Altered States of Consciousness, Part 2: God Gave Ecstasy

15 February 2009

He did, you know.

The squinty-eyed fellow from the Living Way Christian Discernment Ministry* isn’t having any of this.

“No, no, you don’t understand,” he says.  “When you’re in an ecstatic state, you can’t think clearly.  Your defenses are down, you can’t think rationally, and that leaves you open to whatever influences may wander by.  It’s dangerous.”

“How about mid-orgasm?”  I ask him.  “I’d have to say, I’m not at the height of my reasoning powers just then.  Does that make it dangerous, something I should avoid at all costs?”

He looks at me funny, his face reddening.  I think he’s embarrassed that I said the word “orgasm” out loud in the middle of a Christian conversation.

But think about it.

I mean, do we really think that God looks down at a husband and wife and says, “You know Gabriel, if I’d thought it out a little more carefully, I would have done it differently.  Who knew they’d have so much fun with the plumbing?  They’re getting so excited that they’re not thinking about doctrine at all.”

But no.  God knew what He was doing, and every gift of God is good:

Go, eat your bread with joy,
And drink your wine with a merry heart;
For God has already accepted your works.
Let your garments always be white,
And let your head lack no oil.

Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vaporous life which He has given you under the sun, all your days of vapor; for that is your portion in life; and in the labor which you perform under the sun.

But it gets better.  Read the Song of Solomon.  Then read the Ecclesiastes quote above, again.  Then read 1 Corinthians 7:3-5:

Nevertheless, because of sexual immorality, let each man possess his own wife, and let each woman possess her own husband.  The husband must give his wife the affection due her, and likewise also the wife to her husband.  The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does, and likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.  Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

So taken in its proper biblical context, the command is for husband and wife to practice the Song of Solomon as often as at least one of them desires; in fact Paul specifically warns about the dangers of abstinence.

Now, Song of Solomon gives us a view of lovemaking as a mutually delightful feast for the senses.  And this necessarily involves a state of consciousness rather different from everyday waking awareness — that is to say, an altered state of consciousness.

Married people have no choice but to enter regularly into this altered state of consciousness.  It is a sin not to.

Hmmm.

It gets even better: God requires a husband to be drunk on his wife’s charms all the time.  (Here, not being a wife, I’m going to speak to husbands.  There’s an analogue for wives, but I’m not the person to discuss it.)

Solomon gives some very specific instructions to his sons on attitudes toward their wives:

Let your fountain be blessed,
And rejoice with the wife of your youth.
As a loving deer and a graceful doe,
Let her breasts sate you at all times,
And always be drunk on her loving.

Yeah, I know, old King James says “satisfy” and “enraptured” instead of “sate” and “drunk” — I altered the translation for a reason.  The first word means to be drenched, satiated, well-drunk, with connotations of flooding or drunkenness, depending on the context.  The second word means to wander, stray, or weave about, and by metonymy, to be drunk.  Add it all up, and a husband is to be absolutely besotted with his wife, out of his head, all objectivity completely gone.  She is the only woman in the world.  He may know, intellectually, that there are other women in the world who are sexually attractive, but he can’t quite get over his wife enough to see any other woman that way.

You’ll note that the commands here are not of the grim, moralizing sort: “Young man, the woman you marry is going to get old, and she won’t be so attractive, and you’re going to want to stray, but don’t you dare.  Grit your teeth and bear it, and God will make it worth your while in heaven.”  That’s not at all what Solomon says.  Solomon says, “Son, your job is to be absolutely lost in your wife’s physical charms.”  At risk of belaboring the point, he is not just talking about her great personality.**  

It’s a truism in Christian circles that it’s not a sin to be tempted, but only to yield to it.  This is one case where that’s not really true.  A husband who is seriously tempted to stray (including mentally, in the way Jesus talks about) has already violated this command; if he’s thinking about some other woman’s body, he’s not sufficiently drunk on his wife.  By the same token, a Christian husband who thinks of himself as  “breast man” or a “thigh man” is a contradiction in terms; a Christian husband must be drunk on his wife’s breasts, not breasts generally.  The inner workings of this are another discussion; for now, suffice it to say that it’s a very enjoyable and God-honoring form of meditation.

And it is to be cultivated, not just some of the time, but constantly — note the word “always.”  This is not just when she’s present and in the midst of seducing him, but when he’s at work, when she’s eight months pregnant, when they’ve just had a fight — all the time.  Obviously, this is a profoundly altered state of consciousness.  In fact, the Bible even uses the language of drunkenness to describe it.  

This was just the really obvious example; there are other, similarly altered states we could discuss.  Proper exercise will induce euphoria, for example.  I’m not talking about doing something cruel to your body that kills brain cells and makes you see pretty colors.  I’m talking about inducing, and then pushing through, cardio-respiratory distress.  The result is neuro-immuno-endocrine adaptation; your whole internal physiology reorganizes to meet the increased demands of the exercise.  It’s a complete overhaul — neuromuscular coordination, lactic acid transport, oxygen uptake, the works — very, very healthy for you.  And oooooooooh my, does it feel gooooood.

