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

Prayers from the Pilgrimage: Rest is Transformation; Worship is Warfare

27 November 2011

The below is an excerpt from my (God willing) forthcoming book, Prayers from the Pilgrimage.  May it be a blessing to you.

Like Moses and Aaron Your priests, and like Samuel who called upon Your name, so we have called upon You, and You have answered us.  You have been to us God-Who-Forgives, and we have kept the ordinances which You delivered to us.  Having obediently joined in the good works which You prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them, we who believe now enter into Your rest with thanksgiving.

On the sixth day You made man and brought his bride to him, thus completing all Your work which You had made, and on the seventh You rested.  In so doing, You made the Sabbath for man, that Your image might enter into Your rest, and thus refreshed, might labor as You also labor in the world.  And so the Sabbath became chief among the holy convocations of Israel, a day of celebration, rest and worship according to Your command.

On the sixth day the Last Adam completed His work, and on the seventh He rested in the tomb.  On the first day of the week, the New Man walked in the garden, but His Bride could not cleave to Him, because His victory was not yet complete, and she was not yet prepared for Him.  He ascended and sat at Your right hand, exalted above every name and given all authority in heaven and on earth.  On the Lord’s Day, the Bride enters Your throne room, there to be prepared by Him for the day when He returns.

May our worship on this Lord’s Day be a pleasing offering to You, and may Your will, done in heaven through our worship, flow out from the sanctuary and be done on earth, that we may disciple the nations and the kings of the earth may kiss the Son.

Blessed are You, O Lord, who gives bread to strengthen our hearts.  As we have eaten at Your Table in heaven, so we will eat on earth, that we might soon eat with Your Son in Your Kingdom.

Blessed are You, O Lord, who gives wine to gladden our hearts.  As we have drunk at Your table in heaven, so we will drink on earth, that we might soon drink with Your Son in Your Kingdom.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Tradition: Dealing with Error

20 November 2011

This is the second post in a series on the Tradition, which is also related to the posts on Mystical Union and Theopoetics.  In the last post, we finished with the idea that the Tradition could be wrong only if Christ is not risen, Yahweh is not the God of heaven and earth, and so on.  Which leaves us with the question: Living within the Tradition, how do we deal with errors when they arise?

The Tradition is the only game in town.  How will you walk with Yahweh except by His Spirit, among His people, and according to His Scriptures?  As a Christian, you’re part of the Tradition whether you like it or not; you can’t judge it from outside, because you can’t get outside it.  “I am right and the Tradition is wrong” is a self-contradictory statement for a Christian; every Christian is part of the Tradition.

One presumes there was nothing wrong with the way the Apostle Paul conducted a church service.  Chrysostom writes a liturgy in the 4th century, the Divine Liturgy that much of the Eastern church still uses to this day. The interesting question is not why a 21st-century church uses a 4th-century liturgy, although that will certainly bear exploring.  The interesting question is, why a 4th-century liturgy, rather than a 1st-century liturgy?  What did Chrysostom add, replace, change?  Was he justified in doing so?  And if so, then couldn’t Thomas Cranmer have been justified also?  Couldn’t I?

The Tradition is providentially developing through history.  The Tradition is always maturing, and therefore is always incomplete in that sense, because it always has room for future growth into greater maturity.  We can’t disparage the Tradition on account of its historically-bound incompleteness.  That’s the way God chose to do it, and there’s that whole business of critiquing the Potter to be concerned about, and anyway, it’s just silly to criticize others for their historically-bound incompleteness when we have the same problem.

But sometimes, we’re not just talking about incompleteness or immaturity.  We’re talking about serious sin in our history.  How shall we talk about rampant and obvious sin within the Tradition?  The obvious answer is to critique it biblically — and this is also the right answer.  But how we go about this task matters.  Let’s take an easy example: the antisemitism of the early church.  This problem is not often discussed in most evangelical circles, because it’s embarrassing, but for those of you who don’t know, large swathes of the early church were virulently, violently antisemitic.  This is a well-established historical fact, so I’m not going to repeat all the evidence here.  Feel free to look it up; it’s almost certainly worse than you imagine.

