Church of the Holy Sepulchre: An Excerpt From My Israel Journal

13 December 2009

Many thanks to some good friends, I had the opportunity to go to Israel in the first half of November with HaDavar Ministries. Bob Morris of HaDavar was our tour host, and Hela Crown-Tamir of Israel, the Holyland Way was our guide (shameless commercial plug: buy her very useful book).  Both were outstanding.

The opportunity arose suddenly, and as Kimberly and I were discussing whether or not I should take it, she asked me to keep a journal* of the trip for her.  I did, and to my surprise nearly filled the thing.  Below is an excerpt:

Today we also went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Both Hela and Bob are saying, 100%, This Is Where It Happened.  Haven’t heard the reasons yet.  Took a series of pictures of the icons, including a nice set of the four evangelists.  The church has all manner of chapels, corridors, passageways &c.  After coming out — 10 min. before the rendezvous time — I saw a little side door, just off to the right of the main doors as you face the church.  I stuck my head in out of curiosity, and saw it was a little chapel.  One cleric was sitting in the shadows in the corner, droning his prayers; it was otherwise deserted. I sat down.  As I had in a quiet(er) corner of the church above, I said the Creed quietly.  Here I added the Lord’s Prayer and some other things as well, thinking of the centuries of brothers and sisters who said these same words here.

I believe in the communion of saints.

Then a door at the head of the chapel banged open, disgorging a flood of pilgrims noisily clambering down the stairs below the door, noisily traversing the length of the chapel and exiting by the door where I’d entered, their chatter disrupting my prayers.  I liked communing with the silent and long-departed dead saints a lot better than the raucous fellowship of the living ones.

Oh, well.  God isn’t finished with me yet.  Grow in grace, Tim.  Grow in grace.

*(By the way, Cavallini & Co. makes a really nice leatherbound journal for Barnes & Noble.  The Israel Journal was my second, and I highly recommend them.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hellenistic Piffle

1 November 2009

“Inferior people discuss people; mediocre people discuss events; great people discuss ideas.”

I came upon that notion somewhere in my travels as a head-in-the-clouds youngster and thought it was brilliant.

Not least because it meant I was superior to my peers.

Incarnated, this is the notion that two philosophers discussing the nature of metaphor in a cafe somewhere are vastly superior to two parents discussing whether to let Johnny sleep over at his friend Richard’s house this Friday night.

The philosophers are so learned, so interesting, and the parents are just so…common.  Boring.  Joe and Mary Sixpack with their mundane problems.  Who cares?

God does.  Truth is, Mom and Dad deciding who Johnny gets to spend time with will impart more wisdom than all the philosophy departments in all the universities in all the land.

Now before I get an endless stream of angry comments, let me hasten to say that gossip is a sin, and ideas are important.  But the notion that ideas are the only subject really worth talking about is just so much Hellenistic piffle; the ideas only matter when a person incarnates them.    The weightiest idea you can think of wouldn’t crush a gnat if it landed right on top of him.

Johnny has crushed lots of gnats.  Johnny matters.  Whether Mom and Dad let him spend the night at Richard’s, and how they handle the situation, shapes his character.  If they do their job well, then by the time the philosophy professor gets hold of him, he already knows which ideas he ought to incarnate, and which ones he’d better not.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Jim Reitman on John 3

27 October 2009

Jim Reitman has begun a series on John 3 over at Kc’s blog.  As of this writing, the third installment is up.  Go forth and read; it’s a strong contribution to the ongoing discussion of how we ought to read John’s gospel.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

More Philistine Biblicism, Please!

25 October 2009

So I wandered off the Approved Reading List for my theological community and stumbled onto Wedgewords, the internet lair of one Steven Wedgeworth. It’s quite the good read in a few different areas, but this little bit just deserved special mention. It’s from a post titled “A Post-Protestant Model“:

…it seems tragic that I would require a shared understanding of limited atonement before I’d recognize a brother as a true brother. So too with the respective relationship between a substance and its accidents during the Eucharist. These just don’t really seem to be the fruits of the Spirit or the way the world will know us, if you’ll forgive my philistine biblicism here.

