Really an amazing blog post that if you take the time to process it will really make you think. It’s on intelligent puddles and early religion.
Peter Enns with a wonderful treatment of a seminar given by Walter Brueggemann.
The heart of the Bible is not the presentation of history but a font of imagination that hosts a world other than the one in front of us. By “imagination” Brueggemann does not mean “irreal” but quite the opposite. He claims that the world we live in, the world where the empires of man rule, is the parody. All empires are acts of imagination: they present a world that lures humanity into its false hopes and lays claim to our hearts and souls as the unquestioned status quo.
Current Dominant Position: Public Policy should be based on “secular morality” or “public reasons” on important matters
John Rawls’ “Political Liberalism” position:
One of the core principles of the liberal democracy is that all persons are to treat each others as free and equal.
Almost all legislation is coercive in one way or another
The reasons that I have for a piece of coercive legislation should be the reasons that you also can accept. If I support it for my reasons and you can’t, then I am not treating you as free and equal. I’m viewing my position for it as more important than yours and this violates the “free and equal” value or ideal.
In our religiously pluralistic society religious reasons by their nature are disqualified from this.
What’s left then would be reasons that we can all accept. Public reasons, those inherent in the consensus of liberal democracy would be the only reasons we could appeal to when debating important matters. Another terms for this would be “secular morality”.
Wolterstorff’s Three Objections
1. Idealized people vs. Actual People: There’s a deep paradox in this position. Of the actual people who are supposed to be participating in this process we only know a few of them and therefore only a few of their reasons. Moreover we also know that some of these people have really poor or lousy reasons for things (our judgment of course). Everybody who holds this position notes that we have to add some sort of qualifier to it or we’d be stymied when we tried to actually arrive at some legislation.
We add some idealizing conditions like “offer reasons that if citizens were rational or well informed would accept…”
If you think that there are reasons they would accept and on the basis of this you pass this coercive legislation then in fact you are coercing these ACTUAL people (who are not the idealized ones who were the basis of which you acted upon) [pvk: What you’ve done then is violated your “free and equal” value.]
Book by Robert Jones “Liberalism’s Troubled Search for Equality” on the debate that preceded the passage in favor of physician assisted suicide. He notes that the debate was highly argued, not just sound bytes, and what he discovers is that there is no such thing as “secular morality” there are “secular moralitIES”. Some of the people were utilitarians, some were Ayn Rand’s egoists, some were romantic expressivists, a whole bunch of religious moralities, some natural law theorists, others Protestant divine command, nobody saying anything so flat-footed saying “God told me assisted suicide was wrong so I’m against it…”
There isn’t anything like a shared morality or there aren’t enough.
You aren’t going to get to the answer on physician assisted suicide from the idea of liberal democracy. If I thought there was such a thing as a thick enough public morality or a shared public reason, use it whenever possible but there isn’t such a thing.
2. A religious person ought to have a right to express their point of view and be a religious person in their own way. A religious person can’t think about important matters of public policy without thinking in these terms and a foundational aspect of liberal democracy is affording all peoples the opportunity to express themselves and engage in the public discussion. To silence people on the basis of their religious commitments would be to violate this tenet of liberal democracy.
3. A public good argument (as compared to #2 which was a rights argument) Is there a social value to allow people to express this? (Volf)
Yes, two things happen when they do it in the right way.
a. When I listen to something from another religious perspective I learn something that I couldn’t learn if I had asked them to communicate it only in a secular way.
MLK Jr.’s speeches were typically Christian, lots of people were inspired by them without converting to Christianity. If we muffle the distinct takes we’ve seriously impoverished ourselves.
b. Allowing these other voices into the public debate forces them also to not just shout, but to think through their positions with greater care, to articulate it. There was a process in Oregon. The first statements were pretty primitive but the process helped the different sides improve their own arguments and positions.
What Conditions are Necessary to host Wolterstorff’s vision of the process? (Volf’s question)
(Volf) If you let the religious people speak their minds are you risking violence and war? What conditions do we need for this to be a fruitful process?
