Alternative Cosmologies and the Christian, Part 3: John from Boston

13 January 2013

This is the third post in the Alternative Cosmologies series. As with the first and second posts, the following tale is fictional. Sort of.

John had the world by the tail. He graduated at the top of his class from a prestigious prep school. Harvard was the only college he applied to, and he got in easily. At Harvard, he majored in all the socializing that had been denied him at his all-male prep school. He also got a degree in biology, and graduated at the top of his class again — the third straight generation in his family to do so. Having lived in Boston his whole life, John wanted to get out a little — far enough away to be really away, but close enough to come home for a Red Sox game if he felt like it. With grades as good as he had, he could apply to med school just about anywhere he liked, and he settled on Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where he continued to excel, eventually specializing in cardiology.
When he finished school, John wanted to return to Boston, but there were no openings he was really interested in at the time, and he ended up in Omaha for a few years waiting for the right position to open up.
John had…ahem…socialized quite a bit while he was in school, but he always told himself and his various female playmates that there was no time for anything serious. Suddenly he found himself with a real job, whole days off with no exams to study for, in a strange city too far from home. He began to date a bit more seriously. He had always pictured himself marrying another young, upwardly-mobile type like himself, but to his great surprise he fell in love with a waitress named Sally who worked at the diner across the street from the hospital. Their wedding was an interesting cultural experience for both families, but everyone was civil enough. After a couple years, Sally had their first child, a boy, and a year after that, she was pregnant with their second. Meanwhile, the right position opened up in Boston and they moved back to his hometown.

At first Sally was thrilled. She had lived in Omaha her whole life, and she had wanted out since she was in high school. She loved Boston. She loved the museums, the ballet, the swan boats at the Public Garden, taking walks along the Charles River — all of it. John was in heaven. He had his dream job — well, not his dream job yet, since he wanted to be head of cardiology at the hospital — but he was in a good position for his age and experience, his wife was happy, he adored his kids, and he was back home where he belonged. Everything was grand.

But after the birth of their third child, Sally started taking Xanax. John’s family was civil enough, but they weren’t close with Sally, and she was having trouble making friends in the circles John moved in. They had plenty of money, so she could hire a sitter and go to a museum exhibit opening or the ballet, but Boston’s rich cultural life didn’t compensate for her total lack of friends. Desperately lonely, Sally began spending long afternoons on the phone with her mother, sister, and cousins back in Omaha. One night over dinner, she casually asked John if he’d ever thought about moving back to Omaha.

John laughed. “Of course not, baby,” he said. “I never would have gone to Omaha in the first place if I’d been able to get a decent position here at the time. Worked out well for me, though,” he said, grinning at her. “I’m glad I went.”
“Me too, darling,” Sally said, and smiled, and John was so happy with his life that he didn’t notice that her smile never quite reached her eyes.

He noticed a few months later, in June, when Sally took the kids on a six-week vacation to Omaha. He talked to Sally on the phone every night, and he could tell something was wrong, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Sally and the kids came back in July, but it wasn’t the same. John would get home from work and he could tell that she’d been crying.
“What is it, baby?” he would ask, and Sally would just shake her head and change the subject.

One day in October, John came home and found a tearstained note on the table. “I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. I’m going back to Omaha. I know you’ll never be happy anywhere but Boston, but I just can’t stand it anymore. I’m so lonely all the time. I still love you, and I want you to be part of our lives. We’ll work something out about custody for the kids. I’m taking them with me right now, but I’m not trying to keep them from you, truly I’m not. I just don’t want them to think I’m abandoning them. I love you more than I can say. I’m so sorry.”

John sat at the table for a long, long time.

Eventually, he got up, put on his coat, and went out. He had no idea where he was going. He just wandered. It was something to do other than sit at the table and stare at that damned note. For a long time he walked, taking turns at random. After a while, he realized he was tired — so tired — and cold, and he looked around to see where he was. It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood he would ever go into, but he was across the street from a little church. The lights were on, so he went in.

The priest spotted John right away — his coat cost more than any of the parishioners would make in a month. When the service was over, the place emptied out, leaving John sitting alone in the back. The priest, a little Irishman with red cheeks and a boxer’s crooked nose, came back and sat down next to John. He’d been at his work a long time, and he knew that look of desperation. So he just sat silently for a while, being present and feeling John slowly unwind.

When the time seemed right, he turned to John. “So what brings a man like you into my poor little parish church on a 15-degree night, hmmm?”

