It’s Not All Foreplay, Pt. 2

22 October 2024

We ended part one with a question: it’s easy enough to see why pagans might believe that all intimacy is ultimately the same, and all leads to sexual intimacy, but what would possess Christians to think that?

Fear, that’s what.

Some of it is fear of adultery. It’s a massively destructive sin, and sensible people don’t want to be anywhere near it. But then, sensible people don’t want to be in a house fire or a high-speed auto accident either, and don’t on that account cut off the electricity in their houses or refuse to drive on highways. Sensible people recognize that everything has risks, and if you think electricity is risky, reading by candlelight is not exactly risk-free. A 30-minute drive on the highway has its risks, sure, but the 60-minute drive it takes to stay off the highway also has its fair share of risk exposure. Our problem, in this case, is that we’re sensitive to the risks of one course of action, and utterly blind to the risks of the other.

Adultery’s damage is well-known. The damage done by fearing and avoiding meaningful interaction with the opposite sex is less well understood, but no less real. Lacking an appreciation for the benefits of healthy cross-gender interaction and friendship, we see nothing there but danger. We ought to know better, because our advice to just stay away from the opposite sex does not track with how Scripture tells us to behave (but we’ll get to that).

Part of the perceived danger comes from a mythology we’ve allowed self-justifying adulterers to build up for themselves. “I don’t know how it happened!” they say. “One thing just led to another!” Too many Christians take these ridiculous claims at face value, and we really ought to know better. It’s fairly difficult to have sex by accident, unless you’re already so far compromised that the final PIV detail hardly matters anyway. But foolish Christians buy this nonsense, and then build on it: since apparently nobody, not even the adulterers, really knows how adultery happens, they conclude that men and women just need to avoid each other. Any intimacy of any type is a threat, and so they treat all intimacy as the same thing. Ironically, their fear of becoming like the world is the very thing that causes them to become like the world (no surprise if you remember Prov. 29:25). But God has not given us a spirit of fear (2 Tim. 1:7), so let’s not forget what He’s told us about sin. We are not ignorant of Satan’s devices (2 Cor. 2:11).

Some while back, I sat in a marriage counseling session with a husband who’d cheated and a wife who was deciding what to do about it. “I don’t know what happened!” he said. You know what I told him? “You just blew a hole in the bottom of the boat that is your marriage, and you’re taking on water fast. You need her help” I pointed at his wife “or you’re sunk. You need her to believe that this isn’t going to happen again. ‘I don’t know what happened!’ doesn’t inspire confidence.” As we dug into it, what we found is that his initial “I don’t know what happened” response was a defense mechanism. He didn’t want to think about it. It was just easier to say “I don’t know what happened” than it was to face the truth: he did know, and he’d been conscious the entire time. Part of my job was to help him do the hard work of facing what he’d done and excavating how it happened so they could prevent it in the future. Over the next half-hour or so, he faced his sin squarely, dug into how he got there, and then we made a plan to keep him out of similarly tempting situations in the future. Thirty minutes after his initial “I don’t know,” all three of us had a clear understanding of what happened. It didn’t actually take that much work; it just took the honesty and will to actually face it.

What we found, of course, tracks with Scripture (and common sense). He didn’t commit adultery by accident; both parties knew what they were doing. At a certain point, there was a decision involving a zipper, and nobody concerned was in any way confused about the implications. Sexual arousal is designed by God to be the sort of thing that gathers momentum as it goes, a bit like a long, steep playground slide. When they’re already three-quarters of the way down the slide, it’s easy enough to see how “one thing led to another” until they ended up in the mud puddle at the bottom. But how did they end up on that slide to start with? Answering that question is where Scripture is a big help.

God tells us: “Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.” The process certainly is deceptive—hence the warning against being deceived—but it’s not a mystery. God has told us all about it: we need to police our desires.

The deception comes in not believing God about this. When the desire passes through your mind, it’s not just a harmless pleasant thought. If you find yourself thinking, “I can’t…but it would be fun,” you’re already in trouble. If you think you can nurture the desire without getting hurt, you’re deceiving yourself. It’s already hurting you. And then, if you think about it long enough, it’s going to infect your behavior, one way or another. The same lies will still be with you: “It’s not hurting anybody. Besides, who’s gonna know?” If you think you can play with the sin a little bit without anything serious happening, you’re wrong. Desire conceives and gives birth to sin; sin matures and gives birth to death. So the thing to do is address the desire.

