Can We Afford It?

20 November 2024

Treating someone graciously is a form of generosity. As with all forms of generosity, graciousness is greatly cramped when we don’t think we can afford it. This is true whether we can actually afford it or not.

Say we have a single mother in the church who asks one of the men in the church to come look at her tires. It seems to her that something’s wrong, she says. He goes out into the parking lot, and the tire has a great big bulge in the sidewall.

“I don’t get paid until Friday,” she says, “and I have to pay rent out of that. Do you think it can wait until I get paid again in two weeks?”

No, it cannot. Now suppose as they’re talking about how she really shouldn’t delay replacing the tire, another fellow walks over and also takes a look. He agrees with the first guy that the tire should be replaced immediately.

Now suppose that one of these guys has $30,000 in the bank and no pressing need for it, while the other has $700 to his name, and his own rent payment looming at the end of the week. Which one of these guys is going to help this lady pay for tires?

You’d be tempted to say that of course the first guy will do it, but if you’ve been around people a little, you know better than to be so sure. We’ve all known people with tens of thousands of dollars who didn’t think they could afford to part with ten bucks, and we’ve all known people with only a few hundred who would buy you lunch if you looked hungry. Generosity does not depend only on some objective measure of what you can afford. Generosity depends on what you believe you can afford.

The guy with a few hundred bucks to his name, who goes and buys the lady’s tires? He believes that God has been good to him. He believes that God has given him everything he has, and everything he has is therefore at God’s disposal. He believes that God put him here to help take care of the tires, and that God knows the rent is due at the end of the week, and He will take care of it. He knows himself to be living in the lap of God’s largesse; why would he struggle to share? “You can’t outgive God!” he’ll say. Or “I shovel it out, and God shovels it in, and He’s got the bigger shovel.”

I’ve known a bunch of guys like that over the years; had occasion to be one now and again. Let me tell ya: it’s a lot of fun giving God’s money to people who need it! You maybe feel a little dumb come Friday afternoon and you’re still not sure how the rent gets paid, but you know what? I’ve seen God come through over and over and over again. (Standard disclaimer: It’s possible to overdo giving just like it’s possible to overdo anything else. I’m not saying you should just be a moron with your money; I’m saying you should be generally wise, and also know that at any given moment, God might call you to do something that looks really foolish. He gets to do that; everything you have is His. When He does, know that He’s got your back, and He’s good for it.)

To return to the observation I began this post with, it’s not just money. I digressed into money because money is easy to talk about, but you can be generous (or not) with any resource you have. It might be your time, your effort, your expertise. It might be a little space on your web server, or a little space in your garage for someone to store a couple boxes. It might be a late-night run out to the airport to pick up an old friend’s stranded kid, and another run back out there in the morning to get the kid on the next flight out. It might be your sympathy. It might mean showing grace to someone who–this being the meaning of grace–doesn’t deserve a bit of it.

In any of these cases, the key to generosity is the belief that you can afford it, and that, in turn, depends on your gratitude for what God has given you. This is particularly the case with showing sympathy, moral grace.

People who feel a need to signal virtue, people whose virtue is brittle, shallow, only skin-deep, can’t afford to be generous. It would endanger their fragile bona fides. They need to be hard on others, critical, scathing even, lest somebody begin to wonder if they themselves are somehow soft on that particular sin. When you’re about the impossible task of establishing your own righteousness, there’s no audience too small or occasion too petty.

Go thou, and do un-likewise. But this is not something you’re likely to be able to fake, or to muscle through as a raw exercise in self-control. You should be a deep and genuine conduit of God’s grace, and that means you need to become grateful for God’s grace to you. So begin to meditate on God’s grace to you. If you need a place to start, you could do worse than Ephesians 2:1-10. Let’s get about it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay, Pt. 2

22 October 2024

We ended part one with a question: it’s easy enough to see why pagans might believe that all intimacy is ultimately the same, and all leads to sexual intimacy, but what would possess Christians to think that?

Fear, that’s what.

Some of it is fear of adultery. It’s a massively destructive sin, and sensible people don’t want to be anywhere near it. But then, sensible people don’t want to be in a house fire or a high-speed auto accident either, and don’t on that account cut off the electricity in their houses or refuse to drive on highways. Sensible people recognize that everything has risks, and if you think electricity is risky, reading by candlelight is not exactly risk-free. A 30-minute drive on the highway has its risks, sure, but the 60-minute drive it takes to stay off the highway also has its fair share of risk exposure. Our problem, in this case, is that we’re sensitive to the risks of one course of action, and utterly blind to the risks of the other.