John tried to lay out the situation rationally, but he started crying as soon as he opened his mouth to talk, and the story tumbled out in pieces. John could never explain how it happened, but he slowly became aware that he was not just talking to the priest — there was a third person with them in the conversation. To this day, John doesn’t remember anything the priest said, but he will swear that Jesus was there with him, hearing his pain and comforting him.
John became a Christian that day. He didn’t become a Roman Catholic — it would have scandalized his (culturally) Presbyterian family — but he would never forget that on the day that he called out to God, God came near to him.

Being a Christian didn’t fix John’s life. At least, not right away. When he didn’t follow her to Omaha within a few months, Sally filed for divorce. But John got some good help, and he did move to Omaha, giving up a promising career in Boston to be near his family, and it didn’t take much effort to persuade Sally to tear up the divorce papers and come back to him. Like Marcus, Daljeet and Chao, John continued in the calling he was in when Christ called him, and became a Christian doctor.

Of course, John’s textbooks said nothing about balancing bodily humors, as Marcus’ or Daljeet’s did. Nor, like Chao’s textbooks, did they teach him to balance the meridian system, nor did they teach him the Daoist history of the universe, in which the emptiness gave birth to fulness which gave birth to Taiji which gave birth to yin and yang which gave birth to the five elements and the whole universe from there. No, his textbooks talked about the Big Bang and evolution, and like Chao it took him a while to think that through and realize that the Bible tells a different story. That aside, John remained primarily concerned with keeping his patients’ hearts healthy, and he delivered the best care he could, prescribing appropriate medications, encouraging healthy diets and exercise, and referring patients for surgery when necessary.

Being in a different sort of society, John was not professionally ostracized for his conversion to Christianity, but he had his own struggles with the paganism in his profession. Two floors down in the same hospital where he worked, they performed abortions. John had been trained that a fetus isn’t really alive in the same way as a person, but one day he ran across Psalm 139, and the more he meditated on it, the more troubled he became. He had certainly loved his own children in the womb, he realized — why wouldn’t God love all children in the womb? And if He did, how could it be right to kill them?

John is still struggling with what it means to be a Christian doctor in the contemporary American medical system. He doesn’t like working in a hospital where abortions are performed, but he doesn’t really know what to do about it, and somehow picketing the third floor doesn’t seem realistic. Some days he doesn’t feel like he’s got any answers; other days, one of his colleagues will corner him and ask him why he handled a particular situation the way he did, or why he’s just a bit different generally, and he’ll have a chance to share Christ. Sally came to Christ a few years ago, followed by all the kids — there are four now — and John loves to gather up the family when he gets home from work and tell them about the doctor or nurse that he got to share Christ with. He’ll tell the story of the conversation, and then they will all pray together for his coworker to come to Christ. John feels pretty good, those days.

John will live with that tension for the rest of his career. He will hope to pass on his accumulated wisdom on the matter to at least some of his children, but none of them will go into medicine. That will be a bitter disappointment to him, but he will make his peace with it in time, and be happy that his children are happy in vocations that suit them. John will live to a ripe old age, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. To his surprise and delight, his oldest granddaughter will be interested in medicine, and John will live long enough to see her enter med school before he dies.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Alternative Cosmologies and the Christian, Part 2: Daljeet the Punjabi and Chao of Xian

5 January 2013

The following tales are fictional. Sort of.

Last week we considered the story of Marcus, a physician in second-century Alexandria. Let us consider a set of similar situations briefly.

Daljeet was a physician in the Punjab region of India in the seventh century A.D. Like Marcus, he was well respected in his profession, and like Marcus, in his middle age he converted to Christianity. In his case it was not a miraculous healing, but the simple witness of a spice trader to whom he had extended his hospitality. When he heard the story of Jesus, Daljeet felt like a gong had been struck inside his chest, like he had known the story all along, and had just been waiting for someone to remind him. Like Marcus, he ceased his offerings to pagan gods, but continued as best he could in his profession. Of course, his textbooks were the Charaka Samhita and the Sustruta Samhita instead of Hippocrates and Galen, and he was interested in balancing the three ayurvedic humors (wind, bile and phlegm) instead of Hippocrates’ four humors. Daljeet had a much greater focus on the medicinal qualities of different kinds of food than Marcus, and he was just as likely to prescribe a certain menu for his patients as he was to prescribe a certain herbal medicine — although he could do that as well. Daljeet also had a surgical practice extending from stitching up wounds and removing foreign objects to a form of cataract surgery and even cesarean section birthing if necessary. Daljeet also believed that treating the physical body was insufficient — what a person thought and believed, the words that were said to him and the conditions he lived in could cause as much damage as any injury or poison. So he would do his best to treat the soul as well — and when he came to the Great Physician, he found that his ability to treat the soul took a great leap forward.
Far from suffering because of his conversion to Christianity, Daljeet’s practice saw even more success in the year following his conversion. The stories of near-miraculous healing spread throughout the region, and Daljeet was careful to tell anyone who would listen that it was not Daljeet the doctor, but Jesus of Nazareth, the Great Physician, who was responsible for these healings. The community around Daljeet was at once amazed and scandalized. No one could offend the gods as Daljeet was doing and hope to escape their wrath, and yet, it seemed there was a new incredible healing every few days. If the gods were angry, they also seemed content to sit back and let Daljeet heal people. The stunned amazement persisted for almost a year after Daljeet had been very publicly baptized by the spice trader.
Then one day in the marketplace an overzealous devotee of one of the offended deities attacked Daljeet from behind and stabbed him to death. By the time anyone realized what was happening, it was too late, and Daljeet died before they could carry him back home.

