Full Contact Christianity

Theopoetics: My Insight Engine

22 January 2012

My partner and I have occasion, from time to time, to introduce people to the Bible, or parts of the Bible they’ve never met before. Or at least never met before that way. Or never seen how that bit connected so nicely to this bit, over here. When one of these things happens, we look like absolute geniuses. In fact, genius has very little to do with it. The Bible is at once a simple and a demanding book, and as we seek to engage it fully, there’s certainly room for genius if there happens to be any lying about. But the genius is not the point, and in fact it’s not really required.

On a good day, someone will ask us how we do it, and we have a chance to engage that discussion. On a bad day, they just assume that it takes something they don’t have, and they could never do what we do. Now, in all modesty, God has gifted us in certain areas, and no amount of training and schooling can put in what God left out. Understanding Scripture, though, is for everyone; this is a thing that can be learned.

We have accepted a fairly simple set of practices — hard, but simple — into our lives. These five things have shaped us into the sort of men who can do what we do. There’s nothing magical (or even especially academic) about it, and the truth is that we learned relatively little of this in seminary. It doesn’t take a degree or time in the classroom; it doesn’t take knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. Again, there’s room for those things to find expression, if you should happen to have them, and if you want them, I can help you get them. But they’re not essential. Diligence is essential, a passion for pursuing God. It was our passion for pursuing God that led us into these things to start with.

So, without further ado, the five core practices that I’ve dubbed my “insight engine”:

Walk with God personally. No excuses, no imitations, no treating God as a thought experiment, a set of principles, or a vending machine in the sky (even if it’s just dispensing spiritual blessings). It is the birthright of God’s children to hear their Father’s voice, to know it for what it is and converse with Him, and to partake by grace in the dance of the Triune fellowship. Accept nothing less. The better you know a person, the easier it is to understand what he writes — and God is a Person. Three, actually.

Map your world with the Word of God. What is man? Dust and breath. What is the sun? A power made by God to rule the day. It’s not a “love scene” in a movie — it’s not even a “sex scene.” It’s a “fornication scene.” Take everything that happens in your world and go back to the Word with it. Find it there, in the Word, and then you will know what it is, and what to do with it. This is a key part of the task the Scriptures describe as meditation.

Talk like God talks. Having done the hard work described above so that you can think of the things in the world, talk that way. Constantly. With everybody. Yes, when you say, “Can we fast-forward through the fornication scene?” they will look at you funny. So?

Walk with the wise. Spend lots of time with people who are skilled in these things. We don’t learn nearly as well from lecture or musty classrooms as we do from apprenticeship, working together with someone else who is more skilled. Find those people and spend all the time with them you can.

Know your limitations. Jesus could walk up to a guy mending nets on the beach and say, “Leave your dad and his servants here, drop your nets, and come follow me.” He was walking so closely with the Father that He could see exactly what the Father wanted, and He could speak it out directly. If I don’t hear the Father quite that clearly, then I ought to be hesitant about speaking that clearly and authoritatively. I am not, in fact, the Holy Spirit, and it’s not okay to poach on His territory.

So that’s it. If you like the biblical insights you find here, this is where they come from, and there’s nothing in the list above that you couldn’t do just like I do. (If you think I’m a nut, well, these things are to blame. But I think all the people who thought me nuts quit reading a while ago.)

1 Comment | Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Psalms, Culture, Memory, and a Brief Book Review

15 January 2012

So it’s been a while since we talked much about singing psalms and such, and I have an update. I’ve been singing, saying, and yes, even occasionally chanting psalms for about 4 years. I’m working with a youth group that’s been singing psalms for more than two years. When we started, we expected that it would take a while to see results, and we had to endure the opprobrium of lots of folks who simply did not believe our approach would work, and felt themselves justified when they could say that it’s been four months, and nothing seems to be happening. Well, it’s been a lot more than four months now, and the results are starting to surface.

Our kids have memorized more scripture completely by accident than most youth groups ever get their kids to memorize on purpose. We did it all without guilt trips or haranguing them about the importance of scripture memory. All we did was introduce them to a musical culture. We worshiped in front of them, and with them, and led them into worship with us, and in worship, we sang a great variety of songs, but at least half of them were/are psalms, ripped right from the pages of the Old Testament.

Understand, these kids come from a culture of personalized performance music. Everybody goes around with earbuds in, but nobody sings together. Over a few years of persistent modeling and encouragement, we have created a culture of participatory musical worship. It’s not weird to sing together anymore; it’s just what we do.

