1. The
Seemingly Schizo Human Status Quo
Christians have always looked to the Bible for comfort and
guidance. But more than a few passages taken in isolation might not seem
particularly user-friendly for such purposes. Some examples:[i]
… all, both Jews and Greeks, are under
sin, as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one; no one
understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have
become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Rom 3:9-12; the litany
continues for seven more verses).
I was once alive apart from the law,
but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment
that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity
through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me (Rom 7:9-11).
For we know that the law is spiritual,
but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions.
For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate ….For I know that
nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do
what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I
want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing …. So I find it to be a law that when I
want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in
my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law
of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Rom 7:14,
15, 18-19, 21-24)
… you are still of the flesh. For while
there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving
only in a human way? (1 Cor 3:3)
But I am afraid that as the serpent
deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere
and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus
than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one
you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted,
you put up with it readily enough (2 Cor 11:3-4).
For the desires of the flesh are
against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for
these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to
do (Gal 5:17).
Now this I say and testify in the Lord,
that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their
minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God
because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They
have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to
practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ! …
Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best
use of the time, because the days are evil (Eph 4:17-20; 5:15-16).
Put to death therefore what is earthly
in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness,
which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming (Col 3:5-6).
This is only a partial list. Such pessimistic and
quasi-condemnatory riffs are frequent in Paul. They are also not absent from
other biblical writers. And they bristle with stated or implied dichotomies:
sin and righteousness; condemnation and exoneration; death and life; sin and
faith; law and grace; evil and good; old self and new self; old creation and
new creation; ignorance and enlightenment; flesh and Spirit; darkness and
light; folly and wisdom; earthly and heavenly; wrath and reconciliation.
Are such passages really apt to help troubled people in
their confusion, sense of guilt, weariness of soul, and other burdens? If so,
under what conditions? To what extent if at all are such motifs and the
passages that express them really fruitful for counseling when an overwhelming
implication seems to be apparently ontological human guilt, pervasive ongoing
human failure, and ubiquitous metaphysical malevolence, sinister forces at work
in and through humans?
It will be argued below that while Paul, in passages like
those above, often deals in dichotomies, he more fundamentally dulls them by
even more fundamental components of his outlook. We can sharpen his
sinister-sounding stress by selective and partial quotation. Fixating on
certain formulations we can be tempted to hopelessness or passivity in
the face of life's challenges. We may decide to circumvent such
Scripture passages as too negative for those we seek to assist, encourage, and
perhaps even cure. Or we may decide to stress happier sounding passages and
leave the likes of those above to the side. How many clients would notice? How
many would demur? A Joel Osteen approach to counseling might be highly
marketable, if it in fact is not already a mainstream strategy to stimulate
cash flow at various levels of professional practice. But such strategies would be unwise. For the
same writings that press and peeve us, or tempt us to meanness by taking their
seeming naked negativity too far, are alive with promise for offsetting what
they diagnosis and disparage. Key to their optimal interpretation and
application is to discern their place within a larger mosaic. We need to reason
from what is known, which in this case is the bigger picture, toward what is
debatable, which in this case are dichotomous and much-disputed biblical motifs
and the texts used to support them.
2. Buoyed by
Biography
A first order of business is to be clear that the Pauline
pronouncements above are not the totality of what he says about these things.
Despite these grim analyses of all persons including himself,[ii]
and despite adversity and suffering that few of us may have experienced, Paul
found in the Christian message resources enabling him to flourish, not free
from discouragement and pain[iii]
but functional rather than despairing as he faced adversities. Even as the
lion's mouth came to seem more imminent than the Lord’s return in glory (2 Tim
4:17), he retained confidence in his personal destiny. He preserved his vision
of a bright future for the church, as the Pastoral Epistles (1-2 Timothy,
Titus) testify. This implied a redemptive vision for the world at large—however
bleak things may seem, God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the
knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). In
this we are reminded of persons in more recent times who faced travail and even
crisis from both within and without, yet found resources in transcendence to
overcome: Viktor Frankl, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Schneider.[iv]
The stories of the first two need no rehearsal here; they saw evil and bore the
brunt of it—they could heartily affirm all the negative things Paul says about
the human condition as a result—but they somehow laid hold of divine resources
sufficient to fill them with a sense of meaning and hope and the courage to act
in caring ways rather than curl up in numb paralysis or lash out in revenge.
