There is a latent assumption that is built into our views of morality: pleasure is good and pain is bad. At first blush, this may seem also tautological, as if “pleasure” and “good” are exact synonyms and “pain” and “bad” are exact synonyms. However, while there is a relationship between these terms, it is important to make a distinction between the two. “Pleasure” and “pain” are physiological experiences of our body in interaction with the world and with itself. They are signals that come from the body. “Good” and “bad” are evaluative terms; we deem something beneficial or deleterious. It is the higher cognitive judgments we make about something. This is different from the physiological signals. In thinking about it, it is important to distinguish between the physiological signal and the cognitive judgment.

For instance, chemotherapy may cause pain and suffering, but we evaluate it as good because it can get rid of cancer. What is the basis for this intuitive judgment? Physiological signals of pleasure and pain are very specific to a particular experience at a particular point of time. Meanwhile, cognitive judgments will consider other factors than just the specific cause of the pleasure or pain. While the chemotherapy produces pain, it also will hopefully kill the cancer cells that can take the person’s life. Cognitive judgments of good and bad can consider a wider range of outcomes and future experiences than physiological signals. Furthermore, cancer at the early stage may not produce noticeable pain or ill effects, Nevertheless, despite the lack of pain, we will evaluate cancer as bad because we are aware of what it can do in causing future pain and eventually killing a person From this one example, we see that pleasure is not the same thing as being good, and pain is not the same thing as being bad.

However, there is clearly an intuitive relationship of pleasure with goodness and pain with badness. When we experience pain, we can say there is something bad that has happened. If I come down will an illness that causes me to throw up, the discomfort I experience indicates to me that there is something wrong/bad about the situation. However, the discomfort along does not lead me to identify what is bad about the situation. Is it the flu? Is it food poisoning? Did something just not agree with my stomach? Did I eat too much? Pain lets me know something is wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell me what it is that is wrong.

However, the pain will lead to know something is wrong, both of which combine motivate me to do what I can to get better. I can go to a doctor. I can look up information of the website. I can take medicine. I can ask a family member or friend to help take care of me. Etc. It is in this case that the physiological signal of pain is both good and bad, but in different ways. Pain is bad in that something is wrong that causes pain, but the pain is good in that it activates my body to take the necessary adaptive behaviors and guides my mind to identify what specific behaviors I should do. In other words, pain is a cause of something bad but pain then causes something good. Meanwhile, the reverse can be true. Pleasure can be caused by something good, but can then cause sometihng bad. For instance, the pleasure of the elite class often times makes them blind to the pain and suffering of those who have little, thereby making them unempathetic towards suffering.

The point is this. Pleasure can be both good and bad. Pain can be both bad and good. The difference roots down to the order of causation. Pleasure and pain is caused by something which can be good or bad and pleasure and pain can be a motivational cause to do something which is good or bad.

However, the complexity of this point is often times not realized in our common, day to day thinking. We are not creatures who naturally do a good job of imagining good and bad at the same time, because our bodies typically do not experience both pleasure and pain at the same time. There are rare instances where a person may experience mild versions of pleasure and pain at the same time, but these are experiences of ambivalence and rarely do we understand ambivalent experiences; they can be quite confusing if one seeks to understand them. The end result is that we tend to oversimplify our view of pain or pleasure to fit with the pragmatism of the moment. When I feel pain, I don’t go through a conscious, reflective analysis of what is good and bad about my experience of pain. Rather, I instinctively think something is bad, because that is all that is needed to motivate my change of behavior to do something good. My awareness of the goodness of my pain is not necessary for the positive effects of pain to come about.

Now, in most cases, this pragmatic view of pleasure and pain is perfectly fine and suitable to guide our behaviors. However, the problems comes in when we go beyond reacting to pleasure and pain, and instead trying reason about pleasure and pain. If we use the pragmatic notion that pleasure is good and pain is bad, I will be unaware of the complex realities that surround pleasure and pain. Once we start to build ethical rules and principles, our pragmatic understanding pleasure and pain can dramatically mislead us. In a chemotherapy example, one hypothetical judgment that could be inferred that because pain is bad, therefore chemotherapy that causes pain is bad, therefore I should not take chemotherapy. Or, to employ a different intutiively wrong example, because: pleasure is good, and recreational drugs bring pleasure, therefore I should take recreational drugs.

I employ these two examples to make a point: pleasure and pain are not in of and themselves purely good or purely bad. To treat them as such will lead us to take actions that all of us would recognize has some problematic consequences. However, we are frequently tempted to think this way. For instance, we can treat the positive emotions that bring pleasure as “good” and the negative emotions that bring pain as “bad.” This fails to recognize the adaptive signficance of our emotions. The emotional experience of mourning and grief that comes with pain allows me to detach from those things I can no longer rely on, whether it be due to death of a loved one, loss of an important relationship, losing something significant, or a change of circumstance; the process of deattaching is a process that can then allow me to adapt to the new circumstances I find myself in. Shame over my bad actions can motivate me to make amends to the person I hurt, thereby repairing a relationship to prevent losing those relationships that would cause me to mourn. Guilt can motivate my taking of responsibility for my behavior. While these emotions do bring pain and when these emotions take permanent residence within out heart (excuse the metaphor) they can makes our life worse, not better, the emotions do serve a good adaptive purpose. Likewise, the joys of hedonistic practice can lead us to act in bad ways by taking little concern for the negative consequences of one’s actions. A college student who spends all day laughing as they watch NetFlix but does not study will as a consequence get worse grades.

The relationship between pleasure and pain with good and bad is complex. While we do not always need be aware of this complexity when we in the middle of are dealing with the specific situations that cause pleasure and pain, we need to be careful to not oversimplify our understanding of pleasure and pain, otherwise it can lead us to bad results as we fail to recognize the good that is caused by pain and the bad that is caused by pleasure.

It is this insight that segues well into the nature of the Gospel as it pertains to our lives: what the world judges as bad because of the pain, such as the shame and powerless of Jesus’ crucifixion, can be something God chooses to use for good. But this isn’t because we have simply reversed things so that pain is good and pleasure is bad in some masochistic fashion. Rather, there is the simultaneous recognition of the injustice of the cross and the blessing of the cross of Christ. However, even this complex reality of the simultaneous goodness and badness of pain is not simply some generic rule we apply to all experiences of pain and pleasure, as if we should find positive significance in every brutal act of injustice, such as in murder, rape, abuse, etc. God knows how many of the attempts to justify such events in search of a theodicy can cause more problems than they solve. Rather, the goodness of the cross of Christ is defined by the action of God to make it good, despite its simultaneous badness. Pain brings eternal joy because God makes it so. While certainly, pain and motivate something temporal good, we only trust in God to make pain be the seed of lasting goodness. As a result, we do not treat suffering as an ultimate good itself, but allow it to be a penultimate good.¹

Thus for us as Christians, we allow two different forms of goodness that comes from pain. There the circumstance goodness that comes from human adaption that pain motives. Then, there is the lasting goodness that comes from the pain that God uses. Nevertheless, we recognize that pain means there is something bad and evil, although we can not always clearly identify the causes of evil or even which causes we know of that should be considered evil. But we do not treat the specific experience of pain separate from its causes itself as evil. This would be to go in a somewhat gnostic direction, where the body that God created is not good itself, but that the reality of pain in and of itself that comes from the body God created is something to escape rather than the things causing pain.

Thus, a robust view of the goodness of creations means we must accept the goodness of pain. Simultaneously, a theology of redemption means we should recognize the badness that pain is a signal of that God is changing. Therefore, Christian theology entails a complex view of pain, and also pleasure, as being both good and bad, depending on the circumstances and the action of God.

Not all emotions that go by the same name are the exact same. When I get angry, I have this deep sense of discomfort that comes with my angry. I don’t like being angry. If you were to do something that would be hurtful and crossing boundaries, I might express my anger but feel uneasy about it and try to figure out when and how to express it. However, another person may be angry and enjoy the feeling it provides them; it can be a rush of pride to feel one is better than the person one is angry at or a feeling of power that comes from how anger can motivate you to take control. So a person feeling an “exhilarating” or “prideful” form of anger may go all out in expressing their anger.

I have heard this phenomenon described that we have “we feelings about our emotions.” While this has some practical usage, my feelings about my emotions are a part of and impact what emotion I am feeling. So, say you are angry at a loved one, you may feel uncomfortable about this feeling because you love this person, so you then the experience of anger shifts a bit. But then say you are angry at a subordinate at the job who you feel has shirked you in the past; you may feel a sense of power that comes from your anger than changes the experience of anger. My emotional experience changes based upon the perceptions I have about that emotion, who or what the emotion is directed toward, and what reasons my emotion is there.