Moreover, the early church’s anti-Semitism is eminently understandable.  It was Jewish people who abducted Jesus in the middle of the night, illegally tried Him, and delivered Him to Pilate.  It was only at their insistence that Pilate crucified Him.  It was Jewish people who murdered Stephen, it was to placate Jewish people that Herod killed James, it was Jewish adversaries who hounded Paul from town to town.  Jesus was Jewish too, of course, but He came to Israel, and took from Israel a people for Himself, and then sent His disciples into all the world.  Judaism after Jesus was not the religion of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Jesus took their descendants with Him (that was the point of Stephen’s famous speech, which got him murdered).  Judaism after Jesus was and is the chaff, not the wheat, and so it will remain until Israel’s repentance and restoration.  In due course God sent Titus the Roman, and the chaff was scattered to the four winds.  The theology was simple and self-evident, the historical evidence was indisputable, and the emotional motivation was potent: Jewish people had been, and remained, implacable and murderous enemies of the gospel, precisely because they were Jewish.

So why not hate them?  The early church forgot two things: first, if Israel is our enemy, then we must do what Jesus told us to do, and love our enemies.  Second, we come from Israel.  We are not a second tree, planted in Israel’s place when she is utterly rejected—no indeed.  We are productive wild branches, grafted into Israel’s tree, and if her fall is riches for us, what will her restoration be?  The fruitless branches will not remain cut off forever: “All Israel shall be saved.”  In the meantime, her root supports us.  Her Scriptures are ours, and we owe her all gratitude for conserving them for us.  From Abraham to Jesus, Israel was the custodian and visible manifestation of the Tradition, and we cannot disown her, however much the early church might have tried.

Which is to say that when the early church sought to expunge every trace of Jewishness from their religious practice, their error wasn’t just hating their enemies; that would have been bad enough.  They were hating their fathers.  God don’t dig father-hatred, and has made His opinion on this most clear: “Honor your father and mother.”  “Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set.”  “My son, hear the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the law of your mother, for they will be a graceful ornament on your head, and chains on your neck.”  “Whoever curses his father or his mother, his lamp will be put out in deep darkness.”  “The eye that mocks his father, and scorns obedience to his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pluck it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.”

Now, how shall we reject the antisemitism of our (early church) fathers — which we obviously must do — without rejecting our fathers wholesale, and thereby repeating the very same sin that they committed?

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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

Third Wave Theopoetics: Fundamental Practices

6 November 2011

An “-ology” implies theorizing.  It implies laboratories and whiteboards covered with equations.  It implies stacks of books and lots of talking.

A “-poetics” implies theorizing too, but it also implies poesis, the making and doing of things.  A poetics is pointless without writing, performance, sculpting, painting, dancing.  So a particular sort of theology might just have foundational principles, but that’s not enough for a theopoetics.  Theopoetics requires foundational practices.  Here are some things that I find foundational to my own theopoetic endeavor.

A Serious Pursuit of God-Honoring Worship.  The regular act of coming deliberately into heaven to offer the sacrifices of praise tunes my soul in a way that nothing else does, or can.  I can’t put into words what this does.

Singing Psalms.  Part of the above, but worth a separate mention. The psalms are the entire emotional lexicon of the human soul, expressed in a way that honors and glorifies the God who made it.  They are a primer in worship, and in worshipful living, thinking, feeling.

Sabbath Rest.  Rest replenishes and restores what is depleted.  It includes naptime, days where I have no commitments and need do nothing, changes of pace like a backpacking trip, good food, and drinks with enough shalom in them to relax the body and gladden the heart.

