Holy Anger?

16 December 2025

Where does the concept of righteous indignation come from? Is it even biblical?

My friend Drew interviewed Brant Hansen a while back, and on his recommendation, I watched the video. Hansen proposes that righteous human anger simply doesn’t exist. We see God’s anger in the Scriptures, and obviously it’s righteous when He does it, but Hansen says humans simply cannot be righteously angry, and the only thing to do with anger is get rid of it.

There are problems with this proposal, which we’ll get to, but I want to commend the interview to you anyway. There’s a lot of pastoral horse sense on display there. Hansen very effectively skewers a number of the sins we commit around anger, and shows up our shabby excuses for what they are. It really is true that we want our anger to be righteous far more often than it really is, and Hansen has a lot to contribute here. I particularly liked his dissection of outrage at people you know well: “You really can’t believe your mom would say something like that? She’s been saying those things for 78 years! I think it’s time to believe it!”

So watch the interview for the pastoral wisdom and sharp observation, but don’t adopt his theology. Hansen’s proposal has three major problems, one exegetical, one theological, one physiological.

The exegetical problem: Hansen observes, correctly, that a lot of people seem to have the first half of Eph. 4:26 memorized (“Be angry and do not sin”), but neglect the last half (“Do not let the sun go down on your anger.”) That really is a problem. Anger goes rotten quickly, and God requires us to deal with it quickly. He’s not wrong about that. However, he tries to rectify the problem by attending to the second half and neglecting the first, which still says what it says (and is quoting Psalm 4, so there’s more Scripture to work through there as well.) Based on the command “Do not let the sun go down on your anger,” Hansen argues that anger is sinful and the only thing to do is get rid of it. This is a bit like claiming that because we need to wash our clothes, it’s wrong to wear them to start with. The same author who said “put your anger away” in v. 26b and 31 also said to have it and not sin in v. 26a. In neglecting half the revelation on the topic, Hansen is just like the people he’s criticizing.

If the command is “Be angry and do not sin,” then by God’s grace there’s a way to do it. That means that there is such a thing as human anger that’s not sin, even if only temporarily. Psalm 4, which Paul is quoting, walks us through how to think and pray through the anger righteously and ultimately let it go.

Hansen will go on to build the rest of his whole case on the claim that there’s no *biblical* argument for human righteous anger—but the biblical case for it is staring him right in the face in Eph. 4:26 and Psalm 4:4.

The theological problem is that Hansen dismisses the biblical discussions of Jesus’ anger with the old “He’s God; you’re not” excuse. This is the practical version of a serious christological heresy. Jesus didn’t show us a life that’s unattainable for us because He’s God and we’re not; we can’t appeal to Jesus’ divinity to beg off following His example. He laid aside His divine prerogatives and showed us what a fully submitted human life actually looks like. If Jesus handled His anger without sin, then it’s my job to handle my anger without sin, too.

The physiological problem is with Hansen’s claim that “anything you can do angry you can do better not angry.” (Which he got from Dallas Willard, if I’m recalling correctly.) They’re just wrong about this. Susceptibility to this error is a function of class. If you live your life behind a keyboard, anger doesn’t do much for you: it clouds your higher critical faculties and fine motor coordination in a way that’s not helpful when you’re trying to use your words. Talking or typing, anger isn’t a big help, and calm goes a lot further.

But all of life is not talking and typing. Anger gives an instant shot of raw physical strength that isn’t easily come by another way (especially for men; the effect is different for women—less pronounced, but lasts a lot longer). People who don’t understand how that could be valuable are blessed to have never needed it. As a trauma therapist and self-defense instructor, I regularly work with people who have needed it, and for some of them, it’s saved their lives.

Hansen is an acute observer of the human condition, and his errors in this area have made him an especially unsparing critic of our sins around anger. In this, he is performing a valuable service to the Body, and I would encourage you to listen to the interview and absorb what is useful in it. We really do sin with anger often.

That said, God made human anger. Anger is a reflection of the divine nature in us; it is a potent gift as language and sexuality are potent gifts. Like them, anger hurts us when we don’t attend to the instructions God gave about how to handle it. That’s no excuse for dismissing it entirely.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

When Protocols Fail

9 December 2025

A friend of a friend recently asked me to explain a little about what I do. This seems to be what came out…

Greetings X,

Our mutual friend tells me that you don’t quite know what questions to ask. I sympathize; I have the same problem a lot of the time. Let me see if I can help get the conversation started.  I believe she told you her experience with my work. What I can tell you about that experience, from my side, is that humans are used to being looked at, but we are not accustomed to being seen. When I make myself entirely present to another person, I often know more than I “should” know about the problem, and my hands seem to find their way to helpful places. 

In the same way you can get someone to wash their own face by putting them in front of a mirror, sometimes the human body fixes itself when it’s invited to notice itself. It is very often the case that when I lay on hands and make myself truly present, without doing much of anything, my client’s system responds by reorganizing itself in more healthy ways. There are certainly techniques and disciplines and lots of practice time involved, but how much is human ability and how much divine intervention I couldn’t really say. But then, God never intended us to exercise our abilities without Him, did He?

As to how I might be able to help you, or what your session would look like, I’m afraid I don’t know for certain. Here’s what I can tell you: I will be present. You will of course be present. God will be present. You will be involved, and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I am not a mechanic and you are not a car; this is not something I can do to you; this is something we will do together with God’s help.

The value of direct obedience to biblical teaching is hard to overestimate; I expect to pray, lay on hands, anoint with oil. I usually work general to specific, so I’ll likely begin by establishing contact with your system at your shoulders or your feet, noticing the pulses and rhythms in your body, looking for unusual tensions or movements in your visceral cavity or anything out of balance or that draws my attention for some reason. 

From there, we will proceed as seems best to us and the Spirit.

