Freely Give

8 August 2010

Evangelical fundamentalists are my people.  Some of them wish they could disown me, and some days I wish they could too, but our relationship is a fact of history–which is to say that it is God’s Providence.  It is among these people that God has called me to serve, and to serve not just as a sheep, but also as a shepherd.  Jesus is the Chief Shepherd, of course.  All the sheep are really His, and all His people are His sheep.  But some of us are also shepherds, under His direction.  The Church being what it presently is, there are a lot of different sub-flocks, divided both by geography (which is fine) and by doctrine/history (which is not).  There are Anglican shepherds, Methodist shepherds, Baptist shepherds, Eastern shepherds, and so on.  I am an evangelical shepherd.

I have friends in other traditions who urge me to convert to their tradition.  They argue that in my tradition, the sheep are  sick.  In their traditions, they say, there is medicine for this sickness.  (Of course their traditions have their own weaknesses, but let’s leave that aside for now.)  Granting the correctness of the diagnosis–and at some points it is correct–how could I leave for that reason?

What kind of a shepherd leaves a flock because it is sick?  A good shepherd heals the sick, and is willing to accept medicine from whoever has it to give.

“You have no right to this medicine,” says the stingy traditionalist, “unless you come serve in our corner of Christ’s great flock.  This medicine belongs only to us.”  But no.  What do they have, that they did not receive as a gift?  And if they received it as a gift, why do they boast as though they did not?  If the medicine heals, then it comes from Christ the Great Physician, and if it comes from Christ, it is for all His sheep: “Freely you have received; freely give.”

1 Comment | Ecclesiology, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Reading by the River

25 July 2010

As I was chatting with someone about my last post, he wanted to know what I was reading that was causing so much trouble.  I thought about a couple of different ways of answering the question, but I think the best strategy here is just to talk about what I’ve been reading and listening to recently.  So here it is:

I read my Bible daily.  I happen to use the New King James version, because that’s what I’ve been using since I was in fourth grade, and I haven’t found a good enough reason to switch to anything else.  Devotionally, I’ve found myself returning to the Eastern Church’s Jordanville prayer book (editing out prayer to saints, the Virgin Mary, and so on), but when I went up to St. Mary’s Glacier, I took my Book of Common Prayer for the Coverdale Psalter it contains.  Yes, I like NKJV psalms too, but my BCP fits in a sandwich bag and is a lot lighter to carry up the mountain.

I attend Englewood Bible Church, in Englewood, Colorado, which I suppose I could best categorize as evangelical fundamentalist.  There I weekly hear the preaching of Pastor Bob Hayes, who is presently taking us through Hebrews.  In the Monday morning staff meetings, he’s taking us through a study of 1 Thessalonians.

I just finished a course from The Teaching Company on C. S. Lewis, spanning his life and works in a breathless 12 sessions.  My next one from them will be a second trip through Brooks Landon’s Building Great Sentences.  In between, I’m listening to James Jordan’s Bucer Institute lectures on the Ten Commandments and George Thompson’s second set of lectures on the Middle Ages.  (Depending on my mood, there’s a Doug Wilson sermon thrown in here and there; I get one every week thanks to the largess of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, for which I am very grateful.)

I do most of my listening in the car, and in between lectures and sermons, I salt in music and spoken-word performances.  Current listening is Kim Taylor, Kelly Minter, Sligo Rags, Sons of Korah, Gretchen Wilson,  a bit of Toby Keith, and a few songs by Over the Rhine; also poets Jack McCarthy and Frankie Drayfus.

I’ve been reading Orthodox Psychotherapy by Archimandrite Hierotheos Vlachos for nearly a year, off and on.  Tough sledding.  I read until I can’t understand any more, then I stop and rest awhile.  In a continuing effort to understand it, I’m reading The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition by the same author, which turns out to be shorter and more general, but also a lot easier to follow.  It’s clearing up some of the questions I had.  In the same tradition, I am involved in a reading/discussion group that is going through The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky a chapter at a time, and then meeting on Skype to discuss it.  We’ve suspended the group temporarily due to upheavals in two of our lives, but we’re hoping to begin again shortly.  I find Lossky to be a starry-eyed idealist when it comes to his own tradition, and he indulges in generalizations that would make the boys at Credenda/Agenda blush (I read them, too), but I find that after my initial outrage subsides, I benefit quite a bit from grappling with his root concerns.

I found a copy of  Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker just yesterday, and began reading.  Thus far, it is a breathtaking reflection on the relationship between God as artist and what human artists do.  Denser and more linear than N. D. Wilson’s Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl (which I keep by my bedside, and to which I keep returning), but similarly life-giving.  Speaking of the folks up at Canon, I would be reading my way through a copy of The Forgotten Heavens right now, but it’s out of stock.  Hope they fix that sometime soon.

After a couple of abortive attempts at reading it, I’ve returned to Beyond Prediction, by Drane, Clifford and Johnson.  It’s a study of the Tarot, in which the authors argue that there’s a Christian message in the symbolism of the Tarot.  These guys aren’t just sitting around theorizing; they actually use their approach to evangelize New Age types and lead them to the Scriptures.  (Picture walking up to someone who’s messing about with Tarot cards, and asking, Philip-like, “Do you understand what you are reading?”)  Now, with all respect, I strongly suspect that the authors are a little nuts.  But if you believe that Christianity is the fulfillment of paganism (or, as I’d prefer to put it, paganism is a parody of Christianity) — and I do — then you can’t ignore the few people who are doing work in that direction.

