Those Pesky Nicolaitans 4: Two Thousand Years of Wrong

“So then, of course, I wondered what this thing could say. You know, if it had made her uncle so mad, he’d tried to burn all the copies, and she’d gone to so much trouble to hide the last one.

And even thought at first it was kind of hard to figure out what, exactly, the document was talking about, by the time I’d finished translating all the words I didn’t know with the help of an online medieval French dictionary (thank you, nerds), I had a pretty good idea why Uncle Francesco had been so mad.

And also why Amelie had hidden it. And left clues in her journal as to where it could be found.

Because it was possibly the most inflammatory document I have ever read. Hotter, even, than Kenny’s nitrostarch synthesis experiment.

For a second, I could only stare down at it in total and complete astonishment.”

Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries: To the Nines (2008)

 

An old-looking document. This one seems to be in German rather than mediaeval French, though.

Did anyone else read Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries as a teenager?¹ Please note I said ‘read’; I’m not talking about the Disney film with Anne Hathaway in it, but the book series on which said film was relatively loosely based. In both cases, the basic premise of the thing is that New York highschooler Mia Thermopolis finds out she’s the heir to the throne of a small European country called Genovia, and, as if high school weren’t bad enough already, has to deal with all the press and politics and pressure that princesshood brings. But the books present a substantially different and even more substantially longer story. The ninth instalment of the series is a particularly dramatic one: as well as dealing with heartbreak, psychological therapy, slipping grades, and a total swap of whom she considers her best friend and her worst enemy, Mia also stumbles across a revelation about the history of Genovia of a literally revolutionary nature. She’s been busy reading the diary of an ancestor of hers called Amelie, who held the throne for twelve days during the 1600s, before she died of the black plague aged just sixteen. Amelie’s diary talks a lot about an important executive order she’s been working on, without specifying what it contains, only that she eventually managed to get it signed, sealed, and hidden somewhere, cryptically, close to her heart. An altogether unbelievable stroke of luck then sees Mia find the very executive order in question when she’s tidying her room and accidentally knocks the backboard off Amelie’s portrait. It turns out that Amelie had passed a law changing Genovia’s governmental system from an absolute monarchy to a ceremonial one. In other words, for the past four centuries or so, the Genovian people have been living under a dictatorship, when they were supposed to have been living under a democracy.

Mia, of course, immediately takes the executive order to her father (the monarch) and his mother (the dowager princess), under the assumption that, although the whole thing is bound to come as a bit of a shock, they’ll inform the Genovian parliament and set about organising an election right away. Better late than never, after all. So she’s rather surprised when her father reassures her grandmother, who has been making some rather derogatory comments about such a thing as democracy, that nothing is going to change.

“Well,” I said. “Actually, a lot is going to change –”

“No,” Dad interrupted briskly. “No, Mia, actually, it’s not. I appreciate your bringing this document to my attention, but it doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It doesn’t have any validity.”

That’s when my jaw dropped. “WHAT? Of course it does! Amelie completely followed all the rules laid out in the Genovian royal charter – used the seal and got the signature of two unrelated witnesses and everything! If I’ve learned anything since my princess lessons started, I’ve learned that. It’s valid.”

“But she didn’t have parliamentary approval,” Dad began.

“BECAUSE EVERYONE IN PARLIAMENT WAS DEAD!” I couldn’t believe this. “Or at home, nursing their dying relatives. And, Dad, you know as well as I do that in a national crisis – like, for instance, a PLAGUE, the ruler’s impending death, and her knowledge that her throne is going to a known despot – a crowned Genovian prince or princess can sign into law anything he or she wants to, by order of divine right.”

Seriously. Does he really think I’ve learned NOTHING but how to use a fish fork in three years of princess lessons?

“Right,” Dad said. “But this particular national crisis was four hundred years ago, Mia.”

“That doesn’t make this bill any less valid,” I insisted.