To plagiarize a certain Dickensian waif: “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

He goes on to offer five basic points of discussion toward a way of approaching church ministry that advances genuinely catholic Christianity.  All five points are worth discussing; I encourage you to read the rest of the post here.

Within Rev. Wedgeworth’s own community, the tireless advocates of so-called Reformed Catholicity ought to sit up and take notice of this thought as well.  Speaking just for myself, I’m tired of trying to interact with wonderful, brilliant saints, only to have the conversation go like this:

Me: I listened to your lecture on xyz, and found it fascinating.  I’d love to hear more about how those thoughts apply in area abc.

Advocate of Reformed Catholicity: Hmmmm…well, are you Reformed?

Me: Well, my Wesleyan friends would probably say so, but really, no, I’m not.

ARC: [pause] Oh.  [pause]  Well…perhaps you could consult the Alliance of Brainless Evangelicals.  They might have something more to your liking.

Me: [sigh]

Come on, people.  The problem with Reformed Catholicity is the problem with Roman Catholicity — the ‘r’ word restricting the catholicity.  “The Universal Church–you know, the one in Rome” is an oxymoron.  But “The Universal Church–you know, the one that subscribes to Reformed theology” just shifts the designation from geography to ideology, which is to say it trades in the relics and the mitered hat for a copy of the Institutes and a Greenville M.Div.

The body of Christ is not defined by those things.  To put it bluntly, the Body is bigger than you, and (unlike a goodly chunk of the Roman church) you know it.

And for you non-denominational Free Grace types who are feeling warm and fuzzy at all of this smacking around of denominations — same to you, for the same reasons.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What Sort of Kinship?

19 October 2009

In the discussion following an earlier post, a friend asked me how close a kinship I see myself having with the present-day Roman church.

Answering that question prompted me to reflect a little on how my perspective has shifted over the last few years. Five years ago, I would have had a very easy time answering that question: I would have just laid out my beliefs next to the Roman Catechism, and compared. “We agree here, and here, not there, here’s okay…whoa! Not on that one…,” and so on.

Kinship, in other words, was a matter of common belief.  We were as closely related as our doctrinal statements.

This has the handy effect of making kinship an entirely at-will relationship.  Change your doctrinal statement, and we’re not relatives anymore — or maybe we just go from being brothers to being distant cousins.

And it’s just as foolish as that analogy.  You can’t write something on a piece of paper that will make your brother no longer your brother, and instead a third cousin or something.  You may, of course, change the nature of your legal relationship under certain circumstances.  However, no matter what it says on the legal paperwork, he is your brother; this is a fact of history and biology and it can’t be changed by fiat, or by anything else, for that matter.

Likewise, those who share a saving relationship with Jesus Christ are fellow children of the Father, and we are all brothers, no matter what our differences might be.

I am not suggesting that common belief is unimportant — far from it!  But common belief is not the whole picture.  There are other forces at work here.  Each of us is born into a certain family, and we are also part of a certain stream of tradition within our common faith.  These things place us in relationship with all sorts of people that we might not have chosen, but we didn’t do the choosing — God did.  I am Protestant by birth.  More narrowly, I am a part of the independent, nondenominational Bible church tradition.  More narrowly yet, I was born into the Florida Bible College tradition — both parents are alumni, and FBC was a major formative influence for them.  Through my parents I have a certain relationship with Ray Stanford, whom I never met, and Mark Cambron, whom I only met once.  They were instrumental in founding FBC, and taught my parents there.  Even though I did later choose to study under his tutelage, I have the same sort of relationship with Dick Seymour, because much of what my parents taught me, they learned from him.

In an important way, I could sever all these connections by converting to a different strand of the Christian tradition: Lutheranism, or the Roman or Eastern churches, for example.  Furthermore, most of the people in my past would agree that by converting, I had severed my connections with the Protestant, Bible-church, FBC tradition.  They’d be half right.  But they’d also be half wrong.