What is happening is something more subtle than we generally realized We are inclined to think all emotions of a certain type are the same because they bear the same name. Why do they bear the same name? Because there are similarities between one emotional experience and another, such as the way I generally feel anger and the way the hypothetical person may experience anger. Despite this similarity, there are significant differences in what experiences we are having and the way these emotions will impact our behavior and the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional habits that will form in the future.

This phenomenon is described as emotional construction, as proposed and popularized by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett.¹ At the core of the idea is that each emotional experience is different, that the way we talk about emotions is more based upon stereotypes, and that there are no basic emotions as proposed by psychologists like Paul Ekman. While I do think emotions have specific patterns that tend to fit certain patterns that we know as basic emotions around due to biological and neurological reasons, I would hypothesize² that emotions are a composite experience from the different neural systems that are responsible for different aspects of emotional experience firing together at different intensities.

As an analogy to this, imagine a person who both plays guitars and does vocals. Sometimes, the strumming of the guitar is more prominent in the music, particularly at the points where they are not singing. Then, at other points, their vocals become more prominent, including the end of the song where they stops strumming and just sings to end it off. The guitar and vocals combine in different ways to produce different musical experiences moment by moment that share a lot of similarities between each other,⁴ All of these views have a tendency for various reasons to treat all instances of a certain emotion as the same, and therefore to treat them all as equally good or bad.

However, if we take a closer look at a few of the places where the New Testament addresses emotions, you will note that there can be a difference between emotions that come under the same name. Consider Paul’s distinction between “godly sorrow” and “worldly sorrow” in 2 Corinthians 5:9. Or consider how James 1:20 says “human anger does not produce God’s righteousness,” implying that there is a godly type of anger. Or, we can even distinguish between the type of love that is only reciprocating love versus the type of love that is extended to one’s enemies that Jesus refers to in the Sermon of the Mount in Matthew 5:43-48. Or, if we go to 2 Corinthians 2:1-5, Paul distinguishes between the faith in human wisdom, and thus in the teachers, from the faith that is in the power of God.

Now, what is the critical difference between these different emotions that share the same name and so may be experienced similarily? God in some capacity impacts the nature of these emotions, whether it is an ’empathetic’ sharing in God’s way of seeing ourselves, others, and the world, as in sorrow, anger, and love, or an emotional experience that takes God as known in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit as the focal attention of one’s experience, as in faith.

For a specific illustration, imagine the emotions of guilt and shame that comes with a recognition that one has done something wrong. Often times these emotions of guilt and shame can put ourselves at the center, with feelings of fear and anxiety about what people will think of and do to us. This type of experience of guilt and shame can be very damaging to us, as we develop a habit of thinking that we are going to be rejected and discarded by others, even God. However, if one has an experience of guilt and shame in repentance that has God as a gracious and merciful God at the center of our attention, the experience of guilt and shame may motivate change of behavior but due to the focus we have on God. Furthermore, if we are grieved in our repentance due to the fact that we think we are going to be punished, it will be different than if we are grieved in our repentance due to us sharing God’s sorrow and disappointment and even indignation over the harm our actions have caused. While the experience of guilt, shame, and grief may bear some similarities in each instance, it is the difference between them taking God as the center of our attention and empathizing with God’s view that shifts the nature of the emotional experience. Trusting God is merciful will not prevent all feelings of guilt, shame, and grief and the pain that comes from those emotions, but it will change how that emotional experience impacts us and forms us into the image of God in Jesus Christ. Allowing ourselves to be lead by the Spirit of God can change how the underlying reasons for those emotions of guilt, shame, and grief such that they are formative tools to change what type of person we are, reducing the inclinations for similar type actions in the future, and lead us to empathetically have the type of love and concern that God has instead.

At the end of the day then, this view suggests that each instance of a specific classes of emotion are not all inherently good or inherently evil, but that each emotion can lead to a good, life-giving direction when they are rightly ordered around the will of God, and each emotion can lead to a evil, death-dealing direction the more they are ordered in a way that opposes the will of God. Thus, the goal of the Gospel in lives of individual people is not a specific set of emotional experiences that we describe by a specific linguistic label, but rather the transformation of the person such that their emotional experiences point towards and lead us to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Our language and reasoning about groups of emotions are guides to help us understand, but not rules to determine what is ultimately good and bad.

Power is one of the most interesting social variables, particularly here in the West. On the one hand, we readily look towards politicians, entrepreneurs, church leaders, etc. to institute our visions for government, business, church, etc. However, at the same time, we are deeply skeptical of power, with a looming fear of those who power hurting the wrong people (who the wrong people to hurt often depends on our political persuasion), whether it be the middle class, LGBTQ, ethnic minorities, women, etc. Despite this two-sided nature of our views of power, rarely do we actually have a complex view of power in actual practice. We have a predilection to idealize or demonize those who hold power in an all or nothing manner. We idealize those who cast visions that seem compelling, those who seem to produce the results we want, etc. Rarely does a sense of caution get placed towards such figures; they are worthy of honor, respect, and praise and any critique of them is “clearly” laid with hidden agendas, selfishness, manipulation, etc.

It is precisely this idealize of particular empowered persons that create many of the conditions for abuse, including in the church. Debbie Doughtery observes the relation between power hierarchies and sexual harassment in organizations:

Although no single factor has been identified that characterizes a sexual-harassment-prone organization, one common thread seems to be the presence of a strong authoritarian management structure. Strong authoritarian management structures attempt to impose a single unified meaning system on workers, often with disastrous impacts on the workplace culture (Zak, 1994). Research suggests a significant relationship between sexual harassment and rigid authoritarian structures in military organizations (Firestone & Harris, 1999), healthcare organizations (Dougherty, 2001a), and blue collar work environments (Zak). Zak makes the most direct link between such management structures and harassment-prone cultures.

The primary disadvantage of an authoritarian style of management is the inflexibility in adapting to organizational change. Because authoritarian managers tend to have a singular, rigid, vision of the organization, they rarely provide a climate in which a new discourse community can develop. For example, AVTA, a vehicle maintenance unit of a larger organization, had no discursive structure for adapting to demographic diversification. As a result the “bully boys,” those who saw themselves as the guardians of the old culture, began a systematic series of assaults on newcomers ranging from racial to sexual harassment (Zak, 1994). Although not all sexual-harassment-prone organizations have rigid authoritarian structures, inflexible authoritarianism can provide the conditions that nurture sexual harassment.¹

This principle studied in the context of sexual harassment but the principle spans beyond that form of evil.

Because organizations, cultures, nations, etc. normalize discourse that has a positive view of those who power, which is one possible condition for creating strong, authoritarian leadership, such authoritarian contexts have a predilection to immediately suspect, minimize, ignore, and demonize all speech that conflicts with this positive view of people in power. Complaints, objections, and grievances direct towards those with power are met with derision, retaliation, and smearing. What is particularly alarming about this is that all of this can be done with sincere beliefs. People who legitimize and justify those who abuse their power may have a pragmatism undergirding their support, but very frequently it can be an idealization of those in power that would not allow them to believe it is possible. Do those insiders who support Jesse Duplantis’s appeal to get a new, private jet from donations have some ulterior motive? Or, do they think this “man of God” is justified for this request? While the former can be the case, for the vast majority of people, it will probably be the latter.

What does this mean? It would mean that a majority of persons enabling the coverup of abuse by people in power is done by people who really do believe in their innocence. It is done by people who could not stomach the idea that someone they support, a cause they are really behind, an organization that they highly esteem, are participating in destructive and abusive behaviors. Instead, they revert to a competitive, tribal instinct that assumes any “attack” against their tribe and its leaders is false, illegitimate, and evil. Authoritarian cultures based upon the fostering a culture of an unthinking positive legitimation of those in power is a variable in controlling discourse and information flow that can silence any discourse against abuse.

While this has in the West this has been typically associated with “conservatism,” this is a bit misleading. Insofar as the values of “conservatism” has been influenced by the power the people who held to such values had, then yes, “conservatism” has a tendency to legitimize strong authoritarian structures that perpetuate abuse. But if we have learned anything about the power of Hollywood in this past few months, sexual abuse and the covering up of it via power is shared by the “progressive” side of the spectrum. Whenever those with power are unthinkingly legitimated because of the purposes they purport to use their power for, whether they are “conservative,” “progressives,” etc., you have a context where abuse is possible.

However, more often than not in Western culture that has attempted to enculturate the value of individual persons apart from status, those who are unthinkingly legitimized will not abuse others.² Because most power is not used abusively, we will tend to overlook the link between abuse and the legitimization that empowers power figures and their following to silence critics and look more to other explanations, such as the evil of the abuser, blaming the victim for not speaking out, the apathy of bystanders, etc. In other words, we will find other explanations, some of which may have truth, some of which may be false, rather than identify the way cultures control discourse and the spread of information that is critical and accusing of those who have power through the way they idealize power-holders.

