Full Contact Christianity

What is energy work, anyway?

17 May 2019

Here’s what I know. In creational terms, you don’t have a soul, you are a soul. That’s what a human being is — a living soul. And a soul is made up of two things: dust and breath, brought together by God. “And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into His nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”

What is meant by “dust?” The physical stuff, the literal dirt that returns to the dirt when we’re done with it.
What is meant by “breath?” The immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it, as Solomon once said.
And — most crucially — what is meant by “and?” . . .

That’s where we’re going to need to play the mystery card. The spirit and body interact in complex ways that we don’t really understand.

There’s a whole range of very subtle physical processes going on in the body. X-ray tomography shows that acupuncture points are structurally different from other points on the body. An electrical current travels faster down a meridian than between two randomly chosen control points the same distance apart…and slower than nerve conduction speed. There’s something else going on.

There are some very subtle, but actually physical, things going on that we’re just starting to understand. We’re just starting to even have the instrumentation to measure some of these things. So that’s the first thing that we mean by energy work – very subtle physical processes.

With respect to those physical processes, here’s my working hypothesis: just like every person has a skeletal system, a circulatory system, and a nervous system, every person has an energy system (or systems). Part of this is simply not that controversial (see Oschmann, 2nd ed.), but the useful models run far ahead of the science and make claims that, as yet, the science can’t really substantiate. But this stuff seems to work anyhow, so I’m using it.

But for me, subtle physical processes is not all I mean.

As Christians, we’re really good at understanding that the spirit relates to God. So far, so good. But spirit can interact with any other spirit, not just God. The first place our heads typically go with that is to realize that we can interact with demons. Which is true. But what about other people?

We can interact with other humans at a spiritual level. My spirit can touch your spirit. I don’t necessarily need to touch your body to do that.

That’s the second thing I mean by energy work.

And — here’s the fun part — there’s not really a clear boundary between those two things. The spirit and the body interact in complex and hard-to-understand ways. I greatly envy people who have a governing theory for what they do. I don’t have one, having not yet encountered a model that I found persuasive enough to adopt wholesale.

In the meantime, it is my experience that I can achieve effects with my clients by manipulating the energy field that I cannot achieve without doing so. It is my experience that I can do these things while working in concert with God in prayer, giving God thanks. So — guided by Paul — I’m not concerned about meddling with something I shouldn’t. God seems to be blessing it.

2 Comments | Healing, Physicality | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Mystical Union: Aiming Right At ‘Em

14 May 2019

Several years back, I got myself in a pile of trouble for talking about mystical union with Christ. Folks in the tradition I grew up in were…resistant, to put it mildly.

With some further years and miles on me, I’m able to reflect on that discussion and see that not everyone was resistant for the same reasons. Best I can tell, there were about six different reasons people didn’t like me talking about mystical union with Christ.

The first reason is the associations the term “mystical” carries with various weird things. “Mystical,” like “intellectual assent” and “legalism,” is a theological cuss word in some circles, and this can be an issue. I expected to encounter this problem when I chose to use the word, but as I said at the time, I don’t believe there was a better choice. With additional years of reflection and considering the alternatives, I still don’t.

The second reason — and this actually surprised me, although it shouldn’t have — is the respectable pedigree that “mystical” has had throughout church history. Evangelical conservatives often harbor a deep contempt for the historical church, and anything the church fathers approved of is automatically suspect.

These first two classes of objectors are suffering from prejudices that need to be overcome. A kid named Fred might have bullied you in second grade, but that doesn’t make every guy named Fred a bully. The word “mystical” might be associated with some people and ideas that you find distasteful, but like the man said: “in understanding be men.” There are realities here the Bible talks about, and believers should talk about them too. Don’t refuse to join the conversation just because someone uses an adjective you don’t like.

A third reason some people object is that they simply don’t understand what I’m saying. For whatever reason, my way of explaining the truths of John 15, John 17, Galatians 2:20, Romans 8:11 and other passages simply doesn’t resonate with them. I suspect many of them haven’t lived these things for themselves, and like virgins hearing a conversation about sex, they simply can’t relate. But many of them, I’m sure, have the experience of walking with God, and for whatever reason, simply aren’t able to talk about this aspect of it.