(Wolterstorff) Democracy is a richer concept than just voting. A curious feature of the Rawl’s position is that they talk very little about votes. The goal is consensus because only consensus would legitimate liberal democracy. Why? Because absent consensus someone is being coerced and in that case you’re violating “free and equal”.
W thinks a fair vote is the essence of democracy. Then what’s essential is that the losers are willing to live with losing the vote. They aren’t deeply angry. They don’t try to upset the process. They’re willing to lose the vote on the assumption that they won’t lose every vote.
Tolerance is key. They will continue to work with the others on the project of their liberal democracy.
“When I watch Iraq from a distance it looks like it is constantly teetering on the edge of the losers not willing to lose the vote.” Always the threat of pulling out. That’s the deepest menace to a democracy.
(Volf) So there has to be sense in the general public that we have a stake in the democratic process. If you have a deeply divided context could you still have this robust public voice?
(Wolterstorff) Probably not. The history of how liberal democracy emerged in the west is that “it will take too much blood to continue the current policy”, in other words without this we’re endlessly slaughtering each other. Western Europeans began to say “what else?”
(Volf) They had practical reasons to embrace it. Could it also be true that if religious voices are not allowed to be heard the tendency might be turn into politically aggressive fundamentalists?
(Volf) To what degree is this dependent upon the soil it had in order to thrive? Is it transportable?
I don’t think any of us know the answer to this question? Is there something peculiar to Judeo-Christian tradition? It’s not clear that democracy can’t flourish in another context.
1. It did in fact emerge in a crisis situation where Europe was full of slaughter.
2. US liberal democracy is most articulate by the highly articulate founders here. Here it is a rights based democracy. Lots of good historians have sown that the idea of natural rights were articulated in the canon law (church law) lawyers in the 12th century. They began talking about the rights of aliens, the rights of the poor, etc.
Suppose you have a culture that does not think in terms of rights, does not think on terms of “violating somebody”, there are moral cultures where rights plays no role. Would it be possible for liberal democracy to emerge in a culture where the idea of “rights” is absent.
The Africaaners in the 70s refused to talk in terms of rights. They only wanted to talk about charity… How can you have liberal democracy when you’re thinking along those lines?
Islam in fact has all the potential for a system of rights.
What about Exclusivist Claims Within Religions?
(V) What might need to happen to a religious faith so that it has a faith in liberal democracy? How do you think about exclusivist religious claims and the need for pluralism as a political project?
Most religions of course think that they have it right, naturally. You can say that and say that it’s profoundly wrong to say that we need to put other religious peoples under coercion or to keep them as second class citizens then no matter what religion they happen to hold then I can’t do bad things to them without violating my own relationship with God if they are image bearers.
(V) A certain sense of religious transformation that needs to happen that is authentically religious.
For everyone at least in the Abrahamic religions that human beings are, one and all, beloved by God and created in the image of God. That’s not an alien view to the religion but are within your own religion.
Don Elium is a marriage counselor from Walnut Creek. He blogs and often has some good stuff on relationships. In this one on mistrust and betrayal he highlights that “comparison thinking” is a significantly different step in a relationship from simple mistrust. It is one thing to let your partner down or let the relationship down, it is another thing to decide to compare your partner against a slate of alternative futures.
In this sense, The Hunger Games is kind of brilliant, even while Katniss is kind of maddening. It is a picture of how social media affects our thinking about ourselves. The picture—Katniss herself—is not encouraging. While she is courageous, skilled, and loyal, she is also confused and directionless she has little sense of identity. When a generation’s main mode of self-expression is a Facebook post, it is unsurprising that we do not understand ourselves. It is impossible to practice the examined life through a Tweet.
