“Not A Young Man”

30 January 2024

Among the list of qualifications for eldership is “not a novice” (1 Tim. 3:6). Depending on the translation you read, it may say “not a new convert” or “not a recent convert” or “not new in the faith.” The words “convert” and “in the faith” are simply not in the passage here. The word is νεόφυτος, and it means “young man.”

So why did some translators add the extra words? For the same reason they usually do: for clarity in English translation. There are two possible meanings: a literal reading (“not a young man”) or a metaphorical extension (“not young in the faith”). Translators who favor the metaphorical interpretation have often chosen to clarify their meaning by adding the additional words. In this case, that is a mistake.

First, let’s start with the vocabulary. Paul uses two different words in his writings to refer to the office under discussion here. The one in this passage means “overseer,” and the other word literally means “old man.” So when Paul says that the appointee should not be “a young man” — well, I ask you. The word Paul chose for this qualification refers to a new-growth plant in Job 14:9 and Isaiah 5:7; it’s applied to the younger generation in Psalm 127:3 and 143:12. In other words, Paul’s Greek OT source material uses the word literally.

Does that mean it can’t be metaphorical here? Not at all. Paul could be crafting a novel metaphor by applying the literal term in a new metaphorical context. As Christians, we already refer to conversion as being born again; calling a new convert a “young man” regardless of his chronological age would make a certain sort of sense. (In fact, that’s exactly the process by which new metaphors enter language.) But is Paul doing that here? If he were, how would we know?

One obvious way would be for Paul to add the extra words himself. If he’s crafting a novel (if fairly obvious) metaphor, it would be fitting to specify it: “not a young man in the faith.” But he doesn’t do that. Another way would be for the context to make it otherwise obvious that’s what he must mean. Proponents of the metaphorical view will argue that this is the case, because Timothy himself is a young man. Surely Paul can’t be giving young Timothy the job of appointing elders, and then telling him, “Don’t appoint someone your own age.”

Ah, but he could! In fact, we already know that Timothy doesn’t meet all the criteria in the list of qualifications. Being unmarried, Timothy isn’t the husband of one wife (for that matter, neither is Paul). Timothy doesn’t have a household to rule well. We don’t need to claim some special spiritual meaning for these terms, as if “husband of one wife” would refer to Timothy’s fidelity to the Church, the Bride of Christ, or that “rules his household well” must mean that Timothy functions properly in the “houselold of God.” No, “husband” and “household” have their ordinary meanings, and Timothy is a valid exception.

How is Timothy supposed to function in that situation — appointing people that meet qualifications he doesn’t? He’s exemplary. The overriding qualification is blamelessness. Paul has that, despite not being a husband. Timothy also has that, despite being young. When we’re evaluating elder candidates, if a man gives us reason to doubt his faithfulness to his wife, he’s not qualified. If we look at his household and think “yikes!” he’s not qualified. And if we look at him and see that his youth is a drawback, he’s not qualified. If, in contrast, we look at him and think “I wish I was like that” — if he’s exemplary despite being young — then he is qualified, in the same way that Timothy was qualified.

The older men who are married and running households are wishing they were like Timothy in word, conduct, love, spirit, faith, and purity. He’s setting an example for them, not the other way round. Because Timothy is exceptional, Paul has recognized him as an exception. And thus we can see that “young man” refers to age in the same way that “husband” refers to marital status and “rules his household well” refers to familial and business affairs — all the terms have their ordinary meanings in the context.

So how do we apply the criteria like Paul would? Clearly it’s not the case that no young man would ever serve as an elder, but it would be rare, and with good reason — chronological age actually is a concern. On the face of it, this ought to be obvious just from the terms chosen for the office: one means ‘overseer,’ but the other literally means ‘old man.’ Maturity matters, and most young men haven’t taken sufficient advantage of the scant time they’ve had, or haven’t had enough experience, to season them out. Life experience and maturity are simply more common in older men, thus most of your elders will be, well, elder men.