Since I continue to take a shot at fiction writing every November (and because I just enjoy it), I read a bit of fiction most nights before I go to sleep.  A week or so ago, I finished Frank Herbert’s Soul Catcher, which is a fairly direct inversion of Christianity — a fictional picture of what the quasi-judicial slaughter of an innocent might mean in a pagan milieu.  Yesterday, I finished Storm Front, the first of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels.  I’ve read a couple of the later ones, but hadn’t gone back to catch up on what happened earlier in the series.  Next up is Stranger in Paradise by Robert Parker.  (Why not Christian fiction?  I do, occasionally, when I get a recommendation I trust.  Mostly, I refuse, because reading Christian fiction is like doing your grocery shopping in the Safeway dumpster.  You can find some good stuff, but what you have to go through to get it….)

I don’t much read magazines, but I have the current issue of Grace in Focus sitting on my desk.  I skimmed it last night, and by the time you read this, I’ll have read it over again.  I also have an Imprimis from Hillsdale College around here somewhere that I need to read, and I’m hunting for someplace locally that carries Journal of the Asian Martial Arts. I buy about every other issue, depending on whether it has enough articles that interest me, but I haven’t found a local vendor yet.

My birthday was late in June, and my dad gave me Branding Faith: Why Some Churches and Nonprofits Impact Culture and Others Don’t by Phil Cooke.  I’m about halfway through it.  He’s got a lot of good to say, but to be honest I can only stand so much discussion of branding at once.  Another very generous friend recently gave me Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Advice, a collection of 46 of Calvin’s letters on such subjects as the Lord’s Supper, church discipline, marriage, and judicial issues.  It lends itself to reading in spurts, which I am doing.  Speaking of letters, I am also engaged in a long-term project to read through the letters of Flannery O’Connor (or at least the ones in the Library of America edition of her collected works.  After her, the letters of C. S. Lewis, which will take a very long while.

Also in spurts, I’m working my way through Comic Poems, an Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets anthology edited by Peter Washington.  The poets are as diverse as Dorothy Parker, Martial, and anonymous composers of timeless limericks.

I have had Cassiodorus’ Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning on my Amazon wish list for over a year, but it was rather pricey, so I hadn’t gotten it.  A month or so ago, a used copy came available for about $5 and I bought it.  I am now most of the way through Book 1, and really looking forward to Book 2.

On a recent trip to Colorado Springs, I bumped into The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose.  I got my hands on a copy, and stalled out halfway through it.  The description of student evangelism at Daytona Beach’s Bike Week/Spring Break was just too painful to read all at once.  I put it aside for a few days, came back.  It took me several days to get through it, a piece at a time.  I am now past that part, and the sailing is a bit smoother.  I expect to write more about this book once I’ve finished it.  Also whilst down in the Springs, a friend lent me his copy of Gerard Lohfink’s Jesus and Community.  Looks like dense reading.  I skimmed over it last week, and will read it in earnest shortly.

I am also working my way through Michael Bull’s Totus Christus, which is taking much, much longer than I expected.  It’s a big, dense book, and I’m having trouble sorting through what I think of it.

I don’t follow blogs much, other than Michele’s, but I browse widely: Stephen Wedgeworth, Michael Bull, Jeremy Myers, Peter Leithart, Doug and Evan Wilson, among other Christians.  Also, two of my favorite fiction authors, Steven Barnes and Steve Perry, both of whom write solid, readable stories, and both of whom practice the same martial art that I do, albeit on a different branch of the family tree, and both of whom blog about writing, martial art, and a variety of other issues.

So that’s a couple of Roman Catholics, a couple of Free Grace types, three Anglicans (if you count Thomas Cranmer), some Eastern Christians, a bunch of Reformed guys, a handful of difficult-to-categorize Protestant mutts, and some pagans to round the whole thing out — and this is about normal for my reading load.  Do I value them all equally?  No, of course not.  Do I recommend that you go out and read/listen to them all?  Again, no.   Can a discerning Christian profit from any/all of these?  Sure.

Everybody doesn’t have to read widely, and most people don’t.  But those of us who write, need to read.  Those of us who wind up being professional theologians (in some sense) need to read.  There’s just not much benefit to reading stuff you already agree with entirely; opening up the windows to let some air in is not just recommended, it’s required.

2 Comments | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

People of the River

21 July 2010

In the beginning, in Eden, God planted a garden to the east.  In the west was a mountain sanctuary, where the unfallen Lucifer Himself walked back and forth in the midst of the fiery stones.  A river flowed out of the sanctuary to water the garden, and from the garden it divided into four rivers and watered the world.  After the fall, Adam and Eve are sent further east, away from the sanctuary and out of the garden.  The way back into the presence of God is upriver, westward, but it is blocked by an angel with a flaming sword.

In the end, the New Jerusalem descends from heaven to earth, and a river of the water of life flows from under the throne of God and of the Lamb.