The logical implication of this sort of world is to doubt the nature of reality and resort to role-playing rather than character formation. If all of life is performance, it becomes difficult to tell the difference between the two. And there is nothing to ground a lasting sense of identity or purpose; people shift their personalities to adapt to the circumstance, playing different roles for different audiences. One character spends much of the third book fighting the effects of brainwashing, trying to determine which memories are true and which were invented. In the finale, Katniss and her companions disguise themselves as refugees as they race through the Capitol under siege; following a violent encounter, they keep the disguise but pick up weapons, a discordant mix. “Who are we supposed to be now?” Katniss asks. Who, indeed?
On Hope vs. Despair
Where this trilogy differs sharply from something like The Lord of the Ringsor Harry Potter is in the kind of view of the world it conveys in this epilogue. There is no scouring of the Shire, no return of a king. There is not even a resurrection to do final battle with Voldemort, but something closer to the burning of Hogwarts. These books are morally ambiguous and cynical. It is not even clear if the rebels are actually good guys, nor who is responsible for one particularly horrifying event late in the final book (another example of the epistemological skepticism inherent in life-as-performance).
As the story fades out in an inconclusive and troubling ending, it is not clear if the battles were ever worth fighting. The cost of the war is extremely high, as most of the major characters end up dead or psychologically crippled. Nowhere in these books can we find the equivalent of Sam Gamgee’s stirring declaration—”There’s something good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for!”—in the film version of The Two Towers. Instead, Katniss ends the trilogy as a kind of embittered pacifist misanthrope, damning all of humanity for its endless cycle of death and violence and unable to come to terms with her role in it all. This is a time-honored perspective on life, found in better writers like Voltaire and perhaps Hemmingway, and to Collins’ credit it does not come off as trite or clichéd, but it is a view I, and most Christians, do not share. Despair offers precious little nourishment.
We’re not as natural as we think
Again, Books and Culture (really one of the best outfits running) review on Vegetables
Indeed, as Richard Wrangham pointed out in his 2009 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, to idealize a supposedly “primitive” diet is to miss all that is culturally and biologically important about how humans eat and why. Adhering to a raw diet requires near-constant chewing; calorically dense foods generally must be cultivated to be so and cooked for optimal energy benefit. Even the most humble, most seemingly “natural” of foods have long and frequently surprising cultural histories.
Stumbling Towards Shalom
What it took to enforce the English abolition laws in Books and Culture.
Americans, especially evangelical Americans, are heirs of a commendable tradition that valorizes the noble individual (like Wilberforce) and the voluntary association (like his Clapham Sect), and regularly one hears of a new evangelical non-governmental organization dedicated to “stopping trafficking.” But trafficking will be stopped, if and when it is stopped, by a dauntingly vast army of patient bureaucrats and by officers of the peace who put themselves in harm’s way and are willing to mete out harm when necessary. The best NGOS understand this and are dedicated to strengthening judicial and law-enforcement systems; but every time I find another Twitter user whose 160-character bio includes the phrase “abolitionist” I wonder if they know how boring, how costly, and how institutional that work must be to be finally done.
Food, Fear and Spirituality
Books and Culture again. Food again. Review of Fear of Food.
Personally, I would pay more attention to the interests and enthusiasms of the lay public, the consumers of these dietary problems, whose concerns and obsessions shift enormously over time. Some years ago, Ruth Clifford Engs published an intriguing account of Clean Living Movements through American history, those eras of fanatical concern about healthy food, bodily purity, sexual reform, and (usually) avoidance of alcohol and intoxicants, themes that are usually closely linked to religious revivalism.[1] One such wave swept the country from 1830 through 1860, another in the early 20th century, and yet another began in the mid 1970s. Each in turn left its residue in terms of religious movements, and also of food products. The 19th-century movement, for instance, bequeathed such famous names as Kellogg of the cereal and Graham of the crackers.
In other words, America’s ambiguous attitudes toward food (healthful but at the same time potentially lethal) are intimately bound up with its spiritual and moral concerns. Only by appreciating that cultural dimension can we understand what scientific claims will strike ordinary consumers of news as credible and (dare I say) palatable at any given time. It’s much more than just America’s “Puritan streak.”