If the candidate you’re looking at strikes you as a greenhorn in any sense, you probably shouldn’t pick him. On the other hand, if he’s been raised in the faith from childhood, as Timothy was, and he presents himself as exemplary in word, conduct, love, faith, and purity, as Timothy did — sure, go with that guy.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Great Resignation Might be Good

2 January 2024

Pastors are leaving the church in droves. Why? This week, I spent some time reading one man’s answer. It would be worth your time to skim his account. As Rev. Lang articulates his reasons for leaving, not just that particular church, but the pastoral vocation altogether, I find myself sympathetic. There’s a lot in the article that I don’t agree with, and some of the things he says cause me to wonder if he’s called to the pastorate at all; good shepherds have to be tough, and I don’t think he is.

But his list of the seven proficiencies expected of a pastor really struck me. In his experience, church members expect their pastor to be…

  1. A professional speaker
  2. A CEO
  3. A professional fundraiser
  4. A counselor and conflict mediator
  5. The HR director for both paid and volunteer staff
  6. The Master of Ceremonies for a wide variety of community events
  7. A pillar of virtue

That’s true in most churches. I don’t have any trouble seeing why ten years of his job left him burned out. I’m surprised he made it that long.

You know what’s missing in it all? Any sense of what biblical shepherding ministry actually is. Rev. Lang tells us why he stepped into the role which church culture defined for him, and why, some years later, he stepped out of it again. That’s worthwhile information for a church to absorb, but one of the things it’s missing is, well…the Bible. There is no such biblical position as the one his church asked him to occupy. He shouldn’t have been doing that job; no one person should have been doing that job. More importantly, no church should be trying to hire one person to do that job.

“This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself ‘pastoral ministry?’ It’s not.”

I’m hoping that the masses of men leaving the ministry will provoke some soul-searching in congregations. We need — all of us — to be stepping into the work of the ministry. Every Christian should be a disciple, and every disciple should be a disciple-maker at the level they’re able to be. Those who are called to equip congregations to do that work are the leaders we need. More and more of them are bivocational, in part because it gives them greater freedom to do what they’re actually called to instead of getting sidetracked into various backwaters of institutional administrivia. Back when I was on staff at a mid-sized church, I used to keep track of how much time I spent on different activities. When I left that position, I continued keeping track for a while. You know what happened? Fewer people wasting my time, and more disciple-making.

This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself “pastoral ministry?” It’s not. For any young man who finds himself in the unfortunate position of being hired to do that job, I recommend that he resign forthwith and get involved with a ministry where he can heed the Bible’s counsel rather than flouting it as a necessary condition of his employment.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

No Real Discipleship

7 November 2023

For so long as the Holy Spirit restrains the wickedness of the world, culture can only get so bad, and for so long as Messiah tarries, culture can only get so good. We will not descend into the Great Tribulation of our own accord until God permits it, and we cannot ascend to the consummated Kingdom of God of our own accord in any case.

However, between these two great boundary conditions, there is a lot of play, and between these two great boundary conditions, God calls His people “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

The Old Covenant shows us that we cannot do the first two, and the New Covenant shows us that when we do the third, we are given the first two as gifts — a heart of flesh in exchange for a heart of stone, as the prophet said.

This has to include God fulfilling in us His very first command: to tend and keep the earth, the root from which all culture springs. To be engaged in glorious culture-building is a gift God gives His people, and always has. There is no real discipleship without it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hail the Triumphant Dead!

2 November 2023

Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints, the centerpiece of Allhallowtide, a three-day celebration in the Western Christian tradition. All Saints is something analogous to Memorial Day – a grateful celebration of the saints and martyrs who’ve gone before us into heaven, and all they’ve done.

The feast was first celebrated in the early 600s, on a variety of dates that varied locally. Ultimately, it settled on May 13th. Pope Gregory III (served 731-741) moved All Saints to November 1 to coincide with opening a new chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica which was dedicated to all the saints who’ve passed before us into heaven. Moving a major holiday to coincide with your ribbon-cutting is a weird thing to do, but apparently that’s one of the perks of being Pope. Anyhow, that’s how it happened. 

