In his letter to the Galatians, Paul lambasts the Galatians for their flirtation with a group of teachers suggesting the importance of circumcision and obedience to the works of the Torah. Traditionally within Protestant circles, this has been taken as the contrast between being forgiven by simply trusting God or by our own efforts, as if these teachers were seeking to sully the pure Gospel with a works-based righteousness. And so, we interpret Paul’s powerful rhetoric as being simply confrontational.

But what if, however, Paul’s rebuke was rooted in trying to grab the Galatians’ attention because he saw the way their attention was beginning to stray? After all, Paul’s first order of correction is to tell people to not be caught given credence to someone whose teaching diverts from what they had already heard. Paul doesn’t start off by correcting their theology; he starts off by trying to tell them who not to pay attention to. Then, once we begin to see Paul gets into his exegetical-theological argument in Galatians 3, we see Paul asking the following questions about the Spirit: how did they receive the Spirit and how God works among the people? The two contrasting answers he provides is not the antithesis of “works of the Torah” and “the faith(fulnness) of Christ,” but between “works of the Torah” and the “hearing of/with/from faith.” AS Paul goes back to the very beginning of the Galatians journey in Christ and how it continues, he doesn’t talk about the faith that Christ possess, but about the way they hear and listen. We can construe the genitive πίστεως that describes ἀκοῆς as defining the way the people hear; they hear with faith in mind.

IF we step back from the text and take a step into the psychology of attention, it is pretty intuitive to us that all hearing and listening is not the same. We are aware of those people who seem to barely listen to anything we are saying from those whose attention is focused on what you are said. But there is another way attention differs from people and situations: what people are listening for?

For instance, when I served as a pastor, I could be making small talk with my parishioners, my attention would not be heavily invested but I was focused on simply what was interesting and could continue the conversation. However, if I was engaged in a theological conversation, I would pay close attention to what ideas they were proposing or questioning and the Biblical and theological rationale behind the proposition or question. But, if I was meeting someone going through an emotional or spiritual crisis, I would listen more for what expressed their hearts in faith and life. In those pastoral counseling moments, there might be some small talk or discussions might be broached about theology as it impinges on their experience, but I was not listening to small talk and theological discussion to the same degree that I would in other conversations. I would pay attention to how their small talk or their theological questions related to their own spiritual and emotional struggles. So, if a hypothetical conversation¹ were to occur over the loss of a loved one via suicide, they might ask a question about whether that person goes to hell. While I would certainly try to comfort them that nothing in the Bible or what we know about God’s character would suggest such a result, I would not be focused on their theological reasoning; I would be focused on the emotional content.

The way we listen has a dramatic impact on what we think we hear someone else saying. The attitude and expectations we have going into a conversation will determine what sense of we make of it.

So, bring this back to Paul, I would suggest it is important to see that is what Paul is referring to here. Paul is trying to encourage the Galatians to go back to their initial attitude of faith when they came to Christ, which impacted how they heard and what they took from it. This gets demonstrated in 3:6-14, as Paul goes through a brief foray into various sayings from the Old Testament Scriptures. His argument is that faith was always primary, with it starting in story of Abraham and being expressed later in the prophet Habakkuk. Meanwhile, the instructions from Mosaic instruction are interpreted through the lens of faith: Deuteronomy 27:26 is understood through the lens of faith, as its similar wording about living by obedience to the words of Torah is contrasted with the righteous living by faith; then, Paul speaks of Christ as receiving curse in being put upon a tree in line with Deuteronomy 21:23, which redeems people under the curse of Deuteronomy 27:26. In short, the way Paul understands the Mosaic instruction is through the lens of faith. The attitude with which Paul listens impacts the interpretation and understanding one garners from the (Old Testament) Scriptures.

In other words, for Paul, the important thing is that faith is the hermeneutical key to make sense of the Torah, and the rest of the Old Testament Scriptures. If that is the case, then the conflict between the “works of Torah” and the “faith(fulness) of Christ” isn’t necessarily about believing vs. performance/merit as the traditional Protestant paradigm has made it. Rather, the question is shifted to something different: what is the most fundamental thing to which people submit themselves to in order to be righteous? Is their focus and attention on the specific works one should perform and then setting one’s life in conformity to that, or is the work of God realized in people’s lives through the way they hear and listen to God with faith?

The concern then is about what or who people are paying attention to and how they are paying attention to them. One’s relationship to God and the character that becomes realized within us, which is justification and righteousness, is realized through listening to God Himself with faith. The major error of the Judaizer’s in Paul’s eyes was to misdirect people’s attention and focus from what was primary and most central. They were focused on what must be done rather than on what God was doing in fulfilling the promise.

While we can’t be exactly sure how Paul’s opponent construed the significance of Christ in their own teaching, Paul’s emphatic statement in 2:21, where concludes his statement on the justification with saying justification by Torah may Christ’s death purposeless, may suggest that the Judaizer’s did not give an appropriate focus on and understanding of Christ’s own faith(fulness) in going to the cross. Rather, if the rebuke about listening to angels with a different message is suggestive, Paul’s opponents may have been focused on providing further apocalyptic revelations and understandings that they purportedly received from angels to implore obedience to Torah, in which case the did not see God’s decisive and defining action occuring in Christ. While this is speculative and may risk mirror reading, it is plausible to suggest that Paul’s opponents were not in Paul’s eyes appropriately focusing and understanding righteousness through the lens of Christ faith(fulness) to the cross. If correct, they would have seen everything through the lens of the Torah, including the significance of Christ and further revelations that supplement the Torah, rather than on Christ.

Hence, in the end, Paul’s dramatic rebuke to start the letter wasn’t simply the statement of an angry person; he was certainly hurt in 2 Corinthians but he didn’t engage in such a strong rebuke. Rather, the harsh tone of Paul was perhaps done in service of getting the Galatians to rightly direct their attention so that they get back to listening to the way they used to. IT is like someone yelling at us when we are zoned up; the intense expression opens our eyes and ears to redirect our attention.

“Love God” and “Love your neighbor.” The two cornerstones of the Christian ethic, on which all other things we are to do and seek are to hang upon. But this term is not a well-defined term. As a result, great theological divisions run within Christian churches, some thinking love is more nuturing and open to people’s own individual expressions; others think love is more directive and disciplining to get people to go down the right path. Then, as anyone with a familiar with Greek can tell you, there are multiple terms used to describe love in the New Testament, but αγαπη is the primary term for the Bible. So, the temptation runs that if we can define what the terms mean, we can get it all straight. But the reality is, we all experience “love” in very different ways

But while there is some value to getting the right definitions, it is perhaps more important to know what “love” expects, thinks, seeks, and does rather than to give it a specific definition. Definitions are helpful for discernment, but they are not necessarily as helpful in instructing people who have their idea of what “love” is. Rather, an exploration of how we experience love and then how love is used, not defined, is perhaps more helpful.

If you are to read the psychological literature on love and attachments, there are a variety of love styles. I am not going to repeat them here, but I will provide a helpful summary of the three aspects that can be part of our experience of love and being loved. Love as energizing; love as approval; love as commitment.

1) Love as energizing – I was tempted to speak of passionate love, but that is to be overly narrow. Passionate, sexual romance can very energizing, but there are other forms of energetic love. For instance, that person who is always exciting and fun that everyone just wants to be around. We feel optimistic and cheerful when we are around them. They light our hearts on fire, causing us to run headlong, sometimes without thinking, into some event or project. Energizing love makes us feel alive in that we want to go and do. In many ways, this sort of love is an adrenaline rush. When brought into the Christian contexts, this looks more like ecstasy, emotional exuberance, a charismatic emphasis on our experience and emotional state, etc. This can also take the form of encourging communities, that seek to get people to realize some gift within themselves and use it with passion. But in other contexts where people do not wish to be overstimulated, love may be experienced in a calm, reflective environment, where people can experience a sense of peace and quiet so that they can be appropriately energized for who they are.

2) Love as approval – This is the type of love we offer to people when there is something we appreciate about them and/or when they avoid doing things that bother us. This can be mild as in a general appreciation of a person’s personality and style or extreme as focusing on judging every single action a person makes. Relationships form around this principle are often times rule-bound, where there are certain things one must do. But there are two distinct versions of this: there is the love of deservingness and then there is the compensatory style where we confer automatic approval on people to avoid the feeling of deserving approval. But at the heart of this notion, whether it is the default or compensatory mode is that we experience love when we approve and are approved. So, in Christian contexts this can show itself up in highly moralistic churches where those who appear as saints are loved or in gatherings where people showering appreciation on people simply for being people.

