Full Contact Christianity

Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women, Part 3: Does Gender Difference Make a Difference?

26 February 2012

The church at Corinth is justly famous for its problems, but it was also noteworthy for its gifts. So richly gifted was the Corinthian church that Paul said they come short in no gift. There’s all kinds of discussions we could have about the various differences between Corinth and the present milieu, but let’s start by trying to understand what was happening in the church then. There’s a particularly rich vein of discussion centering around how the Corinthians were supposed to use the gift of prophecy, so we’ll focus our discussion there. They had a number of prophets functioning in the Corinthian church — in fact, they were completely out of control, and part of Paul’s purpose in writing the epistle is to help restore a measure of order to their worship service.

So let’s take a little time to look what the practice of that particular gift was supposed to look like in the church. The first stop is 1 Corinthians 11:1-16. Again, lots of ink spilled on whether we need to do this head covering thing today, and for the moment, let’s bypass all that and focus on what Paul wanted the Corinthians to do. It’s pretty simple, actually: men, when praying or prophesying, should uncover their heads; women, doing the same, should cover their heads. Why? As a sign of submission.

Let’s just sit with that for a moment. Here we have a man and a woman. Both are believers; both have the gift of prophecy; both have a word from the Lord to speak. No problem with any of that; they can both speak, but Paul insists that the man uncover his head to do it. Paul also insists that that the woman cover her head to exercise her gift. This from the same guy that wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” to the Galatian churches earlier in his career. Has he changed his mind?

Of course not. Jesus is one with the Father; Jesus is not the Father. The Father sent; the Son obeyed to the point of death; the Father raised and exalted Him. Christian unity is trinitarian unity: real equality in value and glory, but not sameness in either identity or function. The application here to men and women fits well with the internal logic of Pauline iconography; a husband represents Christ and a wife represents His Bride, the Church.

If we stop right there, we have something valuable already: Paul plainly teaches them that both men and women can (and should) pray and prophesy, but not in exactly the same way. Which is to say, gender difference makes a difference in how the gift should be exercised in the Corinthian church. It could also make a difference today, could it not?

But let’s keep walking with the Corinthian church a while, because there’s more to say. A woman in the church of Corinth is certainly supposed to use her gift of prophecy for the benefit of the Body. Does that mean she may prophesy in the church meeting? There are two options here, and they have to do with how you understand 1 Cor. 11 and 14:31 as over against 1 Cor. 14:34-35. The latter passage says,

Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.

Let us begin, first of all, by discarding the notion that we cannot just stomp a foot, say “That’s not fair!” and disregard this portion of Scripture. It’s there; God said it, and if you’ll pardon a note of philistine biblicism here, we’re just going to have to live with it. God loves us, and He knows what He’s doing. It will turn out, if we obey wisely, that this is a good thing, a glorious thing, and not some scourge to be borne until the Lord returns.

But how to obey? Of course, we have to consider how to map the Corinthian situation onto our own situation (and that’s coming, Gentle Reader, but first things first), but before we can do that, we still need to settle out what Paul was asking the Corinthians to do.

The problem is that we have a seeming contradiction. Paul has already said, back in 1 Cor. 11, that women are to pray and prophesy with their heads covered, which means that he believes women should pray and prophesy. He has also said, just a few verses earlier, that all can prophesy one by one, so that each one may learn and be encouraged. So how are we to take it when, just a few verses later, he then says women are not to speak? There are two basic positions that seem viable.

Option A is that women are supposed to exercise their gifts of prophecy within the church, but not within the church meeting proper. This understanding has the virtue of a commendable simplicity, but it seems to leave a number of unanswered questions in the context. Option B is that women are to prophesy in the church meeting just as men are, but they are not to take part in the judging of the prophecy that follows a prophet speaking. This latter understanding seems to answer more questions in the context and follow the argument more closely, but at the same time feels a bit like a cop-out given the absolute-sounding statement in v.34.

Up to this point, I have felt that either understanding made equally good sense, and neither answered all my questions. I have not been able to rule out one or the other. If you’ll bear with me in an experiment, Gentle Reader, I want to undertake the project of exploring these two positions over the next few weeks and seeing if I can rule one or both of them out. If we can do that, then we can consider how this might map onto the present day.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women, Part 2: What About Preachers?

19 February 2012

So for those of you who are just joining us, the title says most of what you need to know. In the first installment, we discussed the biblical case for deaconesses and prophetesses — which we will revisit shortly in order to discuss the differences in the ways men and women minister. But the pressing question, for most of the conservatives, is whether we’re going to have women preachers. If I wait six installments before I address that question, that’s going to annoy some of the neighbors I’m supposed to love — so let’s go ahead and start that ball rolling this week.

The first thing we need to think about here is what we typically mean by “ordaining a preacher.” Within my tribe and the model I grew up with, we ordain a “minister of the gospel” to go out and take that lead pastor position. We know, of course, that not everyone we ordain will, in fact, be a lead pastor one day, but the lead pastor position is seen as the paradigm case, the example par excellence of what we’re ordaining the man (and in this tribe, it is always a man) for. The job description includes deciding on the vision and direction for the church, leading that church, counseling the congregation, overseeing the services of the church, preaching every Sunday, representing the church to the community and so on. There’s effectively only one office we do a full-blown ordination exam for, and this is it.