Physical Obedience.  If I sing the Psalms with an eye to obeying what I find there, I will sing, shout, write songs, beat drums, dance, raise our hands, kneel, bow down, and so on. Paul desires that the men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting.  There’s more where these come from.  What does body posture and instrumentation have to do with spiritual benefit?  Guess I’ll find out along the way, by obeying…

Pretheoretical Obedience.  Speaking of obedience, there are times when God calls me to do something where I haven’t yet worked out all the theology.  Of course this is dangerous stuff; if I say “God told me” when it’s really just my own fleshly longing, then I’m likely to blunder into all kinds of sin that adequate time for study and reflection might have protected me from.  But then, there’s a ditch on the other side of the road, too: the Spirit leads me to act, and I say “Sorry, no can do; haven’t done the theological work on that one.”  How’s that gonna play at the Judgment Seat of Christ?  Of course, this is just saying that hearing God is a big deal and I need to do it right.  No surprises there.  Theopoetics requires obedience in the presence of mystery and confusion.  I do better than we know when I obey, and that’s okay.  The best embodied, lived theo-art happens in close communion with God, whether I understand what we’re doing or not.  Often, in my experience, not — or at least, not until later.

Feasting and Celebration.  I can’t say I’m very far into this yet, but much has been made of the spiritual discipline of various privations, and very little of the spiritual discipline of feasting well.  Making a deliberate attempt to incarnate our joy meaningfully in serious feast is a good, good thing, and carries Sabbath rest a step further.  Celebration of both customary days (All Saints, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Pentecost) and ad hoc occasions (crossing the Red Sea, bringing the ark up to Jerusalem, getting a promotion at work) is a discipline, and I find that it changes my walk with God for the better to engage in it.

Composed Prayer.  Taking the time to write my prayers (or read what others have taken the time to write) makes a substantial difference in the way that I pray.  Ought I to pray in a biblically mature way off the cuff?  Sure.  But I don’t, and growth requires disciplined attention.  For me, writing my prayers fosters that disciplined attention.

Some of these are optional, others are just plain biblical.  The point, in either case, is that theopoetic living does not arise simply from thinking about key principles.  It arises from the disciplined cultivation of soul and body through doing as well as talking and thinking.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Third Wave Theopoetics: Guiding Principles

30 October 2011

My practice of theopoetics is relatively new — I’ve only been doing this for a few years (and even less time under this term) — and so I couldn’t possibly list all the principles that go into it yet.  However, some of them, and in particular some of the principles that differentiate my present stance toward world-life-Scripture from the posture I was trained to take, are pretty near the surface and easy for me to talk about, because I’ve had to become conscious of them in order to make sense of where God has led me.  Below are a few of those.  I offer this discussion partly as an apologetic for what I do, partly as a recruiting pitch, and partly out of an obligation to honor my fathers, which in this case means explaining to the community that trained me why I have suddenly become such a weirdo.  (Believe it or not, guys, it’s because you did such a great job teaching me to take the Scriptures seriously, obey thoroughly, and where necessary, repent instantly, with no shilly-shallying about.  But more below.)

So with no further ado, some of the guiding principles of third wave theopoetics (twelve of them, for you numerological types):

Charitable Hermeneutics.  Love Yahweh first, then interpret His Word.  This cuts through a lot of the baloney in discussions of hermeneutical method.  It issues in a good-faith submission and desire to obey what we find written in the Word, with no hermeneutical monkey business about beating the text into a shape that better accommodates our sins.  Or our theology.

Divine Authorship.  Yahweh wrote the Word and the World.  The Word gives us an authoritative interpretation of the World; it’s the manual that goes with it.  The motifs, symbols and themes in the Word carry over their interpretive significance into the World.

Story-Centered.  Because we must read the Bible with love for the Author/authors, and because we recognize that the same Yahweh wrote both Word and World, theopoetics must be story-centered.  He is the author of the One Story in the Bible, and He continues to write that Story today.  Every human being, no matter how distant he might think to be from God, is part of that Story.  Our stories only make sense when embedded within the Story.

Obedient Rhetoric.  God’s speech is not just content to be parsed and then communicated how we will; it’s also a model for communication.  We have been given outstanding examples to follow, and we should be obedient to God in this, striving to live up to the rhetoric of Word and World. In simple terms, we are the image of God in the world, and we should speak as God speaks, not just in any way we decide to.  This means we don’t always play nice: there’s a lot of rough speech in the Scriptures.  It also means that we don’t simply cut everything up into topics, because even the NT authors give most of their theological and ethical instruction by situating their readers into the Story.