How the Internet Might Change College Education
David Brooks in the NYT on online college. It strikes me that this is not a new thing for the church. The church has been playing with this for a while now too and it seems like with most of the dislocation and alterations the Internet brings the changes are hardly clear cut.
Nick Wolterstorff on Religion in the Public Sphere
Christianity and the Tooth Fairy: Has Science Made Christianity Obsolete
KEZ Meeting today. Continuing to work to figure out how the CRC and RCA can work together better in Northern CA. Always a treat to get together with my colleagues.
Wonderful piece on Her.meneutics blog on Marilynn Robinson’s address at the FFW2012.
Did some sermon work in the wee hours this AM. Reflecting on the distance between Paul and the diaspora Jews he reached out to in Pisidian Antioch from Jesus and how in his sermon in Acts 13 he bridged that gap.
“Tom’s Targum” on NT Wright’s New Testament translation in Books and Culture (paywall).
Ann Voskamp simply is an amazing blogger. If you have a blog reader, hers is a “must” subscription. http://www.aholyexperience.com/
Miracles. See the videos of Craig Keener’s new book. video 1video 2, video 3, video 4, video 5 (miracles as signs), video 6 (western prejudice, “Only ignorant and barbarous peoples believe in miracles” said David Hume),
Kristen Tennant on “Religion without stories…” (the comments are good too) It follows news reports on a study that suggests highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than they are from dogma. In the comments on this posting someone has done some helpful sleuthing on the report to check out some of what the actual report says as contrasted with the newsy write-ups. It’s an interesting subject.
Doctrine and Compassion
For all of my professional career I’ve had a visible position as a provider of emergency aid (3rd world missionary, pastor in an economically struggling community) and I was raised by a father who did this all of his life. Providing emergency assistance has been part of my life all of my life. What have I noticed? People who do this for a living, or have it as an inescapable aspect of their life very quickly develop “doctrine” with respect to their generosity. The number of requests (and their position making them available in an inordinate number of requests, often far beyond what they are able to respond to) creates in them a more systematic approach to the relationships. There are down sides to this too.
What often happens to people in this situation is that they learn to temper the compassionate impulse. Talk to workers in psych unites, nurses with the elderly. We get conditioned to things, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. This give us an insight into the emergence of “doctrine”, the importance of good doctrine (don’t abuse the weak) and the reason for indoctrination (not really a bad word if the doctrine is good). We have in our anti-institutional culture maligned the innocent word “doctrine”. Doctrine is simply a considered set of beliefs or best practices in approaching a relationship, a context, or a body of knowledge.
Generally speaking people who participate in religious organizations probably have far more exposure to philanthropic asks. Answer the phone or take in the mail at a church. Every day requests come from all over looking for mostly cash assistance. Sometimes from individuals (power bills, rent, food, gas, bus fare) other charitable organizations, missionaries and ministries of all stripes. We are a church of less than 100 people but an amazing number of people give out our number to people in need of help because word travels that we do help people.
How does this impact the connection between story and compassion and doctrine? We hear a lot of sad stories, sometimes we believe them, sometimes we don’t. I don’t know if it’s good or not, but we’ve learned to curb our emotional impulse of compassion and instead developed doctrines surrounding when to help, how to help, and when to say “no”.
A book like “When Helping Hurts” is probably an exercise in doctrine with respect to training our filters for experiential compassion.
Mirroring, Motivation and Generosity
The relationship between narrative, mirroring and emotions is also an interesting one. I’m working on Paul’s sermon in Acts 13 to Pisidian Antioch in which he essentially tells the story of Israel now with Jesus in it to the Synagogue. You’ll find this is a common sermon technique in Acts, see Peter in Acts 2. Emotions are the way we become aware of our subconscious construals of this world. Stories are so powerful because they construct these construals below our conscious level.
Mirroring happens because we are unable to know our selves apart from a world through which we mirror our selves. We both attempt to discover and construct our identities through this process of mirroring. Add to mirroring our propensity to project.
