The Peach and the Turnip

17 February 2026

When you pick a peach and dig up a turnip, you have two very different things on your hands. Lots of people will eat a peach straight off the tree. There are few better ways to enjoy a peach, actually. Very few will pull a turnip out of the ground, rinse it off, and take a big bite standing right there in the garden. 

Turnips can be wonderful, but we have to be convinced. It takes a good recipe and a skilled cook to get us to fall in love. And even then, some people just don’t like turnips. It’s ok; we all understand. Even if we think “You haven’t had turnips until you’ve had Aunt Minnie’s famous maple-glazed basil turnip slaw,” we understand that some folks don’t like them.

Peaches, on the other hand…if it’s hard to improve on a peach straight off the tree, it’s also hard to ruin one. I made a pretty bad peach pie once—bad enough that I wouldn’t give it away—but I happily had a slice with breakfast every day until it was gone. You almost have to burn peaches to ruin them, and even then…I once didn’t stir a batch of peach jam enough, and burned the bottom. I transferred what I could save to another pot, tasted it, and discovering a pleasantly smoky flavor, added a little Laphroig to accent it. It was divine. Everything I’ve ever made with peaches, I’ve been happy to eat, even if I wouldn’t serve it to a guest. Literally everything.

And so it is with school subjects. Geometry is a turnip: delightful in its way, but getting most people to like it takes skilled preparation and presentation. History, though…history is a peach. Everybody loves a good story, and history is one long story, with lots of little vignettes and episodes embedded in it, all of them crafted by the best Storyteller to ever live. When someone doesn’t like history, it’s because they had a teacher that actively ruined it for them.

Unfortunately, the profession seems to be full of people who delight in doing exactly that.

Leave a Comment » | Hammersmith, history, Parables | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Hospitality as Alchemy

18 February 2025

I’ve been meditating recently on the parable of the unjust steward, found in Luke 16:1-13. Since Jesus Himself calls the guy unjust, obviously it’s not the cheating that Jesus is recommending. What does Jesus want us to take away from this?

The steward has a short window of opportunity where he has access to his master’s accounts, and he makes the most of his temporary access to make friends for the long term. We find ourselves in a similar situation. Everything you have can just disappear (as some of our brothers and sisters in California recently found out). But while you have it, what are you doing with it?

We can squander the goods we have, or we can use them to lasting effect. Few things are as fungible as a warm meal. The scraps you don’t eat will be cold in an hour and inedible in days; what you do eat will end up in your toilet in a day or two, depending on your intestinal transit time. But that meal, that future poop, shared with someone else, becomes an expression of love and care. Applied to someone at the right moment, that very transitory matter becomes a lifelong conviction that they’re loved.

The alchemists of old expended enormous effort trying to turn lead into gold. In hospitality, we do something much more spectacular, and we succeed at it! We transmute the basest of matter into something better than gold: the pleasure of God and the care of His image. So go forth and be hospitable to someone who can’t pay you back.

2 Comments | Mere Obedience, Parables, Shadow Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Sax in the (New) City

3 December 2024

The best saxophone player to ever grace planet Earth was born in North Africa in 425 BC. She lived her whole life without ever touching a saxophone. Some day 8,000 years from now in the New Jerusalem, she’s going to pick up a saxophone for the first time ever, and we’re all going to be astounded. 

It’s going to take another thousand years before you and I get to hear her. She doesn’t like crowds all that much, and prefers to play really intimate venues. When we try to get her to play somewhere big so more people can enjoy it, she just laughs. “Are you afraid we’ll run out of time?” Gotta admit, she’s got us there.

Of course this little parable is exactly that—a parable. Even if (God’s sense of humor being what it is) every word of it turns out to be true, there’s certainly no way I could know that now. And that’s exactly my point. We live in the constant presence of an eternity so wide and deep we can’t actually know its extent, and yet we must live in a way that takes it into account.

This is one of the holy uses of imagination, as over against knowledge: imagination helps us reckon with realities too big to know. It helps us steer in the right direction, even when we don’t quite know where exactly we’re going, or what it will look like.

We know we are built for eternity. This life fits us out for eternity, but after we die, the vast majority of our life is still in front of us. (Side note: if you’re worried that you’re not living up to your potential, rest assured, you’re not. There’s not a ghost of a chance that anybody built for eternity could realize all that potential in a mere 80 years.) We know that, handcrafted for eternity, we are bound for the New Jerusalem, where we will encounter the saints of all the ages who are also bound for the same destination. What will that look like? We have very little idea, and yet we need to live our lives in light of the truths we know.