Let’s take an example. Say a particular couple’s sexual relationship is on the rocks, no matter why. He’s out there in the working world, he’s sexually hungry, and an opportunity—a willing coworker who’s particularly interested in him, say—crosses his path. What is he supposed to do with this situation?

Say no, of course, but that’s not nearly enough. He needs to kill the desire. His desire for sexual communion is a good and godly thing, and there’s exactly one person he’s to fulfill that desire with. When that desire gets misdirected onto anybody else, the thing to do is starve it ruthlessly. Don’t toy with it; don’t think about it. Give it no occasion for expression, and pray until it dies. He should turn his attentions to his wife (cf. 1 Cor. 7:2-5), and if for whatever reason his wife cannot or will not meet his legitimate needs, then he should embrace the ascetic struggle and suffer like Jesus would rather than give the enemy a victory. Jesus’ legitimate human needs were going unmet in the wilderness (food), in the Garden (companionship and emotional support), and on the cross (physical safety). We should be prepared to follow Jesus; a servant is not greater than his Master.

But this is not to say that the man has to go it alone. Christians are meant to live giving and receiving daily encouragement. Particularly in times like these, a believer needs the support of his brothers and sisters. How does that work? Stay tuned.

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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).

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay

13 August 2024

“Spiritual intimacy leads to physical intimacy.” I was told that a number of times growing up, by various parties in and around my church, but especially (and repeatedly) by a godly older couple I highly respected. Their practical application of that idea was a corollary to the Billy Graham rule: a man and a woman ought not to have serious conversations about deep spiritual things. Aside from your spouse, men ought to talk with men, and women with women, (or maybe couples with couples) and that’s that. (I’ve both written and said my piece about that error elsewhere, and won’t belabor it here.)

More recently, I had an unbelieving colleague with whom I did some very high-quality, very careful bodywork over a period of about a year. Everything was going well until one day, out of the blue, she began a conversation that turned into an invitation to adultery. To her dubious credit, she was very forthright: for her, being seen well and known well created sexual tension, which she wanted to relieve by taking our working relationship into the bedroom. I declined, which she certainly expected—the invitation was framed in a “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” kind of way—then I declined further contact, which seems to have surprised her; and when she continued to reach out to me, ultimately asked her not to contact me again.

Now, the same type of work I did with her, I’ve done with others of both genders over the years with no such difficulty. So what caused her to have such a problem? The same misbelief that the godly older couple in the first paragraph was suffering from: thinking that all intimacy is ultimately the same thing.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The world was formless and empty. God forms the world by dividing a series of contrasting pairs one from the other: light and darkness, sea and sky, dry land and sea. Then He fills the newly-divided world: the greater lights to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night, fish in the sea and birds in the sky, and land-dwelling animals. Then He signs the portrait: “male and female He created them.”

God created genuine variety, not a world of monist mush. Many of the different things He made are perichoretically related in surprising ways, but they are different things, each with its own glory. One of the fundamental truths about God and His creation (as Francis Schaeffer famously observed) is that all things are not the same to Him. He doesn’t just recognize distinctions; He literally makes distinctions. Christians ought to be automatically suspicious of any claim that starts out, “It’s all the same thing, man!”

One of the distinctions we ought to recognize is between a marriage and every other human relationship. Different kinds of relationships are different, each with its own unique glory. There’s not a single staircase of human relationship with casual interaction at the bottom and a marriage bed at the top, the only variable being how far up the stairs you climb with a particular person. Relationships differ in kind as well as degree. There’s more than one staircase, and they don’t all go to the same place.

This is something that Christians ought to already know: we will have eternity—literally all the time in the world—to know each other better. There’s not a single person on the New Earth that you won’t meet, and with that kind of time on our hands, we’ll all get to know each other very well indeed. As well as you can get to know your spouse in 50 or 60 years of successful marriage, that’s nothing to how well you’re going to know, say, Deborah or Samuel one day. And you still won’t end up married to them. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” like Jesus said.

