Fuller Theological Seminary publishes a handy journal called Theology News & Notes. As part of Spring cleaning, I was reading through their Winter 2006 issue and discovered a very interesting progression, a "developmental teleology" which, beginning with a trinitarian (relational) anthropology, both describes and proscribes a thoroughly trinitarian and yet therapeutic approach to spiritual formation. I illustrate this progression through the following, which is simply clusters of quotions from the issue placed in my own particular order.
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Developmental teleology is a theological understanding of human development (i.e. God's view of our completion) Narrative therapists tend to advocate a postmodernism that, following Nietzchean ideas, rejects metanarratives as a linguistic form of the will-to-power of a dominant group. Clients are seen as suffering the imposition of oppressive, life-restricting stories from without, handed down from family or culture. Metanarratives are to be replaced with alternative meanings that better reflect client preferences.
Spirituality, freed form the restriction of religious tradition, can be little more than an individual hodgepodge of personalized ritual and belief. To value religion for its usefulness is a form of idolatry. [Christianity isn't about "getting your life together." (Nouwen)] Many modern "spiritualities" reflect the individualism of our Western cultures--the self as autonomous, self-interested, and unencumbered by responsibilities for others. Healing is not assumed to occur in the context of a community, and hence an individualistic culture constructs a religion that helps me achieve my mental health. [Yet] the community is the smallest unit of health and to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradition in terms. Such implicit "religion" is substantively thin in that is generic, abstract and departicularized . . . traditionless.
We understand a person not just as an individual but as one who finds his or her true being in relationship with God and with others. We focus on relationality as the key aspect of being human and anchor our understanding of the human self in trinitarian theology. To be made in the image of God is to mirror this relationality--to exist as reciprocating selves, as unique individuals living in relationsihp with God and human others. To live according to God's design is to glorify God as a distinct human being in communion with God and others in mutually giving and receiving relationships. The church is a community of mutual moral formation that demonstrates the truth of its metanarrative in its life together. As [Christian therapists] it is faithfulness to our calling to "respond to the whole person God has created.
The transformation wrought in therapy has an emotional side and a spiritual side. The emotional side can be seen as the healing of the self while the spiritual side can be seen as the vision for a good life and the commitment and will to live in a way consistent with that vision. I would suggest that the tasks of both pastoral counseling and preaching share a common goal: to help the people of God imagine or reimagine their lives in terms of the present reality of God's reign and its future consummation. The goal, in other words, is to stimulate the imagination in such a way that one begins to locate one's story in the larger metanarrative context of the history of God's interation with the human race. As Dallas Willard has suggested, disciplined spirituality begins with vision. To re-imagine one's own story as part of the long train of witnesses to the grace of God as portrayed in Scripture is a remarkable vision, difficult as it may be to attain. Our spiritual struggle is that we cannot always clearly understand nor articulate how God's story is playing out in ours. But that is the sustaining purpose of eschatological hope. Christians confess a God who "will restore power where there is none and return order where there is chaos."
If each person is born in the image of God, then personal identity emerges--from childhood through adulthood--characterized by a sense of meaning that is rooted in belonging to God. This journey, much like the wanderings of the people of Israel, can be told as a history of spiritual development where the promise of a hopeful future is not determined by one's talent, opportunities or efforts, but by the providence of God's hope-filled future. . . . The goal of spiritual development is to love God and to love one's neighbor as oneself." Our ability to worship God the Father occurs through our participation in the life of the Son through the Spirit. A person's capacity for transcendence is embedded in relationships to others and ultimately to God . . . as such, spiritual development--like other aspects of human functioning--is dependent on the existence of developmental "nutrients" such as loving relationships, role models, and opportunities for righteous living.