***

In the eighth century A.D., a bishop of the Church of the East fell ill while traveling through central China, in what is now Shaanxi province. He was taken to the city of Xian and treated by a doctor there, a man named Chao. The bishop was only there a week, but he struck up an acquaintance with Chao, and the two men corresponded for some years and became friends. Eventually persuaded by his friend’s humility and devotion, Chao became a Christian. He too remained in his profession. His friendship with the bishop gave him access to the Scriptures, so of course he realized that the Taoist story of how the world came to be was false, and he began to adjust his thinking accordingly. Like Marcus and Daljeet before him, he set aside his false gods and worshiped only the true and living God.
Also like Daljeet and Marcus, Chao was interested in restoring his patients to bodily harmony, but he did not seek to do this through balancing bodily humors, but rather by massaging or needling points on their bodies in order to balance the blood and chi that flowed through their organs and each organ’s associated meridians, as he had learned from his medical textbooks, The Yellow Emperor’s Internal Classic, Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders, and others.
Also like the other two doctors before him, Chao believed that illness could have a spiritual cause like a witch’s curse or a malign deity — such things were not unheard of — but that in general illness was a natural process best treated by natural means. Doctors in his tradition had believed this since before the Yellow Emperor’s Classic was written seven centuries before. In addition to massage and acupuncture, Chao had recourse to a wide array of herbs and foods to address different illnesses, and he also could prescribe certain exercises for his patients that would have the effect of strengthening the function of a weak organ.
Chao’s conversion was not dramatic. Even after he confided in his friend the bishop that he had come to believe in Jesus, it took some time before he ceased making sacrifices, and more than a year before he worked up the courage to be baptized into the Church. Rejected by his family and community as a result of his baptism, Chao lost everything, and one day showed up knocking on the door of his friend the bishop, homeless, penniless and ashamed, with nowhere to go. He had nothing but the clothes on his back, his needles, and a few herbs. The bishop took him in, and from that day forward, the two men were inseparable. The bishop traveled to encourage the churches under his care, and wherever he went, Chao would go and treat the sick. “I will share Jesus with their spirits,” the bishop would say to Chao, “and you see what Jesus will do for their bodies.”
After some years, the bishop felt himself called to go up into the mountains of Tibet as a missionary. He told Chao that it would be quite dangerous, and that he ought to stay behind. “My friend,” Chao said, “If it is going to be dangerous, you had better take a doctor with you.” The bishop took several months to anoint a successor and set his affairs in order, and then, commissioned by the people of the diocese, the two men set off on the long and dangerous journey. No one knows if they ever made it to Tibet, and if they did, how they fared there. The two men were never heard from again.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Alternative Cosmologies and the Christian, Part 1: Marcus the Alexandrian

29 December 2012

The following fictional tale is part of a thought experiment that will take a few weeks to develop properly. Stick with me; I promise it will be worth it.

Marcus was a doctor in Alexandria during the second century A. D. His internal medicine practice was largely concerned with balancing the four bodily humors (fluids) — blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile — in order to prevent or cure disease. He had diligently studied the writings of Hippocrates, Galen and others, and understood that disease was a natural process which a doctor could only assist. In order to ameliorate the disease and assist in hurrying it along toward healing, Marcus used massage, herbs, and other methods.

A cold, for example, was the result of an overabundance of phlegm, perhaps brought about through overexposure to the cold night air. The cold air cooled the lungs, and thereby the heart, which is the very center of a person. Attempting to protect the lungs, the body produced a great abundance of phlegm, which now needed to be brought back into balance with the other three humors. Marcus knew which herbs to use internally, which to apply as poultices, and so on. Marcus also understood which gods the patient ought to make offerings to, but he had noticed over his years of practice that the gods tended to ignore minor cases and preferred large offerings in any case. If the cold progressed to pneumonia, he would tell his patients, that was the time to invoke the gods — and in that event, it was best not to be cheap about it.