Trinitarian Metaphor.  The fundamental is/is not relationship that drives metaphor is a reflection of the Trinity in the world.  “If you have seen Me,” Jesus says, “You have seen the Father.”  And yet, Jesus is not the Father; He is the icon of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  Biblical interpreters often talk about symbols, motifs, or types in the Bible; these are sub-categories of metaphor, all of them absolutely pervasive throughout both Word and World.  If you understand Word and World as Story rather than as raw material for a Systematic Theology laboratory, this makes a lot of sense; otherwise it’s going to cause you trouble.  But the biblical authors, especially in the New Testament, make metaphorical connections all over the place.  We can ignore them because they don’t fit our guiding principles, or we can submit to them, learn from them, and get to work.

Poetic Precision. Once the far-reaching implications of metaphor are understood, most conservative evangelical folks get very nervous, and start asking, “Where are the brakes on this thing?”  That’s a fair question, but to be honest it’s mostly born of inexperience.  Just because the hermeneutical controls aren’t the ones you’re used to doesn’t mean there aren’t any.  As I’ve grown in my grasp of biblical metaphor, it has become very plain that the connections are precise, and that you can’t just prove anything with it.  But it is the precision of a well-constructed poem or symphony, not the precision of a logical syllogism, and folks find that unnerving.

Imaging God.  Our primary mandate is to be God’s image, not His chief theorist. “Thinking God’s thoughts after Him” is all well and good, but being God’s image is what we’re actually called to.  The thinking is a portion of that, but it’s not the whole thing.  One of the chief implications of this is that sometimes God leads us to do something before we’ve worked out all the theological theory.  In such a case, obedience is called for–we walk by faith, not by sight–and the action forms our character and matures our theopoetic being in the world.

Hunger for Righteousness.  “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness,” Jesus said, “for they shall be filled.”  We too often get so tangled up in our pursuit of freedom (even “freedom in Christ”) that we no longer want to hear how we ought to do something.  God loves us and accepts us because of Christ; no amount of commandment-keeping could earn that for us, and nothing whatsoever can separate us from it.  Precisely because that is the case, we ought to hunger for His instruction in how to live well.  “I opened my mouth and panted,” wrote the psalmist, “for I long for Your commandments.”  Amen.

Loving Scholarship.  Scholarship at its God-honoring best is loving enough to Get It Right.  This has been the subject of a post already, so I won’t repeat all that here.

Mystical Union.  There is no substitute for actually walking with God, in fellowship with Him and guided by His hand.  If we’re not doing that, we have no business talking about God.  This has been the subject of a whole series of posts already, so I’ll be brief about it here.  I know portions of my community are still uneasy with the “mystical” term, but I can’t really apologize for it.  If you don’t believe in mystical union with Christ in the sense I’ve talked about it here (with or without assenting to my choice of terms), you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, the unity of Christ’s Body, or the genuine possibility of real fellowship with a personal God (as over against Christian-life-as-thought-experiment).  If that is the case, then you need to repent.

Living Tradition.  Honoring our fathers means attending to the voices of the saints, past and present.  We are part of a living tradition spanning millennia, whether we know it or not, whether we’re willing to admit it or not.  The Tradition is our broadest fellowship, and like all fellowship it guides and guards us if we love the people in it.  I understand this sounds a bit nebulous, and I look forward to clarifying it in a future discussion.

And last but not least, Growing in Grace, or to put it a little more bluntly, Failing Well.  God calls us to grow in grace, and this means that today’s effort isn’t going to be perfect.  As Chesterton said, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly.”  My own practice of the discipline of theopoetics is still young.  I expect to make some mistakes, repent of them as soon as the Lord makes me aware of my errors, and profit from the experience.  I know of no other way to proceed, and I certainly won’t improve by burying my one talent in the backyard, waiting for that perfect, risk-free investment opportunity.  So take the risk of doing the work, out loud and in public, and when I need to repent, I’ll do that out loud and in public too.  It’s how the Body works, and I’m honored to be a part of it.