The river that waters the world flows from the sanctuary; the life of the world flows from the focus of worship.   This is true in the beginning, and it is true in the end.  But what about in between?

In between, there is development.

In Abraham’s time, there is no river.  He travels a desolate land, digging wells, building altars and sitting under trees.  He worships God at the altars, and God hears him.  But there is only still water in his wells, and only temporarily.  After  time, he has to leave the well and move on to the next place.  The water does not flow.

In the Tabernacle, there is once again a sanctuary, and the laver provides a portable well.  It’s not a river; it’s just still water.  At least it travels with them, but the water does not flow.

In the Temple, the sanctuary stays in one place.  The bronze Sea provides water, and arrayed in front of the Sea, extending toward the east, is a double row of water chariots.  It’s a picture of a river, of flowing water.   But even so, the “river” doesn’t flow outside the temple—if you want to see it, you have to come in; the water doesn’t come to you.

And then on that great day of the feast, Jesus stood up and cried out, “He who believes on Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his belly will flow rivers of living water.”  John adds that Jesus was speaking of the Holy Spirit.

Through the Holy Spirit, the life-giving river is restored to the world.  Every believer is the sanctuary, and from every sanctuary, the living water flows.  The Body of Christ on earth waters the world, and will do so until the day that our Head, the Lamb of God, sets His throne in Jerusalem, and the water pours from under His throne.

The river flows from the sanctuary, and wherever you find the river flowing from, there is the sanctuary.  Where the people of the river congregate to worship, there you find the church, and where you find the church, you will find an outpost of the Church.

The continuity of the Church is not a continuity of ordinations, as Rome would have it, nor even a continuity of baptisms, as some of the Reformed (e.g., Doug Wilson) would have it, nor yet a continuity of litmus-test scheme of spiritual stages, as though becoming Christlike were like becoming an Eagle Scout.  It is a continuity of experience, the experience of living water, an actual relationship with the living Christ.  It’s the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and we ought to guard it as Paul instructed us.

This is my ecclesiology.

****

The water appears in surprising places.

I have met a man who was desperately concerned that every last jot and tittle of his doctrine be in order, precise and technically correct to the last syllable.  Given what he knew, he ought to have been a fountain, and yet his every word was poison.  I have met a muddled, confused believer who hardly knew anything, and knew it, and yet the water gushed from her in torrents.

Watch these two for a year, or five.  The second one will be less confused, more knowledgeable, and still a spring of life-giving water.  The first one, unless God intervenes dramatically, will still be making converts twice as much a son of hell as himself, and his doctrine will grow steadily more perverse.

The water is the first thing.  With it, we grow.  Without it, we die, and too often, we take others with us.

The water flows from the saints of past ages, men and woman who walked with God.  Many of them were deeply confused, or just plain wrong, about things that seem quite obvious to us.

No doubt they would say the same of us — and they’d be right, just as we are.   “He who believes in Me, as the Scriptures have said” Jesus cried, “out of his belly will flow rivers of living water.”  The criterion here is not perfection; if it were,we would qualify no better than anyone else.  Thank God, it’s much simpler than that: believe in Jesus.

Many do, in many traditions, and the water flows from them, as Jesus promised.

****

My friends in other traditions are certain that I will convert.  No one can think so highly of the Book of Common Prayer and not become Anglican, one friend will say.   “Five years,” another says, “and you’ll be Eastern Orthodox.”  (The first time someone told me that was ten years ago.)  A third friend says that because I believe in miracles and answered prayer, I’m a charismatic in my heart.  I ought to quit kicking against the goads and just come to his church, he tells me.

On the other hand, a number within my own (evangelical fundamentalist) tradition are equally certain that I am converting to something else — the Roman church, the emergent church, a generic postmodernism…

I am not.  I intend to stay right where I am.  So why do I drink deeply from so many sources outside my own tradition?  Am I discontent?  Well, yes; my tradition needs reform.  But I am not seeking to turn my tradition into some other tradition, nor am I trying to assemble some unholy pomo-pastiche of “the greatest hits of Christendom,”  as though I could get it right where all other traditions have failed.  I am doing something much simpler than that:  Christian fellowship.  Where the water flows, I drink — and the water flows in the most surprising places.  Wherever God graciously permits me to find it, I take it and share as much as I can with the people among whom God has called me to serve.  I can do no more, and in good conscience neither can I do any less.

5 Comments | Ecclesiology, Meditations, Parables | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Preaching in a Formal Liturgical Framework

11 July 2010

In God’s providence, I have shifted jobs, locations, and churches, and my days of regular preaching and participation in formal liturgy have come to a definite pause.  I wasn’t at it very long — less than a full year — but it seems an appropriate time to stop and ask what I learned.

At the end of last December, when I’d only been doing it for four weeks, I wrote the following:

I’ve been at this for mere weeks now, and I’m sure there are all sorts of things about preaching in a formal liturgy that I still don’t know.  But I have found a series of interesting things as we’ve made the transition.

Obedience is a lot of hard work.  Not exactly news, but there it is.

Preaching a sermon that fits in with a more formal liturgy takes conscious preparation.  It sounds obvious when I say it like this, but if you’ve done both, you know what I’m talking about.  There’s a very real sense of changing gears here.