Paul Schneider's story is not so well known. He was the
first Protestant pastor martyred by the Nazis, in Buchenwald
in 1939. I first learned of him through my research into the theologian Adolf
Schlatter, who helped lead Schneider from the liberalism he was taught in the
German university to a personal sense of salvation through faith in Jesus
Christ. As the result of his explicitly faith-based resistance to the Nazis,
Paul Schneider was incarcerated in
Buchenwald, near Weimar,
on November 27, 1937, just a few months after the camp opened. Among the labor
overseers, Pastor Schneider watched out for his fellow inmates. After being
sentenced to solitary confinement, he preached the “Good News” from the window of his prison cell. He
“earned” the new accommodations when he refused to remove his beret in tribute
to Hitler on the Führer’s birthday, April 20, 1938 and in tribute of the swastika flag.
He explained his behaviour by saying "I can not salute this criminal
symbol". He also refused, as he had done earlier, the Hitler salute,
saying that "one can only expect salvation (Heil) from the Lord
and not from a human". From his cell, Schneider accused his captors
and encouraged his fellow inmates. On one occasion on Easter Sunday, when thousands
of prisoners were assembled for mustering, despite being severely handicapped
by previous torture he climbed to the cell window and shouted: "Comrades,
hear me. Here speaks Pastor Schneider. Here there is torture and murder. Thus
says the Lord: I am the resurrection and the life!" His speech was
interrupted by his tormentors. As others had pleaded years earlier, the man who
mopped the floors in the solitary confinement building begged Schneider,
“Please stop provoking the SS against you… They will beat you to death if you
continue preaching from your cell window”.
On July 18, 1939, Paul Schneider was
murdered with a lethal injection of strophanthin
in the camp infirmary. Camp officials notified Margarete Schneider of her
husband’s death and she made the long journey from Dickenschied to retrieve his
body in a sealed coffin. Despite Gestapo
surveillance, hundreds of people and around two hundred fellow pastors attended
Pastor Schneider’s funeral, including many members of the Confessing Church.
One of the pastors preached at the grave side, “May God grant that the witness
of your shepherd, our brother, remain with you and continue to impact on future
generations and that it remain vital and bear fruit in the entire Christian
Church”.[v]
Schneider's dying witness exudes the same conviction as Paul
in his final known literary statement, his second epistle to Timothy: "The
Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly
kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen" (2 Tim 4:18). Like
Jesus forgave the thief on the cross, Paul in the face of his own execution
affirmed the glory of a God who overcomes evil as he rescues sinners like Paul
from the midst of it and transfuses them with heavenly hope.
While some might call a life ending in arrest and capital
punishment a tragedy, followers of Jesus know that Paul and more recent
Christians like Bonhoeffer and Schneider had it right: the human condition is
at times shown to be unspeakably bleak, but there is a message that mediates
sanity and hope in the midst of it all. What are some elements of this message?
What convictions informed Paul so that his dour assessments of human
nature—“the old self” in its profound ignominy—did not destroy but if anything
enhanced his consciousness of divine redemptive survival resources?
3. Providence
A plausible grasp of "providence" can be gleaned
from the Westminster Larger Catechism: "God's works of providence are his
most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures;
ordering them, and all their actions, to his own glory."[vi]
Paul certainly believed in a divine pattern of action in the world that
corresponds to that definition. For one thing, the OT Scriptures that Paul
hallowed[vii]
view God in this way. Ezra declined to ask the Persian king for protection
because, he declared, “The hand of our God is for good on all who seek him, and
the power of his wrath is against all who forsake him” (Ezra 8:22). Or again,
the many references to God as king over a kingdom in the OT envision the one
creator God of all as the one who steadfastly rules over all.
This is a God who despite “old nature” realities is "merciful and
gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness"
(Ex 34:6).[viii]
Given such a God, who in turn had in Paul's lifetime fleshed
out his identity in the person and work of Christ, Paul can say with confidence
despite the human condition: "And we know that for those who love God all
things work together for good, for
those who are called according to his purpose" (Rom. 8:28). He tells the
somewhat faithless Corinthians, "God is faithful, by whom you were called
into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Cor. 1:9). Like
Jesus who said, "Are not five sparrows sold for two
pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered"
(Luke 12:6-7), Paul was convinced that people and particularly followers of
Jesus could count on God to bring their faith in gospel promises to a
redemptive outcome: "And I am sure of this, that he who
began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ"
(Phil. 1:6). For Paul this was not just a projection for others to embrace but
his own personal conviction as well, as he wrote not long before his death:
"I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard
until that Day what has been entrusted to me" (2 Tim. 1:12).
