Those Pesky Nicolaitans 3: The Blooming Obvious

“Can’t we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? Next contestant, Sybil Fawlty from Torquay; special subject, the bleeding obvious.”

Fawlty Towers S2 E6, ‘Basil the Rat’ (1979)

So it turns out that one of the things people are likely to do when you tell them you’ve developed some unusual theological opinions, is lend you things to read. I’ve been lent a few this past week. Here’s a short extract from one that made me laugh (emphasis mine):

Things to read.

“This is one reason why faithful Bible teaching isn’t more common in churches, because faithful Bible teaching will always cause offence. Sermons about the right way to do liturgy, or about church government, or about current affairs, or about the terrible sins of other people, or about the fascination of religions and philosophies will not upset me. But the voice of God spoken by a faithful Bible teacher will get under my skin.”¹

Ahem. Maybe sermons about church government won’t upset you. Me, on the other hand…

Another bit of literature that’s been kindly sent my way includes a chapter called ‘Follow your leader’ which includes, in its introductory section, the following:

“It seems to me that most of us simply accept the leadership pattern of whatever church we happen to go to. It may be that when we change churches we come across a different pattern or system. We might prefer it, or dislike it in comparison. But we don’t often step back and ask, ‘What leadership does the Bible tell us about? What leaders are we to have? What are they to do?’”²

Well, blimey O’Reilly, if the author hasn’t hit the nail on the absolute head – but he goes on, unsurprisingly, to draw conclusions on this matter that are extremely different from mine. I was toying with spending this third instalment of my little series on a refutation of his points, actually, until I decided that that just wasn’t how I wanted to play this game.

We’re all so used to reading passages that talk about specific roles within the church under the assumption that they’re referring to leadership structures that, if I were to go on the defensive at this point, I could spend week after week dissecting pericope after pericope, and explaining why they don’t automatically imply that some Christians have authority over others, until we were all totally sick to the back teeth of this whole business. I really don’t want to be sitting here next Christmas writing ‘Those Pesky Nicolaitans 27 ½’ or something, and I’m quite sure you want to be sitting here next Christmas reading such a thing even less, so instead, I’m going to introduce you to one of my favourite principles for studying the Bible, with just a few case studies, and you can all go away and examine the text for yourselves and figure out your own views on the matter.

That, in fact – if you’ll permit me a brief digression – is kind of the whole point. My position on church government is, in a way, a slightly self-defeating one. It’s like believing in democracy is kind of self-defeating: we’d rather be governed according to a philosophy we don’t like, provided that a majority of our countrymen voted for it, than impose government according to a philosophy we do like on them against their will. Similarly, the fact that I don’t believe any member of the Church should exercise authority over any other, precludes me from exercising any authority whatsoever over fellow-believers such as yourself, O Capable and Freethinking Reader. I would rather – I would much, much rather; I really can’t overstate this – that you go and search the scriptures and draw your own conclusions, even should they contradict mine on every possible level, than that you agree with me completely and even passionately without having actually seen these things in scripture for yourself. Let each be fully convinced in her own mind,³ and all that.

So don’t assent to what I say just because I’m pretty nifty with language and splash my opinions all over the Internet. But equally, please don’t assent to what you hear from the pulpit just because that guy has been to theological college and everyone else at your church seems to reckon he’s sound. Regardless of any of that, can you see this stuff in the scriptures for yourself? Are you convinced? Could you stand on that conviction if you were standing alone? Can you see it?

And on that note, meet one of my favourite Bible-study principles. Here it is: assume that everything in scripture is obvious or explained. Assume that God is not being cryptic, as if he were some mystical oracle delivering an ambiguous rhyming prophecy or something. Assume that the meaning is plain, because the mystery once hidden, the mystery of Christ in us and the hope of glory, has now been revealed to the saints by the Spirit, so that we might exercise all wisdom for each other’s edification.⁴ (How insanely cool is that? We have access to knowledge that the faithful prophets of old would have given anything to get a glimpse of; we, sinners that we are, have been granted to see truth concealed from even heavenly beings.⁵) And assume that if something in scripture seems obscure, it’s probably – not definitely, but probably – because you don’t know your Old Testament well enough.

With all this in mind, consider the following little segment of Hebrews: “Obey your leaders and submit to them.”⁶ Well, gosh, Anne, doesn’t that rather blow your church-leadership-is-not-a-category-that-exists theory out of the water? I don’t think so. What does ‘leader’ actually mean here? Well, scoot back a few verses and we find this: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God.” (Same Greek word for ‘leader’, just to be clear.) Boom! The term is defined for us, just like that. Our ‘leaders’ are those who spoke to us the word of God, and any believer might have done that for us; no special status is needed. So the people we’re being charged to obey and submit to here are those who have spoken to us the word of God. And frankly, obeying people who are chatting truth about God seems like a pretty reasonable course of action in any circumstances, right guys?