The sermon has to be a bit shorter to accommodate everything else we’re doing.  Courtesy of the way I was trained to do exegesis, I started learning how to condense in my second year of seminary (2000), and I’ve been working at it ever since.  I can condense the same content into a shorter time span.  All it takes is time in the study…

Crafting a liturgy also takes time.  Lots of time.  The first week, I spent all of my sermon prep time, Monday through Thursday, on the liturgy.  Come Friday, I’m pulling out my sermon notes that I normally would have picked up again on Monday.   Better scheduling needed here, but I expect to have to work twice as hard until we get the liturgy up and running.

The [liturgical] framework enhances the preaching.  A lot.  I can’t put my fingers on the differences yet, but I can feel them.  There is something about doing it this way that makes a huge difference.  More on this when I have something intelligent to say about what the differences are.

I’ve had six months since then, and while there are still many, many things I don’t know, I do have a few more things to say.

The liturgy makes counseling easier. The training in confessing our sins and receiving assurance of pardon sets the stage for church-wide application of James 5:16.  Believers are priests, and this is a priestly function.  But evangelicals don’t know how to do it.  The liturgy gives them a model; they are trained every week.

The counseling causes the liturgy to take hold. After I counsel a congregant through some sin issue, assist them in confessing the sin to the Lord and assure them of His pardon, and (of course) help them to begin growing beyond it, I have the privilege of watching their eyes light up when we get to the assurance of pardon in the service.  Their certainty that He has forgiven even that sin is palpable.

Doing formal liturgy well requires a spiritually mature, musically talented worship leader as well as a capable pastor. We were missing that, and I could feel the lack.  Good liturgy takes teamwork; it’s not the kind of thing that one man should do solo.  I learned this a little too late to do anything about it, and I’m grateful that God blessed our obedience in spite of me missing this (in retrospect) pretty obvious point.  I was blessed with a willing body of congregants who were committed to being obedient to the Scriptures in our liturgy.  We could never have done what we did without their willing help and participation, and I’m eternally grateful to them, each and all, for their suggestions, support, participation and commitment.

God blesses obedience. Our execution was often fumbling and inept.  How could it be otherwise?  We’d never done anything like this before.  But God was kind to us, and we saw results beyond all proportion to our skill.  Put another way, skill is no substitute for obedience.  We’ve all been to services where there was vastly more skill in evidence, and yet we were left empty.  Taking heed to God’s commands makes a real difference in weekly edification.

4 Comments | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Of Wickedness, Blessing and Gratitude

4 July 2010

Today we celebrate our freedom from foreign domination.  Our fathers had a compact with their king.  Parliament, with no legal standing whatsoever, violated that compact, and despite many appeals for protection, our king allowed it to happen.  With no choices but to submit to unlawful tyranny or fight, our fathers chose to take up arms.  God judged between our fathers on one hand, and the scofflaw Parliament and tyrannical king on the other, and today we celebrate the results.  A ragged band of colonists, short on supplies of every kind, fought the greatest military power in the world of their day.  God granted them strength beyond their numbers, tenacity beyond any reasonable expectation, favor in the eyes of their allies, and ultimately, victory.

Praise Yahweh, the house of Hanover is fallen.

A nation so blessed with freedom from tyranny ought to respect that God-given legacy, and honor the One who gave it.

We have not.

  • We have repeatedly, even habitually, disregarded the biblical ethics that govern just war.  Our sins range from  straightforward wars for others’ territory (Mexican War, Spanish-American War) to the deliberate slaughter of civilians and destruction of their sustenance (Sherman’s march to the sea in the War Between the States, the area bombing and firestorm tactics of WWII, of which Dresden is only the most famous of many examples).
  • We have allowed the creation of a fiat money system that steals purchasing power from those who have worked and saved their money, and puts that purchasing power back in the hands of the government and its designees through inflation.  This is using false weights and measures, and it is an abomination to the Lord.
  • We have legally sacrificed nearly 50 million babies to the false gods of  financial, social and sexual convenience–our very own Molech.  We add more than a million to that number every year.

I could go on; I won’t.

But the world is a messy place, and the news is not all bad.  The same country that committed all the above crimes is also the hub of unprecedented good deeds:

  • Americans are by far the most generous people on earth.  Our charitable contributions, measured either in total or per capita, dwarf those of the world’s other nations.
  • Largely through the efforts of American missionaries, mission agencies and supporting churches, the gospel has gone out to the ends of the earth.
  • Bible translation efforts, again funded by American largess, have exploded.  The contribution of Christian missionaries to linguistics is so significant that when the Long Now Foundation produced their famous Rosetta Disk, they used Genesis 1 as an exemplar passage–because the Bible was the only document translated into more than a few hundred languages. In other words, we were the only ones that cared enough to go and learn all the languages of the world; the linguists had to deal with us because we were the only ones who had the information they wanted.

These things are possible for us because God has blessed us with power and wealth; He has been kind to us far beyond what our sins deserve.  Israel was judged harshly for the same crimes that we have committed.  Whence this kindness to us?  Romans tells us that the kindness of God is intended to lead us to repentance.