I know that’s not a particularly satisfying answer. It would be nice to give you a definite protocol, some kind of road map for what comes next. But the people with protocols are telling you they can’t find anything wrong. I’m the guy you call when you’re off the edge of the map, and still have to navigate the territory. I don’t have a map either, but I live here, so that’s something.

I didn’t set out to be this person. When God called me into ministry as a junior in high school, I had a picture in my head of what that would entail: an expository preaching ministry in a suburban Bible church. To that end I earned a bachelor’s in Bible, then a Th.M in New Testament. During seminary, I interned in a suburban Bible church in eastern Washington, training in exactly the kind of expository ministry I expected to pursue for the rest of my life. Upon graduation, I worked as a pastor and seminary instructor.

Then Jesus mugged me, and not for the first time. The first time was when He gave me to faithful Christian parents. I came to know Him early, and hardly remember a time when I did not know Jesus as my Savior. The second time was when, as a very angry 16-year-old, I found my life unlivable, and God taught me to forgive. I came to know Him then as a worker of miracles, the one who made me able to forgive when I simply didn’t have the ability.

This time around, the mugging took the form of a surprise: the small suburban Bible church I thought I was planting turned out to be an exit ministry for people leaving a cult. By the time I realized what I had gotten into, I had bonded to the people and didn’t want to quit. Getting the people out of the cult was hard, but doable. Getting the cult out of the people…well, that was another matter. Fast-forward several years, and this teaching pastor and professor had become, of necessity, a pastoral counselor, worship leader, liturgist, and church history teacher. God was just getting started. 

He brought me next to Englewood, and over a period of years and a series of gigs in youth and city ministry, He taught me to obey some verses that, although I’d known them all my life, I’d never quite seen, if you know what I mean. I learned to sing the Psalms. I learned to pray in the manner of the Lord’s Prayer. I learned to tangibly love my literal neighbors. I learned to rejoice, for real, when people slandered me. 

And then God began drawing my attention to a series of passages that talk about laying hands on the sick, praying for healing, anointing with oil. I’m sure you know the passages as well as I do, but for me suddenly the question bubbled up: why don’t we do these things? What would happen if we did? 

Not too long after that, He led me to enroll in massage therapy school. The entire endeavor was ridiculous; I couldn’t afford the money or the time for even the shortest, cheapest program. I told Him “If we’re doing this, then You’re paying for it, and since I know You can afford anything, I’m going to the best school in Denver.” And you know what? He made it happen. 

Massage therapy led to Trauma Touch Therapy, Craniosacral Therapy, and an assortment of other modalities, and along the way I learned a few very important things. 

  1. Human attention heals. When one person–the whole person, body and spirit–sets all distractions aside and rests the full weight of their attention on another person, it is amazing how people can heal, even before anyone does anything. It seems that our systems adjust spontaneously in response to being really seen. 
  2. God shows up. His priorities are not mine; He doesn’t always do what I want Him to. But He always shows up, and He always works.  
  3. American Christians need a radical worldview revision. 

That last one was a real kick in the teeth. Most of us live like the world is what the materialists say it is — matter in motion — and then we add an overlay of heaven, hell, biblical miracles, resurrection, and so on. We’re basically materialists with a whitelist of exceptions that allow us to be meaningfully Christian. But no. The world was spoken into existence and is upheld by the Word of God’s power. Even matter isn’t what the materialists think it is; still less the human person. 

Genesis 2 says God made us out of dust and breath; we are a divinely forged union of body and spirit. When I lay my hands on another person, I’m never just touching a body. That fact raises an interesting question. If you have a sore back, obviously my body can work on your body for your benefit. Can my spirit work on your spirit? The materialists think it’s a nonsense question, but it isn’t, is it? 

I pray. I lay on hands. I anoint with oil. God shows up. This is either the church’s first and worst attempt at healing, a primitive medicine long since overshadowed by modern science, or it is a healing ministry God gave to the church, something we should never have stopped doing. 

I think it’s the latter. I invite you to come and find out for yourself.

Blessings, 

Tim

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Can a Christian do Energy Work?

28 October 2025

Some while back, a friend asked me about energy work. Isn’t it all some new age mumbo-jumbo, after all? Or is there more to it than that? This was my answer.

Moving into bodywork was…well, it was a surprise. I expected to spend the rest of my life in the study and classroom, doing exegetical work more or less full-time. But God has an infinite capacity to surprise.

I remain a theologian, and I want to be able to offer a theological account of what’s going on as I work with a client in my new capacity. Doing that work has proven to be an adjustment. By comparison with the exegete’s calling, stepping out to theologize about what happens on the massage table felt a lot like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no net. Being an exegete by training and inclination, I was not much given to wandering out into areas that the text of Scripture didn’t explicitly address. Or so I thought…  But as I have come to grips with my new calling, I have begun to notice all the ways in which I was already plowing the fertile fields of general revelation, ways I was blind to because I just thought of them as “the way things are done.”

As a teacher, I had no qualms about showing a new preacher how to set up a 3-point topical sermon. That’s certainly not a particularly biblical structure; it’s just something that works well, and gives newbies a starting point. There’s nothing unbiblical about it, of course. It’s craft knowledge, discovered by working in my calling in God’s world, and paying attention to what works and what does not. There are any number of other teacher tricks — use of slides and visual aids, intelligent use of assignments, questions, discussion, and so on — that are likewise discovered in the doing, and then passed from master to apprentice, down the generations. I learned many of them from my teachers, discovered some on my own, and I pass them on to my students in their turn, which is all as it should be.

