People are looking for help because people are a mess, all of us. Whether we realize it or now we are all self-destructive, ardent self-salvationists. We instinctively try to rescue ourselves from what we see as threatening us and we do it in different ways.

What I’m about to write is very much a work in progress, working through some ideas out loud. It’s a way of self-processing, thinking through a bunch of things. That’s part of what a blog’s for. Anyway, end of disclaimer.

I watch people working to rescue themselves and I see patterns. Part of what we also struggle with in the church is religious pluralism and the “competitors” for the kind of rescue people are seeking.

Part of being helping I think is being honest. People get help with themselves through all kinds of things. Help is, at a certain level, help. We’ll have to get into the deeper weeds of “help” later as we go because part of what we’ll see is that all “help” is not the same. Some “help” brings temporary relief but brings longer term complications. We know this medically, we see it socially, it’s important to keep that in mind as we get into the “help” discussion especially as it relates to religion and worldview.

Sources of our Distress

Experientially fear and pain appear as great enemies of us in the age of decay. People are afflicted and are in pain. Sane people experience fear. In the age of decay we lose everything and nothing is secure. Time ravages our bodies, our relationships, threatens our dreams, our hopes, and our idols. Handling pain, not just physical pain of course, is a major concern. Likewise managing and trying to defeat fear too is central to much human civilization. Fear and pain drive us to many things, that seeking itself then brings us to different places, and that is a lot of what I’ll be postulating a bit here.

We naturally seek to address fear and pain, but not all means are the same.

Lower order, dangerous powers

I’m no expert on brain structures, and what I hear may be a bunch of bunk, but I hear about parts of the brain in what is presented as an evolutionary framework between lower order, instinctive, more automatic functions and higher order, more highly developed areas of the brain. The lower order functions are vital for our survival as “animals”, are tremendously powerful in their capacity to “take over” immediate behavior and powerfully adjust our perception of reality. The fight/flight response comes to mind here with respect to pain and fear. When we are in pain we draw back, when we are afraid we respond.

The fight/flight mechanism often results in anger and violence. We instinctively and immediately respond to a threat and the response is automatic and powerful. Difficulties come, however, when these these responses go beyond the immediate threat of a speeding car or an attacking dog. When these responses become part of our way of addressing ordinary life, life breaks down, relationships are impossible to maintain, and there is no peace in the mind.

I remember listen to an ” NYC Radiolabs” and they were talking about the brain and drugs. Drugs trigger things in the brain. Think about anger, sex, chemicals (alcohol, drugs), etc. These are lower order powers that trigger deep structures in our brains. They can powerful bring an experience of control, comfort, escape and address pain and fear. In many cases the things themselves are not bad, but they can be abused and here is where we get into the language of abuse and addiction. We self-medicate through these lower order powers and when we do so in an abusive or addictive way we destroy ourselves. This doesn’t seem hard to understand.

I also categorize distraction at this level. Again, there are many wonders in this world but we as a society through technology have really perfected the practice. Movies, books, entertainment, games, culture making, work, etc. None of this is bad in and of itself, but when it becomes a regular way of medicating ourselves, finding comfort, addressing fear and pain, problems can arise. If we are busy enough we can keep the pain and fear at bay and move along. Long term, of course, and in some cases this is dangerous. We also call this denial.

Many aspects of our civilization are acquainted with this approach and rightly warn against it. The medical community knows about it and approaches it with its tools. Religions likewise have long attempted to address it through morals, taboos, teachings, etc. We can appreciate the danger of the lower order approaches to addressing fear and pain.

A word about other religions. I know that Christian exclusivists (of which I count myself as one) have long had difficulty in figuring out how to approach non-Christian religions. I think it is important to recognize that religion making is an aspect of culture making and much religion is generated by general revelation and therefore out not necessarily to be dismissed out of hand. A fair critique of other religions I think recognizes that people have developed practices in order to address pain and fear in the age of decay and a good bit of what they may be practicing and proposing should be considered within that realm. Biblical wisdom literature freely and overtly takes from “wisdom” of other pagan peoples. I don’t think we need to be embarrassed by this. I think it’s a part of human civilization, the capacity for which was built into us by the creator. I will get into some of these issues a bit later in this little project because there is more to say.

Middle level powers

Some people never get beyond the lower level powers. Some of these people are addicts. All of these people are miserable. The lower level powers can in the short terms deal with a lot, but many of the powers are too strong and we quickly abuse them to our own longer term misery. At some point many people being to realize this and begin to look in different places for longer term, more life giving, more communally friendly powers to address their fear and pain.

Some lower powers get domesticated and are leveraged and employed in ways that are less destructive. Please don’t understand “lower” in my mind to work on a gnostic or material/spiritual spectrum. I mean “lower” in terms of the language of brain evolution as it is employed today. Anger, sex, chemicals, all of our means of distraction are not evil or “part of the body”, they are aspects of who we and are in my religious framework gifts from God. “lower” means closer to the “brain stem” (again, I probably don’t know what I’m talking about here) and therefore instinctively able to take us over automatically. Middle level powers appropriate some of these things in ways that don’t wreak so much havoc in our lives.

