Parable of the Hats

13 July 2022

Once upon a time, a feller named Jack grew disturbed at the number of people running around without hats. Finding hats both useful and stylish, Jack set about to change the trend, to which end he founded the Hat Society “to promote the wearing of hats.” Jack worked hard at helping see the advantage of hats, and the Society grew to the point that they were running on a half-million dollars or so a year, all to promote hats. Now Jack himself had always worn a fedora, but at Hat Society meetings you could find cowboy hats, homburgs, berets, bowlers, baseball caps, tams, even a few propeller-topped beanies.  

Over time, that began to change. The propeller-topped beanies were the first to go, but they hadn’t done much for the dignity of hat-wearing, and nobody really missed them. The guys in berets and tams kinda disappeared a few at a time. A few years later, baseball caps began to get scarce, and that feller in the fishing hat with all the flies on it was asked to never come back. 

Fast-forward a few more years, and there’s an occasional cowboy hat around, but pretty much everybody at the meetings is wearing a fedora. Jack himself is maintaining that a dark fawn fedora is the perfect epitome of hat-ness, and he never wears anything else. At one point, this led to a confrontation between Jack and the board; Jack asked all the non-fedora-wearing board members to resign, which they did.

Some folks claim that back in the day, Jack used to sometimes wear a grey fedora. Others maintain that it was always dark fawn. Nobody seems able to prove it for sure either way, and most of the people who were around back then have long since left. Oddly, it’s not called the Fedora Society; it’s still the Hat Society, and the mission statement still reads “to promote the wearing of hats.” 

Now Jack may be within his rights to promote the dark fawn fedora, and perhaps even to use Society funds for the purpose. But he can’t really claim to speak for the community of hat-wearers anymore, can he? 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Are All Who Identify As Free Grace Cessationists? NO!

8 July 2022

A few days ago, Bob Wilkin of the Grace Evangelical Society came out with a blog post titled “Are All Who Identify as Free Grace Cessationists?” Now, given the title of the piece, you’d expect it to be about people who are Free Grace and their views on the sign gifts. You’d expect that…but no.

I encourage you to read the piece; it’s an impressive little piece of bait-and-switch journalism. Were anyone at GES inclined to give the question a straightforward answer, the answer, in a word, is NO. Which, it seems, is the one thing they really didn’t want to say. So we get treated to some very clever framing instead.

The article begins by posing the question from the title and defining cessationism. Then, instead of talking about Free Grace people and their positions on cessationism, the article pivots to focus on charismatics and their views on the gospel. R. T. Kendall, Michael Eaton, and Jack Deere all get a favorable mention, and then we get this clever little sentence: “Beyond those three, I do not know of any third wave or charismatic theologians who hold to eternal security, let alone FGT.” He then continues, “My guess is that there are more. But most would not agree with FGT on justification or sanctification.”

The claims of fact are technically true, but the overall effect is lying by omission. The paragraph cultivates a general impression that Free Grace people are basically cessationists except for R. T., Michael, and Jack, the first two of whom don’t seem to have ever publicly identified as Free Grace anyhow, and we don’t know if Jack still holds to it. Hardly any overlap between the camps, it would seem….

But remember the question we started out with? “Are all who identify as Free Grace cessationists?” By dodging that question and focusing on charismatic theologians (who might be Free Grace), Bob has avoided addressing the question he actually started with, which is whether all Free Grace people are cessationist. The answer — and Bob knows this; don’t make me get my screenshots and prove it — is no. That there are a number of us non-cessationist Free Grace folks, not least the man who was for 10 years Bob’s right-hand man (until 5 days before this blog post went up). Ahem.

So why didn’t he just say so? He could have just said, “No, not all Free Grace people are cessationist; we don’t have to agree on that to be Free Grace.” He didn’t. Why not?

Note: Unfortunately, GES seems to have made a habit of this sort of thing. Drew McLeod of the Provisionist Perspective and I discussed another instance a few months ago.

Comments Off on Are All Who Identify As Free Grace Cessationists? NO! | Cessationism Or Not, Ecclesiology | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

A Supernatural Faith: An Interview

14 June 2022

I had the opportunity to sit with my friend Chris Morrison of Gulfside Ministries and chat for a while. You can find the interview here.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What Can’t Be Faked

15 February 2022

You can fake wisdom, in some settings. It’s relatively easy for a smart young adult to memorize the doctrinal reflections of their elders in the tradition. Memorize the system, and you have an answer for more or less everything. To the uninitiated, this looks pretty good.

A more discerning audience quickly sees through it. Book-smarts without experience has a brittle quality to it that’s easy to recognize once you have a bit of life under your belt. Memorizing a couple fat books worth of content is nothing to sneeze at; it takes a ready mind and is an achievement in its own right…but it’s not wisdom. It took wisdom to write the books in the first place; memorizing them takes a lot less than that. Memorizing other people’s wisdom is not the same thing as having some yourself.