Fourth, some people object because they don’t see how there can be good grounds for assurance of salvation in this way of understanding relationship with God. To them, all this talk of relationship just seems so slippery and messy. Assurance can’t be allowed to rest on a miasma of relationship talk; it needs a foundation of objectivity in order to remain solid and dependable. These folks are correctly wary of anything that endangers assurance, and in their minds that means all this business about mysticism and relationship has got to go.

The third and fourth classes of objectors are suffering from legitimate misunderstandings, and with them, I hope for the opportunity to have long conversations over meals and drinks. As we explore how they would describe their own life experience of walking with God and living out John 15, John 17, Galatians 2:20 and so on, I learn a lot about how other Christians talk, and we are able to explore ways of bridging between my language and theirs. Or if they’re struggling with the assurance side of things, we often talk about their experience and mine, and frequently find that our stories are not so very different. Again, at that point we will have room to explore how to talk about that and relate theology to it.

Finally, there are two groups of objectors who understand very well what I’m trying to say.

The fifth group is composed of people who also live the reality I’m seeking to talk about, but they believe I’ve made an unwise choice of terminology. Basically, we agree on (most of) the doctrine and the praxis; we just don’t yet have a common language for it. I suspect their stance is mostly a result of their theological training scaring them away from all things subjective, with the result that they can’t talk about the very real subjective elements of a relationship with God. These people are fun to talk with, and I do, often. They are fellow workers in the same field of endeavor, and I’m glad to be working alongside them.

The other group understands what I’m saying, and they hate it. They hear me saying that a person can know his Bible inside and out, and “love” God the way John Hinckley “loved” Jodie Foster, the way Saul of Tarsus loved Yahweh. They understand that I’m saying if there is no acceptance of God personally and on His own terms, then they’re not loving God; they’re stalking Him, and it will end in murder.

These people have invested themselves heavily in academic understanding of doctrinal principles because that’s what they wanted the Christian life to be about. They haven’t really come to know God as the One who loves them, with all the subjective experience that implies, and they don’t want to. They’re furious when I talk about real relationship with God, and no wonder–I was aiming right at ’em.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

“…not even our church.”

10 May 2019

One weekend while I was in massage school, I took an introductory class in Polarity Therapy. Polarity is a big field of study, and we just scratched the surface of most aspects. We did come out with a series of basic energy balancing exercises we could use with clients, though.

The day after the class, I came home and found my wife in serious distress. It was certainly manifesting in physical and emotional discomfort, but there didn’t seem to be anything physical obviously wrong. I wondered if the Polarity balancing session might help. I am automatically suspicious of myself when I think that a new tool I just learned is exactly the thing for someone’s ailment. To a man with a shiny new hammer, everything looks like a nail, you know?

But on the other hand, wouldn’t it be just like God to give me the tool right before I need it? So I thought, “Well, if it doesn’t work, I’ll just try something else.”

With nothing to lose, I set up the massage table and got her on it. As always, I began with prayer (I don’t pray out loud if the client’s not up for that, but I always pray). I asked for God to take this time and restore her well-being, then I went to work. The entire sequence had taken about an hour in class. Doing it on my own, it took two, and it was anything but smooth. I had to keep consulting my routine sheet to see what to do next, and the techniques were unfamiliar, so I had to keep deciphering the notes I’d hastily scribbled in the margins to remind me how we’d done each thing in class. Not ideal. Kimberly later described it as “the most boring massage of my life” — Polarity bodywork is on-body, but barely touching for the most part.

But here’s the thing: God answered my prayers. It absolutely worked. When we finished the session, she was calm and collected. The distress — both physical and emotional — was just gone.

We later lay in bed together debriefing. I described what the session had been like for me — the continual reference to my notes interrupting the flow, the battle to keep myself grounded, but also the sensations of energy moving from place to place in her body, where it felt stagnant or blocked, the shifting patterns of heat and cool I felt as I worked with her, and so on. She described her experience, and what she had sensed as I did certain techniques during the session. At one point I was talking, somewhat excitedly, about how it all felt, when she interrupted me and said, “You realize, you can’t talk about this at church. Not even at our church.”

I said, “I know.”

