“We Can’t Be Amish…” or Can We?

30 April 2024

Throughout our time in the positive and neutral worlds, we have been able to take it for granted that a conscientious Christian could be involved more or less anywhere that mattered in our culture. Naturally certain vices were always off limits, but in the positive world they were generally acknowledged as vices, and you could be a fully-participating member of respectable society without them. In the neutral world, these vices were more readily accepted in mainstream society, but still regarded as largely optional.

Under those circumstances, discussion of the ethics of cultural engagement and participation would usually include the line, “Well, we can’t be Amish, so….” “We can’t be Amish” was shorthand for a series of related ideas: “we can’t just abandon cultural production,” “we have a duty to participate in every realm of the culture” and so on. How could you be salt and light, so the reasoning went, if you didn’t participate?

That reasoning no longer holds. As the enemies of God solidify their hold on gate-keeping positions in various institutions and fields, the question is actually quite the opposite: If you meet their criteria for participating, can you still be salt and light? If you had to affirm all manner of sin and wickedness get the job, and if you can only keep the job by soldiering on in complicit silence, are you being salt and light?

I think we all know the answer.

But we should also remember that God is endlessly creative, and loves to insert His people into places where they “have no business” being. Do not forget that Daniel ended up the leader of a pagan emperor’s “wise men” (read: magicians), and no matter what it said in the employee handbook, he got that position without eating the king’s unclean food and without giving up his daily prayers. Joseph was the minister-in-chief of another pagan king. Cyrus rebuilt the temple. Obadiah was in charge of King Ahab’s house, and saved 100 prophets’ lives. Naaman the Syrian was given God’s permission to escort his master into a pagan temple. Jesus got invited to the parties good Jewish boys didn’t go to…and He went. “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.” In the same way that we ought not take someone’s millionaire status as proof that he musta stole something, we have no business deciding that if that guy has that place or position, then he musta betrayed the faith. “I can’t see how a faithful Christian could possibly…” we will say. Just so—you can’t see. But what does that have to do with reality? Once upon a time, Peter couldn’t see how Jesus could possibly die on a cross, either. Turns out God’s more creative than we give Him credit for.

So go ahead and try for positions you “shouldn’t” be able to get. It will be easy enough to look at a particular institution’s public persona and conclude that no conscientious Christian could long survive in that environment. That might be true, but individuals within the institution often vary in their ideological zeal, and some of them still care more about getting the job done than they do about a hard-to-replace employee’s ideological soundness. Any number of conscientious Christians may be laboring away heartily, as unto the Lord, in the bowels of an institution that (on social media, at least) has impeccable pagan credentials. If God is leading you that direction, then off you go!

At the same time, you should remember that God also finds use for a wide variety of sacrifices and martyrdoms. Stephen represented the Lord faithfully and got murdered for it, following the example of Jesus and all the prophets before Him, “from the blood of righteous Abel to Zechariah son of Berechiah, whom they slew between the temple and the altar.” Many of us have since followed Stephen’s example, including the young fellow, one Saul of Tarsus, who ran the coat check at Stephen’s murder. Fortify your soul with their stories. If you’re looking for a good starting point, get Fox’s Book of Martyrs. Read the tales of what they did to us back in the day.

Then, when they’re going to fire you, reflect on the precipitous decline in the quality of our opposition over the past few centuries. They used to be creative. The saints of old were burned alive, fed to lions, staked to the ground at low tide, sewn into a leather bag with wild dogs and thrown into the Tiber. Today, you stand for Jesus, and you get some buffoon ominously talking about…H.R.? A cardboard box and a security escort to the parking lot? “They’re not even threatening to cut off my hand,” you’ll think to yourself, suppressing a giggle.

The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. If he wants you to get that fellowship, that job, that professional license, that political appointment, then nobody can stop you. And when His purposes will be better served by demonstrating your immovable conviction in the face of persecution, you will be persecuted, ostracized, fired, expelled.