4 Comments | Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Theopoetics: The Case for Scholarship

23 October 2011

Once upon a time, someone asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest.  He said that the greatest command is to love God with everything you’ve got, and the second greatest is to love your neighbor as yourself.  Those two commands, Jesus said, undergird all the Law and the Prophets — which is to say, the whole Bible at the time He was speaking.  Paul made a similar comment when he said that love fulfills the whole Law.

I teach in a seminary.  I regularly require scholarly papers, complete with footnotes and all the appurtenances of academic geekdom.  When I have such a requirement, I expect the bibliographic citations to conform to Turabian and the Chicago Manual of Style.  How do I reconcile Jesus’ commands on love — plus all I’ve said on theopoetics in the two prior posts – with my pedagogical “rigidity” in an academic institution?  Or put another way, how does scholarship meet theopoetics?

At its best, scholarship is the opposite of laziness and sloppiness; it is precision with purpose.  Scholarship is about loving enough to Get It Right, and that  is a truly great idea.  You don’t want to hear the words “Well, I think that’ll fix it good enough” from your brain surgeon…or even from your barber, for that matter.  No, you want them to know what they’re doing, be skilled enough to get the job done, and care about you enough to be sure they get it right.

In the theo- disciplines, this means loving God enough to make sure you understand His Word (or His world) correctly.  Loving your neighbor enough to be sure you explain your idea well, and clearly.  Loving those who’ve gone before you enough to give them credit where it’s due, rather than letting your readers or listeners think you just came up with it all on your own.  Loving your fellow scholars enough to pay your dues into the guild, listen to those who’ve gone before you, gain the wisdom they have to offer, and demonstrate to them that you have something to offer which can benefit them.

However, when “academic standards” and the folkways of the guild become an end in themselves (which they often have), then they have become Dagon, and Dagon must fall in the presence of Yahweh.  When the pursuit of theory and minutia and theological castles-in-the-sky impedes our obedience to the two Greatest Commandments, then our “pursuit of truth” has become, in fact, a 72-straight-hour-long game of Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy that distracts us from reality — our relationship with the Living God.  When we are willing to sacrifice the integrity of our relationships with the brothers and sisters God gave us  in order to maintain the integrity of our thought experiment, we love neither our brothers nor our God.  At this point one can no longer talk about how some people enjoy fellowship and other people enjoy old books, as though it were a simple matter of Christian liberty.  Where there is no love, there is no liberty; addicts always think their addiction sets them free, and they’re always wrong.  Even if it’s an addiction to theology books, or a particular theological system of thought.

Good scholarship is first, last and always about love.  This is not simply a different-parts-of-the-body kind of argument.  If the whole body were loving, then where would be the…what?  Is there a body part or function that fits in that sentence?  No.  If I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, but have not love, then I am nothing.  An unloving scholar, a man whose “pursuit of truth” causes division and sows discord among brethren, does not serve our Lord Christ, but his own belly.  He is nothing.  Let him repent and be restored, to the greater glory of God.  If he will not, then let his days be few, and let another take his office.

Good poetry touches the real world; it makes us see something we never saw before, or see something as if we’ve never seen it before.  To do that, and do it well, we must observe the world as it really is.  In our contemplation of divinity, this means careful observation and interpretation of God’s Word, Christ’s Body, the Spirit’s work in the world, and so on.  The best sort of scholarship — the love that draws us to Get It Right — is not only helpful to good theopoetic work, it’s absolutely indispensable.

But this is a scholarship that serves, a scholarship unashamed to wash feet, not a ruler-of-the-Gentiles scholarship that aspires to personal empire-building.  It is a scholarship that serves Yahweh, not just the standards of the guild, and therefore it must be a scholarship that aspires to communicate in the way that God models for us.  It may never write a paper with footnotes and a bibliography; it is enough to love well, and in loving well, get it right.  Imperfectly, to be sure, but right enough for this application, right now.  If there is a paper with footnotes, the guild may be satisfied, but the Christian scholar must not be.  That paper must be only an intermediate step; there is no biblical precedent for that as the end product God wishes us to produce.  A scholarly paper on chronological teaching as a tool for evangelistic Bible study must become an actual evangelistic Bible study, or what’s the point?

