Full Contact Christianity

Creeds: Description, Prescription, and the Role of Gratitude

12 December 2010

In a preceding post I mentioned gratitude as a factor in my use of the creeds, and in discussions with friends and colleagues it has become clear to me that this requires a little elaboration.

First of all, a couple of thoughts about the nature of gratitude in general. Gratitude is not just about warm feelings in your chest. Gratitude is about what you do. If your parents raised you, fed you, clothed you, loved you, and you always felt warmly toward them for these things, but you treated them badly and never once gave any indication that you were aware of how much they’d done for you, are you grateful? No, not really. Suppose a friend rebukes you for your ingratitude, and you protest that of course you feel warmly about all your parents have done for you. Wouldn’t your friend be perfectly right to say “So what?”

Of course he would. That warm feeling is not an all-purpose moral solvent that cleanses whatever you decide to to. If you take for granted all your parents have given you, and then protest that of course you’re grateful — by which you mean that you have warm feelings toward them — this is just to say that you are only grateful where it doesn’t matter. Gratitude that is not meaningfully incarnated is not gratitude at all; it’s just cheap sentimentality.

With reference to the early creeds, I am grateful to those men who went before me, for their many sacrifices and their great struggle. Even more, I am grateful to Christ for giving such evangelists, pastors and teachers to His Church. But if this is to be more than a sticky sentiment, a warm feeling in my chest when someone says “Nicea” or “Chalcedon,” then I need to incarnate this gratitude in a way that matters.

These creeds are the weapons our fathers used in their war against heresy. This is simply a matter of history; it is as God Providentially arranged for it to be, and we must show gratitude for the way God actually preserved His church, not the way we wish He’d done it. So we must celebrate these key aspects of the faith which our fathers so ably defended, and do so in a manner respectful of God’s design in history — which is to say, respectful of what actually happened and what they actually said. Therefore, an aspect of this celebration will inevitably be the public reading, or the corporate saying, of the creeds. And so we find once again that “descriptive vs. prescriptive” fails us as a useful way of categorizing. The creeds are not just descriptions of what the church believed at one point in her history; they are also — in the fashion just described — prescriptions that govern aspects of our present practice.

But how? How will it work in practice? We don’t have to say the Creeds weekly, but we can’t just ignore them, either. Some churches may simply integrate the Creeds into their weekly worship. Others may choose to do something quarterly, or integrate the Creeds into their doctrinal statements and new members’ classes. Others still may designate one Sunday a year to celebrate these things. After all, if we can manage to observe Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day to celebrate the warriors who have defended our country, why can’t we find room in the schedule for a day to celebrate the warriors of the Church, who defended our faith? (And may I suggest the Feast of All Saints as a convenient time?) There is no One Perfect Way to do this, but do it we must, somehow.

Now, am I saying that a man is in sin if he doesn’t say the Nicene Creed at least occasionally? Not as such. Saying the Creed is not directly required by Scripture, and so a man can walk with God and not say the Creed — at least in theory. However, in actual practice, I find that among American evangelicals, our particular refusal to say the creed is the result of a sinful attitude on our part: ingratitude, sectarianism and father-hatred that ill becomes Christians.

The wage of that particular sin is a particular sort of death. If you insist on isolating yourself from other members of the Body in defiance of Eph. 4:3, God may give you your desire, but send leanness to your soul. Cut off from the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit in past generations, cut off from the wisdom of your fathers, you will be reduced to whatever formulations you can dream up yourself, and you get only the counsel of your living friends — which is to say that you will be low-hanging fruit for the fads of the age, and your churches, your schools, your daily practice will fall victim to a pervasive silliness. (Oh, wait — I just described modern evangelicalism, didn’t I?)

We are ungrateful, and God has given us over to our folly. You want to know why, when you walk into a Christian “bookstore,” you can’t hardly find a Greek New Testament or even a decent devotional book, but there are crucifix pencil toppers and “God’s Gym” t-shirts in every size you can think of, including a little onesie for your newborn Christian soldier? This is why. Could it be any clearer that we need to repent?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: What’s There And What’s Not

5 December 2010

When you read the Definition of Chalcedon, you will find a reference to Mary as the mother of God. As I mentioned last week, that was not just pious boilerplate language; it was at the heart of the controversy, and a key part of the fathers’ success against the heresies of their day.

Now, “mother of God” could be taken to imply all the cult of Mary business — adoration of Mary, prayers to Mary, kissing statues or pictures of Mary, the whole nine yards. Certainly parts of the present-day cult of Mary are later innovations, but even in 451, the cult of Mary was a going concern. We can’t say that the fathers at Chalcedon simply didn’t have a clue that anyone would go that route. They did, and at least some of them approved of it.

