Way back when I was still in house-selling mode, I commented on Eric’s post about justification by faith and Christian anxiety. I wanted to comment on it further, because this is an issue cuts close to the bone for me. Also, someone accused me of mischaracterizing Martin Luther.
I probably did mischaracterize him, because I don’t actually know that much about Luther, but my comment arose from how Luther has been presented to me. See, I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I haven’t discussed it on the blog before, and I don’t want to discuss it in detail now, but this has been a rather large part of my spiritual experience in 3-D life. Many people of a psychological bent believe that Luther also had it, and so assume that his views on justification and forgiveness will be helpful to other OCs.
On an intuitive level, it makes sense. After all, OCD is a disease of perfectionism. What could be more apropros than a doctrine emphasizing the grace and forgiveness of God? And it may well be that for some OCs it is helpful. Somewhat to my disadvantage, I’ve never known an OC Christian well enough to discuss it in depth. But it never quite worked for me, and I think Eric’s post brings up some of the reasons.
It seems to be standard for OCs. at least in the modern era, to live in a kind of double consciousness. On the one hand, you feel you need to do a lot of weird things to avert disaster. On the other hand, you know that it’s crazy and those disasters will probably never happen. And so the OCD feels sort of like an alien force, an internal dictator that you obey but also resent. It can feel downright demonic, and Christians who believe in demons are inclined to explain it that way.
But if it is demonic (and given the limited success I’ve had with psychiatric methods, I won’t rule it out), just why is it evil? Is it because it because it torments me for not being perfect? Well, even in Reformation theology I deserve to be tormented for not being perfect. I’m just lucky enough that God forgives me, assuming I am willing to accept forgiveness and worship him for it. But that’s where the resentment comes in. Accepting forgiveness means admitting that I should have been perfect — after all, there’s nothing to forgive if you didn’t do anything wrong — and after all these years I’ve developed a pretty stiff resistance to that claim. And the mysterious origin of the disorder makes things worse in that regard. In psychotherapy I’ve been through the usual suspects, but I still don’t feel any confidence about where it came from. So I tend to fall back on blaming God. (Blaming it on Satan seems to beg the question.) Being angry at God doesn’t do much to ease one’s anxiety either.
As Eric alludes to in his post, when Christianity isn’t trying to reassure you, it’s trying to terrify you. This may be an inevitable problem given the range of confidence and anxiety that people seem to have — all the way from people with anxiety disorders like me to people who go motorcycle jumping for fun. And I think the reason Eric’s post in particular set this off, though I realize this was not his intention, was how it demonstrates the obliviousness that I keep running into. Anxiety becomes an abstract theological issue, not a lived experience. But is there such a thing as too much of it? Do we have a right to ask for deliverance from it?
What if Christianity were not designed to reassure you or to frighten you? What if that’s the Humanist error? I think it’s just supposed to show us…show us God and if that terrifies, then let it be so. If that reassures, befuddles, generally confuses, or transforms, then let it be so.
Good post.
Comment by Tripp — May 12, 2009 @ 7:44 am
Well, I don’t mean that the whole thing is designed to have that effect. But to say that it simply “shows us God” makes God sound a little more passive than he appears to be in the Bible. Both the Father and the Son threaten people at some points and reassure them at others, because they expect things out of people. Christianity may not be humanist in the usual sense of the word, but it’s not deist either.
Comment by Camassia — May 12, 2009 @ 8:36 am
Camassia, this is a very challenging post, and obviously I don’t have a fully satisfying response, but I wonder if it’s helpful to think of “perfection” as a goal rather than a binary pass/fail standard. At least as I understand it, when Jesus says “be ye perfect” in Matthew he’s using a derivative of “telos,” meaning that the end, or goal, of human life is to love indiscriminately as God loves. This reads to me less like a threat than a description of what a fully flourishing human life is like. I frankly find the traditional Reformation interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount–that it’s just meant to show us how far short we fall so we recognize our need of God’s forgiveness–pretty unconvincing. Not that we don’t need forgiveness, but I don’t think it’s on account of failing to be “perfect.”
Comment by Lee — May 12, 2009 @ 12:46 pm
I am aware of that translation of “perfect,” but I don’t think the concept rests entirely on that passage, or even on the Sermon on the Mount. If I remember right, Luther leaned more heavily on Paul, and his assertion that even “little” sins condemn you, so no one is really righteous. Also, the images of judgment that keep being evoked really do indicate a binary pass/fail standard. It’s hard to know what to make of those. The Mennonites, for one, seem to take on face value that this judgment will be based on works, but that brings us back into the territory of distinguishing “little” sins from “big” sins, since everyone commits little sins.
Even the sola fide traditions, I think, expect you to repent of your little sins, because of this assumption that they offend God. Protestants tend to confess in a more diffuse global way than Catholics (“what we have done, and what we have left undone”), but I don’t think they abandoned the idea that all sins should be repented. Did they?
Comment by Camassia — May 12, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
Backsliding is what we baptists often call it…Once saved always saved? Dunno if that’s even a good idea. Wishful thinking, maybe…
Deism and Humanism…Smush the two together and you get Christianity. I know you weren’t working to the far Humanist polemic. I was type/thinking aloud, i guess. This is a debate we are having at church all the time these days. Some say that God is not a free agent. God is only found enfleshed in human communities. Certainly God is there, but God is not limited to us. And, surprisingly, that’s good news. If it were just us, we’d be S.O.L.
Good to see you posting again, my friend.