This to say: be curious about what God might be doing. Don’t decide in advance what God can’t do. But also, be faithful. Don’t bow to the idols. If that means you’re going to get consigned to “being Amish,” then so be it. Don’t take full participation in the culture for granted; as the culture gets grosser, you won’t want to fully participate anyhow.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

“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

Do We Chuck the Books?

21 November 2023

Imagine if all the worst predictions of the current splatter of YA dystopian novels came true. Civilization falls. Your post-apocalyptic community correctly understands that the collapse was a natural consequence of our decadence and abandonment of God, and you’re faithful Christians. As faithful Christians, you’re trying to live up to the Dominion Mandate, and so trying to recover the scientific knowledge to do so. On one of your forays into the city, you discover a couple boxes of science textbooks in a closet, clearly left over from some long-gone engineer’s college days, or some such.

Of course you haul them all back to the compound, and start going through them. You discover pervasive references to human evolution, favorable references to abortion, and so on.

So here’s the question: do you chuck the books?

This is exactly the position we find ourselves in now when it comes to various forms of knowledge preserved by traditional societies. Modernity burned through our culture, and for a few generations nobody believed Granny knew anything worth preserving. Most of our folk knowledge has been lost, and what remains is largely preserved by weird little enclaves that are wildly out of step with the rest of the world in various distasteful ways. We can also look to a variety of foreign cultures for support in our reclamation project, but we encounter all manner of pagan balloon juice along the way.

Shall we chuck the books? Or do we do the best we can to filter the genuine knowledge that’s there?

I say we filter. Not all of us are called to it, and in general the impressionable young’uns have better things to do, grounding themselves in the truth. But I’ve been at this work 30 years and more, and there’s a lot to be learned by paying attention to what other people know.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Shiny Foil Wrappers

10 October 2023

Many times here in Englewood, I’ve seen Christians practicing so-called “Christian charity” by giving warm burritos to homeless folks. They’re doing exactly the same thing as when our local pagans give out burritos. Exactly. Right down to the delicious bacon crumbles and those shiny foil wrappers.

The parallels are really quite disturbing. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, people! Don’t be deceived!

***

“Pagans do something that looks like this” isn’t a valid means of discernment. Pagans pray, perform acts of charity, eat apple pie, go to work, wear clothes, make love, raise children. Pagans turn water into blood and staffs into snakes, and yet Moses is one of the good guys. We have to learn to pay attention to the difference that makes a difference.

An American soldier from WWII and a German soldier from WWII look an awful lot alike in dress and equipment. Suppose we have those two men in a lineup, along with a Minuteman and a Navy SEAL with the latest equipment. Which ones look most alike? The two guys from WWII, of course–but that doesn’t tell you which side they’re on.

We want discernment to be easier than it is. We want the good guys to look entirely unlike the bad guys. We want criteria we can photograph from across the street, and very often, it just doesn’t work that way. If we’re to believe the examples furnished to us in Scripture itself, God regularly steps over lines we wouldn’t. We need a discernment in the church that’s willing to reckon with the kinds of surprises God likes to give us.

  • There was no biblical precedent for God revealing Himself in a burning bush or a wet fleece…and yet He did.
  • Touching bones makes you unclean, and yet the guy who touched Elisha’s bones was raised from the dead.
  • Touching lepers makes you unclean too, but Jesus did–and they didn’t make Him unclean; He made them well! He let an immoral woman touch Him, too.

The key in all these things is not “does this look like something the pagans might do?” The key is “What has God given us permission to do? Is He in this?”

If the answer is yes, then get to it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Torah as Wisdom Literature

29 August 2023

tl;dr: The Law isn’t law for us, but it *is* wisdom literature!

In my early Bible classes growing up, I was taught that there were three divisions to the Torah: moral, ceremonial, and civil. It wasn’t until seminary that I realized that as helpful as those categories sometimes can be, they are not organic to the Torah — you’ll search the Torah itself in vain for any such division. In the actual books of Moses, the Law is presented as a whole, and you can die for murder, gathering sticks on the Sabbath, or offering strange fire on the altar.

Therefore, when Paul says that we are not under the Law, he doesn’t mean just the ceremonial portions. He means the whole thing. The Law is a whole, and we are not under the Law as a rule of life, period. No part of it.