So I find myself facing objections on opposite fronts: many of my evangelical brethren object to my use of the Definition because they feel I am giving aid and comfort to the cult of Mary. On the other hand, there are folks, say from the Eastern Church, who will object that I don’t really agree with the Definition of Chalcedon. “You don’t pray to Mary,” they will say, “you don’t venerate her as the Mother of God; how can you say that you agree with Chalcedon?”

What these two objections have in common is an assumption that “mother of God” implies all the ‘cult of Mary’ baggage, that the two come as a set and can’t be separated. But this is just silly. What the Definition does say can certainly be separated from what it does not say.

I do, in fact, believe what the Definition says: that she is the mother of God. I believe this because the Word was God, and the Word became flesh, and did so in the usual human way, by growing in the womb of a specific woman and passing through her birth canal. Now, we have a perfectly good designation for the woman who takes that role in a person’s life, and the word is “mother.” We don’t blink at saying that Jesus is God come in the flesh, born to the virgin Mary; why would we blink at saying, in the same breath, that God had a mother? Didn’t he? (Of course, this is God-the-second-person-of-the-Trinity. The Father doesn’t have a mother, nor does the Spirit — but who is claiming that they do? The Chalcedonian fathers would have been first to deny it.)

On the other hand, I note that “mother of God” is all the Definition says on this subject. It does not affirm Mary as a fit recipient for prayer, for example, nor does it say anything about a Christian duty to venerate her. It may well be that at least some of the Chalcedonian fathers did, in fact, pray to and venerate Mary. They might even have found it baffling, unthinkable, that someone could affirm Mary as the mother of God and not pray to her. Perhaps they would have thought the two ideas were inseparable. But with the advantage of additional centuries to reflect, we can see that actually, they are separable, and in God’s Providence the Definition only speaks to one of them — the one that the Scriptures clearly support.

Since the Scriptures clearly support it, so should we.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A fun little chat…

3 December 2010

…can be found on Bobby’s blog here, in the comments thread. This is easily the best Bobby and I have ever done at communicating with each other, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

We take it by the case around here…

1 December 2010

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: Generosity

28 November 2010

I need to say thank you to my good friends Dr. Steve Lewis and Joe Anderson, whose discussion and friendly disagreement over the use and meaning of the creeds inspired me to think more deeply and more clearly about these issues than I ever had in the past. I’m grateful to you both.

In our theological community, nitpicking is considered the acme of theological skill. I honed the skill from a very early age; I’m one of the heirs of a particular strain of southern fundamentalism, so I was raised to it. I can, in all modesty, nitpick with the best of ’em. To be honest, the skill has served me very well in certain contexts. It’s important at times to be exact, say what you mean to say, no more and no less, and to hear everything that others are saying — or, even more importantly, to hear what they’re not saying.

But…

But there are other times when it’s a weakness. It can be a real problem when we’re trying to obey Ephesians 4:3 with living people, and I’ll save that discussion for another time. But the trouble it causes the living doesn’t even hold a candle to the trouble it causes us when we’re dealing with the dead. We read every historical formulation as though it were written yesterday, and criticize it for all the things it doesn’t say, all the things it says differently than we would say them. We do not pay attention to the vital historical context in which the creeds were written, and therefore we do not notice the victories our fathers achieved.

What we ought to do is ask a different question. Not, “Would I say it like this?” but “Did they succeed at addressing the problem before them in their day (not, notice, the problem before me, now)?”

For example, “Eternally begotten of the Father” in the Nicene Creed is hard to prove. In Scripture, begetting seems to be discussed in the context of the Incarnation, and it’s not exegetically clear that it applies to the preincarnate Christ. But what was the context? The Nicene fathers were at war with the heresy of Arius, who said that Christ was not eternal, but “There was a time when He was not.” “Eternally begotten of the Father” was the Nicene fathers’ way of clearly, unequivocally saying that the Arian claim was a lie. For the need of the hour, it was a most effective tactic, imperfect as it may seem to us from our present vantage. (Do you think you have a better solution to the problem? Let’s say you’re right — so what? Who couldn’t come up with a better answer, given a millennium and a half to think about it? But the Nicene fathers didn’t have a millennium and a half. Arius had to be refuted then; the sheep God committed to their care needed a solution then.)

