charismatic – neumatikos

Get it Right!

Listening to Writing Excuses on the way home from work today, I had a little mini epiphany. In TV and Movies today, a lot of the supernatural elements are built on a Catholic mythos. That is, they visibly depict angels and demons and other supernatural elements (such as the use of crucifixes and holy water) in a way that is generally consistent with the Catholic understanding of how those things actually work. Not being Catholic, these depictions are really unsatisfying for me.

I was raised in a pentecostal/charismatic background, where the supernatural is considered very real, but things work very differently than what Catholics think. For instance, in a movie with a pentecostal mythos, there would probably be a scene in which somebody tries to ward away the demon or vampire with drops of holy water. No effect. But get some anointing oil out and bam! instant hedge of protection. It just works differently, and those differences are jarring. The only think I can think to compare it to would be an Explosive Ordinance Disposal Soldier trying to watch Hurt Locker. All the inaccuracies drive you nuts!

On the other hand, when I was a kid, I really enjoyed Frank Peretti novels. I haven’t read much of his in a while, but Peretti started out writing supernatural thrillers based on a charismatic ethos. It turns out I’m not actually all that in to thrillers, but the supernatural elements for me were gripping, because it was so… accurate, in a way that Hellboy could never hope to be.

So here’s the question: What movies, books, etc, really grabbed you because the supernatural elements struck you as accurate to what you had been raised to believe? On the other side, what stories completely knocked you out of the plot because they depicted supernatural elements in an “unrealistic” way? What one supernatural or spiritual element do they never get right that you wish you could see depicted accurately… at least just once?

Teetotal

Or, the half-Nazarite.

So. my seminary application process has hit a snag.

I left Gordon Conwell some six years ago, half-way through my seminary degree, due to finances, and a lack of focus. The finance issue you can figure out. The focus was more subtle. Gordon Conwell didn’t have the best advising program in the world, so there was a partial issue of me taking classes that didn’t actually apply all that well toward degree completion. But there was also the issue that, when you get out, you have to get a job somewhere, and churches tend to come in flavors. Where does a Charismatic-Calvinist-Congregationalist go to become a pastor? Answer me that, and I know what tradition to study, and maybe I’ve got some guide rails to a shorter answer to those big open-ended questions.

So then I joined the Army, which has helped tremendously with the finance issue, and I really dug in to parsing out different theological traditions in modern Evangelicalism. Best I can figure, I’m a sorry excuse for a Baptist. I’m not much of a modern Baptist, but go back 200-300 years and I think I can make a decent defense for myself.

I decided to apply to Southern Baptist Seminary. It has the reputation for academic intensity that I’m looking for, and they certainly can’t get any more Southern Baptist. The firm denominational footing will be useful to me in thinking through how well I really fit into that tradition, and the name on the degree should be helpful in calming people’s fears when I confess to unusual doctrines, such as my belief in the third person of the Trinity.

But I’ve hit a snag. I really should have seen it coming. SBTS requires its students to sign an oath not to touch a drop of alcohol.

Now I’m not a heavy drinker. In fact, I’m hardly a drinker at all. I had to force myself some years ago to stop being teetotal, because my study of scripture led me to the conclusion that Jesus drank. The servant is not greater than his master, so if I don’t drink it had better be for some reason other than an ethical one. Otherwise I’m saying Jesus was a sinner, which rather defeats the whole purpose of being a Christian. I have never even come remotely close to being drunk. If I buy a six-pack of beer, it will take me the better part of six months to drink it. But if a guest to my house offers me a bottle of wine (as happened just last night), I will accept it with a thankful heart.

I won’t give a grand theology of alcohol right here. It’s not the sort of thing you can persuade somebody to in the space of five minutes. But it is my conviction. Jesus and his disciples drank alcohol for the same reason they didn’t fast. The bridegroom was with his friends, and it wasn’t time for mourning. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they called him a glutton and a drunk. He wasn’t either, but he laid himself open to the accusation by not being an ascetic like his cousin John.