The young’un in question is usually not trying to fake anything; there’s no intent to deceive. It’s just that he (or she) really, honestly believes that the book-smarts are more useful than they really are. How do I know? I was that kid.

When you managed to make it a decent way into your education as the smartest person in the room, you want to believe that being smart will carry you the rest of the way. But it isn’t true. Outside the artificial world of the classroom, nobody cares how smart you are; they care what you can do. If the smarts don’t translate into service, they don’t matter. In ministry, that means that your mastery of a system of doctrine only matters to the extent that you can cash it out in practice, and that takes, well, practice.

These are the things you can’t fake, the things where reading fat books won’t help you much. You either actually show up and love actual humans over the long term or you don’t. You move the dead washing machine, rock the screaming baby so mom can get a shower, bring food and medicine when they’re sick, take the 2 am call when they’re 7 days sober and maybe not gonna make it. Sometimes they don’t, and you show up for the funeral. Sometimes they make it, and you celebrate. Sometimes they make it, but their brother, or sister, or kid doesn’t, and you hold them while they sob til they puke. You show up because Jesus called you to. You show up because Jesus is already there, and He wants you to be His hands and feet and voice.

In those moments, your ability to win a classroom debate is nothing. You either bring Jesus or you bring nothing at all.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Can We Understand the World?

5 October 2021

Contemporary skepticism looks like this: God made a movie, and a theater to watch it in, and then an audience of people to watch the movie. And now the audience is starting to wonder: Can we really understand the movie?

See, we have been analyzing the movie, and we’ve discovered that the whole thing is a fraud! The pictures don’t even actually move — there’s just 24 still pictures every second, in rapid succession. I mean, seriously — the whole thing’s just a trick! How could it mean anything?

But all this is folly, of course. God made the world for us, and us for it. He is revealing Himself in the world, and He is good at what He does. Of course we can receive revelation.

Modern man has just forgotten how.

Primitive man knew how to see the meaning in the world. Everything was alive, everything was meaningful. For the ancient Hebrews, the heavens declared God’s glory. When Messiah delivers His people, the very trees will clap their hands.

Even in its corrupted, nature-worshipping form, the ancient worldview didn’t lose the meaning in the world. We talk about it as “animism,” the belief that every thing in the world also has an anima, a spirit. But primitive man doesn’t see the tree and the tree spirit as two separate things. He sees a single, metaphysically thick entity — a physical and spiritual tree.

Primitive man could see the meaning in the world, could follow the thread of the story. But primitive man could only see a single thread.

With Descartes and Galileo, Western man began to realize that the thread was 2-ply, a twine of matter and consciousness. They unwound the composite thread in order to better study matter alone. Thus astrology became astronomy, alchemy became chemistry, and so on. This was all to the good, and we got a whole lot of good from it — the whole technological world we live in.

Nobody wants to turn back the clock. We’re all very happy to have vacuum cleaners, penicillin, and Prime 2-day delivery, thank you very much.

The problem is not that we need to undo the work that was done over the past few centuries. The problem is the work we didn’t do. We unwound the two-ply thread of matter and consciousness, and examined one of the threads exhaustively…and then pretended that the other thread doesn’t matter. We have not carried out the parallel examination of consciousness.

We have come to a point where our study of matter is forcing us back to consciousness. Matter, it turns out, is not just a series of ever-smaller Lego bricks. The quantum world does not behave like Legos at all. We have tiny particles that behave differently depending on whether we’re looking at them.

Consciousness matters. Consciousness influences the activities of matter. And so we cannot proceed until we understand more about the consciousness of the people that are looking.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Washed

9 March 2021

I had occasion to finally summarize my research and teaching on baptism over the past decade or so. Here it is.

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

On Being Misunderstood

24 November 2020

Paul required that elders be of good reputation among those outside the faith (1 Tim. 3:7)–and this in a culture that sometimes accused Christians of atheism and cannibalism, that crucified us, threw us to the lions, burned us alive. Paul himself had quite the criminal history as a Christian, as did that escaped jailbird Peter and many others, all following the condemned and executed Jesus. Plainly Paul did not mean that you can’t serve in church leadership if anybody has bad things to say about you. He cannot mean that you’re only qualified if your godly conduct has never been misunderstood by the world. 

Yet we are surrounded by Christians who think that’s exactly what having a good Christian testimony means. These credulous folks have been lulled by four centuries of unprecedented prosperity and freedom, during which the culture took it for granted that being a Christian was a good thing. (Perhaps a little too wholesome and not much fun, but a good thing nonetheless.) But it has not always been that way, and–have a look around–it is not really that way now. 