Why did it matter? As with all the early Christological controversies, what was at stake was nothing less than the very essence of the Christian faith: the promise that human beings can be partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). Jesus is the paradigm case: He shows that it is possible for full deity to really meet full humanity. If His deity is diminished (as Arius would have had it) then what we struggling, sinful men partake of is not really the divine nature, but something less. And if His humanity is diminished, then it is not possible for real human beings to partake of the divine nature — which is to say that we go over the same cliff by a different path.

Believe it or not, we get “mother of God” (Theotokos if you prefer the Greek) in the Definition of Chalcedon in similar fashion, as a refutation of Nestorius, who was perfectly happy to say that Mary was the mother of Jesus, but would not say that she was the mother of Christ. For Nestorius, “Christ” meant both the man Jesus and the divine Word, come together in one, and he would not affirm that the divine Word had a mother. The fathers took this (correctly, I might add) as a flat denial of John 1:14, and a serious threat to the theological underpinnings of the promise of 2 Pet. 1:4. As a result, they adopted the verbiage “mother of God” to unequivocally deny the errors of Nestorius — and it worked, beautifully. They were defending the truth that Jesus is undiminished deity and undiminished humanity. They succeeded; we reap the benefits of their success–and make no mistake, “mother of God” was the instrument of their success.

Can we improve upon the wording of the Nicene Creed, or the Definition of Chalcedon? Perhaps so. Ought we to evaluate them as though it were written last Tuesday by some evangelical pastor in Tucson? Of course not. What we ought to do is read them as a stunning and hard-won refutation of a pernicious heresy. We ought to say them as celebrations of victory — they are the particular formulations by which, once upon a time, the core truths of the faith once delivered to all the saints were preserved so that we might hear them now. The men who wrote them are our people, members of Christ’s church and part of the same Body in which we now find salvation; we are their brothers-in-arms, their spiritual children and heirs.

We ought to be generous enough with them not to subject their words to tests they weren’t designed to meet. Nor should we Monday-morning quarterback them, as if they ought to have been omniscient and foreseen the loopholes that later generations found in their words, or the abuses to which their words were later put. It is enough to ask of them that they handled — often heroically — the problems of their own day. It is far too much to ask that they would also have anticipated ours; that’s our job, not theirs. “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: Harmony and Unison

21 November 2010

As we saw in a preceding post, when the language of the Creed is biblical, we are not free to abandon it, even if the framers of the creed — or later users of it — would not understand that language in the same way we do. We are not free to shy away from the way the Bible talks about things.

So what do we do? Isn’t it dishonest to recite the Creed knowing that we don’t mean the same thing as some others do when they say the same words?

Two issues here: First of all, how come this kind of thing always seems to only work one way? How come it’s me being dishonest, and not them? Especially since — from where I’m standing, at least — I mean what Scripture means by it, and they don’t. Hardly seems right. How about this: I am honestly employing the language of Scripture, and they are betraying their principles by unlawfully importing to the biblical expressions meanings that God did not intend?

Second, and more important, we can disagree and still be one. Christ only has one Body. What actually unifies us is not our doctrinal statements, nor our creeds, but our common participation in Christ. A difference on whether Christ descended into hellfire after His death simply isn’t enough to trump our common participation in Christ. You can’t undo the cross with a pen and a sheet of paper.

Or to say it in the old way: We believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church. We believe in the communion of saints. Or in the even older way: “There is one Body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism; One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

When I go to, say, a GES conference, I find myself sharing an auditorium with many people with whom I disagree quite seriously, some of whom I would never allow to speak to a flock for which I am responsible. In other circumstances, I find myself sharing a classroom or even a pulpit with someone I seriously disagree with. And yet, we fellowship and worship together. I recently became involved with a prayer effort in my community that puts me on the same team with a very broad range of folks. And yet, we will continue to pray together. Why? Because Christ has united us. They are my people, even if I don’t like it (I do, actually, but my likes and dislikes are irrelevant).

If a pen and paper can’t undo the work of the cross, neither can a clock or a calendar.

Back in 650 or 700, there were Christians. Christ was building His church. The gates of Hades were not prevailing against it. These people said the Creed, and by those words they were expressing their belief in Jesus, the same Jesus I believe in. They were joined to Him who is my Head; they were members of the Body in which I am also a member. They still are; when I ascend the heavenly Zion on Sunday morning to worship before the mercy seat of the heavenly tabernacle, they are the “spirits of just men made perfect” about whom the author of Hebrews writes. I was baptized into the same Christ as they; I eat of the same bread, drink of the same wine, worship on the same holy mountain. They were, and they are, my people, and if I cannot speak in unison with them on everything, I can still speak in harmony.