Singing triumphant, God-glorifying psalms for a good stretch will induce a similar state of euphoria; physiologically, it has to do with the way singing regulates your breathing, and music enhances the effect upon your emotions.  Even an extended responsive reading, carried out vigorously in a group, can do it.  It’s not uncommon for a person in that state to be so overcome that he’s temporarily unable to speak or sing.

Now all these — sexual communion between husband and wife, proper exercise, psalm-singing, and public reading and recitation of Scripture — are things we must do, even if they do feel really good.  If it turned out that all of these things involved mild pain, say, like getting a papercut, then we would preach the joys of serving God in spite of how it may feel at the moment.  We’d quote Paul saying, “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us.”  And so on.  In short, we’d be all gung-ho about it.

Well, it turns out that these things are pleasurable instead of painful.  And something about that makes them hard to accept.  It’s hard to get a good self-righteous buzz going when you’re doing something fun.  It’s incredibly revealing — of uour character, of our view of God — that we have such trouble with pleasure.  

But we still need to just obey.  So may I suggest that at the very minimum, we should obey God in spite of how it might feel?  If it turns out that obeying God engenders a hit of endorphins, we’re just going to have to grit our teeth and trust Him to get us through it, in spite of the pleasure.  It’s a tough job, but Christian living can’t always be a bed of thorns.

Of course, we should go much further than that — we should thank God for His good gifts, and enjoy what He has given us, as we are commanded to do.

The squinty-eyed fellow thinks for a moment.  “But the Bible says that if we follow Christ, we’ll have tribulation.”

“So we will,” I tell him, “but does it ever say that it will be tribulation every moment?”

He is silent.  I continue: “Doesn’t it also say that God gives us all things richly to enjoy?  Doesn’t it also say, for example, that the heavens declare the glory of God?  Shouldn’t I enjoy the sunset?”

“Sure you should,” he says.  “But God’s doing that.  When you’re exercising so that you’ll get high, that seems a little different.  It sounds addictive.”

“‘Exercising to get high’ is not quite what I said, but maybe we can come back to that later.  Let’s talk about ‘addictive.’  What does that mean, exactly?” I ask.

“Well, you know,” he says.  “You do something, and you like it, so you get to doing it more, and you like it more, and pretty soon it’s all you can think about.”

“So your solution is to not do anything you like?”  I ask.  “Sounds a little drastic to me.”

“It works,” he says primly.  “I’m not addicted to anything, either.”

“That’s arguable,” I say.  “Paul has some pretty spiky comments about neglect of the body not having any spiritual benefit.  But let’s explore this addiction thing further, because I think you have a valid concern.  It is certainly possible to abuse the pleasures God gives.”

He nods.  “Exactly.”

“So let’s talk about alcohol,” I say.  “It seems like the ideal test case — it’s discussed quite a bit in the Bible, it can be physically addictive, and a person could avoid it altogether and live a perfectly healthy life, so it’s totally optional on that level.”

By this time, he’s a little suspicious.  “Okay…” he says doubtfully.

to be continued…

*See the disclaimer in Part 1.

**Real beauty begins internally, and the Bible has a lot to say about that.  It goes way beyond “having a great personality” — true beauty is both true beauty and true beauty; there is a physical outworking of the internal condition.  But here, Solomon is not talking about internal beauty, and in fact there are no exception clauses for internal ugliness.  He must still be absolutely besotted with her body, no matter what the state of her internal beauty.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Altered States of Consciousness, Part 1: Definition?

1 February 2009

Conservative Christians hate altered states of consciousness.

Altered states lead to demon influence, demon possession, bad dreams, narcolepsy  and the ownership of Cabbage Patch Kids.  Or is it the other way around?  Anyway, they’re bad for you.  So says the squinty-eyed fellow at the Living Way Christian Discernment Ministry*, which also publishes pamphlets warning of the occult dangers of pyramids, rainbows, and Procter & Gamble.

Before we get too deeply into this, though, we probably ought to define the term.  What is an altered state of consciousness?  Altered from what?

Here enters the first problem: “altered state of consciousness” is an unbelievably sloppy term.  It implies that there’s a baseline state of consciousness, and this other state is ‘altered’ from the normal one.  In reality, though, the state of a given person’s consciousness is in constant flux.  Let’s think this through a little.

6:30 a.m. The alarm woke Jack up.  He fumbled for the clock, slapped the button, and squinted at the glowing red numbers.  Six-thirty already?  He heaved himself out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom, ricocheting off the doorjamb on the way in. He went through the motions almost automatically, still barely awake until he washed his hands.  The shock of the cold water jarred him; he pulled his hands back and waited for it to warm up.

6:33 a.m. Still blinking sleep from his eyes, he headed for the kitchen and got the coffeemaker started.