The same dynamic of craft knowledge applies to everything. Scripture tells us much, and it is authoritative. But in most fields of endeavor, special revelation walks us right up to the edge of the field, legitimizing the inquiry — and there it leaves us to explore. Scripture teaches us that the physical creation is real, and good, and worthy of our study, and then leaves us to study it. It doesn’t tell us that the oak tree has several different kinds of tissue in it, nor that all those tissues are composed of complex molecules, nor that those molecules are composed of atoms, nor that the atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, nor that those particles break down into still more elemental particles, and so on. All that, we have to find out by examining the oak tree. Scripture gives us warrant for the examination, but it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to find.

And so it is with my work. Scripture tells me that the body is real, that it can be ill or healthy, but precious little about how to get it from the former state to the latter. That, we have to learn by exploring the fertile fields of God’s general revelation in the world. And by consistent and careful examination, by honest experiment, we have learned a whole lot — and we have a lot more to learn. Likewise, Scripture tells me that the spirit is real, which brings me to your question about energy work.

For pretty much any subject, I find the best way to begin is at the beginning, which is to say, in Genesis. The foundations of biblical anthropology are in those first few chapters. We first learn that we are designed to be God’s miniature self-portrait, His signature on the work of art that is the universe, which means we — male and female as a married team — are responsible to cultivate and guard the world. Thus far the first chapter. In the second chapter, we discover our composition: God compounded man from dust and breath. Dust is the material part that returns to the earth when we die. Breath is the immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it. But crucially, in the expression “dust and breath,” what is meant by “and”? In the complex interaction between physical and spiritual, there’s a lot we don’t really understand.

Our exploration of general revelation helps here, but it only takes us so far. We are learning that cells respond to very subtle influences — magnetic fields long thought to be so weak as to be indistinguishable from background noise, for example, or inputs as small as a single photon. It turns out that the human hands generate magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation that is certainly strong enough for a body to respond at the cellular level. (See Oschman’s Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed., for a treatment of the physical science. Thanks to Flexner and his blinkered minions, we are a century behind on really exploring the field, so it’s maddening in spots, but it’s also really intriguing. The Healing Touch Program also maintains a research archive at healingtouchresearch.com, and they’re pretty good about keeping it up to date.) So that’s one thing we might end up meaning by “energy work:” instinctive manipulation of very subtle physical electrical, magnetic, and photonic inputs. 

But as a Christian, I see no reason to stop there. The things which are seen are not made of things which are visible, and we’re not just talking about subatomic particles here — electrons are visible in principle; it just takes a really expensive set of glasses to see them. But behind all that, behind the physical matter and energy, is something…other. Something spiritual in nature, that manifests in physical reality, but is prior to it and cannot be reduced to it.

In the language of the Eastern Church, everything that exists is made of God’s divine energies. Not His essence — that way lies pantheism or panentheism — but His energies, which flow from His being. There was no pre-existing material; it is all made by Him, and it all exists in Him — in Him we live and move and have our being, as both the pagans and Paul affirm. All that is, is the spoken word of God. He spoke, and it is, and He upholds all things by the word of His power.

And so when there is a person on my massage table, there is dust and breath, body and spirit. Following the biblical anthropology, I can use my body to work on their body, relaxing hypertonic muscles, releasing trigger points, and so on. Could I also use my spirit to work on their spirit? It seemed a hypothesis worth exploring, and upon experimentation, I find that it works. Moreover, when I set to work with that intention, and invite God to enter into the work and accomplish His will for my client’s well-being, I find that He shows up, and very interesting things happen. With some clients, it all happens quietly (because they’re not ready to be prayed over out loud), and with others, I come all the way out of the closet. We pray together, and God moves. I’ve seen everything from physical healings to spiritual turnarounds on my table. In all modesty, I’m good at what I do, but I’ve seen God do things that go way beyond anything I could accomplish.

So this is a very long way round to answering your question. As best I can tell, my energy work is partly manipulation of subtle physical energies that we’re only beginning to study, partly my spirit working on my client’s spirit in much the same way that my body works on his body, and partly the Holy Spirit (or whatever delegated angelic powers may be at work) responding to my prayer of invitation to do what the client and I are unable to do on our own.

I need to emphasize that the above is a description of my energy work. I make no guarantees about someone else’s work. Certainly the process is open to demonic manipulation, and some energy workers directly invite it. Others address their requests to “the universe,” which is sending your request into the spirit world addressed “To Whom It May Concern” — a dangerous practice if ever there were one. Lots of entities out there that might answer that request, and not all of them friendly. Some seem to address their requests to God without quite knowing who they’re talking to — “to the unknown god,” as it were. It is my pleasure, in that instance, to make the introductions. As with Paul’s experience in Athens, I find that most people aren’t too excited to have the veil of divine anonymity ripped away. But some want to hear more, and they’re the ones I came for.

The possibility of demonic intervention makes a lot of Christians nervous, and they want to be able to set up some kind of wall to separate our work from the bad stuff. A lot of people want that separation to be a matter of technique, as if you could photograph the difference between us and them — but no. There are doctrines of demons, but we don’t differentiate our teachers from theirs by their teaching techniques; we discern the content and results of the teaching. You don’t tell the difference between Moses and Jambres by technique — they both threw a staff on the ground that became a snake, both poured out water that became blood. It’s not the technique that distinguishes us; it’s which outlet your power cord is plugged into. We are made to live in partnership with God; nothing could be more natural than a human being seeking spiritual help in an endeavor. We shouldn’t be frightened by partnership with spiritual power. That admittedly leaves us with no escape from the task of actual discernment. But in my experience, the difference between God and a demon is not particularly subtle.

In my practice, I work spirit-to-spirit under God’s authority, and by His leading. The Scriptures lead me to expect that this might be a fruitful endeavor, practiced in service to Christ and under His Lordship, and I find that it is. I have seen wounded bodies restored and broken hearts healed. Some of that work was a stunning demonstration of human possibility. Some of it was plainly beyond my ability — and yet it happened nonetheless, thanks be to God. As with physical healing, not everything I try works — so I remember what does, and what doesn’t, and I try to do more of what does next time.

