Iconoclasm and the Preservation of Knowledge

“vita hominis plus libro valet.”

Rachel Caine, Ink and Bone (2015)

Suppose the Library of Alexandria had never been destroyed. Now suppose that it was kind of running the world. Suppose that it didn’t only collect literature, but also exercised complete control over people’s access to literature; suppose that it had a enforced monopoly on human knowledge, and owning original copies of written works, rather than official library ‘blanks’, were a crime. And stick all that in a sort of steampunk dystopia run on alchemy and clockwork, and you should have something approximating the world of Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine. Henceforth be spoilers.¹

 

A library - though this one’s at Trinity College Dublin rather than in Alexandria.

I was hooked on Ink and Bone right from the first chapter, when our young protagonist Jess Brightwell, the son of a professional book smuggler, successfully delivers the single surviving copy of the most valuable book in the world, Aristotle’s On Sphere Making, to a wealthy customer, only to witness the man tear out page after page and stuff them into his mouth. The man finds satisfaction, somehow, in obtaining what’s rarest and devouring it so that nobody else can ever have it, but to Jess – and indeed to us the readers – the thing feels like a horrifying outrage: This was like watching murder. Defilement. And it was somehow worse than either of those things. Even among his family, black trade as they were, books were holy things. Only the Burners thought different. Burners, and whatever this perverse creature might be.

The Burners mentioned are a radical political faction whose motto is vita hominis plus libro valet: a human life is worth more than a book. Burners resent the Library’s oppressive control of written knowledge, and protest it in various ways, including, when they get the chance, setting fire to original copies that the Library is hoarding for itself. The Library, of course, would never dream of destroying a book. Or then again, would it? Later in the story, Jess undertakes training in order to work for the Library, and on one occasion, after a day spent raiding illegal book stashes, one of his classmates, Izumi, raises the question as to what the Library actually does with all these books once they’ve been confiscated. If they’re unique, fair enough, they’ll be kept so that they can be alchemically transferred to blanks for people to read, but what if they’re duplicates? Why would the Library waste all that storage space? Izumi’s heard that, despite everything they teach, the Library takes confiscated books and destroys them in a furnace – by fire, just as the Burners do.

Another classmate, Portero, is outraged by the suggestion and immediately denounces it as a lie. Mind you, though, he’d displayed his own fair share of Burner-esque tendencies earlier on, during a carriage ride through the city:

Portero idly stared out of the window as the wide, clean Alexandrian streets rolled by. They’d all got used to the sight of the teal-blue harbour and white-sailed mountains of ships floating there, but Portero was staring out at the old Egyptian gods that lined the roadway, still mighty under the sun after so many thousands of years. He clicked beads between his fingers, and Jess finally realised they were part of a rosary.

‘Does it bother you?’ he asked Portero, and nodded out at the gods on the street. Portero shot him an unreadable look.

‘Shouldn’t it? They’re false gods.’

Jess shrugged. ‘Real enough to the Egyptians,’ he said. ‘And they’re beautiful, in their way.’

Portero was already sweating from the intense heat; even the carriage’s cooler interior couldn’t keep it all out, especially next to the windows. ‘They should have been pulled down ages ago,’ he said. ‘The Christians and Muslims agree on that much.’

Jess flashed back to the death of On Sphere Making, and felt a slow roll of revulsion. ‘That sounds like a Burner talking,’ he said. ‘Destroying what offends them, and never mind legacy.’

Portero turned on him angrily. ‘I said nothing of the kind! I would never harm a book! Never!’

‘Not all knowledge is books. Those out there, they’re history in stone. Men carved them. Men sweated in this sun to put them there, to make their city more beautiful. Who are you to say what’s worthy for men to see today, or tomorrow?’

‘You’re an irreligious bastard,’ Portero said. ‘I knew you would be.’

‘I’m as good a Catholic as you,’ Jess said. ‘I just don’t hold with making the world into copies of what I like.’

Jess seems on pretty solid ground here in his insistence that ‘book’ is not automatically a special category: other material objects are indeed also able to make contributions to human knowledge of what the world is and has been like, so there’s no logical reason to treat written documents as an exception to any rule. And as a result, the question that keeps raising its head here is: for what if any reason is it acceptable to destroy a physical vessel of human knowledge? For mere personal pleasure, like the customer who ate On Sphere Making? For political protest against an oppressive system that places too little value on human lives, like the Burners? For the straightforward convenience of not having to store multiple superfluous copies of one work, like the Library, according to Izumi’s hypothesis? For the purging of the trappings of idolatry from a monotheistic society, as Portero advocates?

For the purging of the trappings of idolatry, is it acceptable to destroy a physical vessel of human knowledge?

Last week, a good friend and I took a trip to the British Museum to see the exhibition ‘I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria’.² It was a brilliantly curated tour through Ashurbanipal’s family, his reign, his empire, his warmongering and his garden-planting, his legacy in more recent culture – but then it finished with a section devoted to archaeology in Iraq, exposing the devastating destruction to which the standing remains have been subjected by the actions of Islamic State in recent years. I think the proportion of Nineveh irreparably lost was cited as 80%, though don’t quote me on that. While it was encouraging to get a snapshot of some of the efforts that are being made to train and equip Iraqi archaeologists so that they can address the damage and undertake further work to preserve their country’s heritage, to walk out of this stunning collection of ancient artefacts into a blank-white corridor where their cities of origin were said to have been almost obliterated was still a stark kind of heartbreaking. To be fair, given that trying to extract contributions to human knowledge from centuries-old artefacts is literally my day job, I probably find this stuff more moving than many. Still, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that, contra Portero, the vast majority of us, regardless of religious persuasion, lament rather than advocate the wilful destruction of ancient sources, whether literary or material, that represent religious beliefs and practices contrary to our own.

So what, then, are we to make of those passages of scripture where people are commended, even upheld as exemplars, for destroying objects associated with idolatry? I’m thinking, for instance, of Hezekiah, who removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah and even crushed the bronze serpent that Moses had made according to God’s instructions for the relief of the plague of serpents back in the wilderness, because people had been sacrificing to it: In the LORD, the God of Israel, he trusted, and after him  none was like him among all the kings of Judah, and who were before him. For he clung to the LORD; he did not turn aside from (going) after him, but he kept the commandments that the LORD had commanded Moses. And I’m thinking of course of Josiah, who went through his kingdom on a destructive rampage of unprecedented scale, burning idols and pulling down altars and desecrating sites of pagan sacrifice: And like him was no king before him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, and after him none arose like him. And I’m thinking of the new Christians at Ephesus who brought their expensive books of magic out of their houses and publicly burned them: Thus, according to the Lord’s power, the word increased and prevailed. How is it consistent to echo the Biblical authors in affirming these actions as right and praiseworthy, and then turn around and mourn the loss of the pagan artefacts at Nineveh or wherever?³

Well, I think it is consistent, and here’s the crucial difference between the two scenarios: Hezekiah and Josiah and the Ephesian believers – and everyone else throughout scripture who is commended for destroying idolatrous objects – were all acting against idolatry within their own covenant community. The objects in question were ones that people who were supposed to be serving the LORD their God, and worshipping him only, were using to serve and worship false gods instead. Hezekiah and Josiah were destroying idols and trappings of idolatry in current use by the subjects over whom it had been granted them to rule; the Ephesians were burning their own books. These were not trips out into the surrounding pagan world to tear down its idols. In fact, in that regard, consider Paul in Athens: his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was rife with idols – as Portero’s was in Ink and Bone, but check out the difference between his response and Paul’s – so he reasoned therefore in the synagogue with the Jews and the worshippers, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.⁴ There’s a stark distinction, then, in the correct response to seeing idolatry in the world, and the correct response to seeing idolatry in one’s own covenant community. In the latter, absolutely, pull down the idols, desecrate the altars, burn the books; but in the former, do nothing more violent than starting a debate.

 

The Erechtheion, a temple in Athens dedicated to various deities, principally Athena. It was built in the 5th century BCE, so it would have been there in Paul’s day too.

For the purging of the trappings of idolatry, is it acceptable to destroy a physical vessel of human knowledge? Only if said vessel is yours to destroy. And if it is yours to destroy, then destroy it you must. But if it isn’t, you’re better off taking the reminder of how badly the world needs the gospel and starting a conversation about it. In which respect, there’s no prohibition on better equipping ourselves to start such a conversation through familiarising ourselves with the nature of the idolatry that surrounds us: if, for example, Daniel and his friends didn’t object to being instructed in the literature of Babylon, idol-endorsing as it doubtless was,⁵ neither need we shrink from studying the culture of the idolatrous world around us.

Hang on, back up: so you’re saying you would advocate the destruction of a book or an artefact, if it belonged to your fellow-believers and were being used by them for idolatrous purposes. Um, yeah, I would, actually. The preservation of my brothers and sisters in the faith of their salvation is to be counted as a smidgen more important than the preservation of material objects, however great a contribution said material objects may be able to make to human knowledge. A human life is, indeed, worth more than a book. But that said, I don’t think destruction of material objects is typically the main manifestation of the fight against idolatry in our church communities and our own individual hearts. A lot of the idols we most commonly find ourselves guilty of serving, I think, are things that aren’t inherently bad and are actually kind of necessary, like money and food and work and other human beings, and tearing down those altars is a far more complicated process than tearing down physical ones. But the ruthlessness with which Hezekiah and Josiah and the Ephesian converts carried out their destruction of idols still provides us with an example for the approach we’re to take in carrying out this work amongst ourselves.

The destruction of certain material objects may sometimes prove useful for our sanctification, but it isn’t ever going to bring about the process of repentance and belief. It isn’t ever going to raise dead spirits to life. And so iconoclasm is only to be carried out within the covenant community, not imposed on a world that isn’t in any way claiming or striving to adhere to the standards demanded by the scriptures. There’s no inconsistency in both applauding the actions of Hezekiah and Josiah and the Ephesian converts and so forth, and mourning the destruction of pagan artefacts, and with them the knowledge they contained. Still, when we see our world rife with idols, material or otherwise, it’s right that our spirits should be provoked within us, and that that should prompt us to preach the gospel ever more urgently – because the gospel and the gospel alone is what will bring about the process of repentance and belief, what will raise dead spirits to life. And only after that has happened can any idol of any sort be torn down in a way that gives glory to the true God.

Footnotes

¹ If you fancy a read, here it is on Hive, https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Rachel-Caine/Ink-and-Bone/17352580, though personally I got it out of the library and then consulted it for this post using the Libby app, of which I’m a huge fan, and suspect you probably will be too if free ebooks sounds appealing at all: https://meet.libbyapp.com/.

² It’s on until 26^th February, so you’ve still got time to go and check it out if you fancy it: https://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/ashurbanipal.aspx. Student tickets are buy-one-get-one-free on Fridays.

³ Check out 2 Kings 18: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+18&version=ESVUK, 2 Kings 23, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Kings+23&version=ESVUK, and Acts 19, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+19&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Acts 17 for that one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+17&version=ESVUK. The word I’ve given as worshippers is here best understood as a technical term for Gentiles who worshipped the God of the Jews.

⁵ And last scripture link of the post to Daniel 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=dan+1&version=ESVUK.

A Little Convenient

“It's a little convenient that you're saying all this after Hope Yards was exposed as an actual evil plot to destroy the city.”

Ms. Marvel (2015) #3 (2015)

Thanks to the talented DocLew at new grounds.com for the truly epic fanart.

I collect Ms. Marvel compilations. By this I in fact mean that I have an obliging sister who knows how much I love Ms. Marvel, aka Kamala Khan, and often buys me successive instalments of her illustrated adventures as gifts on appropriate occasions. So far I've seen Jersey City's polymorphous protector battle a plethora of foes, including a human-bird hybrid with plans to reappropriate young people as living batteries, a perfect-boyfriend-material family friend who tries to draft Kamala into his Inhuman-supremacist terrorist group, alien tech smugglers, living pizza dough, and what appeared to be the actual end of the world (but then sort of wasn't, or something; I think one has to trouble oneself to follow more than one superhero's story arc to really get to grips with the substance of these grander storylines). The latest compilation I've been gifted, however, sees Ms. Marvel face arguably her most terrifying enemy yet: an unscrupulous urban development corporation.

The first taste we get of the Hope Yards Development and Relocation Association's unscrupulousness is the fact that they've slapped Ms. Marvel's face all over their marketing materials, assuring their audience that to buy into their gentrification plans is to ‘help Ms. Marvel clean up Jersey City’, without having bothered to ask the permission of the hero herself for the use of her image and brand. Certainly if they had asked, that permission would have been withheld: Kamala is severely unimpressed with the posh flats and artisanal sushi restaurants in favour of which the area’s previous tenants have been ungraciously turfed out. Beyond that, though, she's suspicious of some of Hope Yards’ equipment - like state-of-the-art crowd dispersal gadgets, winged security drones, and mysterious purple refrigerated goop, touted as a new energy drink, that turns out to be crammed full of definitely-illegal brainwashing nanotech. (I mean, of course.) So she barrels in and busts the bad guys just like she usually does. Except this time things are different. This time she's beset by a crowd of anti-gentrification protestors demanding an explanation for her supposed selling out. And just to make things worse, said crowd is fronted by her best gal pal, Nakia, who has no idea about Ms. Marvel's true identity.

“Listen...” Kamala begins. “I never agreed to have my picture associated with this redevelopment stuff. This all happened without my permission. I don't want to be the reason Jersey City becomes the next Park Slope or whatever. I love this place.”

Nakia isn't convinced: “It's a little convenient that you're saying all this after Hope Yards was exposed as an actual evil plot to destroy the city.” Her fellow protestors rally with her: “No smoke without fire!” one of them asserts. “She's just trying to protect her public image!” In the next panel, Kamala stands forlornly beneath Hope Yards’ ‘Clean it up!’ banner while the crowd erupts into arguments before her, and mumbles a little lamely into the chaos: “But … I'm telling the truth…”

And she is. Kamala never endorsed Hope Yards’ activities, never wanted them carried out in her name, never suggested that to buy into that scheme was to play a part in her own work for the good of her neighbourhood. The whole notion that she approved of Hope Yards originated because they seized on her identity as someone to be respected, and declared her approval over something they were doing that actually had nothing to do with her - actually went against everything she stood for, indeed. But because they had declared her approval over it, however unjustifiably and deceptively, well, it nonetheless did then look a bit suspicious for her to turn round and publicly denounce Hope Yards only after it became clear and universally acknowledged that they were definitely Bad.

And I wonder whether I don't sometimes entertain similar suspicions about God as the crowd of protestors entertained about Ms. Marvel. You know when the church ties itself in knots stressing so hard that God doesn't endorse some attitude or practice considered particularly loathsome by modern western society - racism or misogyny or slavery or whatever - even though huge numbers of Christians in decades and centuries past claimed the very opposite? You know when the church cherry-picks its own history for examples of figures who don't stray too far from current societal orthodoxy on these matters, and glosses over anything uncomfortable? Like, we'll uphold William Wilberforce as a shining paragon of faithful Christianity, and John Newton will do because even though he continued his involvement in the slave trade for some time after his conversion, he did turn his back on it eventually, but please keep George Whitefield's founding role in the evangelical movement carefully separated from his economically-justified pro-slavery campaigning, thank you kindly. And you know when the church explains away confessedly ‘difficult’ passages of scripture that have traditionally been read as approving of such things, by babbling about Historical Context and Common Idiom and ‘well if you look at the Hebrew, this word really means such-and-such’ in a fashion that seems more embarrassed by God's revealed word than awed by it, and, perhaps more pertinently, doesn't strike one as all that compelling an explanation of the actual words on the page? Well, doesn't it ever put a little niggle in the back of your mind that it's a little convenient that Christians have started saying all this after the attitude or practice in question has come to be universally acknowledged as Bad? Doesn't it ever put a little niggle in the back of your mind that maybe the text really does imply what the exegetes of previous eras thought it did, or at least something closer to that than the modern church is prepared to admit?

Look, I'm not saying that when I come across someone making a spurious-sounding argument that ‘slaves, obey your masters’ doesn't really mean what it looks to mean, I immediately start seriously entertaining the possibility that God was actually a huge fan of the transatlantic slave trade, or something (he definitely wasn't). It's just a niggle, just a little niggle that our sudden rediscovery of the right ways to read these passages just in time to be in line, or in line enough, with the views of wider society on the issues in question, is a suspiciously fortunate coincidence. And a niggle like that, if undealt with and allowed to grow, essentially leaves you with two options: either you reassess your ethics and decide that the pro-slavery racist misogynists of days gone by were in fact onto something in terms of Biblical interpretation, however much nuancing that something might need; or you retain your ethical stances and start to question instead the extent to which the Biblical text really is infallible or reliable or literally intended. Call me crazy, but I'm not exactly enchanted with either possibility. So is there a truthful and compelling way to prevent or neutralise the niggle before it grows?

Well, let's go back to Ms. Marvel and the crowd of protestors. What she said did seem suspiciously convenient from their perspective, but we the readers knew that in actual fact she was telling the truth, that she had never given Hope Yards her approval. All their claims that they were working in her name were false, and that fact couldn't be negated, even by the most suspiciously fortunate coincidence in the world. Convenient doesn't necessarily mean untrue.

Plus, people do frequently commit the same offence against God as Hope Yards committed against Ms. Marvel: they take his name, his ‘brand’ if you will, as someone to be respected - and how much more so! - and they claim his approval of things they're doing that have nothing to do with him, that go against everything he stands for, indeed. This jazz is all over the Bible: Aaron called the worship of the golden calf he'd made a festival to the LORD; some bloke called Micah made himself some household gods and expected the LORD to prosper him just because he'd managed to persuade a Levite to serve as his priest for them; the Rabshakeh told the inhabitants of Jerusalem that the LORD had told him to destroy their land and they therefore shouldn't expect their God to save them (hint: he totally saved them). But the example I'm going to zoom in on is this, from Jeremiah 7:31: “And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.”

Note how God is kind of clarifying here: I did not ask you to perform human sacrifices, he says. That did not even occur to me as something to ask you to do. The implication being, of course, that people had somehow got it in their heads that that was something he'd asked them to do. The funny thing is that even today some people try to claim that the Bible does actually advocate human sacrifice. They pick out the binding of Isaac (where the whole point is that he isn't sacrificed because it's an incomplete prototype of the cross), the story of Jephthah and his daughter (where the moral is, don't make blank-cheque vows you might not want to keep), the command to give firstborn sons to God in Exodus 22:29 (ignoring the earlier instruction in 13:13 that firstborn animals were to be sacrificed, humans redeemed). There's enough material there to create a niggle, if you don't know the rest of your Bible well enough, the way the anti-gentrification protestors didn't know about Ms. Marvel having opposed Hope Yards from the start.

That said, when Ms. Marvel turned round and denied any endorsement of Hope Yards, the crowd knew they were dealing with a human being, a fallible, changeable, not-always-entirely-truthful human being likely to be looking out for her own interests; their suspicion was justified. When God turns round and denies any endorsement of something, on the other hand, we know he's infallible and unchangeable and always entirely truthful.

Now, obviously the above ramblings have not solved the problem of any of the difficult passages. They have not attempted to identify any specific areas in which the church has followed modern thinking too far, or, conversely, clung to things God doesn't endorse because earlier saints thought he did. They have not really dealt with the problem of any particular niggle. But I hope they might have vaguely indicated a few tools and principles by which various niggles might be dealt with. The point is, people have always been declaring God's approval over things he doesn't actually approve of. It shouldn't surprise us if society's changing ethics sometimes provide the necessary jolt for us to examine those lies and recognise them for what they are. And it shouldn't surprise us if we find ourselves disagreeing with traditional exegetical positions; but at the same time, we need to be humbly conscious that we share the same faults as our predecessors, the same tendency to want to claim God's endorsement of whatever it is we're already doing or want to do. And we need to know our Bibles really, really well - not just the words on the page, but the heart of God, the essence of what he's like, that’s revealed by them - so that any niggle that impugns the perfection of his character can be swiftly debunked.

It does sometimes seem a little convenient that the church has taken up a given stance on an issue at a time when said stance has become widely acceptable - but convenient doesn't necessarily mean untrue. The Bible itself, and not how anyone else happens to have read it over the centuries, is our standard for truth. People have been declaring God's approval over wrong attitudes and practices pretty much since records began; our burden is to aim, with the Spirit's guidance, to correct their mistakes and avoid making more of our own - all the while knowing and trusting that any we do make are forgiven by the blood of Jesus shed on the cross. Now isn't that convenient?

The World's Most Unlikely Radical, or Those Pesky Nicolaitans 27 ½

“But don't you find

it interesting how, most of the time,

your self-interpreting seems to coincide

with what's deep inside

your heart's desires?

Seems rather convenient, doesn't it?”

Beautiful Eulogy feat. Propaganda, ‘Symbols and Signs’, Instruments of Mercy (2013)

Unlikely, is the idea here, because this probably isn't somewhere you'd expect to find a kids' playpark. But I do love kids' playparks in unexpected locations.

Those of you who've been following my blog for some time (hi, loyal readers! Love you lots) may recall that about six months ago, I trotted out a little series in which I espoused some fairly left-field thinking on the matter of church governance. I made some remark at the time to the effect that it would have been entirely feasible to continue publishing posts dealing with various aspects of the same subject for at least the rest of the calendar year, but, for the sake of my sanity and yours, I determined to drag myself away from the topic after a mere five instalments, and spent the following few months’ worth of posts rambling about other matters. As you may already have guessed, however, I thought the present moment an appropriate one to briefly revisit the question of Those Pesky Nicolaitans.

Here's the TL:DR as to my view: I think that Jesus hates ecclesiastical hierarchies. I think that the bestowal of a special leadership status on any individual within a Christian community violates the principle that the body of Christ only has one Head, and the rest of us are all brothers and equals. I think that no exercise of any spiritual gifting entails any assumption of spiritual authority over other believers, and to suppose that it does represents a misuse of the gifting. I think that all this is plainly laid out in scripture, as is the warning that the Church at large is going to get it wrong an awful lot. I think that it’s the responsibility of every one of us as believers to be increasing one another in holiness through the exercise of our giftings - and I think that that's humungously exciting.

This represents, as I say, some fairly left-field thinking, at least in most of my usual social circles, and so the past six months of bloggerly silence on the issue have not in any way corresponded to six months of inertia regarding it in the non-online portions of my life. I have tried to explain why I've not been showing up on Sundays for the past little while to a good number of siblings in Christ, and there's been pushback. I was expecting there would be, and indeed I'm glad there has been. Had none of my Christian friends who subscribe to more conventional views on the matter questioned my decisions or tried to persuade me back round to something approaching their own way of thinking, I'd have feared that they didn't actually care for me and my walk with Jesus as much as I'd supposed they did. Even as I beg people not to worry about me, I have to admit that in their shoes, I'd probably be worried about me too. And they've made some good arguments as to why they should be. I've debated, I've considered, I've gone back to the scriptures and thoroughly frustrated myself over them, I've prayed from my heart and remained just as frustrated, I've reasoned, I've wrestled, and I've teetered on the edge of taking a softer approach on several occasions. Still, as things stand, I'm still where I was; if anything, I've dug my heels in harder.

And the point I really want to make today pertains to something I suspect has played a major role in my granting myself permission to do that digging in of heels, namely a question that more than one person - some Christian, some not - has posed upon my explaining my Strange and Unusual Opinions as sketched out above. Well, they say, isn't this really just a matter of preferred worship style? Why delegitimise what works for somebody else just because it doesn't work so well for you? Maybe for you, with your personality, this more flat, unstructured, fluid format you describe is a really helpful way to engage with God, but might other people with different personalities not benefit more from a format that includes, to a greater or lesser degree, some form of leadership structures?

Now, this actually constitutes a far graver accusation against me than I think the people who have made it have realised. Sometimes, granted, differences in how people do church really are down to nothing more sinister or significant than personal or social or cultural preferences: music style is perhaps the most obvious example. On trivial matters like that, though, we're not to dig our heels in; rather, we're to be as flexible and accommodating as possible for the sake of our brothers and sisters. The statement I'm making about church leadership is that it's a contravention of God's commands, that he literally hates it, that to uphold it is a serious offence against him; if my making such claims were to be attributed merely to my indulging my own preferences about the style of collective worship, what a deplorable, self-seeking false teacher that would cast me as! What a wolf among the sheep, beckoning them astray from the safety of God's path for the sake merely of facilitating my own enjoyment! What a Jezebel, taking the desires of my flesh and declaring God's approval over them, along with his displeasure over anything contrary to them!

The variety of butterfly known as a Jezebel. Still not very fair on the poor butterfly.

It is, it must be admitted, completely true that sometimes the biases contained in my personality, though fairly neutral in and of themselves, can have unfortunate effects on what my practice of my faith looks like. For instance, because I'm naturally a very academic person, I'm prone to turning following Jesus into an intellectual exercise instead of something I pursue with my whole being. This, I recognise, is categorically Bad. It demands the rebukes of others, my own determination to strive against sin, and a whole lot of help from the Holy Spirit, without whom sanctification is entirely impossible, to correct it. And I do try to be really honest and self-critical about where particular facets of my personality might lead me into particular errors. I have previously encouraged you my lovely readers to maintain a healthy degree of cynicism towards any theological argument I make that chimes suspiciously well with my own personal preferences, and I continue to encourage you thus.

But to suggest that my views on Those Pesky Nicolaitans chime suspiciously well with my own personal preferences is basically just hilarious, and I'll tell you for why: if anybody out there has a personality with an inbuilt proclivity towards structure, hierarchy, tradition, and all these things I'm arguing we should throw unceremoniously out of the figurative window, well, it's I. I'm an ISTJ. I love order and neatness and clear organisation, everything having a set place and staying in it. I love arbitrary and pointless tradition, the doing of things in a particular way for no reason other than that that's how they've always been done (within reason, of course). I love having explicitly defined responsibilities that don't overlap with other people's, and designated superiors to go to with problems or queries. I even sort of love being told what to do. Following someone else's lead is naturally my most comfortable posture; typically, I only take initiatives on behalf of a group if I don't trust that the task at hand is going to get done if I don't. Chaos and anarchy and spontaneity and blurredness of lines are all things I naturally recoil from. And so, if the issue at hand were merely the proclivities of my own peculiar personality (and peculiar it certainly is, in both senses), then, crikey, I would surely be the very last person in the world to want to tear down church leadership structures.

I hasten to add that this in itself doesn't constitute a reason to suppose that I'm right. Each of our personalities is naturally going to find some of God's commands easier to hear than others; the mere fact that something goes against one of our personal preferences doesn't automatically single it out as a just and obedient choice. After all, our preferences are different, but God's commands to the Church apply equally to all its members. All the same, though, the clash between my natural inclinations and my theological stance as regards church governance does reassure me that, on this matter at least, I'm probably not just indulging the desires of my own flesh and calling it holiness. I'm the world's most unlikely radical here, and yet a radical I am. Naturally, I love structure and hierarchy and tradition; in other contexts - my old secondary school, for example, or the Brownie and Guide units I help to lead - I have consistently enjoyed and valued and defended them; but when I see them in the Church, I'm seized by this impassioned desire to raze them to the ground and scatter the ashes to the four winds. That's a bit weird. Evidently enough, something has interfered here that has the power to overcome my natural inclinations. And I don't think it's too far fetched to identify said something as the conviction of the Holy Spirit, achieved through the scriptures.

So that's a whole lot of rambling about me and where I'm at; let me leave you with a bit of a broader exhortation on the same theme. My Bible-in-5-years reading plan had me in Numbers 15 this Tuesday just gone, which ends with a command to make tassels on garment corners, “for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the LORD, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after.” It's normal enough for little chunks of instruction to be capped off with “I am the LORD your God” in the Law, but the final verse of this chapter is more emphatic than that: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God; I am the LORD your God.” This in the context, by the way, that God just decreed a man be stoned to death for gathering sticks on Shabbat. The point is, it really, really matters that we be constantly striving and choosing to do what God has commanded we do rather than what our own heart and eyes desire to do. That’s not easy, because naturally, our own heart and eyes will happily encourage us to prostitute ourselves after virtually anything that promises pleasure. So we need to stick constant reminders of God's commands in front of them, tassels or otherwise, because indulging our personal preferences at the expense of obeying him is a sure-fire route to death. The stakes are that high. There are no trivial matters when it comes to what God has commanded. We need to be robustly cynical of our own motivations and ready to challenge fellow-believers about theirs as well. This question of whether my holding of a particular theological view amounts to merely an indulgence of my own fleshly desires is a really important one, a really grave accusation. So thank God that when Jesus died for us, the fleshly self with all its disobedient lusts died too. Thank God that we are born again as spiritual people able to learn to conduct ourselves according to spirit instead of flesh. And thank God that, because through faith in Jesus we have died with him to self and sin and in him been resurrected righteous, that status of righteousness can never be revoked or diminished, any more than our Lord's own status of righteousness ever can.

I am the world's most unlikely radical here. But then, chief of sinners that I am, I'm kind of the world's most unlikely righteous person too, and yet that happened. Turns out all things are possible with God. Now where have I heard that before?