Egalitarianism as Luxury Belief

26 March 2024

If you’re not familiar with Rob Henderson’s work on luxury beliefs, it would benefit you to get acquainted. The essay above will develop the idea in more depth, but here’s the quick-and-dirty version: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” A common example would be the “defund the police” concept. People who live in gated communities with private security can afford to hold such a belief; people who live in a rough neighborhood where they need to call 911 a few times a month can ill afford to hamstring the police.

As luxury goods of all types (or credible knock-offs of same) become more attainable for anybody with a credit card and an Ebay account, it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who’s a member of the upper- (or upper-middle) class club by someone’s dress or accessories. Henderson suggests that fashionable ideas—luxury beliefs—are taking up that slack.

Both in general society and in certain quarters of the church, egalitarianism functions as a luxury belief. In general society, very few framing carpenters or concrete guys are women, and this is not because of some sort of systemic sexism. In jobs where physical strength and durability really matter, the workers are overwhelmingly male. Dangerous jobs are overwhelmingly male, as are workplace fatalities. More prosaically — and speaking from several years’ experience as the only male employee of a particular retail establishment — when the big, heavy box needs to go on the high shelf, the women look around for the guy to do it.

By contrast, people with laptop-class careers are much less likely to encounter circumstances on the job where they are forced to reckon with the biological differences between men and women. Anybody can sit at a desk and push buttons on a keyboard. These folks can afford a correspondingly higher level of fantasy about how much biology matters, because they don’t have to live with the consequences of that counterfactual belief. The head of a network administration department can entertain the notion that men and women are largely interchangeable; the foreman of a concrete crew had better not.

In other words, the key differentiator here is whether you face any plausible danger of having to eat your own cooking.

There’s a church near me that exemplifies this trend. On gender issues, good number of members profess to be strongly egalitarian as a matter of basic justice. However, the polity of the church they attend is such that they cannot have a female lead pastor, and they do in fact have a very strong, masculine man leading the church. One of the worst upheavals the church ever had happened because egalitarian staffers, most of them female, tried to steer the organization in a more progressive direction, and badly overplayed their hand. The strongly complementarian direction of the church was confirmed; many of the egalitarian congregants nonetheless stayed. Today, those egalitarian congregants–mostly middle- to upper-middle class, mostly driving 10-15 minutes or more to attend–drive past multiple churches with far more egalitarian convictions, some of them with female pastors, in order to attend this particular church. How many of these people would actually be happy with the results, were their fashionably avowed convictions actually put into practice? We’ll never know — and that’s exactly the point of a luxury belief.

Leave a Comment » | Ecclesiology, Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Bodywork and the Dominion Mandate

12 March 2024

For those of you who don’t know, I went back to school when I was 40. I had a Bachelor’s in Biblical Studies, a 4-year Th.M. in New Testament, and was working in my field. I expected to spend the rest of my life in the study and classroom, doing exegetical work more or less full-time. Going to massage therapy school…it was unexpected to say the least. But God has an infinite capacity to surprise.

I remain a theologian, and I want to be able to offer a theological account of what’s going on as I work with a client. By comparison with the exegete’s calling, stepping out to theologize about what happens on the massage table felt a lot like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no net.

Several years into it, I have come to understand that my task is not all that different from any other field. We all plow the fertile fields of general revelation; we just don’t think of it that way. We think in terms of “It works” or “That’s just how you do it.” For example, as a teacher, I had no difficulty showing a new preacher how to set up a 3-point topical sermon. That’s certainly not a particularly biblical structure, but it’s hardly unbiblical. It’s craft knowledge, discovered by working in my calling and paying attention to what works and what does not. The 3-point topical outline just works, and it gives newbies a starting point. There are any number of other teacher tricks — use of slides and visual aids, intelligent use of assignments, questions, discussion, and so on — that are likewise discovered in the doing, and then passed from master to apprentice, down the generations. I learned many of them from my teachers, discovered some on my own, and I pass them on to my students in their turn.