I look forward to growing in craft knowledge as I go. I already have a fairly good stock of knowledge that I couldn’t back up with a verse, any more than I could put a verse behind quenching O1 tool steel at 1475 degrees. But O1 hardens best when quenched at that temperature all the same, and likewise for what I’ve learned about energy work.

Well, I had better stop. I’m sure this was far thicker of an answer than you were really asking for, but I didn’t think I could do your question justice with less. Perhaps as I grow, I’ll be able to make it simpler.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Losing Ground with Style

21 October 2025

Every common rock is disease-free, but we do not call rocks healthy or well on that account, because we intuitively recognize that health is more than the absence of disease; it is the presence of vitality.
Health is not an accident; it is a gift from God. As with any gift, health calls for gratitude, and gratitude cannot be merely spoken. A child who says “Thank you” to his grandmother for the hand-knit sweater and then never wears it is polite, but not grateful. Saying “Thank you” is appropriate as far as it goes, but embodying real gratitude requires right use of the gift.

Every gift has its right use. A sweater should be worn; an album should be played; a toy should be played with. Even that most generic of gifts, money, is meant to be spent — as is our health. The gift can be stewarded, but not hoarded. We are all spending our capital, and in the end, our last creditor drains the account. In N. D. Wilson’s unforgettable phrase, “death by living” is the best we can hope for. So the question is not whether we will spend our health, but how — and how quickly.

Healing is the art of slowing down, of losing ground with style. We all move toward the edge of the cliff where our last creditor is waiting. Healing is helping someone spin away from the edge this time, helping someone dance two steps forward for every three steps back, helping someone dance instead of just being inexorably dragged toward the edge, clinging in vain to a bean-sprout sandwich. He who saves his life will lose it, as the rabbi said. Might as well dance.

Healing takes in the whole person. It is not enough to say that we require words for the spirit and touch for the body. A living soul is made of dust and breath, body and spirit, coextensively. You have never touched a living body without putting your fingers on a soul. When you touch a spirit with a loving word, watch what happens to the body — pupils dilate, posture and muscle tone shift, cheeks flush, breathing changes. Sometimes a word heals the body. Sometimes a touch heals the spirit.

But in reality, we do not heal people. Healing is a mystery, a gift. A surgeon can align bones and stitch up a wound, but we say that he set the bone and closed the wound, not that he healed the injury. He can bring the pieces into proximity with one another, but he cannot make the skin join, the blood vessels reunite, the fascia reconnect, the fracture remodel. A counselor can cause thoughts to meet that had been carefully hidden from one another, but he cannot reach in and fill the place where someone tore a hole in his client’s spirit. We remove barriers. We align the parts, hoping for wholeness. We create an opportunity, a container in which someone can receive healing, if it is given to them. And we wait, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for weeks. The work is too fine for any hands but God’s.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Introducing Humans

31 July 2025

I don’t usually announce our church podcast episodes here, but this past week’s episode focused on Genesis 2:4-7, and is right on point for our focus on physicality.

You can find it here, or wherever you procure fine podcasts.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Denying the Incarnation

15 October 2024

A few weeks back, someone posted this quote in a theology forum I sometimes frequent. I’m told it’s from The Golden Path by John R. Rice:

“God’s ministers sometimes feel that they should first teach Christians the Bible and Christian living and later hope they will win souls, but they do not make as good Christians of young converts as the pastors and evangelists make who teach people to win souls as the main Christian duty. For God Himself presses on the soul winner to be clean. He ‘purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.’ All over America, some Bible teachers and pastors teach Christians a code of conduct without soul winning, and make Pharisees – don’ters.

But when God’s Spirit puts the inward urge in a Christian that he must “by all means save some,” there is a real striving for spiritual holiness, a consecration of life and talents that rules cannot make.“

Now thus far, I love this. While I think it’s possible to overemphasize anything, including the duty to evangelize, in general I favor an approach to discipleship that majors on putting people into play, and handling the rest of it along the way. I particularly like the language of “don’ters.” I’ve seen that problem firsthand, been part of it in my youth, and I’m very grateful to have been rescued from it.

Dr. Rice continues:

“Everywhere I go as an evangelist, I find pastors shocked, grieved, troubled and struggling because of the drift of their people away from clean, holy living, their entanglements in the world’s amusements and pleasures and aims. Even in the most fundamental churches, I find the young people going continually away from the standards the church has set in many, many cases. But I find that trouble among churches fundamentally sound in doctrine is far more prevalent where there is not a strong soul-winning program in the church. In those great churches over America (and I am acquainted with many of them) where the whole program of the church is centered around soul winning, I find there is a holy enthusiasm for Christian living. Christians who earnestly labor at soul winning feel they are citizens of a heavenly country, that they are not supposed to be like the people of this world. They are trying to snatch people from fire, and they tend to hate the garments spotted by the flesh.

I have been bombarded with thousands of letters from Christians, particularly young Christians, asking, “What is wrong with dancing? What is wrong with moderate drinking? And why not join in with other moral, good people in lodges and secret orders?” But I have found in literally hundreds of cases that Christians who set out to win souls decide for themselves, from an inner compulsion by the Spirit of God, that this or that worldly thing is not for them the way of happiness and the way of blessing. God Himself has pledged to help to purge and cleanse the life of a Christian to win souls! Oh, there are blessings a soul winner has beyond those of any other Christian.“

Dr. Rice’s application is questionable, but the underlying sentiment is exactly correct. Concern for the lost will determine how you handle peripheral matters. It is precisely in ministering to the lost that I found myself having a Bud with the construction crew that worked on my building (and nothing less would have driven me to drink tasteless rice beer). I’ve brewed beer for Jesus’ sake too; we did a couple community beer-brewing nights where we “cast [our] bread upon the waters” the way they did 5,000 years ago. As promised, it returned after many days, and the better for the aging. Of course, if I were a host with a residential rehab for guys in recovery, I’d probably be a teetotaler, and for exactly the same reason — Christlike concern for the people God put in front of me. (And that sort of thing is kind of the least of it. I’ve been places that would scare the hide right off your average seminary-trained pastorling — I know, because I was one! — places “good” people don’t go, but I was following Jesus, and that’s where I ended up. The key to those environments is to do what Jesus did: listen to the Spirit. He won’t steer you into sin.

