Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Christianity

Charisma: Being Liked and Solomon’s Proverbs

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What is Charisma?

Olivia Fox Cabane, in The Charisma Myth, outlines three qualities she finds important for becoming a charismatic person (Cabane, 13). I would define a charismatic person as “somebody who is well liked or favored in and beyond his or her circles of influence.”

  1. Presence – She never actually defines this, but reading pages 13-17 gives the impression that presence is giving full attention to the people around you. Sometimes being a bit aloof can make somebody likable, but it’s a risk.
  2. Power – “Being seen as powerful means being perceived as able to affect the world around us” (18). In general, this is a trait that makes people likable. We invent gods because we love power.
  3. Warmth – “Warmth…is goodwill toward others” (18).

Cabane’s breakdown of charisma is very helpful. For instance, if somebody were to complain to me of not having friends or of having trouble getting people to like them, I would ask them whether or not they would rate themselves as possessors of these traits. It is certainly the case that people could be excluded unfairly on account of their attempts to be a good person or some form of issue based exclusion. But generally, if somebody is the black sheep in a group, it is because one or more of these traits are lacking.

Charisma and the Christian Life

According to the Bible, these traits are actually an important component of the wisdom. If you are skeptical about learning charisma, recall that as Jesus “grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. (Luke 2:52)” In other words, it’s okay to be well liked and to even grow in the traits that make you likable.

Of course, for the Christian to “be persecuted for righteousness’ sake” is far better than being liked for compromising truth, goodness, or holiness. So, favor with God always trumps favor with man, but they do not always contradict one another.

Charisma in Proverbs:

  1. Presence

    Presence, though not explicitly mentioned, is an important component in Proverbs. The idea is that one who listens and is patient with people can influence them, learn from them, come to like them, and be liked by them.

    1. Pro 25:11 A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.
    2. Pro 18:15 An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.
    3. Pro_18:2 A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.
    4. Pro_20:5 The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.
    5. Pro 25:15 With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.
    6. Pro 25:17 Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor’s house, lest he have his fill of you and hate you.

  2. Power

    Power in the form of finances, knowledge, skill, and political power is consistently recognized by Proverbs. Solomon treats power as a dangerous possession. Those with money and skill who use it for selfishness are unwise, evil, and self-destructive. The question for somebody who wishes to become more powerful is “how will I do it without departing from goodness and true wisdom?

    1. Pro 14:20 The poor is disliked even by his neighbor, but the rich has many friends.
    2. Pro 14:28 In a multitude of people is the glory of a king, but without people a prince is ruined.
    3. Pro 19:6 Many seek the favor of a generous man, and everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts.
    4. Pro 19:7 All a poor man’s brothers hate him; how much more do his friends go far from him! He pursues them with words, but does not have them.
    5. Pro 22:29 Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.
    6. Pro_27:2 Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.

  1. Warmth

    Warmth is definitely key to being liked or favored in Proverbs. It is a characteristic of genuine pleasantness, kindness, and eloquence. This is distinct from the attractive features of the adulterous and the wicked. This is because gracious/warm behavior is just as much a skill to be exploited as it is a characteristic of the godly to be internalized.

    1. Pro 11:16 A gracious (same word as charm Pro 31:20) woman gets honor, and violent men get riches.
    2. Pro 22:11 He who loves purity of heart, and whose speech is gracious, will have the king as his friend.
    3. Pro 25:15 With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.
    4. Pro 28:23 Whoever rebukes a man will afterward find more favor than he who flatters with his tongue.
    5. Pro 28:23 Whoever rebukes a man will afterward find more favor than he who flatters with his tongue.

Religion is Child Abuse and Other Silly Ideas

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A common claim on the internet these days is that raising children in a religious tradition is child abuse.

This same notion comes with a related notion that being religious is a form of brain disorder.

If you do not believe me, look this up. Richard Dawkins has claimed that raising children religiously is worse than pedophilia. Sam Harris says that being religious is worse than rape.

I challenge atheists who actually think this way to stop being lazy and perform their civic duties:

  1. To report child abuse in the form of religious education and religious upbringing to appropriate government authorities.
  2. To attempt, as is the duty of any reasonable citizen, to prevent acts of such child abuse as they occur. Who, in his right mind, would sit back as a child is beaten in public?
  3. To treat religious persons as mentally deficient rather than mocking them, find ways to seek treatment for mental disorders connected to being religious.

Until atheists start to do this, it will be clear that their posturing, insinuating of mental inability on the part of the religious, and their accusations of child abuse are empty rhetoric. My hypothesis is that atheists won’t do these things because despite how many of them possess poor social skills due to an inability to imagine how another person experiences the world, (this might also explain why certain Calvinist types have no personal warmth despite espousing an ethical system based on the command to love God and neighbor) they still have self-preservation skills and don’t want their little tribe to become utterly intolerable.

But if billions of children are being abused by being raised religiously and billions of people have psychological problems for which medication and treatment are required, then there is a huge problem in the world and the best solution that has been offered by Richard Dawkins and company is mockery and ridicule.

Hypocrisy: A working definition

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What a hypocrite is not

We use the word hypocrite a lot. But what does it mean?