It doesn’t just go for music, either. A while back, we used the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed regularly. We found it necessary to take an extended hiatus from both for reasons you don’t want to hear about. (Trust me on this, Gentle Reader; the making of church policies, like the making of sausage, is a process best not described in public.) Nonetheless, during that time of hiatus, we would find the language of both the Prayer and the Creed popping out of our kids’ mouths at some very applicable moments, and now that we’re free to resume, the kids have picked up as though we never stopped. As we are a people who sing together, so we are a people who pray and confess our faith together — and the confession spills over into Facebook and school cafeterias as well as occurring in our worship. Again, I hasten to point out that we never tried to get them to memorize any of this, never harangued them about the importance of memory, not a bit of it.

Behold, the mighty culture-forming power of sheer repetition.

Nor is this boon confined to the kids we’re ministering to. Since (as you may have noticed) I’m sort of serious about the psalms, I do a fair amount of reading about them. My latest book is Seeing the Psalms: A Theology of Metaphor by William P. Brown. I heartily commend it to your attention. It is a scholarly book, and Brown does salt it a bit more liberally with Latin phrases than is strictly necessary to his purpose. (Et cetera has entered the English language; ad nauseum is tolerable; qua avis is a bit too obscure. “As a bird” would do just fine; saying it in Latin adds nothing.) Those drawbacks aside, it is an outstanding exploration of the poetics and metaphors of the Psalter, and I’m enjoying it immensely. But the reason I mention it is that I’ve noticed something interesting. In pursuit of explaining the various metaphors of the Psalter — refuge, the path, animals, plants, water, and so on — the book wanders all over the Psalter, and I’ve discovered that far more often than not, I know the passages. Frequently, the author will quote a line from a psalm, and I find that I know the next line. Four years of immersion in the Psalter is paying off — and again, I made little to no attempt to memorize. I simply sang, said, prayed, and chanted the psalms in the ordinary course of my life — “a long obedience in the same direction” as it were. Of course, recognizing lines from the Psalter in a book is just a sidelight, an interesting epiphenomenon. The point is that knowing the Psalter that well has transformed the way I talk to God — and the way I hear His voice, too.

Repetition forms personal culture too — who knew?

The fashion of the age is to scorn repetition. Repetition is just too simple for us; we prefer to emphasize understanding and critical thinking. The problem is, a person can understand an explanation perfectly well today, and then forget the whole thing tomorrow, never to have been deeply touched by it at all. If we want a person to be formed, however, repetition is essential. So we say, for example, the Apostles’ Creed. They won’t understand it first time out, but who cares? If it takes a year, that’s fine. We’re going to be saying it at least that long.

First we trust in a teacher, then we obey, then we understand, and lastly we are perhaps in a position to innovate intelligently and think critically. That’s the order. Or as one ancient writer put it, “Add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge….”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

2012: Bus Driver to…

8 January 2012

Walking with God…sometimes it’s running ridges like a mountain goat or a calm walk along the beach, but often God leads into the deep places, the valley of the shadow of death. If it’s Yahweh we serve, we have to be as ready for the thick darkness of Sinai and Golgotha as the light of Mount Tabor — “if I make my bed in the depths, You are there.” Like all the really important things in the Christian life, this is much easier to talk about than to actually do.

Ditching “Theologian” as a label for myself (as I discussed last week) allows me to dump a whole set of agendas and expectations that never did make much Kingdom sense. The publication credits, conferences, contacts, all the accoutrements of building a personal empire — I suppose in the right hands all these things can be made to serve Kingdom ends. But in my hands, they were building a career. A career of service to the Body, sure. It would all have been very defensible. But in His hard mercy, God had something else in mind for me, something that required a major humbling and the resulting change of heart. He who exalts himself will be abased, and God did that for me. I’m not gonna lie to you; it sucked like a brand new vacuum cleaner. Being humbled is a miserable experience. It has to be, otherwise it’s not humbling.

This is what it takes, I suppose, to become the supple clay that the potter can mold into whatever He desires. Maybe other people yield better than I do, and don’t have to take such a pounding to become soft, but this is what it took for me.

So now what? The temptation, of course, is to wallow in the mire. I can say “I’m just a bus driver — what could I do for the Kingdom?” It would all be very defensible, again. “I got humbled, remember? I can’t do that kind of work anymore. God took it all away.” But of course, that’s foolishness. If God can ordain praise from the mouth of nursing infants, certainly He can use me. I don’t really get to say I’m “just” a bus driver, because a Christian is never “just” anything. We are partakers of the divine nature, heirs of God, the hands of Jesus to minister in the world, and His feet under which Satan will shortly be crushed.