Occupy yourself with the people Jesus was occupied with, and you too may find that He calls you to have a Dos Equis with the boys, accept the invitation to a dance, or join the Elks. Which is to say, Jesus might call you to do what He Himself did — go where the people in need are, even if “good” people don’t go there, for the same reasons that Jesus went those places.

Jesus never joined in anybody’s sin in order to “reach” them, but He was constantly joining in whatever they were doing. Zacchaeus lived at his house; Jesus joined him there. Somebody at Cana had a wedding and served wine; Jesus joined them (and provided a rather large amount of the wine, come to think of it). Tax collectors and sinners (and their contemporary equivalents) eat; Jesus joined them in it. The town hussy was drawing water at the well; Jesus asked her for some. All of which, if you apply your theology even a little, is a natural extension of the Incarnation.

There’s a school of thought in ministry that Christians ought to be distinguished from their worldly counterparts by their don’ts: the neighborhoods they don’t go to, the invitations they don’t accept, the occasions they don’t attend, the people they don’t spend time with. Practically speaking, that kind of life is a denial of the Incarnation. It is a refusal to follow Jesus and behave as He behaved.

I want to be clear here: I’m not saying that you have to hang out on skid row to follow Jesus. I don’t have any idea where Jesus is calling you to go. Remember, Jesus didn’t spend all His time with the hookers and drunks; He dined with Simon the Pharisee and worshiped at the Temple too. But I’ve been walking with Jesus a long time, and I’m pretty sure He’s going to call you to go to places where you’re going to be very uncomfortable, places where you’ll be tempted to make an excuse and not go. This is going to happen because Jesus is making you like Him, and He was equally willing to hang out at a country club luncheon or around a burn barrel in an alley on the bad side of town. He went where His Father sent him, empowered by the Spirit who rested on Him. You are directed by the same Father and empowered by the same Spirit — do you really think you won’t end up in similar places?

Jesus joined us as one of us in our world in order to draw us into His. When Jesus shows up in a place, He’s bearing the Spirit. He’s different from everybody else, and so should you be, but for the right reasons. It’s not about your clothes or where you go or who you go with; it’s about the Spirit that indwells you. If you’re not being a light, then it doesn’t matter that you got invited into the room. But it doesn’t matter that you’re “being a a light” if you’re in an empty room — you might as well be under a basket, or buried in the backyard.

So be like Jesus — provide wine to the wedding, eat with Zacchaeus, have a private chat with that girl at the well. Be “a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Because He would. Joining in what people are doing in order to gain them is literally the basis for His whole earthly ministry. It should be the basis for yours too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

God Made Wine

8 October 2024

Many common beliefs are basically unsupportable, and spread for sociological reasons totally unrelated to the merits of the idea. For example, the initial spread of Darwinism and the current scientific establishment’s death-grip on the neodarwinian synthesis both rather obviously owe their success less to their ability to answer the relevant questions, and more to the sentiment that “we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” The calumny that Christmas, Easter, and Halloween are pagan holidays repurposed by the church likewise flourishes because of an unwitting alliance between 18th-century French intellectuals and present-day evangelicals drunk on father-hatred. The odd notion that anybody thought the earth was flat in the days of Christopher Columbus is another. There are plenty more.

Mostly such ideas die when the sociological reasons fade. No longer in the grip of a passion that makes them want it to be true, reasonable observers note that the evidence was never all that good, and move on with their lives. One such idea, mostly dead but occasionally flourishing in out-of-the-way corners of the church, is the notion that wine in the Bible was really just grape juice. Now, as I say, this notion is mostly (and deservedly) dead, but occasionally it comes up, to the detriment of poor folks who are ensnared by it and therefore miss what the relevant passages are actually saying. I’d like to help administer the coup de grace. Hence this post.

It will help to know at the outset that there are a handful of biblical words that are translated “wine.” The common Hebrew word is yayin. That’s what Noah got drunk on when he had too much in Gen. 9:21, for example, and what was prohibited to the priests on duty in Lev. 10:9, but you’ll also find it offered to the Lord as a drink offering in the firstfruits offering (Lev. 23:13) and the twice-daily ascension offerings (Num. 15:1-16). There’s also a Hebrew word for new wine (Heb. tiyrosh). Likewise, there’s a common Greek word for wine (oinos) and another for new wine (gleukos). It’s possible to get drunk on both gleukos (Acts 2:13) and oinos (Genesis 9:21, 1 Sam. 1:14-15, Isa. 29:9, 49:26 in the LXX, the Greek Old Testament, and Eph. 5:18, Rev. 17:2 in the New Testament). This to say, there is no biblical word for “grape juice that’s nonalcoholic.”

Do you wonder why? I did too, many years ago, so I did a little research. As it turns out, this is one of those cases where we are the weird ones. Before 160 years ago, nobody really needed a separate word for grape juice, because what we think of as “grape juice” today was basically impossible. You know that cloudy stuff you find on grape skins? That’s yeast. It’s literally impossible to make grape juice without introducing yeast cultures to it; fermentation begins the moment the skin of the grape is broken. (A wise man might take that as a particularly broad hint from a loving God; as we will see, some men took it as a challenge.) In a warm climate like harvest-time Israel, freshly-stomped grape juice was already fermenting as it ran into the buckets and was poured off into new wineskins (Luke 5:38-39). That’s why there are passages that talk about getting drunk on new wine.