Again, there is that pesky saving relationship with Jesus to consider, and it doesn’t just go away when my doctrinal statement changes.  If I suddenly run off and join the Oriental Orthodox churches (not gonna happen, but just to talk about it), I do not sever my connection to Christ.  I am still a member of the Body.  And–not to put too fine a point on it–when the Oriental Orthodox churches gather on the morning of the Lord’s Day to pray and worship, they worship and pray to Yahweh, the Maker of heaven and earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob–which is to say, the true God.  Weird as we may find their worship, filled with bells and smells and strange pictures, they are nonetheless in communion with the same God we serve.*  If I were to join them, I’d be joining a group of people who love, serve and pray to the same God I do, and I’d be continuing to love, serve and pray to Him, not to some other god.

Second, and just at a practical level: How would I convert?  By changing my present beliefs and practice, correct?  But that won’t change the past, and so there’s also an important way in which my connection to my heritage can never be severed.  It is a fact of history, and I can’t change it.

The modernist response to this is to shrug and say, “So what?  I didn’t pick to be born into this tradition; I don’t owe it anything.”  But we know that this kind of thinking is not in tune with the way God made the world.  I didn’t pick my parents, but I must honor them nonetheless.  I didn’t pick the country where I was born, but Jesus still tells me to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.  So here’s the question: what sort of honor is due to our ecclesiastical heritage?  And how do we give due honor while still holding that heritage up to biblical critique, which we most certainly must do?

I’m not sure I have a well-rounded, wise answer to that question yet, but I’m pretty sure that pretending my heritage doesn’t exist isn’t it–and that heritage goes all the way back through the Reformers, through the medieval Roman church, through the (relatively) undivided church of the seven-ish ecumenical councils, through the early persecuted church to the apostles.  All of it.

*Point of clarification: this is not to say that everything about this worship is God-honoring.  In fact, there are elements of the worship in the Eastern churches in which I could not participate in good conscience.  That’s a separate debate.  The point I’m making here is that the worship is, in fact, addressed to Yahweh, the Triune God of Scripture, which is to say, the same God.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Science: Universals and Particulars, again

11 October 2009

This universals and particulars thing just isn’t going away.

In this week’s tour (or more correctly, half-tour), Tackett said that philosophy’s task is to deal with the universals, and science’s task is to deal with the particulars, but science is now taking a more philosophical mode and trying to evangelize for materialistic Darwinian philosophy.

This is half true.  The institutions of modern science certainly do evangelize for Darwinian materialism.  But why should scientists stay away from the universals and stick to particulars?  And is that even possible?

No, it isn’t.  Psalm 19 — of which this tour has correctly made much use — works from particulars to universals.  The heavens declare the glory of God.  A scientist rightly studying the heavens will hear them declaring the glory of God, and he will, in turn, glorify God and be thankful.  God has so made the world that the particulars of it educate an observer in certain key universals — notably Yahweh’s eternal power and God-ness — and obligate that observer to worship Him.  When scientists don’t worship, it’s sin.

Moreover, the whole edifice of modern science rests on a Christian worldview to start with, as Pearcey and Thaxton show clearly in The Soul of Science.    The development and long-term support for science in Western culture depends on a series of Christian beliefs:  the material world is really there (Hindus and Buddhists, among others, take it as an article of faith that it isn’t); the material world is separate from God, and valuable, and behaves precisely in an extrinsic order that is comprehensible to man, and so on.  Most of the people in the world do not affirm these things even today, and very few cultures in the history of the world have ever espoused them. So universals and particulars can’t be separated in science because to even do science is to rest on a certain set of universals.

Since these beliefs are Christian, the implication is that science today is subsisting on borrowed capital and institutional momentum, and has been committing a slow and painful suicide for a century.  Exactly.