In addition to his skills with herbs and practical theology, Marcus was also a capable surgeon. He could remove tumors, treat hernias, and on occasion would even drill a small hole in a patient’s skull to relieve pressure and headaches. Some time in the army had also given him ample practice closing wounds and removing arrowheads.

Marcus was not always successful — no doctor is — but in general he enjoyed a good rate of success and there were a number of people in the city who attributed their continued life and good health to his ministrations.

And then, at the age of 45, in the middle of his career, Marcus himself became sick with the plague, and try as he might, nothing he did would cure him. One of his servants, who happened to be a Christian, begged him to allow Christian holy men to come and pray for his healing. At first Marcus refused. He was a doctor, learned in all the medicine of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Persians! What might some fleabitten hermit following that Nazarene criminal have to offer him? But the servant continued, plying him with story after story of how people were healed through prayer, begging him not to be so stubborn, and by this means eventually prevailed. The servant ran out of the house and shortly returned with a group of men that he described as the elders of his ecclesia. They surrounded the bed, anointed Marcus with oil, sang some hymns and prayed for healing in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Despite his doubts, Marcus was instantly healed.

Marcus didn’t know what to do. Of course, he had to become a Christian — and wouldn’t his friends think that was entertaining — but beyond that, he didn’t know what he would do for a living. How could he go on being a doctor when he couldn’t heal himself? How could he prescribe herbs when it had been the prayers of a servant, a rug merchant, a field laborer and a potter that had healed him? Not knowing what to do, he went back to the men who healed him and asked them.

“Let each man remain in the same calling in which he was called,” they told him. Someone named St. Paul had written this in their scriptures many years before. He should remain a doctor. After all, one of Paul’s companions, St. Luke the evangelist, had been a doctor, and had not St. Paul himself referred to him as “Luke, the beloved physician” in his letter to Colosse? If St. Luke had remained in the profession, then surely Marcus could also. Of course, the men cautioned him, he must have nothing more to do with other gods. The idols of the Greeks and Romans were demons, and although they could work miracles of their own, it was for the purpose of damning souls to hell. From now on, Marcus must serve only Yahweh — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Marcus left the conversation a little fuzzy on whether he was serving one God or three, but he got the general idea. He continued practicing medicine, prescribing herbs for the balancing of the four bodily humors, performing surgery when it was called for, and commending prayer to Jesus Christ as the Great Physician who can heal any disease, no matter how small or how desperate. Marcus was subject to considerable mockery for this, and was eventually kicked out of the trade guild over it, because he was unwilling to participate in the guild sacrifices to pagan gods. Many of his patients refused to see him any longer, and a number of the merchants he depended upon for supplies refused to do business with him, for fear of the guild. But Christ had taught him, “Freely you have received; freely give” — and so although he sometimes lacked for patients who could pay, he never lacked for patients, and the Lord always seemed to supply him with just enough of the necessary herbs and implements to get the job done.

Over time, several young Christian men came to him to learn. They were unable to apprentice themselves to anyone in the guild, because like him they were unwilling to participate in the guild’s pagan sacrifices. However, Marcus was happy to teach them all he knew. Each of them spent at least ten years with him, learning all the healing properties of each herb, how to balance the bodily humors, how and when to use each surgical implement, and much more — everything he knew about the practice of medicine, and as he grew in his Christian faith, everything he knew about serving the Great Physician as well. By the time he died at a ripe old age, there were five capable doctors, unrecognized by the guild, who took his place and continued his work, each man expert in his craft and a diligent servant of God.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Not In Kansas Anymore

15 December 2012

I left a comment last week on this post to the effect that I’m not in the same place theologically that I used to be. A few days ago a good friend who knows my theological journey very well told me how surprised he was to hear me say that, so it seems like a little clarification is in order. I thought about appending it to the comment thread, but it seemed like it might be more visible as a post, so here it is.

First the assurances. I still believe in the virgin birth, the miracles, the bodily resurrection of Christ, His return in the clouds in like manner as He went, and just for good measure, His coming reign on this very planet. I also believe in the preservation of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego through the fire, the ascension of Elijah in a fiery chariot, Joshua’s long day, manna from heaven, the Red Sea crossing, and Noah’s flood that covered the whole world, by which I mean the whole world. I believe all these things because the Bible says them, and being the very word of God, the Bible is true in all its words and in all its parts. It is never wrong.