2 Comments | Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Third Wave Theopoetics: Toward a Definition

16 October 2011

The word theopoetics has been in use since the late 60s or early 70s, apparently.  It seems it was originally coined by Stanley Romaine Hopper as part of a scholarly conversation, then independently coined a second time by Catherine Keller in the early 2000s to describe her own work.  As I presently understand them, these two uses are distinct streams of thought, but with a certain amount of overlap.  I’m still reading up, so I don’t know much about the previous uses yet.

The word was independently coined a third time (that I know of) last Sunday by me, to describe a conversation I was having with Jim and Michele.  It occurred to me at the time that it was a fairly obvious coinage, so I googled it and discovered the above history.  It’s probably been coined independently dozens of times over the years, but these are the ones I’m aware of.

Theopoetics is a wonderfully apt descriptor for a project I’m part of — a project quite unrelated to the two previous uses.  It’s too good to give up, so I’m keeping it, but in order to be fair to the other communities that are also using theopoetics to describe what they’re doing, I’m going to use the term third wave theopoetics.  Of course, I will also invest some effort in description and definition over the next little while.  I’ll begin by giving the rationale behind the coinage, then a brief definition of the project as I see it.  In later posts, I hope to fill in some of the gaps by articulating some guiding principles and looking at the project through a series of different lenses.

Why theopoetics rather than theology?  The -ology suffix generally refers to giving an orderly account of the thing to which it is attached.  Thus, geology, the study of Earth (i.e., rocks), zoology, the study of animal life, climatology, the study of climates and how they change, anthropology, the study of human societies.

A poetics, by contrast, is typically a treatise on poetry or aesthetics.  Rigor is not by any means absent from a good poetics, but it’s understood that the practice of poetics depends heavily on seasoned judgment and a trained and practiced eye and ear.  An -ology is a science; a poetics is an art and a craft.  It simply isn’t “objective” in the way that biology is.

Theology, in very simplistic terms, is the -ology, the giving of an orderly account, of God and the things related to him.  So far, so good, but to modern people, just the use of the -ology suffix causes us to catch a whiff of bunsen burners, test tubes, and fourth-grade frog dissections.  It’s impossible to use -ology without causing the odor of science to cling to the field.

On the other hand, -poetics carries none of those connotations.

Now some folks really like the scientific connotations, and want to practice their studies of divinity in such a way as to imitate the rigor of the chemistry lab.  They can speak for their own motivations, but I was once one of them, and I can certainly speak for myself.  For me, the attraction of dressing theology in the trappings of empirical science was the idolatrous regard our society attaches to all things “objective” and “scientific.”  I loved the praise of men rather than the praise of God, and God rewarded my sterility of spirit with a sterility of intellect and worship to match.  In His mercy, He also led me in due time to repent.  This to say that I’ve seen the case for “scientific” theology, and I’m not impressed with it.  I am even less impressed with its results: barren theology leads to barren living.

No, the New Testament itself teaches us clearly that if we want to understand what God says to men, we have to have eyes to see and ears to hear.  This is not an objective enterprise; it matters if the one looking and listening loves or hates God, if he is experienced or a novice, if he knows the One he’s listening to, or not.  It’s a relationship, and like all relationships, it’s an art and a craft.

With that preface, I’d like to define what I mean by (third wave) theopoetics.  Theopoetics is the appreciation of — no, the embodied luxuriating in — God’s words and works as art.  The same God wrote the Bible as spoke the world, so theopoetics extends from the exegesis of Paul’s use  of kosmos to the dancing of taste buds at breakfast this morning.

You could say that this is a supplement to theology.  That would be true, in some sense.  But I mean it as a rebuke for theology’s tin ear, glass eye, and wooden leg, a corrective to too many theologians’ bean-counting ways.