A quick aside about pagan holidays: We all know that ancient cultures aligned major projects like the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, or the Hill of Tara according astronomical movements, and presumably they celebrated solstices and equinoxes in some fashion, but the links between those old festivals and present-day celebrations like Samhain are speculative at best. (Our earliest hard evidence for Samhain is ninth century). The coincidence between the old festivals and the November 1 date of All Saints is just that — a coincidence.

The day before All Saints is All Hallows Eve, the vigil that comes before the feast. It is a time where we look straight at the darkness of the world, a time when we celebrate our brothers’ and sisters’ victories over that darkness, and a time to pray that we would be like them in our own time. That’s what we were about last night. How it also became an occasion for dressing your kid up like Thomas the Tank Engine and sending him door to door begging for candy is a tale for another time, but it has to do with America’s melting-pot confluence of everybody’s local traditions, plus a healthy dose of good old fashioned American commercialization. 

Today, the final day of the feast, is All Souls, also known as the Feast of the Faithful Departed. This feast commemorates all those in heaven whose names are not widely known. These faithful servants of God have benefited us in countless ways, and we take the time to celebrate them, even though we don’t know who they are or what they did. One day we will, and on that day we will be glad to have been grateful in advance. It is also a time to be grateful for our family and friends who have gone before us.

Taken all together, this is a celebration of the Church Triumphant by the Church Militant — we are grateful for them now, and we will join them soon enough. Hoist a glass in their honor tonight.

Hail the triumphant dead – because they’re not actually dead! 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Whose Faith Follow

12 September 2023

Once upon a time, I was a doctrine wonk. I honestly believed that if we just got the doctrine right, we would live well. My community valued correct exegesis and theology, and invested enormous effort in doing them well. As one of their fair-haired sons, and I got paid to research, write, and teach at seminary. It was a geek’s dream job, and I loved it….  

<cue spooky music>

…then the whole community tore itself apart. Some of the best exegetes and theologians I knew went for each other’s throats. I’d love to say that I stayed above the fray, but I didn’t. My personal loyalties were with one side, but I also thought they were exegetically and theologically more correct…at first.

I quickly began to realize that the conflict wasn’t actually about doctrine. That’s a big claim, but it’s true. The doctrinal differences were not entirely insignificant, but there was ample room for everyone involved to continue working together. A number of close observers and secondary participants, myself included, suggested ways to move forward, but there was a problem we couldn’t solve: the principals didn’t want unity. The doctrinal difference was a smokescreen, a way to make the conflict respectable. The real problems were personal and relational: abundance of offense, lack of repentance and forgiveness, and lack of sufficient emotional maturity to address the personal conflicts.

I slowly began to realize that even if the problem were primarily doctrinal, we were handling it poorly. As I dug into Scripture looking for instructions and patterns for handling this kind of conflict, I kept coming back to Acts 15. This chapter is the first big doctrinal conflict in the Church, and the pattern that it sets upholds the unity of the Body of Christ as a cardinal doctrine and practice for Christians. I’ve written on this at great length elsewhere, so I’m not going to belabor the point here. Outward unity that is visible to observing unbelievers is Jesus’ prayer to the Father for us, it is the manner in which we win the world, and without unity right down to the practical level of seating arrangements at supper, we are not being straightforward about the gospel. It’s a big deal. 

Once I had gotten this far, God moved me to Englewood, Colorado, to see unity in practice. 

In Englewood, I met a group of pastors who got along. They prayed with and for each other. They blessed each other’s ministries. Every once in a while, they preached in each other’s churches. They gathered their churches once a year for a joint worship service. Were they all the same denomination? Not even close. We had Messianic Jews, Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Bible church guys, nondenominational, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and more. With far less common doctrinal basis than my seminary faculty had, the Englewood pastors created a far greater obedience than we had ever dreamed of. What was I to make of that?

“Remember those who rule over you, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering the outcome of their conduct.” The author of Hebrews 13:7 is talking specifically about our relationship to our local church leaders, but the principle applies. Pay attention to the outcome of your leaders’ conduct. Follow the faith of those whose fruit is good; do not follow the faith of those whose fruit is bad. 