3) Love as commitment – This is more a teamwork approach, where people work together in life towards each other’s goals and needs over the long haul. Here, a common understanding and sharing of responsibilities is essential. The Biblical concept of the covenant is a very apt description of this type of love, where God and people, or husband and wife, bind themselves together for each other’s benefit. Another term for this commitment is faith and faithfulness. In Christian contexts, this shows itself in communication, listening, and care for God and His will and for His people.

Now, our experiences and expectations of love are going to be a mixture of these three. For instance, a marriage should ideally have a deep sense of commitment, with some occasional energizing passion and the communication of appreciation and approval. Some friends who go out to have fun times will be very energizing, whereas there won’t necessarily be a lot of expression of approval, except for fun times, and commitment to each other’s lives.

Anyone who is familiar with the psychology of love won’t be surprised by many of these observations. But there is something important to recognize our experiences and expectations of love when it comes to Christian contexts: as the default, our expectations about love do not change once we become a Christian. If love for us is an adrenaline rush before coming to Christ, we will probably continue to be an adrenaline junkie in our Christian convictions. Are you one who seeks after approval and appreciation before you gave yourself to the Lord? Then you will probably still be seeking approval and appreciation. You might change how you expect to receive that approval from performance to simply being a person, but you are still focused on approval. Are you a person who is deeply committed and wants a commitment from others; then commitment will define the relationships you wlll want to be involved in?

However, the closer our teaching about love conforms to the Biblical canon, the more the instructions will be geared towards faith and faithfulness, as this is the overriding way in which God’s love for people is defined and this is the way Paul defines the relationship people are to have with God. At the center of a Biblical love isn’t some ecstatic experience or a feeling of appreciation, but a trusting commitment that perseveres. God’s long-suffering love for Israel and the world and our hopeful expectations in the midst of life that doesn’t always show the power of God’s presence directly to us. This type of love can not be based upon energy and approval, because it would either fade with disappointment and exhaustion or dovetail into imaginary dreams where we can experience that energy and approval.

This isn’t to deny the energizing and appreciative aspects of love for the Church. Worship and communities that can marshall people’s energies, hopes, and (Realistic) optimism can serve to energize the way people live of their commitments to God and one another. Communities that provide appropriate levels of approval and appreciation can help people to continue in their commitments, while trusting others will be committed to them, But it is only to say if our understanding and expectations of God’s love and our love for reaching others is based upon energy and/or approval, there is still some learning, stretching, and growing to do. Why? Because occasionally, God performs dramatic, quick work, but for the most part, there are no shortcuts. We must be able to hear and see through the eyes and ears of faith in God’s love and power and respond in faithfulness to retain our involvement, engagement, expectations, and attunement to God’s will and work. The wells of energy and appreciation just don’t go deep enough into the human heart.

“Al the time, God is good. God is good, all the time.” This familiar little phrase that we repeat in churches and retreats enculturates us with two notions: 1) that God is defined by being good, whatever we mean by the word “good,” and 2) that this goodness is consistent, unchanging. This, and other similar liturgical practices, have a way of training the way we think about God. If God is good, then we should never feel any disapppointed, angry, frustrated, scared, or any other negative emotion towards God.

But this not the precise Biblical confession about God. If we were to look at the Psalms, for instance, we wouldn’t see an emphasis on God’s “goodness.” Furthermore, whenever God’s goodness is mentioned, such as Psalm 145:9, it doesn’t necessarily mean what we mean by “good,” as the definition of good varies depending on the context.¹ When we use it referring to God, however, we tend to think of “goodness” as either a moral goodness, in that God never does anything wrong or as a normative statement of how we should experience God, as if we should only think and feel positive things when it comes to God. This type of language about God’s goodness has a tendency to lead us into either a moralism or a feel-good-ism. In other words, we either see God’s goodness in terms of ontology and metaphysics or in terms of psychology. Unless we have developed a sensitivity to words and ideas that allows fluidity of usage, the idea of goodness does not enculturate a sense of relatedness and interdependence between God and us as people.

However, the language about God in the Psalms is more explicitly relational, as it pertains more to the notion of faithfulness, commitment, and love. The psalmists express a confidence in a relational God who is faithful, who is in relationship to psalmist and to Israel. God is someone who the psalmists look to in their lives, who they worship, praise, celebrate, complain, express confusion, etc. Why? Because they believe that God is a faithful God, who has brought much good to them and who will help them in their times of distress. They don’t get into some metaphysical notion about the universal nature of God’s actions or some universal statement about their own experiences of God. The Psalms do not express “this is a wrong thing to feel about God or others, so I should change what I feel to get it right.” Rather, the Psalms are an open expression of one’s calling for God’s action and their understanding of God’s action and inaction. There is a refreshing honesty, an openness and intimacy with God, where masks are not worn before God, who already sees the heart.

What is one of the markers of intimacy? Being able to express oneself openly to someone, without fear of punishment or judgment, but that what will be received will taken without damaging the relationship, because one does not intend one’s expression to be a representation of how one views the relational bond and one is confident this will be how the comments are received by the other party. So, in the bonds of a close, loving relationship, a person may express negative feelings about something the partner did or did not do. But isn’t this a contradiction, to think both good and bad about your partner?

Not at all. Our affective life is a complex reality, where we have emotions that are responding to specific situations, moods that determine the general tenor of how a person feels over an extended period of time, and attitudes that tend to persist and not change dramatically from one instant to the next. We can have positive attitudes towards someone, and yet have negative emotions at a specific moment towards them. IF I am someone who is well-grounded, then my attitudes will form as the result of many different experiences I have with someone, and once the attitude becomes strongly formed by many interactions, the attitudes we have towards people will not dramatically change from one moment to the next, even if emotions do change. These attitudes built from repeat experiences have a way of influence the shape our emotions take in response to events. A false incrimination from someone you have a  strongly formed loving attitude towards will lead to a different sort of anger than if the false incrimination comes from someone with whom you have an ambivalent or negative attitude towards. Attitudes do not control our emotions, but they do help shade and color them.

Ever heard the phrase “I love you, but I don’t like you right now.” This is an expression about the ambivalent experience where we have negative feelings towards someone but positive attitudes towards them. Essentially, our attitudes are the most prevailing emotional response and expectations we have about someone or something. If I love and trust someone, then my natural tendency when I think of or am around that person will be positive emotions and optimistic expectations. But, if there is a moment where the person does something that doesn’t match my expectations, it may generate negative emotions within me, such as disappointment, anger, etc. in response to their actions. However, when those negative emotions have subsided, the positive attitude towards someone will lead them to feel positive and warmly about that person again. In other words, well-formed positive attitudes of trust and love towards someone allow for the person to experience negative feelings, but yet for the general feelings about that person to be positive.

This is the precise pattern we see in the lament psalms, where the psalmists bring their complaints to God. They express the littany of emotions they have, but once the complaint and plea has been expressed, their expressions go back to a positive expression of God’s faithfulness. The positive attitudes the psalmists have is accompanied with the expression of negative feelings in the bonds of intimacy that such a love, trust, and optimistic expectations bring.

But our attitudes about God in the modern world, built around metaphysics and emotional experience, do not readily allow for such expressions. Instead of allowing the honest expressions of our feelings about disappointing and painful life circumstances and the God who we trust and believe is powerful enough to change them, we have a predilection to engage in a form of “spiritual censorship” of our experience, where either mask our feelings or fence of certain feelings when it comes to God.

Sometimes this is the result of beliefs that God is a God whose anger is on a hair-line trigger, that if you say something the wrong way just one time, if you make one single mistake, God will be angry at you. This notion of an insecure God is neither Biblical, as Israel learns that God is slow to anger in Exodus 34, nor rational, because God is powerful enough so as to not be threatened by others as people can be. Sometimes, this is the result of our objectification of God. With objects, our emotions and our attitudes tend to match, because objects are evaluated solely in terms of how they function in regards to our immediate, in the moment expectations. It is rare that we experience ambivalence towards an object, but we tend to have either a simple positive or negative views of objects. So, when we objectify God because our instruction about God has tended towards abstraction and theological systematicity, we have trouble allowing for the experience of both positive and negative emotions without it altering our attitudes about God. Sometimes, this is the result of knowing God simply as an idea that we know only through an accumulation of knowledge, and not a God who we relate to over the course of time; thus to be angry at the idea of God creates an untenable ambivalence with the idea that God is good that leads us to denial and/or rationalization.

