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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