Walk With Me

One thing I realized as we were driving home from the CCEF conference on addictions two weeks ago, was how different it was to walk alongside someone as a sinner, versus as someone who rains down advice and judgment on you from an Olympian throne. The CCEF faculty up there on stage were strikingly humble and compassionate as they spoke to some three thousand conference goers who furiously taking notes on their every word and would replay their conference CDs over and over when they got home. They talked wisely, intelligently, and most of all humbly and compassionately about addictions. Addictions - to anorexia, sex, drug abuse - these are addictions that clinicians talk about wearing rubber gloves and face masks. But these Biblical counselors they talked face to face, with the intimacy possible only because they knew they were addicts themselves. For addictions, really, are just another name for idolatry, and idolatry is what we do when we all fall into sin.

As Christians, we counsel, encourage, rebuke other Christians as those on the same playing field. For we are sinners too. We can condemn no one knowing, first, the grievousness of our own sin (as Bonhoeffer discussed) and, secondly, because we know that it is only by God's grace that the seeds of the same sins which dwell in our hearts have not taken root and bloomed. Murder, incest, and drug addictions are neither so distant cousins nor more foul than the secret sins, lies, and idolatry which we daily commit.

I'm still trying to fully understand what Paul says about being the "worst of sinners" - how do you keep on thinking yourself the worst of sinners without beating yourself on the head all the time and holier-than-thou groveling? - but what Bonhoeffer concluded resonates strongly with me. "How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own? Would I not be putting myself above him; could I have any hope for him? Such service would be hypocritical. (97)"

One of the things that worries me about being a doctor is that I'll have to be the expert. I've never really liked the idea of being on a pedestal, doling out my knowledge and prescriptions to the lowly crowds. An expert normal person fixing the helpless pathologized abnormal. I'm not saying that it's bad to be authoritative. You certainly want your doctors to be knowledgeable and to know what they're doing. The danger is how easy it would be to shift from a compassionate caring doctor who cares for his patients as people, to an authoritative arrogance which demeans and looks down on his patients.

What I like much better is the Biblical counseling paradigm of a counselor walking alongside the counselee, as one who understands the problem and can empathize with that struggle. It's one sinner pointing another sinner to the light. Bonhoeffer explains this further when he says,

"In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God's forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ. (119)."

Often, the words spoken by one who walks alongside you are more powerful than the words of one who speaks down to you, especially when it comes to experiential decisions. We see this in the power of the testimonials: the "Look what Pro-Activ did for me and my self esteem!", in how we've come to trust the common-people tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes more than the expert-meter, in how the recipes on Allrecipes.com with the highest number of five stars are the likeliest of being foolproof. When words are spoken by those who walk alongside, the words do not rest on the authority or greatness of the speaker, but to the good given in the words themselves.

Could it be that it is impossible for those who are the teachers, the pastors, the doctors to truly walk alongside others as equals? Bonhoeffer suggests so when he says,

" It is not a good thing for one person to be the confessor for all the others. All too easily this one person will be overburdened; thus confession will become for him an empty routine, and this will give rise to the disastrous misuse of the confessional for the exercise of spiritual domination of souls…. In order that he may not succumb to this sinister danger of the confessional every person should refrain from listening to confession who does not himself practice it. Only the person who has so humbled himself can hear a brother's confession without harm (120)."

The prescription he gives to avoiding a savior complex is an interesting one - that all those in the business of being confessors must also confess. Can we extend this beyond confessing? That all those who are doctors must also be patients? That all those in authority must submit themselves to the authority of others? It seems to work. There must be a humility, a servant leadership, that, as Mr. B says, is made possible through our salvation by grace.

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Normal?

During the presidential debates, Obama and McCain were asked, is healthcare a right, or a privilege? Listening to life stories this week made me wonder, is having a 'normal life' a right, or a privilege?
To draw the question to its root issue: is normal a right, or a privilege?

One of my concerns about American culture is how everything has become about rights (leading to our increasingly litigious mindset). We have a right to life, liberty, property ownership, and the pursuit of happiness. The American Dream is founded on the belief that everyone has a right to success; with hard work and ingenuity, we can all get there. Which is not all bad; I'm all for life and liberty. What's dangerous is that what we call our 'rights' are also those things which become our demands.

I personally think that healthcare is a privilege. And that is because the target of "good health" is a moving one. In the 1700s, given the high mortality rate, good health is surviving until age 60. Losing a couple teeth or arthritis were annoyances, but overall, the norm. But today, good health has become being pain free with all your body parts functional and accounted for. Braces have become almost a right, rather than a privilege. And soon enough, the definition of health becomes perfect vision and flawless skin and a full thick head of hair like David Norman's …

As a culture we have a pathological fear of any pain and turmoil. People demand to be able to have a perfect night's rest, to wake refreshed, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But I think a good night's rest shouldn't be considered a right - it's a privilege. "God gives his beloved rest." I think it's a gift from God. The same thing with depression (and I might be on a shaky limb here) - to a certain extent, it is normal and perhaps even good to go through a dark night of the soul - for it is in the darkness that your heart learns to yearn and treasure the light. Part of depression is a working out of a real struggle - like Luther's long agonized despair over his sin. Imagine if we'd prescribed him Prozac. There is real fruit that can come of what we call "illness."