6:37 a.m. He returned to the bathroom to shower.  By the time he’d returned to the bedroom to dress, his wife, Mary, was awake.

“G’morning, honey.”

“Morning, love,” he replied.  She headed for the door, and as he began to dress, he could hear the shower running.

6:55 a.m. Back to the kitchen to grab his lunch from the refrigerator, pour the coffee into a thermos cup that would fit in his car’s cupholder, a quick kiss for Mary, and out the door.

7:42 a.m. Walking into work, Jack fell in step with Kowalski, a friend from Marketing.

“Ready for your pitch to the V.P.?” Kowalski asked.

“That’s not until Thursday.” Jack said.

“It is Thursday.” Kowalski told him.

Jack’s stomach turned to ice.  “I’ve gotta go,” he said, and raced toward his office.

7:44 a.m. As he entered the office, the phone was ringing.  It was Kowalski.

“Hey, I was wrong — it’s only Wednesday.  Sorry about that.”

Jake’s face reddened.  “You jerk–“

“Hey, it was an accident.  I know how important this is to you.  I’m sorry.”  Kowalski sounded a little wounded.

“Ah, forget it,” Jake said.  “I’m just glad you were wrong.”

They hung up, and Jake dropped into his chair, his gut slowly unclenching.  The aftereffects of the adrenaline left him jittery until lunchtime.

12:30 p.m. Jake wasn’t particularly hungry.  He didn’t even unpack his lunch all the way; just took one sandwich off the top and ate it.  His stomach was still feeling a little iffy.

2:43 p.m. Jake began to feel sleepy.   He took an unnecessary trip to the copier just to move around a little and try to shake it off.  That didn’t work very well, so he stepped into the stairwell and did a dozen squats.  Feeling a little better, he returned to his desk.

3:35 p.m. The sleepy feeling began to return.  Jake decided he’d better eat something.  He retrieved his lunch from the refrigerator in the break room and sat down at the table to eat a little more.  In the bottom of the sack, he noticed a small envelope.  Curious, he retrieved it.   It was a very sensuously worded note from Mary, ending with the words “I can’t wait until you get home tonight.”  He sat at the table for a little longer until his reaction subsided, then returned to his desk, rather less sleepy than before.

5:00 p.m. Jake left work.  Traffic was heavy on the way home, and he found himself clenching the steering wheel, willing people out of his way.

5:46 p.m. Jake opened the front door and the smell of roast duck flooded his senses.  As he rounded the corner to the dining room, he saw the table set in white linen, glittering silver and fine china.  The wine was already poured; everything was ready.

Mary’s older sister Helen came out of the kitchen with a steaming platter.  “Hi, Jake.  She’s upstairs getting dressed; everything else is ready.  Take this for me?”

Jake took the platter and set it on the table as Helen returned to the kitchen and brought out two more dishes.

“Thank you, Helen,” Mary said from the doorway behind them.  Jake turned and his breath caught.  She was wearing that blue chiffon dress she’d worn that time…

Helen smiled.  “Well, my work here is done.  You kids have fun.”  She picked up her purse from beside the door and let herself out.

Jake grinned.  It was going to be a very good evening.

Given the contents of Mary’s note, it would be a little indelicate for us to continue looking in on the rest of Jake’s day.  Let’s just say that Jake and Mary had a mutually blessed evening together, and leave it at that.

Now, how many times did the state of Jake’s consciousness alter, even in this very truncated account of one day?  How many different states of consciousness did he experience?  Barely awake, alert, frightened, angry, jittery, sleepy, aroused, impatient, and so on.  How many things conspired to alter the state of his consciousness?  Cold water, caffeine, fear, anger, adrenaline, food, low blood sugar, exercise, an arousing note, impatience with the traffic, the scent of roast duck, the sight of Mary in that dress…quite a range, isn’t it?

The squinty-eyed fellow at the Living Way Christian Discernment Ministry* isn’t buying it. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he says.   “All those are part of normal life.  I’m talking about dabbling in ecstatic states — drugs and alcohol, breathing exercises, chanting, so-called ‘relaxation techniques,’ guided meditation, all of that.”

“Ah, so it’s not just any alteration of state.  What you’re really trying to say is that ecstatic states are bad?” I ask him.

“Exactly,” he says, thinking that I’m finally getting it.

I’m still confused.  “Let’s go back to Jake and Mary…without describing the rest of their evening, let’s just say that at a certain point in the proceedings, they propelled each other into a state of ecstasy.  You’re telling me that’s bad?”

“No, no.  It’s not the same thing at all,”  he says.

I ask him for the difference, and he sputters.  Apparently getting a definition of “altered state of consciousness” is going to be a little harder than most people think.  I can’t help wondering if there’s a more biblical way to approach the subject…

*Please note that this is a composite of a number of organizations I’ve encountered and conversations I’ve had over the course of the last thirty years or so.  As far as I know, there is no organization called “Living Way Christian Discernment Ministry,” and I am not taking a shot at any single person or organization, but rather at a set of broad trends and currents of thought.