So now what? What shall I call myself? “Bus driver” doesn’t exactly ring with the sort of Kingdom expectations I need. It’s a good thing to be, and at a certain point in the story, there’s nothing wrong with it. But I’m already visibly more than that — God is already adding things back into my life. (Which is exactly what I should have expected, because Jesus’ promise is good: seek first the Kingdom, and all these things will be added. Some exciting stuff is going on there, Gentle Reader, but more of that anon.) So what can I say about myself at this point? What shall I aim for, and who am I?

I’m not sure I can answer that yet. I know for sure that if I’d tried to answer that question back in the summer, the answer would have been way, way off — there was still too much stuff in my life that needed to be stripped away, too much deconstruction that I couldn’t yet see. I’ve come a long way since then. A lot of what God stripped away was good stuff, too — I wouldn’t have been into it if it weren’t, and it wouldn’t have been so hard to accept losing those things if they hadn’t been good. But every good opportunity is not my good opportunity, and there was a lot in my life that is not part of where God is taking me next. Those things had to go; not everything good is good for me.

As I said, God is already bringing new things forward in my life, building up new ministry endeavors and giving me new relationships and opportunities. Some of the old ones have been deepened and transformed as well — it’s very good. But I have this sense — very strongly confirmed by a friend I trust — that if I lean too hard into the new things right now, I will truncate some of the blessings God has for me.

It’s like God is building me a mansion on a plot of ground that holds a swayback shack and a briarpatch. Half the shack is bulldozed down and a bunch of the ground is cleared, and He’s already starting to build. But if I dive into the building project now, I’ll wind up with a briarpatch smack in the middle of the living room, and there will be no place for the east wing, because the wreckage of the shack is still in the way. God is building, and He’s letting me see it, and this gives me hope. But he wants me to focus on clearing the ground. Up to now, I’ve been simply trying to deal well with whatever ground God chose to clear, trying to accept the suffering as necessary. Now, though, I’m ready to be God’s partner in removing whatever needs to go. He has to provide the wherewithal, of course; I can’t do this in my own strength. But I’m ready to remove what needs to go.

He who saves his life, as Jesus said, will lose it. There’s still more deconstruction to do. Here’s to the deep places in the earth; we find diamonds nowhere else.

3 Comments | Autobiography, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

2011 in Retrospect: Theologian to Bus Driver

1 January 2012

I had three communities that I considered home at the beginning of 2011, and in all of them, I was something of a hotshot young theologian. In the spring, one community made it very clear that my contributions weren’t welcome. Late in the year, I was laid off from the church I was working for, and so my role in that community is coming to a close.

At the same time, God opened new doors. A friend in the city started a mentoring group for young leaders and invited me to join, which I did. During the summer I found myself a welcome part of Fishes & Loaves, a ministry to the homeless in Englewood, and even though I’m presently going through a season where I can’t make it there, they’re good friends and I look forward to rejoining them when I can. Also during the summer, I helped out a friend with a church plant, and although I had no intention of doing anything more than lending a quick helping hand, found myself quite unexpectedly becoming part of the community. God made that church, The Dwelling Place, into my new home church, and He did it with surprising speed and thoroughness.

Some communities have been continuous throughout all this flux. Most notable are my continuing close association with Jim and Michele, and my partnership with my youth ministry compadres Joe and Becca, who together with my wife Kimberly make up the best core team I’ve ever worked with in my life. Above all, my marriage to Kimberly has been a safe, stable, exhilarating little community of three (no, she’s not pregnant; God’s the third). But the fact that these communities have endured does not mean there was no change. All these relationships changed shape in surprising ways over the last year, and we’ve grown closer and stronger as a result — it’s been good. I’m humbled and grateful to you all.

We Westerners — and especially Americans — want to be radical individualists. “Your community is not you,” we want to say. But of course, it isn’t true. The Triune community certainly defines God; why should we who bear His image be any different? We are who we are in community, and while we bring our own internal selves to the relationship, the relationship defines us to a great degree. The external association shapes the inner man.

So over this year, my identity has shifted profoundly. I’ve become a disciple to one mentor, and deepened my discipleship with another. I’ve become a better brother to several people, and entered into some new ‘brother’ relationships I hadn’t had before. I’ve terminated a couple of mentoring relationships (giving and getting), and I’m no longer a foot soldier for certain causes. Even my areas of gifting are shifting. I’m still a teacher, and in all modesty, a good one. God’s given me a gift there, and I’m still using it. But I also find that God’s moving me into areas of function within the Body that I’d never suspected I’d fill, and my interests are shifting to the new vistas God is leading me to explore.