For the same reason, I believe that about 6,000 years ago, God made the world in 6 days, by which I mean six days. I have not failed to notice what is sometimes called “evidence of literary design” in the creation account, but unlike some folks, I seem to have also noticed that God is not just writing the account, He is also writing the world. These marks of authorship are a feature of the text because they are a feature of history, because God is telling the story.

I believe in the priesthood of all believers, salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and I mean “faith alone” in a way John MacArthur would heartily disapprove of.

So what’s changed? Two things.

First, I have heartily rejected the rampant sectarianism of my former ecclesiastical tribe. Some of them will say straight out that of course they don’t think the folks in the local Anglican church are saved. Others would never say something like that, but practically, they certainly will not seek to love and serve their brothers and sisters at the local Anglican church. They will simply behave as though the local Anglican church doesn’t exist. In whatever guise, this breaking of table fellowship is a practical denial of justification by faith (Gal. 1-2), a moral failure to walk worthy of our calling (Eph. 4:1-6), and a refusal to comply with Jesus’ dying wish for His people (Jn. 17).

Second, I now believe in all the biblical spiritual gifts, not just some of them, which is to say that I am not a cessationist. I believe in all the biblical gifts for the same reason that I believe in six-day creationism: because that’s what the Bible says.

I didn’t initially think of these two changes as a complete break with my ecclesiastical tribe. After all, we still had a huge amount in common, and I was prepared to work with them. However, I quickly discovered that virtually nobody was willing to work with me. They would fall all over themselves to affirm that I’m a good guy and they wish me all the best and they’re sure God’s doing great things through me — they just don’t want to, you know, actually work together. On anything. Ever again. But hey, thanks for calling, and let’s get coffee sometime….

So when Jeremy mentioned that he’s no longer where I am theologically — which he’s not — I felt pretty comfortable allowing as how I don’t feel like I’m in Kansas anymore either. I see how that was ambiguous, and I hope I have clarified it.

5 Comments | Autobiography, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Not Idiots After All

9 December 2012

In the long journey from my bapti-fundie roots to where I am now, the visible changes have been many. I raise my hands in worship and prayer these days. I touch people when I pray for them, and sometimes I anoint them with oil. I sing Psalms and say the Lord’s Prayer. And the Creed. I listen to good quality music of all types, not just that slop they cook up in whichever “Christian” label it is that Sony owns these days. I drink alcohol — and not always in Communion, either.

In truth, though, it all comes down to relatively few real changes, and the downstream consequences of those few changes. One of the big ones was the realization that the Christian world is not, in fact, largely composed of idiots.

See, where I started, we had it right, everybody else had it wrong, and no further thought beyond that was really required. Why were so many people so wrong? Well, the question didn’t really come up all that often. Probably they didn’t really read their Bibles nearly as much as we did. I mean, I went to an Episcopalian church once and I was the only person in the whole congregation that brought a Bible to church! (That really happened, by the way.)

Imagine my surprise when I discovered people in impossibly “liberal” denominations like the RCA or the United Methodist Church who really did love Jesus, and were not crazy or stupid. When I began to actually listen to these people, I discovered that they were very difficult to dismiss. They didn’t see things the same way I did, but the Spirit was clearly operating in their lives. Moreover, they had some things to teach me — and the lessons I learned from God through His people have certainly contributed to the distance that has grown up between me and my tribe over the years.

I had occasion to reflect on this as I was talking with someone last night about figuring out who you can work with, and who you can’t. It turns out that on paper, I still have most things in common with the people in the tribe that raised and trained me — certainly enough to be able to work together at least on some things. However, the common attitude they hold toward people who disagree with them is more than enough to keep us apart. They really do think that such people are irresponsible, or just stupid. I have not found that to be the case.

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

Neighborhood Sacramentology: Baptism

18 November 2012

In a previous post, I began discussing the gap between the western institutional structure we think of as “the church” and the activity of the Body of Christ as the Church in the world. Given that “church” as the New Testament uses the term is hardly coextensive with the 501(c)(3) corporate model that we use today in the US, what does that mean for sacramental observance?

For baptism, it’s a no-brainer. The New Testament shows us nary a single example of baptism in any other pattern than this: the new believer is baptized immediately upon profession of faith, by whoever is handy, with the nearest available water. There’s just no NT concept of getting interviewed by the elders or the priest first, waiting three weeks until the next time the baptistry will be filled up, none of that. Maybe there was an occasion with somebody, sometime, where wisdom dictated that one or more of those extrabiblical constraints was a good idea in some particular case, but there’s no call to be accepting that as the normal pattern.