Spiritual disciplines enable us to do what we cannot by direct effort; they "bring us into more effective cooperation with Christ and his kingdom." Spiritual disciplines paves the way for deep internal change that mere willpower can never bring about. Christian spirituality involves an awareness of and response to the Trinity as a community of mutual love, best envisioned as a journey of transformation through union with God.
developmental teleology; relational anthropology; authenticity; psychology; spiritual development; spiritual disciplines.
Christian character develops in community, CLC conference speakers say
ReplyDeleteBy: Ken Camp
SAN ANTONIO-Christian character is formed in community, not in isolation, speakers at the annual Texas Baptist Christian Life Conference said.
"Christian Character" was the focus of the annual statewide conference, Feb. 11-12 at San Antonio's Trinity Baptist Church. The Baptist General Convention of Texas Christian Life Commission sponsored the two-day event.
The church at its best reveals the character of Christ. And through the church, the Holy Spirit shapes followers of Christ into his image, said Charles Foster Johnson, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church.
"The church of Jesus is the presence of Christ in the world. In some ways, the church may be as much of Jesus as we will ever know," Johnson said. God builds character in the lives of his people through the disciple-making work of the church. Johnson refuted the "false notion" that discipleship is "up to us as individuals…The church is the entity that shapes us into the form and character of Jesus Christ. We are made disciples by other disciples."
Johnson maintained that "99 percent of what we call discipleship in the church today is nothing but self-help and self-improvement." True discipleship, in contrast, builds up the church as the "body of Christ."
Salvation in the full sense-not only conversion, but also growth into the image of Christ-requires the support and nurture of a faith community, Johnson said. "Our Roman Catholic friends are right on the money when they say there is no salvation apart from the church."
Johnson noted several ways the church shapes Christian character:
Worship. In worship, attention shifts from self to God's glory. "Worship is a character-forming activity in which we acknowledge that we are created, and God is the Creator."
Prayer. Through prayer, Christians enter into a "supernatural reality" beyond what is empirically verifiable. Quiet, contemplative prayer offers God a "circumference of silence" in which he can work in believers' lives.
Scripture. Baptists claim to take the Bible literally, but they often fail to take it seriously, Johnson maintained. "The Bible is strangely silent in our churches. For a people who are so exercised about the Bible, why don't we take it seriously?"
Churches should create "Scripture-reading communities" where believers take "an incarnational approach" to reading the Bible, he added. "Then we learn God's story, and we learn our own story. And we find we can't know one without knowing the other."
Baptism. When a believer is immersed, that person is baptized into the Holy Trinity, into a death and resurrection, and into "an ordination for Christian ministry," Johnson said. Baptism is the Christian's "authorization" for service.
Ministry. "We are not formed just by thinking the faith but by doing the faith," Johnson said. Rather than allowing Christians to become "Bible study junkies" who spend all their time accumulating knowledge, the church should involve believers in doing the kinds of things that Jesus did.
"If we took Christian character formation as seriously as the military takes character formation, the world would be changed," Johnson said.
Instead of just imparting information, the church needs to focus on character formation, said Phil Kenneson, associate professor of theology and philosophy at Milligan College in east Tennessee.
The role of the church is to "embody the gospel" rather than just teach propositional truth, Kenneson said. "In following Jesus, the church is called to bear embodied witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ."
Acts of worship, truth telling and forgiveness can become "formative practices" in shaping character, he said. "Our lives are largely shaped by the practices we engage in."
Betty Talbert, director of spiritual formation at Baylor University's Truett Seminary in Waco, challenged Baptists to adopt the formative practice of contemplative prayer to foster a deeper relationship with God.
Many Christians have "stressed the rational dimension to the diminishment of the relational dimension," she said.
Christians develop healing virtues of love and wisdom-as opposed to deadly vices such as pride and lust-as they grow in spiritual maturity, according to Don Murdock, executive director of Laity Lodge near Kerrville. And believers learn to recognize these virtues in life together.
"What does well-formed Christian maturity look like? We learn the most about the Christ life from one another. Becoming well-formed in Christ is relational," Murdock said.