Now, there was a way to stop the process, and they sometimes used it. Yeast feeds on sugar, but high concentrations of sugar inhibit or kill yeast, so if you boil the juice down into a syrup, the yeast can’t grow. So you can store the syrup without it fermenting, and then add water to reconstitute the juice when it’s time to serve it. Easy, right? However, this process also had problems: while yeast can’t grow in the syrup, various molds and bacteria can, and will spoil it entirely. You have experienced this yourself if you’ve ever had a batch of homemade jam go bad on you.

So how did we come to think of (nonalcoholic) grape juice as a thing? To answer that question, I need to introduce you to Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist minister, doctor, and dentist serving in Vineland, NJ. Born in Glastonbury, England, in 1925, Dr. Welch emigrated to the States and became involved in the poorly-named Temperance movement. The teetotaling Temperance advocates (then and now) face a very serious problem in the church service: it’s difficult to maintain that wine is evil when you’re simultaneously serving it at the Lord’s Table…and they were! Remember, grape juice as you and I know it today did not yet exist.

Some Temperance churches would fresh-squeeze grapes when they were in season and serve the juice before it had time to ferment; some would refuse to serve communion at all when fresh grapes were unavailable. Others, not content to ban the sacraments most of the year, resorted to recipes that involved procedures like boiling raisins to make a kind of tea, or mixing raisin puree and water. The more extreme Temperance advocates would serve water at communion in order to avoid serving anything that might be alcoholic. But most churches simply continued serving wine; that’s what the Bible said to do, and the alternatives were both unappealing and nonsensical. The 1864 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church pointedly nixed the alternatives, recommending that “the pure juice of the grape be used in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.”

Enter Dr. Welch, who served his church as the communion steward. In 1869 Dr. Welch, working in his own kitchen, successfully applied the (then-new) techniques of Louis Pasteur to sterilize grape juice, killing the yeast so it wouldn’t ferment in the bottle. He served it in his church, and advertised Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine to surrounding churches, but garnered little interest. For four years, he continued to produce a small quantity of his Unfermented Wine for a few local churches that used it, but it never really took off, and so he quit. Two years later, his son Charles Welch took up the cause, convincing him to start again. Charles advertised Welch’s Grape Juice heavily, and by 1880, the Methodist Episcopal Church had begun to require serving unfermented juice wherever practical. Charles went on to launch multiple advertising campaigns, extolling various (and dubious) health benefits of grape juice and even serving it at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Growth was explosive; Charles would move the business to a factory in New York to keep up with the demand. The rest, as they say, is history. Today you can buy Welch’s grape juice in any grocery store, and most American evangelical churches think of it as the default choice for communion.

But is it? Scripture is quite clear that what’s in the communion cup is oinos, and it’s equally clear that oinos is something one can get drunk on. It’s not grape juice. And why should it be? Scripture repeatedly presents wine as a blessing from God (Gen. 27:28, Psalm 104:15, Prov. 3:10, Ecc. 9:7, John 2) a suitable sacrifice (Lev. 23:13, Num. 15:5, 7, 10), and part of communion with God (Deut. 14:26). Scripture presents the lack of wine as either a form of fasting (Num. 6:2, 20, Jer. 35) or a curse from God (Isa. 24:7, Jer. 48:33).

The New Testament pointedly tells us not to judge one another in matters of food and drink (Rom. 14, Col. 2:16), which means that we are free either to drink or to abstain. Timothy had evidently chosen to abstain; at a certain point in his life, Paul told him to start drinking a little for his health (1 Tim. 5:23).

So how shall we then live? Today, we live in the world Welch made, and you can have your pasteurized grape juice in communion year-round. If that’s your conviction (or your church’s practice) then drink your Welch’s with gladness and simplicity of heart. Nothing could be less fitting than turning the feast of unity into an occasion for division. By the same token, barring medical necessity, if the church you’re part of (or visiting) serves wine, drink your wine with joy and thanksgiving; taste and see that the Lord is good! In any case, don’t seek to bind other’s consciences on such matters; no less an authority than Paul himself tells them not to listen to you (Col. 2:16-17).

3 Comments | Dust and Breath Anthropology, Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Bodywork and the Dominion Mandate

12 March 2024

For those of you who don’t know, I went back to school when I was 40. I had a Bachelor’s in Biblical Studies, a 4-year Th.M. in New Testament, and was working in my field. I expected to spend the rest of my life in the study and classroom, doing exegetical work more or less full-time. Going to massage therapy school…it was unexpected to say the least. But God has an infinite capacity to surprise.

I remain a theologian, and I want to be able to offer a theological account of what’s going on as I work with a client. By comparison with the exegete’s calling, stepping out to theologize about what happens on the massage table felt a lot like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no net.

Several years into it, I have come to understand that my task is not all that different from any other field. We all plow the fertile fields of general revelation; we just don’t think of it that way. We think in terms of “It works” or “That’s just how you do it.” For example, as a teacher, I had no difficulty showing a new preacher how to set up a 3-point topical sermon. That’s certainly not a particularly biblical structure, but it’s hardly unbiblical. It’s craft knowledge, discovered by working in my calling and paying attention to what works and what does not. The 3-point topical outline just works, and it gives newbies a starting point. There are any number of other teacher tricks — use of slides and visual aids, intelligent use of assignments, questions, discussion, and so on — that are likewise discovered in the doing, and then passed from master to apprentice, down the generations. I learned many of them from my teachers, discovered some on my own, and I pass them on to my students in their turn.