The point is that while Paul often speaks in deflating terms
about humans, and these are bedrock and unwavering assertions, humans' status
is less bedrock than God's, for his reality alone is ontological and determinative
for all creation. God "works all things according to the counsel of his
will" (Eph. 1:11). And in God good things lie ahead,[ix]
as he expressed memorably, just before a great and richly deserved judgment,[x]
regarding his longer-term intentions: "For I know the plans I have for
you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a
future and a hope" (Jer. 29:11). There are therefore positive prospects
for creation and humans within it, despite the bleak and nasty dimensions that
Paul and other writers document and decry which are dominant in us.
This hope at least in some form is not only for those who
receive God's saving grace through faith in Christ; as Paul tells non-believers
at Lystra, there is a sense in which among all peoples in all times God
"he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you
rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and
gladness” (Acts 14:17). Paul extends this outlook at Athens: God who is
"Lord of heaven and earth" made people "that they should seek
God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he
is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have
our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we are indeed
his offspring'" (Acts 17:24, 27-28).
The reality of Providence has implications for all people in
all places and times. Man may well be a dirty rotten sinner, but every single
“old self” inhabits a world where God's benevolent will ultimately triumphs,
not man's despicable designs. This fact offsets Paul's negative anthropological
statements, casting them in a more nuanced light. To set forth that light in
terms of Paul's outlook and teaching in detail is beyond the scope of a conference
paper. James Dunn's rendition of this, e.g., runs to well over 700 pages, a
very hefty book.[xi]
As an analytic key to unlock Paul's apostolic counsel as it plays out under his
providential view of things, we note this widely regarded Pauline summary statement:
"So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of
these is love" (1 Cor. 13:13).[xii]
Let us consider each of these three pillars of Paul's conviction in turn in
their implications for “old nature/new nature” issues.
4. Faith
"Faith" can be regarded as synonymous with
religion. In that sense it is no obscure or controversial thing but a universal
human phenomenon. "Faith" is certainly central in Paul's rhetoric and
teaching. Since the noun pistis (faith) and its cognate verb pisteuō
(to believe, to have faith) occur dozens of times in Paul's letters, the
importance of "faith" in Paul may be regarded as established.
But what is meant by "faith"? Theologians have
observed that in biblical parlance it is a word with two foci. The dominant
sense, perhaps, in the evangelical world is what is termed fides qua
creditur, which we may translate "the faith by which it is
believed." This is personal faith, "my" faith. Viktor Frankl
commended "faith" in the sense of personal religious conviction. But
this was not Christian faith in particular, and the existence of such a term
reminds us that if there are in Paul resources for soul care and psychological
flourishing, "faith" in this generic and purely experiential sense,
while necessary, is not sufficient for laying hold of the full measure of what
Paul knew and preached to address “old nature” issues.
Paul commended a certain person by whom God had revealed
himself in a saving way, namely Jesus Christ. And he presented Christ as having
acted savingly by dying and rising again, as when he writes, "We preach
Christ crucified" (1 Cor. 1:23), or when he speaks of "Jesus our
Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our
justification" (Rom. 4:24-25). There needed to be faith in this for
salvation to occur; but there needed to be faith in this.
"This" points to the second focus of faith, one I believe often
overlooked or downplayed in the current climate: fides quae creditur,
the faith which is believed, "the" faith in terms of its substance,
content, and claims. The Apostles Creed is an example of a statement of this
faith, as is the answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism.
Viewed in this way, when we speak of Pauline faith, we are not talking about
generic religious belief as a universal phenomenon of human existence, although
it is, but of the characteristic claims associated with the apostolic leaders
in the early church and in the Scriptures that emerged from their circles.
To be in line with God's providential work in the world, for
Paul, called for penitent hearing of the message of what God had done in Jesus:
"faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ"
(Rom. 10:17). When the human faculty of religious devotion, human believing,
lays hold of Christ and the particulars of his saving person, work, and call,
the human condition is subject to radical alteration by Christ. Numerous
passages associated with Paul can be understood as affirming fides quae
and not merely fides qua, although translations may or may not opt for a
fides quae rendering. We are probably seeing "the faith,"
e.g., in Acts 13:8: "But Elymas the
magician … opposed them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith."