Now we see an abandoned child. What is going on in our hearts? Are we projecting fears of abandonment onto that child and are therefore acted to move to help that child? Are we attempting through that child to see ourselves (mirroring) as generous and compassion or to construct an identity with these elements because this is the kind of person we’d like to be?
We might say “what does it matter as long as the child is helped.”
OK, but this brings us further into the reason why Americans are horrified when children that look like our own are suffering, while many others with less visibility or less connectability suffer all the time and we do little or nothing about it. This gets us into reasons why compassion is often short lived (name the last three fashionable emergency causes we saw pass through twitter) and how often the short bursts of compassion sometimes do more harm than good. Are we really compassionate or are we using an occasion to really simply construct a narrative about ourselves. Do we really love the other?
Here doctrine comes in again because “love your enemy” is the most unnatural thing we can imagine. We have no natural compassion for our enemy. By definition we are acting or merely wishing for their harm.
Love is always more difficulty, challenging and costly than we care to imagine.
Picked up on Voices and extensive interview with Pres. Obama on his faith journey. Fascinating. This fall we will have an Mormon whose faith story sounds quite evangelical, but with all the terms meaning something different running against someone whose language doesn’t sound evangelical but with a history in the mainline African American tradition, the one from which MLK Jr was from. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to reflect on this further. You couldn’t ask for a better wedge-test-case dilemma for those who simply feel better if there is a “man of God” in the White House, never mind the politics.
James KA Smith video preview of his upcoming book on “The Fall of Interpretation”.
The new Christopher Nolan Batman trailer looks engaging! Trailers are of course movies in and of themselves, a sort of epigenetics of the foundational movie.
Terrific blog post on the Church of No People on Priorities during the decades of our life.
Review of Soul Force vs. Assassin from Sojourners on Gandhi. From Books and Culture an interview with the reviewer about the author of the book Jim Douglass and the influence of Thomas Merton.
Merton wrote his Raids on the Unspeakable in the midst of the turmoil of the ’60s. He was corresponding with friends around the world about the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the threat of nuclear disaster. He’d become a spiritual counselor to activists (including Jim Douglass). And yet, at the same time, Merton’s superiors forbade him to write on political issues. In a fascinating way, this forced him to explore the spiritual dynamics of activism.
So, the notion of the “Unspeakable” emerges as a way of naming what can’t be spoken—those powers that lurk in the silence, defying description and so paralyzing us all the more. Raids on the Unspeakable reads like an apocalypse. It’s a prose poem, really. Out of context, it almost seems crazy. But it is a prayer at the heart of the world’s dark night. In the midst of it, Merton names a bedrock truth: “Christian hope begins where every other truth stands frozen stiff before the power of the Unspeakable.”
Everyone knows that Gandhi was assassinated. Most people assume, as with many modern political assassinations, that this was the result of one deranged individual. But what if, forty years before he was finally killed, Gandhi met the mastermind behind his assassination at a debate in London—a debate about whether the best way for India to gain independence was violent assassination or nonviolent truth-force? What if Gandhi lived his whole life knowing that he would face an assassin and that the truth of his entire philosophy would be tested by his response? What if when he prayed to die with the name of God on his lips he meant that to be a prayer of grace for his assassin? These are the questions that Jim’s telling of the story raises. His point isn’t to re-write history. As best as I can tell, his facts do not contradict the facts in the conventional history. But they do highlight a truth at the heart of Gandhi’s story that’s hard to see if you don’t consider these details of his life. They make it a particularly challenging story for the “war on terrorism,” in which overt assassination has become a standard tool of American foreign policy.
Also in Books and Culture a nice review of the Review of the Reformed Journal. One of the tidbits out of it is that they’re going to be posting the full historical content of the Reformed Journal online.