John Piper (the ideas guy behind Desiring God) connects the heart in Scripture with the sentiments. When he does this, his apparent background in romantic thought and in “authenticity thinking” comes through. Another author, like Piper, essentially equates hypocrisy with doing something you don’t feel like at the moment:

What can we do when our hearts feel nothing?

What we must not do is think feelings are optional — and just go through the motions, acting as if we are feeling what we are saying and singing.

Jesus called that hypocrisy: “You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me…’” (Matthew 15:7–8) But if our hearts are feeling far from God, and were not supposed to just go through the motions, what else can we do?

But is this really a reasonable definition of hypocrisy? If the heart, in Scripture, is closer to the faculty of reasoning and choosing, then Jesus’ comments above are about the reasoning behind the Pharisee’s actions, not their feelings.

Jesus’ Definition of Pharisee

In fact, Jesus uses the word hypocrite to describe those who do pious deeds purely for the sake of praise by people instead of for God:

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. (Mat 6:5)”

Hypocrisy the Bible is doing pious deeds entirely to be honored by others with no regard for God or the well-being of others.

The Distant Heart

The heart being far from God is a quote from first chapters of Isaiah. There the people follow the sacrificial practices as an excuse to ignore godly character. The solution to their worship problem is given in in Isaiah 1:17:

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause. “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be eaten by the sword; for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” (Isa 1:16-20)

A Final Point

One of the prime commands in the New Testament is self-denial (Mark 8:34). Because our affections are damaged by sin, cultural influence, and neglectful habits we must do it against what we want in the moment. Not only so, but our bodies rebel against us when we want to do hard things. If we make self-denial into a form of hypocrisy then basic Christian spirituality stops making sense.

Paul even notes that the fruit of the Spirit comes to those who “crucify the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24). Not feeling like doing Christ-like things is not hypocrisy. Sometimes people don’t feel like paying taxes, but it’s still moral for them do to so.

If you want to stop being a hypocrite, the best strategy, according to Jesus is to do your good deeds in secret, presumably before you attempt to be the light of the world.

Redeeming Self-Love

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For the Christian, there is a right and wrong way to love yourself or your own life. One can disqualify you from being a disciple of Christ:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)

The other leads you to seek you own highest well-being: God, virtue, wisdom, and so on. 

Whoever obtains wisdom loves himself, and whoever treasures understanding will prosper. (Pro 19:8)

Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the LORD is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.
(Psalms 34:11-19)

Elsewhere, Jesus puts the two ideas into a paradoxical statement:

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for life in the age to come. (John 12:25)

Now, why would you want to keep your life for the age to come unless you loved it? Chesteron once said, “One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.”1.G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxoy ,174 Now, there are several ways to consider this apparent paradox of Jesus. I’ll offer three:

  1. The Radical View
    Jesus means for us to be martyrs for the cause or not be disciples at all. And if you’re not martyred, you’re not really to enjoy this present life, mired as the world is in sin. But rather you are to relentlessly spend yourself and trust only the Holy Spirit to give you joy. 
  2. The Two Natures View
    You must hate your life, insofar as it is defined by sin. To hate your life means something like, ‘hate the aspect of you which continues in its passions, loves to sin, is enslaved to the devil, and so-on.’
  3. The Wisdom View
    This is the idea that a knight, to survive must live as thought he has to concern for his life. In other words, because he loves his life dearly he must fight and risk as though his life meant nothing. Chesteron explains this well, “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaneers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.”2.Chesterton 171

The whole point though is that the motivation to ‘hate your life’ is the very love we have of our lives. In his less paradoxical moments, Jesus entices people to come to him to have life, and that to the full (John 10:10).  And so a love of your life that leads you toward truth, goodness, and beauty, toward disciplined acquisition of virtue, toward a deep and abiding love of God, and toward a willingness to risk lesser goods for greater is good for you. But to love your life as is or so much you will not risk for that very life is ultimately to hate you life and therefore to lose it. Perhaps Paul says it best when he refers to Christ as “he who is your life” (Colossians 3:1-4). If your love of life is the sort of love that loves what God has given you and God himself, then it is good. One might call it redeeming self-love. 

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References

References
↑1 G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxoy ,174
↑2 Chesterton 171

Ancient Sexual Ethics

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“For traditional societies, social justice, and not sexual conduct, is the basis for morality. Consequently, teaching dealing with virginity, marriage, divorce, infidelity, adultery, promiscuity, and rape are concerned not only with the sexual relationships of individuals or couples, but also with the social and economic relationships between the households in the village as a whole.”
Victor Mattews. The Social World of Ancient Israel 1250-587 BCE (Henrickson), 31.

Ancient forms of ethics/law were concerned with the integrity of the whole group rather than the rights of individuals. It is not that individuals did not have rights, it is just that individual desires (the desire to sleep with whomever you wish) were to be regulated on the basis of the impact those desires would have if fulfilled. 

The modern ethic of authenticity (the idea that what I want is uniquely best for me if I seek it in the way that I know best because I am me) leads to a vision of virtue that I predict cannot be sustained in the long term. If everybody gets what they want then only some people can get what they need. And if everybody’s sexual impulses are equally good, then nobody’s are particularly bad or dastardly. This is playing out in a big confusing way in the entertainment and political realms right now.