So that one’s pretty obvious: if we follow the NT pattern, when someone professes faith, we baptize ’em right then. If they happen to be in a church building at the time, well, so be it. If not…the bathtub, pool, pond, or river will do just fine. If Baby Jesus could be laid in a manger, His disciples can be baptized in a horse trough.

1 Comment | Baptism, Ecclesiology, Kingdom Parish, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The (Western) Institutional Church…and everything else

28 October 2012

[In a number of ways this is a follow-up to the River Ecclesiology series.]

Suppose you want to know what God is up to, what is going on with the church and the growth of His Kingdom. Where do you look?

You could talk about this on a national or international scale, but let’s think locally for a moment. One place to start is with the telephone directory. Go that route, and you find, say, a couple dozen churches. Some of them are totally independent nondenominational entities. Others are affiliated with a denomination — some national, some international in scope. Some churches will have a meaningful denomination-type affiliation beyond the denominational level as well, as with NAPARC, the Eastern Orthodox communion, or the Anglican communion. There may also be churches with an affiliation that functions (in some ways) in place of, or parallel to, denominational ties, as with Acts 29, the National Association of Evangelicals, or the Grace Evangelical Society. All this you could establish with a phone directory, a few telephone calls, and perhaps a glance at the church org charts.

But is that it? There was a time, perhaps, when it would have been. Personal ministry has always happened mostly outside the walls of the church, but there was a time when most of the people doing personal ministry were church members, overseen (at least loosely) by their institutional church community. But no more. Today, there are countless communities and networks outside the church that exist for Kingdom purposes.

To continue your survey of what God is doing in your locale, you would now have to leave off a study of church institutions and begin to go out into restaurants and cafes, pubs and parks. There, you might find remarkable things.

You might find that the pastors of these various churches gather and pray for one another. Not one of those gatherings where you brag on how well things are going for 45 minutes and then shoot up a quick prayer for God’s blessing on all the pastors at the end. No. A serious gathering where the shepherds of the city armor up and go to war on each other’s behalf, and for their city. A quick, 15-minute sketch of where everyone’s at, then 45 minutes of laying siege to heaven. Or more. (Sounds like pure fantasy to some of you, I know, but I’ve seen it happen.) Quiet as it’s kept, you might even find the occasional Roman Catholic priest or Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor participating in these gatherings.

Given that kind of unity, informal leadership would likely emerge. In order to make things work at all with pastors from so many different denominations and backgrounds, they would have to take a great deal of care not to step on each other’s toes. But inevitably, as they cared for one another, a pattern would begin to emerge. Some few men would clearly be more capable of shepherding the others and tending their wounds, and so, as time passed, there would be a few who came to be first among equals — the pastors of the pastors, as it were.

By the way, that’s the ancient function of a bishop — pastor of pastors. So from the phone-directory-and-org-chart perspective, your town might have no bishop of its own, while at the same time having a number of denominational churches in subjection to their several bishops elsewhere, and others in subjection to no bishop at all. Meanwhile, functionally speaking, that same town might have two or three devoted local bishops deeply invested in caring for its pastors. If these men are wise, they might also be identifying the young pastors that have the potential to take on the same responsibilities in another decade or two — taking those young pastors under their wings and carefully, informally, without stepping on toes, mentoring them.

If you have that much going on among the pastors, you might also have a great deal more going on among the people: prayer gatherings; ministries to the aged, infirm, and poor; informal networks of neighbors that gather for a party at someone’s house now and then, the network of relationships among the ‘regulars’ of a particular cafe or pub that some local Christian has adopted as a Kingdom hub. These extended families of people might cross all the denominational lines, and draw in a number of people who will never darken the door of an institutional church. But they come to meet God and His people in a backyard, a park, a pub — to care and be cared for, to serve and be served.

How are we to think about these things? The host of a regular backyard gathering of neighbors would never think of his home as a chapel, nor himself as a parish priest. The Christian who adopts a pub and its regulars would not call himself a chaplain. The pastor who shepherds the other local pastors would never call himself a bishop. And yet, in a certain fairly obvious sense, aren’t they?

How do these unofficial efforts relate to the official, institutional ones? At what point are they churches? How would we know? How do they relate to sacramental observance? In abstaining from serving communion, is that regular neighborhood gathering maintaining proper boundaries and respect for the church, or is it a de facto church depriving its members of the Lord’s body and blood, to their detriment?

At a historical level, the old Reformation discussion of ‘marks of a true church’ would seem to be relevant to this discussion. However, it was born out of a very different historical situation. How can we translate that conversation into something helpful for this one?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I would very much like to. Those of you who are willing, let’s start a conversation about it.