But, if we recognize and act on the faith that God is faithful, that God is slow to anger, that God is a personal being, and that we relate to God rather than simply understand God, the existence of anger is not a threat to our religious or spiritual life. Rather, it is the realization of the most authentic, most intimate, most mature form of relationship one can have with someone. It is a type of relationship that can be hard to have with others, as our own insecurities, our own fears, our own objectifications, hinder and prevent us from both giving and receiving from others the truth of who we are and what we have experienced. And that is okay, because the reality of human relationships can be tough, as it can sometimes be hard for those who have been deeply hurt to distinguish people we should trust from those we should not. But I will say this: if you can’t be honest with God, who can you be honest with? If the idea of honesty with God threatens you, then ask yourself the question: are you a person attached to your masks? Or, are you a person who does not actually relate to God as a faithful, slow to anger, personal being?

Yesterday, Seedbed tweeted out a quote from Asbury Theological Seminary President Timothy Tennent: “Sin is our embrace of the absence of God in our lives.” This quote stuck out to me, as a little over a week ago, I myself had reflected on the theme of God’s absence as mentioned in the Bible. My reflection was on the purposeful God has in His absence as addressed in various parts of the Bible. But this struck me as being on our side of how we respond to those things we might call the absence of God. Just as we would say that God initiates His gracious action and we respond, and so grace has an impact on us in a synergistic fashion, so too might we say about the events and realities we might interpret as God’s absence. There is the divine purpose and there is the human response to it.

Now, I don’t know what President Tennent means himself. Without further context, there are many things one could read into it. But here is where his observation is quite fruitful: if we recognize that God’s absence refers to all the events in our lives that God does not intervene or control in such a way leading to evil comes out rather than good, then the absence of God is experienced by us in the maladjusted, wrongly ordered events and process that are not consistent with God’s will. God leaves things to go on as they are presently set up to do. Thus, in a world marred by sin and death, God’s absence leaves us in a place where we experience the full brunt of this reality, much as Jesus anguishedly expressed in His cry of dereliction.

Sin then can be said to embrace the world and our experience as it is in the absence of God. Not to simply accept its reality and to fine purpose within it while we prayerfully wait and long for something different, but to embrace the experience of life in this disordered nature as good. Whether it occurs with Pharoah and his power, who prior to the coming of Moses knew nothing of YHWH, who celebrates the present order where God has not intervened in the oppression of the people of Israel, or whether it is the people of Israel who were disheartened by their wilderness experience toward God’s promises and longed to go back to what they had in Egypt, the embrace of the world when God’s inaction leaves it as it is is a common reality. In fact, this is the default human reality, which Paul refers to as the flesh/σαρχ, which apart from an at of God and an attentiveness from people, we will continue to go along living with.

But as people of faith in line with Israel’s testimony, we don’t deny the idea of the absence of God through some abstracted notion of omnipresence. We recognize it expresses a very real reality that God does not always, or even much of the time, show up to stop the disordered process and events of the world. Sometimes, we experience these events in particularly devastating ways, as Israel did under bondage. But rather than deny the idea of God’s absence, we accept its reality, but we experience it with an attitude of faith and longing, looking forward to the day when life with be rightly ordered under God’s care, love, and faithfulness.

But as people on this side of the cross, we don’t experience this absence in the same way as Israel did under Pharoah. Whereas Israel’s cries were said to rise up to heaven suggesting their cries of anguish had a metaphorical distance to travel to reach to God, Paul paradoxically expresses a confidence in God’s presence within the persons in the midst of God’s absence within the wider world; the Spirit groans with the people’s groaning, as the Spirit intercedes on our behalf. We experience a groaning at the absence of God in the outer world with the presence of God within us. It is this outpouring of the Spirit upon the Lord Jesus’ people that allows us to resist the embrace of the world disordered by God’s absence, continuously calling us towards life and peace. As God’s absence calls forth a responses of faith form us, God’s own response is to be with us, strengthening us to resist being formed into the image of the world, but by the renewing of our minds from the disorderedness that the disordered reality inserts into us, we are made into the image of God through the glory of the suffering Christ.

And so, we wait, resisting all the impulses of the flesh that can lead to destructive actions, not wishing to go back to the way of life in Egypt, allowing the SPirit to lead us and with it to cultivate the fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control, as we through the Spirit, by faith, wait for the hope of a rightly ordered world by God’s presence, both in ourselves and even the world.

I am a Wesleyan at the heart of theological understanding. Nevertheless, I can critique my own tradition, such as having concerns about Wesley’s epistemic definition of faith as relating to certainty. Or, I would say that grace is not subdivided across the process of spiritual maturity in prevenient, convicting, justifying, and sanctifying, but rather that the same grace, God’s sending of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, has drawing, convicting, assuring, and transforming effects throughout the span of the Christian life. Then, I have my reservations about entire sanctification and the whole second work of grace, but not because I don’t believe that God can not perfect us as I think there are no strongholds of sin that God can not fight, but because I fear the perfectionist attitude that can be engendered by the desire for entire sanctification.

My simultaneous identification with the Wesleyan tradition and yet critique of it has always been rooted in the importance I placed on Scripture. After all, as a good Protestant, I was taught to always evaluate my theology in light of the Scriptures. So I engaged in an ever continuous process of self-critical reflection on my theology as I tried to interpret the Bible.

But, there was something subtle about this that I never realized until most recently. This way of reading Scripture and doing theology essentially makes theological interpretation the most important thing we can do, not the act of pay attention to Scripture. Believing the Scriptures are inspired by God (although I don’t have a refined sense of divine inspiration except that they are caused by God’s actions and disclosure therefore can say something about God), we presume that the most important thing in reading is to pick up the meaning because God has some meaning He is conveying to us. This often times works with an implicit assumption that the meaning is hidden in the text, and we just simply need the right hermeneutical tools to divine its message.

But what if the most important part of reading isn’t interpretation but attentiveness to Scripture? What if, as Deuteronomy 6:4-9 suggests, that God wants these words to be in our heart, to receive them, to know them, to meditate upon them? This isn’t to suggest a mutual exclusion of attentiveness from interpretation, but rather it places the emphasis for our spiritual formation in being attentive rather than in coming to know.

When we are focused on interpretation, we may minimize the amount of attention we provide to the words themselves. The most obvious example of this is eisegesis, where people find some meaning they want to be in the text, rather than draw it out based upon inductive, textual evidence and deductive, reflective reasoning. Some words can be interpreted to fit within some idea we have, so we think that is what the Scripture means.

This style of reading and doing theology engenders is the engendered by idea that the Bible is the go-to book of laws and rules as to what theology and ethics are right and wrong. We have some idea and then we go search the Scriptures to find the texts that support that idea. Why? Because ideas are usable; they are something under our control, so we are much more comfortable having our faith built upon a series of theological idea and concepts. Then, these ideas are used to guide our behavior, thinking, and feeling in a top-down, cognitive manner. What is important is that we get the right theological and ethical meaning and then conform ourselves to those meanings.

What I am proposing doesn’t condemn going the Bible to find answers, or trying to conform our behavior, thinking, and feeling to the specific interpretations we have. Rather, what I am saying is that our attentiveness to the words of Scripture and the very memory this act engenders is as important, if not more important, than deriving the right interpretation at the start. If God has expressed Himself, and if God is holy and is not wholly like us, then we would be wise to pay attention to what is said, rather than focus on trying to immediate divine the meaning of the words. Sure, we will interpret when we read; it is an automatic response that we can not just turn off when reading. But the primary formative elements of Scriptures comes through the act of attentiveness, with a heart of love and faith towards God. Then, over the course of time, reliable and spiritually edifying interpretations will rise to the surface, as we have been immersed in the whole of Scripture, in the various parts of the Bible, and then our theology and ethics will emerge from the bottom-up.

What if this is how God intends the content of our faith and holiness was to be engendered in the first place? What if we aren’t supposed to focus on getting all the right theological and ethical interpretations down from the start, but allow ourselves to be formed by the attention we give to those words because we trust them to be God’s Word to us?

To be clear, this is feasible and doable because interpretation is a multi-layered process. When we read, we get semantic senses of the individual words, the meaning of words together in phrases and sentences, and then the meaning that comes from integrating them all together in a specific genre (such as narrative, law, poetry, song, etc.). Then, as Christians who believe the words do not merely speak about things, including God, but that they are an expression from God, we find ideas about God, ourselves, and the world that we derive. Early, less familiarized readings of texts we are not familiar with work from a the bottom-up, where the individual words impact how we see interpret the collections of words, which impact how we make sense of the whole passages we have read, and so on. However, when we specific theological ideas in mind, then the process can work in reverse, in a top-down manner, where our theological ideas impact what the more rudimentary acts of interpretation.

So, when we place a greater emphasis on theological and ethical interpretations and meaning, the more we read the Scriptures in a top-down manner. Thus, attentiveness to the words is not as important in our process of reading, but rather how we align the interpretations of those words to into conformity to our theological ideas and questions. At the extreme, we act as if we have God, God’s power, and God’s will locked down into a set of abstract concepts that we suggest regulate God’s actions in a law-like systematic manner which God never deviates from.