The same dynamic of craft knowledge applies to everything. Scripture tells us much, and it is authoritative. But in most fields of endeavor, special revelation walks us right up to the edge of the field, legitimizing the inquiry — and there it leaves us to explore. Scripture teaches us that the physical creation is real, and good, and worthy of our study, and then leaves us to study it. It doesn’t tell us that the oak tree has several different kinds of tissue in it, nor that all those tissues are composed of complex molecules, nor that those molecules are composed of atoms, nor that the atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, nor that those particles break down into still more elemental particles, and so on. All that, we have to find out by examining the oak tree. Where Scripture speaks about the oak tree, all that it says is true, but it doesn’t speak to every question we have. For many questions, Scripture gives us warrant for the examination, but it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to find.

And so it is with my work. Scripture tells me that the body is real, that it can be ill or healthy. It does say some things about the factors involved (e.g., “A merry heart doeth good like medicine.”) But there’s a lot it doesn’t tell us about how to get it from illness to health: treating specific infectious diseases, setting bones, making medicines, correcting postural imbalances, releasing visceral restrictions. That, we have to learn by exploring the fertile fields of God’s general revelation in the world. And by consistent and careful examination, by honest experiment, we have learned a whole lot — and we have a lot more to learn.

Likewise, Scripture tells me that the spirit is real. So why wouldn’t the same kind of craft knowledge dynamic apply to working with the spirit? Of course we start with what God has given us, but then we learn by experience from there. (If that sounds hazardous, try not learning from experience, and see where that gets you!)

For pretty much any subject, I find the best way to begin is at the beginning, which is to say, in Genesis. The foundations of biblical anthropology are in those first few chapters. We first learn that we are designed to be God’s miniature self-portrait, His signature on the work of art that is the universe, which means we — male and female as a team — are responsible to cultivate and guard the world. Thus far the first chapter. In the second chapter, we discover our composition: God compounded man from dust and breath. Dust is the material part that returns to the earth when we die. Breath is the immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it. But crucially, in the expression “dust and breath,” what is meant by “and”? There’s a complex interaction between the physical and spiritual, and there’s a lot there we don’t really understand.

Our exploration of the dust and only take us so far. It is now beyond scientific question that living cells respond to very subtle influences — magnetic fields long thought to be so weak as to be indistinguishable from background noise, for example, or electromagnetic inputs as small as a single photon. It turns out that the human hands generate magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation that is certainly strong enough for a body to respond at the cellular level. (See Oschman, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed., for a look at the physical science. Thanks to Flexner and his blinkered minions, we’re a century behind on research, so it’s maddening in spots, but it’s also really intriguing. This kind of subtle physical phenomena will be one of the things people mean by “energy work.”)  

But as a Christian, I see no reason to stop with the dust — we know there’s more to a human than that! The things which are seen are not made of things which are visible, and we’re not just talking about subatomic particles here — electrons are visible in principle; it just takes a really expensive set of glasses to see them. But behind all that, behind the physical matter and energy, is something…other. Something spiritual in nature, that manifests in physical reality, but is prior to it and cannot be reduced to it.

In the language of the Eastern Church, everything that exists is made of God’s divine energies. Not His essence — that way lies pantheism or panentheism — but His energies, which flow from His being. There was no pre-existing material; it is all made by Him, and it all exists in Him — in Him we live and move and have our being, as the pagans inferred and Paul affirms. All that is, is the spoken word of God. He spoke, and it is, and He upholds all things by the word of His power.

And so when there is a person on my massage table, there is dust and breath, body and spirit. Following the biblical anthropology, I can use my body to work on their body, relaxing hypertonic muscles, waking up hypotonic ones, reorganizing fascia, breaking up unhealthy adhesions, releasing trigger points, mobilizing organs, and so on, right down to (maybe) using my hand’s magnetic field and biophotonic outputs to affect the injured area at a cellular level—but that’s not all. If I can use my body to affect their body, why can’t I use my spirit to affect their spirit?

It seemed a hypothesis worth exploring, at the very least. Upon experimentation, I find that approaching the interaction conscious of both dust and breath makes for a more effective result. Moreover, when I set to work with that intention, and invite God to enter into the work and accomplish His will for my client’s well-being, I find that He shows up, and very interesting things happen. With some clients, all that happens very quietly (because they’re not ready to be prayed over out loud), and with others, I come all the way out of the closet. We pray together, and God often moves in dramatic ways. I’ve seen everything from physical healings to spiritual turnarounds on my table. This is work I was born to do, and in all modesty, I’m good at it — but I’ve seen God do a lot of things that go way beyond anything I could accomplish.

