who are aware of the Federal Vision controversy, a few words: Wilson gave this address anticipating significant resistance within his circles to the shift toward “poetic” ministry.  Undoubtedly there was some resistance, but it does not seem to have been a huge thing.  However, it seems to me that the Federal Vision battle that erupted just three years later is the anticipated controversy.

To my eye, what’s happened is this: the shift toward a poetic mode of operating is the root, and within a Reformed milieu, the Federal Vision is the predictable fruit.  Most of the FV opponents don’t understand the root and never did — hence all the accusations of lack of clarity — but they can see fruit that doesn’t mesh with their ideas of what good fruit should look like.  So they object to the fruit, and they still don’t really understand where it’s coming from.

**Wright, N. T., Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009) 51.

2 Comments | Meditations, Person/Proposition, The Free Grace Food Fight | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

You Can’t Leave Out the Dirt

2 August 2009

In the preceding post, I concluded by claiming that an abstract proposition is not the story “boiled down to essentials” because God made the world ex nihilo, entered it Himself in a body, and will resurrect it all one day.

Why would I say that?

God made the world.  Created it all from nothing, spoke it into existence.  In that world, things happen.  God enters into the world He made and acts within it.  God put us in that world — this world — and we act within it.  This is what really happens.  The stories are accounts of what really happened.  The abstractions are short summaries or interpretations of what really happened — but it’s the happening itself that is the reality.

When we say that “by grace you are saved through faith” is the gospel, stripped down to bare essentials with all the extraneous information left out, we are saying that it’s the idea — make that Idea — that matters, and not the incarnational reality.  We are moving, in other words, from Yahweh’s world to Plato’s.

This is a problem, because Plato’s world doesn’t exist.

Yahweh made dirt.  The Word of Yahweh became flesh and dwelt among us, and got dirt under His fingernails.  In the resurrection, redeemed men will get redeemed dirt under their redeemed fingernails, and glory to God for all of it.

Abstractions, important a tool as they are, are not the thing itself.  They always leave out the dirt.

13 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, Meditations, Person/Proposition, The Free Grace Food Fight | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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