On this day, of all days, let us be grateful for our fathers, most of whom loved and served the God of Israel, and tried to found a Christian country.  Let us be grateful that God has been kind to us although we have not honored their legacy as we ought to have done.  And let us pray for the repentance of our nation before it is too late.

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

7 Comments | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

A Praise

7 June 2010

Truly, all wisdom is Yours,
And from Your lips come knowledge and discernment.
Before I cried out to You,
Before the prayer was formed in my heart,
Your eyes saw my plight
And You gave Your servant understanding.

Therefore I will praise You while I live,
I will bless Your name in the company of Your saints.
For You have dealt bountifully with me.

Sing to the Lord, my nation!
And kneel before the Lamb, all you nations of the earth!
Serve Him gladly, for He is great;
Inquire of Him, for in Him is all wisdom and knowledge.

He founded the seas;
He conceived the plankton before any existed.
The blue whale is His;
His mouth spoke the hummingbird,
The lions in their pride and the larks in their exaltation.
The ebbing tides proclaim His glory,
And the rising mountains utter His words.

Who is like Yahweh?
Show me, and I will praise him.
Who is like the Son of God?
Display him, and every knee will bow.
But the gods live at His pleasure,
And at His rebuke they will burn like chaff.

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

Revivalism+Pietism+Free Grace Gospel=Death

23 May 2010

American Christian culture is revivalistic and pietistic, and when we mix those prevailing elements with the Free Grace gospel message as it is commonly presented, the results are spiritually debilitating, if not fatal.

Revivalism teaches us that the individual conversion experience is by far the most important spiritual experience of a person’s life.  You’ll hear a man telling the story of how he met his wife say something like “…and then I asked her to marry me, and amazingly, she said yes.  It was the most important day of my life — except for when I came to Christ, of course.”

Pietism teaches us that it is not the externals that matter, but the internal condition of the heart before God.

Combined, these two teach that an internal, heart conversion is the quintessence of spiritual experience, and everything else comes in a distant second.

That’s already all kinds of wrong, but let it pass for now.

Add to that already dangerous mix the biblical gospel message: being born into God’s family is a free gift, not dependent in any way on your own works before, during, or after the new birth.  Once you’re in, you’re in forever.

The sum is this: the quintessence of all spiritual experience is a totally free, internal, heart conversion that delivers you from hell and unchangeably guarantees you a place in heaven.  That is by far the most important moment of your life; nothing else even comes close.  Of course you’re supposed to do good works and all that, but that’s very secondary to having the conversion experience itself, which is given to you and to which you can contribute nothing.

What sort of life does that teaching produce?

****

Let’s ask it a different way.  Suppose someone really believed that physical birth was the high point of his whole life.  Being squeezed out through the birth canal was as good as it was ever going to get, and everything else was downhill from there.  Isn’t that a twisted way to look at life?

What sort of life do you think that person is likely to have?

Would you be surprised if that person became suicidal?

Me neither.

****

Believing that spiritual birth is the high-water mark of the whole Christian life induces spiritual suicide.

FG believers need to understand that until we root out the underlying culture of revivalism and pietism among us, people will come to Christ based on a clear, correct gospel message, and then immediately get confused because at a deep, deep level, they can’t face believing that the high-water mark of their spiritual experience is already behind them.  Revivalism does that already without a FG gospel message, but our clarity on the place of discipleship vis-a-vis the new birth forces the issue into high relief.

People need to believe that the rest of their life matters, and that “further up, and further in” there are glorious heights that await them.  We have allowed them to think that getting into heaven is by far the most important thing, so in a move as unpredictable as sunrise, they begin to think that getting into heaven depends on how they live the rest of their lives.

That is a fatal mistake for an unbeliever.  For someone who’s already believed, it’s still a dangerous, terribly unhealthy mistake to become confused on this point.  But it is not nearly as unhealthy, not nearly as suicide-inducing, as believing that the best and most important spiritual experience of their lives is already behind them.

****

Which is to say that the Free Grace theology commonly presented fails to win a hearing because its end product, taken as a whole, is often more spiritually destructive to the life of a believer than the end product of, say, Reformed or Arminian theologies — which at least give some motivation to keep moving — and at some deep level, people seem to recognize it.

****

So what do we do?

We go back to the text of Scripture. Where, pray tell, do we see Scripture supporting the idea that conversion is the most important spiritual experience you’ll ever have?

Nowhere I know of.  If you’ve got a passage, by all means let me know.  I’d love to see it.

As far as I can tell, Scripture is not a revivalistic document.  Imagine Moses telling the Exodus Generation, “All right, you’ve just been delivered from bondage and passed through the Red Sea, and that is the most important event that will ever happen to you as a nation.  Nothing else will even come close.”  Imagine Joshua telling the Conquest Generation, “All right, you’ve crossed the Jordan and entered into the Land.  This is the most important thing that will ever happen to you.”  Ridiculous, yes?  There was more to do, further heights to be attained.  True, they could never have reached those further heights without the initial step, but that doesn’t mean that all the focus should be on the initial step.

In fact, of those two generations, one committed suicide by refusing to keep moving forward.  The other pressed on, and achieved everything God had planned for them.  The initial experience, while important, was neither most important, nor did it complete God’s agenda.