The proconsul had received the particulars of Paul's message, and this is what
Elymas opposes. Or consider Acts 14:22, near the end of Paul's first missionary
journey, when he sums up what he has learned and now preaches about the gospel;
Paul went about "strengthening
the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the
faith, and saying that
through many tribulations we must enter the
kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22; cf. 16:5). Pauline references that probably
stress the fides quae include Gal. 1:23; 3:14, 23; 6:10; Eph. 3:12, 17;
4:5; 6:16; Phil. 1:27; Col. 1:23; 2:7; 2 Thess. 3:2; 1 Tim. 3:9; 4:1, 6; etc.
Such passages are epitomized in 1 Tim. 5:8: "But if anyone does not
provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has
denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." In view here is not
denial of religious conviction in general but of particulars that "the
faith" enjoins on someone facing this situation.
Whatever Paul may say about humans and their sordid nature
(laying aside the fact that he must share the Bible's basically high view of
humanity as the crown of God's creation [see, e.g., Ps. 8], or he wouldn't have
devoted his life to ministering to them), he commends the hearing of a message
by which faith comes. Through that faith comes likewise an entrée to growing
grasp of "the faith" that captures the heart and mind as it saves the
soul. I have observed that many people with fervent faith stumble because their
faith has false components; their fides qua does not line up with the
fides quae. Or the fides quae is so sparsely represented in their fides
qua that God's ministry to them and presence with them is humanly speaking
sadly limited. A prayer item in a recent missionary letter from the Philippines
may illustrate: "We covet your prayers concerning a man who invites our
team to his house for a Bible study but does nothing but oppose God's
word."[xiii]
In Paul's setting there were likewise those with "a zeal for God, but not
according to knowledge" (Rom. 10:2). The result can be things like
frustration, confusion, misguided behavior, despair, sinful practices in God's
very name, and perhaps even religious expression that is not Christian at all
despite practitioner claims. This is quite apart from the still more common
problem of people knowing what to do, and having real Christian commitment, but
simply lacking strength of character to do it, a major theme in, e.g., Rom. 7.
5. Hope
A second component in Paul's providential outlook is hope.
Like faith, this word is prominent in Paul, the verb occurring ca. two dozen
times, the noun ca. three dozen times. Either the noun or the verb (and usually
both) occurs in every Pauline letter but 2 Timothy. The presence of hope in the
covenantal community, in Paul's message, and in his own personal life temper
his negative statements about humanity in its “old nature” dimensions in
significant ways.
For Paul hope is an ancient feature of the life of God's
chosen people.[xiv]
At one point he tells his life story like this (underlining added):
“My manner of life from my youth, spent
from the beginning among my own nation and in Jerusalem, is known by all the
Jews. They have known for a long time, if they are willing to testify, that
according to the strictest party of our religion I have lived as a Pharisee.
And now I stand here on trial because of my hope in the promise made by
God to our fathers, to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they
earnestly worship night and day. And for this hope I am accused by Jews,
O king!"[xv]
"Hope" occurs three times, all referring to the
confident expectation of God's people in his promises. In large part because of
this, a Jewish people still existed in Paul's day, despite the successive and
often destructive impositions of Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Syrian,
and finally Roman powers on Jewish soil and affairs for over half a millennium.
Because of the God who created the world and called forth a people in Abraham,
there is hope, however discouraging things may currently seem at the
anthropological level. (And as Paul in the above passage fights for his life
against Jews for the sake of the honor of the King of the Jews, human
recalcitrance and degradation of a high order are on open display.) The God of
Israel and the church is "the God of hope" (Rom. 15:13). This aspect
of Paul's hope-consciousness is seen elsewhere in Acts (23:6; 24:15; 28:20).
Hope is a core element not only in
corporate and personal Jewish conviction going back to Abraham (cf. Rom. 4:18):
it is also a significant aspect of Paul's message. God's grace mediated by the
gospel generates rejoicing "in hope of the glory of God" (Rom. 5:2).
Life in the gospel is not easy, but "suffering produces endurance, and
endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope
does not put us to shame, because God's love[xvi]
has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to
us" (Rom. 5:3-5; underlining added). Apart from the gospel this hope in
its fullness is absent (Eph. 2:12); people are without God and without hope.