“No,” Dad admitted. “But it does mean there’s no reason we have to share it with parliament at this time. Or any time, really.”

“WHAT?”

I felt like Princess Leia Organa when she finally revealed the hidden location of the rebel base (even though she was lying) to Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: A New Hope, and he went ahead and ordered the destruction of her home planet of Alderaan anyway.

“Of course we have to share it,” I yelled. “Dad, Genovia has been living a lie for almost four hundred years!”

Can I just reassure you all that I don’t think I’m the equivalent of Mia here?

I’ve spent three blog posts now arguing that we’re doing church government wrong,² and one of the obvious questions that it’s pretty reasonable to shoot back at me is, so, do you think the Church has been living a lie for almost two thousand years? Do you think you have got hold of some extra-special revealed truth that no previous generation of saints in Christ – all those souls much, much wiser and godlier than you will probably ever be – had any idea existed? How can you look at all those centuries of church leadership indisputably having been a thing, and claim that you know better? Are you really so arrogant?

Well, I am blooming arrogant (it’s one of those sins that clings to my soul like a particularly vile and detestable limpet), but I’m most definitely not claiming to have got hold of some extra-special revealed truth that no previous generation of saints had any idea existed. The reason nobody had realised Genovia was supposed to be a democracy was because the one piece of evidence that proved as much had been hidden beneath the backboard of a painting ever since it was put on paper; our scriptural canon, on the other hand, is set, and if anybody shows up with some other bit of prose he thinks should be added to it, you can call him a heretic straight off. If Mia had made a case that Genovia ought to be a democracy based on some known body of legislation that her countrymen were already acknowledging as valid, then there’d be a plausible parallel there for my arguments about those pesky Nicolaitans. As it is, there’s not.

 

Hurray, democracy!

But the question remains: if I haven’t got hold of some extra-special revealed truth, if I’m working from the exact same old body of revealed truth as my brothers and sisters in the Lord throughout the Church age, then how on earth do I account for the fact that they haven’t generally been running their churches anything like how I claim that body of revealed truth says churches ought to be run?

Well, here’s the very sad but not very surprising news: the visible Church gets things horribly, horribly wrong all the time. Just look at mediaeval Roman Catholicism for a shudder-worthy case study.³ Pretty much the whole of Europe was being run by people who professed to be following Jesus, but the picture of what following Jesus entails that they were perpetuating was absolute bunkum – and God, in his unfathomable and frequently highly counterintuitive wisdom, let it happen.

This sort of thing bothers me intensely. It’s the aspect of God’s will I’m tempted to question and even rail against most often (with the one exception of the fact that he appoints some and not others for eternal salvation): why does he allow his beloved Church to be infiltrated and, in some cases, overrun by people who are not interpreting the scriptures rightly? Why does he allow such profound divergence of exegetical opinion, on really important issues, to exist within the body of Christ? It’s not a straightforward case of obviously sound versus obviously unsound, either: I see all these wise and godly souls throughout the Church age who sought God earnestly and prayed that they might handle the scriptures correctly, who then nevertheless drew vastly different doctrinal conclusions. Why does God allow that? And in the face of it, moreover, how am I, fool that I am, supposed to figure out who’s got it right?

The first three questions, I can’t answer. As for the fourth, after all my agonising, I’m always forced back to the same conclusion, the only one that holds any water: I have to go by what I myself can see in the scriptures – fool that I am, regardless. Sometimes, it seems, that is going to differ from what most Christians of whom I am aware can apparently see in the scriptures. And sometimes, fool that I am, I am going to be wrong – but I’d rather hold a wrong opinion because I’ve been genuinely convinced of it for myself, than because I’m just going along with what other Christians are saying despite the fact that I’m personally none too sure about it. Because the visible Church gets things wrong all the time. That much is obvious from more than just Church history: the letters to the seven churches in those early chapters of Revelation define a number of doctrinal errors found within the communities of believers to which they are addressed. I’m not going to quote the whole thing here for you, so grab a paper Bible or open Revelation 2 and 3 in another tab.⁴ I’ll wait.