And so we feed our imaginations on the wild things that might be possible in such a reality…because the reality God made really is that wild.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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? 

Comments Off on Parable of the Hats | Discernment, Parables, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Parabolic Living

11 August 2013

This post is part of the August 2013 Synchroblog on the subject “Parables: Small Stories, Big Ideas.”

Parables are weird. I’m not talking about the specifics of particular parables — although those are often weird too. I’m talking about the entire genre. The very existence of parables is a really odd phenomenon. The premise of the parable is that small stories of mundane events, sometimes just a few sentences long, can somehow contain life-altering challenges.

Have you ever thought about how odd that is? It’s one thing to see big ideas at work in, say, the sack of Rome, the failed Mongol invasions of Japan, the death of colonialism, or even something as comparatively small as the Berlin airlift or the Tiananmen Square massacre. It’s quite another to see big ideas at work in the tale of a nameless sower at work in a generic field. Why does it work? What sort of world do we live in, that such a thing is possible?

In the beginning was the Triune God, and the Word spoke all things into existence. The world we live in is the ultimate spoken-word performance piece, and like all works of art, it reflects the nature of the Artist. Within that overall spoken mixed-media portrait, we as human beings are meant to reflect the likeness of God in a special way. “Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness,” God said, and “in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” This is reflected to some extent in the parables. Have you ever noticed how virtually all the parables center around human activity — sowing and reaping, buying and selling, making bread, fishing, investing?

Within these simple stories, each parable presents its own challenges to us. The Good Samaritan: will I be a neighbor to anyone I meet? The Wheat and Tares: am I willing to leave final judgment to God for the sake of protecting vulnerable saints? The Leaven: will I be patient with the slow and hidden coming of the Kingdom, or will I try to gin up something flashy and quick, something I can take credit for?

If simple fictional tales set in mundane circumstances can contain such life-altering challenges, might the mundane moments of our own lives not contain those same challenges? Might it be possible to see those challenges, and live in such a way that our choices make parabolic lives?

Of course it is. There are famous examples, like when the Pope forgave his would-be assassin. But that’s pushing it up onto the grand scale again, and that’s not where parables happen. When a mother loves her teenage daughter, even though the girl has just screamed “I hate you!” and slammed her bedroom door — a parable is taking place. When a husband and wife stop in the middle of a stupid fight, forgive each other, and try to make date night work after all — a parable is happening. When an infertile couple conceives, then goes ahead with the planned adoption anyway, because that child needs a home — a parable appears before our eyes.

So what will it be in your life? The Kingdom of Heaven is like a person who…[your life here.]

This is the promise of the parables: that your life, rightly ordered by God annd lived in the power of His Spirit for the glory of Messiah’s Kingdom, your life, can be a succession of parables for the world to read.

Of course, as Jesus once explained to the disciples, parables have a dual purpose: to conceal from some, and reveal to others. Some people will look right at your God-glorifying, poetically lived, parabolic life and see nothing of consequence…or worse still, entirely misunderstand. Some people won’t have eyes to see. They just won’t get it. But some will — and for those that do, you can be a lamp set up on a lampstand, that gives light to the whole house. What will they see in your light?

 

****

You can find the other August Synchroblog participants here:

Jesus’ Parables are Confusing? Good! – Jeremy Myers

Seed Parables: Sowing Seeds of the Kingdom – Carol Kunihol

Parables – Be Like the Ant or the Grasshopper – Paul Meier

The Parables of Jesus: Not Like Today’s Sermons – Jessica

Penelope and the Crutch – Glenn Hager

Parables and the Insult of Grace – Rachel

Changing Hearts Rather Than Minds – Liz Dyer

Young Son, Old Son, a Father on the Run – Jerry Wirtley

3 Comments | Meditations, Parables, synchroblog, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Alternative Cosmologies and the Christian, Part 2: Daljeet the Punjabi and Chao of Xian

5 January 2013

The following tales are fictional. Sort of.

Last week we considered the story of Marcus, a physician in second-century Alexandria. Let us consider a set of similar situations briefly.