And it was true. Our church (at the time) was probably, of all the churches in our town, the most open to various forms of weirdness in daily life. We strove to be “naturally supernatural,” and we really meant that. But I knew better than to think I could talk about energy work at church.

It was a defining moment for me. I agreed with God when I got into this that I was going to explore, submit to the process and the experiences that He led me into, and never allow myself to ignore something or pretend it didn’t happen just because I didn’t understand it. And I won’t. But at that moment I realized that my agreement with God meant I was going to have to carve out a niche somewhere outside the established American church. At least in the churches I knew, there was simply no place for what God was showing me.

Their loss. God’s doing a lot beyond the walls of the established church, and it’s good. So I’m gonna start talking about it.

2 Comments | Alternate Cosmologies, Healing, Meditations, Physicality | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Rachel Held Evans, Entered into Rest

7 May 2019

It will surprise no one to learn that I have never been a big Rachel Held Evans fan. We differ fundamentally and widely on many things, principally the authority of Scripture. And yet, as so often happens in God’s family, I would from time to time happen upon something where we unexpectedly converged. Because of course we do. Like Father, like daughter. To a greater or lesser extent, sure. But that’s the journey we’re all on, isn’t it?

I don’t believe that journey will ever really be over; I suspect C. S. Lewis had it right in The Last Battle: “Come further up! Come further in!” Tonight as I write this, she is in Narnia, and we are still here: no matter how we differed a few days ago, she’s out ahead of us all, now. And good for her.

So on the occasion of her passing, I wish to offer a tribute to my sister. Her treatment of modesty made me rethink some things. Her reflections on Sabbath (and also here) were beautiful, and helped me renew my own commitment to accepting God’s rest regularly. Writing pieces like that is real work, and I’m grateful she did it.

She has now fully entered His rest. I look forward to meeting her there. I owe her a thank you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Can You Spell “Church” without C-E-O?

7 May 2019

Leadership is an important field of study; I’ve seen a lot of damage done by unskilled, untrained leaders. Church leaders often try to borrow the “best thinking” on leadership from the business world. But it’s a mistake to assume that the business way of approaching things maps well onto the church. The wrong leadership training is sometimes worse than no training at all.

I’ll never forget attending a Christian leadership conference (nothing related to 3DM) in which the two main speakers–both CEO-style leaders of Big Important Churches that will remain nameless here–kicked off the first session by mocking the concept of shepherding, and distinguishing their kind of leadership as something else entirely. (My wife got up and left the conference early in that talk, correctly discerning that the conference would have little relevance for her.) The rest of the day was devoted to discussing their version of organizational leadership.

Now perhaps one can run a business empire without being a shepherd; I wouldn’t know. But biblically obedient churches are led by (a team of) elders, and every elder’s first job is “shepherd the flock of God.” These two church leaders spent a day teaching a type of leadership that has no place in a church, and a thousand or so overawed church leaders sat there and lapped it up.

What a tragedy for their churches.

Leadership works differently for Jesus followers; Jesus pointedly said so.

But Jesus called them to Himself and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25-28)

Perhaps we should take Jesus seriously. A guy might know how to defend his budget against other executives’ resource grabs, how to take credit for success and make sure someone else gets stuck with the consequences of failure, how to fire half the production department to save the stock price–what makes us think he knows anything about how to lead a church?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Dust and Breath

3 May 2019

What is a human?

It has been fashionable in the West to affirm that a human is simply the matter that makes up the body, and all else — psyche, mind, spirit, whatever words we use to describe the invisible part — is an epiphenomenon of the body, or else an illusion altogether. The East tended toward the opposite move, the contention that nothing but spirit is real, and all else is illusion. A popular variant of the spirit-only view concedes the reality of the ‘coarse’ body, as a stepped-down manifestation of the ‘finer’ energies of the spirit, or an unfortunate prison, an “earth suit” from which the real person (i.e., the spirit) will ultimately be liberated.