As best I can tell, my work is partly manipulation of the body, partly communication with the body through subtle physical energies that we’re only beginning to understand, partly my spirit working on my client’s spirit in much the same way that my body works on his body, and partly the Holy Spirit (or whatever delegated angelic powers may be at work) responding to my prayer of invitation to do what the client and I are unable to do on our own.

I need to emphasize that the above is a description of my bodywork. I make no guarantees about someone else’s. Insofar as it’s an interaction between two fallen people, it’s certainly possible there will be demonic attack or interference, and some practitioners openly invite it, addressing the demons by name. Others address themselves to “the universe,” which is sending your request into the spirit world addressed “To Whom It May Concern” — a dangerous practice if ever there were one. Lots of entities out there that might answer that request, and not all of them friendly. Some seem to address their requests to God without quite knowing who they’re talking to — “to the unknown god,” as it were. It is my pleasure, in that instance, to make the introductions. As with Paul’s experience in Athens, I find that most people aren’t too excited to have the veil of divine anonymity ripped away. But some want to hear more, and they’re the ones I came for.

The possibility of demonic intervention makes a lot of Christians nervous, and they want to be able to set up some kind of wall to separate our work from the bad stuff. A lot of people want that separation to be a matter of technique, as if you could photograph the difference between a prophet of Yahweh and a shaman — but no. There are doctrines of demons, but we don’t differentiate our teachers from theirs by their teaching techniques; we discern the content and results of the teaching. Moses and Jambres both threw a staff on the ground that became a snake, both poured out water that became blood. It’s not the technique that distinguishes us; it’s which outlet your power cord is plugged into. That leaves us with no escape from the task of actual discernment. But in my experience, the difference between God and a demon is not particularly subtle.

In my practice, I work spirit-to-spirit under God’s authority, and by His leading. The Scriptures lead me to expect that this might be a fruitful endeavor, practiced in service to Christ and under His Lordship, and I find that it is. I have seen wounded bodies restored and broken hearts healed. Some of that work was a stunning demonstration of human possibility. Some if it was plainly beyond my ability — and yet it happened nonetheless, thanks be to God. As with physical healing, not everything I try works — so I remember what does, and what doesn’t, and next time, I try to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

I look forward to growing in craft knowledge as I go. I already have a fairly good stock of knowledge that I couldn’t back up with a verse, any more than I could put a verse behind quenching O1 tool steel at 1475 degrees. But O1 hardens best when quenched at that temperature all the same; the only verse we need is the Dominion Mandate. Likewise for much of what I’ve learned about bodywork. The more I do, the more I learn. I can’t wait to see what God will show me this week!

2 Comments | Autobiography, Dust and Breath Anthropology, Functioning Supernaturalism, Healing, Livin' the Bivocational Dream, Physicality | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Hidden Costs of Disobedience

20 February 2024

Well over a decade ago, I was challenged by another pastor to become a psalm-singing Christian. The New Testament said to, and I wasn’t one, which seemed like something I should fix. I had no idea where to start, but I dug around and found a few resources. Armed with a few CDs (remember those?) and a psalter/hymnal, I dove in. Not being much of a musician myself, I shared the idea with some friends who were, and the result was a partnership that invested long-term in singing the Psalms, and doing it well. We’re still at it.

Back in those early days, we had no idea what the benefits of psalm-singing would be. We just knew that God said to do it. As we shared the idea with other people–especially worship leaders–a pattern quickly emerged. They could see the obstacles and costs of adding the Psalms to their repertoire, and they could see the benefits of continuing to do what they were already doing. But they had a hard time seeing the benefits of psalm-singing, and an even harder time seeing the costs of their current practice.

Anytime you’re contemplating a change, you are not contemplating it from some blissfully neutral limbo. What you’re doing now has costs. If those costs are so baked into your thinking that you can no longer see them, you won’t be able to make an honest assessment of the proposed change. When that’s the case, it’s time to get fresh eyes on the problem.