"3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied."

I'm sure those who have studied human rights can provide a much more thoughtful and accurate definition, but off the cuff, here at 12 PM, I think rights are those things which allow each person their dignity as human beings. I think as Christians we have to be careful about our use of the word "right." Because "rights" quickly become things we demand of God. I'll bet that's most of the reason why we get angry at God: we get angry at God for not giving us things we consider essential to our happiness. Things like perfect health. Perfect parents. A happy childhood. A trauma-free life. Success when you've worked your butt off. A happy marriage when you were faithful, and good. When our relationship to God becomes that of protecting and demanding our rights, and we try to argue with God, we put God on trial and appoint ourselves the judge.

When we stand before God, I don't know if we have any rights at all. We are all horrible sinners. We all deserve eternal damnation, and lifetimes of bad weather, malformed bodies, getting up on the wrong side of the bed, fruit flies, starvation, abuse, self-hatred, and being surrounded by people who hate us. Any good, or happiness, or wholeness we have experienced in our lives is the totally gracious gift ofGod. He gives rain to all. There's a common view that there's this line called normal, which we all are trying to attain, or deserve to have. Normal health. Normal families. Normal lives. But hey, none of us is normal. Normal is a fiction, to which we have no rights at all.

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The I AM

My freshman year, I took a 9-unit class called SLE - Structured Liberal Education that was supposed to cover all the great classics of philosophy and literature, all the great shapers of thought and culture. We lived together, had classes in the lounge, talked philosophy over lunch, and watched and discussed movies once a week. What was most difficult about the program however, wasn't the finals (we were given twenty-four hours to write three essays). It was the heady and crazy things that were taught and praised that shook what I had believed to be true to the core. Logic and reason and skepticism ruled the day. Believing things just because you'd been taught them as a child -- big no-no. The director was a huge and intimidating Marxist Buddhist (and the A students were those who learned to think like Marxist Buddhists). One lecturer explained how the Bible was an inconsistent mishmash of several different texts and Middle Eastern origin myths, and criticized the Judeo-Christian God for removing the feminine from the act of creation.

Faced with this dizzying kaleidoscope of ideas , I put myself to a great task: to apply logic to everything and accept nothing to be true until logic proved it sound. I quickly realized 1) my brain is really quite feeble and not up to that task 2) plenty of brilliant minds had already tried to prove all the things I was trying to figure out 3) they came to lots of different conclusions 4) it got really really tiring. It took me longer to realize that it was not so foolish to accept things on faith and there are things that are beyond the reach of logic. Swinging my logical sword about trying to dissect every ideas, I was in mortal danger of decapitating myself.

Our use of logic, such as in Aquinas' proofs, seems to assume an objective world. It assumes an external reality untouched by subjectivity, that you can probe, knock about, and build on with measuring sticks and premises and theorems, that no matter what you think or anyone thinks, is firmly and stably out there. We approach the task of wielding logic on reality to find God as we might an archaeological dig. We sift through the bones, garbage heaps and crumbling buildings, and try to piece together the pottery shards and figure out what kind of person once lived here. We define reality as an objective world that
God deposits out there and walks away from, as something external to both ourselves and to God.

But what if true external reality is not objective at all? What if reality, what is REALLY real, is instead a subjective world, namely God's subjective? I don't mean that we're all in God's head. Or actually, come to think of it, maybe I do. If God is omniscient, if He knows everything, that would mean everything that is is contained within God's thoughts. Adam mentioned ideas I don't quite understand about time and quanta. In it, however, he postulated that God might be the One carrying the universe from one moment to the next, making things exist. If I understand Adam rightly, that would make God the Great Sustainer; the ultimate reality beyond the flashes we see of this world.

Maybe explaining it this way will make it clearer (or more confusing):


Figure 1
Descartes makes as his Premise Number One, the one knowable fact on which all other knowledge should be built, "I think, therefore I am." And with that foundation, he hopes to use logic to circumscribe the world and find God.

Can we ever prove the existence of God using just our thinking, our logic? For if the only one true premise on which all real knowledge can be based is instead GOD, the diagram would look like this.


Figure 2

If this is really how things are, our logic could not stand alone without God. To use only, "I think therefore I am," would only get us to broken pieces of truth, because the full explanation would lie with God. That is why it is impossible, I think, to produce an airtight absolutely convincing argument for the existence of God, using only our logic. We have seen, I think, how logic is fallible and sound logic can lead to multiple contradictory conclusions. It is because He is the only thing we can assume to be true. God is the only one who can stand alone, and exist without our logic, without us, without the world. He would still Be. He must be our first premise, the foundation of our knowledge. For Descartes' "I think therefore I am," we substitute He who declares "I AM that I AM." That is why true logic, true understanding, would really be thinking as God thinks.

How do we know what is true? How do we think rightly? How do we think the thoughts of God? We have to subject what seems apparent to us in this world (general revelation) with what God has actually declared to us to be true through His Word. It is only through that lens that we can find answers to the problem of evil, evolution, and other such conundrums.

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