So for the Body of Christ, this stands as a challenge for the Church to be distinct from the way the world deals with power. When James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approached Jesus about having a place of prominence in Jesus’ kingdom in Matthew 20:20-28, Jesus asks if they are willing to suffer in the way that Jesus will suffer. However, he does not even guarantee any sort of prominence based upon such a virtuous action as suffering alongside Jesus. For Jesus, power and status are never to be automatically conferred to another, even for genuine, virtuous behavior. Instead, status is legitimated only insofar as people are taking the role of slaves. Slaves do not have the automatic protections for their behaviors as the Gentile lords may have, but their authority conferred AS they are serving, not because they served in the past.

If I may suggest, what is being offered by Jesus isn’t some premise that people in power must use their power for those under them. The Roman Caesar was seen as working for the benefit of the people of the Roman Empire, which legitimized their power to forcefully institute the Pax Romana. A close reading of Jesus here is not some way of legitimizing power by how you use it. Rather, it is something more radical. It is the idea that power is never a person’s possession. Jesus’ followers were to never treat their past actions as earning some sort of status that gave them a fixed position of authority in the future. James and John’s faithfulness to suffer alongside Jesus was not going to grant an automatic possession of power and status from God.

In other words, power and status in the Body of Christ should always be negotiated by the present actions, not automatically conferred into the indefinite future for any meriting past actions. Leaders are never worthy of automatic, unthinking approval and protection. Our assumptions about power should be challenged such that there is never acceptance of a static power hierarchy, by which abuse of power can be covered up and minimized. We should not run from there being those who have power, because, for instance, God certainly bestowed spectacular gifts to the apostles for the sake of leading the Church in its early infancy. However, this power is never a secure possession of individual persons, nor is it even a secure possession of an organization, institution, etc. Power-holders are to be accountable to what they doing, not to simply what good they have done. This means unthinking legitimation of power-holders is counter to the very way that Jesus conceives of power. This means liturgies, practices, and participation in worship that acknowledges and celebrates the God-givenness of each momentary need of powerful action on behalf of the Church. This means instead of focusing on bestowing certain people titles that are based upon a permanent role one acquires, as Jesus warns against in calling people father or rabbi,³ we learn to be the types to discern to whom God is working through at that moment rather than focusing on who have been given a persisting role based upon whatever criteria in the past that was used to authorize them. Not that persistent roles are inherently offensive to the Church, only that ideally they should not be persisting roles of authority over others that are unassumingly immune to persistent re-negotiation and accountability. Nor is the stability of the Church to be grounded upon the stability of human authority as the Western Catholicism made the mistake of doing, but only in the eternality of God’s power made known in the Lord Jesus Christ and realized afresh by the work of the Holy Spirit is the Church’s stability and hope to be firmly and absolutely grounded. Nor is the safety of the individual leader in the Church sufficient grounds to immunize them from the potential false complaints that might arise when power is not automatically immunized from critique, as Jesus connected status in the Kingdom of God with bearing the cross.

While this might seem idealistic, and it can come across that way, it is this type of practice of power that has been enculturated, embodied, and expected that would undercut the powerful nature of claims about God from being marshaled for other purposes than God’s own design. We can bemoan the abuses that occur within the Church, or even society at large, but until we recognize 1) how our practices of, expectations of, and assumptions about power train us to think in such ways that we unwittingly cover over and support the misue of the verypower we celebrate and 2) have the courage to learn how to do it differently as the Body of Christ, resisting the temping pragmatic results of the modern Western society, then we will always be reinforcing one of the most conditions for allowing for and covering up abuse. This would take a real faith, a faith that would shift from the value of uniting people through compelling visions from leaders for purposes of collective power that Western democracies have celebrated, to a faith in the power of God to provide what is needed. And even if it is truly unrealistic, it is by comparing the modern practices to such an ideal to see how our practices fall short and reinforce the problems we bemoan about what is happening in our churches and even in our societies.

There are many commonplaces and phrases we use in talking about the Bible. For instance, “Bible” can be said to be an acronym for “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” or we can talk about the Bible as a set of rules, laws, or as evidence. Beyond the poor “leaving earth” theology of the first one, what each of these ways of speaking about the Bible all convey is the manner in which we are to relate to the Bible, whether it be instructions, laws, evidence, etc. Without us realizing it, each of these words have their own implicit hermeneutic and epistemology related to them. If the Bible is instructions, it is some behavior I have to put into place, so I look for the specific action being prescribed. If it is a set of laws, it is something that people are bound to do so I find the principles to apply across the board and begin pay attention to how well other people adhere to the laws. If it is evidence, I can be inclined to read the Bible as a set of data about certain topics and expect others to accept as true.

Now, the Bible certainly contains instructions, laws, and evidence. But none of these three terms describe all the Bible. The Torah commandments were laws, although they could also be understood as instructions, that were to be generally applied across Israelite society. The New Testament, particularly the Gospel of John, conveys evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount takes on the form of instruction while warning against treating it as laws by not judging others. There are other ways to talk about parts of the Bible. The Psalms are confessions of one’s life with God. The Wisdom Literature contain insights and exhortation. And on it goes.

But here comes the important premise behind this: when we use each of these terms to talk about the Bible, we are subtly encouraging people to read from and reason about the Bible is different ways. This is closely related to the notion of genre, where the different books of the Bible have different genres that should impact how we interpret the texts. We don’t read the Psalms the same what we read the narratives and commandments of the Pentateuch; the Psalms are highly laced with figurative language, the narratives are episodes, and the commandments are descriptive of particular actions and in many cases responses to those actions. You wouldn’t read a love letter from a secret admirer the way you would read a decision from the Supreme Court. The genre impacts how we read.

However, the problem comes in that we talk about the Bible as a singular entity. This is due to our manner of publishing the Bible together as a single book, therefore we treat the whole book as being fundamentally the same. Even those of us who know that the Bible is a collection of different literary creations, we are still inclined to the automatic behavior of thinking about the Bible as one thing, rather than a collection of different things. As a result, we will commonly use the language that is consistent with the way we tend to read the Bible, no matter what part of the Bible we may be referring to.

This is an unavoidable habit we will have so far as we have Bibles; it may change with the rise of the electronic medium for the Bible where programs like Logos or Bibleworks where you don’t have a singular but a list of documents you go to in a text box or go to from a drop-down menu. But until that change comes, if it were to occur, we as Christians who are concerned about evangelism and discipleship need to think carefully about how we talk about the Bible when we do talk about the Bible as a single thing. Specificity in talking about the various texts will be helpful, but so far as we either revert back to Bible language or try to read the different texts of the Biblical canons into a singular set of coherent ideas, it will be helpful to determine what our language will be.

My preference is the word “witnesses.” Witnesses are considered evidence, but it doesn’t have the baggage that evidence has in our current science driven age; by default “evidence” sounds more like I am sifting through a series of data that I then put together to get to some right theory or proposition. However, the word witnesses firstly echoes the New Testament way of spreading the news about Jesus and the language that is used. Secondly, it is also coherent with the Old Testament ways of passing down a tradition to each generation of God’s works, in that the traditions can taken as important witnesses. For instance, we can understand the Pentateuch provides witnesses of God’s instructions to Israel. Thirdly, witnesses allow a personal involvement on the part of hearers or readers who can determine the trustworthiness of what is said; other people can make the decision from reason, experience, etc. that confirms the reliability of the witnesses. This is similar to Paul’s pedagogy in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 read in light of 1 Corinthians 15:2-8, where he testified to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ that is then made clear by the demonstration of the Spirit can lead people to trust in the power of God that caused both the resurrection and the powerful demonstrations. Fourthly, witnesses humanizes the texts of the Bible, recognizing they had authors/producers who conveyed their own thoughts for specific purposes. In the end, the word of “witness” leads people into a set of assumed hermeneutic and epistemic practices that is consistent with much of the New Testament and can be taken to be coherent with the rest of the Biblical texts.

The downside for some will be that such language provides ambiguity about the truthfulness of the Biblical texts; if you leave it open for others to decide, they might make a wrong evaluation. Another downside for some is that it doesn’t convey decisive authority they think fitting for God; it lets people come to a decision on their own end. Without realizing it, these can be pretty strong concerns in Christian contexts. The ambiguity leading to the wrong decisions can run counter to those who emphasize the role of human choice in coming to faith; we must persuade them to believe and think rightly. The lack of decisive authority might be seen as promoting chaos in strongly authoritarian contexts who use the ascribed authority of the Bible as a means to control people. However, if we place the appropriate emphasis upon God’s action and truly believe that God is working in other people, the ambiguity and lack of decisive claims of authority should not be concerns for us. The Bible witnesses to the power and love of God in both the created order and in dramatic new actions and people can come to discover the truth of these witnesses in accordance to the way in which God’s power and love and demonstration in the regular ordering of providence and dramatic power in Christ and the Spirit. The Bible as witnesses would make more space for faith to spring forth as a result of apprehending God’s actions, and thus making the center of faith in God’s power, rather than coming from some subtle hermeneutic and epistemic way of controlling people’s thinking based upon other social influences and factors such as our desires for clarity and decisive authority. In talking about the Bible as witnesses, we fight against our desires to avoid uncertainty and to have a powerful means of control and thus put ourselves and our interests more in the background.