But when we’re talking about direct instructions from God, fresh eyes are kind of a moot point. You should be obeying because God told you to. You don’t need to assess whether obedience is worth the costs; by obeying, you’ll be doing better than you could know. But obedience is hard, and there are times when you’ll wonder, “Why am I doing this?” At those times, it can be helpful to look back and ask yourself if you can see the costs of your former disobedience.

In the case of psalm-singing, I can tell you that I’ve come to pray more often and more deeply, I’ve grown more emotionally honest, and I know how to talk to God and other people in ways I couldn’t before. Leithart was right: “Worship is language class.” You learn how to talk.

Sometimes, the Scriptures themselves will peel the scales off your eyes. I had this happen to me a couple decades ago reading Hebrews 3. “Exhort one another daily, while it is called ‘Today,’ lest you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.” The straightforward command is that believers should encourage one another every day. I remember thinking to myself, “I don’t even see another Christian some days.” I realized that in modern life, we are more separated from one another than they were back in the day, and despite all our communication technology, it’s harder to connect.

Well, so much the worse for modern life! Since when do we accept “We don’t really live like that now” as a valid reason to ignore a command from God? If we need to modify our form of life so that we are able to obey, then we should do so, trusting that God will make it worth our while.

I’ve been at it for a couple decades now, and I can tell you: He has. Lack of fellowship was hurting me more than I knew back then. I was lonely, in my own head too much, immature. It was hard to see that at the time, because I was used to it. Two decades later, I’ve been blessed with a place in some of the best communities I’ve ever seen, or even heard about. From my current perch, it’s easy enough to see what I was missing back then.

Far more than these two specific items from Hebrews and the Psalms, though, the point I want to make here is…what else is there? How many direct biblical instructions are out there that we could merely obey, and reap the blessings? Let’s go find them!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Supernaturalism

19 February 2024

Check out this post from Douglas Wilson, talking some hard sense about the supernatural. Money quote: “The first point is that while the Bible teaches us the reality of the spiritual world, it also teaches us that that world, like the physical world around us, is filled with liars. When we enter the spiritual realm, the need to have every fact established with two or three witnesses, and confirmed as being in line with the Word, does not go away.”

Amen.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Right Between the Shoulder Blades

19 December 2023

In case you’ve missed it, there seems to be a bit of a furore about Christian Nationalism all of a sudden. The thought seems terrifying to the secular media, and they seem to be joined in their terror by all the Best Christian Thinkers. (You know, the same ones that thought “Do not forsake assembling yourselves together” was optional if Caesar has any objections to it.)

Some of us are wondering what the big deal might be. Me, I love my country as I love my mother: not because everyone else’s is trash, but because in God’s good providence, this one is mine, and has been a blessing to me. Mixed blessing, to be sure, but how are we to make it better? Why, by seeking to live according to what is true, good and beautiful.

“Ah,” they say, “But who is to say what is true, good, and beautiful? After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Everybody has a different idea of good. And truth?” They shrug, Pliate-like. “What is truth?”

Right. So don’t give the steering wheel to those guys. And in case you haven’t noticed, those guys seem to be the ones doing most of the steering in our culture right now. They’re happy to let us all continue to celebrate Easter, continue to think of Jesus as risen from the dead, and like that, just as long as we think it personally and privately, and don’t attempt to insert it into any discussion that matters. You want to believe in Jesus? Fine. You want a baby in the womb to be legally protected from murder, because Jesus? Oh no, that just won’t do. That’s Christian Nationalism, you see.

Also in case you hadn’t noticed, those guys aren’t just steering the culture. They’re also steering the Best Christian Thinkers. As it turns out, the Best Christian Thinkers are all afraid to be called Christian Nationalists, and that fear causes a little steering wheel to grow right out their backs, right between the shoulder blades. Periodically, the powers reach out and turn that wheel just a little. There was some Christian Nationalism in the road ahead, you see. A little to the left…there we go! Missed it! Phew! What a relief.

Again, do not let those guys have the steering wheel.