So what did the Englewood pastors have that my seminary faculty did not? There actually are some relevant doctrinal pieces here, but that’s another post. The first and most important common element wasn’t doctrinal at all. It was obedience, straight up the middle. Jesus wanted us to be one, and they set out to find a way. They knew they weren’t going to be able to iron out every little doctrinal difference, and they were looking for ways to obey anyhow. Turns out, when we start looking for ways to obey instead of reasons not to, a lot of things are possible.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Niceness: A Unity-Breaking Disease

11 July 2023

I hang out in theology discussion groups some. In a particular (very doctrinally narrow) group, someone recently asked a question about non-theological issues in the group. “What things other than doctrine divide the group?” he wanted to know. As I mulled it over, it occurred to me that one of the biggest divides is our accepted modes of speech. Some of us seem to think that the speech norms of the faculty lounge should govern all Christians all the time; others of us don’t buy that. Now if you’re reading here, you probably already know that I am in the latter group. As far as I’m concerned, kindness is a virtue, but niceness is a disease. We should be willing to speak like Jesus did, and He didn’t say nice things and make everything smooth. He was willing to make things awkward and difficult for the sake of a jagged truth. Among brothers, of course, we have no business slinging a ‘truth bomb’ and then running away; Jesus never did that. We hang around for the whole conversation, and then move forward and work together regardless, because action for Jesus’ sake matters more than agreement on every little thing.

I’d made my defense for a more biblical mode of speech in that very group multiple times already (and mostly been rebuffed), so this particular question would hardly have been worth commenting on by itself. But it sparked another thought: many of the members of the group are also very, very specific about who they’ll fellowship with or collaborate with. “Is there a [___insert affiliation here___] church near my town?” is a frequent question in the group. The responses will always include tales of people who drive 60 miles to get to a church they can stomach, others who are listening to an internet broadcast from another state, and still others who’ve simply given up for lack of a local fellowship they can be satisfied with. Still others, having found a local church that meets their exacting specifications, are busy pretending that all the other local churches don’t exist.

The same people who upbraid me for being coarse and disagreeable — people vastly nicer than I am, who want me to be nicer too — are unable to get along with the majority of their fellow Christians. You’d think that the niceness would make it easier, but it doesn’t seem to. Meanwhile, as rough as I sometimes am with people, I’m deeply embedded in two local churches, we routinely join up with other groups for prayer and sometimes for shared worship services, and our working partnerships span Anglican, Messianic, Charismatic, Baptist, Reformed, and more.

This to say, adherence to faculty-lounge norms of smooth speech does not seem to be the difference that makes a difference. There’s a divide between people who value honest community and people who value niceness, and it shows up in the way we’re able to minister. In my experience, honesty makes you able to minister in ways niceness can’t touch, and gives you partnerships you couldn’t get by being nice. So don’t be nice; be like Jesus. The more you’re like Him, the more you’ll be able to share life with others who are like Him, despite your disagreements. Truth is, talking and being like Jesus is your best shot at getting the disagreements resolved anyway.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

(Not) Fencing the Table

27 June 2023

“How do you fence the Table?” my friend asked me.

We were talking about the church service I host for homeless folks every Saturday night. For those of you not familiar with the terminology, he was asking how I regulate who is allowed to partake in the communion service.

I had a simple answer: “I don’t.”

I’m very much in the minority here. Across the history of the Church, the vast majority of churches have felt that since the Lord’s Table is a sacred thing, the church leadership should carefully regulate who is allowed to participate, and under what terms. I used to think the same way, but I noticed a few things that changed my perspective.

First, the Bible never tasks church leadership with fencing the table. It never tasks anybody with fencing the Table. The one place it talks about examining someone with reference to coming to the Table, it says “let a man so examine himself.” If I were going to fence the Table, I would need authority to do so–after all, it’s not my table, it’s the Lord’s Table. He has not delegated that authority to me as a church leader; therefore I may not do it.

Second, I noticed that the historical pattern is out of step with Jesus’ own way of being in the world. We fence the Table lest someone profane the body and blood of the Lord by partaking unworthily. Jesus gave Himself recklessly to a world that constantly received Him in an unworthy manner, and in the end gave His very body and blood to His enemies. Is it blasphemous? Of course! But it’s not my blasphemy; Jesus did it Himself. If I’m following Him, then why would I be paranoid about some pagan getting away with a wafer?