Got it? Good. Now, I think there are five errors mentioned in these seven letters, and each one is alluded to twice. Here they are:

1)      Nominalism, that is, claiming the name of Christian but not living one’s life accordingly.

a.      The church at Ephesus is rebuked for having abandoned her first love, such that, although she was bearing up for the sake of Jesus’ name, her works were lacking.

b.      The church at Sardis was in a much worse state: she had the reputation – literally ‘name’ – of being alive, but was actually dead, i.e. not in Christ at all.

2)      Nicolaitanism, the one I’ve been chatting about this whole time: instigating an ecclesiastical elite.

a.      The church at Ephesus is commended for hating the works of the Nicolaitans.

b.      The church at Pergamum is rebuked for the fact that some of her members hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans.

3)      The prosperity gospel, that is, the teaching that following Jesus is a means of acquiring earthly health, wealth, and happiness.⁵

a.      The church at Smyrna is told that she is rich even though she is poor and persecuted, which I think acts as a foil for the fact that…

b.      The church at Laodicea is warned that though she thinks she’s rich and needs nothing, she’s actually wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. She thinks that, having got rich, she’s achieved the end-goal, but she’s wrong, and all her riches can’t buy her the white robes of righteousness that she really needs.

4)      Supersessionism, or replacement theology, that is, the doctrine that the Church has superseded or replaced Israel as the definitive people of God, and the Abrahamic-Mosaic covenant is no longer valid for the Jewish people.⁶

a.      The church at Smyrna is troubled by some people who are blaspheming by calling themselves Jews when they’re not.

b.      So is the church at Philadelphia.

5)      Worldliness, that is, borrowing sinful behaviours from the world and passing them off as acceptable or even commendable Christian conduct.

a.      The church at Pergamum is rebuked for having some members who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who persuaded the Israelites that sexual immorality and food sacrificed to idols were totally fine.

b.      The church at Thyatira is rebuked for tolerating someone given the title Jezebel, who advocates these same two behaviours, and even claims to be speaking for God when she does so.

 

This is a type of South Asian butterfly called a Jezebel. Not a great compliment to the poor butterfly, it must be said.

I realise there’s a lot there that could do with some more unpacking, but hopefully you can see where I’m getting this stuff from. The thing I think is so striking about these five errors is that they have all seriously plagued the church in a big way over the past two thousand years, and continue to do so to this day. Jesus doesn’t have a go at the churches over, I don’t know, the filioque, or whether Mary may be titled ‘God-bearer’, or how many natures he has,⁷ or any of those abstract and abstruse theological issues that the church fathers got so het up about. Nor, interestingly, does he have a go at them over core gospel issues that would mark out a heretic at a thousand paces, like outright denial of his humanity or divinity. Rather, he has a go at them over pretty practical, easy-to-fall-into stuff, that large swathes of the Church have continued and do continue to get wrong. He offers rebukes that have kept needing to be heard.

So, in a way, we can consider it no surprise that so much of the Church has been tolerating and advocating Nicolaitanism over the past two thousand years. The only kind of error Jesus mentions in these letters is the kind that’s actually going to lead an awful lot of his followers astray over the coming centuries. This matches up with the suggestion I made in my first post in this little series, that, if the Nicolaitan heresy was really dealt with as quickly and easily as early Christian writings seem to suggest, Jesus surely wouldn’t have bothered to mention it.

So how come all the authors of those early Christian writings got Nicolaitanism wrong? If I’m right that the error being warned against is that of granting one particular believer authority over another, how come none of these guys could see it?