Similarly, same-sex friendships like Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, are held out as examples of close friendship and love: a different kind, not a lesser degree, of relationship. Contemporary revisionist takes on those relationships (wrongheaded for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere) are actually a symptom of the very error we’re addressing. The revisionists’ inability to imagine a close relationship that’s not sexual is precisely the problem, and they’re projecting their own lack of imagination on everyone else.

Contemporary people think they live in a world of monist mush, and they’ve deified their lusts to the point that many of them will bed virtually anybody under a highly flexible ‘right’ set of circumstances. Many really do only have one relational staircase. That staircase leads inexorably to sexual intimacy, and every step below it is some combination of audition and foreplay, all the way down to a casual conversation with a stranger on the sidewalk. Which is kinda gross, if you think about it for a moment.

Framed that way, the failure of imagination is easy to see, and it ought not to surprise us that pagans would struggle in this way. It’s baked into their basic premises about the world; the mystery is that they don’t struggle more often. But what in the world would possess Christians to get tripped up like that?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Cooking Up Excuses

30 July 2024

In order to join the church I grew up in, you had to sign off on the statement of faith in its entirety. That statement of faith was pages and pages long, very detailed. It got down to the level of things like the pre-trib rapture. I recall one family who faithfully attended the church–in fact, the wife ran our nursery for two decades or so–but could never officially become members, on account of holding a different view of prophecy. Too often, doctrinally conservative churches wear such nit-picky particularity like a badge of honor, touting how we “care about truth” and “take doctrine seriously.”

That’s a lie. (I say that advisedly, and I mean it.) Allow me to demonstrate: if we cared deeply about the truth, then what about the truth that “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body”? How do we present that truth to a watching world? When we allow such nit-picky details to define the boundaries of our membership, cooperation, or fellowship, we are–to borrow Paul’s words from Galatians–“not straightforward about the truth of the gospel.”

What does that mean? In the immediate context, Peter and Barnabas and the rest of the Jews in the Galatian church had been freely mixing with Gentiles until certain folks came down from Jerusalem who wouldn’t approve. Then they all withdrew, and wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles at the church potluck anymore. Paul calls it hypocrisy, and with good reason: if the Gentiles belong to Christ, and Christ has cleansed them, then they are as clean as it gets! There’s no reason to divide the body into slighly-more-clean and slightly-less-clean factions, which is what Peter and Barnabas were doing.

And that’s exactly what we are doing, when we make that degree of doctrinal specification the boundaries of our membership, fellowship, or cooperation. We are dividing the Body into the people who really get it, over here with us, and those people over there. We admit that those people really belong to Jesus, and we know we’ll be sharing heaven with them…but that’s soon enough, eh? Let’s not over-realize our eschatology.

If you can’t smell the reek of brimstone coming off that line of thought, get your sniffer checked.

You should care about the truth, right down into the details. In a teaching ministry (church or otherwise), there’s nothing wrong with clarifying what you’re going to teach. It’s nice to have a label on the package that tells everybody what’s in it, you know? But requiring that level of agreement for membership, fellowship, or cooperation is asinine. You do that, you’re just cooking up excuses to break the unity the Spirit made. Don’t do that.

In the ministries I’m part of, the doctrinal boundaries of our fellowship and cooperation are ordinarily defined by the ancient creeds (Apostles’ Creed, the 325/381 Nicene Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon) and a broadly Protestant grasp of salvation by grace through faith, not of works. That’s about it; we work out everything else as we go.

That makes people panicky. “What if [fill in whatever imagined disaster here]?” Well, first of all, as Mark Twain said, “I’m an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.” In four years of church services with an open floor for reflection on the week’s Scripture readings, we’ve only ever had two people bring up a doctrinal error that called for specific correction. It’s not the case that we just never have to solve a problem, but it’s pretty rare. Is it worth foregoing four years of fellowship with our brothers and sisters in order to avoid difficult conversations with two people? Don’t be silly.