That said, if the shoe fits, well…in the words of the old Quaker storekeeper who surprised a burglar in the middle of the night, “Friend, I would do thee no harm, but thou standest where I am about to shoot.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

How We Know What Words Mean

25 January 2009

For some years now, I have grappled with how to communicate certain things for which the proper words have all been co-opted.

By way of example, suppose you are giving foster care to a child from an abusive Christian home, whose father always said,  “Son, I love you, and that’s why I have to do this,” before he delivered the inevitable daily beating.  When you say “I love you” to the child, he cringes and shies away.  What do you do?  The words have been stolen from you; you must reclaim them.  The only way to reclaim them is through experience, carefully.  Over time, the child will learn that when you say those words, they mean something different — they mean what they ought to mean.

I have been grappling with other expressions, things like “Christian worldview,” “interpreting Scripture according to context,” “church,” “fellowship,” and the like.  I had reached the conclusion some time ago that more explanation was not the answer; I had first of all to deliver an experience that was qualitatively different from what people expected. Then when the explanations came out, people would understand what the words meant.

This has always made me uneasy.  I had a hard time making my peace with it, theologically.  It always seemed to me — no doubt because of my bapti-fundamentalist background — that I was making some sort of weird compromise that should not be made.

I have slowly made my peace with it, grappling with how God establishes the meaning of words through creation, how He teaches all theology through history (which is to say, experience), and so on.

About a week ago, I read something that summarizes and extends this trend in my thinking far better than I could have done.  Here it is:

Our words are often flabby and weak.  For the word to be passed on and to give life, it has to be made flesh.  When, along with your word, you give your flesh and blood to others, only then do your words mean something.  Words without flesh, which do not spring from life and do not share out our flesh which is broken and our blood which is shed, mean nothing.  This is why, at the Last Supper, the Lord summarized the mystery of His preaching by saying: “Take, eat my Body,” “Drink My Blood.”

Fortunate is the man who is broken in pieces and offered to others, who is poured out and given to others to drink.  When his time of trial comes, he will not be afraid.  He will have nothing to fear.  He will already have understood that, in the celebration of love, by grace man is broken and not divided, eaten and never consumed.  By grace he has become Christ, and so his life gives food and drink to his brother.  That is to say, he nourishes the other’s very existence and makes it grow.

(from Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church , translated by Elizabeth Briere  (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1984) 36.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Re-learning to Speak Biblically: Another Riddle

18 January 2009

I posed a riddle from Psalm 99 a while back.  In the course of my Greek class last fall, I came upon another one in 1 John 2:3-4:

Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.  He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in Him.

The thing Free Grace folk usually talk about here is the definition of knowing God — what does that mean?  Is he talking about eternal destiny, or is he talking about something else?

Let’s skip that very important question and talk about something even more basic, that often gets missed.  Whatever knowing God might be, is it achievable?  Knowing what the commandments are — and John is at some pains to make sure the more demanding aspects of the commandments remain uppermost in our minds — how could anyone ever claim that they know God?  And if they can’t claim it for themselves, how could they claim it for anyone else?  We all violate the commandments every day.

So then here’s the riddle: How can John say, just a few verses later in 2:12-14:

I write to you, little children,
Because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake.
I write to you, fathers,
Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young men,
Because you have overcome the wicked one.
I write to you, little children,
Because you have known the Father.
I have written to you, fathers,
Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.
I have written to you, young men,
Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you,
And you have overcome the wicked one.

He says to those he addresses, three times, that they have known (already!) God.  He says it twice to “fathers” and once to “little children.”  This is significant because he addresses his whole audience as little children in a number of other places in the epistle (see, for example, 2:18, and also the synonymous uses in 2:1, 28, 3:7, 18, 4:4, 5:21).

How can he say to his audience “If you keep God’s commandments, then you can say you know God” and then say to them, only a few sentences later “You have known God”?  Given human sinfulness, how can he do that?

We would not dare, most of us, to speak this way to one another.  And because we would not dare to speak biblically to one another, we will find ourselves compelled to speak in truncated ways that do not match the Scriptures.  The solution is to come to terms with speaking biblically.  And to do that, we must solve this riddle.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Competent to Counsel?

11 January 2009

Within the evangelical, Bible-believing, American church in the last four decades, an awful lot of things have happened which I fervently hope my grandchildren will have a hard time believing.  But among a truly embarrassing heap of incongruous strangenesses, there are a few that really stand out, and I’d like to talk about one of those.

Starting in the late sixties, our counselors — those specialists in explaining to us how people in disagreement can sit down and have a peaceable discussion like grown-ups — divided into two camps that were, for the most part, utterly incapable of peaceable dialogue.

Let me say that again: Our conflict resolution specialists could barely speak to one another, let alone resolve their intramural conflicts.