So here’s how the “we can only ordain men” thing works: That job description above is what we’re ordaining people for. Add in a dash of 1 Timothy 2:12, notice that the job description calls for exercising authority over the whole church, men most definitely included, and there you are. Can’t ordain women; the Bible says so.

But what’s biblically necessary about that job description? Is that job description what ‘pastor’ means in the New Testament, or have we just taken the biblical word and superimposed our own definition on it?

Yes, indeed we have. So is it okay for us to put a woman in that position? Of course not. But I’ve got a better question: Is it okay for us to put anybody in that position?

Let’s back up. How do we know there’s even such a thing as a “pastor?” Because it’s right there in Ephesians 4:11, right? Let’s look at that. Paul says in chapter 3 that the grace given to him is to proclaim Christ to the Gentiles, but then adds in 4:7 that grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the gift Christ gave. What’s that? Christ rose up from His throne in heaven, descended to earth, won the victory, and ascended again, taking the spoils of His victory (i.e., the people He redeemed) with Him. He then gave these people as gifts to the Church: some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers (hereinafter APEPTs, just to save me some typing). The purpose of giving APEPTs is in order that they in turn equip the saints, so that the saints can do the work of the ministry, through which work Christ builds His whole body up into adulthood. So just as proclaiming Christ to the Gentiles is the grace given to Paul, we all have some function in the Body that is the unique grace given to each of us. Christ has given gifted people to His Body, and in turn the Spirit has given those gifted people their capacities to serve within that Body.

The ‘fivefold ministry’ school of thought would say that everybody’s gifting fits into the APEPT schema somehow, but that’s a discussion we can bypass for now. The gender question is what concerns us at the moment, so let’s look at the APEPT classifications with that in mind. Apostleship is not limited to the Twelve, nor even the Twelve plus Paul (see Acts 14:14), so there’s certainly a possibility that it’s a more expansive category, but I’m not aware off the cuff of any attested female apostles in the New Testament. However, there were certainly prophetesses, as we’ve already established. Nobody thinks gifted evangelists are exclusively male, nor does anyone think the gift of teaching is reserved for men alone. So why would the shepherding gift be reserved only for men?

“Because,” sputters my complementarian friend, “a woman can’t teach or have authority over a man. So how’s she supposed to be a gifted shepherd without doing those things?”

Gee, I dunno. How’s a gifted female teacher — and we all acknowledge they exist — do her thing without violating the same scripture? Not being a female teacher, I couldn’t say for sure, but I suspect she does it by not accepting teaching authority over men. Not exactly rocket surgery, is it?

So what if — and I’m just throwing out a wild idea here — we step up to the challenge of acknowledging women’s shepherding ministries as fully worthy of the dignity, celebration and recognition that attends men’s shepherding ministries? In other words, what if we male shepherds get up off our blessed assurance and treat female shepherds as “fellow heirs of the grace of life”? What might that look like?

Different than what we’re doing, to be sure. We’ll pick up the discussion of some of the differences next week.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women

12 February 2012

Because men and women are different, and that difference is expressed in they way we minister.

Got it?

No?

Lemme unpack that a bit. Two things we need to think about here: How do men and women minister, and what does ordination mean?

Let’s not mince words on this: there are some roles that a woman ought not to play, just as there are some roles a man ought not to play. Scripture describes some of these.

The description “husband of one wife” in the qualifications of elders (Titus 1:6) and overseers (1 Timothy 3:2) would seem to require that a male fill those positions. People try to finesse this by arguing that filling these positions with a man was an accommodation to the culture of the time, but since the apostles and prophets do not seem to have ever been interested in catering to the culture of the time in essential matters of church order (note what Paul did to their dining customs in 1 Corinthians 11), I see no reason to believe that they caved in at this one point. No, they had only men in the position of elder/overseer because that’s what God wants His church to look like.

Of course, for the same reason, they had deaconesses and prophetesses. Now, I’m aware of a couple of lame arguments against deaconesses, but let’s be realistic. If Romans 16:1 contained a man’s name instead of a woman’s, there would be no discussion at all: the verse would be taken as proof positive that he was a deacon in the church at Cenchrea. The reason we doubt that Phoebe was a deaconess is only because of an underlying prior theological commitment. Those who share that commitment will regard the translation “deaconess” as a priori unlikely, and will insist that the burden of proof is on their opponents. I say that anyone who presumes to interpret the Word of God had better have a good reason for their understanding, and “burden of proof” arguments are about evading the necessity to do some actual work. I don’t think that theological construct can hold up, but I welcome any theological dance partner with a work ethic who wants to take up the project. Let’s discuss it.