So we approach the situation differently: we look at how much we need to have in common for what we’re actually doing. Do we have enough in common to pray, say, the Lord’s Prayer together? Cool–let’s do that. Do we have enough in common to feed the hungry? Cool–let’s do that together. The mayor and the city council are struggling with a difficult situation; do we have enough in common to pray for God’s wisdom for our civil authorities? Cool–let’s do that together. I’m sure there are a dozen solid reasons why the timing of the Rapture is theologically important, but let’s not be using it as an excuse to stop us from what we can and should be doing together.

So many theological conservatives think unity is based on doctrine. If that were true, then certain key misbeliefs follow from it: the more doctrinal uniformity, the greater the unity; doctrinal disagreement means we can’t really be united; cooperating despite doctrinal disagreement means we really don’t care about truth; etc. But none of that is true.

Unity is not based on doctrine. “By one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body.” Our unity is a spiritual reality gifted to us by the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit, we are all united to Christ and therefore to each other. We should live like it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Ruined in the Kitchen

16 July 2024

I saw a meme the other day:

Once upon a time, there was a chef named Burk. Burk absolutely refused to cook with anything less than the very finest ingredients. Thing is, Burk sucked at cooking. He would buy perfectly ripe, beautiful, crisp peas and boil them into tasteless grey mash. His chicken cutlets were raw on the inside, and his pies were burned black. Obviously, the feedback Burk got was less than stellar.

So Burk did the obvious thing: he took to the internet to complain. “Chefs who use the best ingredients will be rated poorly only by people who are seeking something besides the best ingredients,” his meme read. Lots of other chefs liked Burk’s meme, and Burk never got any better at cooking.

Is there a subset of the Christian public that the meme accurately describes? Sure, and it’s not a small group, either. But that “only” in the meme transforms what could have been a penetrating observation about the Christian public into a steaming pile of pastoral cope. They will only call you boring if they’re not interested in faithful preaching? Really? It’s just not possible that you’re, well, actually boring?

Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing you can buy at the farmer’s market is so good you can’t ruin it in the kitchen. In the same way, the Word is living and powerful and profitable, but YOU can still ruin it with bad presentation. You might get called boring because you’re hard to follow and never get to the point. You might get called boring because you make your point in the first five minutes, and then repeat that same five minutes relentlessly for an hour before mercifully closing in prayer. You might get called boring because your voice is a flat monotone and it puts people to sleep no matter how good your content is. Or for any one of a hundred other reasons. Preaching isn’t entertainment, but it is public speaking, and it’s a skill, and it’s entirely possible to be terrible at it. If you’re patting yourself on the back purely because people call you boring, you’re an idiot.

There’s a subset of conservative pastors who are absolutely terrible teachers, and genuinely proud of it. They preach long, impenetrable sermons, use Greek and Hebrew grammatical terms that are meaningless to the congregation they’re preaching to, adorn their preaching with unnecessary theological neologisms, wander off on rabbit trails that are at best diagonally related to the point they’re making. Their congregants tend to be proud of it too, to the point of dismissing other skilled teachers as “not serious enough” if they don’t also do these same things.

Among these folks, there’s a group that maintains, in all seriousness, that if you’re walking with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit will teach you through your pastor’s sermons, no matter how bad they are. Therefore, they reason, if you didn’t get anything from your pastor’s sermon this week, it must be that you had some unconfessed sin gumming up your relationship with the Spirit, and were unable to grasp what the Spirit was teaching you. (I am not making this up — I’ve heard this taught from the pulpit, and I’ve heard it invoked self-condemningly from people who were struggling to understand a poorly constructed sermon.) That’s all rot. Pastors are not inerrant; sometimes we just preach a bad sermon.

Do not be like the hypocrites. There’s no excuse for sucking at your craft, and slagging the audience instead of finding ways to improve yourself is a really lame approach to ministry. Don’t do that.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

“Shouldn’t we at least have…?”

2 July 2024

When it comes to programs and services in the church, the answer to all questions that begin with the phrase, “Well, shouldn’t we at least have…?” is a hearty “Heck, no!”

Of course it seems unreasonable to answer the question without knowing what specific “improvement” is in view, but stick with me for a minute. I concede that a good case can generally be made for any single improvement of this kind. Considered in the abstract, the proposed improvement is a good thing, and would perhaps take relatively little effort. It’s hard to see what harm could come of it, and so it’s very hard to make a case against it—but this is a failure to see the big picture. The problem is threefold. 