But here’s the thing: drink or don’t drink to the glory of the God. There’s a dozen reasons why a fellow might abstain in good conscience, but a blanket “it’s wrong to drink” isn’t one of them. That’s a dietary law, and it isn’t even found in the Old Testament. When the council at Jerusalem met, the only restriction they thought fit to put on people was to avoid meat that had been strangled. For 1900 years that’s the way it was.

Tee-total is not a Biblical standard. In modern western culture, it goes all the way back to the late 19th and early 20th century, when there was a great social push to eliminate drinking. You may recall prohibition and the 18th amendment. That was the last joint effort between the conservative and liberal church traditions in America. The liberal churches pushed for it by working for a law to be passed. The conservatives did it by adding temperance to the moral code, right next to chastity.

In fact, I’d say that abstaining from alcohol isn’t really a Christian standard at all. It’s closer to Mormonism or Islam than anything else. And yet, here’s this oath in the middle of my seminary application. What do I do with it?

There’s a line of reasoning I got from DA Carson (though for the life of me I can’t find a reference in print) where he says that if somebody asks him to abstain from drink because they have an alcoholic background, of course he won’t drink. Or if someone asks him not to drink because it’s an unacceptable practice in the local culture, and it will confuse the non-believers, of course he won’t drink. But if someone tells him not to drink because it’s a sin, he’ll say, “pass the port!” I’m wondering if this should be that sort of thing for me.

There is, of course, another way to look at it. There was one condition in the Old Testament that allowed for abstaining from alcohol: the nazarite vow. For a set period of time (or occasionally a person’s whole life), a man would dedicate himself to the Lord, and the sign for this would be that he would abstain from alcohol, all the fruit of the vine, and from getting his hair cut. Samson is the famous example, but there’s reason to believe that John the Baptist was also a Nazarite. Paul apparently took a Nazarite vow on his final return to Jerusalem.

So, it’s possible to consider a requirement by a seminary not to drink alcohol as a kind of Nazarite vow. Seminary makes sense as a kind of temporary period of religious fervor. And they make you sign an oath, that is to say, a vow. Of course, as a Soldier, I couldn’t make it a fully Nazarite vow – failing to get a haircut is grounds for disciplinary action in the Army. But could I consider this oath as a kind of half-nazarite vow.

Of course it’s a rather transparent mendacity to commit to something “for purpose of evasion,” that is, affirming something with a certain meaning, knowing that it is taken by the other party as having a completely different meaning. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what sort of mental gymnastics I put myself through in order to sign an oath. What really matters is what it means to the person requiring the oath. Does Southern Seminary, and whatever board they fall under, think of their temperance oath as sort of temporary vow that you can reaffirm or rescind later, or do they think of it as a commitment to adhere to an already established moral standard?

Because if it’s the one, sure I could do it. But if it’s the other, how can I submit to a moral standard that violates my conviction? What sort of convictions are those? I may have to take my studies elsewhere.

Spirit of Prophecy

In my daily Bible reading, I’m coming up on Ezekiel, and he’s making me nervous.

Always in the back of my mind is a series of books that I want to write some day, about how people understand mystical experiences, the supernatural, prophecy, etc. I have in mind at least three books: The first one would cover the Old Testament and be titled, “Saul among the prophets,” referring to the two times that King Saul got distracted from whatever errand he was on because he ran into a group of prophets, had some kind of ecstatic experience, and ended up in a daze and naked. The second book would be called, “You may all prophesy,” from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and it would cover what the New Testament church thought about these things. The third book would be about the early Christian era, and I would call it, “With a loud voice,” which is a quote from Ignatius of Antioch. Around 100 AD, he wrote a letter to the church at Philadelphia, where he asserted that what he said during a church service had been a prophecy, because he said it, “with a loud voice, with God’s own voice.” (What grand aspirations he has for a soldier, you say. It’s all right. I know of a newspaper man who once wrote a tome on Biblical authority.)

