My new post on the prodigal’s older brother is up at Theopolis.
The Older Son
12 December 2023
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Posted by Tim Nichols
Trying on a Mind
5 December 2023I was raised to be a student of great thinkers. My parents were modeling and teaching good hermeneutics in family Bible study before I could even read. My whole life, I was taught to do the research and expend the imaginal effort to grasp the situation of the writing: what was happening for the writer? For the readers? What was their culture, language, cause for writing the message? It was understood (long before I ever heard of speech act theory) that writing is hard work, and the writer isn’t just spouting off for self-expression; he’s trying to do something to the readers. What are the readers supposed to see and hear? What are they supposed to do?
All this is just basic to being a good student of the humanities, but being raised on the sacred text, there was also an additional dimension: application. Of course a good teacher can bend your ear at length about the value of, say, Abraham Lincoln’s discourses on slavery or St. Patrick’s Confessio for our present day, but a student can just add them to his fund of knowledge of history with no particular thought to present-day lessons. A faithful Christian student of Leviticus has no such luxury. Our fundamental orientation toward the Scriptures is obedience.
Some Scriptures are written closer to our immediate situation (e.g. Romans), and others (Leviticus) further away, but toward all of them we bring a desire to hear what the Holy Spirit will say “Today, if you will hear His voice….” Failure to bring that desire to the text is a moral failure, as demonstrated in the next breath: “…do not harden your hearts as in the Rebellion.”
Coming into my own as a student of the humanities in high school, I applied all my background to my studies. My biblical lessons gave me a leg up on my classmates in grasping the underlying source material for the (Western) literature we studied. More than that, my reflexive habit of looking for application added dimension and depth to my study and commentary. Which is not to say that I had nothing to learn: I came out of high school with two big additional pieces. First, I fell in love with the beauty of the arts. I didn’t come from a background that appreciated beauty, so waking me up was not a trivial task. I was blessed with teachers that tackled the job with great enthusiasm. (Bornarth, Brinkley, Kuyper, and Virgo: Thank you all!) Second, I learned how to drill down into an author’s biography and body of work, to become a student of that author in particular and begin to see the world as he or she saw it.
My first project of that nature was a months-long team effort with two other students, focused on George Bernard Shaw. It had honestly never occurred to me that one could develop that kind of grasp of a particular person’s work. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve devoted serious attention to authors as diverse as Plato, Euclid, Flannery O’Connor, St. Patrick, Matteo Ricci, Stephen Barnes, Rex Stout, George Leonard, Peter Leithart, Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert, and N. D. Wilson.
Every human is handcrafted for eternity; there’s not the slightest chance that even a prolific writer will successfully convey all their own depths to even the most apt of readers. Happily, you need not be the most apt of readers to immerse yourself in a particular person’s thought for a time. The strength of this sort of experiment is that you get a chance to try on someone else’s mind, see what they see, think what they think. It’s never a perfect fit. Of course it’s not. The places that fit don’t fit easily are the whole point.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
Which is Quite a Thing to Miss
28 November 2023I was maybe 14 or 15 when I first read Frank Herbert’s Dune. In college I discovered the sequels–all 5 of them–and I’ve returned to them a number of times since. Herbert’s sociology of religion shines in certain ways. The average sociologist of his time is a fairly woodenheaded materialist who thinks of religion as humanity’s first and worst answer to being lost in a perplexing cosmos, an ill-fitting patch pulled over a waning ignorance, soon to wither away before the growing light of Science. Herbert knew better — he understood that religion is one of the fundamental driving forces of human society, and it’s not going away; in fact the opposite: the more humans explore their potential, the more powerful religion is going to get. His explorations into the human potential movement only took him further in that direction. The theme is implicit in The Santaroga Barrier, touched lightly in The Dosadi Experiment, and explored rather thoroughly in the Dune universe.
What Herbert fails to explore is the possibility of genuinely supernatural elements operative in religion. He can countenance humans shaped by extreme training (The Dosadi Experiment, the Sardaukar legions) and even radically transformed by millennia of selective breeding (the Guild Navigators, the Tleilaxu, the various products of Bene Geserit breeding programs, the children of Siona). But as close as he gets to a genuinely *other* presence is the Caleban race of Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment, and he situates the Caleban within the ConSentiency universe (which is full of aliens, as opposed to the Dune universe, which has none) as one more alien species, perhaps a little stranger than most.
Which is to say, Herbert takes the enduring presence and power of religion seriously, but he treats it as an entirely human artifact; it doesn’t seem to occur to him that any of it might be real. This dyed-in-the-wool materialist approach could easily be a rational business decision to work within the default approach of the genre. Working with deity in fiction is tricky; even Tolkien (a devout Catholic of immense narrative power) mostly left religion out of his books — and he was writing in fantasy, where he could have gotten away with it.
But Herbert, as far as I can tell, just didn’t take the existence of a deity seriously, at least in his fiction. He viewed religion as a complex force entangled with deep and poorly understood parts of the human psyche, and therefore having an immense power that was a sort of emergent property, greater than the sum of the inputs and therefore capable of turning on even sophisticated manipulators like the Bene Geserit. So he avoids the deus ex machina problem by having no actual gods, and gains some of the plot tension divine intervention can create via that emergent-property power. Far from being puppet masters, his religious manipulators discover they’re riding a tiger and barely holding on.
He’s certainly right that humanly created religious manipulations have a way of turning on the manipulators. He misses that this is because God will not be mocked.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
Do We Chuck the Books?
21 November 2023Imagine if all the worst predictions of the current splatter of YA dystopian novels came true. Civilization falls. Your post-apocalyptic community correctly understands that the collapse was a natural consequence of our decadence and abandonment of God, and you’re faithful Christians. As faithful Christians, you’re trying to live up to the Dominion Mandate, and so trying to recover the scientific knowledge to do so. On one of your forays into the city, you discover a couple boxes of science textbooks in a closet, clearly left over from some long-gone engineer’s college days, or some such.
Of course you haul them all back to the compound, and start going through them. You discover pervasive references to human evolution, favorable references to abortion, and so on.
So here’s the question: do you chuck the books?
This is exactly the position we find ourselves in now when it comes to various forms of knowledge preserved by traditional societies. Modernity burned through our culture, and for a few generations nobody believed Granny knew anything worth preserving. Most of our folk knowledge has been lost, and what remains is largely preserved by weird little enclaves that are wildly out of step with the rest of the world in various distasteful ways. We can also look to a variety of foreign cultures for support in our reclamation project, but we encounter all manner of pagan balloon juice along the way.
Shall we chuck the books? Or do we do the best we can to filter the genuine knowledge that’s there?
I say we filter. Not all of us are called to it, and in general the impressionable young’uns have better things to do, grounding themselves in the truth. But I’ve been at this work 30 years and more, and there’s a lot to be learned by paying attention to what other people know.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
Theopoetics Levels Up?
14 November 2023I’ve been advocating for a while for an angle of approach that I refer to as theopoetics. I’ve elaborated on that in other places, so I won’t repeat it here.
I was surprised and delighted to find that my friend Bob Hitching has independently coined the term logospoetics, and is in the process of elaborating his project. There’s substantial overlap between us, and we have a lot to talk about. In the meantime, check out what he has so far.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
Get Curious!
12 November 2023When you see someone behaving unreasonably, there is one thing that you can know for certain, and it’s not what you think. Of course we all want to think that we know the other person is being unreasonable. But that’s difficult to know for sure. You’ll find that the person who presently seems so unreasonable to you doesn’t think they’re being unreasonable. In fact, it can be quite a challenge to explain to them why they’re being unreasonable, even when it’s obvious to everybody else in the room. And if we’re honest, I think we’ve all had the experience of being that person: in the moment believing ourselves thoroughly reasonable, only to discover in hindsight that wasn’t the case—and everybody but us knew it. It’s surprisingly difficult to assess your own reasonableness from the inside.
It’s safe to assume that you won’t know you’re being unreasonable without outside help. So when you find yourself internally certain that someone else is being unreasonable, all you really know for sure is that you don’t share their concerns and priorities.
Why does that matter? James 1:19 has the answer: “Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” You can escalate, condemn, demand compliance. But rather than being quick to anger, slow down. Listen. There’s something going on in this other person that you don’t know about. Ask questions. Study the person in front of you. Get curious. See if you can grasp what’s going on in their world.
Of course, it really may be that the other person is being unreasonable—after all, it won’t always be you. But you can always get angry later, if you need to. Get curious first.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
No Real Discipleship
7 November 2023For so long as the Holy Spirit restrains the wickedness of the world, culture can only get so bad, and for so long as Messiah tarries, culture can only get so good. We will not descend into the Great Tribulation of our own accord until God permits it, and we cannot ascend to the consummated Kingdom of God of our own accord in any case.
However, between these two great boundary conditions, there is a lot of play, and between these two great boundary conditions, God calls His people “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
The Old Covenant shows us that we cannot do the first two, and the New Covenant shows us that when we do the third, we are given the first two as gifts — a heart of flesh in exchange for a heart of stone, as the prophet said.
This has to include God fulfilling in us His very first command: to tend and keep the earth, the root from which all culture springs. To be engaged in glorious culture-building is a gift God gives His people, and always has. There is no real discipleship without it.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
Hail the Triumphant Dead!
2 November 2023Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints, the centerpiece of Allhallowtide, a three-day celebration in the Western Christian tradition. All Saints is something analogous to Memorial Day – a grateful celebration of the saints and martyrs who’ve gone before us into heaven, and all they’ve done.
The feast was first celebrated in the early 600s, on a variety of dates that varied locally. Ultimately, it settled on May 13th. Pope Gregory III (served 731-741) moved All Saints to November 1 to coincide with opening a new chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica which was dedicated to all the saints who’ve passed before us into heaven. Moving a major holiday to coincide with your ribbon-cutting is a weird thing to do, but apparently that’s one of the perks of being Pope. Anyhow, that’s how it happened.
A quick aside about pagan holidays: We all know that ancient cultures aligned major projects like the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, or the Hill of Tara according astronomical movements, and presumably they celebrated solstices and equinoxes in some fashion, but the links between those old festivals and present-day celebrations like Samhain are speculative at best. (Our earliest hard evidence for Samhain is ninth century). The coincidence between the old festivals and the November 1 date of All Saints is just that — a coincidence.
The day before All Saints is All Hallows Eve, the vigil that comes before the feast. It is a time where we look straight at the darkness of the world, a time when we celebrate our brothers’ and sisters’ victories over that darkness, and a time to pray that we would be like them in our own time. That’s what we were about last night. How it also became an occasion for dressing your kid up like Thomas the Tank Engine and sending him door to door begging for candy is a tale for another time, but it has to do with America’s melting-pot confluence of everybody’s local traditions, plus a healthy dose of good old fashioned American commercialization.
Today, the final day of the feast, is All Souls, also known as the Feast of the Faithful Departed. This feast commemorates all those in heaven whose names are not widely known. These faithful servants of God have benefited us in countless ways, and we take the time to celebrate them, even though we don’t know who they are or what they did. One day we will, and on that day we will be glad to have been grateful in advance. It is also a time to be grateful for our family and friends who have gone before us.
Taken all together, this is a celebration of the Church Triumphant by the Church Militant — we are grateful for them now, and we will join them soon enough. Hoist a glass in their honor tonight.
Hail the triumphant dead – because they’re not actually dead!
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Posted by Tim Nichols
The Pooping Goes Mobile
24 October 2023The human duty to love fruitfulness goes all the way back to Genesis 1, and presents having children as the prototypical act of fruitfulness. Every part of having children is messy, from the lovemaking that leads to conception, to the morning sickness that follows, to the birth. Then there’s a lot of spitting up, even more pooping, and before long, the pooping goes mobile!
Believe it or not, that’s still the simple part — the messes keep getting harder, more complex, more consequential. The first leaky diaper feels like a catastrophe at the time, but it’s nothing compared to the first E.R. visit, first break-up, first car accident. In the end you launch a new adult into the world.
No part of this process is clean and efficient. It’s long, grueling, labor-intensive to the point of comedy. It teaches us how fruitfulness works. You can’t be afraid of hard work. You can’t be afraid of looking ridiculous. And above all, you certainly can’t be afraid of making a mess.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
Where the Road Goes
17 October 2023Suspicious Christians like to say that you shouldn’t take grace too far. If it’s just all grace, all the time, then nobody will be motivated to do the right thing. You have to lower the boom on people at some point. The more biblically savvy of them will point to Romans 6:1, where no less an authority than Paul himself faces the question, “Shall we keep on sinning?” and answers it with a resounding “NO!!!”
“See?” they say. “Even Paul says you shouldn’t take it too far.”
But I want to know what “it” is that we “shouldn’t take too far.” What is it that they think grace is? Because they’ve fundamentally misunderstood both grace and Romans if they think “shouldn’t take it too far” is what Paul is saying in 6:1. The message of Romans 6 is not that you should only go so far down the road of grace. The message of Romans 6 is that when you red-line the engine and take it all the way to the end of the neverending road of God’s grace, that road doesn’t go anywhere near sin. Far from it!
When grace superabounds your sin, no matter how much sin there is, then–and only then–you can know that you’re truly dead to sin and alive to God; you can reckon yourself so. On that basis–what other basis would serve?–you can surrender your members as instruments to God. Of course that doesn’t quite work out the way you’d hope, there being another law in your members that strives toward sin despite your best intentions. Serving God with your mind and sin with your flesh is a devil’s bargain if ever there was one–“who will deliver me from this dead body?” indeed! Glory to God, He doesn’t leave us there.
The Law–the ever-present admonition not to go too far–could never deliver us from that predicament. But what the Law could never do, God did by raising Jesus from the dead. That same Spirit now indwells us, and although our bodies are not yet redeemed, He cheats and gives spiritual life to our (yet-dead) bodies. The life of the Resurrection is available to us now, before the Resurrection, and so we are able to offer our Spirit-indwelt bodies as a living sacrifice that is acceptable to God.
No amount of “not taking grace too far” could have rendered our yet-dead bodies even an acceptable sacrifice, still less a living one; nothing short of a resurrection could possibly do that. And a resurrection is precisely what we have–not ours, but His, and we participate in it solely by grace.
Now obviously all this is ridiculous, but Jesus did it anyway. Good thing He didn’t listen to the people who would have told Him not to take it too far.
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Posted by Tim Nichols
Full Contact Christianity 