Hacking Our Virtues

4 March 2025

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues….The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” – G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

For Christians interacting in the public sphere, it is often true that “the sons of this world are more shrewd…than the sons of light.” One common tactic Christian voters fall prey to is an appeal to hard cases. The enemies of the truth often don’t really need you to support wickedness; it’s enough that you’re silent about the common good. How do they achieve your silence? Easy. Given any proposal, find someone who will be adversely affected, and then make you feel uncharitable, unfair, and unchristian if you back the proposal. While you’re stymied into silence, a united block of opposition crushes the measure. In this way, Christians are repeatedly shamed into silence.

Simple response: Ask yourself, “Does this person share my values?” If the answer is no, then get really suspicious. If you’re letting someone who thinks it’s ok to dismember babies in utero appeal to your sense of fairness, for example, that calls for a closer look, don’t’cha think?

For example, take the current hullabaloo over the question of having to identify yourself in order to vote. In a country with our democratic system–only citizens can vote, and each person may vote only one time–voter identification seems like a very basic requirement. Yet political progressives have managed for decades to stymie multiple proposals to protect the integrity of the system by requiring voters to show a valid ID. It’s racist, you see. Or sexist. Or ableist. Or something.

In recent conversation with a friend, one of the common objections came up: “My mother is disabled and can’t really leave the house. Does that mean she shouldn’t be able to vote anymore?” This is exactly the kind of thing that trips Christians up. We want to be fair, and we want to value the disabled members of our community. So far too often, all it takes is a question like that, and we wilt.

Don’t wilt. Of course the disabled woman should still be able to vote! She’s disabled, and that means this is going to be harder for her than it will be for other people who don’t struggle in that way. It may take a major effort and some help. It may be that she really does need an absentee ballot (as various Americans abroad will also). That sucks! It’s not ok. But it’s not ok that the poor woman needs help to get to the toilet, either. Let’s stop pretending that this is some insurmountable barrier.

We live in such a convenience-addicted culture that we forget: inconvenience is just inconvenience. “Difficult” does not mean “impossible.” And the truth of the matter is, the inconvenience here is pretty minimal. We make you show a valid ID to buy beer, a pack of cigarettes, or even cough syrup. That’s not because there’s a smoke-filled room in Washington where they’re plotting to deny women and people of color access to cough syrup.

So yeah, an ID requirement might make voting a bit more inconvenient. So what? Meaningful community participation is often inconvenient. Pretty much everything worth doing is inconvenient. Hard cases are hard; no one is saying otherwise. But let’s be real: this is not remotely an impossible problem, and there’s no reason to pretend that it is. We have always had people with a legitimate need for an absentee ballot, and we’ve long had the ability to accommodate that. I don’t see that going away; in fact, internet technology has made it even more possible to satisfactorily demonstrate your identity at a distance. In fact, just recently I had to set up a financial account online that required a scan of my ID plus other identifying information, and then compared that to government databases. I never left the couch except to get my wallet. If we can manage this sufficient for tax/banking purposes, we can manage it for voting.

Inconvenience is not really a sound argument against protecting the integrity of the system. The argument here is that it’s worth the inconvenience. I remember voting being inconvenient for my parents, too. I grew up so poor we ate the seed potatoes–breakfast, lunch, and dinner–one winter because we had literally no money to buy food. My parents always found a way to get to the polling place, because it was important, worth sacrificing for. I remember, because they certainly didn’t have money for a babysitter — I got dragged along with ’em, right into the voting booth.

In a nation of 300 million people, are we going to be able to find someone who should have been able to vote, but couldn’t because of this law or that one? Yes. No matter what the law, there will be such a case somewhere, no question. And it will be a travesty, and we should fix it. But exceptions are exceptions, and ought to be treated that way. Most people will have no such difficulty, and there’s no reason to use a fractional minority of hard cases to avoid taking the same sort of commonsense precautions we routinely navigate to buy beer, cigarettes, and cough syrup — particularly when we’re facing a massive (and thoroughly justified) drop in public confidence in institutions.