Some of the rules I’ve lived my life by up to this point, I’m having to bend. Others, I’m having to break. They weren’t biblical rules to start with, more “It’s a good idea to…” stuff. Mostly, I’m trashing the rules because I can’t follow Scripture and keep them. But these rules are accepted as gospel in my (former) home communities, so at the same time that I’m shifting into new communities, I’m learning to let go of old shibboleths. This, too, makes me a different (and much freer) person, and a better image of God.

I’m also learning to minister more like Jesus taught us to do. He told His disciples to seek out sons of peace, and minister to them, and through them to others. I have made a career out of seeking out sons of conflict, and trying to induce them to repentance. If you’re a budding young theologian trying to make a name for yourself in academic circles, this makes a certain kind of sense. (Worldly sense, but still…) I gotta admit, I started this year thinking that way. I thought of myself as a theologian: I didn’t go through four years of seminary classes and a master’s thesis to be a bus driver, after all (even if I might, temporarily, drive a bus to pay the bills.)

And then, slowly, it began to dawn on me: I did go through all that training so I could be a bus driver. That training made me very, very efficient at what I do; I see guys spend 20 hours on a sermon, when I can prep the same sermon in 2 or 3 hours. If I’m drawing a full-time salary to prep sermons, I can spend 20 hours. If I’m driving a bus 40 hours a week, that’s not gonna happen — I may only have 2 hours to spare. So let that other guy draw the salary. He will minister to the people who can afford to pay for his services, and more power to him. People with money need Jesus just like the next guy. Me? I’ll be ministering to people who can’t afford to pay me anything. Don’t need it, thanks; I can buy my own food. (In truth, some support really helps the ministry, but I need a lot less than a full-time supported worker would.)

I’m working on a couple of books, and I began the year feeling the pressure to get the work done. Calvin published the first edition of the Institutes when he was 29, for crying out loud, and I’m not going for anything so monumental — what could be taking me so long? As I see it now? No pressure; God will get me there when He’s ready, and if the work should take another decade or three to ripen, well, I’m just a bus driver, after all…. Takes all kinds to make the Kingdom.

Will I ever go back to full-time paid ministry? Probably, at some point. When the Lord calls me to. I like the work; I’d do it all day if I could afford to. I also like having the flexible schedule that allows; there’s a couple of prayer meetings I really want to attend that I can’t go to because I’m driving in the early morning. But that’s not God’s will for me right now, and His plan is good. His heart toward me is for good, and I trust Him. (That said, I’m praying for this to be the year of Wednesday snow days, so I can go pray with my family and still keep my job.)

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, expect to see some corresponding shifts in the posts here. Some battles, I’m no longer interested in fighting. Some of them are because my convictions have changed. Others are because although I still hold the same doctrinal position, I’m just not interested in expending limited resources on that battle, however theoretically important some may find it to be. And truth to tell, I’m just less interested in fighting, period. Some battles have to be fought, and I’ll fight the ones God asks me to, but I’m no longer interested in hunting for worthy causes to fight for. I’d rather find unworthy people to love. Love gets me into enough fights as it is; no need to look for more. There’s a lot to celebrate and thank God for and support, and I plan to do more of that.

I’m deepening my associations with parts of the Body I’d never met before. I’ll continue to offer the reflection you know and love, but expect me to fall silent in some areas, change my position in others. And of course, there will be new insights, new areas of thought, and new associations. Well, new to me. The Body’s been around a long time; I’m just getting set to enjoy a glorious year of catching up. Gentle reader, I’m glad to have you with me. We’re gonna have fun this year.

4 Comments | Autobiography, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Mystical Union: The Incarnation

25 December 2011

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name ‘Immanuel,’ which is translated, ‘God with us.'”

That was true beyond what Isaiah could have guessed. The prophecy was fulfilled, not by a child whose name reminds us that God is with us, but by a Child who was God with us. The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.

It took us centuries to think that one through. All the Christological debates back and forth for years, the roads being filled with galloping bishops hurrying from one council to another, all the letters written and polemical sermons preached, were just to come to grips with this simple truth.

Why?

Because it’s extraordinarily important, and being so important, it was under constant attack by the enemy. The Church was besieged by one idiotic scheme after another: “Well, maybe it worked like this….” Unfailingly, it would turn out that at the heart of the scheme would lie one of two flaws. Either Christ was divine, godish, but not really God, in the sense that the Father is God, or Christ was humanish, human in some respects, but not really man, in the sense that we are man.

What difference would that have made?

The center of the Christian faith, the promise on which we utterly depend, is that ordinary human beings may be partakers of the divine nature; that we, frail broken as we are, can come as we are, and enter into the fellowship of the Trinity itself.

How do we know this is true?

Because God promises it, of course, but also because we’ve actually seen it. Jesus did it perfectly. The Word became flesh. He was a man as we are men, and very God of very God, as the creeds put it.