First, humans have notoriously low sales resistance to anything that involves other people’s work. It’s very easy to sell the idea that we “ought to have” something, but it’s quite another matter to assemble the wherewithal to actually do it—and it’s usually substantially more work than it sounds like, because everything is. In a church with a professional staff governed by a board, a few zealous congregants can often persuade the board to their way of thinking, thereby foisting the necessary work onto the staff. In our church, there’s additional resistance because no one is making a living tending to the needs of the church. All of us have jobs that support our families, and aren’t looking for ways to make our ministry more labor-intensive, especially not for secondary things that “would be nice.” If it’s not primary to our mission, we’re not touching it.

Second, this sort of task tends to travel in packs. First there will be one, which is harmless enough, but then there’s another, then a third, and before you know it, there’s a mountain of such obligations, all of which have to be maintained. Proponents will argue that we can always stop doing a given task, if it becomes onerous, but in reality they always oppose efforts to prune back whatever is presently being done (by other people—see #1!) The net result of these two tendencies is a ratcheting effect: it’s easy enough to start a church bulletin, or newsletter, or phone tree, or nursery, or whatever, but it takes an extraordinary effort of leadership to stop doing those things once you start them. It’s much easier and faster to kill it before it starts.

Finally, this burden of (theoretically low-level) tasks has a way of compromising church leadership. The tasks themselves can usually be handled by some sort of administrative assistant, even a volunteer one. However, once ensconced in the position, the administrative assistant often ends up being a de facto elder simply by virtue of being willing to do a bunch of tasks that, while nonessential to start with, nobody can now imagine living without (see #2)—which is to say that this person has accrued power out of all proportion to his/her qualifications. In the church, directional leadership is reserved to a select group of men meeting specific biblical qualifications. The elders may not abdicate their core functions to a third party who doesn’t meet the qualifications God assigned for those functions, and therefore it’s best not to create perverse incentives that encourage such abdication.

The bottom line is simple. We have work enough and to spare just doing what Jesus gave us to do: make disciples. Things that “would be nice” are a distraction we simply can’t afford, and tend over time to choke out the work Jesus told us to focus on. If you need a demonstration of this fact, you need look no further than the five churches nearest you. I promise you, if you look around, you’ll swiftly find a church that does a dozen such “nice” tasks with real excellence, and hasn’t a clue how to make disciples.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Ruin it for Them

25 June 2024

Last week, we looked at matters of politics, class, and Pentecostalism discussed in Dr. Miles Smith’s summary of exvangelical memoirs. In addition, Dr. Smith also spoke of a type of clericalism, in which “the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.” In some of the churches Smith has in mind, this is because the church is effectively a cult of personality; the pastor’s opinion is effectively law on everything from the Trinity to parenting philosophy to the merits of the Chicago Bears.

While there’s undoubtedly a problem there, Dr. Smith represents an unhelpful form of backlash: an implicit contention that pastors exceed their mandate when they speak to this-worldly concerns. So it is that Smith opines one of his exvangelical writers “can be forgiven for retroactively wincing at the graphic depictions of copulation in a book written by Tim Lahaye and his wife Beverly.” He goes on to say that pastoral advice on sex is clear “evidence of a clericalist culture run amok.” The book in question would have to be The Act of Marriage; I read it years ago, along with a whole generation of evangelicals older than me. For what my opinion is worth, I don’t recall it leaving any scars.

Whatever the shortcomings of a particular book, one has to ask: as opposed to what? Should we have no books on sex written by pastors? If an accurate depiction of copulation offends Smith’s sensibilities, one wonders what he thinks of the act itself — or of the God who designed it! Would Smith have pastors remain silent about sex, or speak in tasteful generalities that offer no actionable advice? For two suburban virgins on their wedding night, a few “graphic depictions of copulation” are helpful. Where would Smith suggest that ordinary Christian people get practical advice on the details of sex? Pornhub?