We see the same pattern in the New Testament.  Jesus commissions His disciples to “go therefore, and disciple the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”  Note where the focus is: not on the initial evangelism, although certainly it’s not possible to fulfill the Great Commission without that, but on making disciples.  That means continuing to learn and grow and develop into all that Christ intended each person to be.  And this is the focus of Christ’s parables as well.  Scholars dispute about whether the thorny ground and stony ground represent truly regenerate people, and about whether the servant who buried his one talent in the ground represents someone who goes to heaven or hell.  (Yes, and heaven, but that’s another post.)  The point here is that no matter which side of that debate an interpreter might take, nobody thinks starting well and finishing badly is the goal.  Everyone understands that the goal is to be the good ground, the servants with five or ten talents — that is, to be a believer who goes on to maturity and becomes all that a believer should be.

****

So just for giggles, let me make a modest proposal.  I’m not saying it’s true, and I’m certainly not attached to it.  I can’t prove it.  I don’t know of anywhere in the Bible that says anything like this.  (Have I put in enough disclaimers yet?)  However, I think it will be good exercise to see if you can prove it wrong.

Here it is: The day you came to Christ might be the most important day of your life up to that point, but it is the least important day of your life as a Christian. Who you will be as a Christian depends on every day after that, and every one of them is more important than the day of your birth — today being the most important of all.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hermeneutics is not a Science

24 February 2010

…not the way anybody understand the word today, at any rate.

Of course we defend the notion of hermeneutical science by repairing to some of the older definitions of the word science, chiefly the ones that boil down to “knowledge.”  And there’s nothing wrong with referring to hermeneutical knowledge.

But today, when you hear the word science, you think of experimental science, that endeavor begun by Christians as an investigation of God’s creation, but which has today morphed into a false god in its own right–and one which our society publicly worships.  In our eyes, science gave us rocket ships, birth control, the microwave oven, the vacuum cleaner, cheap produce from Chile, and Christmas vacations with Grandma, even though she lives on the other side of the country.   Religion, on the other hand, gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials and 9/11.  So we worship science, by which we mean both God-less humanistic empiricism and knowledge about the real, tangible world — as sharply opposed to the fantasy world of religion.

(In truth, science, even done by atheists, continues to survive on the borrowed capital of its Christian roots, but that’s another post.)

The point here is, science today is the name of an idol, and attaching the idol’s name to something gives it a veneer of respectability which is, of course, borrowed from the idol by association.  Hence Brand X Whitening Strips, scientifically proven to make your teeth gleam, Acme Weight Loss Pills, scientifically shown to reduce weight by an average of 10 pounds in 3 months, and so on.  Scientifically in this usage means really, actually, in the real world — again, as distinctly opposed to the fantasy world of religion.  Can you imagine someone advertising Brand X Whitening Strips as religiously proven to make your teeth gleam?   Endorsed by five pastors instead of five scientists?

In this climate, when an American evangelical talks about the science of hermeneutics, he is dressing biblical interpretation in the borrowed robes of godless empiricism in order to make it respectable to our God-hating society.  “No, really,” he whines,  “hermeneutics is an objective science.”  This is just begging for table scraps–and from the table of demons, at that.

There are two sets of problems here.  The first is that too many of us believe our own propaganda.  Many evangelicals today, especially of the more conservative sort, really do think that the study of the Bible is a purely empirical matter, and when they contend vociferously that hermeneutics is a science, they really do mean the word in an idolatrous way.  They mean that when you set up your textual sausage-grinder with the proper set of hermeneutical principles, you can shove a text into the top of the grinder, turn the crank, and the meaning comes out the side in a nice, neat casing–and the same meaning comes out the same way, no matter who turns the crank, as long as the principles are right.

Therefore, so the reasoning goes, a great exegete can be a towering saint, a liberal buffoon or a heresiarch; doesn’t make any difference.  If he’s a scholar and his hermeneutics are sound, then…

The problem here is that God did not write the Scriptures to be studied as a detached academic pursuit, but to be studied diligently in order to be believed and obeyed — every word, every letter, every last i-dot and serif.  To claim that an academic curiosity-seeker can subject the text to his idolatrous sausage-grinder and get the same meaning as an obedient saint is just silly.  If it happens, it is a miracle, and purely God’s kindness to the academic.

To read the Word of God is to encounter God Himself speaking, and this cannot be done in a neutral way.  The reader is always for God or against Him, and this orientation greatly influences the interpretive endeavor.  But that’s only the beginning.

The other bit is that a believer who has believed the propaganda is going to miss much of the Bible too.  The Bible is not a science experiment.  It is not a systematic theology text.  It cannot profitably be read like one.  The Bible is art, and God is the artist.  It is laden with associations, symbols, foreshadowing, jokes, double entendres, and connotations.  Words don’t mean just one thing; metaphors adorn nearly every sentence; symbols abound.  Literal meaning is present — richly present — but in the same way that it’s present in a good painting.  We have no extant photographs, but let us suppose (correctly, I should think) that the Mona Lisa looks like the model who sat for it.  It is a good likeness; the literal meaning is there.  If we look at the Mona Lisa and say, “a photograph would have been better” — that is the literalist’s eye, and it’s true as far as it goes.  Sort of.  It misses a great deal of richness and depth that is present in the painting, and would not be in the photograph.  The Bible is a painting, not a photograph.  It is literally true, just like a painting — and not like a photograph.