If Jesus was humanish, but didn’t really have all the traits we do, then whence our confidence that the traits He did not assume could be redeemed? Without that confidence, we have no hope of being redeemed as human beings. The Fall was permanent; humanity is ruined forever, and salvation lies in becoming something less than entirely human.

On the other hand, if Jesus was only godish, divine, touched by the Father but not of the same nature as the Father, then we could hope to be better than we are, certainly, but we can have no confidence of entering into true fellowship, true union, with God. We can be good human beings, maybe even spiritual supermen, but entry into the fellowship of the Godhead is forever barred to us. If even Jesus couldn’t manage it, how could we?

But the Divine Word, true and complete God, became the son of Mary, true and complete man, and in His person bore our every sin and frailty to the cross. In Him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and therefore we may trust that we too can be partakers of the divine nature, and enter into the circle of the perichoretic Triune fellowship, as Jesus prayed that we would:

I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.

The enemy has not stopped attacking our Christology. We’ve weathered the storm of doctrinal defections, but having pure doctrine on paper never saved anyone. It has to be lived, and the tragedy is that we simply fail to rise to the destiny Christ won for us. We live not only as if the Incarnation did not happen; we live as though it could not have happened. We settle for giving in to our flaws: “I’m only human,” we say, as though Jesus had not shown us what true humanity can be. Or we settle for being merely good, moral people, as if Jesus had been merely a moral man rather than very God. But we are neither called to be showcases of the sins of our flesh, nor showcases of the moral accomplishments of our flesh. We are called to be the image of God in the world, the Body of Christ, and members of the Triune dance. We are called to union with God, to know the love of God that passes knowledge, and this is not a thought experiment. It is a real experience, or it is nothing at all.

Today we celebrate the Incarnation, the ultimate demonstration that such an experience is available to us. Merry Christmas to you all.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Advent Service Communion Meditation

18 December 2011

This evening I had the honor of presenting the Lord’s Table as part of the Advent service at my church, The Dwelling Place. I had been praying and thinking for a week about what to say, and the biggest problem I had was resisting the temptation to try jamming six sermons’ worth of material into a few minutes’ meditation. But although I had all the pieces of the puzzle, try as I might, I just couldn’t get it to go together. The problem persisted right into this evening; I was wandering around the piazza in front of the church just minutes before the service, praying because I still didn’t know what I was going to say. About five minutes before I actually had to get up and start talking, God made it all click together, and here it is.

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death til He comes.”
Paul’s meditation on the Lord’s Table includes past, present, and future. In the past, Jesus died and rose. In the present, we proclaim that truth by celebrating the Lord’s Table, and we will continue doing that until, at some point in the future, He comes again.

Nor is this some sort of late development brought into the church by Paul. At the very first celebration of the Lord’s Table, Jesus passed the cup and said, “Drink from it, all of you, for I tell you that I will not taste of the fruit of the vine again until I drink it new with you in My Father’s kingdom.” From the beginning, the Lord’s Table looked forward to the day that we eat and drink with Jesus in the Kingdom.

Each season of the church year has its own lessons to teach, and all of these lessons apply all the time in our lives. For example, Lent is about repentance, but of course if we wait for Lent to come around before repenting, we’re going to lead miserable lives; we need repentance every day. But we set aside the seasons to focus on particular lessons and particular skills in the Christian life. This season is Advent, and it is about waiting. Advent anticipates Christmas. Jesus is coming, but He has not yet come, and so we wait.

It was a long wait. God placed Adam in the world to be His image, and Adam blew it. Eve had a son and said “I have gotten a man from the Lord” — hoping that this would be the Seed of the Woman who would crush the serpent and put the world to rights. Instead, he was Cain, the bad priest who slew his brother Abel, the good priest. They began a long succession of flawed images: Aaron, the High Priest who made an idol, David, the great King who committed murder and adultery, Balaam, the prophet of God who gave in to greed. There was a long succession of prophets, priests and kings who failed — a long succession. But not, God be praised, an endless succession.

Jesus came, and God’s people recognized Him for who He was: the Messiah, the priest, prophet, and king who fulfilled all their hopes. Then he was crucified — which is what happens to failed messiahs. All was lost…and then He rose from the dead, and victory was assured.

So what remains to us? We’ve won, haven’t we?

Jesus died, rose, and ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. Once again, God’s people are waiting for Messiah to come, and we can’t even imagine what we will be on that day. As John put it in his first epistle, “It has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”

While we wait for that day, God has given us the task to be His image in the world, the very Body of Christ. And this is a job that, by His supernatural grace, we can do, because we are what we eat.