But what if being formed by God comes first from an attentiveness to God in His forms of disclosures, which then through a bottom-up process we begin to connect to the things in ourselves and the world around us. When we see Paul say we are justified by faith, rather than imposed some top-down Protestant paradigm upon it, in our attentiveness in reading, we begin to discover the role that our faith plays in our relationship to God and how we experience and access the grace that God has given to us in Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit.

In the top-down process, we seek to interpret the Scriptures, God, the world, ourselves in conformity to the set of ideas we have. We have a tendency to  create a Procrustean bed, lopping off all that does not fit without these set of ideas, minimizing the attention paid to passages that do not address one’s favored ideas. We develop an attitude of only partial listening, filtering out all information that is dissonant with these theological and ethical ideas we have. As we began to idealize and dream of these ideas are becoming true in our self, this theological process can lead us into a process of rationalizing away all information that doesn’t conform to these theological ideas and the ideal selves we have in being conformity to these ideas. A focused and emphasis on theological knowledge can lead to theological rigidity, rationalization, and inhibited listening.

By contrast, the bottom-down process of interpretation focuses on attention, taking in the specific, concrete information we trust that God has disclosed to us, and allow ourselves to discover over time the interpretations that are reliable and edifying. Our hearts are in each event become conformed to the words, rather than the words to our hearts. Then, the various parts of our inner life can emerge into union with the words that God have spoken. Here listening becomes deep and then a more robust understanding emerges.

To be clear, you don’t have to have all this minutiae of analysis to be able to engage in a more attentive style of reading. It simply takes us spending more time to focus on the words rather than on the interpretations of the words. It entails slowing down, letting everything come in rather than trying to master what comes out from the reading. This is more, however, than a spiritual practice; Lectio Divina works under some of these principles, but this form of reading shouldn’t be a special practice that we add to complement our spiritual life. Rather, it should be the primary action we take. Attentiveness to God and what and who He has chosen in His Son and His Spirit is where our faith grows from.

An added benefit is that this style of attentiveness also allows us to be more attentive to the impacts of our reading and interpretations. For instance, my concern about Entire Sanctification is not that there is no legitimacy at all for the idea. The Scriptures, particularly the New Testament, entails a notion of sanctification that is not limited by the flesh, but that the Spirit prevails. There is some grounding for the idea in that some people may experience dramatic changes and transformations in their life a long while after initially coming to faith, which John Wesley observed happening in other people. But Entire Sancitifcation and the second work of grace is not expressed in the Scriptures, nor is it the universal experience of all mature believers. But if we are focused on a top-down understanding and emphasis of the doctrine, it can engender within ourselves expectations and longings for perfection, a type of longing for perfection that the Bible rarely exhorts. We can project it onto our reading of the Scriptures and we can form within ourselves a perfectionist attitude as we move towards idealizing this being true for us. This is actually one of the weaknesses within my tradition, as Wesley’s rather exacting, perfectionist manner can be transmitted to those of us who wish to follow in Wesley’s footsteps with a top-down attempt to conform ourselves in a perfectionist manner, rather than in a bottom-up growth, which the realization of can take on various shapes, forms, and patterns.

But as a Wesleyan, I have discovered that my attentiveness to the Scriptural texts, and then later my growth into paying attention to the specifics of what I see, hear, etc. and less emphasis on how I interpret what I perceive, that I truly value the merit and understanding the Wesleyan perspective brings, but as I am formed and find both the positives and downsides of it, I can identify their problems and failings, without delegitimating the whole Wesleyan theology. This has also allowed me to related to other theological traditions, such as Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, less in a mutually antagonistic manner, as if it is a battle of ideas, but rather seeing them as expressions that can be understood together to help God’s will to emerge in a more cooperate manner, much as Paul saw the wisdom of God emerge from the various voices of the teachers, such as Paul and Apollos, when the people spiritually discerned the words.

In other words, love and faithfulness start in our listening to God.

I am going to speak honestly here, as having been a pastor, as an aspiring Biblical Scholar, as one who has Bachelor’s degree in and an ongoing interest in psychology, and as one who grew up with a mother as a psychiatrist: Christian leaders need to be real careful about spiritual gaslighting and similar forms of spiritual judgment.

Gaslighting, if you aren’t familiar with the term, gaslighting is the series of events in which a person thoughts and feelings are consistently and routinely invalidated, to the point that they feel insane and cannot trust their own thinking. It is commonly the result of people whose intentions in their actions are constantly questioned or challenged. Or, in narcissistic relationships, narcissistic people might say or do something and then later deny it ever happened, causing their victims to question themselves. But this process goes beyond a merely questioning ourselves at any one point or time or another; the person perceives their own memory,  feelings, and/or thinking as unreliable and they can not trust it at all.

Now as Christians pastors, leaders, and those who identify as some sort of spiritual formation guide, we are particularly prone to being able to gaslight people for two reasons. Firstly, because we are so focused on the hidden, spiritual condition of people, we are prone to seeing things about people that they do not see. Secondly, because this knowledge of the spiritual condition is tightly intertwined with psychology, we are deeply aware of the various theories about personality and the inner-experiences of cognitive and emotion, The very type of knowledge and understanding we have are about things that we do not directly observe; then, the more we develop a mastery of spiritual and psychological knowledge, the more confident we are in our analysis of other people through them.

Now, offhand, this doesn’t lead to gaslighting. We can use this knowledge in ways where it is vastly specific to certain actions and behaviors. We may sense someone acting with narcissistic intentions, expecting to be treated better than they treat others. We may, if the honesty necessitates it, label such behaviors narcissistic. Or, we may notice a pattern of behaviors from someone who is consistently living in self-deception, and we may point this out to them. Then, sometimes we may make general observations about people, such as in blog posts, that talk about different dynamics people go through. With the exception of the few people whose have little trust in their thoughts, feelings, and memories, most people can healthily endure a specific challenge to their inner thinking processes. They may not like it; they may storm away; people don’t always appreciate having the veil torn away. But they can endure it.

Although, at the same time, people may not like it because what is being said is false. Anger is not a sign of resistance; anger can be a sign of being wrongly attacked. Sometimes, we are wrong. Spiritual and psychological reality is incredibly complex, where there can be many different causes and explanations for any specific behavior or sets of behaviors. A defensive, conflict oriented behaviors in one person can be the result of narcissistic personality, whereas in another person it can be the result of them being routinely attacked and disregarded. Or, the strong frustration of a person who can not reach their longed for goals can be the result of a perfectionist attitude, or it can be the response of someone who lost their dreams and wishes they could have them in their grasp again. And this is where our spiritual and psychological knowledge and our sense of mastery can absolutely lead us astray: no matter how much knowledge you have about these matters, even if you have read ever important spiritual classic and every groundbreaking work on psychology, you are never, ABOSLUTELY NEVER, an expert on an individual person’s life and heart. You may know their actions and have some insight into the patterns that exist in those actions and the context they occur in, but you do NOT have direct access to fullness of that person’s psychological and spiritual life. That means you can make mistakes; that means you can misunderstand them the first time through.

Now, I want you to listen to me carefully here: I am not saying that if you have made a mistake, you are an abusive person who gaslights. The difference between people who make mistakes and those who abuse is that the former are attentive enough that they can prevent it from becoming all-out abuse. So, take heart, you will make mistakes and that doesn’t make you a spiritual abuser. As I said, most people are healthy enough to endure a mistake, and so if you make a mistake, you can simply make the necessary amends and restore a sense of affirmation to the person you misunderstood. Similarly, if you can identify someone whose sense of self-reliability has been utterly questioned, you can be very judicious and careful about how you talk about inner realities.

Where we get into problems, however, is how we can use this knowledge in the midst of competitive and hostile circumstances. This sort of knowledge can be very useful and even helpful in these situations, but we are also walking a very fine line as Christian leaders when we try to use this knowledge in competitive and hostile conflicts.

Firstly, in hostility, our first instincts if for self-preservation, and there is a predilection to think anything that threatens our self-preservation is wrong, whether it be morally wrong or wrong as a matter of fact. Thus, if we are in a conflict and we feel threatened by what someone has said or done, we can be inclined ot then use our psychological and spiritual knowledge to construct an explanation of that other person that preserves our sense of preservation. Our preservation is the truth, and therefore we imagine other people to be deeply troubled figures. This preserves our sense of self-worth, validation, and esteem. As a result, we are inclined to constantly target the inner experience of the other person when we speak to them.