Christians know that neither of these simplistic answers is true. Like the Christian answer to the classic problem of the one and the many, so here: Christians affirm the difficulty of the dilemma, and then affirm the equal ultimacy of both. As the problem of the one and the many finds its only possible solution in the being of the Triune God Himself, so the problem of the spirit and the body finds its only possible solution in the being of humans as we really are. God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. We are equally dust of the earth and breath of God. Separating the two is the very definition of death; when we “separate” the two in our inquiries, something dies there as well. The best answer to the separationists is from the mouth of Jesus: “What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

Someone will object that I have taken the quote out of context. I say I have noted a principle in one circumstance of united and equally ultimate opposites, and applied it to another such circumstance. Neither man nor woman is the ‘original’ in marriage; they are equally ultimate. The first woman was taken out of man; every man thereafter is taken out of woman, and no marriage is possible without the combination of the two.
Same with human spirit and body. What makes a living soul is the combination of the two.

If we seriously intend to address the whole person, we have no choice but to take both seriously.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Jesus Is Not A Multilevel Marketing Scheme

30 April 2019

Some people think of disciple-making as the ultimate MLM scheme. You find a good mentor, build a downline…but no. That’s not how it works. Jesus is not running a multi-level marketing company.

Among the followers of Jesus, disciple-making influence is more of a “one another” kind of thing. We love one another. Bear one another’s burdens. Encourage one another. Consider one another in order to stir up love and good deeds. When God gives me a newbie to disciple, part of my job is to grow him from dependent to peer, and quick. The harvest is plentiful, and I need help!

Through Paul, God gave us a genius mechanism for doing that job: “Imitate me, as I imitate Christ.” You can’t just teach people. You have to invite them into your life.

See, just teaching allows you to hold people at a comfortable distance. You can be the leader, the professional, the guru, and they are the follower, the client, the acolyte. But we’re Christians. That’s not what we do.

Paul’s example shows us another way. I call it the “open a vein” school of discipleship. We invite them into our lives, not just as learners but as coworkers, as friends, as family. Make no mistake, this calls for deep integrity. If I don’t practice what I preach, the closer they get to me, the more repelled they’ll be. Being a person who can imitate Paul’s example by calling someone to imitate me is a very high calling.

And you know what? No matter how deep my integrity goes, I guarantee you that when I invite someone into my life like this, he’s going to see my sin, my weaknesses, my failures. I’m not perfect, and my disciples aren’t stupid. The sin is there, and they’re gonna catch me out. Of course they will.

Here’s the thing: that is not a bug; it’s a design feature. The instruction and accountability do not just flow one way; we do these things for one another. God speaks to and through my disciples, and they’re worth hearing. I grow in response to their correction the same way they grow in response to mine–and *that* is a critical part of the example they’re following.

Many years ago and far from here, I once asked a roomful of older pastors, “Haven’t you had the experience of a baby Christian asking why you did something or calling you out–and them being totally right, and you being totally wrong?” They all looked at me blankly…and I permanently crossed every last one of those men off my list of advisors.

I had occasion to work closely with a few of those folks over the years, and they proved to be everything I suspected on the basis of that single interaction: professionalized, dictatorial, unhearing, unteachable. And man, were they hypocritical! The more so because no one could tell them. They wouldn’t hear anything you said if they “outranked” you.

There was no “one another” with those guys, and they were the poorer for it. Go thou, and do un-likewise.

Comments Off on Jesus Is Not A Multilevel Marketing Scheme | Mentoring/Disciple-Making, Unity and Community of Christ's Body | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Providence, Vindication, Vengeance

26 April 2019

I take an occasional interest in a doctrinal fight that I really don’t have a stake in, some bit of inside baseball in a tribe that’s not my own. It’s a tedious exercise, since it requires me to get up to speed on issues I wouldn’t normally pay any attention to, but the work pays off. When you’re not on one side or the other, you can see a bunch of other things more clearly: how they treat one another, how they treat the Spirit-created unity they all have despite their differences, how the fight is perceived by the outside world, that sort of thing. In this way, I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons that I apply to the fights I do have a stake in. Here follows one of those lessons.

Many years ago, some folks in the PCA went after Peter Leithart, accusing him of heresy. At the time, I didn’t know Leithart from St. Moses the Black, but the accusations were related to one of those controversies I was studying. The matter went to trial before the presbytery; I remember listening to the recordings. The lead prosecutor in that trial, one Jason Stellman, argued (among other things) that Leithart was sliding slowly toward Rome, and had departed from the doctrine of the PCA.