And these are the people who are supposed to help us get along with our in-laws.  “Tell it not in Gath…”

David Powlison unfolds half of the sad tale in Competent to Counsel? The History of a Conservative Protestant Biblical Counseling Movement.  As the title indicates, Powlison is writing a history of the biblical counseling movement, not a history of the debate between it and the evangelical psychotherapists. As far as the debate goes, this is hardly the whole story.  But thus far, it is the only serious, scholarly attempt to chronicle the biblical counseling movement — which is valuable in itself, and addresses the conflict from one side in any case.

Why does it matter?

Because if we want to avoid similar decades-long battles in other areas — like, say, over the exact content that one must believe to be saved — then it is helpful to see what our brothers have done wrong (and what they have done right) in past conflicts.

Just one example:  When Jay Adams began writing and speaking about counseling, he almost completely bypassed the evangelical psychotherapists and went straight for their constituents.  His message was “The Bible has the answers for problems in living; seek the answers there.  Don’t listen to these guys; they’re not basing their responses on the Bible, and in any case they are an illegitimate secular pastorate and their function needs to be returned to the church.”  (My paraphrase, but he was at least that blunt.)

Now, the response was predictable as sunrise: the psychotherapists fought back tooth and nail, or ignored him.

Adams had to know that was going to happen.  He seems to have made a decision that he was unlikely to win them over in any case, so he would take his argument to the broader church as fast as possible, using deliberately inflammatory rhetoric to make friends quickly where people agreed with him — at the cost of making enemies quickly among the psychotherapists.

Now, I think Adams had an important message, and the wider church needed to be brought into the discussion.  But the biblical standard for engaging fellow believers is “Consider one another in order to stir up love and good deeds….”  Instead, Adams chose a course of action practically guaranteed to maximize animosity and bad deeds among the evangelical psychotherapists, with predictable results that largely persist today.  While there are pockets of biblical counseling here and there, the evangelical world as a whole has weighed it and found it wanting.  The reasons for that state of affairs would fill a book, but it surely hasn’t helped that while bringing much biblical content to bear on problems in living, the movement simultaneously behaved unbiblically toward one group of fellow believers.

For those of you conversant with the present gospel spat, this ought to sound familiar.  Think we can learn anything from history?

6 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, Doctrinal Inconsistencies, Meditations, Reviews | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Novel is a Christian Art Form

28 December 2008

I came across the following in an interview titled “Faith Fired by Literature” hosted by speakingoffaith.org.

Krista Tippett (interviewer): What did he [Walker Percy] mean when he wrote, “There is a special kinship between the novel as an art form and Christianity as an ethos, Catholicism in particular?”

Paul Elie:  What he meant is that the novel as a form is distinguished from other forms in the broad sense,– like a play or an epic poem– in that it deals with narrative events in the lives of ordinary people.  There are exceptions to this, but in the main, if you looked at the history of the novel over two hundred fifty years, that would be true.  With the novel, the ordinary person comes on stage.

Well, theologically, the coming of Christ is the entry of God into the life of an ordinary person.  Jesus was just an ordinary man in first-century Palestine, walking the earth like the rest of us, having problems, encountering opposition, dying a violent death.  So in this sense, Christianity is seen as sanctifying and directing us to ordinary lives as the place where the divine is to be found , and so you can see the parallel between that and the novel, which looks for meaning in precisely the same place.

Amen.  I would, of course, take issue with the notion that this understanding is the property of Roman Catholicism in particular, and on two grounds.

First, if you’re any kind of Christian at all, you believe that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  This belief, affirmed from the earliest days of the ancient church and expressed one way or another in the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Definition of Chalcedon, is the common property of small-c-catholic Christianity — the whole of the Christian church.  It is one of our great grounds of unity, and far too little is made of it.

Second, recovering the doctrine of vocation — the belief that God calls the farmer to his field as surely as He calls the missionary to his — was one of the great victories of the Protestant Reformation.  In the west, the medieval church had largely lost this truth, and its recovery was one of the centerpieces of the Reformation, now sadly neglected in much of the church.  But it is our property nonetheless, and this dignifies all the “mundane” details of imaging God through dominion over the earth.  Our fulfillment as human beings is found there, being human as God called us to be, or it is not to be found at all.

So in the one case, the truth which makes the novel a peculiarly Christian form is common to all Christianity, and in the other the truth is represented most strongly not in the Roman, but in the old Protestant, tradition.

I say “old Protestant” tradition because the modern Protestant has lost it again.  We talk blithely of “full-time Christian work” as if that phrase meant something more than “sanctified living” — because to us it does.  We regularly follow this up with a pro forma qualification — “of course we’re all supposed to be ‘full-time Christians,'” we’ll say, “but you know what I mean.”

And we all do.  What an indictment!

“Full-time Christian work” means you leave off directly taking part in the dominion of the earth for talking to people about God.  It means imaging God with your mouth rather than your hands.  It means you’ve entered the Christian ‘chattering class.’

In its common usage then, the phrase “full-time Christian work” is the wheezing gasp of an ecclesiology that desperately needs to be put out of our misery.  In biblical ecclesiology, the Church is not just a club or a religious group among other religious groups.  It is nothing less than the new humanity — man-in-risen-Christ rather than man-in-fallen-Adam.  And everything that man-in-risen-Christ lawfully does is charged with meaning: it is the image of God in the world.

Hence the modern novel, the tale of ordinary people doing ordinary things — meaningfully.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

If You Can’t Base Doctrine On Experience…

20 December 2008

It is a truism universally acknowledged — at least in my incestuously small circles — that you can’t make doctrine from experience.  We often say it exactly like that: “You can’t make doctrine from experience.”  Or in the disclaimer form: “I realize you can’t make doctrine from experience, but I’ll tell you, I’ve found that…”

Of course this position is perfectly understandable.

I think of a man and a woman, both married to other people, who were committing adultery together.  (By the way, this is a true story.)  They justified their adultery on the grounds that they always knelt by the bed first and prayed together that if them coming together was not God’s will, He would step in and prevent it.  He never did.  On the strength of God’s non-intervention, they concluded He must approve, that their ‘love’ for each other must have somehow sanctified their illicit relationship.

See?  You can’t make doctrine from experience.

Countless abuses, errors and rank sillinesses are being avoided, at this very moment, by people who are having strange experiences, but who, on the strength of this dictum, will not try to make doctrine out of it.  This is a Good Thing.

But…

…is it true?  Is it really as simple as “You can’t make doctrine out of experience”?

I submit the following example for consideration:

Does this blessedness then come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness.  How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised. And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also, and the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also walk in the steps of the faith which our father Abraham had while still uncircumcised.

For the promise that he would be the heir of the world was not to Abraham or to his seed through the law, but through the righteousness of faith….

For those of you who haven’t recognized it, that’s Romans 4:9-13.  Paul is arguing that an uncircumcised person — i.e., a Gentile — can be found righteous on the basis of his faith.  How does he prove his point?  Note the portion in bold. Paul argues on the basis of Abraham’s experience.  We use the word “history” instead, but that just means it’s really old experience.

The comeback, of course, is that Paul was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write Romans as Scripture; not being similarly inspired, we can’t interpret experience in the same way that he could — and anyway, he’s interpreting Old Testament Scripture, not his own personal experience.  I think there are good responses to both objections, but let’s bypass them for the moment and look at another example:

If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; but if I do, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and believe that the Father is in Me, and I in Him.

That’s Jesus speaking in John 10:37-38.  He challenges his hearers that if they don’t find His words convincing, then they ought to believe His works — i.e., His miracles.  But these are events which they have seen and heard themselves, that is, personal experiences.  From these personal experiences, Jesus’ readers should derive a christological conclusion.  That is once again getting doctrine from experience.

But perhaps someone will say, “That’s all well and good for the people who see supernatural events like the miracles Jesus is talking about there, but you can’t make doctrine out of the events of ordinary life.”  Really?  Let’s look at a third example:

You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field produces year by year. And you shall eat before the LORD your God, in the place where He chooses to make His name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil, of the firstborn of your herds and your flocks, that you may learn to fear the LORD your God always. But if the journey is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, or if the place where the LORD your God chooses to put His name is too far from you, when the LORD your God has blessed you, then you shall exchange it for money, take the money in your hand, and go to the place which the LORD your God chooses.  And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen or sheep, for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the LORD your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household.

This is from Deuteronomy 14:22-26, but particularly note the clause in bold.  It’s an instruction on the conduct of the festival year, and the disposition of the ‘party tithe.’  At the appointed time, they are to gather up 10% of the previous year’s income, go up to the place God designates, and throw a party.  They are to do this every year.  No miracles, no supernatural events — just the ordinary rhythms of life, like a Thanksgiving dinner, the Super Bowl, and watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve.

They are to throw this party, Moses tells them, so that they will learn to fear God always.

This rings strangely to our ears for a number of reasons that I’ll pass over here.  We should notice, however, that the theological conclusion comes in the doing of it, that is, in experience.  Again, it is precisely in experience that they are to learn their doctrine.

Does this mean that we can have a strange experience and use it to justify any theological nonsense we want?  Of course not.  There are controls — interpreting experience by what God has said — but that’s a discussion for another post.  For the time being, note: our modern dictum that “you can’t get doctrine from experience” would ring very strangely in the ears of the men who wrote the Bible.  They plainly did not believe any such thing.

Neither should we.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

News: Winning NanoWriMo

15 December 2008

nanonovember120x238Ten years ago, a merry maniac by the name of Chris Baty decided it would be a good idea to try to write a novel in a month.

This is obviously ridiculous.

But he did it, and got people to join him.  The event is called National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), and it takes place every November.

To clarify, the challenge is to write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel entirely in the month of November.  It doesn’t have to be perfect.  It doesn’t have to be edited.  It doesn’t even have to be finished.   It does have to be nonexistent until midnight on November 1 — no starting early — and at least 50,000 words long no later than midnight, November 30.