So come now to the Table: This is the body of Christ, broken for you. This is the blood of Christ, shed for you. As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death, til He comes.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Community

11 December 2011

I recently had occasion to hear from a disaffected pastor who felt that my talk about “community” was an affectation, an unnecessary flirtation with a popular buzzword. That furnished me with an occasion to think a little more deeply (and theopoetically) about why community has become a pillar of my practical theology. Below you’ll find some of my ruminations; I hope they’re helpful to you.

One person is a rotten image of the Triune God.

In the beginning, God saw that everything He made was good, except for one thing: a solitary person. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the person: the “not-good-ness” was very specific: “It is not good that man should be alone.” God is three Persons; one person is not a good image.

The fix? God puts the man in a death-like sleep, tears him in two, and fashions woman — the crown and glory of man — from his very flesh. She is different from him, other than him, not-him. And yet, what does he say?

“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.”

He sees her, and knows her for what she is. She is his flesh — if you’ve seen her, you’ve seen him. And then, you haven’t; they are different.

“Show us the Father,” Philip says to Jesus, “And it is sufficient for us.”

“He who has seen me,” Jesus replies, “has seen the Father.” He later adds that He indwells the Father, and the Father indwells Him. In big theological polysyllables, we call this perichoresis. (That’s Greek for “dancing around,” by the way.) In another author’s terms, “In Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” This extends to the Church, and that’s only natural: we are the Body of Christ, of His flesh and of His bones, which is to say, His Bride. And while He has ascended, the Body remains here on earth, a tangible witness to the Father.

A solitary person, no friends, no family contact, is a lousy image of God. This is the image of the Trinity in the world: that we dwell in each other’s lives. A lot. In a husband and wife, this dancing around one another leads to nakedness and physical union, an intimacy so deep and glorious that it’s too dangerous to share with more than one person. Too much glory can kill you. On the other hand, that glory is also the ultimate picture of Christ and His church.

In other contexts, this dancing around leads to the shedding of masks and armor, so that we can see and love one another for who we are. A different sort of nakedness, to be sure, but it’s still quite threatening, and we’re still tempted to start stitching fig leaves together. Another person in my life is going to act like…well…not me. He’s going to be himself. In my life. He might not like me; he might not do things like me.

That’s all true, and it’s my job to give him the freedom to do that, as a gift. And to receive the same freedom from him, if he’s willing to offer it. That mutual gift becomes a dance that lets us both be ourselves, in harmony, richer than we could be separately. Sinners can’t do this naturally, but God never meant for us to be only natural; we were always meant to partake in the divine nature. The dance depicts the Trinity, and the dance requires the presence and guidance of the Trinity, or it will never work.

When it does work…wow. God has blessed me with this dance in a number of relationships, and I am rich beyond measure. I can’t begin to express my gratitude adequately, but the very least I can do is name some names: my Sunday morning thinktank partners, Jim and Michele; my youth ministry partners, Joe and Becca; my “huddle,” Dave, Jody, Brad and Joe (again); my church family at The Dwelling Place, whose names are too numerous to list, but y’all know who you are; and saving the best for last, my Lady Wife, Kimberly. I aspire to be the sort of blessing you have all been to me.

And you, gentle reader, wherever you may be: May God bless you with the same, and may you bless others with the same, that the world may know that the Father sent Jesus, and has loved us as He loved Jesus.

4 Comments | Ecclesiology, Meditations, Mystical Union, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Marks of a True Church

4 December 2011

When our fathers were expelled from the Church of Rome five hundred years ago, they had to reconsider what it meant to be a true church. Since the first few centuries of the Church, they had been able to tell themselves that if they were in communion with the other churches (and then later, if they were in communion with the Pope), they were a true church. Suddenly they found themselves cast out of the political organization they’d come to identify with the Church, and this forced them to re-confront the question: What is a true church? How can you tell if you’re in one?

I’m not going to review the whole discussion here, but suffice it to say that over time, the Reformation fathers settled on an answer: the marks of a true church are faithful proclamation of the Word, faithful practice of the Sacraments, and church discipline (which protects the other two). For quite a long while, “word, sacrament and discipline” were considered the marks of a true church throughout the Protestant world. Even today, many Protestant churches consider these marks to be the core of their church activity.

As a result, a certain sort of superstition has grown up around the marks of a true church. Many people believe that if a church is faithful to just maintain word, sacrament and discipline, then God will bless that church. Unfortunately, in the world we actually live in, churches are regularly closing despite what they would consider their faithful preservation of word, sacrament, and discipline. Something wrong there…

In my own tradition, the word/sacrament/discipline got boiled down to just word, which is to say, doctrinally sound teaching. A similar superstition plagues us: if we will just maintain the teaching of sound doctrine, God will bless us, and the rest will come. But in our tradition also churches are closing every day, despite having maintained the teaching of sound doctrine.