It is important the way we talk about the Bible, because it can be the difference between putting ourselves and our interests into the center or allowing the space for people’s faith to be placed God Himself as disclosed in Jesus Christ and through the Spirit.

For those of you who don’t know, my dissertation project for my Master’s at the University of St. Andrews is focused on sketching out a Trinitarian epistemology in the Apostle Paul, particularly from 1 Corinthians 2,¹ that focuses on how the three persons of the Holy Trinity relate to theological knowledge. My interest in this project has been due to complex reasons. I affirm the validity of Trinitarian doctrine and think it is next to impossible to make to interpret the New Testament in a way that is both reasonable coherent and also correspond to the various texts without the basic Trinitarian framework. However, I have always felt the way people used the doctrine of the Trinity typically puts the emphasis in the wrong place on the metaphysical descriptions of the Trinity, to the point that I remember that in a homiletics class in seminary I was almost considered a heretic because I was criticizing how the Trinity was used in one of the preaching texts. I lacked the specific language and clear concepts to adequately express my criticism, so that combined with being in a strongly orthodox environment suspicious of heterodoxy or heresy, made me realize the importance of refining my understanding.

Without going into all the glorious details of my dissertation, which I am sure many of which will change over the course of the upcoming months, I will provide a simple summary of my argument. For the Apostle Paul, God discloses Himself in an absolutely reliable way through two agents, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. While there are other agents, such as Paul himself, who may disclose correct understand about God, only Jesus and the Spirit are worthy of objects by which we come to confidently trust that we know God because they come from God, have the creative power of God, are fully faithful to the will of God, etc. We know of God as disclosed through Jesus Christ via the narrative traditions of his ministry, life, death, resurrection, glorified body, and ascension. We know of God as disclosed through the Holy Spirit by the dramatic power, inspired speech, transformation of persons, etc. In short, for Paul, His conviction about God being known through Christ and the Spirit is a deeply epistemological concern. This is how God has chosen to make Himself known that undergirds a particular pedagogy: we as individuals come to know, both propositionally and relationally, God as we are known by God in attunement to the stories of Jesus and the present, on-going work of the Spirit. Paul’s form of Trinitarian thinking is deeply instructive and pragmatic. Thus, it is incoherent with Paul’s view to treat the doctrine of the Trinity as an idea or set of concepts that help us to understand God and faith; they are ideas or concepts that direct our attention in faith and practice in obedience, and it is actually through our attention and practice that we come to know God.

So, when an article as this one treating the Trinity as an arbitrary construct gets posted on a United Methodist site, I mourn. I don’t mourn simply because of the presence of “heresy.” I also mourn the way Trinitarian theology has been taught and employed that exemplifies the criticism of that article. The doctrine of the Trinity emerges out from the epistemic reality of Paul and the rest of the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of John. To protect the worship and practice of the church that put this epistemic reality into practice, the formalized doctrine of the Trinity had to be presented against various challenges, most particularly Arianism, in order to protect the integrity faith, devotion, and practice of the Church. But in so doing, the Church went down a direction that came to its apex in medieval theology, where the central focus on the Trinity is on the metaphysical explication of the reality, rather than on the (epistemic) reality that the metaphysics of the Trinity undergirds and warrants. Ever since then, it has been the primary litmus test of Christian orthodoxy, and taught in such a way that people adhere to the formal concepts of the doctrine, rather than also learning how the doctrine of the Trinity undergirds and explains the very way people come to know God. Being abstracted apart from its original epistemic context, it can be taken to be quite as arbitrary and conjectural, as the article complains.

However, this isn’t the problem of Trinitarian doctrine, but the failure to recognize that the origins of the Trinity is rooted in how the Scriptures testify to how people come to know God; this is no more arbitrary and conjectural than models of the scientific method being a way to understand the practice of science and warrants the knowledge gained from science. The value of the models/doctrine is more so in how it directs epistemic practice and reasoning rather than what the ideas themselves state; furthermore, the validity of the models/doctrine is based upon how they represent the forms of practice and reasoning that produce reliable knowledge that we can trust in. If models of the scientific method aren’t arbitrary, neither is the doctrine of the Trinity. They are in origins derived from specific practices and forms of reasoning. One can suggest they are not reliable, but arbitrary they are not. However, because we fail to adequately connect the doctrine of Trinity to the epistemic practice and reasoning of the New Testament church, in part because we fail to connect the doctrine of the Trinity to an epistemic practice and reasoning in our own lives, then yes, the Trinity may comes across as an arbitrary litmus test simply designed to control people. Why? Because that is how the doctrine of the Trinity is commonly taught and used. But as I have personaly learned, function does not determine origin; that the doctrine of the Trinity can be used the way the article describes does not mean it has an arbitrary or conjectural origin.

For Paul, the reality of the unity of Father, Jesus, and Spirit should direct Christians to learn about God through Christ and Spirit. It’s importance is not in the metaphysical descriptions in and of themselves, but the ways of knowing people ground their faith in God to. However, insofar as the critical context is lost in doctrinal pedagogy and we live in a society that celebrates free thinking, the decontextualization of the doctrine of the Trinity from its original, epistemic base serves as seeds for heresy by making the doctrine appear to be something it actually is not in its origins.

For the past few weeks at the Logos Institute here at St. Andrews, we have had the metaphysician Peter van Inwagen lecturing to our class on various topics such as substance dualism, relative identity, and the Trinity, with discussion free will to take place next week. However, the past couple weeks have been engaging as N.T. Wright engaging on these topics. Both van Inwagen and Wright as Christian physicalists, which means they do not believe there is anything immaterial to us as human beings. Strictly speaking, belief in a soul is not necessary to be a Christian, as the New Testament espouses hope in a bodily resurrection. While I do think the idea of some immaterial aspect of life is implied throughout both the Old Testament and New Testament, it is never made a major point of contention for the writers, nor does it ever take the shape of the Platonic doctrine of the immortal soul. During our class, one of our fellow students read 1 Corinthians 15:35-49 with a particular emphasis on the “kernel” (κὀκκος).

However, what is of particular interest to me is the repetitive use of the word σπείρω¹ and σπέρμα² in V. 38. This is the same metaphor that Diogenes Laertius attributes to the Stoic in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.132-133:

[132] Their physical doctrine they divide into sections (1) about bodies [σομάτων]; (2) about principles; (3) about elements; (4) about the gods; [θεῶν] (5) about bounding surfaces and space whether filled or empty. This is a division into species; but the generic division is into three parts, dealing with (i.) the universe; (ii.) the elements; (iii.) the subject of causation.

The part dealing with the universe admits, they say, of division into two : for with one aspect of it the mathematicians also are concerned, in so far as they treat questions relating to the fixed stars and the planets, e.g. whether the sun is or is not just so large as it appears to be, and the same about the moon, the question of their revolutions, and other inquiries of the same sort. But there is another aspect or field of cosmological inquiry, which belongs to the physicists alone : [133] this includes such questions as what the substance of the universe is, whether the sun and the stars are made up of form and matter, whether the world has had a beginning in time or not, whether it is animate or inanimate, whether it is destructible or indestructible, whether it is governed by providence, and all the rest. The part concerned with causation, again, is itself subdivided into two. And in one of its aspects medical inquiries have a share in it, in so far as it involves investigation of the ruling principle of the soul [ψυχῆς] and the phenomena of soul [ψυχῃ], seeds [σπερμάτων], and the like. Whereas the other part is claimed by the mathematicians also, e.g. how vision is to be explained, what causes the image on the mirror, what is the origin of clouds, thunder, rainbows, halos, comets, and the like.³

As Stoic discussions of the soul employed the metaphor of seeds.⁴ it shed light on the nature of Paul’s argument. However, Paul only once directly refers to the ψυχή (“soul”) as an object in v. 45 when quoting from the Genesis 2:7, while only using the adjective ψυχικός in v. 44 and v. 46. However, when Paul first starts his explanation of the logic of the resurrection via a series of contrast, he begins in v. 42-3 not by referring to the “soul” but to the act of “sowing.” He repeats this notion three times, then uses the adjective ψυχικός twice, and then the noun ψυχή once. This chronological priority of sowing at the start seems that Paul is more intent on employing what was perhaps a common metaphor to understand the soul than the idea of the soul itself. That the only reference to the soul comes in quoting the LXX Genesis 2:7 where the body is formed first and then God gives its life is highly suggestive: Paul does not want to hinge the hope of the resurrection on the idea of a soul as popularized by Plato’s immortal soul. There is some “seed” that survives death, but it is not the thing in and of itself that is important but rather its origins in God and what it does in providing the basis for the resurrected body. In fact, continuing the contrast in v. 50, the first stage of the seed is perishable, and only at the second stage when grown is it imperishable. For Paul, whatever the ψυχή is, it is not immortal as the Platonic doctrine stipulates.