Last year, my darling wife did it — starting late and finishing early, even — and I made taquitos and encouraged her when she thought she wasn’t going to make it.  It looked like so much fun I decided that I’d join her this year, circumstances permitting.  Well, circumstances didn’t really permit, but I decided to join her anyway.  I could always quit if I was failing horribly.  And besides, 50,000 words sounds like a lot, but spread over 30 days it’s only 1,667 words a day, which is not all that bad.  After all, I’ve banged out 10,000-word position papers in an afternoon; 1,667 words a day should be easy.

I was behind from the very first day.

1,262 words behind, in fact.  The next two days were so busy I didn’t even try to write — which put me even further behind.  By the morning of November 4, I needed to write 6,263 words by midnight just to get caught up.

I didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong; I wrote a very respectable 2,007 words that day.  But it wasn’t close to enough.

It got worse from there.  When I went to bed on November 21, I  still needed almost 28,000 words — more than half the total — and I had only 9 days to go.  Meanwhile, I had no idea where my plot was going, and my wife was in worse trouble than I was.  Her writing process is to talk about what she’s writing.  A lot.  As she talks, and people comment and ask questions, ideas come to her, and then she goes and writes them down.  Last year, that worked wonderfully, because I was supporting her.  This year, though, I was writing.  My writing process is to say nothing, and write in utter solitude and silence.

Cracks were beginning to appear in the domestic bliss.

The spectre of failure loomed.  We began to discuss whether we’d have to alternate, with one of us writing at a time, and the other in a support role, and then switching places next year.  We decided, though, that we were going over the cliff with all our flags flying — either win together, or not at all.  We needed a way to work together.

We didn’t have one.  We talked about both our projects, which helped Kimberly immensely and — to my delight — helped me some, too.  But it was costing me valuable writing time.   Thinking that we were going to succeed became a conscious discipline rather than a belief.

That lasted for days.  Just before bedtime on the 25th, with just 5 days to go, I was struggling along at 31,000 words, and Kimberly was just behind me.

Then a friend introduced us to Write or Die.  It’s a web-based app with a simple text editor.  If you stop writing, it turns your screen angry colors and plays nasty sound effects — crying babies, Hansen, and worse — on the theory that an immediate, negative consequence motivates better than a distant, positive one.

If it sounds like this doesn’t allow for sober reflection and careful attention to what one is writing, then you’re getting the idea.  The goal is to WRITE — editing can come later.  Bad writing can be edited, but blank pages can’t.  It works better than you’d think, and both of us found surprising twists of plot and characterization arising from “mistakes” we made under pressure.

It was the tool we’d been waiting for.  We instantly went from 1,000-word days to 3,000-word evenings, and better.  We would write for 10 minutes at breakneck speed, churning out 300-600 words, then compare word counts so the winner could celebrate.  A quick break to shake out the hands, get a bite to eat, talk character and plot on our respective projects, then back to it for another ten or twenty minutes.

All of a sudden I could spare the time to talk as much as Kimberly needed so she could write, and still get my own writing done.

nano_08_winner_largeWe made it.  Together.  Rather handily, actually — we both hit 50,000 words with time to spare.

Needless to say, we’re pretty happy with that.  Kimberly’s book is nearly done.  Mine still needs some serious surgery, and probably another 20,000 words or so.  I’ll have something to do over the Christmas holidays.

But for us, the most important thing to arise from NaNo 2008 was gaining the ability to write together.  Still on separate projects, but in the same house, at the same time, with two very different writing processes.

The domestic bliss is back.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

If You Confess Your Sins, You Should Pick Up Litter, Too

7 December 2008

One of the enjoyable sidelines I’ve tried to develop here at Full Contact Christianity is a ferocious intolerance for theological inconsistencies.  It’s one thing to just be wrong; it’s quite another, much more irresponsible thing to believe (1) A, and (2) Not-A — and loudly declaim on both topics.  Granted, the two proclamations don’t usually take place at the same time.

I’d like to address a doozy this week — the idea that one can be so taken with “spiritual” matters like relationship with God or sharing the gospel with the lost that one simply has no time for “peripheral” concerns like caring for the world we live in.  After all, it’s all going up in flames anyhow, and then God recreates it, so why worry about it?  Where’s the contradiction, you ask?  Just watch.  Much as I would enjoy an opportunity to do some first-hand mocking,  N. T. Wright said it better than ever I could, so with no further ado, here he is:

I’ve spoken about God’s ultimate intention, that through the renewed human beings in Christ, the cosmos itself would be renewed.  This strikes very hard at those of us who grew up within some kind or other of a pietistic tradition which actually had a low social concern because it said that was just oiling the wheels of a machine which was going to go over the cliff:  What’s the point in tinkering with the structures of society?  What’s the point in worrying about global warming, or whatever it is, because we know that the world is going to be jettisoned, and that we the saved will go off to be with God elsewhere.