Do not allow people who do not share your values to hack your virtues in order to paralyze you. A policy need not be perfect to be an improvement on what we have now. Support common-sense reforms because you love all your neighbors, but don’t stop there. No matter how good the policy, some people will fall through the cracks. So step up yourself and do your best to take care of them, too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Lessons on Worship

25 February 2025

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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.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Fuller Fulfillment

11 February 2025

When we talk about “fulfilled prophecy,” what we usually mean is a straightforward prediction along the lines of Micah 5:2, which says that Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Matthew shows how the prophecy was fulfilled. But that’s not the only thing that “fulfilled” can mean.

“Fulfill” has a fuller sense (if you’ll pardon the expression) than just the Micah 5:2 predictive prophecy meaning. In the Hosea 11//Matthew 2 usage, the original sense in Hosea is critical to Matthew’s meaning. Knowing that Israel is God’s son is necessary to understanding the points that Matthew is making: first, that Jesus is Israel (in exactly what sense is a question Matthew will spend the whole book exploring), and second, that the land of Israel has become spiritual Egypt.

Don’t miss that latter point. Matthew invokes “out of Egypt I called My Son” not when Jesus leaves literal Egypt, but when Jesus flees Judea. Judea is the “Egypt” Jesus is fleeing, and Herod is the baby-boy-slaughtering “Pharaoh.” John the Baptist will later reinforce this same point by calling repentant Israelites to come out into the desert to pass through water, a new Exodus forming a new people of God (Jesus joins the new people of God “to fulfill all righteousness”). John the evangelist will much later make the point explicit in Revelation 11:8.

We don’t want to read something into the text that isn’t there, but neither do we want to miss something that is there—and the NT shows us repeatedly that there’s a LOT more there than one might think at first glance. From Jesus Himself proving the resurrection by exegeting a verb tense in Genesis (Matt. 22:32) to the fulfillments of the first few chapters of Matthew to the dizzying displays of Hebrews, the NT shows us a way of reading the OT that we perhaps wouldn’t have come up with on our own, but that’s ok. God is revealing it to us in the way He handles His own revelation.

In conservative circles, we have gotten our hermeneutics from the Book of Nature (mostly as read by E. D. Hirsch), which is very useful as far as it goes. But if that’s all we have, then our hermeneutic will force us to condemn the Holy Spirit’s exegesis of His own work. There has to be something wrong with that picture. What is it? Easy: the Book of Nature isn’t all we have. The Book of Scripture also has something to teach us about how to read.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Reading Your Life

4 February 2025

The church through most of history did not view typology as a feature of literary texts. We viewed typology as a feature of history that is reflected in literary texts.

That sounds like a small difference; it’s not.

There is really only one true Story, and God is telling it. It starts with “In the beginning, God created…,” continues through the Deluge, Abraham offering Isaac, Moses breaking the tablets, Jesus touching the lepers, your breakfast this morning, and right on until the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven…and then it gets really good! This genius Story has themes and motifs running through it that happen in your life just as surely as they happen to anybody else.

Understood that way, the Bible is not just a storehouse of theological knowledge or moral directions for living your life; it’s the Rosetta Stone. The Bible doesn’t contain the whole Story (what book could?), but it contains key parts, told by God Himself. Understood rightly, the parts of the Story contained in the Bible don’t just teach us what sort of story we’re in; they teach us how to read all the rest. Particularly the part we happen to be living in.

New Testament authors read the Hebrew Bible this way. In fact, later Old Testament writers read earlier ones this way as well. If we can be taught by them, then we can read, not just the OT, but our own lives.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

With Reverence

28 January 2025

A friend recently raised the question of how to cultivate reverence for God. In a culture of therapeutic moralistic deism and “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” music, how do we keep ourselves from treating God casually, even flippantly? This was my answer.