Third, I noticed that we haven’t empowered people to examine themselves well. We’ve taken self-examination to mean that you need to descend into morbid introspection and confess all your sins before you partake, lest God strike you down. That’s just not what the passage is talking about: you will ransack that whole chapter in vain looking for a mention of confessing your sins before the Table.

Rather, the passage talks about correctly discerning the Lord’s Body, and that’s what we need to present so people can self-examine and decide whether to partake. We need to say what Scripture says about the Table: “This is the body of Christ,” “This is the blood of Christ.” We need to say what Scripture says about the Body that celebrates at the Table: “You are the Body of Christ.” And we need to let people decide on that basis whether this is something they want to be part of. If they do, then we should do what Jesus did, and give them His body and blood.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What’s that Tree for?

20 June 2023

Did you ever notice that Adam didn’t do anything to bring on the temptation? He didn’t leave a gate open that God told him to close, and then get a snake in the Garden. He was doing everything right, and the snake showed up anyway. Trouble and temptation are not the result of the Fall; they’re the occasion for it. Man is born for trouble; that’s just part of the Story God is telling.

When I teach Creation and the Fall to my middle-school kids, they unfailingly ask about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Why did God put that tree in the Garden to start with?” The answer is that it was a tool for Adam’s maturation. That Tree was God’s gift to Adam and Eve, the site where they would learn good from evil. In biblical terms, knowing good and evil is not a bad thing; it’s a way in which we become like God — as God Himself says in the account (3:22). God will later bless Solomon for asking for this exact thing (1 Kings 3:9).

In order to live in the world God had made for them (which included the serpent), Adam and Eve would need knowledge of good and evil. The Tree would have been the site where Adam and Eve attained knowledge of good and evil one way or the other, but they were meant to gain knowledge by resisting temptation, not by yielding to it. By yielding, they seized knowledge by illegitimate means, and died.

The Tree is a gift, but it’s like someone giving you a chainsaw for Christmas — it’s a good gift, but if you handle it badly, it’ll kill you all the same. The biblical account teaches us that knowledge of good and evil is inherently dangerous, and do notice that it’s not just knowledge of evil. There is a knowledge of good that can kill you too. The vital thing is to handle the gift in the way God tells us to handle it.

Adam and Eve had been given everything they needed to know to handle the temptation in front of them. If they’d simply remembered God’s instructions, if they’d waited until the cool of the day to meet with God and ask Him what He thought, if…. But they didn’t.

By way of analogy, imagine a kid whose parents own a bed & breakfast. Reaching the age where he’s curious about sex, the kid conceals a camera in someone’s room on their wedding night. What the kid observes is a Good Thing, but him observing it is not! The way he’s supposed to acquire that knowledge is by participating in his own wedding night in due time, not by watching someone else’s. Grasping illegitimately for that knowledge is sin, it damages him, and he doesn’t really learn the same things that he would have if he’d waited and gone about it the right way.

So it is for us. Knowing good and evil is becoming more like God, but we don’t need to grasp after it. He will take us there in the right way. Our job is to trust Him and be faithful to what He has already given.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Out of the Greenhouse

13 June 2023

“One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of our disagreements.”
-C. S. Lewis

Let me say a hearty “Amen!” We make the mistake in both directions, but soft-pedalling a major disagreement is something we’ll come back to another day. Today, I’d like to address our pernicious habit of making far more of a disagreement than we ought.

When we’re making a mistake of this kind, usually the problem has relatively little to do with the merits of the actual disagreement. Far more often, the problem has to do with pursuing comfort and avoiding hard work.

The comfort pursued has chiefly been of two kinds. The first kind is very personal. Person X and Person Y have a tiff of some sort, X’s ego is bruised, and X lacks the skills or the will to address it properly. So he waits, and in due time, some doctrinal molehill will arise that, properly nourished by his latent discontent, can be turned into a mountain. At that point X will divide from Y, ostensibly over the molehill in question, and entirely too many of us will think that is respectable. In this way as a community we have frequently given at least grudging respect, if not open admiration, to people who should have been sternly ordered into no-nonsense pastoral counseling.