So to return to the matter of how we describe the interpretive endeavor: Hermeneutics is not so impoverished and so easy that we could call it a science.  I have a suggestion for a substitute term, one that takes into account that God is an artist and it takes an artist’s eye to read His word skillfully–but which also takes into account that there really are rules and systematic principles involved in interpretation.  Here it is: hermeutics is a discipline — an art and a craft.  The word craft suggests a craftsman, and we all recognize that craftsmanship matters, and varies from one craftsman to the next.  The principles may be timeless, but each person incarnates them a little differently, and those differences matter.

If this is the case, what would we expect to see?  We should expect that different interpreters interpret differently.  And as they grow in the image of Christ, their craft increases and their art expands–and they converge on one another, because they are growing closer to the same Triune God.

This, I submit, is what we actually see in the world.  Academics can be, and often are, bitter enemies–as are academically-oriented pastors (you know who you are, boys).  Men who walk with God find ways to be friends with one another.  The more they walk with God, the more they recognize one another as fellow godly men–even though they may differ deeply on academic theological matters.  Moreover, in matters of worship and practice, they converge on one another.  They may ‘do the theological math’ differently, but they increasingly come up with the same answers, however framed in the language of their respective traditions.

*****

I would love to hear some feedback on this.  Fire away — what do you think?  What have I missed?

7 Comments | Hermeneutics, Meditations | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Should Christians Imitate Animals?

3 February 2010

If you’ve ever watched a Jackie Chan flick or two, you are probably aware that there are many, many martial arts that are modeled on an imitation of one animal or another.  There are tiger styles, crane styles, preying mantis, lion, bear, monkey, snake, rooster, crab, and even dragon, phoenix and unicorn.   And many, many more.

I occasionally meet a well-meaning Christian who objects that it’s not right for a human being to cultivate the imitation of animals, and that therefore the animal stylings in martial arts should not be practiced by Christians.  God commanded us to have dominion over the creation, including the animals, and we must approach the world like men, not like subordinate creatures.  Or so goes the objection.

Obviously, we’re sinners, and we can always find a way to mess something up.  I’d like to say right up front that an animistic approach to an animal style would be a serious problem.  Adopting a totem animal, seeking a spirit guide, all those things, should be forsaken by Christians.  The question here is not whether an animal style could be wrong—obviously, yes—but whether it must be wrong.  It is possible to practice an animal style in a way that is compatible with Christian belief?

I believe it is, and I will follow two lines of argument.  The first is that the Bible itself teaches us to learn from and imitate animals, in order to be better men.  The second has to do with the biblical meaning of animals—but we’ll get there in due time.

In Solomon’s instructions to his son, he writes, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.”  In the following instruction, Solomon enumerates the ways in which his son ought to be like the ant.  According to the prophet Hosea, when Yahweh describes himself going to war against Israel, he compares Himself to a lion, a leopard, and a bear.  Jesus is described as the Lamb of God and the Lion of the tribe of Judah.  If it is always bad for a human to behave like an animal, why does God say that He does?

That, really, is a sufficient answer.  If God tells us to learn lessons from animals, and compares Himself to animals when He is fighting, then why should we be afraid to learn lessons from animals about fighting?

Thus far sound, obvious theological reflection—a trifle pedestrian, perhaps, but safe enough ground.  But if we’re willing to think a little more poetically, the Scriptures give us a great deal more to think about.  This will, of course, be more indirect.  We’ll have to consider angels, creation, the meaning of animals and the role of men in the world.  But if we can follow the path the Bible lays, we may find ourselves a good deal richer for the effort.  We’ll begin with the angels.

Descriptions of angelic beings are relatively sparse in the Bible, but there are some common themes.  Consider the following:

Each one had four faces, and each one had four wings.  Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the soles of calves’ feet. They sparkled like the color of burnished bronze.  The hands of a man were under their wings on their four sides; and each of the four had faces and wings.  Their wings touched one another. The creatures did not turn when they went, but each one went straight forward.   As for the likeness of their faces, each had the face of a man; each of the four had the face of a lion on the right side, each of the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and each of the four had the face of an eagle.  (Ezekiel 1:6-10)

Before the throne there was a sea of glass, like crystal. And in the midst of the throne, and around the throne, were four living creatures full of eyes in front and in back.  The first living creature was like a lion, the second living creature like a calf, the third living creature had a face like a man, and the fourth living creature was like a flying eagle.  The four living creatures, each having six wings, were full of eyes around and within. And they do not rest day or night, saying: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come!” (Revelation 4:6-8)

Descriptions of angels in the Bible draw on a variety of animal features.  Some angels appear as men, but many others appear as animals, or an odd mixture of animal parts.  Hold onto that thought for a moment, and let’s consider the order of creation.

The angels already existed when God made the earth.  We know this because when God is taking Job to task in Job 38, He says that the angels rejoiced at the earth’s creation:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements?
Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
To what were its foundations fastened?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Later in the creation week, when God filled the sea and skies with fish and birds, and the land with animals, the angels were already in existence.  Which means that it isn’t so much that angels look like animals, as that animals look like angels — or angel parts.  Man is the image of God; animals are the images of angels.