Adultery’s damage is well-known. The damage done by fearing and avoiding meaningful interaction with the opposite sex is less well understood, but no less real. Lacking an appreciation for the benefits of healthy cross-gender interaction and friendship, we see nothing there but danger. We ought to know better, because our advice to just stay away from the opposite sex does not track with how Scripture tells us to behave (but we’ll get to that).

Part of the perceived danger comes from a mythology we’ve allowed self-justifying adulterers to build up for themselves. “I don’t know how it happened!” they say. “One thing just led to another!” Too many Christians take these ridiculous claims at face value, and we really ought to know better. It’s fairly difficult to have sex by accident, unless you’re already so far compromised that the final PIV detail hardly matters anyway. But foolish Christians buy this nonsense, and then build on it: since apparently nobody, not even the adulterers, really knows how adultery happens, they conclude that men and women just need to avoid each other. Any intimacy of any type is a threat, and so they treat all intimacy as the same thing. Ironically, their fear of becoming like the world is the very thing that causes them to become like the world (no surprise if you remember Prov. 29:25). But God has not given us a spirit of fear (2 Tim. 1:7), so let’s not forget what He’s told us about sin. We are not ignorant of Satan’s devices (2 Cor. 2:11).

Some while back, I sat in a marriage counseling session with a husband who’d cheated and a wife who was deciding what to do about it. “I don’t know what happened!” he said. You know what I told him? “You just blew a hole in the bottom of the boat that is your marriage, and you’re taking on water fast. You need her help” I pointed at his wife “or you’re sunk. You need her to believe that this isn’t going to happen again. ‘I don’t know what happened!’ doesn’t inspire confidence.” As we dug into it, what we found is that his initial “I don’t know what happened” response was a defense mechanism. He didn’t want to think about it. It was just easier to say “I don’t know what happened.” Part of my job was to help him do the hard work of facing what he’d done and excavating how it happened so they could prevent it in the future. Over the next half-hour or so, he faced his sin squarely, dug into how he got there, and then we made a plan to keep him out of similarly tempting situations in the future.

What we found, of course, tracks with Scripture (and common sense). He didn’t commit adultery by accident; both parties knew what they were doing. At a certain point, a decision gets made that involves a zipper, and nobody concerned is somehow unaware of the implications of that decision. Sexual arousal is designed by God to be the sort of thing that gathers momentum as it goes, a bit like a long, steep playground slide. When they’re already three-quarters of the way down the slide, it’s easy enough to see how “one thing led to another” until they ended up in the mud puddle at the bottom. But how did they end up on that slide to start with? Answering that question is where Scripture is a big help.

God tells us: “Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.” The process certainly is deceptive—hence the warning against being deceived—but it’s not a mystery. God has told us all about it: we need to police our desires.

The deception comes in not believing God about this. When the desire passes through your mind, it’s not just a harmless pleasant thought. If you find yourself thinking, “I can’t…but it would be fun,” you’re already in trouble. If you think you can nurture the desire without getting hurt, you’re deceiving yourself. It’s already hurting you. And then, if you think about it long enough, it’s going to infect your behavior, one way or another. The same lies will still be with you: “It’s not hurting anybody. Besides, who’s gonna know?” If you think you can play with the sin a little bit without anything serious happening, you’re wrong. Desire conceives and gives birth to sin; sin matures and gives birth to death. So the thing to do is address the desire.

Let’s take an example. Say a particular couple’s sexual relationship is on the rocks, no matter why. He’s out there in the working world, he’s sexually hungry, and an opportunity—a willing coworker who’s particularly interested in him, say—crosses his path. What is he supposed to do with this situation?

Say no, of course, but that’s not nearly enough. He needs to kill the desire. His desire for sexual communion is a good and godly thing, and there’s exactly one person he’s to fulfill that desire with. When that desire gets misdirected onto anybody else, the thing to do is starve it ruthlessly. Don’t toy with it; don’t think about it. Give it no occasion for expression, and pray until it dies. He should turn his attentions to his wife (cf. 1 Cor. 7:2-5), and if for whatever reason his wife cannot or will not meet his legitimate needs, then he should embrace the ascetic struggle and suffer like Jesus would rather than give the enemy a victory. Jesus’ legitimate human needs were going unmet in the wilderness (food), in the Garden (companionship and emotional support), and on the cross (physical safety). We should be prepared to follow Jesus; a servant is not greater than his Master.