I remind myself who I’m dealing with: the God who made the world and everything in it (and then de-created and re-created it all in the Deluge), crushed the Egyptians’ gods and slaughtered their firstborn, came on Horeb in earthquake, fire, and storm, invaded Philistia alone by allowing the capture of the Ark so as not to reward Israel’s faithlessness, and emerged with offerings, triumphant. The God who fulfilled His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who opened the secrets of the kings’ dreams to Joseph and Daniel, who used Balaam (1400 years before the event) and Daniel (550 years before the event) to send the Magi to fund His Son’s life-saving flight to Egypt. The God who has never failed to notice a sparrow falling from a bough, who numbers the very hairs on my head, who knows my every sin, failing, weakness, and character flaw, and has aggressively forgotten them all.

I’ve spent time with some dangerous men over the years — good men, but dangerous. (I’ve spent time with dangerous men who were not good, too, but I’m talking about the god ones right now.) Sensible people do not treat such men carelessly: you think before you speak, attend to small courtesies, go somewhat out of your way to avoid giving offense unnecessarily. And if you’ve given offense, you face it decisively and take the consequences as they come.

I remind myself to treat God at least as reverently as that. He is *for* me and He loves me, but He is not to be trifled with. Wise men remember that.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Strong Flavor

21 January 2025

For many years in my ministry, we’ve talked about taking a “craft beer” approach to ministry. A mass-produced beer like Miller Lite is designed so that pretty much anybody can drink it. There’s nothing that would bother anybody, but at the cost of being pretty tasteless: inoffensive, but insipid. Nothing memorable, nothing interesting. A craft beer like Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, on the other hand…it’s a very strong set of flavors. Set free from the burden of trying not to offend anyone, the makers of Pliny the Elder are free to execute a positive vision, to make a product that is unapologetically something in particular instead of generically inoffensive. Lots of people don’t like it, but the ones that do, like it a lot more than Miller. A liquor store near me used to limit Pliny purchases to one bottle per customer, and they’d still sell out in a day.

God has not called you to be inoffensive.

Everything you do isn’t going to be for everybody. To some we are the aroma of life, and to others the aroma of death. But what God has called you to be — be that, as hard as you can. Don’t make yourself tasteless

Go forth and be a strong flavor. If God calls you to serve a particular demographic, do what you need to do — and then be a strong flavor! Don’t make yourself tasteless.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

G-d

14 January 2025

Some believers have taken to using “G-d” and “L-rd” rather than “God” and “Lord.” What are we to think of this?

This is a modern reflection of the rabbinic practice of refusing to say the name of God. This was not the practice of the ancient Hebrews of Old Testament times (an important point, and we’ll get to that). The practice of substituting a circumlocution for God’s name developed at some point after the Babylonian captivity (I’m not sure we can pinpoint when).

The rationale given for the practice of substituting “Adonai” (“my Lord”) for YHWH is derived from the Third Commandment: “You shall not take the name of YHWH your God in vain.” If we never even say the name—so goes the reasoning—then we can’t take it in vain, and thus we will keep the commandment. This is wrong for four reasons.

First: REALLY???? Does anybody honestly think that God gave the Third Commandment hoping that we would all just stop saying His name? Does anybody really think that’s what God was after?

Second, this sort of overly scrupulous fence around the law is an unnecessary burden. God actually gave us the law that matters, and here we are making up extra regulations to keep. Why? This is the kind of reasoning that took a command against boiling a kid goat in its mother’s milk and extrapolated it so far that you can’t have a milkshake with your hamburger, even though none of that is from goats, the milk and the meat don’t come from the same breed of cattle, and it doesn’t boil in your stomach anyway.

Third, from Eve’s “Neither shall you touch it” to today’s adulterous pastor who keeps the Billy Graham rule, that sort of thing is always destined for failure. As Paul would later write, “These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.” It just doesn’t help. Building extra fences doesn’t stop us from eventually breaking God’s law anyhow.

Finally, this particular brand of scrupulosity doesn’t actually meet the burden of the Third Commandment anyhow. Remember the expansive way that Jesus reads the Sixth and Seventh Commandments: hating someone in your heart without cause already breaks the command against murder; lusting for someone not your spouse already breaks the commandment against adultery. Now imagine that you were to say something that would violate the Third Commandment if you used the actual name of God, but instead you substituted “G-d” or “HaShem” (Hebrew for “the Name” and a commonly used circumlocution for exactly this purpose). Do you really imagine God is going to say to himself, “Well, technically, that’s allowed”??? I don’t think so.

So this to say: If you personally feel convicted to use “G-d,” then go ahead, but don’t think that observance is protecting you from violating the Third Commandment. If you’re wondering if you should adopt the practice, you need not feel compelled, and no one should try to compel you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Glories of a Good Corn Dog

7 January 2025

Imagine a friend of yours got involved in a commune, one of the really crunchy ones that does their own farming and such along with poetry nights and music and art. They’re pretty good at all this, actually. They’re using some really interesting permaculture practices at the communal farm, the poetry is actually half-decent, and they make the absolute best goat-cheese pizza you’ve ever tasted. As you ask a few more questions, it turns out that come March 21st, they’re all planning to drink cyanide in order to liberate their spirits to join the alien spacecraft that’s coming to take them away. Upon further investigation, this is the third such cult the charismatic leader has founded. He contends that the suicides of the two previous groups have indeed gone on to be with the aliens, while he selflessly remained behind to spread the good news.

How fast would you want to get your friend out of there?

So listen, I have some bad news for you. Large swathes of Western culture are that commune. We’re doing it in slow-motion, but look at the birth rates. What we are seeing is a cultural suicide pact. Hold that thought for a moment, we’ll come back to it.

****

In a post that’s worth your time to read, Michael Clary observes that one of the major objectives of neutral-world church strategy was “drawing left-leaning urban millennials, the most coveted demographic of the neutral world church planting boom.” In the interests of drawing the left-leaning urban crowd into church, we were all counseled to be “gospel centered” and “major on the majors,” setting “secondary matters” aside as “distractions.” Why were we given that counsel? Is it because our church growth experts were so taken with the gospel that for them, everything else just paled in comparison? Pretty to think so…but no, as I’ll demonstrate about four paragraphs down. Our experts knew that the left-leaning urbanites we were courting despised everything we love: backyard barbecues, fireworks on the 4th, “World’s Greatest Mom” mugs from Wal-mart, funnel cakes and corndogs at the county fair, all of it. They told us to “major on the majors” because our corn dogs offend left-leaning urbanites.

The urban elite have way fewer kids than the rest of us. It’s “grill Americans” who have the kids; the ranks of the urban elite are fed by a steady stream of young adults emigrating from flyover country. As a result, the rank and file of left-leaning urbanites didn’t grow up in that culture. They actually came from “grill American” culture, and lhey left it behind on purpose in order to fit into the elite leftist culture of their colleges. (You can tell this by their social media feeds over the holidays: they’re constantly reposting supportive tips for getting through dinner with your conservative relatives. Natives of the urban elite don’t have dinner with conservative relatives.) As young adults, these cultural emigres look back on heartland American culture with the white-hot disgust of the newly converted. In part, that performative disgust is driven by vulnerability: if you grew up slinging fries at McDonalds, you can’t afford for anybody at your art gallery job to even suspect you of plebian tastes — the accusation alone could ruin you.

I had half a mind to make this post a hit piece on that sad and hypocritical demographic. While they maybe deserve it, they need Jesus too! Somebody’s gotta go in there and get them, and the ugly truth is that unless you happen to catch them struggling to change a tire, you probably can’t make the initial approach in greasy Wal-mart jeans with a Modelo in your hand. When it comes to the logistics of winning that demographic, our neutral-world coaches were not wrong about the things they would find off-putting. But this is one of the major problems with managerial culture: it gets preoccupied with logistics at the expense of values.

Our coaches didn’t just steer us away from tailgating at the high school football game; they also told us to expunge all references to the sin of abortion from our church services; in fact, they told us not to talk about politics at all (as if the Bible doesn’t speak to such issues!) They upbraided us for big celebrations of Mothers’s Day and Father’s Day. They wrote long think pieces about the dangers of what they called “idolatry of the family” — a sneer at those who have the audacity to think growing up, getting married, and raising kids is normal. “Major on the majors; keep it about Jesus,” they said. “All things to all men,” they said. Too many of us listened.

Here’s what actually happened: Our advisers were not counseling us to “avoid secondary issues” because they cared so much about the gospel; it was because they wanted to muzzle the conservatives. Conservative values embarrassed them, and so as long as the voice of the church on “secondary issues” was conservative, no excuse was good enough for bringing those issues up. Now that left-leaning urbanites occupy positions of influence in the church, the very same advisers have suddenly discovered that there’s nothing more gospel-centered than a left-leaning take on…well, anything.

That joke about global warming on a record-setting snowy day? Total distraction. Come on, let’s keep it about Jesus, okay? But Greta Thundberg on climate change, that’s gospel-centered. Christians of all people should care about the world God made.

What are we to do with this situation? We can gather in twos and threes in desolate places and grind our teeth about the injustice of it all, but let’s not. I suggest we rethink the situation from the ground up. Let’s go back to that admonition to keep things gospel-centered, and have another look. I’m going to say something a bit controversial, and I welcome pushback, but I think I can make it stick.

I contend that we had a gospel-centered culture, however imperfect. In order to appeal to the coveted neutral-world demographic (left-leaning urban Millennials), we were urged to surrender our gospel-centered culture in favor of a different culture entirely. It is…ah, not obvious, shall we say, that the replacement culture is more gospel-centered than what we had. For one thing, that culture is committing suicide in slow motion. Remember the low birth rates? These are the people driving those statistics. Left-leaning urban Millennials are the cultural equivalent of that commune with the suicide pact.

Was existing grill-American culture perfect? By no means! But the Christian version of it loved children, honored mothers and celebrated fathers, valued and incentivized intact families, loved our country, made quilts and fluffy biscuits and plumbing that worked and sturdy front porches for the kids to play on, and had kids to play on them.

Left-leaning urbanite tastemakers don’t have kids. We traded young adults who got married and raised families for young adults who shack up, get cats, travel the world, and “don’t feel called to children.” We traded women who knew all Grandma’s best recipes for women who can’t make anything but a cocktail; men who could build a retaining wall in a weekend for inexplicably bearded men who can’t so much as change a tire. (A friend of mine asserts that today, a conspicuous beard is “the push-up bra of masculinity.” I’m afraid she may have a point.)

Conceding that someone needs to win these folks to Jesus, why would we want to adopt their culture? It’s not like it’s an improvement. So here’s my modest proposal: the gospel is indeed the center, but it is the center of something. Something good, not to put too fine a point on it. Where we genuinely fall short, let’s repent, and having repented of the evil, let’s not be embarrassed by the good things that remain. Let’s be a little loud about the beauty of marriage, the joys of having a gaggle of kids, the pleasure and difficulty of physical work, and the glories of a good corn dog. We have plenty of room to grow, but let’s not give up the good we already have for bland, HR-approved substitutes. Yech.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Death and Birth

31 December 2024

One year dies; another is born. It’s a good time to reflect and set some new goals.

Since this is going to be one of those New Year’s posts on goal-setting, I want to acknowledge at the outset that goal-setting doesn’t always make sense. Real life doesn’t always lend itself to the strategic long view; I’ve had a few years where my life was so upside-down that surviving from one week to the next was all I could do. I know some of you are in that situation too. If it doesn’t make sense to set goals for the year, may God bless and guard you. Keep being obedient in the moment, and trust that in so doing, you’re following God’s strategy, and doing better than you could know.

Now, for the rest of you who can afford a moment’s reflection, let’s reflect a bit.

Back when I was a full-time seminary prof many years ago, I found myself regularly needing books that I just couldn’t afford on my meager salary. So I put the books I really needed to own on my Amazon wish list and would check it once a week to see if there was a bargain used copy available. Every once in a while, there would be, and I’d snap it up. (I gotta tell you, when there’s a book I really needed for research, couldn’t find in the library, cost $80 new if it could be had at all, and I can grab it for $10? That’s a thrill!) Over time, I noticed that a book didn’t stay on my wish list for more than a year or two; either I’d find it on one of my weekly forays, or I’d find that I didn’t need it after all.

Meanwhile, I also noticed that I’d gone my entire life without successfully keeping even one New Year’s Resolution.

The juxtaposition of those two facts suggested to me that I can actually achieve a goal, but there was something about the “New Year’s Resolution” scheme that just didn’t work for me. So I decided to take the scheme that was working and apply it to my goals, and just like that, “Amazon Wish List” goal-setting was born.

That first year, I set 8 goals spread across multiple domains of my life (body, spirit, and career, if I remember right). I didn’t do any strategizing about how I’d achieve them–no SMART workup, no scheduling, no nothing. I just did the same thing I did with my Amazon wish list: review the list once a week. Each week, I gave myself a simple yes/no grade on each goal. If I’d made progress toward that goal that week, it got a yes; no progress got a no. I resolved that I wasn’t going to beat myself up over a no, any more than I would beat myself up over a book on my wish list that I couldn’t get a good price on. I just forced myself to notice: am I progressing or not?

With nothing but a 3-minute weekly review, I hit 5 of 8 goals that year. For those of you who are keeping track, that’s 5 more goals than I’d ever gotten making a New Year’s resolution. It was worth doing again the next year, so I did.

I’ve refined it somewhat over the years, but I still use the same basic approach, and it still pays off handsomely. Here are some of the refinements I’ve found helpful:

  • I’ve tweaked the categories a bit. Current categories are body, spirit, relationships, and calling.
  • I generally allow myself 8-12 goals. More is too much to keep in mind. I do permit subcategories where they make sense (e.g., a goal to “go deeper in my friendships” will have subcategories for each person/couple I intend to go deeper with).
  • While my weekly scoring is still a simple yes/no, I’ve moved to a different scoring system when I’m reviewing the whole year. Final grading options are 1 for an achieved goal, 0 for a failure to achieve the goal, and .5 if I didn’t hit the mark but made solid progress (= better than halfway there; no rounding up!) This year’s score is 12/20. (I don’t have 20 main goals, but there are subcategories.)
  • I take the time to look for patterns in my year in review. For example, I’ve never missed a reading goal, so I know my “3 minute magic” approach to goalsetting works for me in reading (also for upskilling/continuing ed., relational goals, and certain types of calling goals). It does not work (at least not consistently, for me) in workout or major writing goals; those have to get a spot on the calendar, or they don’t happen.

That bit about looking for patterns, especially in failed goals, helps set the next year’s goals. Nearly every failure on this year’s list is either due to a too-distracted lifestyle or to a lack of specific, scheduled time to achieve the goal. That tells me that eliminating distractions and clearing dedicated time for major tasks are going to be high priorities in the coming year.

I’m still praying and thinking, but I expect to have a solid list of goals by the end of the week. What about you? What are the big pieces in your life? Marriage? Parenting? Career? Education? Fitness? Prayerfully and thoughtfully, set some goals in each area and review them once a week. See what God will give you!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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