Here’s what’s actually happening: there’s at least two different kinds of Christian Nationalism. There’s Bugbear Christian Nationalism, which is what the talking heads at NPR (and the talking heads who listen to them) will accuse you of advocating if you want your Christian beliefs to have any impact in the public square—if, for example, you want to outlaw murder (like, say, dismembering babies in utero, you misogynist), or if you want to enshrine liberty of conscience, or any other Christian value, in law. Every discerning Christian is guilty of these charges—haters, every one a’ youse—and there’s no point in quibbling about the label; might as well hold our heads high and ask “As opposed to what?” Molochian Nationalism? Liberte, Egalite, and Guillotines? The Five Year Plan to reach true communism? Looting liquor stores for racial justice? The options just keep getting better. It’ll work next time, you’ll see….

Then there’s a second kind: Wierdbeard Christian Nationalism, which is all prairie muffin dresses and fines for wearing clothing of mixed fibers, or some such thing. In a nation of 350 million people, there are literal fives of people holding this view, and the talking heads are hoping to steer the rest of the Christians by making us afraid to be associated with them. Now, to be fair, they really do have some things I don’t want to associate with—I like my poly/cotton shirts and my dental care, ya know? On the other hand, the nice folks in button-down shirts are selling baby parts in bulk. Compared to them, the wierdbeards are starting to look downright civilized. If the choice is between high-end necromancy and square dancing, swing your partner!

This really doesn’t have to be complicated. I love my neighbors and I want good things for them. I want their faucets to run with clean water, their neighborhood streets to be smooth and pothole-free, the cracks in their sidewalks to be repaired promptly, their toilets to be a one-way system. Even for the poor families. I want their children to live free of the danger of being abused, mutilated, or murdered by anybody, including their own parents. I want them to have public order, that they might lead quiet and peaceable lives, and I want them to have the freedom to worship in accord with their consciences.

You don’t have to be Christian to want clean water for yourself, but wanting clean water for your neighbors is another matter. Historically, that ‘love your neighbor’ thing gets very limited play in places where the gospel hasn’t seriously penetrated the culture. All these things—every one of them—are Christian values, and I vote in support of them, because Jesus thinks I should. If that makes me a Christian Nationalist…what the heck? Ain’t the worst thing I been called this week.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Pooping Goes Mobile

24 October 2023

The human duty to love fruitfulness goes all the way back to Genesis 1, and presents having children as the prototypical act of fruitfulness. Every part of having children is messy, from the lovemaking that leads to conception, to the morning sickness that follows, to the birth. Then there’s a lot of spitting up, even more pooping, and before long, the pooping goes mobile!

Believe it or not, that’s still the simple part — the messes keep getting harder, more complex, more consequential. The first leaky diaper feels like a catastrophe at the time, but it’s nothing compared to the first E.R. visit, first break-up, first car accident. In the end you launch a new adult into the world.

No part of this process is clean and efficient. It’s long, grueling, labor-intensive to the point of comedy. It teaches us how fruitfulness works. You can’t be afraid of hard work. You can’t be afraid of looking ridiculous. And above all, you certainly can’t be afraid of making a mess.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Shiny Foil Wrappers

10 October 2023

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

If the answer is yes, then get to it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Whose Faith Follow

12 September 2023

Once upon a time, I was a doctrine wonk. I honestly believed that if we just got the doctrine right, we would live well. My community valued correct exegesis and theology, and invested enormous effort in doing them well. As one of their fair-haired sons, and I got paid to research, write, and teach at seminary. It was a geek’s dream job, and I loved it….  

<cue spooky music>

…then the whole community tore itself apart. Some of the best exegetes and theologians I knew went for each other’s throats. I’d love to say that I stayed above the fray, but I didn’t. My personal loyalties were with one side, but I also thought they were exegetically and theologically more correct…at first.

I quickly began to realize that the conflict wasn’t actually about doctrine. That’s a big claim, but it’s true. The doctrinal differences were not entirely insignificant, but there was ample room for everyone involved to continue working together. A number of close observers and secondary participants, myself included, suggested ways to move forward, but there was a problem we couldn’t solve: the principals didn’t want unity. The doctrinal difference was a smokescreen, a way to make the conflict respectable. The real problems were personal and relational: abundance of offense, lack of repentance and forgiveness, and lack of sufficient emotional maturity to address the personal conflicts.

