For Gorman, I’d take a look at what he has to say about the communal aspects of justification in Inhabiting the Cruciform God.

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

Chuck DeGroat, at his New Exodus blog, had a great series on cruciformity and abuse that deals with some of the “limits” of self-giving last May.

But in general I don’t think I’d want to say that the call to self-giving is only for the specially trained or specifically trained. It’s the most basic element to our Christian calling–what makes us Christian.

I’m influenced here by Richard Hays and Michael Gorman (besides Jesus and Paul… )