But this is not to say that the man has to go it alone. Christians are meant to live giving and receiving daily encouragement. Particularly in times like these, a believer needs the support of his brothers and sisters. How does that work? Stay tuned.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay

13 August 2024

“Spiritual intimacy leads to physical intimacy.” I was told that a number of times growing up, by various parties in and around my church, but especially (and repeatedly) by a godly older couple I highly respected. Their practical application of that idea was a corollary to the Billy Graham rule: a man and a woman ought not to have serious conversations about deep spiritual things. Aside from your spouse, men ought to talk with men, and women with women, (or maybe couples with couples) and that’s that. (I’ve both written and said my piece about that error elsewhere, and won’t belabor it here.)

More recently, I had an unbelieving colleague with whom I did some very high-quality, very careful bodywork over a period of about a year. Everything was going well until one day, out of the blue, she began a conversation that turned into an invitation to adultery. To her dubious credit, she was very forthright: for her, being seen well and known well created sexual tension, which she wanted to relieve by taking our working relationship into the bedroom. I declined, which she certainly expected — the invitation was framed in a “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” kind of way — then I declined further contact, which seems to have surprised her; and when she continued to reach out to me, ultimately asked her not to contact me again.

Now, the same type of work I did with her, I’ve done with others of both genders over the years with no such difficulty. So what caused her to have such a problem? The same misbelief that the godly older couple in the first paragraph was suffering from: thinking that all intimacy is ultimately the same thing.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The world was formless and empty. God forms the world by dividing a series of contrasting pairs one from the other: light and darkness, sea and sky, dry land and sea. Then He fills the newly-divided world: the greater lights to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night, fish in the sea and birds in the sky, and land-dwelling animals. Then He signs the portrait: “male and female He created them.”

God created genuine variety, not a world of monist mush. Many of the different things He made are perichoretically related in surprising ways, but they are different things, each with its own glory. One of the fundamental truths about God and His creation (as Francis Schaeffer famously observed) is that all things are not the same to Him. He doesn’t just recognize distinctions; He literally makes distinctions. Christians ought to be automatically suspicious of any claim that starts out, “It’s all the same thing, man!”

One of the distinctions we ought to recognize is between a marriage and every other human relationship. Different kinds of relationships are different, each with its own unique glory. There’s not a single staircase of human relationship with casual interaction at the bottom and a marriage bed at the top, the only variable being how far up the stairs you climb with a particular person. Relationships differ in kind as well as degree. There’s more than one staircase, and they don’t all go to the same place.

This is something that Christians ought to already know: we will have eternity—literally all the time in the world—to know each other better. There’s not a single person on the New Earth that you won’t meet, and with that kind of time on our hands, we’ll all get to know each other very well indeed. As well as you can get to know your spouse in 50 or 60 years of successful marriage, that’s nothing to how well you’re going to know, say, Deborah or Samuel one day. And you still won’t end up married to them. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” like Jesus said.

Similarly, same-sex friendships like Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, are held out as examples of close friendship and love: a different kind, not a lesser degree, of relationship. Contemporary revisionist takes on those relationships (wrongheaded for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere) are actually a symptom of the very error we’re addressing. The revisionists’ inability to imagine a close relationship that’s not sexual is precisely the problem, and they’re projecting their own lack of imagination on everyone else.

Contemporary people think they live in a world of monist mush, and they’ve deified their lusts to the point that many of them will bed virtually anybody under a highly flexible ‘right’ set of circumstances. Many really do only have one relational staircase. That staircase leads inexorably to sexual intimacy, and every step below it is some combination of audition and foreplay, all the way down to a casual conversation with a stranger on the sidewalk. Which is kinda gross, if you think about it for a moment.

Framed that way, the failure of imagination is easy to see, and it ought not to surprise us that pagans would struggle in this way. It’s baked into their basic premises about the world; the mystery is that they don’t struggle more often. But what in the world would possess Christians to get tripped up like that?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Cooking Up Excuses

30 July 2024

In order to join the church I grew up in, you had to sign off on the statement of faith in its entirety. That statement of faith was pages and pages long, very detailed. It got down to the level of things like the pre-trib rapture. I recall one family who faithfully attended the church–in fact, the wife ran our nursery for two decades or so–but could never officially become members, on account of holding a different view of prophecy. Too often, doctrinally conservative churches wear such nit-picky particularity like a badge of honor, touting how we “care about truth” and “take doctrine seriously.”