Which raises a point: I can tell you that while some exvangelicals “checked all the boxes” while they were in the church, others very much did not. Some exvangelicals I know hated the discussions of sex at church because they were already daily porn users, even if they weren’t actually sleeping around themselves. They didn’t need to hear a “graphic depiction of copulation” from a pastor because they were watching it for entertainment already, and they didn’t want to hear about chastity, because they were already in high rebellion. They still recall those conversations with guilt and loathing, and nobody should be concerned about that.

Meanwhile, a number of the exvanglicals of my acquaintance complain of the opposite problem: their churches seemed preoccupied with the details of internecine doctrinal squabbles, and unable to offer substantive help for important matters of everyday life like dating, sex, and child-rearing. When we’re damned for speaking to sex, and damned for refusing to, one begins to suspect that talking about sex is not really the problem. “We played the harp for you, and you did not dance; we played the flute for you, and you did not mourn.”

But returning to the matter of pastoral advice: there’s a “great gulf fixed” between the earthy preachers who get into the details on one hand, and upscale ministry professionals who keep things at the level of luncheon conversation on the other. This cultural divide has been a feature of Western ecclesiastical life for centuries. The internet hasn’t really changed that, but it has made the divide easier to see, since anybody with access to Youtube can see plenty of both types, and the wide gulf between them. (See the last 10 or so paragraphs of Nathanael Devlin’s excellent essay on the Moscow Mood for a discussion of one such divide within the Reformed community.) What are we to do?

Obviously, not every pastor is well-equipped to offer advice on every subject, nor is the pool of people with helpful counsel about sexuality (or anything else) confined to pastors alone. The relevant command from Christ is to make disciples, and it applies to all of us! Where we’re able to offer a disciple-making influence to our brothers and sisters, we should, and we it makes little sense to confine ourselves to unhelpful generalities. In a culture where The Experts (all rise!) are wildly unlikely to honor God’s design for anything at all, God’s people dare not leave one another at the mercy of the secular wolves. On anything.

We are not gnostics; we proclaim Christ in all places and for all things, right down into the earthy details that don’t make for polite country-club conversation. Of course, not everyone will agree on everything, and we should relish the opportunity to foster robust discussion and debate on everything from sleep-training your kids to making fluffy biscuits to sexually satisfying your spouse. Nobody should be embarrassed to get into the details as required to offer one another meaningful help; loving your neighbor requires it. God made us of dust and breath, after all. There’s no shame in being material, nor in talking like you are.

Pastors above all have this responsibility; it’s our job to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Ministers who stand aloof from such “peripheral” matters are betraying their office, no matter how “gospel-centered” it makes them feel. “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed” — a very old problem, but no less pressing for its distinguished pedigree. Many ministers want to hold back, and many of the sheep want their ministers to hold back. They have acquired a taste for the sweetmeats of the secular wolves, and they’re not overly interested in having a pastor intrude “outside his area of expertise” and ruin it for them.

Let’s go ruin it for them! Jesus did; how can we do any less?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

People Like You

18 June 2024

Miles Smith of Mere Orthodoxy was kind enough to read a stack of exvangelical memoirs for us. For those of you who are blessedly unfamiliar with the trend, this is now a whole subgenre of personal memoir. You, too, can be applauded as courageously speaking truth to power, if only you will very publicly break up with the church, preferably on Instagram. You might even get a book deal out of it. Mr. Smith has done us all a service, plowing through a number of such books in order to discuss some of the common elements. He writes:

“Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.  The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors….Enough of these churches led by enough of this clericalist type of minister popped up between 1970 and 2000 to build an entire subculture.”

Just a Subculture?

Speaking from my experience ministering to people who’ve abandoned their faith, I agree that a number of them fit Smith’s profile, which is to say that (in rough generalities) they come from churches that mix generic doctrinal orthodoxy with cult-of-personality sociology. I’ve been at war with that defective ecclesiology my entire adult life. I cut my teeth in ministry doing counter-cult work with the victims of exactly that sort of ministry. Upon hearing their stories, I’ve surprised quite a number of exvangelicals from such churches by responding, “Well, you can’t go back to that!” (And they shouldn’t, either. There are plenty of faithful-if-flawed churches to fellowship with; no need to get tangled up in a cult.) But look, while we all agree that cults of personality are a bad idea, that’s hardly the whole story with exvangelicals.