Secondly, when we are are acting with competitive and hostile intentions, our listening to others is very constricted and biased. What we pay attention in others is information that pertains to what might make them potential threats and what weakness or desires they have so that we can manipulate to gain mastery and control of them. As a result, we do not pay attention to them to comprehend the complexity of their own psychological and spiritual tendencies. As a result, we very easily miss information that might tell us we are wrong about them; we sometimes even intentionally ignore this information because it doesn’t fit with the way our instincts to self-preservation control our interpretations of reality. Consequently, we make repeated errors of judgment that we never pick up and correct.

Thirdly, in such hostile and competitive conflicts, we are prone to get others involved and to spread our wrong interpretations about these people in the act of triangulation. Sometimes it is with the overt intention of trying to get back at them; sometimes we can say it is with the intention fo “helping,” which we in the helping professions often use to justify our actions, without regards to our actual intentions or the effectiveness of our actions. As a consequence, we can get other people to repeat and reuse these interpretations of a person, leading to others to join in on the questioning of that person’s inner experience. AT the extremes, this can get to the point that that target cannot find people who they can talk to who will listen to them, but they only interpret them from the lens coming from a poisoned well. Then, these people, who are not experts but have relied upon the supposed “experts,” may or may not be able to question these interpretations and find the errors, so they too do not listen appropriately to correct the errors of judgment.

The end result is that with our spiritual and psychological knowledge, we as Christian leaders can spiritually gaslight people we feel we are in a competitive or hostile conflict with if you are not incredibly careful. The problem is, such a barrage on a person can be massive and unrelenting, that can lead them to entirely question themselves as a whole. Furthermore, when this attitude enters into a community, it can become incredibly destructive, as people who experience gaslighting can instinctively try to engage in the same tactics. I am speaking from experience here, as me getting gaslit lead to a defensiveness that taught me part of what this community is about is gaslighting others that I feared that I joined in on. In the end, you can see battles between people who keep thinking they can judge and know the psychology and spiritual content of the minds of others.

And the struggle is that any of us can get this way if we are not spiritually formed in our we deal with conflicts along with well-trained in how we use this spiritual and psychological knowledge in the midst of conflicts. So, from my experience and reading, here are a few pointers that we can train ourselves in how to use this knowledge so that it becomes an ingrained habit that does not simply vanish when conflict arises:

1) Always remind yourself that before you can analyze you must listen well – There is a reason trained therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists (like my mother!) who are worth their salt say that they do not diagnose people they don’t meet with. The primary rationale behind this is that they need to able to hear and listen to the person themselves; second-hand information does not provide enough information, as it filters out a lot. Similarly, we can filter out a lot when we are listening to people, plus there is a lot that is not revealed form what we see and hear of people. You must listen well, to get a sense of the patterns and context to be able to address.

2) Observe, express, and act upon the conditional nature of your interpretations – Spiritual and psychological interpretation is more of an art, rather than a science, but insofar as it tries to be more “science-like” way to explain people, we need to recognize how conditional our interpretations might be. If you are talking to a person about their own experience, don’t speak like an expert on that person’s experience but speak more as an explorer, wondering and musing about what is around the corner. Sometimes this entails saying something along the lines of: “this might be the case, but it could be this.” Sometimes, it might entail being so general that it will allow the other person to take the general idea to see how it applies to themselves (although, this can lead to some false understandings itself. Sometimes, it will entail changing your interpretation once information comes in and expressing that change of interpretation. But a hermeneutical praxis of conditionality and expressing this can keep you using your knowledge as a tool for listening, as tools for exploring the landscape of people’s inner worlds.

3) Do not blame people for resistance to your interpretations and accept this comes with the work you do – When you get into people’s inner worlds, don’t blame them if they get angry, push away, or resist. This resistance is a natural response that we can have to such actions, whether it be due to the revealing of the truth about someone or whether it be due to the fact that we made a mistake. The events of resistance should not themselves be labeled as moral failings or a failure to see the truth. These are a natural instinctive response. But, while you shouldn’t blame people for resistance, do hold them responsible for how they act based upon their anger.

4) Be as specific as the information you have – IT can be a tempted action to see someone acting in a way we perceive to be arrogant and say “he is narcissistic,” in that we see them as a narcissistic person. But a single action does not represent who a person is; their actions may be more due to the circumstances they are in rather than their default personality traits. We are often times tempted to overgeneralize only a narrow range of people’s actions into personality traits while ignoring all the rest we have either ignored, forgotten, or never seen. This is known as the fundamental attribution error. But we can only get to reliably know a person through an aggregate of all their behaviors, words, and the contexts in which these words and behaviors occur in. So be specific to what you have, and don’t overgeneralize. For instance, don’t assume that someone who has expressed anger and disappointments directed towards God is not being a faithful Christian; they may have a deep sense of devotion, commitment, love, and listening that you either ignore, miss, or do not know about.

5) Recognize that is natural that people may overgeneralize what you say – Much as we can have a tendency to (over)generalize, the people we talk to can also have the tendency to (over)generalize what we say. To suggest that someone may be acting in an avoidant manner, for instance, that person may turn around think they are “avoidant” person all the time. Recognizing this will save you a lot of heartbreak when a person has begun to label themselves. Don’t offload the responsibility onto them to get the interpretation right, but make it YOUR responsibility as the one who is acting with power and expertise to clarify Then, if you see people who begin to overgeneralize and are beginning to distort and take things out of context, you can become aware that this is not an appropriate time to try to enter explore more in the person’s inner world.

The reality is that as Christian pastors, leaders, and spiritual guides, we don’t go through a licensure process to make sure we are adept at our work, that we are the types who will use our knowledge with great care. Most of our training comes from a few classes and some reading we have done on the side, which means we are prone to misuse spiritual and psychological knowledge in ways that can have disastrous consequences. The solution is either to say 1) this information is entirely out of bounds unless you are credentialed to use it or 2) that we should only use it if we have developed habits like these that define how we use spiritual and psychological knowledge, especially when we are in heated circumstances. But without either #1 or #2, then spiritual and psychological knowledge is a very dangerous material, much like nuclear power, and can be used to destroy rather than to bring life. So, we are Christian leaders should think wisely and develop habits in how we can use this knowledge.

Because let me say this in the most clear and decisive way: If you use this knowledge to tear people down in conflicts, you are in that moment acting far from being in the kingdom of God; you are acting more like the Pharisees who used their knowledge of the Torah to judge and tear down other people, without offering to lift a finger to help except by saying “you need to do this and be this way.” You will not be fulfilling the God-chosen task for being spiritual leaders, but you will be leaving the sheep without a shepherd, leaving God to have to send His own shepherd(s).

Do you know the biblical king of the northern Kingdom of Israel, Jehu? You don’t. You mean you know who David and Solomon are, or even Hezekiah and Josiah, but not Jehu? There is a good reason for that, but he could have been a prominent king.

You see, he was given a predigree that would make him like the King of David. Like David, he had received a prophetic confirmation and anointing, from Elisha, the disciple Elijah and the inheritor of Elijah’s prophetic ministry. Elisha prophetically spoke the following over Jehu: ”

I anoint you king over the people of the LORD, over Israel. 7 You shall strike down the house of your master Ahab, so that I may avenge on Jezebel the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the LORD. 8 For the whole house of Ahab shall perish; I will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel. 9 I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha son of Ahijah. 10 The dogs shall eat Jezebel in the territory of Jezreel, and no one shall bury her.¹

Jehu had been given commission, authorization, and legitimation from God. Jehu has been given a grand task, to take part of a heroic plan for the side of God and righteousness. He is on path to be a king that will make history! But, that is not how the story actually ends up. Here is a word about Jehu from the word of the prophet Hosea:

And the LORD said to him, “Name him Jezreel; for in a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. 5 On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.”²

What happened? What changed between Elisha’s anointing and Hosea’s prophetic denunciation of the violence done by the royal family of Jehu?

One explanation one could provide is that this is simply a denunciation from Hosea because of his disdain for the northern kingdom if Israel. Whereas Elisha was a support of Jehu, Hosea is seen as simply standing against all the northern kingdom stands for, therefore pronouncing a judgment against Jehu as its ruler. But, if you reader further in the narrative in 2 Kings, you find another possible explanation. Jehu didn’t only dethrone the royal family of Ahab from power. He went beyond that. 1 Kings 10 records the story of the massacre of seventy descendants of Ahab through the subtergfuge, treachery, and trickery of Jehu. Jehu didn’t simply rise to power; he was involved in a massacre.

But if you pay close attention to the words of God through Elisha, it said “For the whole house of Ahab shall perish; I will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel.” IT didn’t say that Jehu would cut off every male; God said that he would. Jehu, had gone beyond his divine mandate, and in his haste with the power that had been bestowed upon him, treated the prophecy as a legitimation of his own power that he then used in violent and treacherous ways, rather than as an instruction from God as to what is to happen. Jehu didn’t play close attention to Elisha’s words; he listened only so much that he provided him the status that it conferred upon him.