Daljeet was a physician in the Punjab region of India in the seventh century A.D. Like Marcus, he was well respected in his profession, and like Marcus, in his middle age he converted to Christianity. In his case it was not a miraculous healing, but the simple witness of a spice trader to whom he had extended his hospitality. When he heard the story of Jesus, Daljeet felt like a gong had been struck inside his chest, like he had known the story all along, and had just been waiting for someone to remind him. Like Marcus, he ceased his offerings to pagan gods, but continued as best he could in his profession. Of course, his textbooks were the Charaka Samhita and the Sustruta Samhita instead of Hippocrates and Galen, and he was interested in balancing the three ayurvedic humors (wind, bile and phlegm) instead of Hippocrates’ four humors. Daljeet had a much greater focus on the medicinal qualities of different kinds of food than Marcus, and he was just as likely to prescribe a certain menu for his patients as he was to prescribe a certain herbal medicine — although he could do that as well. Daljeet also had a surgical practice extending from stitching up wounds and removing foreign objects to a form of cataract surgery and even cesarean section birthing if necessary. Daljeet also believed that treating the physical body was insufficient — what a person thought and believed, the words that were said to him and the conditions he lived in could cause as much damage as any injury or poison. So he would do his best to treat the soul as well — and when he came to the Great Physician, he found that his ability to treat the soul took a great leap forward.
Far from suffering because of his conversion to Christianity, Daljeet’s practice saw even more success in the year following his conversion. The stories of near-miraculous healing spread throughout the region, and Daljeet was careful to tell anyone who would listen that it was not Daljeet the doctor, but Jesus of Nazareth, the Great Physician, who was responsible for these healings. The community around Daljeet was at once amazed and scandalized. No one could offend the gods as Daljeet was doing and hope to escape their wrath, and yet, it seemed there was a new incredible healing every few days. If the gods were angry, they also seemed content to sit back and let Daljeet heal people. The stunned amazement persisted for almost a year after Daljeet had been very publicly baptized by the spice trader.
Then one day in the marketplace an overzealous devotee of one of the offended deities attacked Daljeet from behind and stabbed him to death. By the time anyone realized what was happening, it was too late, and Daljeet died before they could carry him back home.

***

In the eighth century A.D., a bishop of the Church of the East fell ill while traveling through central China, in what is now Shaanxi province. He was taken to the city of Xian and treated by a doctor there, a man named Chao. The bishop was only there a week, but he struck up an acquaintance with Chao, and the two men corresponded for some years and became friends. Eventually persuaded by his friend’s humility and devotion, Chao became a Christian. He too remained in his profession. His friendship with the bishop gave him access to the Scriptures, so of course he realized that the Taoist story of how the world came to be was false, and he began to adjust his thinking accordingly. Like Marcus and Daljeet before him, he set aside his false gods and worshiped only the true and living God.
Also like Daljeet and Marcus, Chao was interested in restoring his patients to bodily harmony, but he did not seek to do this through balancing bodily humors, but rather by massaging or needling points on their bodies in order to balance the blood and chi that flowed through their organs and each organ’s associated meridians, as he had learned from his medical textbooks, The Yellow Emperor’s Internal Classic, Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders, and others.
Also like the other two doctors before him, Chao believed that illness could have a spiritual cause like a witch’s curse or a malign deity — such things were not unheard of — but that in general illness was a natural process best treated by natural means. Doctors in his tradition had believed this since before the Yellow Emperor’s Classic was written seven centuries before. In addition to massage and acupuncture, Chao had recourse to a wide array of herbs and foods to address different illnesses, and he also could prescribe certain exercises for his patients that would have the effect of strengthening the function of a weak organ.
Chao’s conversion was not dramatic. Even after he confided in his friend the bishop that he had come to believe in Jesus, it took some time before he ceased making sacrifices, and more than a year before he worked up the courage to be baptized into the Church. Rejected by his family and community as a result of his baptism, Chao lost everything, and one day showed up knocking on the door of his friend the bishop, homeless, penniless and ashamed, with nowhere to go. He had nothing but the clothes on his back, his needles, and a few herbs. The bishop took him in, and from that day forward, the two men were inseparable. The bishop traveled to encourage the churches under his care, and wherever he went, Chao would go and treat the sick. “I will share Jesus with their spirits,” the bishop would say to Chao, “and you see what Jesus will do for their bodies.”
After some years, the bishop felt himself called to go up into the mountains of Tibet as a missionary. He told Chao that it would be quite dangerous, and that he ought to stay behind. “My friend,” Chao said, “If it is going to be dangerous, you had better take a doctor with you.” The bishop took several months to anoint a successor and set his affairs in order, and then, commissioned by the people of the diocese, the two men set off on the long and dangerous journey. No one knows if they ever made it to Tibet, and if they did, how they fared there. The two men were never heard from again.

Comments Off on Alternative Cosmologies and the Christian, Part 2: Daljeet the Punjabi and Chao of Xian | Alternate Cosmologies, Meditations, Parables | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Mystical Union: Rays of Light

20 February 2011

Suppose a man is sitting in a closed tool shed.  It is pitch-dark, except that there is a tiny crack in the roof, and a single ray of light shines through it.  This tool shed, like all tool sheds, is dirty and dusty, and in the dust that floats on the air, that single ray of light is clearly visible.

The man could look at that ray of light from the side, seeing the dust motes dance in it, and admire its beauty.  And it is beautiful, is it not?

But if the man wants to see the sun, looking at the ray won’t do the job.  He has to sight along it, and if he does that, the ray of light becomes more than a thing in itself; it becomes a pointer, a guide that leads him back to its source.

That is what a proposition about God must do.  False propositions point us somewhere else.  True propositions can be beautiful, elegant, and so on — and they often are — but to admire them as things-in-themselves is to miss the point.  The goal is to sight along the proposition so as to see the God who gave it, and about whom it is speaking.

This is exactly what Romans 10:14 tells us.  Your English translation will say something like “How will they believe in Him of whom they have not heard,” but that’s incorrect.  (For you Greek guys out there, yes it’s a genitive, but akouw takes genitive direct objects.)  The correct translation is “How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard?”  In the preaching of the gospel, the unbeliever hears propositions, of course.  But Paul says there’s more to it than that: in the preaching of the gospel, the unbeliever hears Christ — not just “about Christ,” but hears Christ — and hearing Him, he believes.  Faith in Christ comes by hearing Christ, and hearing Christ comes by the Word of God.

But what are we to do when we discover — as Gordon Clark did, to his considerable embarrassment — that in Scripture different propositions are held up on different occasions as the preaching in which one can encounter Christ and believe in Him?  (For example, Rom. 10:10 on one hand, and Jn. 20:30-31 for a different proposition.)

Let’s go back to the toolshed, and extend the analogy a little.  Rather than just one crack in the roof, let us say there are three, each one about a foot away from the others.  Through each of these three cracks, a ray of light shoots down.  Let us further suppose that there are four men in the shed, not just one. Sitting together in the corner of the shed, they look across the small room at the three rays of light.

“That one, over on the left?” the first man says.  “That one’s sunlight.  I can tell.”

“No, Larry,” says the second man.  “The one in the middle is sunlight.”

The argue for a while, and then the third man says, “You’re both wrong.  The one on the right is sunlight.”

“Curly, you idiot!” the first man says.  “It has to be one of the first two.  Right?”  He looks at the second man for confirmation.  The second man nods enthusiastically, and the bickering continues.

Meanwhile, unnoticed by the three, a fourth, quiet man gets up from the corner and walks across the shed.  He goes to the first ray of light, and looks up along it, through the crack in the roof.  Then he goes to the second ray and does the same, and then the third.  He frowns and shakes his head, and repeats the process.  And then, slowly, a smile spreads across his face.

“Excuse me, guys,” he says.

The three men look up from their bickering.  “What is it, Elihu?”

Read more about the COSF controversy here.

34 Comments | Meditations, Mystical Union, Parables | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

People of the River

21 July 2010

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

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

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

In between, there is development.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is my ecclesiology.

****

The water appears in surprising places.

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

Crawdad Theology

2 November 2008

Go to the crawdad, thou theologian; consider her ways and be warned.

Ever caught a crawdad before? I don’t mean with a trap or something; I mean the fun way, picking your way up the streambed with your jeans rolled up, catching them one at a time with your bare hands.

If not, you can meander over to YouTube for a quick tutorial. Pay particular attention to the ten seconds of explanation starting at 0:25. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

Yeah, it’s important.  Go on, seriously.  It’ll only take a minute.

And the preacher spake a parable unto them, saying,

“Hear then the Parable of the Crawdad:

Among the slow creatures of God’s earth is the lowly crawdad, but when danger threateneth, lo! it doth propel itself backward — only backward, mark ye well — with great speed.    Behold now the genius of the lowly crawdad: that when the hungry bass doth menace it, the crawdad doth reach forth its claws and menace in turn its persecutor.  If its persecutor be unafraid, and doth make to molest it further, the crawdad speweth forth a mighty surge of water, and thereby doth shoot itself right speedily backward from peril.