2 Comments | Ecclesiology, Kingdom Parish, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Always?

21 October 2012

Back in the day, occasionally someone in Sunday school would look up at the teacher in all innocence and ask, “How come God doesn’t answer my prayers?”

“God always answers prayer,” the teacher would glibly say. “Sometimes He says yes; sometimes He says no; sometimes He says wait.”

That little Sunday school chestnut has always bothered me. It used to bother me because that’s not what we mean when we talk about answered prayer. When people talk about answered prayer, they mean that they prayed for Aunt Martha’s gout to get better, and it got better. If it got worse instead, nobody said, “See? God does answer prayer! (He just said no!)”

So I always thought it was a little disingenuous, a slippery redefining of the terms in order to avoid having to answer the hard question of how come God clearly heard Johnny’s request that his parents would not get divorced, and — as far as any of us could tell — just decided to ignore it.

*****
I still harbor that same objection, but now this whole “God always answers prayer” schtick bothers me for a different reason entirely: the people who say it don’t really believe it either.

Suppose I ask you for a lollipop. You have the same three possible responses:
“Sure; here you go.”
“Sorry, no.”
“Hang on a minute.”

Suppose you do nothing, and say nothing to me, even though I ask again, and then once more. Would I say that you answered me? Or would I say that you didn’t answer me, even though I asked you three times?

Some of you see where I’m going here, and I can already hear the protests. “I would be answering you in my actions.”

Really? How do I tell the difference between “no” and “wait”? I can’t, except by waiting until you eventually — in ten minutes or ten years — give me a lollipop, or until I die, whichever comes first. Not the most kind and helpful possible responses, huh?

If you treated me like that, even if it was just over something as insignificant as a request for a lollipop, you’d be a jerk. How much worse if it was over a request for a job, for healing my wife, or something else equally life-altering?

But how many of you think God is exactly like that?

Jesus said, “If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father give good gifts to those who ask him?” Most of us don’t believe that God is much better than an earthly father; we believe He is incomparably worse — the sort of dad who, when we ask for a fish, would give us a viper, make sure we got bit, and then tell us that it will improve our character. We send dads like that to jail. The early Christians used to mock the pagans for worshiping gods that indulged in adultery, incest, rape, theft and every sort of debauchery while at the same time disapproving of those behaviors in human society. We have become like those ancient pagans, rather than like our fathers who mocked them.

*****
I have good news though. God is not a bit like we think He is. He really does answer prayer. For example, when Paul asked God to take away his thorn in the flesh, God answered him: “My grace is sufficient for you; My strength is perfected in your weakness.” That’s what our loving Father sounds like when He says “No.”

Know what it sounds like when He says, “Wait”? It isn’t the silent treatment; it sounds like “Wait.”

The question is, do we listen?

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

The Kingdom of God Has Come

30 September 2012

“But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the Kingdom of God is come upon you.”

With these simple words, Jesus raised the stakes on the religious leaders. He had just cast out a mute demon, a difficult feat that some rabbis maintained could only be done by Messiah Himself. Rather than believing, the Pharisees had rejected Him again and accused him of casting out demons by Satan’s power. Jesus pointed out what a foolish thing it would be for the ruler of demons to cast out his own demons, but the real challenge was yet to come.

The real challenge was simple: What if He wasn’t using Satan’s power? What if it was the Holy Spirit? What then?

Then the Kingdom of God is come. God’s rule, already firmly established in heaven, is breaking into earth, and where that is happening, the agents of the kingdom of darkness are being driven away.

The Kingdom is future. One day, we will see God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven, and Christ’s enemies will be His footstool. As Hebrews 2:5-9 observes, that day has not yet arrived, and so we can confidently say that the Kingdom has not yet come.

But then again, there are little pockets where we see exactly those things happening — God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven, and Christ’s enemies crushed under His feet. Jesus was pointing out one such pocket. In that place, at that time, the rule of God was being asserted, which is to say that the Kingdom had arrived.

***

Abram’s servant, seeking a wife for Isaac, met her at a well. Jacob met Rachel at a well. Moses met Zipporah at a well. In the Bible, when a man meets a woman at a well, you can practically hear the wedding bells in the background. So when Jesus meets a woman at the well outside Sychar, we know what is about to happen.

Jesus is going to marry Samaria.

Samaria has had five “husbands,” five nations who possessed her (see 2 Kings 17:24*), and the nation that dominates her now, Rome, is not really her husband. The emperor is just using her for the tax revenue. She’s defeated, hopeless, oppressed — a captive, trapped in the kingdom of darkness.