In other words, it might be fitting to suggest that Paul employs the notion of ψυχή in a demythologized sense, referring more to the aspects of the present order of the world and life that ψυχή captures, but does not grant it everlasting, eternal status. I think this is how Paul employs ψυχικός in 2:12 and 15:44 as a reference to a way of knowing and mode of life as defined by Stoicism, which is in contrast to the πνευματικὀς as the way of knowing and mode of life grounded upon, ordered, and arranged by God’s work in Christ and by the Holy Spirit. For Paul, ψυχικός and ψυχή seem to function more as placeholder terms for the reality that perhaps undergirds the Stoic metaphysics rather than suggesting they have an ontological status themselves; this would function to place the wisdom, power, and glory of the world, dominated by Rome and Roman Stoicism, at a lower tier than the wisdom, power, and glory that comes from God in Christ and the Spirit.⁵

While I do think Paul believed in the idea of some immaterial aspects of persons, it would not have the characteristics of the Platonic soul of immortality, nor would Paul localize particular functions such as thinking to the soul as Plato and later Descartes. Paul’s doctrine of the soul only needs the most minimalistic notion of the soul, which the metaphor of seed conveys, in order to suggest the continuity between the mortal body and the resurrected body. I don’t even know if you need to say there is an immaterial substance, though I am inclined to accept that is the simplest explanation of the various New Testament comments on ψυχή, the resurrection, etc. so far as you give it only a minimal function and do not make the eternal life as being in a state of a disembodied soul. Whatever the “soul” is, Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 seems to trivialize it to simply being the basis of a continuity between the period death to resurrection.

The furor over Andy Stanley’s sermon regarding “unhitched the Old Testament” activated many deeply felt attitudes and beliefs that many of us as Christians have about the Old Testament. But if one notes the characteristics of the people compared to their reaction to Stanley, you would note a general, but not absolute, trend: those who have a more evangelical or traditional theology found Stanley’s sermon problematic. Those who have a more progressive and modernist theology did not find much to object in Stanley’s sermon. Why is this the case? Perhaps due to the role of the Old Testament as it comes to our theological expressions. Most salient in this present time is the role of the Old Testament as it pertains to sexuality, where those celebrating sexual freedom finding the Old Testament overly confining, whereas adherence to the Old Testament serves as a way to maintain an espoused orthopraxy amongst more traditional and those who lean evangelical. However, other attitudes may be playing out in one’s reactions, such as views on power, authority, gender, etc. In a sense, the various views on the Old Testament serve as sort of a meta-theology that governs the grammar of faith, hence it can be tempting to either throw out the heretical category of Marcionism in order to maintain doctrinal regulation or to throw out heresy altogether to subvert such doctrinal regulation.

Nevertheless, there are exceptions to this principle. I happen to be one of them, finding little objectionable in Stanley’s sermons when heard in context and yet I have many strong evangelical and traditional sympathies, even if I don’t strictly identify as such. How is it that I can do that? It is because, in the end, I recognize that there are at least two Scripturally legitimate ways to connect the Old Testament and Christ, while recognizing that both patterns have their own weaknesses: the chronological relationship where the Old Testament leads to Christ and the retrospective relationship where Christ leads to the Old Testament.

Both of these views have been debated in Biblical scholarship and theology. Christian scholars of the Old Testament are often notorious for a chronological relationship. New Testament scholars tend to be mixed. However, many theologians, such as those in a more Barthian mold, have endorsed a more retroactive relationship. This is also consistent with the pattern of the early church, who tended to interpret the Old Testament as it pertains to Christ rather than vice versa. While there is hermeneutical danger in oversimplifying the two perspectives that treat all retroactive and all chronological relationships as essentially the same, I would suggest it is these two basic patterns that are deeply formative for how we do theology.

The chronological relationship expresses a higher view of the Old Testament. You might hear the relationship between Christ and the Old Testament being described as a narrative in which Christ is the climax, as N.T. Wright is inclined to say. The emphasis here will be on the continuity of Christ and the New Testament with the Old Testament. Meanwhile, the retroactive relationship expresses a more ambivalent view of the Old Testament, it can either positive, negative, or somewhere in between. This view was expressed in Stanley’s sermon, referring to the Old Testament as a “background story.” The emphasis here will be on the discontinuity of Christ and the New Testament with the Old Testament, such as Stanley referring to what Christ is doing as something new.

I will suggest that both relationships are justified from within the practice of the New Testament church, being roughly in line with epistemology from a Jewish perspective and epistemology from a Gentile, at the risk of oversimplification. I would suggest the two best contrasts of these views are containing in the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul, both of which express evangelistic motivations.

For the Gospel of John, Jesus talks about the Scriptures, which we would know as the Old Testament, as witnesses to him in John 5:39. The problem that the Jesus said the Jewish leaders had was that they were studying them for another purpose, eternal life, rather than instead, to listen and know the heart of God. According to the explanatory paradigm of faith for the Gospel of John in 3:20-21, living in accordance to the truth is the condition upon which one will accept Jesus as the light sent by God. Synthesizing these insights together, the Gospel of John suggests that those of his audience¹ who have genuinely put into practice the truth as they pay attention to the voice of God in the Scriptures would accept Jesus. According to this Jewish paradigm, the Old Testament scriptures are instrumental in coming to know about Christ, particularly in faithful practice and obedience.

However, the Apostle Paul had a different context than the Gospel of John. For Paul, he went primarily to Gentiles who would have had little education in the Old Testament Scriptures. Instead, his primary emphasis in his preaching was on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ such as in Romans 10: and 1 Corinthians 2:1-5. For him, the critical point of faith is containing in the event of resurrection and one’s acceptance of that as being true. Thus, as I argued in a previous post on Faith and Wisdom, Paul would employ the death and resurrection of Christ as offering a retrospective justification of the Scriptures in 1 Corinthians 15, allowing him to describe the significance of Christ’s resurrection through reference to Adam. Paul’s concern about the Torah, however, is that the letter of the Torah that describes a set of works be compelled upon Gentiles, as Acts 15, Romans 7, and 2 Corinthians 3 all testify to. For Paul, the great error with the Torah is not in its acceptance, but rather in believing that means of transforming persons comes through the teaching of the letter of Torah and the external adherence to the behavioral prescriptions that come from Torah. Nevertheless, Paul will employ Torah as a source of moral reasoning, such as in Romans 13:8-10.

Both approaches, however, share something in common: the focal emphasis on the resurrection of Christ. It is Thomas’ recognition of Christ’s resurrection in John 20 that climaxes Thomas’s confession of Jesus as Lord and God, in alignment with the Prologue of John 1:1-17. This should be understood against the background of John’s implicit Temple theology that N.T. Wright mentioned, allowing that the resurrection of Christ and the confession is understood as the recognition of God’s arrival, emphasizing a continuity. For Paul when he uses the Old Testament as a source of ethical reasoning, he has a tendency to understand it as it pertains to the resurrection of Jesus Christ as in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 and the ministry that results from this reality as in 2 Corinthians 3 while always highlighting the discontinuity from the Old Testament narratives and characters and Christ. Whether one sees the resurrection of Christ as a climax to the Old Testament narrative or a new event that retroactive appropriates but contextualizes the Old Testament narratives, they both have their warrants within the New Testament witnesses.

Nevertheless, both styles have their weaknesses. Chronological relationships will in emphasizing the continuity with their interpretations of the Old Testament will miss the discontinuity. One of my critiques of N.T. Wright’s view on Paul is that while Paul is saturated in the Old Testament world, he still does emphasize the discontinuity more because of the importance of the notion of New Covenant as in Jeremiah 31. Retroactive relationships have the reverse problem; they will minimize or overlook the importance of the continuity, such as in apocalyptic interpretations of Paul that while rightly recognizing Paul’s highlighting of discontinuity, overlook the fact that Paul assumes an incredible amount of continuity between the Old Testament Scriptures and Christ in the way he makes his arguments. This is not to mention the strikingly strong incoherence of their interpretations of Paul with the rest of the New Testament, which I regard to be a negative mark against the apocalyptic interpretations because I find good reasons to assume a relative coherence of Paul with the rest of the NT corpus. Of course, these negatives are reflective of my knowledge in the Biblical Studies world and there may be other weaknesses when it comes to theological arguments. My only point is that within each perspective, there are weaknesses that can become more magnified under certain conditions.