But this, the crawdad’s great strength, doth surely become a most grievous weakness when its hunter be a man, nay, even a stripling child.  For the child doth cleverly place his hand behind the crawdad, and then doth menace it in front with aught he may desire, be it a stick, his hand, his foot, or aught else, and lo! the crawdad doth fly at once backward into the child’s waiting hand.

And though that crawdad may then punish the child severely with its claws, yet the determined child may work all his desire upon the crawdad.”

And the multitudes were astonished at his teaching, for though he counted himself among the theologians, he yet reckoned them as witless crawdads.

What does this have to do with theology?

History repeatedly demonstrates that theology often proceeds in the same way as the crawdad.  Person A does something.  Person B perceives it as a threat to orthodoxy, pepperoni pizza, and all things sacred and holy.  Person B faces the threat and waves his claws menacingly, and if that doesn’t work, he shoots away backwards, putting as much ground between him and the threat as possible…paying no attention at all to where he’s going.

Take, for example, the fundamentalist/modernist controversies that plagued the American church in the early 20th century.  The fundamentalists were right, yes?  The Red Sea really did part, Elijah really was caught up into heaven in a fiery chariot, Jesus really was born to a virgin, really did die on the cross as a substitutionary atonement for our sins, really rose from the grave, and will return bodily to earth…all that.

When the modernists forsook the historic Christian faith, they had nothing left but Christian charity, and they proceeded to practice it with a vengeance.  Salvation no longer came from the cross, resurrection, ascension and return of Jesus; now it came only from Christian action in the world.  So they focused on what came to be known–at least pejoratively–as “social gospel” concerns.

The fundamentalists, recognizing that the liberals had hijacked Christian charity, swarmed into society in an outpouring of Christian influence not seen since the conversion of Constantine.  They outdid the liberals in every good work, the better to adorn the gospel they so zealously defended.

Well, actually, no they didn’t.  Mainly, they withdrew from the discussion, and gathered together in desolate places for the Prayer of Elijah and corporate sulking.  In fact, in many quarters, feeding the poor became identified with liberalism, and woe betide the young fundamentalist pastor who tried to engage his congregation in the “social gospel” work of applying James 2:14-17.  Although we have begun to recover, there are still significant portions of the church where James’ “pure and undefiled religion” has fallen on hard times, where doing good works for unbelievers outside the church walls brings down accusations of “social gospel” and “human good,” and a deep suspicion of doctrinal compromise.

What happened here is simple.  The fundamentalists were afraid to touch anything tainted with liberalism.  In their zeal to avoid error, they shot backwards crawdad-fashion, right into a whole new set of errors.  Why did it happen? Because the fundamentalists were idol-worshippers. They were more devoted to not being liberal than they were devoted to humbly serving God.  Even as they defended the inspiration of the Bible, they abandoned its clear teaching at key points.  The resulting schisms, social impotence, and neglect of the poor became their bitter sacraments.  To return to the Parable of the Crawdad, the mighty claws of doctrinal orthodusty were completely inadequate to rescue the church from its surrender to idolatry.

There are plenty more examples where this one came from.  Martin Luther, so taken with the freeness of justification, abhorred James, as if the Bible would somehow steer him wrong. The ascetics, terrified of the corruption in the world around them, rejected God’s good gifts in favor of a life of self-torture.  A number of modern Christian movements, desperate to avoid any hint of legalism, have embraced licentiousness, drunkenness and debauchery with a zeal that would make a Corinthian blush.  In every case, this is the outworking of crawdad theology, the idolatrous worship of anything but that — whatever that might be in the particular case.

What should we do?  Simple.  Obey the Bible. All of it.  All the time.  Believe what it says, and do what it commands.

Sound easy?  It’s not.  Because we have a very hard time with this, there’s another key point.  Humility. Lots of it.  Occasionally our adversaries are entirely wrong about everything.  But not very often; usually they reject our position because they see something that offends them — and far too often, there is legitimate cause for offense. But we don’t listen, because they’re wrong about something else, something more important to us.  It takes humility for a fundamentalist to sit down at the table with a modernist and just listen to the man tell him, “You’re so concerned about people’s souls that you’ll let anyone do anything to their bodies.  You think it doesn’t matter, as long as you can tell them about Jesus.”  It takes more humility to overlook the obvious exaggeration and seek the grain of truth in the accusation.  It takes still more to admit — even to ourselves — that it’s there.  And the brutal truth is that it usually is.

It’s hard, messy work, and it requires eating generous helpings of crow, but that’s what God has called us to. Anyone who says different is the sort of person that Jude, 2 Peter and 3 John warn us about.

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Posted by Tim Nichols