To answer that, I’m going to take us back to Mia and her ancestor Amelie’s executive order. When she showed the bill to her father, he could see what it was – they were looking at the same words on the page – but he told her that it didn’t mean what she thought it meant. Why was he so unwilling to accept it? Because it would have cost him his position. He held authority over a nation, and were he to acknowledge the real implications of this document, he would have to relinquish that authority. And even supposing he didn’t mind that, he would still have to make massive changes to the way he was used to doing things, and that would be messy and uncertain. This was talking about something that happened hundreds of years ago, and it would be much easier to make excuses and ignore it and just keep doing what he was used to doing.

Might something similar have been going on with the church fathers when they put together their implausible explanations of Nicolaitanism? Might something similar be going on in the Church today?

I hasten to stress that I don’t mean to imply that everyone who’s ever held authority in a church has been desperate to cling to that authority at any cost, or has been willing to sacrifice adherence to scripture for the sake of comfort and ease. On the contrary, there are many, many people who hold authority in churches who are remarkably humble and self-sacrificial and zealous, and just genuinely hold a different view to mine about this whole Nicolaitans business. But surely it’s not totally unfair to suggest that we tend to have a harder time acknowledging Biblical truths when they demand the dismantling of systems we like and benefit from. That’s true also of those of us who don’t lead in church ourselves, but are fond of the system, perhaps because it absolves us of certain responsibilities, or creates the illusion that we can outsource our pursuit of holiness.

So, do I think the Church has been living a lie for almost two thousand years? Not really. I do think that a lot of people in the Church have been getting a lot of different things wrong in various times and places during the past two thousand years or so. I also think that churches run without leadership structures are likely to leave smaller footprints in the historical record than churches run with leadership structures. I don’t think I have got hold of some extra-special revealed truth, and I hope some of you who know me well would be kind enough to call me out if I claimed that I had. I think that, in the face of profound divergence of exegetical opinions amongst the body of Christ, each of us has no choice but to go by what we ourselves can see in the scriptures. And one thing I think I can see in them is that the Nicolaitan heresy is one, like the others mentioned in the seven letters, that a lot of Christians have fallen and continue to fall for.

Jesus’ rebukes to the seven churches stand for us too. We need to be ready to hear his call to repentance. But his promises that to the one who conquers, he will grant to eat from the tree of life; and to escape the second death; and to access his daily provision and a new identity; and to rule the nations with him; and to be written and acknowledged in the presence of God; and to dwell in his presence; and to share the Lord’s own throne – these promises stand for us too. Whatever we may get wrong, he is able, by his blood shed on our behalf, to make us stand – and we’re to strive not to get it wrong only in the light of that breathtakingly glorious truth.

Footnotes

¹ There are more of them now than I read, it turns out: http://www.megcabot.com/princessdiaries/.

² You might want to read those ones first, actually. I’ve been thinking about this stuff so much that I’ve hit that point where I can’t tell how much of what I’m saying makes no sense without preestablished context.

³ There’s some good stuff in Michael Reeves’ The Unquenchable Flame about the sorry state of mediaeval Roman Catholicism and what the Reformers sought to correct: https://www.10ofthose.com/products/21785/the-unquenchable-flame. Hilarious/depressing examples that I vaguely recall include rival Popes excommunicating one another, and the idea that cramming as many Mass attendances into your Sunday as possible was a way of obtaining extra grace. Laugh. Cry.

⁴ Look, I’ll even give you a link: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+2-3&version=ESVUK. Aren’t I generous?

⁵ We’re pretty good at calling this one out in the (prosperous) west, but it’s a massive, massive problem for the Church in much of the developing world. Here are some versified thoughts on the subject from the talented and zealous Shai Linne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJmcEAwazD0. (Lyrics in video not totally accurate, but whatever.)

⁶ This, I’d say, is the next most controversial point of the five errors I identify, after the whole Nicolaitan thing. But I’m not going to make this post any more unwieldy in length by talking about that one today.

⁷ If you don’t know what I’m talking about in this sentence, don’t worry. These things are really not that big of a deal. I sort of wish I didn’t know what I was talking about either; I’m sure the required brain-space could be spent on something far more useful.