As it happens, Leithart was (rightly) acquitted, amid much howling by the heresy-hunters, but that’s not really the point here. The point is what happened next. Fast forward a couple years, and lo and behold, this same Jason Stellman resigns his ordination in the PCA…and joins the Roman Catholic Church. Meanwhile, Leithart remains (as ever) a Presbyterian.

***

In Philippians 3, Paul urges his readers to have no confidence in the flesh, and recounts his own fleshly pedigree:

If anyone else thinks he may have confidence in the flesh, I more so: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ.

Because we’re conditioned by our heritage of revivalism, the meaning we see right away is the individual salvation from hell: Paul has forsaken his reliance on fleshly credentials for the sake of justification by faith. He now trusts in God alone. But there’s more here: a social layer of meaning as well as a theological one.

Remember that Paul had been excommunicated from synagogues multiple times for teaching that Jesus is the Messiah–which He is! They should have welcomed Paul with open arms for teaching the true meaning of the Hebrew Bible, and instead they threw him out.

Now imagine what would have happened if he’d gotten hung up on that. If he’d spent his whole life in a vain search for a retrial, for a fleshly vindication that he’d been right all along. Hold on to that idea, and read what he says next.

Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Again, the individual, theological meaning is there, but so is the social meaning. Paul is not seeking a vindication before the Law. A human court has nothing to offer him. He’s leaving all that behind to pursue Christ. If he suffers, if he’s wrongly convicted–that’s just another way to be more like Christ, isn’t it?

If God wants to vindicate him, then God can do it. Paul isn’t going to waste energy chasing that vindication. As it happens, God did vindicate him, although Paul didn’t live to see it. In A.D. 70, God delivered Jerusalem into the hands of Titus the Roman, and expressed His opinion of the Temple that rejected His only Son. Not one stone was left on another.

***

If we wait, if we just keep pursuing God, we often find that God will vindicate us. He vindicated Paul in the destruction of Jerusalem. Anybody with eyes in their head could see what was happening there (although many are blind).

The same thing happened with Leithart’s heresy trial, not through the acquittal, but in the subsequent events. If you have eyes to see, Providence has painted a little picture in the form of Jason Stellman–the federal head of the heresy-hunters–swimming the Tiber. We are being invited to consider the Romishness of their position, and it’s right there in the trial transcripts, if you missed it the first time through. God has decisively vindicated Leithart in this matter.

I’ve been on the receiving end of similar attacks myself–two stand out as particularly memorable. In one case, I don’t think it was all that hard for bystanders to see what was happening at the time. In the other, it was very hard to see. “The sins of some follow after them,” like Paul said. But in both cases, as time has passed, Providence has done its vindicating work. The people that matter, know. They may be fuzzy on some of the details, but they know enough.

Things become clearer over time.

One person holds to the doctrine he was accused of abandoning, while his accuser—that guardian of orthodoxy–abandons it.
One person remains faithful to the people he was accused of failing to serve, while his accuser skips town, leaving a trail of wrecked relationships in his wake.
One person continues in unity with the believers around him, while the one who excluded him in the name of “preserving unity” excludes more and more people until there’s only a few he’s not at war with.

Over time, it becomes easy to ask a few clarifying questions. Where are the two parties today? Look at one. Look at the other. What do you see?

***

“He who covers his sin will not prosper,” the proverb says, and the sin of slander is certainly included. God has the habit of causing the truth to come to light in time, and this is one of the practical reasons for leaving vengeance to God.

God does not say “Vengeance is bad;” He says “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” As we are tempted to push for vindication, we are also tempted to seek vengeance. Don’t. God’s got it…and He’s better at it than you are.

Count it all loss for the sake of Christ. Pursue knowing Him. Let God take care of the rest.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Marketing the Reformation to the Pope

23 April 2019

“Future generations will be amazed that at one time, we actually thought it was a good idea to run a church like a business.”
“Now that you’ve finished your SWOT analysis, here are some key ideas from the classic business book Good to Great that will help you shift the culture of your church.”
-same people

One of the biggest things screwing up our public rethink of church is the need to market the book/article/consulting service to the sorts of people who can afford pricey resources: successful church professionals.