However, we can readily exaggerate the weaknesses and dangers of those espousing a different relationship between Christ and the Old Testament, As with all disagreements, we are inclined to upgrade all potential weakness as actual dangers, thereby denigrating the opposite view while shoring up the confidence in and the necessity of our view. But I think a critical reading of the New Testament that still takes the NT as normative for faith would suggest both relationships have their validity, with their own corresponding potential blind spots. Nevertheless, they are both united under the umbrella of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and also, while I have not mentioned it previously, God’s pouring of the Holy Spirit upon those who believe. Why? Because I would suggest the central epistemological framework of the apostolic church was not based upon how one related the Scriptures to Christ, but upon the knowledge gained from the traditions of Jesus life, death, and resurrection and the power and leading that the Spirit provided. I would suggest that all other forms of knowledge and the ways one acquired this knowledge would be considered in relation to what is known by Christ and bt the Spirit, allowing an epistemic diversity that was contextualized to the epistemic unity of Christ and Spirit. This is essentially what Acts 15 accomplished, allowing there to be a diversity of moral epistemology, allowing Jews to obey Torah and not holding the Gentiles accountable to obeying the Torah commandments. I would simply extend that to more than a moral epistemology, but also a broader theological epistemology as it pertains to how Christ and Old Testament were related.

It is truly an unfortunate reality, but the Church is no stranger to abuse. We are all familiar with Catholic scandals surrounding the sexual abuse of minors. As it turns out, however, this was not just a Catholic reality, as the past few years have brought to light the sins of abuse amongst Protestants. Sovereign Grace Churches has been accused of the sexual abuse of children. However, the scope has broadened to consider other forms of abuse, such as the condoning of spousal abuse or overlooking the sexual abuse of women that Paige Patterson as been accused of. Then, we had the Baylor rape scandal, if we broaden our look beyond churches to institutions of higher education. However, even this is an overly narrow scope of the problem of abuse in the church, as it focuses on abuse in the contexts of sex and marriage, and overlooks the other forms of abuse that can take place in the church. While I would not call it “abusive” I recall a church I was involved with earlier in my college days that was a rather controlling church, with egos that dealt with issues of conflict and discipline in a poor manner.¹

So how then can we and should we address the situation? The current trend has been to creates a set of rules that protect people from abuse, such as Safe Sanctuary policies that are implemented in United Methodist Churches. These are a good thing and while they can offer some ways to deal with particular forms of abuse, particularly sexual abuse and the abuse of children, they do not address the wider issues of abuse in Christian settings. AT the end of the day, minus the most flagrant forms of abuse such as assault, rape, the violation of children, etc., abuse is not really a behavior, but a set of behaviors in a specific context. Policies and procedures can protect against the most salient forms of abuse, but they leave a whole host of other ways of harming others unaddressed, for instance, the form of social bullying that can be perpetuated via social isolation and triangulation. However, it takes insight, education, and listening to identify these forms of abuse, and the means it is often too late to prevent the damage to the victim.

However, if we consider that the type of abusers that tend to be in power in churches tend to be a particular sort, those who have a high social awareness (HSA) of what other people think, feel, and expect, including even the possibility of showing cognitive empathy where they can rationally understand what other people including their victims might feel, but little emotional empathy where the feels of their victims prevent them from action, you can begin to address one of the principal contextual factors that allows abuse to occur in the first place. Abusive people who have little ability to manage impressions are quickly caught and punished within organizations and in the legal system. What distinguishes abusers with HSA from them is their ability to cloak themselves and their actions such that they never experience any vulnerability and substantive accountability. What this looks like is their ability to notice what types of actions, words, and expressions are effective at giving positive and/or negative impressions and then accommodate their public persona in accordance to the positive views, mitigating any suspicion towards them, while shift blame towards their victims by mastery of casting negative impressions in skillful ways. This is what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount when he referred to wolves in sheeps’ clothing; people like the Pharisees and scribes are effective at garnering social approval through their prayers, giving, manners of publicly judging others, etc. but at the end of the day, they are like ravenous wolves, who have murderous hearts and can do such through their words. In a sense, I would say the Sermon on the Mount is the very way of life that is antithetical to the way of life of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, where moral awareness moves us as people towards the perfection in love that God has instead of moral awareness being used as a tool of power over others.

So then, there is one important form of power that HSA abusers have that enable them: they rely on the habit of human thinking in how we interpret and understand people based upon surface words, actions, etc. to cloak what they are actually doing. Social awareness, including awareness of moral expectations, becomes a tool for avoiding vulnerability and accountability. Any set of values we espouse, any set of practices we employ, any sense of bureaucratic or institutional procedures we set up, any norms of reason we lift up, no matter how truly good and valuable these values, practices, procedures, and reasons are, they are resources to potentially exploit by HSA abusers.

Furthermore, since various nations, cultures, institutions, etc. have different sets of values, practices, procedures, and reasons that would take time to master, HSA abusers will tend to keep their environment the same. They often times thrive in insular cultures and organizations, where there is so little change to how things operate that people have developed habitual ways of thinking within that social networks such that they can readily exploit. These types often times espouse the values of peace and order and will portray their opponents as threat to the peace. However, HSA abusers who are themselves not too alarmed emotionally, particularly of the psychopathic variety, can also thrive in situations of chaos and rapid change, as people exhibit very distinctive and relatively predictable patterns of thinking and emotions when ambiguity overwhelms them. These types can resort to chaos and panic, such as shouting to the masses about massive, widespread injustice, casting their own opponents as oppressors trying to shut challengers down. However where HSA abusers would not easily thrive, however, is in contexts where there a moderate amount of change; here there is enough unpredictability in how people will think in the future that it is hard for them to master the appearances necessary to cloak themselves, their HSA is not sufficient for them to reliably manipulate others.

With that said, here are a list of some practices HSA abusers may employ based upon reading in the psychological literature, hearing people’s stories, and from my own experiences.

1) Justifying their behaviors, such as employing the legal, organizational, or moral authority given to them to explain their behavior

2) Will resort to “reframing” abusive behaviors much akin to public relations, such as calling abusive behavior a “misunderstanding”

3) Will strategically “apologize” if it will immediately allow them to re-establish control and/or allays further attention and suspicion.

4) Projection of one’s own behaviors, emotions, and motivations onto others including their victims, such as calling their victims control or abusive.

5) Notices the faults in other people’s behaviors and will exaggerate them, such as treating the defensive behaviors of their victims as signs of their mental instability and aggression.

6) Tell a narrative of events are frequently a patchwork quilt truth and falsehoods designed to give plausible to their distortions, such as neglecting to mention how their behavior threatened their victims.

7) Will use all resources at their disposal to control their victims, such as getting other people in their victims’ social network involved in controlling the victim through isolation, triangulation, repeating the same judgments, and/or to gather information on the victim.

8) Withholding information from others, such as failing to share important institutional procedures to others.

There are many more examples, but what is particularly insightful about this list is that these are all behaviors all of us can employ. We can justify, reframe, apologize, project, focus on other’s faults, tell narratives that are out of context, try to our resources to influence others, and withhold information. This is all part of what it means to be social creatures; these are things that may have some value or at the least are not signs of malicious intentions. However, it is these very actions that are so commonly the marrow and joints of our relationships that can and do get exploited, particular by HSA abusers.

What is the solution? To assume these actions are covering abusive behaviors will be to isolate us as social creatures; for instance, one of the particular struggles I have is to notice these patterns of relationships and to recognize they are not signs of malice, but I tend to isolate despite trying to remind myself of that. But, instead, it is to avoid our automatic thinking processes when signs of problems start to crop up and to substitute it with patterns of paying close attention, asking questions, listening to stories, etc. but in such a way that we do not automatically discard people who have had to endure a process of investigation. The more we are quick to discard, the more people’s defensive natures will employ the tactics above, making it even harder to sift out the wheat from the chaff. A culture of that gets down to the specifics that would circumvent the automatic thinking processes that HSA abusers can manipulate while being slow to judge but will judge when needed can provide just enough unpredictability and change in the system to prevent HSA abusers from being able to gain a needed mastery while also providing the conditions where well-intended people who make mistakes can get the needed direction without feeling like they too have to hide.

In short, a culture such as this would be moving towards a union of grace and truth, allowing a sense of the truth to come up from understanding specific circumstances, thereby undercutting the means of control that HSA abusers commonly manipulate via treating truth as a manipulation of symbolic communication, while also extending grace to others for their own weakness, failures, and sins when they mess up in their positions, acting in proportion to their actions rather than going beyond. But this is deeply antithetical to the drives for power, control, and predictability that people, organizations, and institutions seek out. The drive for success and protection makes us want to resort to the more automatic forms of social relationships, and the more we employ these forms again and again, they more we unwittingly make ourselves susceptible to manipulation by those with HSA. It is almost as if the Apostle Paul knew what he was talking about in the dynamics of the flesh with its unrestrained passions and enslaving, inflexible forms of fear vs. the Spirit with His cultivation of contenting joy and sustaining love and the struggle to listen to the Spirit is countered by the voice of the flesh.