I don’t know that we can have a conversation that asserts knowledge that transcends culture, not because culture cannot be transcended, but because we cannot transcend it. All of our conversations are within cultures and their mergers and collisions. Likewise the Bible cannot communicate to us outside of culture. Maybe this piece I wrote for a comment on another blog might help explain my idea. I don’t think that means we can’t learn anything or that everything is relative. It means that culture (practices and ways of thinking that frame our perception of the world) are always with us. It also doesn’t mean that things can’t be true for all human cultures or normative for all human cultures. It does mean that expression of those norms might have different appearances and practices.
My understanding of a basic complementarian position is that it asserts than men and women have normative different contributions to make to the body of Christ. More on my position. I am not as convinced that keeping women from holding office is a universal normative mandate for the church. I am not sufficiently convinced of that position to advocate it’s application in our context, in fact my experience has been that having male and female office bearers working together in church leadership has been better than having only one sex at work.
Our current specific cultural application of office bearing, however, is also a cultural construct (hopefully pursuing more universal norms.). I’ve been active in the church in cultures where women did not serve in formal leadership but served in other leadership capacities within the church that exerted power and influence even if not in the structure that we are paying attention to in this debate. Korean congregations often have women called and commissioned (ordained would not be an inappropriate word given the language, ceremony, respect, position, etc.) in their churches. In the DR many churches has “damas misioneras” who preached, taught, led, etc. A similar thing.
If our current cultural location is bringing churches to not use the gift God has given women in the church to exercise them because of a lot of cultural norms about what names and chairs they must exercise leadership from, then we need to do some re-arranging. How elders, deacons and pastors work today continues to change in our culture and others. Despite the language you’re hard pressed to say that our application of the offices is identical to the NT context. That’s OK because the world is different. Again, I’m not advocating for relativism, just application. CRC deacons sometimes give out food but probably not in the same way that it was happening in the Jerusalem church.
In coming to application (as in just about every circumstance) we look to the word of God and the Spirit of God to guide us. Things may look different again 100 years from now and we have no idea how.
I’m comfortable letting the process work its way through. If we look at the history of the church (Alister McGrath’s fine book on Heresy) we find that over time the church figures out what is heresy often by dead ends. It may be that allowing women in office becomes a dead end and Christ’s living church moves beyond it. At this point I doubt that but I could be wrong. The church often takes hundreds of years to work things through. The issues we’re dealing with today will become clear in time, but I don’t know that we know the outcome yet. Best to keep reading God’s word and working with it and doing the work of the church.
But this issue isn’t going away…
Look at the issue of Infant Baptism. How long as this been going on? Neither side has given up, but many have learned to live with the disagreement. I would argue that infant baptism is a more important issue than women in office but clearly many more don’t see it that way. I’m sure some have left the CRC over women in office only to get re-baptized.
This is in my experience (as stated above) not really an issue that has separated the sexes. Many women don’t believe in women in office and many men do. My heart mostly goes out to women (like Dawn and others) who wish to serve but don’t get the chance. That’s very hard. At the same time I’ve known men who very much wanted to serve and were never given the opportunity, not because of their sex but because of other things. Life is full of disappointments and injustices in the church and out of it.
In my experience a small minority post on a forum like this. In my classis where women are allowed to be seated there are a good number of churches that don’t have women elders or don’t permit them. At every classis meeting one church from our classis attaches to their credential their protest over women in office. It is read or noted at each classis meeting. I know that bothers some, but it doesn’t bother me. For the last 5 years I’ve always had a woman elder with me and I’ve seen nothing but graciousness and kindness towards them at classis, even from those who publically oppose it. My elders often are a bit hesitant about what will happen. Even though they are permitted to be there it is very much a majority male environment, out of 50+ delegates only 1-5 women often. I can appreciate their discomfort often. This is the difficult path that both sides are walking now, and on the path we learn to love our “enemies”, which is what a foundational behavior of Christianity.
The longer I ponder the miracle of the gospel, the more I see that love of enemy is not some optional merit badge in advanced, exceptional Christian practice, but rather the very basis itself. We made no greater enemy and no other enemy than God himself and it required the Son of God himself at no lesser expense than the cost of his life to get us back into the family. Why we imagine that we can finesse, negotiate or fudge our way through the inevitable conflicts of life in order to avoid loving our enemy is only attributable to the ever present blinding nature of sin. pvk
Yes, two things happen when they do it in the right way.