This stands against the spirit of God’s relationship to Israel, however. In Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the love of God is defined by listening and a particular attentiveness to the words of God’s instructions. Moses didn’t say to Israel: “Here are some ideas you need to wrap your head around; here is some knowledge I am trying to give to you.” No. Rather, the emphasis was on the words. But, the purpose of this attention to the words was not a legalistic emphasis of clearly outline specific obligations and rights. Rather, this emphasis on words was tightly connected with loving God in the whole person, such that the whole of Israel was to love God through learning and attentiveness of God’s word through the repetition of the words throughout their life. It wasn’t about mastery of laws or even knowledge, but about attunement of the heart to the love of God.

But Jehu didn’t do that when a word came from Elisha. Or at least, he didn’t pay attention enough so that he thought himself legitimate to engage in trickery and massacre. He didn’t pay close attention to what God spoke through his prophet. King Saul had a similar failing, where he decided to take matters in his own hands and offer a burnt offering, rather than wait on Samuel to arrive to do it who appeared to be late, Samuel’s response was to say that Saul’s kingdom would not survive.³ The pragmatism of the circumstances had caused two kings, Saul and Jehu, to engage in actions that spanned beyond the instruction from God. While there was a great sin in the massacre by Jehu, there was no great sin with Saul, except that in his actions he showed his heart was not attuned to God’s own heart. By contrast, David, when he fell into great sin, repented, because he was a man after God’s own heart.

This spirit of great attentiveness to God undergirds Paul’s concern that the Corinthians understanding “Nothing beyond what is written.”⁴ The Corinthians, craving knowledge, had engaged in a lot speculation that had the end result of creating a competitive atmosphere where status and rivalry seized the community. Paul nowhere else shows such a specific emphasis on telling people to pay attention to what specifically has been said, but it seems to be an instruction specifically tailored to the attitudes and habits of the Corinthians. They were wanting knowledge, and so they would amass lofty speculations about even the ontology of God being the only God, which justified their eating of meat sacrificed to idols, And yet, they were not paying attention to the other people whose faith lacked such knowledge, and would take part in actions that would hurt the faith of these other people. Because the Corinthians were not able to pay proper attention, but drifted into speculation, they were failing to live out the will and purposes God had for them.

Undergirding this is the nature of our relationship to God: how attentive are we? I don’t mean, can we spend hours reading the Bible and praying to God. I mean, is your attention on what God speaks or is your attention of what meaning you take from what God speaks? Are you focused on what is provided to you from God, or are you focused on driving to divine the mind and will of God from individual sayings? For Paul, the will of God expressed through the inspiration of the Spirit comes as one listens to the whole of God’s disclosure, not just the isolation and analysis of specific words, phrase, sayings. But as people who have our own interests, and these do not always align with God’s, we can be more eager to “translate” the words from God into ideas and justifications for our interests. God’s Word and power becomes a mean to an end, rather that the very thing we place our trust in and listen to.

This doesn’t mean we can do nothing without explicit instructions from God. This is not some radical, early Protestant, Scripture and nothing by Scripture argument. But it means that without explicit instructions, we need to respond out from the whole of what God is forming us to be, and not simply our of some personal interest that some part of God’s Word may, or may not, speak to. Otherwise, our lack of listening and attentiveness can make us like Jehu. Don’t be like Jehu. Be faithful to God through listening to God and then you will be lead into the love, righteousness, and holiness that you seek that God will form into you. Hence, the words of Hebrews 2:1: “we must pay greater attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it.”

Morton Deutsch, a social psychologist who has been a researcher in conflict management, observes that conflicts arise as a of people’s percieved interdependence upon each other.¹ Sometimes this interdependence has an asymmetry where one party’s actions have a greater impact on the other party. As a result, conflicts can get quite messy through it all. But the factor that has a major influence on the result of these conflicts of interdependence and asymmetry is whether people see the conflict as a matter of cooperation or as a competition. Deutsch defines cooperation as containing the following:

1. Effective communication is exhibited. Ideas are verbalized, and group members are attentive to one another, accepting of the ideas of other members, and influenced by them. They have fewer difficulties in communicating with or understanding others.

2. Friendliness, helpfulness, and lessened obstructiveness are expressed in the discussions. Members also are more satisfied with the group and its solutions and favorably impressed by the contributions of the other group members. In addition, members of the cooperative groups rate themselves high in desire to win the respect of their colleagues and in obligation to the other members.

3. Coordination of effort, division of labor, orientation to task achievement, ment, orderliness in discussion, and high productivity are manifested in the cooperative groups (if the group task requires effective communication, tion, coordination of effort, division of labor, or sharing of resources).

4. Feeling of agreement with the ideas of others and a sense of basic similarity larity in beliefs and values, as well as confidence in one’s own ideas and in the value that other members attach to those ideas, are obtained in the cooperative groups.

5. Recognizing and respecting the other by being responsive to the other’s needs.

6. Willingness to enhance the other’s power (for example, the knowledge, skills, resources, and so on) to accomplish the other’s goals increases. As the other’s capabilities are strengthened, you are strengthened; they are of value to you as well as to the other. Similarly, the other is enhanced from your enhancement and benefits from your growing capabilities and power.

7. Defining conflicting interests as a mutual problem to be solved by collaborative laborative effort facilitates recognizing the legitimacy of each other’s interests and the necessity to search for a solution responsive to the needs of all. It tends to limit rather than expand the scope of conflicting ing interests. Attempts to influence the other tend to be confined to processes of persuasion.

By contrast, Deutsch defines the competitive mindset:

1. Communication is impaired as the conflicting parties seek to gain advantage by misleading the other through use of false promises, ingratiation tactics, and disinformation. It is reduced and seen as futile as they recognize that they cannot trust one another’s communications to be honest or informative.

2. Obstructiveness and lack of helpfulness lead to mutual negative attitudes tudes and suspicion of one another’s intentions. One’s perceptions of the other tend to focus on the person’s negative qualities and ignore the positive.

3. The parties to the process are unable to divide their work, duplicating one another’s efforts such that they become mirror images; if they do divide the work, they feel the need to check what the other is doing continuously.

4. The repeated experience of disagreement and critical rejection of ideas reduces confidence in oneself as well as the other.

5. The conflicting parties seek to enhance their own power and to reduce the power of the other. Any increase in the power of the other is seen as threatening to oneself.

6. The competitive process stimulates the view that the solution of a conflict flict can be imposed only by one side on the other, which in turn leads to using coercive tactics such as psychological as well as physical threats and violence. It tends to expand the scope of the issues in conflict flict as each side seeks superiority in power and legitimacy. The conflict becomes a power struggle or a matter of moral principle and is no longer confined to a specific issue at a given time and place. Escalating lating the conflict increases its motivational significance to the participants pants and may make a limited defeat less acceptable and more humiliating than a mutual disaster.²

As a result, the competitive mindset can lead to a spiraling of consequences, leading to the lack of effective communication. Deutsch refers to this as autistic hostility, which “involves breaking off contact and communication with the other; the result is that the hostility is perpetuated because one has no opportunity to learn that it may be based on misunderstandings or misjudgments or to learn if the other has changed for the better.³ Lack of communication leads to distorted views of the conflict. This is often joined with the nature of self-fulfilling prophecies, “wherein you engage in hostile behavior toward another because of a false assumption that the other has done or is preparing to do something harmful to you.”⁴ However, these hostile behaviors may not be overt aggression, but more covert. As a result, the covert aggressor can tell themselves they are playing the role of the peaceful partner and the other party is the hostile party, all while maintaining the competitive attitude, refusing to communicate. It becomes a way that people offload their responsibiltiy for the creation of conflicts off onto others, often times with fear when it done with covert action, rather than the courage to face the conflict head-on and to listen what needs to be said.

If I could define the cooperative mindset with an easier to remember list, I would define the cooperative mindset is defined by: clarity, care, consistency, containment.

Clarity – The clear expression of needs, wants, desires, and expectations for being together in an interdependent relationship. The lack of clarity in the midst of conflict can create uncertainty, confusion, and in the midst of the ambiguity, the fear circuits will activate, to fill in the gaps that incompetent or unwilling communication leaves.

Care – Cooperation entails a genuine concern for each party’s needs, wants, desires, and expectations. It doens’t mean the fulfillment of everything, but it means that people’s own life has legitimacy. This is distinguished from lack of concern, where what is happening with a party is totally irrelevant to the other party. This is also to distinguish from faux forms of care, where people try to manipulatively appeal to what they think is what the other party needs, wants, desires, and expects, but not in a way that genuinely addressing those concerns nor in a way that allows for the other party to express themselves. This is a form of manipulation, sometimes conscious and sometimes not.