That said, Paul also says the Law is holy and just and good, and if you’re having trouble seeing that, then pray Psalm 119:18: “Open my eyes, that I might see wondrous things in Your Law.” We’re supposed to be singing the Psalms in the New Covenant anyway (see Eph. 4:18-21, Col. 3:16, Jas. 5:13), so this is a good start! Jesus Himself, and the NT writers who followed Him, all made great use of the Law in making spiritual and moral arguments. Paul does the same (see, for example, 1 Cor. 9:9, 14:34, 1 Tim. 5:18). So while we’re not under the Law as a rule of life, Paul continues to appeal to it. Why?

Because it’s holy and just and good. It reveals God’s character, and the truths thus revealed apply to our situation, even if we’re not in ancient Israel and aren’t going to do exactly what they did. So Paul borrows a command about how Israelites treat their oxen to make an analogy to how the church treats its elders.

Likewise, since we’re in possession of a civil law code created by Almighty God Himself, nothing could be sillier than to ignore it in our pursuit of the common good. He made it for Israel, not for us in the Gentile nations, but He says He made it for us to marvel at.

“Surely I have taught you statutes and judgments, just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should act according to them in the land which you go to possess. Therefore be careful to observe them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes, and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ For what great nation is there that has God so near to it, as the Lord our God is to us, for whatever reason we may call upon Him? And what great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in all this law which I set before you this day?” (Deut. 4:5-8)

If we’re looking at the Law and all we have to say is, “Thank goodness we’re not under that!” then we’ve missed something crucial. We ought to be asking how we can appropriate that wisdom and apply it well in our own situations.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Wearing the Old Jacket?

22 August 2023

I was raised with a particular picture of what the terms “old man” and “new man” mean in the Bible. We took them to refer respectively to our continuing proclivity for sin, and our new nature in Christ. We would illustrate this (literally) as two tiny people fighting it out for dominance in the human heart. As it turns out, that picture was entirely wrong.

Colossians 3:9-10 says you already have put off the old man and put on the new. Ephesians 4:20-24 says the same thing: you already put off the old man, you are being renewed in the spirit of your mind, and you already put on the new man. (The grammar in Ephesians 4 is arguable, and it would be difficult to nail down if that were the only passage we had, but the grammar in Colossians is very clear, as is Romans, and Ephesians 2:15 nails it down nicely, as we’ll see below.) Romans 6:6 says the old man was crucified with Christ.

The renewing of your mind is an ongoing process, but the old man/new man transaction is not. Moreover, the old man and the new man are not inside of you; you are inside of them. Think of it like a jacket: when you take an old jacket off and put a new one on, you aren’t still wearing the old jacket. You were in the old man, but he was crucified with Christ and you put him off, and now you have put on the New Man, and you are in Him. It is helpful here to remember that “Adam” literally means “man.” You were in the old Adam, and now you are in the new Adam, Christ. The old man is your corporate identity in Adam, and the new man is the Body of Christ, as Ephesians 2:15 pointedly says.

So if I have put off the old man, Adam, and have put on the new man Christ, why I am still drawn to sin, and I still sin regularly? Ephesians 4:20-24 gives us a hint already — our mind is being renewed. Some part of the process is still under way, which means it’s not done yet. Romans fleshes it out a little more, and the best way to see it is to start with a puzzle. At the end of Romans 7, Paul–already a believer–cries out, “Wretched man that I am — who will deliver me from this dead body?” In the beginning of Romans 12, Paul challenges us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. So the question is, what happens between these two passages that transforms the dead body into a holy and acceptable sacrifice?

The answer is in Romans 8:10-11. Your body is dead, which is to say, unresurrected. The world still waits for the redemption of our bodies. Christ paid for it at the cross, but the reality for which He paid has not yet come to fruition. But in the meantime, the Holy Spirit is alive in you, and so God does something which is fundamentally impossible: He gives life (now!) to your dead body through the Holy Spirit. So you are a hybrid being. Your inner man is redeemed (“I delight in the law of God according to the inward man”), but your body is not yet redeemed. Your inner man is alive, and your body is dead. Therefore there is a struggle between the two. The struggle will one day be resolved by the resurrection of your body. Until then, your mind is being renewed, and God is working a miracle in your body, to allow your dead body to be a living instrument of righteousness. It makes no sense and it shouldn’t be possible, but there it is — a continual miracle.