We are going to be misunderstood. Sometimes it will be an honest misunderstanding brought about by simple confusion. The devil excels at manufacturing that sort of thing. Sometimes it will be a tactical misunderstanding, and the wounded party will be flopping about like a French soccer player, even though nobody was within 3 yards of him. There’s a great deal of the latter, actually, and our National Evangelical Leadership (all rise!) has been steered by the flopping soccer players of the secular world for some time now. Steered straight into severe compromise, and all in the name of empathy for the player with the allegedly injured leg. 

Comments Off on On Being Misunderstood | Discernment, Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

How Seasoning Works

13 October 2020

You can’t season mashed potatoes by adding another potato. You also can’t season mashed potatoes by having salt in a saltshaker in your cupboard. Two things are necessary: you have to have something different from the food, and you have to bring that different thing into contact with the food.

You are the salt of the earth. Discuss.

2 Comments | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

One Mind?

22 September 2020

Therefore if there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. (Phil. 2:1-2)

What does God’s idea of “one mind” actually look like? In an age of ideology, we look for the wrong thing. We look for someone to parrot the party line, to have no “unapproved” thoughts, no unexpected questions. If we’re impatient, we punish anyone who deviates from expectations with whatever label our community uses to mark out Something You Can’t Say (i.e., blasphemy): “heretical,” “problematic,” or the ever-popular “racist” or “sexist.”

But God is not an ideologue, and we are not Unitarians. We are trinitarian, and that means we expect to hear the truth in multiple complementary voices. Our proverbs have two lines. We don’t all sing the same note; we believe in harmony. We even believe in discord: Jesus died on a tree. That was a hell of a note, but it’s not the end of the song.

On a walk recently, the Lady Wife and I were talking about the relationships where we have one-mindedness, and what characterizes those relationships. There’s certainly a lot of agreement, but that’s not the thing. We disagree too, and not just temporarily. I often find myself “holding hands across the fence” with someone who on paper holds a view on the other side of the ideological bright line, but has the same heart I do, and we are nearer to one another than we are to other people who *on paper* are on “our” respective sides.

Where we disagree, we find — Kimberly’s words here — “a place of peace where we’re not sinning” against each other, we’re not mad about it, and the work God’s called us to can go forward. We’re not all singing the same note, but there’s harmony. Even discord doesn’t in itself mean we’ve lost one-mindedness; it just means we’re doing jazz — if you keep playing, it wasn’t a mistake, and it will come to resolution in time.

Of course, as our more ideological brothers will be quick to point out, there is such a thing as intractable discord, and that really does create problems. Part of maintaining unity is discernment and discipline.

But the ideologues are good at discipline and no good at discernment, and as a result, they have conformity, but not unity. They don’t know what they’re missing.

1 Comment | Ecclesiology, The Tradition | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

On Rebaptism

8 September 2020

Zaccheus walks into the temple. Since Jesus visited his home a few weeks ago, he’s a changed man. He has restored everything that he cheated anyone of, like he promised–and that took a while–and word has spread far and wide of the tax collector who has repented. As he passes through the temple gate, whispers spread through the crowd like a wind through dry leaves. He stops inside the gate and looks up at the inner temple. It’s been so long since he was welcome here. So long since he came here to worship.

A wizened priest approaches him, suspicion etched deep in his wrinkled face. “What brings you here, tax collector?”

Not long ago, the man’s tone alone would have been enough to drive Zaccheus out of the temple. But he’s a different man now. Zaccheus bows his head. “I need to be circumcised again.”

Does that sound odd to you?

As circumcision was the rite of entry under the Old Covenant, baptism is the rite of entry in the New. Some folks have taken that to mean that we should baptize babies born into Christian families, but that’s only because they haven’t thought it all the way through. You circumcise an Old Covenant baby after he’s born into the Old Covenant, which was simple enough. Under the New Covenant, though, people are born twice. Which birth do we baptize them after? If baptism is the new circumcision, what is the new birth?

Well…the new birth. So once the person is born again, we baptize them. If the man wanders away, becomes a gambler and a drunkard, joins the Hell’s Angels, sells automatic weapons to third-world dictators, the whole works, and then comes back, does he need to be baptized again?

No. The original baptism counted, and it still counts. His many sins are an insult to his baptism, but they don’t undo it, anymore than cheating on your spouse undoes your wedding. You can’t commit adultery enough times to make your wedding didn’t happen. (You might induce your spouse to divorce you, but that’s a different thing.)

Now, if this man comes to me, repentant of his life and seeking to return to the Lord, will I receive him? Of course! If he wants to be rebaptized as a symbol of his repentance and return, will I refuse him? Of course not!

A couple whose marriage was dead and has come alive again may renew their wedding vows. I see nothing wrong with renewing the man’s baptism. But that is what we’re doing — renewing it.

2 Comments | Baptism, liturgy | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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