Consistency – Cooperation entails a consistency across people and across circumstances. When people can trust that the expectations and actions is consistent, that it isn’t going to change abruptly and without warning, people will cooperate with one another. Sometimes changes do occur, but these changes and the reasons for them are communicated if it has an impact on other parties. But in conflict circumstances, arbitrarily change the narrative, move the goal posts, and hold people accountable to expectations that not only they haven’t communicated, but changed from what has been expressed, directly or indirectly, in the past.

Containment – In cooperation, people contain their involvement in other people’s affairs to that which is mutually agreed upon. Sometimes, people may get involved without another person’s consent in emergency circumstances, but in cooperative arrangments, the emergencies are rare. Furthermore, sometimes people may cross another person’s boundaries, but there is a responsiveness and willingness to accommodate to these boundaries that come with clear communication. By contrast, competitive circumstances will see drama in every situation, seek to find ways to resolve the situation because their competitive nature makes them feel. Competitive mindsets justify meddling, which neither provides clarity, care, or consistency.

But there is an important factor to understand about conflicts. Conflicts become cooperative as both parties act in cooperative fashions. Conflicts where one party offload the responsbility of being cooperative act based upon the self-fulfillng prophecy, where the other person is seen as competitive. It takes two parties to be cooperative. But what commonly happens is that one party will treat the conflict in a competitive atmosphere, whereas the other party will see the competitive nature but will try to also appeal to engage in cooperative behaviors. But due to the self-fulfilling prophecy, the conflict oriented party will continue to keep the conflict competitive, never receiving the forgiveness offered to them so as to enter into a two way process of reconciliation. They can bristle at the idea that they are the main contributor to the problem, and will engage in further competitive, even hostile behaviors, the more attention that is brought to them and the more boundaries and warnings that is placed upon them. In the end, sometimes conflicts become competitive, but sometimes it is because one party just refuses to actually acknowledge and own their responsbility and to treat the other party with clarity, care, consistency, and containment. This is commonly what happens in divorces, for instance.

I speak this from the anguish of my own heart, as I have had to endure a painful conflict many years ago, where I had made some failures on my end. As I owned my failures and tried to be cooperative, I wasn’t provided much clarity. Then, as things developed, there were concerns on my end about some inconsistencies that I saw. But as I tried to express myself, there was little care, but my attempts to express myself seem to have been interpreted as competitive and concealing other intentions, rather than the genuine concerns, fears, and confusions. In the end, the conflcit was not contained but meddled in my life in ways that cross boundaries that should have never been crossed, likely because they justified everything as an emergency because of the mayhem and drama they percieved it to be. Eventually, however, my life became so constricted, I become so emotionally isolated for anyone to care, with great confusion, that I went into a a mental breakdown and had considered taking my life. Then, rather than these people later on down the road acting with clear signs of clarity, care, consistency, and containment, continued in the same pattern, seeing my attempts to plea with them as competition rather than pleas for them to cooperate as the consequences of the conflict continued to develop. This conflict developed over the years to the point that I have had to say to people that I used to care to basically get out of my life and leave me alone, because people that I loved and cared for could not see how they were treating me and taking responsbility for it. Their autistic hostility and self-fulling prophecies, and covert manpulation created a pattern of interdepenence that I had to say “Respect me or GET OUT!” This has brought me much pain and struggle in me life, but it has also taught me a lot, including about conflicts, hence my recent posts on the topic.

So I implore you readers to here this: in your conflicts, are you truly being cooperative? Are you doing what you can do on your end to find solutions to sticky problems? Or do you only see others as competitive and hostile? Do you see people’s direct pleas as genuine invitations, or do you see them as manipulations and control? Do you view yourself as the “cooperative” one but refuse to have a single conversation with the other party? How is it that you yourself deal with conflicts? That will have a tremendous impact on how they turn out, as it takes both parties to cooperate to have a cooperative conflict.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

We expend so much energy and time in our lives trying to protect ourselves. Fear is our instinctual, survival emotion that we don’t often feel, but guides and motivates our actions in ways we often times overlook and miss. As a result, we develop our habits built on a sense of preservation from things in our environment. But sometimes, this fear goes further than just protecting us from immediate threats or from threats we have experienced in our past. This fear in often unseen ways forms our fear of hearing anything that might provoke a feeling of vulnerability in us. Any thought or message that that we can be associated with something threatening, perhaps in the most indirect of fashion, can activate our stress and lead us to try to protect ourselves. This is a phenomenon we see often in social media, where we can feel the compulsion to respond to anything and everything we see that we don’t like; political discussions are often times exercises in the activation of stress due to mere words that we try to argue with.

We fear words sometimes. We fear what they have to say and mean. As a consequence, we become poor listeners. Words are frightening and dangerous, so we have to protect ourselves from them, even though they present no real threat in and of themselves. Certainly, they can hurt us, that is the truth. And sometimes this hurt really is deeply traumatized, as they can be words of deep unfairness, seduction, and accusation. Sometimes, the words can be something we once trusted, but as the pain of wrong information and false promises amount, the trust wanes and these words become simply hollow, evoking a deep sense of pain in our hearts due to broken faith. Words can hurt us in the most painful of ways.

But, if we assume this pain is what will define people’s words, if we assume people’s words if we were to get close and listen will simply be those traumatizing and trust-breaking words, we will be poor listeners, exhausted at our attempts to avoid them and to deal with the emotions they stir within us. The avoidance our fears about words stir up within us can leave us poor at really comprehending and understanding the thoughts and feelings of another, and sometimes this can leave us distant from where love is being offered, and scared of a hostility of harming when a person seeks to express their hurt so that you can have a better relationship. And so, we use the power we amass to shield us from these words; we find all the ways to try to relax and to get away from it, because, lets face it, there are a lot of words that can be traumatizing and breaking of our trust, so we immediately become vigilant for other words of criticism, thinking they are doing the same. If we sense anger in someone, we might rush to think of those instances where people’s anger turned destructive, so we miss seeing another person’s anger as disappointment and pain, simply wishing they would be treated more like a person than the problem we are so often inclined to treat them as.

But here is the thing: love starts in listening. In Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Israel is called to love God, but this is preceded by hearing the statement about God, which is perhaps a concise expression about the nature of the God of the Exodus that would evoke those memories. Then, after speaking about loving God, it moves into discussing the words that Moses is giving the people, telling people to recite, bind, fix, and write them. These words were to be the focus of their attention, because, in the end, one can not truly love God and be faithful to God without listening to God; otherwise, the “god” we love and are faithful to will be some imagination we construct, unhinged from anything that God speaks.

This is similarly the case with other people. James 1:19-21 says this:

You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.

We are often times in the face of words, quick to find some response to those words, or we arise in strong, deep anger for mere words. And sometimes, there are times to speak, once you know what is being said. And sometimes, there are times to be angry, because while we are to be slow to anger, much as God is slow to anger as in Exodus 34, sometimes the repeated hurtful, unfair, and trust-breaking words and actions merit anger. But, this should be the result of being quick to listen, to hear what has happened so that we can know what is really going on. Love for others entails listening. And it is interesting that the conclusion James draw from this statement about listening and anger pertains to moral character and formation in ridding oneself of the moral blemishes that hit upon oneself, so that one can “welcome… the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” In other words, listening entails sometimes wrestling with what rests within our own hearts, including sometimes the very defenses we build up that prevent us from being quick to listen and receive a word. Thus, James draws a relationship between the way we listen to others and the way we listen to the power, saving word of God; it is almost as if our listening to God and our listening to others are deeply intertwined, much as the love of God naturally leads us to the love of others. Likewise, much as we can construct a god of our own imagination if we don’t listen to God, we can construct people in our own imagination if we are unwilling to listen to those people.

Love and faithfulness start in listening, and the forces of the evil will try to prevent us from hearing God and hearing others in the attitude of love and faithfulness. But it can be exhausting to listen if we have built up walls that prevent us from hearing others. It may produce shrieks of fear even. But perhaps the best thing is to stretch oneself. Perhaps the best things to do is to not react defensively to a word that has not torn your down. Maybe you can’t truly hear what is being said, but perhaps try to avoid the defensiveness that leads to trying to figure out what to say or even anger. Don’t feel the need to be an expert in things you are not an expert in, to explain problems in what you fear to hear; none of us are experts of God, even though we have some knowledge about God, and none of us are experts on the stories and hearts of individual persons, even if we have some psychological knowledge about people in general.