The ascetics grasped the death of the body and the life of the spirit, but rushed to the wrong practical solution. Instead of trusting God to work the miracle of life, they attempted to be sanctified through what they could do, which was bring death. Unable to strengthen the spirit, they decided to weaken the body. But that is not the solution that Paul presents to us in the passage. The passage doesn’t say to put the body to death; it says to put the body’s deeds to death. And Colossians 2:16-23 tells us that the various artificial restrictions designed to weaken the body are actually of no value in our struggle against sin.

Of course there is a bodily discipline that profits, but it is discipline, not destruction. The ascetics got it fundamentally wrong. But we’re trying the same thing anyway — and I believe that’s why the two nature view is so popular. It gives us something to do: fight that sin nature! The only difference is, we have “spiritualized” the struggle by making it against an immaterial “sin nature” rather than our material flesh. But making the enemy less visible doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the error.

The thing most necessary for us is something which we cannot do for ourselves: for God to give life to our bodies, for God to work the continuing miracle in us that makes it possible for us to present our bodies to Him as a holy and acceptable sacrifice.

It is easier to fight against sin than it is to lean on God. (Actually, it’s not easier — it’s impossible. But it’s easier on our pride, which is the point.) We can fight against sin without involving God in any immediate way. Rather than admit my helplessness and cry out to God to deliver me right now, I can struggle, trying to whip my sins from sheer force of will. It’s a doomed effort, but it’s that or admit I can’t do it and become a mystic.

The miracle we’re talking about is not just an arrangement of mental furniture or a set of secret principles that I can choose to live by. Someone Who is not me shows up and does things in my heart that make it possible for me to live righteously, when otherwise I could not. That offends us. We hunger for the illusion that we can do it, that we have it under control. In the Protestant world, we’re more than happy to admit that we would be powerless to resist sin without the finished work of Christ in the past, so long as we are spared the humbling experience of moment-by-moment dependence on Him. But that is what we are called to: we put off Adam and put on Christ.

Only He can save us.

***

Editorial note: if the discussion in the comments below intrigues you and you’d like to hear more, read Portraits of Righteousness.

7 Comments | Functioning Supernaturalism, Mystical Union | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Two Objections

25 July 2023

The previous post addressed the continuing role of imprecatory psalms in the Christian’s life. I regularly hear two objections to this.

The first is “but where’s the specific New Testament command to pray these kinds of prayers specifically?” This one is really just a matter of basic reasoning. If you’re commanded to sing the psalms, then the different sorts of psalms are necessarily included. Demanding a specific verse for the imprecatory subset of the psalms is like saying “I see the verses where Paul prohibits stealing in general, but where’s the verse about boosting cars?” What’s wanted here is not another verse, but a course in elementary logic.

To my eye, that one is more an excuse than an argument. If the commands to sing the psalms and the New Testament examples of imprecations don’t convince someone, then more verses aren’t likely to do the job either.

The second, more substantive, objection is that praying such prayers would be vengeful, and God forbids vengeance in the New Testament: “Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord. Therefore ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.'” (Rom. 12:17-20)

This is one of those cases where you have to pay close attention to what the passage actually says. Romans says you may not take vengeance for yourself, but pay attention to the rationale Paul gives. God doesn’t say “Vengeance is bad.” God says “Vengeance is Mine” — and then He says He’ll repay.

Now, when God says that He’ll do something, do we usually take that as grounds not to pray about that thing? Or as grounds to pray for it? He promises to meet our needs, and we pray: “Give us this day our daily bread.” He promises to take vengeance — is there a reason we shouldn’t ask Him to do what He said He would? Paul doesn’t seem to think so: “Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm; may the Lord repay him according to his deeds.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Break Their Teeth? Really?