Romans 8 ought long ago to have given the lie to any such idea.  God loves the world that He’s made and wants to renew it.  He sees it groaning in travail, and the answer to something groaning in travail is that the new is going to be born out of the womb of the old, not that the groaning person or world is going to be left to groan forever until it dies — No!

Where does that then leave us at the moment?  There are many people who will see this picture and then will say “That’s great; we’re going to get that renewal one day when the Messiah comes back.  When God renews everything then it’ll happen, but there’s nothing we can do about it at the moment.”

Now listen, many of you are pastors – probably the majority of you are pastors, that’s why you’re here.  [Suppose] somebody came to you and said, “I’m having a real trouble with holiness, with this sin problem.  I just find I sin all the time, and I see well there is this thing called holiness, but there’s really no point in me trying very hard after it, because after all, one day, God will raise me from the dead and give me a beautiful new life in which I will never sin again.  That’s going to happen, so why should I worry about it now?”

I hope that if somebody came to you like that, you would hit them with a fairly heavy dose of inaugurated eschatology.  You mightn’t express it quite like that, but what you would say is, “God wants you right now in the present, to live as nearly as you can in the power of the spirit to that lovely fully human creature that you’re going to be one day.  Of course you will constantly be saying ‘God have mercy on me, a sinner.’  But He has given you His Spirit so that you can anticipate in the present what you should be in the future.  “

Now, should we not say the same about our responsibility for creation, for the world which God made and which He loves so much?  Of course we should.  And if we get our soteriology right, we can go to that task without any of those snide remarks that this is a derogation from our gospel duty.  It is part of our gospel duty.”

(This is from Session 6 of the 2005 Auburn Avenue Pastors’ Conference, available for $1.99 here, at about the 57:30 mark.)

An additional note for those of you who are interested in (or furious about) Wright’s position vis-a-vis the New Perspective on Paul.  In this particular conference, Wright is addressing an audience entirely conservative, and mainly composed, from what I gather, of Presbyterian pastors.  If you’ve read some of the caterwauling about how Wright is striking at the vitals of the Christian religion, this is a good place to see what he has to say for himself to a group of people who will share your concerns.  He delivers five lectures (Richard Gaffin does the other five) and participates in three Q&A/discussion sessions, so there’s quite a bit of material, and some good interaction as well.

Comments Off on If You Confess Your Sins, You Should Pick Up Litter, Too | Doctrinal Inconsistencies, Meditations, Reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Psalm 99: A Riddle

30 November 2008

Psalm 99 poses a very difficult problem for modern readers.  See if you can spot it:

The LORD reigns;
Let the peoples tremble!
He dwells between the cherubim;
Let the earth be moved!
The LORD is great in Zion,
And He is high above all the peoples.
Let them praise Your great and awesome name
He is holy.

The King’s strength also loves justice;
You have established equity;
You have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.
Exalt the LORD our God,
And worship at His footstool
He is holy.

Moses and Aaron were among His priests,
And Samuel was among those who called upon His name;
They called upon the LORD, and He answered them.
He spoke to them in the cloudy pillar;
They kept His testimonies and the ordinance He gave them.
You answered them, O LORD our God;
You were to them God-Who-Forgives,
Though You took vengeance on their deeds.
Exalt the LORD our God,
And worship at His holy hill;
For the LORD our God is holy.

The problem for us comes in the portion in green.  If we know our history, we’re on the alert immediately.  We want to say, “Wait a minute, God!  Moses did not keep Your testimonies and ordinance; he struck the rock.  Aaron didn’t either; he made the golden calf.  Samuel raised evil sons.  How can You say such a thing about them?”

If we’re not familiar with the history, we still have trouble with the passage, because in the same breath, the Psalmist says that God forgave them, although He took vengeance on their evil deeds.  So if there were offenses to forgive, if they were in fact guilty of evil deeds, then they clearly did not keep God’s testimonies and ordinance — right?

Wrong.  Obviously wrong, because the Psalmist and the Holy Spirit say otherwise.  But we cannot find it in our hearts to speak of Moses, Aaron, and Samuel in the way that the psalm speaks of them.  We believe, right down to our bones, that it is an inaccurate, self-contradictory description.

In other words, we do not have the mind of Christ on this subject; we don’t see it as God does, and can’t speak of it as He does.

And yet, this is a psalm.  We are supposed to sing it, just like the other psalms.  Here, then, is the riddle: How can we sing it in good conscience, with understanding? How can the Psalmist and the Holy Spirit say, in the same breath, that Moses, Aaron, and Samuel kept God’s testimonies and His ordinance, and that He forgave them and avenged their evil deeds?  How is that possible?

When we can answer that, we will know a little more about God’s forgiveness than we presently do.

And maybe we’ll become better at forgiving each other, too.

1 Comment | Meditations, Speaking as God Speaks, Worship | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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