But with gospel faith come "eternal comfort and good hope through
grace" from the Son and the Father (2 Thess. 2:16). There is an assurance
of a rich inheritance in store as the result of reception of the Christian
message, as Paul writes to the Colossians concerning "the hope laid up for
you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the
gospel" (Col. 1:5). Hope is a primary gift of the gospel and can in fact
refer to Christ himself (Col. 1:27; 1 Tim. 1:1), who is the chief benefit and
benefactor of the gospel.
Hope is one of the secrets of Paul's
confidence and resilience over many tumultuous years of arduous Christian
service. The futility of the state of the world is offset by God's own
"hope" that redemption lay ahead (Rom. 8:20). "Hope" in the
sense of confident expectation of what cannot yet be fully glimpsed is one of
the glories of Christian confession and daily life; it is of the essence of
what it means for condemned sinners to be rescued from perdition: "In this
hope we were saved" (Rom. 8:24). It is a basis, or perhaps the sphere, of
Christian joy (Rom. 12:12). It is mediated by the Scriptures (Rom. 15:4), which
for Paul announce the gospel more generally (Rom. 1:2; 16:20). It is a primary
source of Christian fellowship and unity: "There is one body and one
Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call"
(Eph. 4:4). Beyond all these pointers to the present enjoyment of hope, there
is hope in its future aspect, as, e.g., Paul writes to Titus:
…
in hope of eternal life,
which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began (1:2).
…
waiting for our blessed hope,
the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ (2:13).
… so that being justified by his grace
we might become heirs according to the hope
of eternal life (3:7).
Some churches may still sing the hymn line, "and the
things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and
grace." When one studies Paul's references to hope, that is what happens
to his disparaging anthropological characterizations like the “old self.” They
are not less true, incisive, and unflattering. But they are relativized by the
grandeur of God's presence in hope and the expectation of hope mediated by
gospel grace. It is true that without saving knowledge of God in Christ, the
nations lack such hope. And so Paul warns against the Gentile mode of living
that such "God-less" living produces (Eph. 4:17-20, cited in the
opening section above). But in the same Ephesian epistle hope is pervasive (Eph.
1:8; 4:4). The sharp pronouncement of human depravity is dulled by the hope
that gospel grace mediates.[xvii]
6. Love
A third component in Paul's providential outlook is love.
The verb agapaō (to love) occurs some three dozen times in Paul's
writing and the noun agapē over 70 times. Cognate words like agapētos
("beloved," a word rooted in God's loving election of his people) and
words connoting aspects of divine love (like philadelphia, mutual love
in the church; see Rom. 12:10; 1 Thess. 4:9) are also to be found. We have
already noted that Paul ranks it higher, in some sense, than even faith and
hope.
Why is love supreme for Paul?
For one thing, there is no reason to suppose Paul would
disagree with John's assertion that "God is love" (1 John 4:8), which
has a near correlate in Paul's "God of love" (2 Cor. 13:11).
"Love" is descriptive of God in ways that "faith" or
"hope" or other terms are not and cannot be. Love is God's
overarching character trait as he has revealed it in the redemptive activity
culminating in his Son (cf. Eph. 2:4). Paul hypes love because it is how God by
his own will and work unites believers inseparably with him (Rom. 8:35, 39). It
builds up rather than puffs up (1 Cor. 8:1). It is a primary motivating force
in Christian living (2 Cor. 5:14). It is the means by which faith works (Gal.
5:6). It is the first-named fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). A providential
view of things is a theocentric view, and for Paul, the prominent word on God’s
calling card is “love.”
For another thing, Paul speaks to the question of why he
elevates love in the passage where he calls it "the greatest of
these" (1 Cor. 13:13). Love is the communicable attribute of God that has
the most profound and ennobling effect of all on human character and activity
in the practical setting of everyday life. Imagine counseling a person, or
being married to a person, of whom the following could be said:
She is patient and kind. She does not
envy or boast. She is not arrogant or rude. She does not insist on her own
way. She is not irritable or resentful. She does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but
rejoices with the truth. She bears all things, believes all things, hopes all
things, endures all things. She never falters or quits being the loving person
she is.[xviii]
Well, that person could probably counsel us, and we may
suspect that someone so sterling would not choose the likes of us to marry.
This thought exercise suggests that Paul extols love because it is the aspect
of God which makes us most like him and creates the zone in which we can enjoy
the closest fellowship with him, the highest conformity to his will, and the
most intense communion with others who are likewise walking with him in love.