Everything is an echo of the Trinity.  In the Trinity, universals (one divine Nature) and particulars (three Persons) are equally ultimate.  Universals and particulars must ultimately must be understood together, and in terms of one another, and so it is in science.  Trying to separate universals from particulars is just absurd; we can certainly comprehend partially, but real separation can’t happen in the world God made.  Trying to keep true particulars, but build on false universals, is just as absurd.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Truth is a Person

4 October 2009

A further thought to add to the earlier reflection on universals and particulars:

Ultimate reality — truth — is a Person: “I am the Truth,” Jesus says. Because the Truth is also the divine Word, one expects propositions, and there are propositions. But because the Truth is a Person, one expects more than propositions: one expects acts in history, questions, commands, stories, emotions, all the true things of which a person is capable. And there they are. These lay claim to truth in the same way that propositions do: they are the derivative truth that comes from being a reflection of Truth, the Person.A life that honors God — “walking in the truth,” the apostle John calls it — derives its truth in the same way: by reflecting Christ.

This is another reason why universals and particulars are equally ultimate. When the divine Word is made flesh, when Truth is a person with hair of a certain length and eyes of a certain color, particulars and universals have met and kissed, and can never be separated.

Which leaves us with a burning question: how are universals and particulars related?  It’s a question that has plagued philosophers for centuries (again, see Rushdoony’s The One and the Many for details on the history).  Christians have an answer to this question: “The same way unity and diversity are related in the Trinity.”  We have a word for it: perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity in one another.  So we might say that in the world, universals and particulars are perichoretically related — each indwells the other, as in the Trinity.  Which is to say, we don’t understand the phenomenon in the world any better than we understand the Trinitarian phenomenon of which it is a reflection.  But since the world is created by the Trinity and reflects the Trinity, we expect to encounter a mystery on this point, and it should not surprise us that the answer is beyond our ken.

Discovering that the thing is, finally and forever, beyond our reach forces us to realize that we are not God, and never will be.  There are two possible responses to this: glorify Yahweh in gratitude, or be offended and ungrateful.  One of them is life, health and peace, and the other is struggle, sickness and death — the same two choices humanity has always faced, from the Garden right down to today.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Update

1 October 2009

I have updated the Gospel Discussion page, for those of you who follow such things. Not much new info, if you’ve been reading here regularly, but maybe organized a bit better.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Understanding God

29 September 2009

Early in this week’s Truth Project video, Del Tackett said

Nothing that is true contradicts the nature of God.

Amen and amen.  This is absolutely vital, especially in the sort of wide-ranging endeavor that Tackett is engaged in.  See some resources for a further exploration of its implications in different fields here under week 4.

Coming to grips with the truth of God is not the work of five minutes.  The effort is coextensive with sanctification, and it is, at very least, the work of a lifetime.  A couple of paragraphs down on this week’s handout, I find the following:

At the same time, there is no assignment more daunting, no task more demanding…than that of seeking to understand the being, nature, character and attributes of the eternal Creator, who is Himself the ultimate source of all truth (Colossians 2:3).  So impossibly huge is this endeavor that we could not hope to tackle it at all except for the fact that He has graciously revealed Himself to us in His Word.  Apart from this revelation, mankind gropes and struggles in the darkness to piece together even the most flawed and rudimentary concept of God.

A hearty “Amen!” to the first part, but there is a problem here, and the problem is the words “in His Word” at the end of the second sentence.  Apart from the Bible, Tackett says, we have to grope around to find anything of God.  There is a sense in which this is true, as Paul says on the Areopagus:

And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him…

Mankind is blind and in darkness, worshipping idols instead of the true God, Paul says, but God has so designed man’s existence that it points man to Himself, so that even in the darkness man might grope after Him.  But there’s a catch.  Paul continues in the same sentence:

…though He is not far from each one of us;  for in Him we live and move and have our being….

So why is it that man does not find God, if He is not far from any of us?  Paul tells us in Romans 1:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man — and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.  Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves,  who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

And herein lies the problem with the statement in the handout.  Even apart from the Bible, man does not have to hunt for the basic facts about God; we already have them.  The problem is not that men don’t know God, but that they don’t like Him. Because they refuse to glorify Him, their thinking grows futile and their hearts grow dark, and in their darkness they descend to the madness of idolatry.  It was precisely this madness for which Paul rebuked the Athenians.  Why are they in the dark?  Is it because they don’t have the Bible yet?  No!  It is because they fled from clear knowledge of God and did their best to suppress their knowledge of Him.  When Paul found them in their self-inflicted darkness, they were not groping after God, because they were afraid they would find Him, which, Paul says, they would have, because “He is not far from each one of us.”