That’s a lie. (I say that advisedly, and I mean it.) Allow me to demonstrate: if we cared deeply about the truth, then what about the truth that “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body”? How do we present that truth to a watching world? When we allow such nit-picky details to define the boundaries of our membership, cooperation, or fellowship, we are–to borrow Paul’s words from Galatians–“not straightforward about the truth of the gospel.”

What does that mean? In the immediate context, Peter and Barnabas and the rest of the Jews in the Galatian church had been freely mixing with Gentiles until certain folks came down from Jerusalem who wouldn’t approve. Then they all withdrew, and wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles at the church potluck anymore. Paul calls it hypocrisy, and with good reason: if the Gentiles belong to Christ, and Christ has cleansed them, then they are as clean as it gets! There’s no reason to divide the body into slighly-more-clean and slightly-less-clean factions, which is what Peter and Barnabas were doing.

And that’s exactly what we are doing, when we make that degree of doctrinal specification the boundaries of our membership, fellowship, or cooperation. We are dividing the Body into the people who really get it, over here with us, and those people over there. We admit that those people really belong to Jesus, and we know we’ll be sharing heaven with them…but that’s soon enough, eh? Let’s not over-realize our eschatology.

If you can’t smell the reek of brimstone coming off that line of thought, get your sniffer checked.

You should care about the truth, right down into the details. In a teaching ministry (church or otherwise), there’s nothing wrong with clarifying what you’re going to teach. It’s nice to have a label on the package that tells everybody what’s in it, you know? But requiring that level of agreement for membership, fellowship, or cooperation is asinine. You do that, you’re just cooking up excuses to break the unity the Spirit made. Don’t do that.

In the ministries I’m part of, the doctrinal boundaries of our fellowship and cooperation are ordinarily defined by the ancient creeds (Apostles’ Creed, the 325/381 Nicene Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon) and a broadly Protestant grasp of salvation by grace through faith, not of works. That’s about it; we work out everything else as we go.

That makes people panicky. “What if [fill in whatever imagined disaster here]?” Well, first of all, as Mark Twain said, “I’m an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.” In four years of church services with an open floor for reflection on the week’s Scripture readings, we’ve only ever had two people bring up a doctrinal error that called for specific correction. It’s not the case that we just never have to solve a problem, but it’s pretty rare. Is it worth foregoing four years of fellowship with our brothers and sisters in order to avoid difficult conversations with two people? Don’t be silly.

So we approach the situation differently: we look at how much we need to have in common for what we’re actually doing. Do we have enough in common to pray, say, the Lord’s Prayer together? Cool–let’s do that. Do we have enough in common to feed the hungry? Cool–let’s do that together. The mayor and the city council are struggling with a difficult situation; do we have enough in common to pray for God’s wisdom for our civil authorities? Cool–let’s do that together. I’m sure there are a dozen solid reasons why the timing of the Rapture is theologically important, but let’s not be using it as an excuse to stop us from what we can and should be doing together.

So many theological conservatives think unity is based on doctrine. If that were true, then certain key misbeliefs follow from it: the more doctrinal uniformity, the greater the unity; doctrinal disagreement means we can’t really be united; cooperating despite doctrinal disagreement means we really don’t care about truth; etc. But none of that is true.

Unity is not based on doctrine. “By one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body.” Our unity is a spiritual reality gifted to us by the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit, we are all united to Christ and therefore to each other. We should live like it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Got That List From Demons

9 July 2024

I recently found myself once again in a conversation about yoga. We’ve discussed that (and yoga’s history) here before, but in this case, the question specifically centered on the postures involved in modern yoga practice. “Isn’t it true,” the questioner wanted to know, “that certain postures are worshipping a particular Hindu god (i.e., a demon)?”

It’s a good question to raise, and the answer is no. Some Hindus say that particular poses mean you’re worshipping some specific god. Silly Christians believe the false prophets of the demons rather than their own Scriptures, which tell us that “the earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness” and “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” I can’t believe I need to say this, but I heartily recommend believing the Bible, not the demons!*

Certainly some demon — let’s take Hanuman for example — might proclaim dominion over some posture or another. As it happens there is a posture in yoga called “Hanuman’s posture” (Sanskrit hanumanasana). It’s essentially a front split with the arms reaching straight up. Is it the case that every gymnast who’s ever done a front split is unknowingly worshipping Hanuman? Don’t be ridiculous.