Man was given the animals as part of his dominion, and although our dominion has continued to extend and improve, we are a long way from maturity.  We have mismanaged the animals God committed to our care in just about every way possible.  Some kinds of animals have gone extinct because the world is cursed for our sake; other kinds we have driven into extinction through neglect, inept management, or worse.  We have frequently swung the pendulum to the other extreme and worshiped the animals in various ways, which is just as grievous a sin.

So we have a long way to go.  But the animals are there, in part, to help us grow to maturity.  When we can lovingly manage the animals God put on earth, we will have really accomplished something.  And in eternity, it will not just be the animals God commits to our jurisdiction, but the angels they are made to resemble (1Cor.6:3).

Putting all this together, how should we think of an animal styling in martial art?  God has built lessons into the creation, in part through the animals.  So there are lessons about movement and perhaps fighting that we can learn in that way.  And in learning these lessons, we are not just learning from animals but from the earthly images of angels.

But let’s take it beyond that.  In fact, let’s consider an absolute worst-case scenario.

Let us suppose that in the jungles of Indonesia lives a minor demon resembling a bat (or, as we just learned, bats resemble the demon).  In the guise of a bat spirit he has established contact with an up-and-coming shaman, insinuating himself as the man’s spirit guide.  He guides the young man to Fork-Island Village (so named because it’s on an island in the middle of the fork in a river).  As the young shaman enters the village, the village shaman, a wizened old man, staggers out of his hut, shouts out “The bat!  The bat!” and dies.

Seizing the opportunity which his patron demon has created for him, the young shaman ensconces himself as the shaman of the village, and through his influence, the village begins to worship and sacrifice to the bat-demon.  The village champion, in collaboration with the shaman and through a series of trances where he meets the demon, begins to formulate a martial practice around bat-like motions.  The demon has been watching humanity for the whole of its history, and has learned far more than he could ever teach a human in one lifetime.  As long as the champion continues to worship him, the demon teaches him things about combat and human anatomy that he could never have otherwise learned.  The champion grows more skilled and vicious than ever, and the young men of the village beg him to teach them.  Soon they, too, are journeying into the jungle with the shaman and the champion to enter into a trance and meet the bat.

Five generations later, Fork-Island Village is large, well-defended, and prosperous.  The Bat-Style of Fork-Island Village is spoken of in hushed whispers, and its champions feared for miles around.  It is said that an adept can move in utter silence through the night, kill an adversary from across the room merely by pointing at him with his sacred blade, and disappear as though he had never been.  It is said that a true master of the Bat-Style can fly, and fall upon his enemies without warning from the night sky.  How much is truth and how much is fanciful rumor, or stories spread by the villagers themselves as psychological warfare?  No way to know.  And as it is presently taught, with worship of the bat-demon as the point of entry and a continuing, integral focus of the martial art, no Christian should study it.

But let us further suppose that some members of that village move into the cities, and thence to the West.  The father of one family converts to Christianity.  Serving only Jesus, he no longer enters trances to meet the bat.  He no longer offers sacrifices to it.  He breaks his sacred blade, dedicated to the bat, and throws it away.  But he keeps the physical practice, the movements, the knowledge of the human body’s vulnerabilities, the skills of redirection, physical deception and decoy, striking blows that penetrate deeply into the body; he’s still as adept a fighter as ever he was.

He moves in next door to you.  You go out and help them carry in boxes.  A few days later, he asks to borrow your lawnmower.  You let him.  He returns it scrubbed clean as the day you bought it, with a full tank of gas.  You invite him to church, and discover that he’s a believer.  He joins your church, your kids play and study together, and your families become friends.  One day you see him doing some funky kung-fu-looking thing in the backyard.  You ask him what he’s doing, and he tells you the story and asks you if you want to learn.

Could you, in good conscience?

Why not?  Whatever he has learned about how the human body works, how to move it and how to damage it—if it’s true, then it’s God, not the demon, who made the body that way.  He has learned truths about creation that God put into the creation to be discovered.  Those who uncovered this knowledge should have served Christ with it.  If he is now doing that, then he is doing what his ancestors—and the demon—ought to have done all along.  You have a chance to join him in that, and to be a living rebuke to the bat-demon and his worshipers, a demonstration that their secrets reveal the glory of God, as all creation does.  Why not do it?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Psalm 104: A Meditation

31 January 2010

The psalm we considered this morning covers a lot of territory, from the forces of nature to human culture, from the food the animals eat to the thoughts that men think.  In all of these things, the psalmist points to some common themes:

  • First, there are no ‘forces of nature’ in the way we commonly mean it, any more than there are ‘creations of man’ in the way we commonly mean that.  All these things come from the hand of God.
  • Second, there is only one proper response to this: to praise the Lord, and to make your thoughts sweet to Him.

We find it difficult to do this, because we focus on the things we do not like, and so zoom in on those tiny things that we refuse to see anything else.  You must praise God even for those things, and my charge to you this week is to follow the strategy of the psalmist.  Back off, look at the whole world, and praise God for all of it.  Then, in that context, re-examine your discontents, and praise God for those things too.

4 Comments | Meditations, Preaching | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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