When I say the Creed, I am not trying to paper over the differences between us. But I am claiming continuity with them. I am in their debt, and I am grateful. The Creed is their gift to me; they formulated it, spoke it, preserved it for me, and here it is: an adept summary of the Faith once delivered to all the saints, articulated as best they understood it, given to me, although I have done nothing to deserve or earn it.

They are my people. When I say their creed, I am saying that I am in harmony with them, and because of that harmony, it is my creed too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Little Theological Light Verse

18 November 2010

Regarding what follows below: I considered offering a little apologeia for theological light verse, but in the end I gave up. You will either think that it is its own justification, or you will think that no justification is possible. Either way, blathering on about why I do it seemed pointless and self-indulgent. So without further ado, gentle reader, I give you a little theological light verse.

“The Bible’s all one book,” they said,
“So a word means the same in all places.”
“Abide in the ship or ye cannot be saved,”
Said I — and imagine their faces!

Predestined before the earth’s foundation
Long before any Scripture’s read:
Not just their souls; their interpretation’s
Predestined before the earth’s foundation.
Beware the children of the Reformation
If you would not have the meaning of “dead”
Predestined before the earth’s foundation
Long before any Scripture’s read.

When Calvin told Beza to heed to the text
Beza held fast ’til his life was all spent
But old Calvin slapped him when he got to heaven:
“The text of the Institutes ain’t what I meant!”

Predestinate terminology’s
The greatest hazard to the text
To ever rise. Some always see
Predestinate terminologies
As antidotes to uncertainties,
Compared to the dangers of which, a perplexed,
Perdestinate terminology’s
The greater hazard. To the text!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Creeds: Wording

14 November 2010

It’s important, when reading a historical document, to understand what the authors mean by what they say. Corollary to this, it’s dishonest to pretend that their words mean something they did not intend.

For example, Lewis Sperry Chafer always maintained that he believed in the perseverance of the saints. But what he meant by “perseverance of the saints” was that the saints would persevere in being saints, which is to say, eternal security. This is mildly dishonest, because the terminology “perseverance of the saints” goes back to the Canons of Dordt, which definitely did not mean only eternal security; they meant that the saints will persevere in acting like saints.

It would have been more honest for Dr. Chafer to simply say that he didn’t believe in the perseverance of the saints, but he did believe in eternal security.

When the wording in question is biblical, however, we do not have the option of simply abandoning it.

For example, take “He descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed. Arguably, that wording, when first introduced in the Latin version of the Creed, meant no more than that Jesus went where dead people go. They used the word “Infernus,” which repeatedly appears in the Vulgate as a translation of “Sheol,” the Hebrew term. In the Hebrew cosmology, all the dead go to Sheol — some to Abraham’s bosom, and some to torment, to be sure. But Sheol was all of it. That is, apparently, within the semantic range of “Infernus.” (The Greek OT translated “Sheol” as “Hades” with similar connotations.)

Note that I said “arguably” above. Later, in the middle ages, many Christians taught that after dying on the cross, Jesus spent three days in hellfire suffering for the sins of the world before He was raised from the dead. There is some argument as to what the original framers of the phrase in the creed actually meant by it — just that Jesus really died, and really went where dead people go, or that Jesus suffered the flames of hell to really pay for our sin after He said “It is finished.” Turns out, “Infernus” can mean either the place of the dead generally, or the place where bad people go to suffer for their sins.

So what does one do with the creed? When I say it, I say “He descended into Hades” rather than “He descended into hell” because the English word “hell” has connotations of suffering for sin, which is the meaning I don’t endorse. But many of my conservative brethren would ask: With that ambiguity in play, why would I be willing to say that phrase at all?

We cannot simply abandon “He descended into Hades” for the very good reason that it’s true. Scripture speaks of the death of Jesus in just that way, albeit obliquely (Acts 2:31). To say “He did not descend into Hades” is to say that He did not go where dead people go — which is to depart from Scripture, and the Christian faith. We just can’t say that.

So we say the creed, and when we say the words “He descended into Hades” we know that some of the people who have said those words do not mean what we mean by them. In fact, the people involved in framing that part of the creed may not have meant what we mean by it. However, they would have justified the language by appeal to Acts 2:31, just like I would, and Acts 2:31 ultimately does not mean what they mean by it; it means what God means by it. I affirm the biblical language wholeheartedly, and to the best of my understanding, I mean what God meant by it.

