As to the first point, I see your point but honestly I don’t know if the Bible backs it up. Rewards and punishments are constantly being dangled in front of biblical characters to motivate them, and I don’t recall anyone objecting that this was an insufficiently pure reason to do good. This is, of course, a point that atheists like to attack, but I suppose the idea is that simply following your intuitions and human-made social morality isn’t enough for God, so he has to motivate you somehow. After all, if intuitions and real-world consequences were enough to make people moral, there wouldn’t be much need for God to get involved in the first place, would there?

I’m not sure how much this addresses the perfectionist/scrupulosity question, though. After all, a broadly consequentialist morality can still present us with onerous duties. (I could be out maximizing the welfare of others right now instead of typing a blog comment!) And yet, it does seem to me that there has to be a limit to what the moral life demands of us.

And I’m also not sure where forgiveness fits in to all this. I mean, there are clear cases where we need forgiveness (i.e., knowingly doing wrong). But do we need to be forgiven for things that are outside our control? The traditional doctrine of original sin seems to say that we are guilty for Adam’s sin, for instance, but I just can’t make much sense of that.

I don’t know if you’re a heretic, but I am a little unclear on what you mean by actions having no consequences beyond their mundane effects. Does that leave any room for divine justice? If you get away with murder, say, is that the end of the consequences?

I mean, if Genesis is to be believed, human beings are meant to be, essentially, gardeners. A noble calling to be sure, but not a particularly exalted one!

This was kind of Luther’s point too: once we stop trying to prove to God how moral or “spiritual” we are, we can get back to what we should be doing, namely, taking care of God’s creation.

I dunno, maybe this makes me a heretic.

I’m not sure how this squares with prophecy, since prophecy assumes that history is determined, at least in a broad sense. We are assured that the Antichrist can’t win in the end, right?

He is basically right, though, that life is an continuous series of decisions. I know what you mean about perfectionism being potentially self-absorbed, and OCD certainly is, but focusing on serving others doesn’t really change that. I certainly recall when I was living with my grandmother, I was constantly wondering, “What should I do?”

I realize none of this answers the questions of how, in practice, one can learn to stop being self-preoccupied! (Though I imagine prayer and service to others have something to do with it…)

I think you have a point about the difference between awareness of imperfection and being worried about it. In fact, awareness of imperfection isn’t something I really want to lose, since in my experience that tends to make people insufferable. I think OCD has more to do with the perception of enormous consequences for being imperfect. I remember some blogger on First Things a while back saying that living the Christian life means that every moment of every day you’re choosing between good and evil. I can see why he would think that was awesome, because it means I’m a soldier in a cosmic war just sitting here at my desk. My initial reaction was horror, though, because it means that every moment of every day I have a chance to cosmically screw up.

Which brings me to the subject of surrender. I understand what you’re saying and that’s always appealed to me, but it does seem like when I try to grasp the actual process of surrender it sounds kind of like the above. I think the FT line struck me because it sounded similar to what Telford told me some years back when I asked what surrendering to Jesus meant practically, as in, I get up in the morning and …? He answered, everything you do you ask yourself, is this for the Kingdom or against the Kingdom? I don’t know if every Christian would answer the question that way, but it sounds so … so Pelagian!

I guess the difficulty is in finding the balance between saying God isn’t the sort of indulgent parent who will protect you from all the consequences of your actions, and assuring that somehow he’ll make everything turn out all right in the long run. I think that’s what’s really behind this fascination with eschatology that some of my friends find incomprehensible; I’m kind of horrified by the notion that God would just stop at “good enough” and be happy with salvaging a few people. (Which I guess, ironically, is saying that I hope God is a perfectionist, just not about me in this lifetime.)

It seems like you’re saying that acute consciousness of personal imperfection is the perceived reason for the anxiety. I get that and I don’t know that there’s a way out of it for a Christian (or a Platonist…); imperfection is really awful. Small cruelties and lapses of love are still big, maybe for the same reason “His eye is on the sparrow”–all the littlenesses in life are not so little for the Christian.

But, that said, it seems like it should be possible to have this acute sense of one’s own imperfection _without_ the intense anxiety–I don’t get a huge sense of anxiety from Thomas a Kempis’s writings, for example, although the cultural gap there might just be too large. One could have sorrow, for example, or humiliation, both of which seem like maybe more “livable” though still very painful emotions.

And even with the anxiety, it _seems_ (based on the few things friends w/OCD have said) like OCD distorts one’s life largely b/c of the need for control through ritual behavior. And that response, of seeking control or seeking to “make up for” imperfection, is pretty obviously not in line with Christian surrender, thus the intense pressure you feel to do those behaviors would not be “of God.”

(Maybe a related thought: I can see why you would resist being told to be perfect. Is your resistance as stiff if you are told to surrender completely to God so that you’re in a place where He can perfect you in His own time, a process which likely won’t be completed until after your death? …Of course then there is the fun possibility of scruples about whether you’ve _really, truly, fully_ surrendered….)

Again, I know I’m talking in way too impersonal terms here, and maybe I have no business butting in a’tall. Feel free to ignore and/or tell me off if you think this is really off-base.