Anyway, because I have this in the back of my head, I’m always asking the question, “What exactly was this experience like?” When God said to Samuel, Look not to his appearance, what exactly did Samuel experience? Was it an audible voice, a thought inside his head? How did he know it was God and not his own idea? Was there some sort of sense of dread?

Ezekiel is especially hard to answer these questions. He has these dramatic experiences, where he is taken to some place, shown some awesome thing, and it’s not always entirely clear if what happened was in some sort of trance, or if he physically saw it with his eyes. Did he go afterwards and see char marks on the ground along the paths of the four living creatures?

But more close to home is that Ezekiel, being one of the most dramatic of the prophets, sets the standard for people who want to prophesy today. I am not a cessationist, and I think cessationists make their job too easy when they simply say the canon is closed. People have always had experiences. In former times, some of these were from God and some were nonsense. What help is it to say that now we are confident that all of them are nonsense? It’s a great help to those who want to be materialists and Christians also. But it’s kind of a Tolkien view of the world: In a former age, the world was flat and boundless, but in our current age, God has bounded it by curving it in upon itself. The way to the land of the Valar is now closed to mortals. They don’t seem to notice that, in Tolkien, the new rounded earth is a smaller, dimmer world.

But as I say, slamming the door closed on spiritual experiences is a kindness to folks who don’t have those experiences, and wonder if they should. But it’s a great harshness to people who continue to dream dreams and see visions. Those people are forced to resign the brighter half of their lives to the stuff of mental institutions and illegal pharmaceuticals. Yet they keep on seeing things.

As I said, Ezekiel in a lot of ways sets the standard for people who want to see visions. I mean, boy did he see them. But how much did he see them, and how much was it merely a divinely blessed imagination? I suspect the Hebrew word would have been the same.

It’s not an academic question for folks like me, with highly… enhanced… imaginations. If I’m meditating on a thing, and a picture comes into my mind, and boy what a humdinger, and with it comes a sense of dread and awe, how do I report it? How did Ezekiel report his experiences? “And saw a picture in my mind of four living creatures; whether they were real and imagined, I do not know. But as I contemplated these creatures, my heart rate was highly accelerated, and my hair stood on end.” Therefore: the word of the Lord. The ancient saints didn’t have the advantage of writing off Ezekiel’s visions simply because they were visions. (Unless they were Sadducees, but then the Sadducees were no saints.) There wasn’t any value in waiting to see if Ezekiel’s vision of the four creatures “came true.” There was no predictive element. Like all scripture, there was a certain component of his experience that must be self-authenticating.

And yet, charismatic though I am, I see in Ezekiel not only the authoritative word of God, but also the imaginative foundation of every two-bit quack and self-assured heretic in church history. Here is George Fox interrupting formal public meetings to ask why church houses are called churches. Here is William Blake writing vaguely seditious poetry, calling his acid-etched engravings visions of fire. Here is the hook for all the people Jude warned us about.

As the angel said to John, “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” As surely as there are antichrists, there are prophets who testify for them. Their visions must surely sound and feel quite a bit the same.

Here is scripture, both our model and our instructor. Let us handle and divide it carefully.

scope creep

One of the honors my church has given me in the last few months is the privilege of writing study notes to go along with the Sunday Sermon. These notes are then available for use by home groups that meet throughout the week. We’ve been working through 1 Corinthians, and today I’m supposed to be working on the “how do you build on Paul’s foundation” part of chapter 3, but I’m stymied because of how hard this section pulls on my heartstrings. Build the church, man. That is what I am about.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

The second time I went to school to learn to be a minister was much better than the first. It was thicker, richer. And one of the first things that I realized was that my charismatic, independent, localized vision for the church was just too small. It didn’t even cover richness and breadth of the interconnected networks of secular society, and the church is greater than that.

Look, Nebuchadnezzar saw it. Daniel tells us his vision about the layered statue, with the golden head and clayey feet. The statue represented the governments of nations, and the stone which destroyed that statue was Jesus Christ. But what is the mountain that came from that stone, if it isn’t the church?

