Storied Theology

Angela says:

Welcome back!

carlos bovell says:

Whenever I hear stuff like this, I am always reminded that all this stuff about self-giving seems to me to assume that you (not you JRDK, but you generic you) are a healthy emotional person to begin with and that all things are more or less stable. I remember a long time ago reading for one of my psychology classes a piece that argued that Christianity is a tremendously emotionally/psychologically unhealthy religion and I fully understand why someone would think this. The serving others idea is not always something people can just go out and try to do without a good deal of social, cultural and psychological preparation, evaluation and deliberation. And this seems to me an all important pre-scriptural phase of self-”criticism”, as it were. I’ve seen and heard some crazy stuff happen in church and in some cases church splits that start with honorable intentions of trying to help people who were in more trouble than could be handled by the people who wanted to help. But then they think that it’s a failure on the part of the gospel when the situation doesn’t shape up so they stick with it, and when it gets worse, they get sucked into a pattern/dynamic that has unexpected negative consequences.

I’m not saying that self-giving should never be done. I simply think it should be acknowledged that there are a lot of damaged, controlling, dysfunctional people in society, and especially in church (preachers?!) and some good healthy boundaries need to be drawn to keep harmful social systems/dynamics from becoming irreversibly entrenched. I have in mind the withering effects of addiction and co-dependency, for example, which are not always easy to spot and which Pentecostal communities in particular may (or may not be) especially prone to. Even the church/religion itself can show some of these characteristics. After all, churches are places where hurting people go and the way that some people hurt can sometimes impact communities in socially and psychologically deleterious ways which can snowball out of control before anyone realizes what’s going on.

“When I set aside my own desires and seek to please my siblings, I also am giving up myself for the honor of my Father whose likeness I see in them. To be like Christ entails aligning myself with God by aligning myself with God’s family–even at the cost of myself.” If I can be honest, this sounds a little idealistic to me or at least needs to be qualified some. I think a person has to be called and properly trained in psychology/counseling to do this kind of thing in a healthy way. Otherwise, one can end up doing more harm than good or having some life-changing/family-changing harm done to them by an addiction/co-dependency situation, for example, that one is simply not equipped to deal with in a healthy way. There is also the matter of deluding oneself that he/she is giving/helping when what they are doing is not really helping at all but rather reinforcing self-identity or merely boosting one’s spiritual ego. I find myself wondering if this is what “short missions trips” do, for example.

mark begemann says:

Thanks for coming back to the blogging world and for this post. While contemplating and praying about joining a specific church in our new (and most likely permanent) home town my focus seems to have drifted from what i can do for the community to what the community can do for me. Thanks for setting me back on track. Very well said.

carlos bovell says:

JDWK:

Thanks for engaging my comments above; I hope you don’t mind a reply.

I am not in a position to remark on what makes one fundamentally Christian and what might surely signify to others that one is not Christian. I am only trying to give voice to my concern that sometimes Christians try to do what I hear you saying in your post and that emotionally unhealthy things result from it and it may (or may not) stem from lacking proper psychological, sociological and anthropological training (not that I claim to have such training):

“To begin with, the traditional, preindustrial families, regardless of their modes of settlement and inheritance, were typically strong group, collectivistic, enmeshed families. Members learned to blur the boundaries of each other’s psychic unity. They intruded on each other’s psychological privacy and attempts at autonomy. Everyone was responsible for the well being of the others, and each was taught to be exquisitely alert and responsive to the implicit demands of others. As we learn from modern forms of such families, a growing child becomes precociously responsive to the needs of others and is fearful of expressing or even experiencing independent desires…As the child became more embedded in the family myth and more dependent of affirmation from family members, he or she did not create an autonomous or secure self that might later function satisfactorily in the extrafamilial world apart from the family. When apart from the family, the individual was not expected to cope with the changes brought about by the individuation appropriate to adolescence and young adult life. The condition produced by such family behavior is a condition of being enmeshed–embedded–encysted.” (B. Malina, “Power, Pain, and Personhood,” 165)

This, I believe, is the socio-cultural background for the familial self-giving motifs you invoke in your post and I recognize a potentially hazardous clash in cultural conditioning, as it were, between that Mediterranean world and our own. Our 21st century American childhood upbringing and our present day child-rearing habits do not appear to me (now I’m not a professional clinician, of course, just an interested reader in these things) to blend very well with the types of social and cultural patterns that Malina identifies above. To wit, advising others to try to mix cultures uncritically as if the gospel unequivocally requires them to do so may (or again may not) constitute [spiritually] what lawyers call an “attractive nuisance,” at least to specific personality types (and that likely goes for personality types of congregations, too).

Christians should do unto others as they would have others do unto them–I’m all for that, so long as things stay healthy. But care should be taken in how some of these biblical “myths” get internalized by typical churchgoers and adherents.

Peace,

Carlos

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