Pistis Christou

Life is about struggles. Sometimes, these struggles are outwards. Struggles between peoples, as people, groups, or even entire nations can fight for what they believe and even rationalize that they deserve. Social life is a struggle for the recognition of various status or persons that will the either legitimate or delegitimate their interests.

Sometimes, these struggles are inwards. As Freud observed, the neuroses of people are often times the conflict of different drives; while Freud didn’t accurately identify the nature of these drives, the struggle between them, along with the nature of the unconscious, were his seminal contributions to our psychological understanding. Life doesn’t provide us what we want. Sometimes what we deeply want doesn’t come, so we experience the conflicts between our experiences and our desires and dreams. Sometimes, we are ambivalent, simultaneously wanting opposites, neither satisfied with one or the other. At the core, there is the conflict between our own interests.

Nevertheless, whether we are talking about outward or inward conflicts, there remains the fundamental problem of struggle in human life. The story of Adam and Eve recollects this reality due to sin. Because of sin, God tells Eve she will have a desire to control her husband but he will control her. Because of sin, God tells Adam that his toil will not produce a harvest but rather thorns. Because of sin, the world is inhabited by those like Cain who murder their brother Abel. Fundamental to the problem of sin is the struggles and conflicts it places within human existence, but interpersonal conflicts and intrapersonal conflicts.

Now, throughout the Bible, the interpersonal conflicts are primarily highlighted. Occasionally, we get glimpses of the inner struggles such as in the lament Psalms where the psalmist is torn between the complaints about the person life and seeking and trustingly hoping in God’s future faithfulness. But it really isn’t until the New Testament where we begin to get more than just glimpses of the inward conflicts. The temptations of Christ are a presumptive story of Christ’s own inward conflicts, not just with the devil but his devotion to God while being famished. Then, as he is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, he feels the inner conflict of what he knows God is calling of him to go to the cross and the inner desire to not be subjected to this. Meanwhile, right before this, he sees his disciples have dozed off and he speaks of the experience of the struggle he himself has gone through and is going through, saying “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” This inner struggle gets taken up by the Apostle Paul in his explanation about the powerless of the Torah in Romans 7, recognizing that knowledge of what we should do doesn’t stop us from doing it but can actually make the struggle more acute and worse, giving greater power to the forbidden impulses.

Nevertheless, the New Testament does not speak of a world of a hyper self-consciousness that we have experienced in the modern, therapeuticized world. Whereas the New Testament is aware of inner worlds but places the focus on what God is doing in Christ and through the Spirit for the solution of human sin, our modern therapeuticized world is not only aware of the inner worlds but tries to solve the problems and tensions from within. We must find the resources from within ourselves to sort the conflicts out; we need to find contentment and acceptance, or we need to assert ourselves and change the world for our own sense of peace. Whatever the proposal is, the solution is to always look to something within the person to be the source of healing. But at the end of the day, much of what this therapy is doing is resolving the dissonance and conflicts by giving precedence to one sets of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors over another. Sometimes, all people need to do to overcome the inner conflicts is to just pick one side of the inner conflict and go with it, and then they will find their inner conflicts subsiding as they put this into practice.

Now, in making this observation, I am not condemning this practice. Indeed, sometimes we need to pick one side of the inner conflict over the other and learn to live with what comes from that way of life. Healing from within is in many instances a perfectly legitimate option much of the time. However, inner healing from within is not the nature of transformation in the Gospel. For the Apostle Paul, the work that is happening in Jesus Christ and through the Spirit is something that we do not see, have not heard of, nor can even imagine on our own capacity; instead, it is something that Paul can only call a new creation. While this transformative work includes our inner nature and being, the transformative work does not come from within but from without.

For Paul, transformation is the work of the Father through His two chosen instruments, His Son and His Holy Spirit. On the one, there is the story of Jesus Christ in his life, crucifixion, resurrection, and glorification/ascension. On the other hand, there is the powerful work of the Spirit who demonstrates power just as it was demonstrated in the cross, who provides revelation and discernment of wisdom that is embodied in Jesus as the Lord of Glory. Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit working in unison, with one providing a specific image of who God is and what His will looks like when embodied and the other providing further exemplification and understanding of what has happened in the other. In Christ we see the face of God’s glory, through the Spirit we come to understand what this glory is about. Jesus gives us a picture of holiness, and the Spirit gives us the right thoughts about this picture. Perception through narrative imagination and hermeneutical interpretation through inspiration. The transformative work of the Trinity is caused by the Father’s sending and directing, encompassing the entirety of human thought in being passive perceivers and active interpreters to cease to be conformed to this world by the renewal of our minds.

This sort of works comes from without, coming from outside of ourselves. It doesn’t come by selecting one side of our conflict or the other, forming us into the image of the side of the inner tension we select. Rather, the whole of ourselves are formed, all sides of the inner tensions we face become brought comprehensively in line with the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ through the transformation of the Spirit. Apart from worship, prayer, study,  attentive reflection upon, and faithfulness of the heart to God which directs us and attunes us to the one who does what does not come from within, there is no place we go within ourselves to find this healing or make it our own. We do not seek this type of healing for its own sake as that misdirects our attention away from God; we don’t find some power within us that we then put into action as this redirects our formation into the images that direct our own actions. Rather, we behold and come to comprehend God through the sending of His Son into the world and His Spirit into our hearts.

While there are times to pursue inner healing from within, sometimes the act of navel-gazing can only heighten the conflicts and leave us deeper in the problem, especially when the reality of life in is joys and heartbreaks, its peace and conflicts, its loves and hates resist finding any sort of peace and contentment from within. Picking one side only leads to the other side to fight harder, especially so far as our inner conflicts are connected to our outer conflicts where people refuse to align their interests to ours but can be threatened by our own efforts and resist. Navel-gazing in these contexts can only solidify us, harden us into our patterns, making us less flexible, less open, less receptive to the whole of life or others, causing the conflicts and tensions to heighten. Hence, healing must come from without, come from one who can do what we can’t see, hear, or imagine.