The shape of that mountain is important. It’s a single mountain that covers the entire earth. As I realized once in a conversation with some Mormon missionaries, it’s a single mountain, not a mountain range. So Daniel 2:” the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.” No interruptions. That casts down any assertions that there was a true church, which stopped, and then an intermediate period with no church, or a false church, followed by a restored true church.

At the same time, the mountain is a good deal bigger than the statue. It’s a mountain, not a hill, so it’s taller than the statue, and it clearly covers more ground. I take that to mean that it lasts longer through the generations (hello? forever?), and that it touches more of society. Local congregations, private associations, friendships, national governments… all of these things, inasmuch as they are real and valid ways for people to relate to each other and work together and form a society, will be subsumed in the world-mountain that is the church.

All of it. I can’t read the news without my vision of the church getting bigger. I can’t read about economics without my vision of the church getting better. I can’t think about business, or logistics, or farming, without my vision of the church getting bigger.

And here’s Paul talking about building the church, like it’s all okay. Now, it’s not enough to be a component of God’s active retrofit of all of human civilization, he wants me (us) to build it. That’s exciting. It’s astounding. And it’s not too daunting, because as best I can tell, the church universal is still only made up of the church local. I build up the church by building up my church.

And, hey, look. I get to help build the church by writing review questions for a sermon about building the church. The challenge is following the sermon, and not the pictures in my head. (And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up here…”) Talk about scope creep!

Prophecy

Bibliolatry:: When a person relies on the authority of scripture to undermine what the text actually teaches.

Prophesy

Reading my Bible, I’ve been stuck for 6 months in 1 Samuel, mostly because I haven’t been reading it. But I was struck by this passage today:

The LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go. I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.” And Samuel said, “How can I go? If Saul hears it, he will kill me.” And the LORD said, “Take a heifer with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’ And invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do. And you shall anoint for me him whom I declare to you.” Samuel did what the LORD commanded and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling and said, “Do you come peaceably?” And he said, “Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the LORD. Consecrate yourselves, and come with me to the sacrifice.” And he consecrated Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.

When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the LORD’s anointed is before him.” But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” Then Jesse called Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel. And he said, “Neither has the LORD chosen this one.” Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, “Neither has the LORD chosen this one.” And Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel. And Samuel said to Jesse, “The LORD has not chosen these.” Then Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?”

1 Sam 16:1-11a ESV

There are so many things to look into here that my gut wants to look right past: Why were the people afraid of Samuel, when Samuel was afraid of Saul? How is it that God was concerned about Samuel’s dejection over Saul? How is it that Samuel was dejected, when so recently he was stony toward Saul? How could God tell Samuel to use misdirection to get to Bethlehem without arousing suspicion? Wasn’t that a little bit like lying?

I’m stuck on something a little more fundamental: what was it like for Samuel to speak with God like He was a man? How did he know it was the voice of God? Was it audible? Apparently it was enough like an audible voice, that he thought Eli was calling him from another room when he was a child, but not so audible that the people around him could hear it.

I picture Jesse standing there before Samuel, sweat dripping down his face, a little bit nervous and a bit concerned. There’s no indication from the text that Jesse knew why Samuel was there. Samuel says he’s here at Bethlehem to offer a sacrifice, though Bethlehem is not an official place for sacrifice. Then he picks out Jesse and has him consecrate himself and his family. No one knows what Samuel is doing. Again, when Jesse introduces his family, Samuel walks down the line like a judge at a beauty contest, saying nothing, having some kind of personal dialogue inside his head. His eyes light, and then he frowns, and frowning walks his way down the line, staring at each son like he’s weighing their souls. When he comes to the end of the line, he turns to Jesse: “The LORD has not chosen these.” he says, “Are all your sons here?”

What is anyone supposed to make of this? Ah, but Samuel is a prophet, and prophets do strange things. People, in turn, have strange ideas about prophets and what to do with them. Can you use a prophet as your personal tracking device – trade him a little produce and he’ll tell you where your goats have gone? Maybe. In a sense, it worked that way for Saul. At least, Samuel knew where the goats were, though for God, the goats were just an excuse. Can you ply them with gold to pronounce blessings and curses, to change the fate of history? Balak tried, and Balaam was plied, but with stunningly unintended results. How different was a Jewish seer, really, from the voice that moaned at Delphi?