Plenty of these folks don’t fit that profile, and Smith himself mentions one of them when he wonders aloud why so many people listened to Bill Gothard and Joshua Harris. It’s a good question (which I’ve discussed elsewhere), but the point for the moment is that he’s aware of Joshua Harris, himself now an exvangelical. Harris didn’t grow up the downtrodden follower of some clericalist mini-pope out in the swamps, thinking his church was The Only True Church. He grew up speaking all over the country in churches and at conferences, and attended seminary at Regent College in Vancouver before abandoning his faith. The exvangelical phenomenon is not confined to the isolated backwaters.

Politics and Pentecostals…

Smith’s article focuses quite a bit on both recent politics and the charismatic movement with regard to his exvangelical interlocutors. Bethel Church gets a mention, as does Greg Locke’s Global Vision Church, and the word “Trumpist” also comes up a surprising number of times for a short article. The overall effect is to give the impression that you’re seeing a wave of these “I used to be a Christian, but…” books because independent churches with no historical roots got themselves tangled up with Trump and Pentecostalism, and people understandably fled. (If only we’d all remained mainline, cessationist, and respectably centrist, how faithful we would be!) In keeping with that, there’s a definite class-oriented vibe in Smith’s piece. Trump’s appeal is populist, Pentecostalism is famously working-class, particularly in the South, and there’s a certain looking-down-the-nose, “Isn’t this a bit regrettable” tone in the article, especially in its conclusion: “We sometimes accuse exvangelicals of leaving ‘Protestant churches.’ I’m not so sure they did.” I began to wonder about Smith’s background: I made a bet with myself that he was a southern Episcopalian.

Upon a little research, I discovered that Dr. Miles Smith IV (Ph.D. in history, 2013) is Anglican (ACNA), “a native Carolinian,” and a Citadel M.A. graduate who, in addition to his serious work, “sometimes writes for popular outlets like Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and The University Bookman.” Call me crazy, but my Appalachian fundie-trained nose could smell the clubby, upper-crusty Southern Anglican aspirations coming off Smith’s article. As you might have guessed by now, Gentle Reader, I do not find this an endearing trait, but that’s fine; Jesus transcends all our tribal affinities. Miles Smith and I both belong to Christ, and therefore to one another, and anything that stands in the way of our unity is future ash in the Kingdom of God. For today, the point is that you should not be lulled by Dr. Smith’s complacent sense that exvangelicals don’t come from the same places that we real Protestants do.

…and you

I do appreciate Dr. Smith’s sacrificial act, slogging through a stack of self-justifying exvangelical accounts so the rest of us don’t have to. Speaking as a pastor who actively works with such people on a regular basis, I think Smith’s treatment tells some truths, but falls woefully short of really capturing the exvangelical phenomenon. The whole truth is a good bit less comfortable: while some of the folks who abandon the faith come from insular, low-caste swamps on the working-class side of the tracks, rather a lot of them are more like Joshua Harris: well-resourced, experienced, and connected to multiple institutions. (And not all of them admit to having abandoned the faith, but that’s a subject for another time.)

It would be comforting to believe that people like us (“real” Protestants, or whatever) know too much to fall for the temptation to abandon the faith, but it’s just not true. We’re not just losing people from the margins; we’re losing people like you–and your kids. Cool-shaming can work on anybody, and seems to work particularly well on people who aspire to respectability–or as C. S. Lewis put it, a place in the Inner Ring. The antidote is as simple as it is painful:

“Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore let us go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach, for here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come. Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name; but do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” (Heb. 13:12-16)

UPDATE: Dr. Smith recently discussed his article with Aaron Renn.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Shadow Sins

11 June 2024

Some sins are fully conscious. You’re doing someone wrong, taking advantage of their weakness or their goodness or their inattention, or you’re cynically manipulating them to your advantage, and you are fully conscious of what you’re doing.

Some sins are fully unconscious—just as wrong, but you have no idea you’re doing it. Even when someone calls an unconscious sin to your attention, it can be extraordinarily hard to see, not because the act is particularly subtle, but because you’re genuinely unaware of what you’re doing. You are responsible for your unconscious sins—it’s not as if someone else should be apologizing for the things you do—but you can’t do anything about them until you become aware.