But, in the end, rest will come with learning to listen. Learning to listen is an effective antidote to many of the conflicts we face in life. Likewise, listening is an effective way to truly protect us when something really is threatening so we can effectively address those threats by what we pick up. Listening is an effective way to resist the fight-flight responses of the stress that tells us we need to protect. Listening is an effective way to create bonds between people, which can nuture our hearts and souls. Listening forms marriages, prevents marraiges from becoming separation and can prevent separation from becoming a final divorce; many a people have been shocked at divorce but if only they have been willing to listen so that their hardness to their partner could have been ameliorated. Listening forms our hearts to recieve the word that God has for us. Because, in the end, love and faithfulness start with listening.

So, my question to you is this: are you listening?

Lord Acton’s famous phrase “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” rings in our ears in the English-speaking world. Latent within that expression is that power makes people evil or bad, such that power is an evil thing; this skepticism of power goes back to Athenian democracy, vigilant against tyrants who bring great harm and destruction. The danger of power has expressed itself in the American form of government in the three branches of government serving as a system of checks and balances to governmental power. The question we as Christian thinkers are often tempted to ask then: how can we reconcile power in the Church? If it is evil and corrupting, how can provide such power in the Church? If it corrupts us, can the Church or people in the Church ever be morally pure and yet act power with at the same time?

But the perspective within the New Testament isn’t a skepticism about power, but rather about the people who wield power. Jesus warns about false prophets, not against the power of prophecy. Paul in 2 Corinthians suggests there are “super-apostles” who are disguised as angels of light when they really are servants of the devil; he doesn’t criticize the role of apostleship. Jesus doesn’t castigate his disciples for wanting to be of great status, as if there is something inherently evil about that ambition, but that they do not truly understand what greatness is when it comes to the kingdom of God. Paul in the pastoral epistles is encouraging of people desiring to be overseers, but then gives a set of qualifications about the character of that person. If we were to express something that tracks with the NT’s views about power, it would be along the lines of “power is sought by the corrupt, and absolute power sought by the absolutely corrupt at all costs.”

In the social psychology literature, the latter is more accurate than the former. Rather than power making people corrupt or evil, power tends to give corrupt people the ability to act on their corruption. Galinsky, Rus, and Lammers observe in their chapter “Power: A Central Force Governing Psychological, Social, and Organization Life” in Social Psychology in Organizations that: “With power the aggressive become more fierce, the generous more magnanimous, and the flirtatious even more amorous.”¹ Why? Because:

The possession of power frees the individual from the shackles of normative constraints that usually govern thought, expression, and behavior. The domineering press of the situation recedes, allowing a person’s true nature to emerge. Essentially, power increases the correspondence between individual traits and behavior, with their personalities being better predictors of their thoughts and behaviors than are the personalities of the powerless.²

In effect, empowerment operates to unmask us as the people we really are, whereas powerlessness places masks on other people. Of course, this masking process isn’t absolute, because insofar as our power and authority is contingent upon other people’s views of us, then this form of powerlessness and vulnerability will lead to masks, as there is more to lose for those who value power, either as a personal end or as an instrument to other personal ends. In fact, in more democratic societies there is a paradox that is true: the powerful are powerless, and the powerless are powerful. Similarly, Galinsky, Rus, and Lammers observe that power makes us more like your true self and yet at the same time, more like your culture, suggesting the power are more and less like themselves.³ In a way, democratic societies, along with the institutions that are susceptible to other authorities and powers, have institutionalized a reversal of power that the Bible talks about, although the nature of the reversal may not be in lines with God’s will. But how this gets instituted win the Church fosters a form of covert action that I have talked about in a few previous posts on conflict: Christians with power can mask their real intentions and actions, but what in way the enact and seek their true intentions is done in such a way to, on the surface, to appear as good and true.

However, there is one exception to this pattern of covert action and arrangement of appearances and justifications: if the true self is also in line with the hearts of those who have power over them. If people who are simultaneously powerful yet powerless want what the others who have power over them want, then there is no mask and appearance, but an expression of who they truly are.

But this “true self” isn’t some idealized vision of who think or wish to be as persons; this “true self” is what truly determines our actions in specific, concrete circumstances and situations. The “true self” isn’t some abstraction of our identity and personality and wishes that we think behold ourselves within our imagination, but it is the aggregate of our wishes and goals across a vast array of time and circumstances. It isn’t something we find by going to retreats and conferences that celebrate and valorize some ideal virtues and persons. Businesses, non-profit organizations, and even religious organizations can have their “liturgies” that tell us what kind of person will succeed and move up the ladder, and so we can begin to idealize these traits as our own and manipulate our public actions and portrayal to be in conformity to these expectations. But rarely are these espoused values of the organizations who we truly are, unless one has experienced some sort of repentance-like event where one has seen one’s previous way of life as being fundamentally mistaken, which can put us on a formative process where we take on those values as our values, those desires as our desires. The “true self” coming into (comm)union with the values of those who have power only by the work of change that typically occurs over the course of weeks, months, and even years.

But those who are already powerful rarely go through such a formative process after empowerment. The way they pay attention to others and the world hinders that. Those with power tend to see the world in terms of abstraction,⁴ where they fit people and events into specific categories they already have in their mind, and the categories they use about people and events tend to be in alignment what they find most important, whether it be what they truly value or the categories and labels they can instrumentalize for what they value. This process of abstraction hinders paying attention to the specifics and nuances that can alter how one thinks and feels. Instead, the predilection towards abstraction makes the powerful project themselves onto the world.

This predilection towards the projection of themselves onto the world leads them to create large, vast, expansive visions of what can happen in their (over)optimistic future.⁵ The world is a malleable material for them to form in their imagination if only certain things are done. What gets overlooked at the concrete realities of diverging needs, desires, and interests of people along with the complexities of the way the world functions. Their tendencies to abstraction simply wisk this all away as overlooked or irrelevant. Their opinions and plans don’t tend to change based upon learning new information that challenges these labels, but they expect others to change into their plans and ignore this new information.

Therefore, they have a tendency to instrumentalize, if not even objectify, people. People with power pay attention to others in an instrumental fashion,⁶ where what they hear and recognize in others are the things that are relevant for themselves, not necessarily others. As a result, people who do not go along are commonly treated as problems or roadblocks and summarily labeled as troublemakers, resistant, unrighteousness, etc.⁷ Such labels mean they will not change their values.

The net effect is that power hardens us into the person we most deeply and truly are. If we are truly a generous person, it will “harden” us to make us more generous. If we are truly an aggressive person, it will “harden” us to make us more aggressive. If we are truly a self-absorbed person, it will “harden” us to be more self-absorbed. If we are truly community-oriented persons, it will “harden” us to be more focused on community. If we are truly a paranoid person, it will  “harden” us within our paranoid. If we are truly oriented towards peace, then it will “harden us” as persons of peace. Thus, the change of people becomes next to impossible⁸ when they feel empowered; the question then is what their true self really is.

So, the concern for the Church isn’t that power corrupts us, but rather that it makes us into who we truly are. Jesus’ response to the false prophets who did great things in their name is not “you went astray,” but rather “I never knew you.” The necessary repentance and transformation had never occurred; these persons were taking on the form of the godliness which they used, but didn’t know its true power. Much as the Pharisees and scribes manipulated their appearance of righteousness through visible prayer, charity, etc., Jesus warned about false prophets who marshaled the practices and power of the Gospel with other goals in mind. Hence, great care is taken by Jesus, the apostles, and the early Church as a whole to pay attention to what people are having authority and power bestowed upon them.

In summary, then, power makes us resistant to change, looking for the world around us to change instead. Formation becomes next to impossible at this point, sans a powerful work of God or a fall from grace, leading to the question: who are they? are they who we need? Such people may not be perfect and will make mistakes and have sins, such as King DAvid, but the question comes down to this: what is it that the powerful most truly value? This will determine the aggregate of all their actions in various times and circumstances. David was a man after God’s own heart, which moved him to repentance when his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah was powerfully and prophetically brought before his eyes. These actions, including our actions of repentance after we realize our sins and failures of integrity to the things of God that we ourselves value, are the fruit that John the Baptist tells the religious elite to produce and what Jesus calls attention to when it comes to false teachers.

So, I would say the early Church in the New Testament has a much more realistic view of power, and the relationship it has with the people who wield it, than the common demonization of power that the West oversimplistically endorses. The New Testament expresses a view of power that is much more in line with the concrete, complex realities of a powerless people, who sees things more in the concrete, looking for God’s power to be realized within the world through human agents, rather than the Western abstraction about power that was used by powerful people to determine how power is to flow, thus is more of an abstract and less complex view on the matter that reinforces the specific arrangements of power and the interest of the people who have them.