The answer, is “very different.” But not because the prophets are a different kind of men. No, but God is a very different God. He is very hard to manipulate. “Our God is in heaven. He does whatever He pleases.”

But how did it happen, that Samuel heard the voice of God? Oh, don’t hide behind that mysticism. You’re only mystical when the lights are off. Yes, Samuel was God’s own prophet. He heard a voice that was somehow not quite inside his head, and knew that voice was God’s own word and not the frenzy of his own mind. Not a word of his fell to the ground. But how did he know?

It’s an urgent question precisely because it’s 3000 years later. Jesus Christ has come and brought God’s spirit with him. Peter preached at Pentecost that the very thing folks were laughing at – people proclaiming God’s grace, wildly, in every language they didn’t know, was the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy:

And in the last days it shall be, God declares,that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

Suddenly, in some way, and in some sense, what applies to Samuel applies to me. I can grant all kinds of exceptions – Samuel was called to a national stage for a specific purpose, and so on. But it remains that Samuel was a prophet of God, and as a Christian I must believe that God’s spirit has been poured out “on all flesh.” Is Samuel a prophet? Why am I not one?

I can hear the charismatics and Pentecostals cheering. But let me ask you, do you mock the word of God? Not one of Samuel’s words fell to the ground. If you prophesy, do you prophesy nonsense? Do you hear words in your head that sound godly, or even just amazing, and assume they came from God? How can you tell?

On the one hand, I’m constrained to believe that, if Joel is true, then it must not be true, because prophecy now would supersede the personal work of Jesus Christ (See Hebrews 1). On the other hand, I’m compelled to believe that I should be frivolous with the very oracles of God.

But Samuel walked with God, and not one word of his fell to the ground. He mourned for Saul, challenged God like a friend, calmed the people, and appointed kings. If God has sent his spirit, there should be more men like him. How could it be that the coming of the Spirit would usher us from a golden age to bronze?

Irenaeus, Mosaics, and Old Wives’ Tales

Being kept up by a baby who would not sleep, and who would wake his mother with his cries if he were not constantly being bounced about in a chair, with my supply of Agatha Christie and Dick Frances novels depleted, I found myself the other night reading a copy of Irenaeus’ *Against Heresies*, and I ran across this quote:

They gather their views from other sources than the Scriptures; and to use a common proverb, they “strive to weave ropes of sand,” while they try to adapt with an air of probability, the parables of the Lord, the sayings of the prophets, and the words of the apostles, to their own particular assertions, in order that their scheme may not seem altogether without support. In doing so, however, they disregard the order and the connection of the Scriptures, and so far as in them lies, dismember and destroy the truth. By transferring passages, and dressing them up anew, and making one thing out of another, they succeed in deluding many through their wicked art in adapting the oracles of the Lord to their opinions.

Their manner of acting is just as if one, when a beautiful image of a king has been constructed by some skilful artist out of precious jewels, should then take this likeness of the man all to pieces, should re-arrange the gems, and so fit them together as to make them into the form of a dog or of a fox, and even that but poorly executed; and should then maintain and declare that *this* was the beautiful image of the king which the skillful artist constructed, pointing to the jewels which had been admirably fitted together by the first artist to form the image of the king, but have been with bad effect transferred by the latter one to the shape of a dog, and by thus exhibiting the jewels, should deceive the ignorant who had no conception what a king’s form was like, and persuade them that that miserable likeness of the fox was, in fact, the beautiful image of the king.

In like manner do these persons patch together old wives’ fables, and then endeavor, by violently drawing away from their proper connection, words, expressions and parables whenever found, to adapt the oracles of God to their baseless fictions. (Book I, Chapter 1.)

It’s a pretty good image for misquoting the Bible, isn’t it? Continue reading “Irenaeus, Mosaics, and Old Wives’ Tales”