Christian formation is "more about apprenticeship than about information," said Michael Cartwright, chairman of the philosophy and religion department at the University of Indianapolis.
Cartwright derided a "McDonald's" approach to discipleship that promises quick and easy shortcuts to character formation. Discipleship is a life-long learning process done in the context of the church, he said.
"People are not formed in faith apart from the congregation and the community of faith," he said.
The Christian church needs to learn from Moses how to do "memory work" if it really wants to shape character, according to Charles Pinches, professor of theology at the University of Scranton.
The Exodus experience shaped the common memory of the Jews because it continued to be regularly and publicly rehearsed in the rites of Passover, Pinches observed. "Memory is publicly shared. Only public or shared memory has power over time."
Families have a vital role in shaping character, but no family can do it alone, Pinches said. Families need a community of faith to keep their focus from turning inward. "The family needs something beyond itself that it can point children to. Affection for our children is killing both them and us. When we come to believe our children are the most important things in our lives, that is idolatry. Proper love points children to something beyond themselves," Pinches said.
Jonathan Wilson, professor of religious studies at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., echoed that same theme. He explored character formation in the Old Testament wisdom books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job. "The home is set within the larger context of Yahweh's people-the community and the people of God," Wilson said. "We cannot expect the home to do it all. . . . Character formation is very much a shared project."
Narrative is the genre. Story the text. Memory the hermeneutics. Confession the act. The Trinity the agent. Promise the covenantal basis. Hope the existential response.
ReplyDeletethe relationship of the potency of sacrifice to memory, the 'commandments' of ritual memory, and the church as the trainer of memories.
For Pinches, memory is rooted in the physical world, bound by time and space and dependent on the human body.
the nature of true memory as it appears in family, nation, and church, the three structures that preside over memory's territory. He takes a look at the power of memory in a fallen world, shining light on both the lies that disconnect us and the solution to the problem. Pinches deftly shows how memory is tied to community and ultimately to God.
In his book _Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel_, Rowan Williams shows how the resurrection can be understood as "memory transformed by hope." This is among other things, a fascinating discussion of the nature of memory, forgiveness and redemption. It proves very interesting to read Williams account as a contrast to Miroslav Volf's account of redemption as "nonremebering." Williams, on the other hand argues that the transformation of the resurrection is not forgetting sin and suffering, but having the memory of such things transformed through hope which liberates.
"The Christian story is not something we hop in and out of. We are story-formed, and those of us who are Christians are formed (or transformed) by the Christian story. To suppose that we can and should hold Christianity at arm’s length and make value judgments about it from a perspective entirely independent of it -- so that it becomes a "case" of something or other -- is to make an epistemological error that is nothing more nor less than the error of "modernism" which "post-modernists" are lately seizing upon. Hauerwas prefers to identify this as an error of "liberalism" or of the Enlightenment and is not predisposed to refer to his own thought as "post-modernism," which is Muray’s label. While there are similarities between what is generally called post-modernism -- say, the thought of Rorty, Foucault or Derrida -- and that of Hauerwas and other Christian theologians like him, I think it is improper to link them directly, for two reasons. First, Hauerwas learned his emphasis on narrative primarily from Christian theologians such as H. R. Niebuhr and Hans Frei, and only secondarily from (secular) literary criticism. Hence, and this is the second point, it is not a truth-relativizing category for Hauerwas at all, as it is for these other thinkers. Hauerwas has never wavered from declaring that Christian convictions -- which are necessarily in the narrative mode -- are true. And so we can understand the ever-present normative thrust of his work, as we cannot understand it in these other "post-modern" thinkers." Charles Pinches http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2775
"According to Hauerwas, we must be formed after the character of our God by the remembering and enacting of the Christian story in the community (the church) which calls us to and nurtures us in this (trans)formation of character." Ibid.
"1For the meaning I wish ‘tradition" to have, consider MacIntyre’s definition: "A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is Constituted." Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 12." Ibid.