The same dynamic of craft knowledge applies to everything. Scripture tells us much, and it is authoritative. But in most fields of endeavor, special revelation walks us right up to the edge of the field, legitimizing the inquiry — and there it leaves us to explore. Scripture teaches us that the physical creation is real, and good, and worthy of our study, and then leaves us to study it. It doesn’t tell us that the oak tree has several different kinds of tissue in it, nor that all those tissues are composed of complex molecules, nor that those molecules are composed of atoms, nor that the atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, nor that those particles break down into still more elemental particles, and so on. All that, we have to find out by examining the oak tree. Where Scripture speaks about the oak tree, all that it says is true, but it doesn’t speak to every question we have. For many questions, Scripture gives us warrant for the examination, but it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to find.

And so it is with my work. Scripture tells me that the body is real, that it can be ill or healthy. It does say some things about the factors involved (e.g., “A merry heart doeth good like medicine.”) But there’s a lot it doesn’t tell us about how to get it from illness to health: treating specific infectious diseases, setting bones, making medicines, correcting postural imbalances, releasing visceral restrictions. That, we have to learn by exploring the fertile fields of God’s general revelation in the world. And by consistent and careful examination, by honest experiment, we have learned a whole lot — and we have a lot more to learn.

Likewise, Scripture tells me that the spirit is real. So why wouldn’t the same kind of craft knowledge dynamic apply to working with the spirit? Of course we start with what God has given us, but then we learn by experience from there. (If that sounds hazardous, try not learning from experience, and see where that gets you!)

For pretty much any subject, I find the best way to begin is at the beginning, which is to say, in Genesis. The foundations of biblical anthropology are in those first few chapters. We first learn that we are designed to be God’s miniature self-portrait, His signature on the work of art that is the universe, which means we — male and female as a team — are responsible to cultivate and guard the world. Thus far the first chapter. In the second chapter, we discover our composition: God compounded man from dust and breath. Dust is the material part that returns to the earth when we die. Breath is the immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it. But crucially, in the expression “dust and breath,” what is meant by “and”? There’s a complex interaction between the physical and spiritual, and there’s a lot there we don’t really understand.

Our exploration of the dust and only take us so far. It is now beyond scientific question that living cells respond to very subtle influences — magnetic fields long thought to be so weak as to be indistinguishable from background noise, for example, or electromagnetic inputs as small as a single photon. It turns out that the human hands generate magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation that is certainly strong enough for a body to respond at the cellular level. (See Oschman, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed., for a look at the physical science. Thanks to Flexner and his blinkered minions, we’re a century behind on research, so it’s maddening in spots, but it’s also really intriguing. This kind of subtle physical phenomena will be one of the things people mean by “energy work.”)  

But as a Christian, I see no reason to stop with the dust — we know there’s more to a human than that! The things which are seen are not made of things which are visible, and we’re not just talking about subatomic particles here — electrons are visible in principle; it just takes a really expensive set of glasses to see them. But behind all that, behind the physical matter and energy, is something…other. Something spiritual in nature, that manifests in physical reality, but is prior to it and cannot be reduced to it.

In the language of the Eastern Church, everything that exists is made of God’s divine energies. Not His essence — that way lies pantheism or panentheism — but His energies, which flow from His being. There was no pre-existing material; it is all made by Him, and it all exists in Him — in Him we live and move and have our being, as the pagans inferred and Paul affirms. All that is, is the spoken word of God. He spoke, and it is, and He upholds all things by the word of His power.

And so when there is a person on my massage table, there is dust and breath, body and spirit. Following the biblical anthropology, I can use my body to work on their body, relaxing hypertonic muscles, waking up hypotonic ones, reorganizing fascia, breaking up unhealthy adhesions, releasing trigger points, mobilizing organs, and so on, right down to (maybe) using my hand’s magnetic field and biophotonic outputs to affect the injured area at a cellular level—but that’s not all. If I can use my body to affect their body, why can’t I use my spirit to affect their spirit?

It seemed a hypothesis worth exploring, at the very least. Upon experimentation, I find that approaching the interaction conscious of both dust and breath makes for a more effective result. Moreover, when I set to work with that intention, and invite God to enter into the work and accomplish His will for my client’s well-being, I find that He shows up, and very interesting things happen. With some clients, all that happens very quietly (because they’re not ready to be prayed over out loud), and with others, I come all the way out of the closet. We pray together, and God often moves in dramatic ways. I’ve seen everything from physical healings to spiritual turnarounds on my table. This is work I was born to do, and in all modesty, I’m good at it — but I’ve seen God do a lot of things that go way beyond anything I could accomplish.

As best I can tell, my work is partly manipulation of the body, partly communication with the body through subtle physical energies that we’re only beginning to understand, partly my spirit working on my client’s spirit in much the same way that my body works on his body, and partly the Holy Spirit (or whatever delegated angelic powers may be at work) responding to my prayer of invitation to do what the client and I are unable to do on our own.

I need to emphasize that the above is a description of my bodywork. I make no guarantees about someone else’s. Insofar as it’s an interaction between two fallen people, it’s certainly possible there will be demonic attack or interference, and some practitioners openly invite it, addressing the demons by name. Others address themselves to “the universe,” which is sending your request into the spirit world addressed “To Whom It May Concern” — a dangerous practice if ever there were one. Lots of entities out there that might answer that request, and not all of them friendly. Some seem to address their requests to God without quite knowing who they’re talking to — “to the unknown god,” as it were. It is my pleasure, in that instance, to make the introductions. As with Paul’s experience in Athens, I find that most people aren’t too excited to have the veil of divine anonymity ripped away. But some want to hear more, and they’re the ones I came for.