You see what I mean about assuming stuff is obvious or explained? If there’s a definition given, then blooming well take it. Granted, you may well have to look a little more widely than a single verse earlier in the same chapter. Take the business of elders, for instance. Church elders start showing up midway through Acts, but without any explanation as to who they were and what their role consisted of;⁷ the epistles similarly mention them a fair bit, but again, without making it at all explicit what the eldership gig actually involved. In other words, the New Testament writers are assuming that their readers just know what elders are; there’s no explanation because it’s not needed. So our task is to work out what their point of reference was, in order that we might work from the same one, and so interpret the scriptures rightly. And of course, their point of reference was the Old Testament. So let’s kick off from Genesis and see what we can find. The Hebrew word translated ‘elder’ (זָקֵן zāqēn) is really just an adjective meaning ‘old’; it’s not until Deuteronomy that we start seeing elders as a group be given specific responsibilities. These basically have to do with settling problems to do with societal relations, and enacting appropriate discipline: making sure murderers get handed over for proper punishment; making atonement for blood shed by an unknown perpetrator; punishing husbands who falsely accuse their wives of sexual misconduct; witnessing the official disgrace of brothers who refuse to do the duty of levirate marriage; that sort of thing.⁸ So we can assume that the role of elder in the Church entails a similar function, though the types of problem and the nature of the discipline at hand may be a bit different. Note that the eldership is not defined as a teaching or preaching job; note that it’s not paid work; note that the elders always act as a group; I could go on.

Again, you see what I mean? Assume everything is obvious or explained, even if you have to flick an awful lot of pages backwards to find where it is so. Sometimes, though, you don’t have to flick anywhere at all; you just need someone to point out what the passage actually says, or to manage to look at it with fresh eyes yourself. As soon as somebody said to me that 1 Corinthians 9 is about food, not money, that fact suddenly became so glaringly blatant that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it previously.⁹

What was once a mystery has been revealed to us. What is hidden from those who are wise by the world’s standards, God can make known even to little children. The Spirit who searches the deep things of God is living in us – in you, dear reader, if you are trusting in the blood of Christ as your sole means of being counted righteous before God who is thrice holy.¹⁰ Take up and read;¹¹ assume that God is able and willing to make himself clearly understood to you; and see where the blooming obvious takes you.

Footnotes

¹ This is from a little pamphlet by Christopher Ash called ‘Listen up!’, which styles itself as ‘a practical guide to listening to sermons’. It actually packs an awful lot of good advice into a few colourful pages and is well worth a read, particularly if listening to your church minister(s) giving sermons is, and is likely to remain, your primary method of participation in church teaching – but of course, I disagree with the premise that that should be true for any of us. Anyway, here’s one place to get hold of it if you feel so inclined: https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/listen-up.

² That’s from God’s New Community by Graham Beynon. Here’s somewhere you can get it for marginally cheaper than the RRP, if you fancy a peruse: https://www.10ofthose.com/products/1356/gods-new-community.

³ A phrase I draw from that bit in Romans where Paul’s telling the Church not to fall out over Jewish dietary restrictions and festal practices, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+14&version=ESVUK, which I think may be applied far more broadly in light of verse 23: whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

⁴ Here I riff on the last few verses of Colossians 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+1&version=ESVUK.

⁵ No, genuinely; check out Matthew 13:17 and 1 Peter 1:12.

⁶ The thirteenth chapter of Hebrews is the only place where a group of people within the church are described as ‘leaders’ (unless you count the adjectival use of the participle in Acts 15:22), which I think strengthens even further the case for construing the term as it is defined within the chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+13&version=ESVUK.

⁷ I think the first mention is in 11:30, and if you go and read the relevant section you’ll see what I mean about a lack of further explanation: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+11&version=ESVUK.

⁸ I’m basically looking at Deuteronomy 19-25 for this stuff: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deut+19&version=ESVUK.

⁹ It really is! Take another look for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+9&version=ESVUK.

¹⁰ Yeah, I’m not going to footnote all those allusions. You’ve got the Bible Gateway search engine if you’re desperate to know their sources.

¹¹ This famous phrase comes out of Augustine’s Confessions, if you didn’t know. Here’s an English translation of the relevant portion: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.ix.xii.html.