***

Scholars have often commented on the stance of the OT sage as a distinct vantage point, especially as distinct from Moses as lawgiver or the other prophets. Where the prophetic stance begins with direct verbal or visionary revelation, the sage does not. The sage observes God at work in the world, and the sorts of things that God tends to do, and draws conclusions. In other words, the prophet starts with “Thus says the Lord…” and the sage starts with “How’s that working out for ya?”

The sage — even the inspired sage of the book of Proverbs — appeals to observation and experience. See Prov. 24:30-34, 6:6-11, etc. The sage catches things that the doctrine-wonk might miss, like: “Hey, guys? This isn’t working.” This is quite openly an appeal to experience, and if you have the doctrine-wonk turn of mind, you’ll object that everybody’s experience is different, and how can you really appeal to that?

The answer, of course, is “carefully.” It is actually easier to decode God’s revelation in His Word than in His spoken World. It’s easier to misread the World. But for all that, the World is revelation, meant to be read and understood. If it requires wisdom, then we will need to be wise.

***

Experimental science arose from ‘natural philosophy.’ One of the key points of departure between philosophy and science (as we now know it) is the willingness to go out and look. Philosophy can be done from an armchair — if you know the basic nature of things, then you can arrive at all the conclusions you need by thinking through how they interact together, or so the natural philosophers once thought. But they kept being wrong about the way the world actually worked. The experimental scientists realized that there are lots of ways God could have made the world — if you want to know how He did make it, you have to go look.

***

The ‘marks of a true church’ approach to church ministry is like old-school natural philosophy; it revolves around sitting in a study and doing lots of thought experiments. If we’re meeting the standards, then of course we’re doing it right, and of course God will bless our efforts. The path of wisdom is a little more complex: it involves getting out into the world and seeing what God is, in fact, blessing.

It will turn out that the ‘marks of a true church’ approach is also bad doctrine, but that’s not really the point. The point is that God reveals that it’s bad doctrine by not blessing it, and so you learn it’s bad doctrine by going out into God’s world and seeing that it doesn’t actually work. What does? Love. Service. Care for children, the poor, for orphans and widows and the defenseless. Healing the sick; comforting the broken; hugging people who stink. Getting out of the holy huddle and engaging the people who need Jesus most.

I’m not rejecting correct doctrine here; it’s important. I think it’s important enough that I make time to design Bible curriculum for Christian middle school students, and to teach Greek and theology courses to Bible college and seminary students. Nor am I rejecting the proper practice of the sacraments; in fact, I dare say I take a much higher view of the sacraments than the vast majority of you who will read this post. And I’m certainly not denigrating church discipline.

What I am doing is observing that being the Body of Christ in the world involves a ministry profile that looks like Jesus. If we don’t look like Jesus, then how dare we console ourselves because our teaching is good?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Prayers from the Pilgrimage: Rest is Transformation; Worship is Warfare

27 November 2011

The below is an excerpt from my (God willing) forthcoming book, Prayers from the Pilgrimage. May it be a blessing to you.

Like Moses and Aaron Your priests, and like Samuel who called upon Your name, so we have called upon You, and You have answered us. You have been to us God-Who-Forgives, and we have kept the ordinances which You delivered to us. Having obediently joined in the good works which You prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them, we who believe now enter into Your rest with thanksgiving.

On the sixth day You made man and brought his bride to him, thus completing all Your work which You had made, and on the seventh You rested. In so doing, You made the Sabbath for man, that Your image might enter into Your rest, and thus refreshed, might labor as You also labor in the world. And so the Sabbath became chief among the holy convocations of Israel, a day of celebration, rest and worship according to Your command.

On the sixth day the Last Adam completed His work, and on the seventh He rested in the tomb. On the first day of the week, the New Man walked in the garden, but His Bride could not cleave to Him, because His victory was not yet complete, and she was not yet prepared for Him. He ascended and sat at Your right hand, exalted above every name and given all authority in heaven and on earth. On the Lord’s Day, the Bride enters Your throne room, there to be prepared by Him for the day when He returns.

May our worship on this Lord’s Day be a pleasing offering to You, and may Your will, done in heaven through our worship, flow out from the sanctuary and be done on earth, that we may disciple the nations and the kings of the earth may kiss the Son.

Blessed are You, O Lord, who gives bread to strengthen our hearts. As we have eaten at Your Table in heaven, so we will eat on earth, that we might soon eat with Your Son in Your Kingdom.