18 July 2023

Regular readers here know I’m a big advocate of singing the Psalms. On the (unfortunately rare) occasions that believers seriously engage in that project, a question comes up pretty quickly: “What do I do with these psalms?”

It ain’t all “As the deer panteth for the water” in the Psalter. There are also prayers that God would break the arm of the wicked (Psalm 10) or their teeth (Psalm 58), pursue and persecute them (Psalm 35), drive them away and kill them (Psalm 68) and so on. What’s a Christian to do with these prayers?

Sing them, that’s what. Three times the New Testament says we should sing psalms (Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3:16, and James 5:13). The phrase “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” is possibly open-ended enough to include more than just the 150 biblical psalms, but it’s certainly not talking about singing less than what God gave us.

As to how we pray them appropriately, it’s important to read them in context. It’s easy for us to read these psalms in terms of middle-class North America, which is pretty tame by comparison to the times and places these psalms were actually written. You may wonder “When would I ever pray that?” because you’ve never faced the kind of adversity that the psalmist was facing. David has Saul trying to kill him, and murdering every man, woman, and child in the city of priests along the way. It’s not so hard to see how these prayers are appropriate in actual life-and-death struggle with genuinely murderous enemies who are killing innocent people.

In less dire situations, the prayers should reflect the reality at hand. You don’t ask God to break the teeth of your barista because she messed up your latte order. Not even if she did it on purpose. “Let the rich glory in his humiliation, for as a flower of the field he passes away.” If that’s what adversity looks like for you, you’d better milk it for all the spiritual benefit you can.

You don’t pray “let his wife be a widow; let his children be vagabonds and beggars” because someone is running a little mean-girl scheme to get your funding reduced. Asking God to cause their designs to come to nothing and their trap to return on their own head might be more appropriate.

That said, there’s one more thing to remember: “With what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with what measure you measure, it will be measured back to you. That cashes out in two ways: first, the way you forgive other people in this life is how God’s gonna treat you in this life, so bear that in mind when you make your requests. When you ask God to permanently stop someone who’s killing innocent people, you’re effectively also asking Him to do the same to you if you’re ever killing innocent people. You can and should be fine with that, but if you’re not, don’t pray that prayer.

Second, remember that “in wrath remember mercy” is also a biblical prayer, and something we should take to heart. Jesus asked His Father to pardon His murderers. Stephen, following Jesus’ example, prayed a similar prayer, and God honored that prayer by taking the young man who ran the coat check at the murder and turning him into the most famous missionary and church planter in Christian history. Modern martyrs — the Stams, those killed by the Ayore and the Waorani, the persecuted Russian and Chinese saints who died in the gulags and camps — rightly continue the tradition.

Do those examples mean that imprecations should be a thing of the past in the New Testament? It’s a good question, but the answer is no. Imprecatory psalms are invoked in the New Testament. Jesus invokes an imprecatory psalm in John 15:5. The early church follows suit in Acts 4:25, as does Paul in Romans 11:9. Peter applies the threat of Psalm 110 immediately and directly to his audience, in order to provoke repentance in Acts 2:34. There are other examples, but those will suffice to demonstrate that at minimum, Christians should still be reading these psalms and putting them to use in prayer and preaching. Clearly, if you’re serious about following the examples set by Jesus and His early followers, you can’t just exclude the rougher psalms out of hand; they didn’t.

One could use these examples and others to construct a more nuanced argument about the way we use these psalms now. In making that argument, you’ll also have to account for the existence of fresh New Testament imprecations. 2 Timothy 4:14, 1 Corinthians 16:22, Galatians 1:8-9, and Matthew 23 come to mind offhand, and to cap the stack, Revelation 6:10, by saints who can’t possibly be sinning because they’re already dead. There’s a great conversation to be had about how to do this well, but that is a post for another day.

For today, the reason you shouldn’t be averse to imprecatory prayer is very simple: the Bible plainly isn’t. Evangelical culture is, and that aversion is driven by sentiment, not Scripture.

2 Comments | liturgy, New Fundamentals, Prayer, Social Reality of the Fall, Speaking as God Speaks, Worship | Permalink
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.

1 Comment | Meditations, Real Ministry Training, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Taking it Literally…Literally?

2 May 2023

In the tribe I come from, we regularly talk about Literal-Grammatical-Historical hermeneutics. We’ll call it LGH for short, or (many of us) “literal hermeneutics.”

We all know what we mean, but the terminology is a bit strange for newcomers, because — how to put it delicately? — we don’t mean the word “literal” literally.

That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Within the history of biblical interpretation, there have been eras when the text was subjected to the most ridiculous flights of fancy. Things like the four rivers flowing out of Eden being a reference to the four cardinal virtues, or the Levitical dietary laws actually prohibiting, not the eating of certain animals, but the vices figuratively associated with those animals. There’s nary a hint in the actual text itself (nor in the later inspired references to it) of such interpretations. Against that backdrop, “literal” interpretation meant that the four rivers flowing out of Eden were actual rivers, and the prohibition against shellfish meant — follow me closely here — that Israelites weren’t allowed to eat shellfish.

Pretty straightforward, right?

So then what do we do with “He shall cover you with his pinions”? If we’re interpreting it literally, then don’t we take that to mean that God has feathers?

“Of course not,” we say. “Don’t be silly.”

But the thing is, a newcomer who asks such a question is not being silly. He’s taking the word “literal” in its ordinary sense: literal as opposed to metaphorical. Take a look at some basic dictionary definitions:

in accordance with, involving, or being the primary or strict meaning of the word or words; not figurative or metaphorical:the literal meaning of a word.

following the words of the original very closely and exactly:a literal translation of Goethe.

true to fact; not exaggerated; actual or factual:a literal description of conditions.

being actually such, without exaggeration or inaccuracy:the literal extermination of a city.

(of persons) tending to construe words in the strict sense or in an unimaginative way; matter-of-fact; prosaic.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/literal

To a normal person’s ears, when we talk about “interpreting the Bible literally” we are the ones that sound crazy. Many passages are obviously metaphorical, and even we admit that. So if you read a metaphor literally, wouldn’t that be a very basic hermeneutical mistake?

“Well, yes, it would,” we say. “But that’s not what we mean by it.”

And it’s not. We mean that we interpret the utterance according to the original author’s intent, not according to some exercise of allegorical ingenuity imposed on the text after the fact. But again, this is not a particularly obvious way to take the word “literal.”

New Zealand pastor Bnonn Tennant had an interesting take on this recently. I quote:

I think the term literal is functionally meaningless; it is just a pious way of begging the question in favor of whatever interpretation “seems” obvious to the person reading it. In other words, “literal” is a shorthand way of saying that scripture should be read according to the normal rules of communication….

The problem with this, he goes on to point out, is that what we think of today as the normal rules of communication are not the standard everywhere and for all time:

As a simple example, consider how scripture speaks of the moon being turned to blood. A “literal” hermeneutic will say this means the physical moon becomes perceptibly red. This is the most “natural” way to read it—for a 21st century Western Christian. If a newspaper said such a thing, we would assume that the physical moon is in view; but also that physically being transformed into blood is not. That’s the “literal” sense to 21st century English readers inculcated in an Enlightenment worldview.

But what makes us think that worldview is the natural way to read the text of Scripture? It’s certainly not the worldview of the people who wrote it. To the extent that we intend to be guided by authorial intent, we obviously have no business substituting our worldview for theirs.

Tennant suggests dropping “literal” from our description of the hermeneutic and substituting “theological.” His argument is that “literal” doesn’t really mean what we’re trying to say (as above) and that “theological” better captures our desire to read the text as a theologically coherent whole. I would be concerned that “grammatical-historical-theological” hermeneutic signals a tendency to use our theology as a background assumption of our interpretation, rather than allowing our theology to be chastened by the text as we should. That’s not, of course, what Tennant means — but I’m concerned he’s just trading one set of “that’s not what I mean by it” conversations for another.

What do you think?

6 Comments | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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