There’s also a third category: semiconscious sins. This is where a lot of the trouble happens. These are often patterns of behavior that have worked for you in the past, and like all people you habitually resort to things that have worked before. (This is called “learning,” and it’s how we become able to ride a bike or throw a ball or anything else we do: repeat what worked, and don’t repeat what didn’t. But learning is not a fully conscious process, and not all the behaviors we learn are good.) These semiconscious sins involve patterns of behavior that sin against the people around you, and they often involve violations of your self-concept.

For example, if you think of yourself as a generous person, you would probably not allow yourself to be stingy on purpose—say, by always being the last one to buy a round of drinks. If you were fully conscious of the implications of the act, you wouldn’t let yourself do it. But if you somehow acquired the habit back in your poorer days, and it’s worked for you, you will probably will continue the habit even though you don’t actually need to spend less money now. You will simply allow the program to run in the background, as it were, without examining it closely.

How do we know this semi-conscious category even exists? First of all, because the Bible talks about it in terms of self-deception. If someone else is deceiving you, then you can be fully unconscious of a thing, but if you are deceiving yourself, then some part of you knows. Apologist Greg Bahnsen likens self-deception to holding a beach ball underwater: it’s a demanding task, and there’s no way to be successful without being at least somewhat aware of what you’re doing.

Secondly, you know this category exists because you’ve experienced it for yourself. We’ve all had the experience of someone challenging a pattern of our behavior: “Hey, have you ever noticed that whenever you’re in this situation, you do X?” a well-meaning friend will say. X — as your friend is describing it — is clearly sinful, or at least a rotten thing to do to a friend. You’re offended, and you begin to object: “I do not! I would neve….” and then you can’t even finish, because all the times you’ve done exactly that come flooding into your mind, and you experience the stomach-dropping sudden cessation of ignorance: “He’s right! I totally do that!”

Now, if you were fully unconscious of what you were doing, that realization wouldn’t come so easily. And if you were fully conscious, you wouldn’t have been able to start the instinctive defense, only to stop when you suddenly realize your friend is right. That experience only happens because you were semiconscious of the pattern to start with. Someone had to connect the dots to make it fully visible, but the dots were all visible over in the corner of your eye, not quite out of view, just waiting for someone to connect them.

These three different categories call for somewhat different responses. Of course, you should repent of all your sin, but if you’re fully unconscious of a sin, you can’t very well repent of it. Rest assured, there are items in this category for you, and thank Jesus that He cleanses you of all sin. That’s pretty much all you can do, until God makes the sin conscious. Trust me, it’s on His to-do list.

If you’re fully conscious of the sin, and you were conscious the whole time, there’s nothing to do but repent, fully and immediately, and take your lumps.

The third kind is a little trickier, but the brief is ultimately pretty simple: “rebuke a wise man, and he will love you,” and your job here is to be the wise man. Learn to love the people who will grab that thing that was over in the corner of your peripheral vision and drag it into full view. Don’t punish your friends for bringing things to your attention; encourage them!

One of the best things you can do is cultivate a ruthless honesty. Repent of exactly what you’ve done, and don’t repent of things you haven’t done. Depending on your personality, you’ll be tempted in one of two directions. Some people will be tempted to repent of nothing in the past. “I wasn’t aware of it,” they’ll tell themselves, “and I can’t possibly be responsible for something I’m not aware of. Of course I won’t do it in the future.” This won’t do, for the simple reason that you did what you did, and you need to own it. Your heart is a dark, deceitful place, more than capable of hurting your friends for your advantage and lying to you about it. You let it run around without a leash, and that’s on you. So confess it and forsake it.

Another sort of person will be tempted to over-confess, to not only own his actions but apologize as if he’d been cynically conscious of it the whole time. To this person, “I didn’t see it” will seem like a lame excuse he wouldn’t dare to make. But it is a sin to lie to your friends, in either direction. You may not under-confess, and you may not over-confess. Tell the truth: “I never quite thought about it like that, but now that you’ve described my behavior in those terms, I see that you’re right. I was wrong, and I’m so sorry I put you through that.”

And then go and sin no more.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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