4 Comments | Classics, Controversies, Ecclesiology, Meditations, Speaking as God Speaks | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“Descriptive, not Prescriptive,” part 4: Options and Patterns

7 November 2010

Before I begin this entry, I need to make something clear to you, dear reader. Some of the examples I use here are indeed topics of discussion and continuing growth in my church, and I am using them because they are very much on my heart of late. But I am not picking on my church. As my church has been prodded toward obedience on these things, it has responded very well. So as I talk about evangelical resistance to growth in certain areas, that is not a passive-aggressive way of calling out recalcitrant people in my own circle. There aren’t any. I mean just what I say — I see this resistance in the broader evangelical church, and I am seeking to address it as best I can.

Options and Obedience

Many believers will simply fail to notice a biblical requirement — say, the one to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. They may have read those passages many times, but it simply doesn’t occur to them that they should do something in response. The first time this dawns on them, it is because someone is pushing for a particular type of obedience — say, “We need to sing the Sons of Korah version of Psalm 148 in the service this Sunday.” Upon being challenged as to why this is necessary, the speaker will respond with Ephesians 5:19.

The response at this point is pretty predictable. “There’s nothing there that says we have to sing that particular song this particular morning.”

This is of course true. The church could be in complete obedience to the biblical requirement and never sing any song by that particular band, ever. Unfortunately, too often what happens next is…nothing.

Because we need not sing that particular arrangement of that particular psalm this week, we don’t. Also we don’t sing any other arrangement of that psalm. Or any other psalm. And in this way the fact that God gives us freedom in how we obey becomes the occasion for not obeying at all.

Patterns

This is where biblical patterns of obedience are so helpful to us. The Bible not only gives us requirements to obey, it gives us patterns of obedience to emulate. A particular example may not be the only way of obeying, but it is a way of obeying. We don’t have to start from scratch.

The first problem evangelicals have with these patterns is failing to even notice them. We notice that the early church successfully resolved an important theological disagreement in Acts 15, for example — but we pay no mind at all to how they did it. We recognize the commands to be of one mind, to submit to one another, to contend earnestly for the faith, and so on. And Acts 15 becomes a sermon illustration: “See, they stood up for the truth. We should too.”

Yes, but how? Are we acting in continuity with the way they did it? We don’t know. We never even checked to see how they did it. We just take the goal that the requirement gives us, and improvise something that we think will get us there.

At some point, some observant soul may point out how they did it, back in the day. “Look at what they did. They appealed to another church with more theological ‘horsepower,’ they appointed a day to gather, they pursued the dispute until everyone had fallen silent, and then they responded, unanimously, to the issue.”

Most evangelicals respond to that observation in the same way that they do to the suggestion that we must sing this arrangement of this psalm this week. That is, they say “Sure, that was a good way to do it. But it’s descriptive, not prescriptive. We don’t have to do it that way, just because they did.”

True, up to a point. Every situation is somewhat different, and it is the province of God-given wisdom to appraise those differences and tweak our response accordingly. This is to say that we will not respond in unison with our fathers at every point; sometimes we will be in harmony with them.

But what madness makes us suppose that we may simply invent an approach without regard for the examples that God gives us in inspired Scripture? What makes us think that we may act out of harmony with the way in which our fathers obeyed?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Happy Reformation Day

31 October 2010

On this day 493 years ago, Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg chapel, and in so doing started a fire that has not yet gone out.

The medieval church was in many ways a praiseworthy institution, and it has many lessons to teach the church today. However, corruption and doctrinal defection had also accumulated over time. There had always been reformers who protested against the problems in the church, but in the early sixteenth century God used Luther and the other Reformers to bring these things to the attention of the church leadership in a way they could no longer afford to ignore.

This was Christ’s judgment on His church, and the leadership ought to have responded by repenting. Indeed, repentance was exactly the response that Luther and the other Reformers sought. They never conceived of themselves as starting a new church; they never intended to start a new church. But the leadership hardened in their rebellion, and as a result the Protestant churches were born.

Today Christ’s church is fragmented into many pieces, most of whom do not think of themselves as part of one another. But we have only one Head, and He has only one Body. We believe — to put it in the old way — in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, and the communion of saints. We also believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, and on that day when we all stand in the assembled throng before God’s throne in heaven, there will be no fragmentation. Even today, when the spirits of just men made perfect gather on the heavenly Zion, there is no division.

In fifteen minutes, my church body and I will ascend to the heavenly Zion and join them, as will many other churches in this town and around the world, and there, on that holy mountain, nothing will divide us — even if we don’t yet know it.

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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Posted by Tim Nichols