“But it’s not just a front split,” says the suspicious Christian. “See the arms reaching up? Is that praying hands I see?”

Let me tell you why the arms are reaching up: the fascial network. Specifically, in this case, reaching up helps open the superficial and deep front lines. Better yet, let me show you. You don’t even need to do a split for this. Get into a deep lunge, with the right leg back. As deep as you can reasonably manage. Now, look straight up, and reach straight up (or maybe even slightly back) with both arms. Feel that additional stretch and opening through your right front ribs, abdominals, hip, and quads? That’s why.

Now, can someone use this posture to worship Hanuman? Of course! Might it even be standard practice among Hanuman-worshippers? I suppose it could. Is it therefore true that everyone who adopts this posture into their exercise is worshipping Hanuman? Of course not. Hanuman might claim that is the case, of course, but Hanuman is a liar just like all the other demons. There’s no reason why we–indwelt by the Holy Spirit as we are–ought to take them seriously. Certainly you can sin with your body (stealing, committing adultery, and the like), but we know those things are sins because God told us so. You will search the Scriptures in vain for some divinely sanctioned list of postures that irrevocably belong to demons and are off-limits to Christians. Yoga’s Christian despisers claim to have such a list, but they got that list from demons. The truth is that if it’s healthy for your body, it’s fair game, to the glory of God. “Glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

*This recommendation would fuel a variety of inflammatory statements if I cared to make them. Can you imagine if I took to Twitter to say, “The problem with Dave Hunt is that he trafficks in demonic revelation rather than Scripture”??? But in this case, it’s true, isn’t it?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Self-Medicating With Memes…or Laws

14 May 2024

If your approach to public policy is dictated by your empathy, then you are self-medicating. You feel other people’s pain, and you want to do something to relieve the pain. That’s a genuinely good desire, but understand that you are prone to the risks and temptations that always attend self-medication, chief among them numbing the symptoms without finding the real cause, and low sales resistance to hucksters. 

As to numbing the symptoms without uncovering the cause: the pain you feel is mostly not from people you directly know, it’s from media images. The pain you are dispelling isn’t their pain; it’s yours. Here’s how I know: when you hear the plight of whoever, you feel the burning need to do something. Then you do a thing, and you feel better. But that thing you do — what is it? You sign a petition, share a meme, make a donation, vote for a particular measure or person. Even if it was the right thing to do vis-a-vis the problem at hand, you feel better long before your actions could possibly have rippled out to the point where they’ve had any real effect on the actual situation. That person’s pain has not yet been alleviated, but you already feel better. That means you’re not in pain because they’re in pain. You’re in pain because you heard about their pain. 

Your pain doesn’t go away because their pain went away. Your pain gets alleviated because you obeyed your internal mandate to “do something.” Long before you have any way to know for sure if what you did helped them, hurt them, or simply did nothing, you’re going to feel better regardless of the eventual outcome.  

That serves to make your low sales resistance even lower. You’re a decent person; confronted by human suffering, you genuinely want to relieve it. Which means you want to believe (1) that there’s a way to relieve it, and (2) that way is accessible to you. Can you see that your thirst for an accessible fix already makes you more likely to fall for a smooth operator with a slick line of bullshit? It may not actually help anybody except the charity professionals making a salary off your contributions, but if it sounds good, your vicarious pain will evaporate when you click the ‘donate’ button or share the meme. Under those circumstances, the proposed fix barely even has to be plausible, because you already want to believe it. It’ll alleviate your discomfort just because you “did something.”

That sort of foolishness is an abuse of your drive to do something. That drive is given to you by God for the purpose of moving you to change the world. Don’t fritter it away sharing memes; get off the couch and actually do something for the problems that are nearest and clearest to you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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.

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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 (Eph. 5:19, Col. 3:16, Jam. 5:13), 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!

Comments Off on The Hidden Costs of Disobedience | Autobiography, Mere Obedience, Unity and Community of Christ's Body | Permalink
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.

Comments Off on Supernaturalism | Chrestomathy, Functioning Supernaturalism | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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