She meets Jesus, and her world changes. Finally, a man who knows her: “He told me everything I ever did,” she later says. He bypasses the theological smokescreen she throws up on the Gerzim-Zion question (there was a right answer, but she didn’t really care about it anyway). Instead, He speaks to the deep need of her heart: to have reality in her relationship with God, to have life. She drinks the water that He gives, and as He promised, it wells up in her and becomes a fountain of life. All her neighbors hear about it from her, and then meet Jesus for themselves, and He remains a few days in Sychar.

Now here’s the key question: In terms of the kingdoms of light and darkness, what just happened?

Obvious, isn’t it? Yahweh’s reign has come to Sychar, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom of God has come to Sychar. Has it come perfectly? No. Has it come fully? Nope. But has it come truly?

Of course. Where Jesus is, the Kingdom is already forcefully advancing.

***

So the question is, do we believe His promise?

Jesus sent His disciples out, not just with a commission, but with a promise: “All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and disciple the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to do all the things that I commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Do we believe His promise?

If we do, then we know that He is with us wherever we go. As He cast out demons by the power of the Holy Spirit, so we have the indwelling Holy Spirit in us, always.

If the Kingdom breaks out wherever Jesus is, then why shouldn’t the Kingdom break out wherever His Body is?

***

If we understand that it’s God’s will for the Kingdom to break out wherever we go, then we can pray boldly. He wants to break the domain of darkness through us. From driving away oppressing spirits to freeing broken people, we are agents of God, seeking to establish His reign. Knowing that He sent us out, that He is with us, and that He wants to establish outposts of His reign on earth, we pray as Jesus taught us: “Thy name be hallowed; Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

_________________
*many thanks to Michele for pointing out the 2 Kings 17:24 connection.

3 Comments | Kingdom of God, Meditations, Telos of the Gift, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

God Speaks

23 September 2012

There are certain experiences that are just common to being a Christian, and pretty much everybody who’s been a Christian longer than a few days has had them.

Here’s one: You’re reading your Bible, minding your own business, when out of the clear blue sky one of the verses smacks you right between the eyes, with an immediate practical effect. It might be that you suddenly know what to do about a certain situation in your life. It might be a particularly targeted word of comfort, or a sudden understanding of someone else’s point of view. You might have read that verse hundreds of times before — you might even have it memorized. But in that verse, at that moment, God suddenly opens your eyes.

Depending on your background, you may call it a rhema, a prophetic revelation, a word of wisdom, or the Holy Spirit making application of the doctrine circulating in your soul. The description does make a practical difference, but that’s beyond the scope of our discussion at the moment. The point at the moment is that if you’ve been a Christian any length of time, you’ve had this experience, and it’s undeniably supernatural.

Cut away all the theological window-dressing that we pile on top of it, and there it is: God spoke to you, and what He gave you was more than the written text of Scripture. I can hear the protesting: “No, it was just an understanding of how to apply the Scriptures!” Yes, it certainly was. Where did it come from? From God. And a moment before, you didn’t have it. God communicated that understanding to you, at a specific time and place. Whether He used particular words or a picture in your head or a sudden gestalt awareness, God spoke to you.

So let’s just dispense with the argument over whether God still speaks today. We all know better. And let’s be honest, it’s not like that argument ever had a biblical leg to stand on anyway. God makes Adam and talks to him. God speaks to Noah, Abraham, Moses, the entire nation of Israel, Joshua, numerous judges, David, Solomon, a whole potful of prophets, Peter, Paul, Agabus, the daughters of Philip. “But He doesn’t still speak that way to His people today,” said no biblical author ever. No, seriously, where does it ever say, anywhere, that He has stopped speaking to His people? Yeah. Nowhere.

I know, I know. Many leading theologians think God has stopped speaking to His people today. They have heaped up arguments and reasons until the pile rivals the size of the Tower of Babel.

But when pressed, they will admit that they, too, have had this experience. God has spoken to them just as He has spoken to the rest of us, and they know it.

In Jesus and by the power of the Spirit, we have been invited into the perichoretic fellowship of the Triune Godhead. God speaks to us, and we know it. What we can’t explain is why we hear Him so rarely, and so poorly. So let us just admit from the outset that all those arguments that God no longer speaks are so much theological thumb-sucking. They are self-comfort, a sop to our wounded consciences. We know we need to hear from God more than we do, but if we can blame it on Him, then we don’t have to take responsibility.

So let us lay aside the thumb-sucking, and commence with the much more interesting and useful discussion of why we hear God so poorly, and how we can hear Him better.

Comments Off on God Speaks | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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