Why Felt Compassion Isn’t Quite Enough
Kristen Tennant on “Religion without stories…” (the comments are good too) It follows news reports on a study that suggests highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than they are from dogma. In the comments on this posting someone has done some helpful sleuthing on the report to check out some of what the actual report says as contrasted with the newsy write-ups. It’s an interesting subject.
Doctrine and Compassion
For all of my professional career I’ve had a visible position as a provider of emergency aid (3rd world missionary, pastor in an economically struggling community) and I was raised by a father who did this all of his life. Providing emergency assistance has been part of my life all of my life. What have I noticed? People who do this for a living, or have it as an inescapable aspect of their life very quickly develop “doctrine” with respect to their generosity. The number of requests (and their position making them available in an inordinate number of requests, often far beyond what they are able to respond to) creates in them a more systematic approach to the relationships. There are down sides to this too.
What often happens to people in this situation is that they learn to temper the compassionate impulse. Talk to workers in psych unites, nurses with the elderly. We get conditioned to things, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. This give us an insight into the emergence of “doctrine”, the importance of good doctrine (don’t abuse the weak) and the reason for indoctrination (not really a bad word if the doctrine is good). We have in our anti-institutional culture maligned the innocent word “doctrine”. Doctrine is simply a considered set of beliefs or best practices in approaching a relationship, a context, or a body of knowledge.
Generally speaking people who participate in religious organizations probably have far more exposure to philanthropic asks. Answer the phone or take in the mail at a church. Every day requests come from all over looking for mostly cash assistance. Sometimes from individuals (power bills, rent, food, gas, bus fare) other charitable organizations, missionaries and ministries of all stripes. We are a church of less than 100 people but an amazing number of people give out our number to people in need of help because word travels that we do help people.
How does this impact the connection between story and compassion and doctrine? We hear a lot of sad stories, sometimes we believe them, sometimes we don’t. I don’t know if it’s good or not, but we’ve learned to curb our emotional impulse of compassion and instead developed doctrines surrounding when to help, how to help, and when to say “no”.
A book like “When Helping Hurts” is probably an exercise in doctrine with respect to training our filters for experiential compassion.
Mirroring, Motivation and Generosity
The relationship between narrative, mirroring and emotions is also an interesting one. I’m working on Paul’s sermon in Acts 13 to Pisidian Antioch in which he essentially tells the story of Israel now with Jesus in it to the Synagogue. You’ll find this is a common sermon technique in Acts, see Peter in Acts 2. Emotions are the way we become aware of our subconscious construals of this world. Stories are so powerful because they construct these construals below our conscious level.
Mirroring happens because we are unable to know our selves apart from a world through which we mirror our selves. We both attempt to discover and construct our identities through this process of mirroring. Add to mirroring our propensity to project.
Now we see an abandoned child. What is going on in our hearts? Are we projecting fears of abandonment onto that child and are therefore acted to move to help that child? Are we attempting through that child to see ourselves (mirroring) as generous and compassion or to construct an identity with these elements because this is the kind of person we’d like to be?
We might say “what does it matter as long as the child is helped.”
OK, but this brings us further into the reason why Americans are horrified when children that look like our own are suffering, while many others with less visibility or less connectability suffer all the time and we do little or nothing about it. This gets us into reasons why compassion is often short lived (name the last three fashionable emergency causes we saw pass through twitter) and how often the short bursts of compassion sometimes do more harm than good. Are we really compassionate or are we using an occasion to really simply construct a narrative about ourselves. Do we really love the other?
Here doctrine comes in again because “love your enemy” is the most unnatural thing we can imagine. We have no natural compassion for our enemy. By definition we are acting or merely wishing for their harm.
Love is always more difficulty, challenging and costly than we care to imagine.