Blessed are You, O Lord, who gives wine to gladden our hearts. As we have drunk at Your table in heaven, so we will drink on earth, that we might soon drink with Your Son in Your Kingdom.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Tradition: Dealing with Error

20 November 2011

This is the second post in a series on the Tradition, which is also related to the posts on Mystical Union and Theopoetics. In the last post, we finished with the idea that the Tradition could be wrong only if Christ is not risen, Yahweh is not the God of heaven and earth, and so on. Which leaves us with the question: Living within the Tradition, how do we deal with errors when they arise?

The Tradition is the only game in town. How will you walk with Yahweh except by His Spirit, among His people, and according to His Scriptures? As a Christian, you’re part of the Tradition whether you like it or not; you can’t judge it from outside, because you can’t get outside it. “I am right and the Tradition is wrong” is a self-contradictory statement for a Christian; every Christian is part of the Tradition.

One presumes there was nothing wrong with the way the Apostle Paul conducted a church service. Chrysostom writes a liturgy in the 4th century, the Divine Liturgy that much of the Eastern church still uses to this day. The interesting question is not why a 21st-century church uses a 4th-century liturgy, although that will certainly bear exploring. The interesting question is, why a 4th-century liturgy, rather than a 1st-century liturgy? What did Chrysostom add, replace, change? Was he justified in doing so? And if so, then couldn’t Thomas Cranmer have been justified also? Couldn’t I?

The Tradition is providentially developing through history. The Tradition is always maturing, and therefore is always incomplete in that sense, because it always has room for future growth into greater maturity. We can’t disparage the Tradition on account of its historically-bound incompleteness. That’s the way God chose to do it, and there’s that whole business of critiquing the Potter to be concerned about, and anyway, it’s just silly to criticize others for their historically-bound incompleteness when we have the same problem.

But sometimes, we’re not just talking about incompleteness or immaturity. We’re talking about serious sin in our history. How shall we talk about rampant and obvious sin within the Tradition? The obvious answer is to critique it biblically — and this is also the right answer. But how we go about this task matters. Let’s take an easy example: the antisemitism of the early church. This problem is not often discussed in most evangelical circles, because it’s embarrassing, but for those of you who don’t know, large swathes of the early church were virulently, violently antisemitic. This is a well-established historical fact, so I’m not going to repeat all the evidence here. Feel free to look it up; it’s almost certainly worse than you imagine.

Moreover, the early church’s anti-Semitism is eminently understandable. It was Jewish people who abducted Jesus in the middle of the night, illegally tried Him, and delivered Him to Pilate. It was only at their insistence that Pilate crucified Him. It was Jewish people who murdered Stephen, it was to placate Jewish people that Herod killed James, it was Jewish adversaries who hounded Paul from town to town. Jesus was Jewish too, of course, but He came to Israel, and took from Israel a people for Himself, and then sent His disciples into all the world. Judaism after Jesus was not the religion of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Jesus took their descendants with Him (that was the point of Stephen’s famous speech, which got him murdered). Judaism after Jesus was and is the chaff, not the wheat, and so it will remain until Israel’s repentance and restoration. In due course God sent Titus the Roman, and the chaff was scattered to the four winds — Psalm 1 in action. The theology was simple and self-evident, the historical evidence was indisputable, and the emotional motivation was potent: Jewish people had been, and remained, implacable and murderous enemies of the gospel, precisely because they were Jewish.

So why not hate them? The early church forgot two things: first, if Israel is our enemy, then we must do what Jesus told us to do, and love our enemies. Second, we come from Israel. We are not a second tree, planted in Israel’s place when she is utterly rejected—no indeed. We are productive wild branches, grafted into Israel’s tree, and if her fall is riches for us, what will her restoration be? The fruitless branches will not remain cut off forever: “All Israel shall be saved.” In the meantime, her root supports us. Her Scriptures are ours, and we owe her all gratitude for conserving them for us. From Abraham to Jesus, Israel was the custodian and visible manifestation of the Tradition, and we cannot disown her, however much the early church might have tried.

Which is to say that when the early church sought to expunge every trace of Jewishness from their religious practice, their error wasn’t just hating their enemies; that would have been bad enough. They were hating their fathers. God don’t dig father-hatred, and has made His opinion on this most clear: “Honor your father and mother.” “Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set.” “My son, hear the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the law of your mother, for they will be a graceful ornament on your head, and chains on your neck.” “Whoever curses his father or his mother, his lamp will be put out in deep darkness.” “The eye that mocks his father, and scorns obedience to his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pluck it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.”

Now, how shall we reject the antisemitism of our (early church) fathers — which we obviously must do — without rejecting our fathers wholesale, and thereby repeating the very same sin that they committed?

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Posted by Tim Nichols