These people are never going to reform church away from the corporate model, for the simple reason that they can’t. Externally, their organizations and donor base won’t let them, and internally, they have a cultivated blindness to the flaws of the status quo. It’s like trying to market the Reformation to Lorenzo de Medici.

Corporate church culture is certainly doing something, but let us not confuse organizational “success” with serving Christ. By every biblical metric, corporate church culture ties up huge amounts of resources for a very small return–when there’s any return at all. It makes dependent members rather than disciples of Jesus, it barely remembers the poor, and it generally pretends like other churches don’t exist. These are not simply shortcomings that can be readily fixed; they are natural results of the design. Every organizational structure inherently incentivizes certain behaviors and discourages others. The structure we’re talking about is a small number of paid, expert professionals providing religious services for masses of consumers. That structure needs loyal consumers and the amenities that reinforce that loyalty. Those loyal consumers donate, and the structure needs to keep the money in-house, where it can fund competitive salaries for its small stable of experts (and more amenities for donating members). Being a church, of course, it also needs a certain amount of visible outreach and charitable ministry. (Locally, that usually also serves as marketing to bring in more members.) But routinely, the total resources expended on mission are dwarfed by building fund or whatever.

There’s no reason why that model should control what we think of as possible, plausible, or legitimate. And so it seems foolish, if not outright self-sabotage, to choose the scions of that model as our primary discussion partners as we seek to reform the church.

3DM has done exactly that (as have most of the other folks in the discussion). I think it may be their biggest weakness.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Ditching the Whitelist

19 April 2019

Modernism fancied all spiritual powers a delusion. Nothing was real but matter in motion. The vast majority of contemporary Christians have adopted that worldview, with the exception of a whitelist of powers and miracles in which they feel obliged to believe in order to be Christian.

(As I’ve explored elsewhere, how many of those powers and miracles we feel obliged to believe depends to a large degree on how much academic credibility we aspire to.)

But this is not the teaching of Christianity. Christianity has always believed that the old gods are absolutely real—and that we are at war with them. Their heads are to be crushed; their images burned; their sacred groves cut down: Boniface had the right idea. Their followers are to be called to repentance, delivered from their willing slavery to the darkness into the freedom of the light.

On too many occasions over the past 2000 years, impatient Christians have tried to deliver the slaves by force, whether they wanted to be delivered or not. By now we have—let us hope—learned our lesson. The weapons of our warfare are most assuredly weapons, but they are not the carnal weapons of coercion. Our weapons are truth and righteousness, faith and salvation, readiness with the gospel of peace and the word of the Creator Himself, spoken afresh by us.

We live as invaders among the gods and their people. With word and water, bread, wine, and oil, we retake the territory unlawfully stolen from the Creator and prostituted to demons. Our ally is the whole creation that groans with birth pangs, waiting for the revelation of the sons of God.

Christianity is both relationship and religion. Without the relationship, the religion is empty. Without the religion, the relationship is confined to occasional experiences that, while beautiful in themselves, find no tangible expression in everyday life.

The relationship must be real. This is neither a thought experiment (“What if…?”), an arrangement of mental furniture (“I like to think of it like this”), nor a matter of observing principles (which would collapse relationship into religion). It is a real dealing with a particular Person (three, actually) outside ourselves. That means that we carry out our lives in the living presence of Almighty God. That Person births us into His new family, and thereafter grows us up as His children, with the goal of making us partakers of His divine nature. We engage in dialog; we ask for and receive help; we receive comfort and offer up praise. If we are not mystics in this sense, then we are not Christians; we are merely ideologues whose preferred genre is religion.

Now, with that said, what must the religion look like that gives tangible expression to such a relationship?

In order to function in this environment, we need a religious expression that…

embraces the magical nature of the created, spoken world in which we live,
addresses the spiritual realities of both human and angelic/demonic realms,
integrates empirical knowledge of the fertile fields of natural revelation, and
is concrete, livable, and permeates our daily lives.

So what does that look like? Well, that’s the project. I’m workin’ on it. Wanna join in?

2 Comments | Functioning Supernaturalism | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols