Right Between the Shoulder Blades

19 December 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments Off on Right Between the Shoulder Blades | Kingdom of God, Social Reality of the Fall | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Older Son

12 December 2023

My new post on the prodigal’s older brother is up at Theopolis.

Comments Off on The Older Son | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Trying on a Mind

5 December 2023

I 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.

Comments Off on Trying on a Mind | Autobiography, Hermeneutics, Humanities | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Which is Quite a Thing to Miss

28 November 2023

I 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.

Comments Off on Which is Quite a Thing to Miss | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Do We Chuck the Books?

21 November 2023

Imagine 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.

Comments Off on Do We Chuck the Books? | Alternate Cosmologies | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Theopoetics Levels Up?

14 November 2023

I’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.

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Get Curious!

12 November 2023

When 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.

Comments Off on Get Curious! | Exegesis | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

No Real Discipleship

7 November 2023

For 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.

Comments Off on No Real Discipleship | Mentoring/Disciple-Making, Physicality | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Hail the Triumphant Dead!

2 November 2023

Yesterday 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! 

Comments Off on Hail the Triumphant Dead! | Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Pooping Goes Mobile

24 October 2023

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

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

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

Comments Off on The Pooping Goes Mobile | Love of Generous Fruitfulness, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »