Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Christianity

From the outside in?

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The pattern we typically set for people who wish to be more like Christ is this:

Start from the inside out.

It’s not unreasonable. Jesus says roughly that to the Pharisees:

Matthew 23:25-26 ESV “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. (26) You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.

And I think the advice in generally sound. But, sometimes people’s desire to be like Jesus is evidence that the Holy Spirit is already working on the inside and they need something to do to actualize the potential God is putting there.

First, a passage from Proverbs:

Proverbs 24:30-31 ESV I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense, (31) and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns; the ground was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down.

What the passage is getting at is that the sluggard won’t even care for his own property. And the problem with the sluggard is a spiritual problem. But it would seem that taking care of the outside, the literal outside of his house (his field), might help his inside. And Proverbs does mention something like that:

Proverbs 24:27 ESV Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house.

The meaning is very practical, but it may have a spiritual application as well.

If so, for some Christians, especially young men and women, maybe the first steps in discipleship might really be things like:

  1. Clean your apartment.
  2. Clean out your car.
  3. Change your oil.
  4. Get out of debt.
  5. Get to work/class on time.
  6. Groom yourself.

One somebody turns their life into something resembling order, it might be easier to help them overcome something like despair, arrogance, porn, or anxiety.

This Life and the Next

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1 Timothy 4:7-8 ESV Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; (8) for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

Mark 10:29-31 ESV Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, (30) who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. (31) But many who are first will be last, and the last first.

The Bible isn’t shy about talking about material, this worldly blessings associated with attaining godliness and wisdom. My problem with the prosperity gospel is not that it tells people that God will bless them materially. It’s that it tells them God will bless them materially through the wrong channels. I’ve spent hours discussing this issue with people who’ve heard the prosperity gospel their whole life. They frequently wonder why Ephesians 2:8-9 isn’t working to make them rich, better at school, fix their car, etc.

But the whole book of Proverbs tells you how to get rich, how to be content when you’re not rich, how to study and learn anything, how to make friends, be a good husband, and so-on. Ephesians 2:8-9 explains how one aspect of our covenant with God, through Christ works. We don’t earn our way into God’s family. We couldn’t, because by sinning in any case, we’ve fundamentally rejected the concept of goodness, which means that no amount of good deeds on our part could allow us in. God has to accept us into his family and offer us forgiveness. He does require works from us, but works as a result of faith or an aspect of true faith, not works as a counter balance to evil we’ve done. Galatians 5:6 says that saving faith is faith working through love.

But all of that is beside the point.

The Bible is clear that there are present and future tense blessings for the Christian before death and before the coming of Christ, but with persecutions.

Jesus lists those blessings fairly thoroughly. Paul is a bit more vague. But even without referencing Jesus’ list, I can think of several “this-worldly” blessings from Christianity:

  1. In Mark 10:45, Jesus says to become a servant of all to achieve greatness. If you start a business with the goal of serving people in the most effective way you can, it’ll likely be more successful than a business whose only goal is making short term financial gains. The principle of being beneficent to those around you instead of arrogant in order to achieve greatness really does have wide reaching implications.
  2. In Matthew 7:12, Jesus says to treat others the way you wish you were treated. And while the most immediate application is to other Christians in the church, it is not untrue that this command is very helpful in all contexts. Examples: be the employee you’d want at work, be the boss you’d want, be the spouse you’d want, be the friend you’d want, and so-on. Such a principle enlarges your imagination and helps you make friends. It’s just true.
  3. Christianity defines God the Father in terms of love, justice, and transcendent beauty. For people who struggle to cope with having been raised in a single parent home or with a father who wounded them, this vision of a fundamentally loving presence in, through, above, and at bottom of reality can strengthen young men and women. This idea, from a psychological perspective, places a disciplinary perspective upon all of life’s challenges. People who take that frame of mind, that life’s challenges can perfect them, have a growth mindset.
  4. Christianity provides a sense of meaning, which is one of the core components of happiness.
  5. Christianity resulted in the best civilizations the world has ever seen.

Any others?

Learning to Pray

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My wife and I were speaking with a psychologist friend, whose colleague is an atheist.

She’s never studied theology in depth and so she found herself frustrated with his argument that the archetypal underpinnings of Christianity and its similarity of aspects of previous myths show that it isn’t true. This led to a brief discussion about prayer which led me to some thoughts about the meaning and experience of prayer and how to help Christians learn to pray:

  1. We tend to talk to ourselves, so when we pray and it feels like we’re talking to ourselves, that’s not as awkward a state as we think it is.
  2. We frequently talk with imagined versions of people we know, rehearsing arguments we want to make, things we wish we said, bouncing ideas off of idealized versions of parents, fictional characters, and so-on.
  3. We also reason to ourselves about our ideals and our relationship to various rules: am I speeding? was that the right thing to do?
  4. We, if we’re really self-conscious, have conversations with ourselves about an ideal version of ourselves: “will this make me who I want to be…do I care?”
  5. This can lead us to moral and practical introspection of the sort that is very helpful.
  6. We frequently wish, in an impersonal way, for things. “I wish I had less debt.”
  7. Psychologically, when we wish for something or make a goal, our perceptions tend to filter the world in terms of that goal. If you want a motorcycle and set yourself to getting, you see more motorcycles, more open opportunities to buy one, and so-on. And so, there is a psychological explanation for why prayers seem to be coincidentally answered. For a brief look into how this happens with goal based behavior, here’s the gorilla study.
  8. So, if all prayer does is change your perceptions it’s worth it.
  9. Prayer, defined as making requests of what we perceive to be the greatest possible being (God), forces us to compare ourselves not just to the ideal people around us, but to the greatest possible ideal. And so prayer, in the way previously mentioned, reconfigures us to look for opportunities to seek the highest possible ideal we could imagine for ourselves.

And again these aren’t theological reasons to pray, per se. They’re natural experiences most of us have. And they may be conversation pieces to have with somebody who struggles with prayer. The theological realities of prayer, that God hears our weakest requests and honors them are not negated by recognizing some of the more natural elements of prayer. If you believe that we are what God made us, then all these natural results of prayer are God ordained anyway.

Another brief thought, Christian devotion times don’t have to be all prayer in the sense of “asking God for things.” Christian devotion includes soliloquy, prayer, meditation (mulling over a subject), contemplation (focusing the mind on aiming at God), letting your mind wander in silence, introspection, study, family discussion, and so-on.

Our devotion time doesn’t have to be “15 minutes of prayer…followed by listening for God to tell us something specific.”

Two Ways of Speaking About God

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There are, it seems, two main ways the Bible speaks about God:

  1. Phenomenologically – with reference to how God is experienced. This category utilizes metaphor, myth, positive language, etc.
  2. Ontologically – with reference to God’s nature or being. This category typically uses negative language or positive language which implies non-describable realities.

Here is an example of each:

  1. Deuteronomy 1:30-31 ESV The LORD your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, (31) and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the LORD your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you went until you came to this place.’
  2. Hosea 11:9 ESV I will not execute my burning anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not a man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.

Neither of these is superior to the other. One is in terms of an attempt at scientific accuracy, which is helpful for guarding against idolatry. The other is psychologically true and perhaps historically true in a way that is meaningful to finite minds.

The usefulness of each way of speaking about God isn’t always obvious, but I’ll try.

Speaking of God as a mythical bird or angelic creature whose wings can keep you safe (Psalm 36:7), is more experientially true for many people than an exact explanation of how we think or hope that providence and eternal rewards will work out.

But some people might believe that God really has wings in such a way that God is a being in the universe subject to nature and therefore not God. In such cases, language like Paul’s might be best:

Acts 17:24-25 ESV The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, (25) nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

Note that the positive description of God as the one “who made the world” implies that God is not the world or reducible to any feature of the world. And this God doesn’t live in temples or need things. And so the language is philosophical, ineffable, and negative. God is a mysterious other, who nevertheless exists.

But as helpful as that language is, it still misses some of what Hosea said near the passage quoted above (the one which pointed out that God isn’t a man):

Hosea 11:8 ESV How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.

This passage portrays God as incapable of passing righteous judgment upon Ephraim and Israel, Admah and Zeboiim, due to deep personal love and even need.

And so, there are two ways of speaking about God, and both matter.

Sick with sin: is the ‘sin as sickness’ model true or helpful?

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It is frequent in Christian circles to speak of sin as a deadly illness or sickness from which we need God’s help, healing, and deliverance. 

The Bible is not unfamiliar with this concept. For instance, sin and righteousness are often conceived of in terms of pure and impure. And pure and impure are often connected to leprosy and other diseases of the body. 

So it’s not unreasonable to think of sin in terms of illness or disease. But, as I’ve read some of Thomas Szasz‘s work on the “illness model” of psychiatric disorders, I’ve had to rethink things a bit. He argues that viewing observable behaviors primarily as illnesses creates several philosophical, legal and practical treatment problems in his own field, psychiatry (Szasz):

  1. Mental illness is a medical metaphor for persistent disturbing behavior.
  2. But it’s not medical in itself insofar as mental illnesses cannot be found on the coroners’ table, in blood tests, microscope slides, or even in brain scans. 
  3. Doctor declarations of incompetence make people’s non-illegal behavior into ‘diseases’ that allow them to be institutionalized by government power only to be released upon their recovery. 
  4. Outside of drug use, psychiatry uses conversational methods of healing more similar to philosophy, education, or religion. 
  5. Identifying too closely with one’s illness can lead to finding excuses for negative behavior as though it were something for which one cannot take responsibility, but are viewed by the patient as endemic to their person. 

That summary of Szasz’s book is too simple, but I think it’s good enough for my purposes here. You don’t have to agree with any aspect of the argument with respect to the fields of psychiatry or psychology. But what is useful is the parallel to the way we speak of sin.

Usually the Bible speaks of sin in terms of human failure to pursue the good (accidentally and on purpose). And most of the time that failure is precisely spoken of in terms of rebellion against the good (on purpose). The exception to this might be Romans 6-8 where sin is conceived of as a sort of cosmic power which has extreme influence upon the human person by nature of the habits they have appropriated into their bodies. 

My read on things is that seeing sin as a disease is useful insofar as we’re speaking of having a problem that cannot be solved solely by the person who has it and if we perceive as a disease for which the patient is still responsible for following doctor’s orders. And Jesus’ orders are to deny yourself, sin no more, seek first the kingdom of God, cut off that which causes you to stumble, and so-on.

But I think that seeing sin as a disease has a few disadvantages, as it distances us from sorry for our misdeeds (they’re just a state I am in), it removes notion of rebellion for which we deserve punishment from the equation, and while it could help us see the need to incrementally change our habits, it tends to decrease the importance of individual sins in the psychic radar of our minds. 

So, is sin a disease? No. Disease is one metaphor among many, but it is perhaps best to define sin the way John does, ‘sin is lawlessness.’ In other words, sin is any deed which goes against God’s law or any habit of being which disregards it altogether. If we see sin as a crime I think there is a much more urgent inner need to repent.

References

Szasz, Thomas. The Myth of Mental Illness. Perential, 1974.

When you use the Bible politically

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I saw the article below:

One of the most amusing elements of the last few years has been watching the political left and theological left, both of which find themselves appalled by the actual content of the Bible, try to use the Bible politically. Now, the right does it in its own unproductive way. But this article is particularly egregious because it’s evident that the person didn’t read the New Testament. For instance, Jude attributes the plagues of Egypt to Jesus (Jude 1:5). Also, the gospels are only about  third of the New Testament, and one of them contains almost no healing.

The question of refugees isn’t my point. That’s a really good question with a multilayered answer and hundreds of sub-questions. My point is that ham-fisted uses of the Bible which are meant to guilt trip Christians into political action aren’t effective and they’re disingenuous.