Items on my middle level powers are these (probably not a complete list)
Music
talking, community, psychotherapy
meditation, breathing,
exercise
learning and insight

In this middle way we begin to approach our fear and pain and more areas of the mind are informing each other. The sources of fear and pain may or may not be addressed, but the lower order powers are not adding to the fear and pain by simply reacting to them.

You will notice that the elements of this list are very much common to many religions. Through these middle level powers people can make real progress in dealing with their stuff.

One of the real water shed places for dealing with fear and pain is self-awareness and these middle level powers help in this way. In the lower level powers people are for the most part reactive and that mindless reactivity often gets them into deeper trouble. They cannot “read the room” or figure out what other things are going on. The mid level powers here open up our capacity to see ourselves and our interchange with our environment and hopefully, potentially to stop doing stupid things.

Employing these mid level powers can also help make us “better people”. People who are living out of their lower level powers are often near impossible to be with. They are functional solipsists. All that matters is their fear and pain and the immediate escape from it. Community suffers. People who get to the level of managing fear and pain with middle level powers can sustain community, in fact community is often required for these approaches to work.

When we look at these through the religious aspect I think its appropriate for Christians to recognize the “good” that other religions do for people. I remember meeting a young Jehovah Witness who came to my door to proselytize and I saw his tattoos. I said to him, “you didn’t get these as a Jehovah Witness did you.” and he said he didn’t. He shared with me that his life was a mess, in drugs and gangs and being a Jehovah’s Witness helped him get his life together.

Christian exclusivists (like myself) sometimes have trouble with this. Christians regularly like to use their testimony stories of people finding peace and order through the church as a validation of the truth of their religion. Stories of other people finding peace and order (through these middle level powers) however are not exclusive to the Christian faith by any means. You will find people who find sanity through twelve step programs, through new age religions, through Islam, through sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and LDS church, and also through finding a spouse, through reading a book, etc. Middle level powers are not exclusively Christian, they are human and have likely always been a part of what I see in my tradition as common grace or in Jonathan Edward’s terminology as “common virtue”.

A Word about Idolatry

Tim Keller’s teaching on idolatry has been a very helpful framework for me in terms of practical ministry. Idols are good things that we make into ultimate things. Idolatry can function at all levels of human living. In the lower order powers idolatry is pretty easy to see and is very destructive. We usually call that addiction. Idolatry also functions among the mid-level powers. These idols, however, are more sophisticated. We can live with them longer. They are, finally, however, idols. They can’t really bring shalom, restoration, renewal. They can’t finally actually deal with pain and fear. Our hearts must be located in something beyond the age of decay. When we locate our hearts with in the age of decay (Romans 1) we bind ourselves to it and our destruction follows the destruction of all of those things subject to decay.

A Word about Fear and Pain

I have to a degree called “fear and pain” the enemies in this piece because this is what we tend to be fleeing from. I don’t think fear and pain are really the enemies but actually gifts that help to make us aware of the deeper enemies and dangers. If we are aware of our danger we ought to be afraid. Pain is a way by which we are aware that we are experiencing loss.

Higher order powers

At this level we begin to get into the areas of religion, philosophy and worldview. What is finally true, what is finally ultimate, what matters.

It is at this point that fear and pain are no longer the threats, but seen as ways we interact with deeper threats that aren’t immediately obvious to us by simple observation. Lower level powers (and when we are under their power) are unaware of mid-level and higher level powers. Mid-level powers know what is below them but struggle with what is above them. Higher order powers know what is beneath them, manages them, engages them, but all in the service of their own level. In some ways this is the level of life where things get weird.

I am often amazed at the programability of humanity. People have had may ways of viewing reality and the diversity of these ways is tremendous. Look at the history of the world and the diversity of worldviews and how they have been employed no only on an individual level but on a communal levels. Mayans practiced human sacrifice at an incredible level. Egyptians built the pyramids. The emperor of china built the terra-cotta army. It’s at this level that we begin to grapple with our idols and to grapple with why we are here and what we are doing. This level ought rightly to inform our practices on the other levels and begin to integrate life as a whole. Its at this level that our worldviews have practical implications that trickle down.

Now we begin to ask questions about meaning, purpose, truth, destiny, where pain and fear are servants, not masters. Now we begin to wonder “Is there something beyond the level where our sciences help us?” “Is the foundation of the universe personal or impersonal?” “Does the eternal exist?”

All “salvations” in the lower and mid-level powers are within the box of science and human experience. It is at the higher level powers that we begin to explore the box itself.

I think it is at this level that all inclusivisms vanish and we are all exclusivists. It is at this point where the resurrection, the end of the age of decay, the renewal of all things can begin to be seen for the claim that it is, ultimate.