More of that anon — for the moment, let’s move on to prophetesses. The existence of prophetesses, Old and New Testament, is well attested. Miriam was a prophetess, as were Deborah, Huldah, and the wife of Isaiah. In the time of Jesus, Anna (Luke 2:36); in the time of Paul, Philip’s four daughters (Acts 21:8) and the women of Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:5, who needed only cover their heads). In the time to come, both sons and daughters shall prophesy (Joel 2//Acts 2:17).

Now, what is the normal biblical pattern for a prophet’s ministry? Elijah was commanded to anoint Elisha as his successor (1 Kings 19:7). It appears that the anointing can be literal, with oil, or metaphorical, through some other type of consecration ritual. For the latter, consider Psalm 105:15, in which the entire nation of Israel is considered as God’s anointed prophets.

Now, if one ought to anoint a prophet, who could complain if we anointed a prophetess? Shouldn’t we?

If we would lay our hands on a deacon to consecrate him (Acts 6:6), then what would stop us from laying our hands on a deaconess to consecrate her for the ministry to which God has called her?

Prejudice, that’s what. Prettied up in theological language, to be sure, but simple prejudice nonetheless. What we’re dealing with here is an institutionalized conviction that the ministries of women need not be treated with the same dignity, nor attended by the same celebration, as the ministries of men. That’s an offense to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and it needs to be denounced high, wide, and publicly.

My stance here will be denounced as “blurring gender distinctions.” It isn’t. It’s a search for good answers to hard questions — and the people who accuse me of blurring the lines are just mad because they haven’t got any.

Want me to prove it? In a number of churches in my tribe, we’ll cheerfully lay hands on a missionary couple (husband and wife) and commission them to their ministry; we’ll even do that for a single woman — if she’s going to cross an ocean to teach little brown children. If she’s staying here to be a Sunday School teacher to little white children, not so much. Hm. Does it take a greater anointing to minister to brown children, or is it just that Jesus loves them more?

What about other public ministries besides teaching Sunday School? Youth leader? Young Life worker? Counselor? Intercessor? House mother in an orphanage? R.A. in a dorm? How do we recognize these ministries? How should we?

But someone will say, “That’s not ordination. Ordination is for preachers.”

Ah yes. Preachers. We’ll be talking about that next week…

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hearing Daddy’s Voice

5 February 2012

It’s a nice day out and you’re taking a walk in the park. As you pass the playground, you see a little boy sitting on a bench. The other children are playing happily, but the little boy seems downcast. You sit down at the other end of the bench and ask him what’s wrong.

“My Daddy never talks to me.”

“Never? Not even a little?”

The boy shakes his head. “Never.”

You don’t know what to say. As you sit there, trying to think of something, you notice he has a tattered book in his lap. “What are you reading?” you ask, just to be saying something.

“It’s a book my Dad wrote,” the boy says. “He’s an author. I like to read his stuff; I feel like I get to know him a little that way.”

“If he never talks to you, where’d you get the book?”

“Mom gave it to me when I was old enough to read.”

“But he seriously never talks to you?”

“Nope.” The boy pauses. “Well, parts of the book kind of talk to me — it was before I was born, but he wrote a lot about growing up and becoming a man. I feel like he’s talking to me in the book that way.”

Suddenly it all clicks together. Of course! The boy’s dad is dead. He must have known he was dying of cancer or something like that; his wife was pregnant. He wanted to speak to his unborn son, and this was the only way he could do it. “Your dad…” you begin, and then realize that it’s sort of an indelicate question, but you’re committed now. “He, uh…he died before you were born?”

The boy looks up at you quizzically. “No, of course not. He’s right over there.” He points at a man in a blue jacket standing a little distance away. “He goes everywhere with me. He just doesn’t talk.”

You look the man up and down. He looks normal enough.

“Thanks for talking,” the boy says. “I’m gonna go play now.” Still clutching the book to his chest, he runs off to the playground.

***

What sort of father would treat his son that way?

***

After a few minutes, the man in the blue jacket comes and sits on the bench where the boy was sitting. You feel awkward knowing how he treats his son. You want to leave, but it seems like he’ll know you’re avoiding him. You think of talking with him, but it’s not really your business. He seems to sense your indecision.

“My son told you we never talk, didn’t he?”

“Uh…”

The man smiles at you, but you can see the pain in his eyes. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m used to it.” The silence stretches, and he looks out at his son, climbing up the jungle gym with the book still clutched in one hand. “I do talk to him, you know,” he says sadly. “But he doesn’t seem to hear me. If he didn’t read that book I wrote, I’d barely have any input in his life at all.” He turns to look at you. “I’m glad I wrote it — it’s the only thing that seems to get through. But sometimes I wish he’d just listen to me, you know?”

You are unsure how to respond, and the silence stretches again. The boy comes down the slide, but as he gets off at the bottom he stumbles and falls, skinning his knee. The father bolts off the bench, picks up his son and dusts him off, holding him close. You can hear the boy crying. Gradually the tears fade; you notice that although the father is attentive to the boy, the boy never really looks at his father. Odd….

***

What sort of son is this? Is he cruel? Developmentally disabled in some way? Certainly there’s something wrong.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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.)

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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.

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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.

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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