Now that the furor has died over Andy Stanley’s sermon about “unhitching” our faith from the Old Testament, I want to provide a specific reason why he is right on this. Previously, on my blog and social media, I had focused on why I thought criticism was unfair, calling out how his words were being interpreted out of context. The more I read and heard from his critics, the more I felt that way, as every criticism I saw was conditioned upon interpreting Stanley’s words to mean things that Stanley did not talk about in his sermon. However, I suggest that what Stanley was getting at was precisely correct if we read the Bible historically and not simply as a theological document of which everything said is of equal theological importance.

This starts centered around the word “faith,” which is pistis in the Greek. Both words can be used in two, interrelated ways. Firstly, it can be used to describe a relational trust in someone. I have faith that God has forgiven me of my sins. You have faith that your spouse honors you. Secondly, it can be used to refer to accepting some idea, or if we can get technical a proposition, is true. For instance, I believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. You believe, if not even know, your spouse genuinely committed to love you at your wedding. Now, I say interrelated because these two senses are commonly related: our trust in a someone or something, whether it be God, your spouse, your friends, the car your drive, etc. is grounded upon what has happened. That is, my hopeful expectations for the future are grounded in what I believe to have happened in the past. In this way, the two interrelated uses of faith/pistis are related. However, these two different meanings can be flipped. Because I trust someone, I believe certain things. Because I trust God, I believe he will raise my body from the dead. Because you trust your spouse, you believe they will be faithful to you in the future. Here, the order is flipped: because I trust, I believe certain things are or will be the case. Hence, trust and propositional belief are tightly intertwined in both causal directions.

I bring up this distinction to make sense of 1 Corinthians 2. There, the Apostle Paul outlines his pedagogical practice with the Corinthians. in 2:1-5, he outlines how the only knowledge he wants people to ascribe to him is knowledge about the crucified Christ, which was have presumably included knowledge about the resurrection. He joins this knowledge with the powerful works of the Holy Spirit that provide a demonstrative clarity. For what purpose? That the Corinthians faith may be in the power of God, rather than in him as some teacher of wisdom. At the most basic point, Paul wants the Corinthians to have a trust in God’s power that is grounded upon the resurrection of Christ and the demonstration of the Holy Spirit, and how this power works in weakness through Christ’s death and the weakness of Paul. Here, certain propositional beliefs are the grounds for forming trust in God.

However, in 2:6-16, Paul’s framework changes. For the mature, there is wisdom to be taught. In comparing the language of glory here with the language of glory in 1 Corinthians 15, at least part of the wisdom Paul is teaching about the glorious nature of the general resurrection that is to happen in the future. Here, the trust in the power of God ground the basis for what one believes will happen in the future. What is significant though is that nowhere in 2:6-16 does Paul refer to faith/pistis. He refers to this as wisdom/sophia. Why? Because in (Roman) Stoic epistemology that would have been prominent at the time in Corinth, a Roman colony, one comes to wisdom by first apprehending what is known as a “kataleptic impression.” Without getting bogged down in the minutiae of it and possible oversimplifying, the kataleptic impression was some prerequisite understanding of what is true that was necessary to gain wisdom/deeper knowledge. In other words, for Paul, one had to have a kataleptic impression of the power of God before one could obtain wisdom/sophia.

In other words, for Paul, before one could get wisdom, one had to come to trust in God and His power, but in order to do that, one believed in the resurrection of Christ and perceived that work of the Spirit. To use Andy’s metaphor, faith was “hitched” to the resurrection of Christ, which Stanley did mention early in the sermon, and the Holy Spirit.

However, adding wisdom to one’s faith was not simply a matter of some sort of acquisition of more knowledge. Immediately following 1 Corinthians 3, Paul derides the Corinthians for being unable to receive this wisdom because they were acting in fleshy/spiritually immature ways. That they were focused on attaching themselves to certain teachers like Paul, Apollos, Peter, or even Christ showed that they had not truly gotten it. Whatever sense of faith they may have had in God was blurred and distorted by the sense of importance they were putting in entrusting themselves to certain teachers. The very practices they were engaged were the problem. Paul says something similar in 1 Corinthians 15:34, suggesting that the reasons the Corinthians have no real knowledge is because of their sin. What is the type of sin that is the problem? From 15:33, we see that the problem Paul is rebuking is rooted in one’s social relationships. In other words, the very reason the Corinthians were not ready for wisdom was that of their relationships. They set up a competitive atmosphere between the Christian teachers and apparently were willing to put their trust in anyone who had the appearance of wisdom.

In other words, for Paul, because the Corinthians are not loving their fellow disciples of Christ as they should, they are not able to grasp wisdom. Therefore, we can say the fundamental basis for being able to add wisdom to our faith in God is the love of others, particularly the love of one’s fellow Christian community. The problem of sin isn’t failure to adhere to a set of behavioral codes or rules; in fact Paul suggests part of the problem in Corinth is the nature of people’s moral scruples making them arrogant in 1 Corinthians 8. The basic foundations can be summarized by the loving trust in God and the love of one’s neighbors. No other foundations, such as Greek wisdom or Jewish Torah, were given precedence.

So what Andy Stanley accords with what we see in Paul in 1 Corinthians. One’s faith is not in the Old Testament; it is in the resurrected Christ, or as I would say in God through Christ, and the prime commandments to be followed is to love each other. This is not to suggest that the Torah is therefore invalid. Rather, it is to suggest the function of the Old Testament for Paul is to help bring further wisdom and insight, once the foundation of faith in God and love for the Body of Christ has been deeply established. It is in 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul attempts to teach the wisdom about glory, which pertains to the resurrection which Paul understands through reference to the OT story of Adam in comparison and contrast to Christ. For Paul, the Old Testament’s primary role is to bring wisdom; one’s faith was not in Torah.

The one place in 1 Corinthians that may seem to be exception to this point actually validates the overall point. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Paul talks about the death and the resurrection of Christ; in both instances, Paul says it was according to the Scriptures. Now, according to the standard narrative we tell due to the chronological order of history where Old Testament comes before Christ, we might be inclined to say “The Old Testament has prophecies that prove Christ is who he is.” Therefore, we might be inclined to say that the Old Testament validates Jesus and thus is important for faith. This is not entirely without merit in the NT canon; in John 5:39, Jesus ascribes the purpose of the Scriptures as being to testify to him. This, however, does not seem to be the purpose of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul is speaking to Gentile, many of whom presumably did not believe in the OT scriptures when Paul first evangelized to them. Instead of the OT being a validation for Jesus resurrection, it is the resurrection of Jesus that serves to valid the OT Scriptures to the Gentiles; Jesus died and was raised as the most basic point of belief for the Corinthians believers, and if you look and see that this was according to the OT Scriptures, the OT Scriptures are validated. When Paul seeks to validate the resurrection, he goes into detail about the various witnesses. When referencing the Scriptures, however, his references is only the most basic “in accordance with the Scriptures.” This generality is evidence that Paul is treated the death and resurrection of Christ as a ground to accept the authority of the Scriptures; the lack of detail undermines the interpretation that the OT is used to understand Jesus and/or validate belief in the resurrection. So, this sets up Paul’s comparison of Christ and Adam in order to understand the resurrection. In other words, it isn’t that one hold to Torah and then believes in Christ if you are a Gentiles; it is that you believe in Christ first and then the Torah opens up an epistemic source of further wisdom.

In other words, faith and wisdom must be distinguished in Christian theology if we want to take Paul as a normative prototype for how to do theology. Faith has its most basic essential beliefs about the resurrection of Christ and perhaps also the work of the Holy Spirit that grounds the trust in God. This is the necessary grounds to then move into wisdom about what the significance of all this is. There, Paul will incorporate the Torah and Old Testament. There, at the point of wisdom/sophia, or if we were to translate that more according to what it refers to, philosophy, we find the role of the Old Testament for the Christian church; the OT narratives and ethics are an important basis for building a Christian philosophy, depending on how it gets used.¹ It is not, however, the fundamental starting point; the Old Testament is not some Archimedean point around which Christian faith starts and builds from. It is God made known in the crucified and resurrected Christ and in the powerful demonstration of the Holy Spirit. So our faith is not hinged to the OT; rather, it is our Christian philosophy that promotes a deeper understanding that relies so much on the Old Testament to understand the significance of Jesus and the Spirit and the work of new creation that God is accomplishing in them. Andy Stanley is right: our faith should be “unhinged” from the Old Testament because our faith is in God through what He has done in Jesus and Spirit and is not in a set of narratives from Israel’s past. The Old Testament does not serve as the foundation of our faith or our ethics; it is epistemic material that helps us to build on the foundation that is Jesus Christ. Whatever we might say about some Andy Stanley’s exegesis of Acts 15 or whether his view of discipleship would clarify the importance of the OT for spiritual maturity, he gets it right when it comes to faith as the New Testament uses faith. It is starts in the love of God and the love of one another that is grounded in the crucified and resurrected Christ. It is the belief in the crucified and resurrect Savior that grounds faith in the power of God, which then grounds further beliefs, which we call wisdom, about God’s power that pulls in the Old Testament, amongst others sources, to learn from.