Paul's faith in a living God of love whose saving message
creates a fellowship of love among people being transformed by God's love—this
overwhelms his negative views on humans in fundamental ways. When combined with
faith and hope, we see why Paul, precisely as he writes to the wayward
Corinthians, so often spirals up to pinnacles of doxological expression and
theological profundity. It is almost like Christ arriving at his most perfect
expression of the Father's love on the Good Friday his enemies conspired so
spiritedly to do him in. Where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more. The
Corinthians' negatives called forth from the inspired apostle not bitter
recriminations, detailed denunciation, or whining despair but elevation of the
aspects of God who in the outworking of his will calls forth and grants faith,
hope, and love to his people though his Son.
7. Implications
for Counselors.
Midsummer 2010 witnessed the furor of Shirley Sherrod, US
Agriculture employee, being forced to resign over misconstrual of taped
remarks. In that story's aftermath a bigger picture emerged. Now over 60 years
old, when she was a teenage girl in the South white men murdered her father. As
one journalist told the story:
She was 17 when her father was killed,
in 1965. After that, one night, a cross was burned on their lawn. Her mother
had a gun, and black men from throughout the county came and surrounded the
white men who surrounded the house. Shirley was terrified and hid in a back
room, praying. That night something changed. "I made the decision that I
would stay and work." She wouldn't leave the South but change it.
What motivated that decision? To quote Peggy Noonan in the Wall
Street Journal,[xix]
Sherrod admitted in the speech that initially got her in trouble that 45 years
ago she would not have been able to say what she can say now. "I've come a
long way. I knew that I couldn't live with hate, you know. As my mother has
said to so many, 'If we had tried to live with hate in my heart, we probably be
dead now.'" Sherrod went on to say in that NAACP meeting that it was
"sad" that the room was not "full of whites and blacks."
She quoted Toni Morrison: We have to get to a point where "race exists but
it doesn't matter."
And now my main point, in Noonan's words:
Here [Sherrod] addressed the youthful
members of her audience: "Young people, I want you to know when you are
true to what God wants you to do, the path just opens up, and things just come
to you. God is good, I can tell you that."
I am not suggesting that Sherrod is an apostle. But I would
point to that statement as redolent of the providential view of Paul that so
significantly tempers and informs his disparaging statements regarding the
human condition. Sherrod had tasted the bitter side of life, but she retained
faith in better things because of God despite the very real “old nature”
realities she encountered. Theological conviction helped outweigh the
experience of human and in this case white depravity.
"Total depravity" is not a bad summary of Paul's
view of people. Nor was this baseless idle theory or mean-spirited
theologizing. It is what the OT teaches.[xx]
It seems to have been what Paul glimpsed when he looked within himself. And it
is what Paul, in this respect like Sherrod, personally experienced. Even more
analogously like Jesus, and certainly for Jesus' sake, Paul bore the brunt of
human hatred—of him, of Jews, of Gentiles, of Jesus, of the gospel, of God as
Paul preached him—on numerous occasions (see 2 Cor. 11:23-33; cf. 1 Thess.
2:14-16). Yet he did not lapse into a religious psychology that is essentially
a pathology. He kept his insights into sin, evil, and death in appropriate
bounds by a world vision that did not blind him to these things but rather
subordinated them to aspects of God and his work that made it unnecessary ever
to regard those things as the last word or sole ultimate datum in analyzing or
reflecting on the human condition.
Just as pastors need to strive to make gospel good tidings
the main takeaway of their preaching, without in any way downplaying sin and
evil and struggle and the need to repent, so counselors do well to learn all
they can about human nature and behavior from Scripture, experience, research,
history, and any other means—but then go on to deploy those insights in ways
that do not cancel out providence and the supremacy of God in the faith, hope,
and love flowing from Jesus' cross and resurrection and presence with his
people. This can be done within the context of explicitly Christian counseling,
Christian-to-Christian. Or we can think of a non-religious therapeutic setting
where the counselor is nevertheless informed inwardly by distinctly Christian
insights and lets those insights shape her therapy strategies and practice in
the best possible ways.
My colleague Richard Winter has written of a recent
interesting development … found in what is called "positive
psychology." This is a corrective balance to a hundred years of
"negative psychology" which has focused on abuse, trauma, illness and
pathology. Martin Seligman, following Maslow and others, is promoting research
on positive qualities that "promote happiness and well-being, as well as
character strengths such as optimism, kindness, resilience, persistence and
gratitude … what used to be called 'the virtues.'"[xxi]
Discussion above may be regarded as a contribution to such
"positive psychology," in that it affirms the reality of human
psychological malaise documented in Scripture, and reflected in the dark side
of dichotomies like “old self/new self,” but reminds of the countervailing
stress found in Scripture on God's goodness and work of redemption. Are there
better ways for counselors to appropriate a fuller measure of both aspects too
and mediate this to clients?