Comment by Tripp — May 13, 2009 @ 12:09 am
Or maybe if you split Christianity apart you get humanism and deism? That seems to be more the way it happened historically. But I think the thing that gets taken out of both of them is the idea that there’s a relationship between heaven and earth, so it becomes heaven vs. earth (it sounds like that’s the way your church is framing it). But if you take God to be interacting with people in a somewhat human way, he takes on some responsibility for people’s emotional reactions. I’m sure you run into this all the time in your work as a pastor: you tailor the way you tell something to the audience and to their mental state (e.g., you’d give a different sermon at Easter than at a funeral), and even so, you run the risk of people totally taking it the wrong way. That doesn’t mean your sermon is “about” people’s emotions, but it does mean you have to consider them. So I don’t buy the idea that God simply shows himself and how we feel about it is our own problem. Communication is way more complicated than that.
I think the other question I’m trying to get at here is, how do you recognize what is “of God”? There are things about OCD and scrupulosity that seem desirable from a Christian perspective, but it also seems demonic in ways. For all the virtues of “fear of the Lord”, is there such a thing as being too scared? Since mixing up the Holy Spirit and demonic spirits was described by Jesus as the unforgivable sin, sorting them out is a rather pertinent matter.
Comment by Camassia — May 13, 2009 @ 9:11 am
And it’s good to “see” you again too.
Comment by Camassia — May 13, 2009 @ 9:59 am
You may be interested in Balthasar’s book on anxiety, excerpts here and here…
Comment by TSO — May 13, 2009 @ 1:38 pm
So this is out of my wheelhouse, and I apologize if I say something stupid, but: Is it at all helpful to separate out three things–the anxiety, the perceived reason for anxiety, and the response to anxiety?
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.
Comment by Eve Tushnet — May 13, 2009 @ 3:39 pm
Oh, don’t worry about butting in; if I didn’t want people to butt in, I wouldn’t have published this on the Internet. And I suppose people are obliged to speak in impersonal terms when I won’t describe my symptoms in detail.
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.)
Comment by Camassia — May 13, 2009 @ 4:47 pm
I think maybe the FT blogger needs to get over him/herself. Surely a big part of our problem is that we think we’re way more important, cosmically speaking, than we actually are. A lot of the bad stuff people do in the Bible (and now) involves overstepping the bounds set out by God at creation, trying to be more than human, in a sense. And I think the Gospel is more about God than it is about us, one of the consequences of which is that we learn, over time, a certain self-forgetfulness. That’s why I’m always wary of perfectionistic strains in Christianity–they seem to lend themselves so easily to self-preoccupation.
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…)
Comment by Lee — May 14, 2009 @ 10:41 am
Well, to be fair, I went back and dug up the original FT post, and it was in the middle of a refutation of deterministic theories of history: “Christianity and Judaism see life very differently. For both of them, history is a place of human decision. At every moment of our lives, we’re asked to choose for good or for evil. Therefore, time has weight. It has meaning. The present is vitally important as the instant that will never come again; the moment where we are not determined by outside forces but self-determined by our free will. … If the Devil can sell us the idea that history is a single, determined mechanism; if humanity’s freedom of will can be forgotten or denied; then man will drift, and the Antichrist will win.”
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?”
Comment by Camassia — May 14, 2009 @ 3:42 pm
Well, I don’t want to pretend that I can speak knowledgeably about OCD, but I think I do want to get away from this idea that each of our decisions has some kind of cosmic import over and above (behind?) their mundane effects.
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.
Comment by Lee — May 14, 2009 @ 7:15 pm
Maybe I should clarify this: you can be a perfectionist about anything. You can be a perfectionist about being moral and spiritual, but you can also be a perfectionist about gardening, house-cleaning, piano playing, having a small carbon footprint and just about any other task you could name. Scrupulosity seems to be of a particularly otherworldly nature, but I don’t mean to limit the question just to 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?
Comment by Camassia — May 14, 2009 @ 8:01 pm
Well, I’m not 100% sure, but I’m inclined to say that, in considering what actions to take, we should evaluate them primarily in terms of their effects in this world, not in terms of how we imagine they might score us brownie points with God. (Though there is maybe a category of specifically religious duties to which this doesn’t apply.) I don’t want to deny that there’s divine justice (though how that relates to the Cross is a big question), but if our motivation is primarily avoiding God’s wrath (or earning God’s favor), then we’re not really being moral so much as prudent, aren’t we?
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.
Comment by Lee — May 15, 2009 @ 4:26 pm
Well yeah, your comment pretty well demonstrates why this is all so unclear to me. I gather that most Christians have the feeling that there’s a limit to how good you should be expected to be, but where the limit is and why it should be there is a lot harder to pin down or to justify. I remember some years back Terry Mattingly looked at a survey of Americans’ views of the afterlife and concluded that most people believe that there are, on the one hand, ordinary people with ordinary sins that are forgiven (and who thus go to heaven), and on the other hand there are people with really bad sins that send them to hell. Which is definitely not traditional Christian doctrine, but my own experience hearing Christians talk about this kind of support that. The alternatives are so counterintuitive, aren’t they?
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?
Comment by Camassia — May 18, 2009 @ 11:20 am
I guess it all depends on what we think God wants from people. Does God mainly want us to be good, according to some specified definition, or is it something else? I’m reminded of one of the lectionary readings from last Sunday — the part in John’s gospel where Jesus says he no longer calls the disciples servants, but friends. Does God want to be friends with us? And, if so, what does that imply about morality? After all, Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” I realize that other passages can be quoted to support the more “fear-based” approach, of course.
Comment by Lee — May 20, 2009 @ 10:43 am