The artfully written Bible and the artfully spoken world are both revelation and rhetoric.  God communicates by feasting our senses, by engaging the whole man, the dust and the breath.  Theopoetics is about being God’s image, living as His likeness, and therefore will not advance itself by writing laboriously footnoted papers.  The medium is the message.

Away with the temptation to write scholarly papers!  Let no man say when he is tempted to write a scholarly paper, “I am tempted by God,” for God is not tempted to write scholarly papers, nor does He Himself tempt anyone.  If God ever inspired a scholarly paper, He had the mercy not to inflict it on His people in Scripture; let us follow His good example.  Let the scholarly paper’s laboriously footnoted pages be few and let another medium take its office.  Let there be stories, songs, poems, vignettes, parables, sculptures, tapestries.  Let there be dances!  Let there be great rigor, but let it be the rigor of Miriam dancing well and playing the timbrel in time, the rigor of David’s perfect songs, the rigor of Solomon’s fitly spoken proverbs and Jesus’ apt parables, well-driven nails given by one Shepherd.

Let us learn the lessons of the Tabernacle by sculpting one, even a miniature one, and the more detail and prayer goes into it, the better.  Let the plagues be painted on murals, complete with the crushed heads of the Egyptian gods.  Let dances be choreographed in honor of the Red Sea crossing.  Let beer be brewed in honor of Jael slaying Sisera.  Let bread be baked in honor of the feeding of the five thousand — and let it be given to the poor and homeless in the name of Jesus.  Let rattlesnakes be barbecued in honor of Moses’ bronze serpent (we can eat off St. Peter’s sheet; why not?)  Let vibrant old liturgies be revived and adapted in honor of the resurrection of the Son of God.  Let our grasp of the nature and character of God be embodied to the hilt — something we can eat, drink, watch, touch, feel, smell.

And yes, hear.

But let us cease to worry about what those with no ears to hear will say.  They will want proof in the form of footnotes and syllogisms; we will simply live the proof before them, and wait for God to open their ears and remove the scales from their eyes.  “To him who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance.”

God grant that all His people have eyes to see and ears to hear the glory of the Father, expressed in time and space by the Body of the Son through the indwelling power of the Spirit.  Amen.

6 Comments | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Theopoetic Reflection: The Body in the World

9 October 2011

Before someone else does the requisite Google search: yes, I’m aware that “theopoetics” is a pre-existing term, and as a field of endeavor has operated almost exclusively in ways that aren’t particularly amenable to conservatives.  I just discovered that fact this morning, after independently coining the term to describe a conversation I was having.  I mean it maybe a bit differently from the way it’s been meant up to this point, and I’m comfortable with that.  What, exactly, I mean may be the subject for a future post.  For now, the reflection itself, with many thanks to Jim and Michele for their part in shaping it.

The wicked devour God’s people as men eat bread.

From Jeremiah, we learn that God’s word is not just something that we should listen to and obey; it’s also something we should eat, and that gives us joy.

From John, we learn that Jesus is the Word made flesh.  He gathers great crowds, miraculously feeds them bread, and then tells them the next day that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they have no part with Him.  Many follow Him no more, and the ones that do continue to follow Him don’t really understand it either.

Later, He gathers those faithful few to the Table and gives them bread and wine: “This is My body which is given for you….This is the new covenant in My blood which is poured out for you.”  We who eat Christ’s body are what we eat: Christ’s Body.

The world hates us, because it hated Him, and as the world devoured our Savior, nailing Him to a cross, so the world will devour us as men eat bread.  In this way, the world will once again play into God’s hands and be saved in spite of itself, because those who sow in tears will reap in joy, because the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, because in God’s plan, death is the precursor to glorious resurrection — for the one who dies, and often for the one’s he’s dying for as well.

In a lesser way, this plays out in the life of the Church itself, every time you forgive someone, every time you lay down your life for someone.  We die for them, that they might live, and in dying, we are (re)born to yet more abundant eternal life.  The more life we have, the more we can lay down, and the more we can lay down, the greater the resurrection, in an ever-growing upward spiral of eternal life.  Or in the language of Aslan: “Further up, and further in!”

3 Comments | Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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