Now of course, apart from God revealing Himself, we would not know Him.  But God is already revealed in the world that He made, and it’s not as if we can choose to live somewhere else.  So it is not true that mankind would know nothing of God apart from the Bible, because in the creation, God already confronts us always and everywhere with Himself.

So what?

So understand that when you take the gospel to an unbeliever, it is not the case that he has always been ready to believe, if only someone would give him the truth.  It is not true that he’s “never heard.”  It is not true that he simply lacks enough evidence. He is not a well-intentioned person who suffers in ignorance purely because nobody ever showed him a Bible.

He’s the very opposite.

He is a willing captive of the enemy.  He does not want to be freed.  In his heart of hearts, he knows God, and he has fled God, straight into the futility, darkness and madness that afflicts his life and his soul.  God gave him over to these things, and he’s glad; he accepts them because he prefers them; he would rather be futile, dark and insane than have to face the God of the universe.  (Hard to believe?  It’s what Romans 1 says.  If you want to see it in action, read Nietzche sometime; he’s clearer about the choices than most pagans.)

You take this person the Good News that God hasn’t given up on him as completely as he’d hoped.  In fact, he will one day face God regardless, and God has assured us of this by raising Christ from the dead.  No wonder he doesn’t like hearing it — as Paul says elsewhere, it is the aroma of death, leading to death for someone who does not want to face God.

Of course, the rest of the story is that the unbeliever need not wait until he is forced to reckon with God.  He can face God as a forgiven son rather than as a stubborn enemy, because Christ died for his sins, and because Christ was raised to a new life, he can enter into everlasting life in God’s presence without fear.

Every knee will bow.  You can go easy, or you can go hard.

As we share Christ with people, we would do well to remember that it’s not in human nature to want to hear this — but God made man for Himself, and by grace man responds to the truth anyway.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Universals or Particulars?

28 September 2009

In week 2 of the Truth Project, Tackett notes that many pagan philosophies attempt to begin with particulars and proceed thence to universals. Others, notably Plato, try to begin with universals and make their way to the particulars. Tackett contends that “Plato was right; he just didn’t know where to get” his universals. He goes on to say that God gives us the universals by which all the particulars make sense.

There is an element of truth there, but it’s too simple by half, and flies directly in the face of some of the Scripture he cited earlier. When we look at a sunset and see the heavens declaring the glory of God, we are learning a universal from the particulars. When Paul tells us that everyone in the world is without excuse because “since the creation of the world, His invisible things are clearly seen, being understood by means of the things that are made,” Paul is telling us that man knows the universals — particularly God’s eternal power and God-ness — because he sees them in the particulars.

On the other hand, in Genesis 1-2, we note that God speaks to man, and by that revelation gives the principles by which man and his place in the creation make sense. Genesis 3 provides us with a graphic lesson in what happens when man tries to start from the particulars without taking account of what God has already told him. (Even this is oversimplified — we’re equating verbal revelation with universals, which is a bit too facile, but let it pass for now.)

So which is it? Do we start with the universals, or the particulars? The Christian answer to this is “both,” and a brief reflection on the Trinity should be enough to teach us this point.

God is ultimate reality.  Where do we start in the Trinity: unity, or diversity?  Which is more important, more fundamental to the nature of God? Both are equally vital, you say? Exactly. For more on this, see The One and the Many (more demanding, but a great review or the relevant history) or Trinity and Reality (more accessible) and its companion piece, Paradox and Truth.

Does all this seem a little arcane to you?

That’s because it is. But pushed out into the corners, the thing has serious consequences. Rushdoony likes to talk politics, and goes to some trouble in The One and the Many to show how societies that take plurality as ultimate disintegrate into chaos, and how societies that take unity as ultimate trend toward totalitarianism. Since the trinitarian idea isn’t available outside Christianity, pagans find themselves oscillating forever between one pole and the other, unable to reconcile them.

At a simpler level, I’d leave it with this: Christians ought not to forge an alliance with Plato when Scripture has given us a much, much better answer.

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