I slowly began to realize that even if the problem were primarily doctrinal, we were handling it poorly. As I dug into Scripture looking for instructions and patterns for handling this kind of conflict, I kept coming back to Acts 15. This chapter is the first big doctrinal conflict in the Church, and the pattern that it sets upholds the unity of the Body of Christ as a cardinal doctrine and practice for Christians. I’ve written on this at great length elsewhere, so I’m not going to belabor the point here. Outward unity that is visible to observing unbelievers is Jesus’ prayer to the Father for us, it is the manner in which we win the world, and without unity right down to the practical level of seating arrangements at supper, we are not being straightforward about the gospel. It’s a big deal. 

Once I had gotten this far, God moved me to Englewood, Colorado, to see unity in practice. 

In Englewood, I met a group of pastors who got along. They prayed with and for each other. They blessed each other’s ministries. Every once in a while, they preached in each other’s churches. They gathered their churches once a year for a joint worship service. Were they all the same denomination? Not even close. We had Messianic Jews, Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Bible church guys, nondenominational, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and more. With far less common doctrinal basis than my seminary faculty had, the Englewood pastors created a far greater obedience than we had ever dreamed of. What was I to make of that?

“Remember those who rule over you, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering the outcome of their conduct.” The author of Hebrews 13:7 is talking specifically about our relationship to our local church leaders, but the principle applies. Pay attention to the outcome of your leaders’ conduct. Follow the faith of those whose fruit is good; do not follow the faith of those whose fruit is bad. 

So what did the Englewood pastors have that my seminary faculty did not? There actually are some relevant doctrinal pieces here, but that’s another post. The first and most important common element wasn’t doctrinal at all. It was obedience, straight up the middle. Jesus wanted us to be one, and they set out to find a way. They knew they weren’t going to be able to iron out every little doctrinal difference, and they were looking for ways to obey anyhow. Turns out, when we start looking for ways to obey instead of reasons not to, a lot of things are possible.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Wearing the Old Jacket?

22 August 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only He can save us.

***

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

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

Donovan’s Dumb Idea

15 August 2023

Aaron Renn’s most recent newsletter reviews two popular books on manhood that approach the subject from a neopagan outlook: Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men and Ryan Landry’s Masculinity Amid Madness. Renn’s treatment is solid, and I commend it to you; this is a supplementary observation.

One of Donovan’s big points is that historically speaking, men have functioned in small, single-sex groups: hunting parties, construction crews, military squads, and so on. He’s right about that, and although contemporary male single-sex spaces are rapidly being overrun, it still happens to some extent in all the above examples, plus more modern expressions like sports teams or musical bands. Donovan argues that setting continues to be the best environment for men, proffers various prescriptions for regaining such an environment in the present day (which we should, somehow), and–here’s the howler–longs for the collapse of civilization so that roving bands of men might once again flourish on the landscape. Which is to say, he misses the whole point of all the sacrifices his ancestors made.

What those small bands of men have done, for thousands of years, is build. They built lives and homes and farms, won and married women, raised families, built towns and cities. The society that presently surrounds us is the fruit of their labors over thousands of years. That society is presently doing its best to kill its men, pursuant to killing itself, true enough. But so what?

Once upon a time–not too long ago, actually–the killers were starvation, contaminated water, large predators, infected wounds, etc. Our ancestors solved those problems. Today’s killer is a different problem entirely: a cultural autoimmune disorder. Facing a danger he doesn’t know how to navigate, Donovan’s best idea is to wipe out the accumulated contributions of generations of his ancestors, in hopes that he can spend his life going over the same familiar ground, working problems they had already solved for us. This is why you can’t trust pagans with history; they keep trying to act like it’s a circle. But the timeline is a line. History is written by God Himself, and it’s going somewhere.

The past certainly has a wealth of lessons to teach us, but the cutting edge of masculinity will never be back there in the rearview mirror. It’s here, now. The job isn’t to go back and fight hungry bears or bust sod; it’s to wrest our dying young men from the tentacles of legal weed and highly available porn, to snatch them from gears of the secularist sausage grinder that’s trying to crush them into androgynous units of consumption. Our challenge is to disciple them, to be makers and doers and inspire them to join us, to strengthen their hands in building what is true, good and beautiful–to be lights in a darkening time. We can’t do that by ignoring the past, but we can’t do that by repeating it, either.

Comments Off on Donovan’s Dumb Idea | Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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