As someone who struggles with the symptoms of PTSD, I am acutely aware of the phenomenon of hypervigilance, where someone is constantly surveying the landscape for potential threats to one’s well-being. In a state of hypervigilance, your mind is prone towards surveying the environment for threats, and if you catch something that sets of a signal, to jump ready to action to protect against this threat. While some state of hypervigilance are in accordance to reality, as one really is being attacked and has to be protective, many times are hypervigilant states are distorting. As a result, we are prone to see threats that aren’t there; furthermore, we are prone to exaggerate the threatening nature of something. For instance, what may be signs of frustration by a person may get interpreted as signs of hostility. I use this phenomenon as an analogy for what I am referring to as theological hypervigilance.

What brought this up is uproar on social media over Andy Stanley, the head pastor of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, GA, about his statement of “unhitching” faith from the Old Testament. Many electrons have been spilled over the discussion on social media as to whether Andy Stanley is a heretic in the mold of Marcion. Despite the fact that Stanley explicitly stated that he believes the Old Testament to be inspired, people are insistent on saying Stanley is like the guy named Marcion from the 2nd century A.D. who believe the God of the Old Testament was different from Jesus and thus cut out the Old Testament entirely, along with significant portions of the New Testaments he believed to be too influenced by Judaism. While I have not watched the sermon, so perhaps I am missing something, but upon reading various articles such as Wesley Hill’s article with First Things and social media commentary and conversation, I have found the ultimate gist of Stanley’s sermon to be this: Stanley endorses a legalistic view of the Torah as a contract, which is a false stereotype, in trying to tell people that their faith is grounded in the resurrection of Christ and their way of life is not defined by Torah. While some of his language riled up people such as the word “unhitched,” what I have seen is guilty of oversimplified and problematic exegetical assumptions, but otherwise is pretty on point with Paul’s style of evangelism to the Gentiles.

My point is this: it seems upon careful examination (again, I did not watch the sermon; only read people’s quotes from it) that Stanley is far from Marcionism. Rather, what has “triggered” people is certain phrases that diminish the role of the Old Testament that many people were immediately prone to read as “Marcionism.” A sermon that is, in my view, guilty of oversimplification and poor exegesis gets upgraded in the eyes of others into a destructive heresy. Why? Because of theological hypervigilance.

In the secularizing and progressivizing Western society, we who are evangelicals stand in a place where we are seeing our views, opinions, values, and ideas being denigrated, disvalued, mocked, and treated with intellectual contempt. While certainly not life and death persecution, the repetitive experience of such disvaluation in popular discourse certainly signals to people their inferior status; it is a milder version of what has happened to minority communites, most particuarly African-Americans. Furthermore, as Christian churches in America have long been more accommodating to the socio-political ideals of the society, as secular and progressive ideals have become more prominent, so too have the church becomes more dividiing into sharp, bitter conflicts in denominations over concerns such as gender, sexuality, race, justice, etc.¹ Many evangelicals and those of us like me who have evangelical sympathies but may not identify strictly as evangelical have grown defensive towards this repeated experience of external, societal devaluation and internal strife. As a result, we are in a state of theology, if not also ethical, hypervigilance, trying to protect ourselves and our churches from the shifts away from the truth of the Gospel. As a result, there is a quick readiness to see adulterous distortions of the truth in other people who gives even the appearance of heresy or of those who try to bring some civility and careful thinking to the conversation.

Now let me state something. I understand this. There are a lot of emotions associated with this. There is fear about the future of the Gospel in the West. I get it. I really do. But… this type of theological hypervigilance is unhealthy, sinful, destruction of the foundations of the Gospel of Christ. Instead of a foundation of love that while speaking truth, is quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger, it plants the seeds of anger and suspicion and readily justifies this anger by cloaking it as some righteous zeal. It undercuts the very basis by which the Church can come to grow and share the same confession because its readily treats anyone as a false teacher. If theological hypervigilance were to have its way n the end, it would create a unity of faith by kicking everyone out, rather than by the often slower, more arduous process of bring both grace and truth to our relationships in the church. It is as if people feel that God has selected them to be the defenders of the faith and they can only accomplish that goal by pulling out the sword anytime a sheep seems to move the slightest bit suspiciously.

Also, ironically, in trying to root our heresy, we often times are at risk of reinforcing the opposite heresy. Within the history of the church, heresy tend to come in pairs. The early Judaizing that made Torah necessary to justification is contrasted with the Marcionist heresy of rejecting the story of Israel and Torah. Whereas many engaged in Docetic forms of Christology that did not allow Jesus to be truly human, Arianism came in and said that Jesus wasn’t truly divine. Whereas modalism does not grant independence to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit but suggest they are merely three appearances, tritheism would come in and say that there are three different gods. Rarely is Christian heresy a battle between a clear right and wrong; rather heresy is an unrestrained engagement with the extremes. However, when we are quick to label anything that might be construed to bear the slightest resemblance to some heresy and we attack it strongly and viciously, what we are in fact doing is pushing our body of believes more towards the opposite extreme. Witness how some radical Calvinists will reinforce the extremeness of their own views on predestination and unconditional by labeling anything that provides a place for human response as “semi-Pelagian.” Theological hypervigilance plants the seeds of heresy by pushing people towards and extreme.

This is not unique simply to Western evangelicals, however. It is a similar trend I notice in Barthian circles of theology, where the fear of anything like Nazi Germany creates a hypervigilance towards anything that might look like natural theology as distorting the faith; this form of theology where it comes only by direct revelatory inspiration to the person does bear some resemblances to gnosticism; its fight against immanence creates a tendency towards an over-spiritualization of the Christian message. There are other examples littered throughout history, I am not just trying to pick on evangelicalism or Barthian theology. However, the point is this: theological hypervigilance is the result of “trauma-like” experiences as it relates to our theological and spiritual identity, where we have seen the bad and evils of others in either treating us wrong or, more empathetically, treating others wrong so we vow to resist anything that might bear the slightest resemblance to these evils, that we might imagine might open the slightest space for those “heretics.”

However, theological hypervigilance wasn’t Jesus’ method for addressing the leaven of the Pharisees. Paul didn’t jump to conclude anyone, such as the other apostles such as James as in Galatians 2, who may not have been immediately on board with his mission to the Gentiles as themselves standing against the true faith. While there were false teachers, prophets, and apostles that the New Testament warns against, there is nothing that suggests they see the churches just littered with them, sniffing them out by rather arbitrary litmus tests based upon the slightest of resemblances to something false, to protect the churches as every turn. Rather, while they will occasionally talk about false teachers and expelling them, the main tactic for protection against them was more pedagogical, guiding people in their spiritual development so that they will be able to resist the false allures of said false teachers and the devil himself.

Translated into our modern day reality, it would entail helping people to see the difference between what the heresies actually teach (and not some overly genericized, stereotyped, caricatured version of them that we use to delegitimate our opponents) and put them into contrast with the way of Christ and the Spirit that we who hear the witnesses of the New Testament adhere to. However, insofar as our emphasis is pointing out false teachers and we are hypervigilant to find them, rather than training people to discern false teaching from what is true. Sometimes this entails addressing what other teachers have said, but we can critique what someone said as bearing potential problems without labeling them a heretic. I can say “Andy Stanley said some things that falsely portrays the Torah with a negative stereotype and could be taken too far as rejecting the Old Testament entirely, and we refer to this rejection of the Old Testament as Marcionism.” I can say “Karl Barth is fighting against a great evil, but his sole focus on revelation if taken too far may have some bad implications.” There, my focus is on a pedagogy of those I am teaching while allowing myself to see the weaknesses of what some people may teach, rather than engaging in some (often testosterone-fueled) conflict with others persons, falsely imagining that our “righteous” zeal will save the day and make everything better.

In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul addresses the future fate of different teachers of the church. There are some times when teachers who build with gold, silver, and costly stones; other times they build with wood, hay, or straw. Then, there are those who destroy the building of Jesus Christ. If your theological hypervigilance makes you see fewer and fewer people as building with wood, hay, and straw and more and more people who are destroying the church, you are probably in a state of theological hypervigilance. If your first impression of teachings you find problem with is to think the people are destroying the church, which you justify because you find some superficial or mild resemblance to heresy of the past, rather than to see their teaching as being wood, hay, and straw, then you are probably in a state of theological hypervigilance. When we use the word “heresy” readily upon people and what they are teaching in such a state of theological hypervigilance, we do not respect the power of that word and misuse and abuse in inappropriate way.