The second kind of comfort we’ve pursued is avoiding the very ordinary rough-and-tumble of interacting with the full range of our fellow Christians. In the West, we’ve been spoiled quite a bit. We’ve been so successful for so long. If you grew up Methodist, chances are excellent that every city you ever moved to had a Methodist church. Ditto for the other major denominations, and a lot of the minor ones.

Once the seeker-friendly movement kicked off, a lot of the denominational distinctives got smoothed out of everyday church life, radically expanding the number of places a generically homogenized evangelical could attend church without being jostled by something unfamiliar. Most of the “worship wars,” in fact, boiled down to people not wanting to be jostled by something culturally unfamiliar — and that was true both for the children of old (mostly 19th-cent. revival, honestly) church culture who didn’t want to be jostled by contemporary music, and for the children of contemporary culture who didn’t want to be jostled by old music.

If we decide — as we are biblically required to do — to fellowship at table with people who are culturally different from us, but whom Jesus has declared clean, then we’ll find ourselves navigating all kinds of things. The guy on my right baptizes babies; the guy on my left celebrates Purim but not Christmas, and the guy across the table plays worship songs on a tuned badminton racket and speaks in tongues. (Okay, I made up the badminton thing. But not the tongues.) A lot of us think of that as insanely uncomfortable, impossible to live with. It’s not. That’s just being out in the field instead of cloistered in the greenhouse.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Many Tribes, One Lord

30 May 2023

A friend sent me a link to this article by Professor Jay Green at Covenant College. I commend it to your attention; he offers some helpful commentary, and I’ll be using his terminology throughout this post.

Prof. Green’s taxonomy certainly improves on the right-left continuum he’s proposing to replace, but it leaves out an important element: liberal order absolutely depends on Christian values enacted in the public square. This is not a political hypothesis; it is a simple historical fact. The liberal order Green so values as an Emancipatory Minimalist did not spring whole from the head of Zeus, nor was it among the gifts of the Romans. It is the result of a very long, very Christian obedience in the same direction, and it would be instructive to see him classify some historical figures according to his taxonomy. To my eye, Green the Emancipatory Minimalist stands on the shoulders of Boniface, Ambrose, Luther, and Kuyper the Civilizational Maximalists. More, he relies on the thought of folks like William Penn and Roger Williams who defended religious liberty on Christian principles: historical figures who could afford to be Emancipatory Minimalists precisely because they were Civilizational Maximalists, as it were (which I think exposes the key weakness in his taxonomy.)

When he speaks of Emancipatory Minimalists believing “the liberal order is what gives space for the exercise of religious freedom,” he gets it exactly backwards. It was the exercise of Christian freedom and the Christian defense of freedom—over Caesar’s frequent and strenuous objections—that gave us the liberal order. In this article, Prof. Green treats the liberal order as something that’s just there, feet firmly planted in midair, rather than a structure that rests on a particular foundation. When he speaks of Emancipatory Minimalists accepting pluralism as a permanent fixture in the culture, he misses two important facts. 

First, the pluralism he so values is not sustainable, as present events demonstrate. The younger generation of practitioners in fields as diverse as medicine, law, psychotherapy, education, and news media (and all the way down to high school debate) are not simply failing to uphold liberal ideals; they actively reject them as inimical to their own subchristian concepts of class identity, equity, and justice. Some god will be the god of the system, and if we will not have Yahweh, we will have some pretender. We’ve been living off the accrued capital of Christendom for some time, but in the end, pluralism is polytheism. Those other gods are demons, and inviting the demons into a coalition government with Yahweh was exactly what Israel stumbled into time and again. Didn’t work then; can’t work now.

Second, he forgets that he knows the end of the Story. Pluralism is not a permanent fixture; when the assembled throng gathers before the throne on the last day, we will have a magnificent diversity of tribe, tongue, and nation, but not of religion. Pluralism will be a thing of the past, and good riddance. Heaven is not a pluralistic place. “Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” is not a prayer for enduring pluralism.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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