Winter has also stated, "The Bible is clear that we
need to develop a realistic sense of both our dignity and our depravity,
resting fundamentally on God's view of us rather than on our view of ourselves
or on other people's view of us."[xxii] This is the God, be it noted, who justifies
the ungodly and who while we were yet sinners demonstrated his highest love
toward us.[xxiii]
There is a wonderful complexity here, full recognition of guilt alongside
robust affirmation of grace. It challenges all Christians in vocations
involving care and nature of the human to move beyond imbalanced
dichotomies toward a stasis in which the divine end of polarities never
fails to receive its full and final due. An initial impediment here is the
truth that we can seldom move others much beyond spheres we have attained, and
it may be easier to spot, treat, and traffic in negatives than to identify,
inhabit, and credibly commend the higher terrain that the apostolic writers
glimpsed and invite their readers to embrace.
Robert Yarbrough
Covenant Theological Seminary
[i]
Scripture citations are ESV unless otherwise noted.
[ii]
Note Paul's "I am chief of sinners" assertions like 1 Tim. 1:13,
15-16; 1 Cor. 15:9; cf. Gal. 1:23. The earliest of these, from Galatians,
reflects Paul’s self-consciousness some two decades after his conversion.
[iii]
Recall, e.g., depiction of his often wretched lot as an apostle: 1 Cor. 4:9-13,
with the memorable coinage "scum of the earth"; 2 Cor. 4:7-12. See
also Rom. 8:36, often overlooked as descriptive of a lamentable aspect of the
Christian life.
[iv]
Many more could be added to the list, especially from recent generations where
the church has suffered such mass and bitter persecution as in the former
Soviet bloc, China, Korea, the Middle East (where in many quarters the church
has been ground down to almost nothing), and African nations like Egypt, Sudan,
Somalia, parts of Nigeria, and elsewhere.
[v]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Schneider_%28pastor%29,
wording adjusted slightly.
[vi]
Answer to question 18.
[vii]
See 2 Tim. 3:16, or Romans, in which Paul cites the OT dozens of times and
always authoritatively. This was Jesus' practice as well: see John Wenham, Christ
and the Bible (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).
[viii]
The same conviction is voiced in Num. 14:18; Neh. 9:17; Ps. 86:15; 103:8;
145:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:8; cf. Nahum 1:3.
[ix]
The benefit is never purely future; assurance regarding the future ministers a
sense of God's presence in the present.
[x]
I.e., the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem ca. 586 BC.
[xi]
The Theology of the Apostle Paul (Grand Rapids/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans,
1998).
[xii]
These three items appear together in Paul also in 1 Thess. 1:3; 5:8.
[xiii]
"Central Presbyterian Information Central" [Clayton, MO], July 18,
2010.
[xiv]
Cf. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 716: "Paul's faith
remained in large measure the faith and religion of his fathers."
[xv]
Acts 26:4-7.
[xvi]
On love see next section.
[xvii]
Pauline scholars would go on to say a great deal here about Paul's apocalyptic
consciousness. See, e.g. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, p. 726:
"Not only personal history, but also all human history, as Paul now
perceived it, hung suspended between the midpoint of Christ's death and
resurrection and the end point of Christ's parousia." This is a primary
background for what we have placed in the foreground above. This may raise the
question of how much such apocalyptic conviction is required to foster the
sense of hope Paul commends.
[xviii]
An adaptation, of course, of 1 Cor. 13:4-8.
[xix]
"The Power of Redemption," July 22, 2010.
[xx]
Recall that the bulk of the negative passage cited in section one above from
Rom. 3 is simply quotation of the Psalter.
[xxi]
Richard Winter, "The Search for Truth in Psychology and Counseling," All
for Jesus, ed. Robert Peterson and Sean Lucas (Ross-Shire, UK: Christian
Focus, 2006), p. 231, citing Paul Vitz, "Psychology in Recovery," First
Things 151 (2005), p. 19.
[xxii]
Ibid.
[xxiii]
See Rom. 5:6, 8.
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