The possibility of demonic intervention makes a lot of Christians nervous, and they want to be able to set up some kind of wall to separate our work from the bad stuff. A lot of people want that separation to be a matter of technique, as if you could photograph the difference between a prophet of Yahweh and a shaman — but no. There are doctrines of demons, but we don’t differentiate our teachers from theirs by their teaching techniques; we discern the content and results of the teaching. Moses and Jambres both threw a staff on the ground that became a snake, both poured out water that became blood. It’s not the technique that distinguishes us; it’s which outlet your power cord is plugged into. That leaves us with no escape from the task of actual discernment. But in my experience, the difference between God and a demon is not particularly subtle.

In my practice, I work spirit-to-spirit under God’s authority, and by His leading. The Scriptures lead me to expect that this might be a fruitful endeavor, practiced in service to Christ and under His Lordship, and I find that it is. I have seen wounded bodies restored and broken hearts healed. Some of that work was a stunning demonstration of human possibility. Some if it was plainly beyond my ability — and yet it happened nonetheless, thanks be to God. As with physical healing, not everything I try works — so I remember what does, and what doesn’t, and next time, I try to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

I look forward to growing in craft knowledge as I go. I already have a fairly good stock of knowledge that I couldn’t back up with a verse, any more than I could put a verse behind quenching O1 tool steel at 1475 degrees. But O1 hardens best when quenched at that temperature all the same; the only verse we need is the Dominion Mandate. Likewise for much of what I’ve learned about bodywork. The more I do, the more I learn. I can’t wait to see what God will show me this week!

2 Comments | Autobiography, Dust and Breath Anthropology, Functioning Supernaturalism, Healing, Livin' the Bivocational Dream, Physicality | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Trust your Feelings?

8 August 2023

I am known, in certain quarters, for my scornful response to people suggesting that we trust our feelings. I usually object by way of a Star Wars reference: “Trust your feelings” is bad advice unless you’re Luke Skywalker—and even he ended up kissing his sister, so you see what trusting your feelings gets you.

When I’m making that argument, I’m driving home the point that we have no magically prelapsarian place within us that can’t be wrong. There’s a case to be made for distrusting every part of us. You shouldn’t believe everything you think any more than you’d believe everything you feel, nor the other way round. We can and should interrogate and discipline our emotions just like we should interrogate and discipline our bodily urges and our thoughts. At the same time, there’s a ditch on both sides of the road. We can deify our God-given emotions, elevating the gift over the Giver, and that’s bad, but it’s equally bad to denigrate and ignore the gift God gives.

There’s no biblical reason to think emotions are any less trustworthy than thoughts. When Adam fell, he didn’t land catlike on his feet, so that his heart didn’t fall quite as low as his belly, his genitals (of course!) falling lowest and his brain landing uppermost, and therefore most to be trusted. No, it was a faceplant worthy of Wile E. Coyote — all of him fell all the way to rock bottom, and made an Adam-shaped hole when he hit. The project is to sanctify the whole shebang.

God made emotions, and He didn’t do it just so we’ll have something to distrust. There’s a righteous use for them, and when we’ve catechized our loves and loyalties properly and we’re using them rightly, there’s every reason to act based on emotion, just as there’s every reason to act on a properly vetted logical argument.

  • Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before Him. Should He have distrusted that emotion?
  • Love fulfills the law. Someone will say, “Love is not an emotion.” What a foolish idea! It’s not just an emotion, but it is an emotion, isn’t it?
  • Paul also says to let the peace of God rule in your hearts. What is that, if not emotional experience?

Someone will have noticed by now that these are the fruit of the Spirit. Yes, just so; the Spirit works in our emotions as well as our thoughts. Why are we determined to distrust the fruit of the Spirit?

1 Comment | Dust and Breath Anthropology, Healing | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Which Way The Arrow Points

24 September 2019

In the conservative evangelical world, especially the seminary-educated part of it, we take for granted that there is a particular order to living the Christian life: sound theology drives sound living.

This accommodates our grasp of Christianity to one of our great cultural myths, the notion that theory precedes, and drives, practice. Applying that myth to Christian living, we come to believe that intellectual comprehension precedes and drives action. We give this idea a patina of respectability by linking it to passages like Romans 12:2, which talk of transformation through the renewing of the mind.

But reality is far more complicated than that.

In terms of the general myth that theory drives practice, Nassim Taleb ably takes that on in Antifragile, arguing successfully that most innovation is actually driven by practitioners tinkering, improving things by trial and error, and the theory comes afterwards. In other words, the arrow runs the other way: practice ->theory, not theory->practice. There are noteworthy exceptions, but they are noteworthy precisely because of their rarity. In the real world, trial-and-error practice drives theory far more than the other way around. (If you’d like it stated epigrammatically: “The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference….”)

If we’d read Romans more closely, none of this would surprise us. Sure, the renewing of your mind transforms you. But the verse before that, you offer your body as a living sacrifice, which is only possible because the Spirit gives life to your mortal body. Not your mind, note. Your body, directly. God does not only deal with your mind, which then straightens out your body. We could believe that if Romans ended after chapter 6, but it doesn’t.

The Holy Spirit is not some positive thinking guru; He doesn’t just give you holy thoughts. He deals directly with your body, not just with your mind.

***

As a practical matter, we often find that practice precedes theory. God will call us into obedience in an area long before we understand the benefits and ramifications of that obedience. This is how Psalm-singing was for me. I was confronted with three NT passages that said Christians should sing psalms, so I started doing it. It really was that simple.

I had no theory; I had no idea what would happen if I did it. I wasn’t very good at it either, to be perfectly honest. But over time I got better, by God’s grace, and I began to reap the benefits of obedience. I could give you a long speech now about the benefits of singing the Psalms, but that knowledge came long after the practice.

Which is to say that obedience is often necessary in order to acquire eyes to see. The  world is a complex place, and there are limits to how much we can discern about the world by sitting around thinking about it. Going out and trying things is much more productive.

Would that we were obedient more often, instead of just demanding more explanations.

Comments Off on Which Way The Arrow Points | Dust and Breath Anthropology, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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