Obsession

I wonder if it’s too easy in our 12 step culture to mix up addiction with obsession – or maybe there’s an overlap.

For many years, we went about our lives doing good ministry. We were motivated by teens, Jesus, relationships, the Kingdom, but the undercurrent, the obsession, was not Jesus but finance: raising support and paying the rent. As much as we were known as a great ministry family – Godly and loving and hospitable- we were really a family obsessed with money. It didn’t negate the good stuff but it became the (pretty big) thorn in an otherwise wonderful family life.

More recently it’s been the awful stuff going on in our local church leadership. We’ve just today agreed to stop letting the subject creep into every single conversation as there’s only so much church that one marriage can take!

Not the stuff of a good movie plot – I’d guess most obsessions are relatively banal.

Original Sin 2

“If we bracket the explanation that we inherit the ability and inclination and inevitability of doing such, how can we explain the presence of sin in everyone?”

If there’s no theological answer then it must be biological or humanistic……For the humanist perspective I thought I’d check out Carl Rogers.

Here’s a quote from William Coulson about working with Rogers introducing person-centred counselling to a Californian holy order and the chaos that ensued. It doesn’t explain where sin comes from, but illustrates what it looks like to presume a lack of OS.

COULSON: Rogers and I did a tape for Bell and Howell summarizing that project; and I talked about some of the short-term effects and said that when people do what they deeply want to do, it isn’t immoral. Well, we hadn’t waited long enough. The lesbian nuns’ book, for example, hadn’t come out yet; and we hadn’t gotten the reports of seductions in psychotherapy, which became virtually routine in California. We had trained people who didn’t have Rogers’ innate discipline from his own fundamentalist Protestant background, people that thought that being themselves meant unleashing libido.

Maslow did warn us about this, Maslow believed in evil, and we didn’t. He said our problem was our total confusion about evil. (This is quoting from Maslow’s journals, which came out too late to stop us. His journals came out in ‘79, and we had done our damage by then.) Maslow said there was danger in our thinking and acting as if there were no paranoids or psychopaths or SOBs in the world to mess things up.

We created a miniature utopian society, the encounter group. As long as Rogers and those who feared Rogers’ judgement were present it was okay, because nobody fooled around in the presence of Carl Rogers. He kept people in line; he was a moral force. People did, in fact, consult their consciences, and it looked like good things were happening.

Read the whole interview.

More on original sin

Peggy #24 wrote “I am unwilling to embrace either original sin or total depravity because of the ultimate consequences they have regarding how we are to perceive humans. That is where I cannot follow Augustine, Calvin and Luther.”

I’m thinking that how we see OS is dependent on one’s personal church history; mine is fuzzy liberalism followed by 30 years of friendly and flexible evangelicalism. The reason I’ve started reading and trying to participate in these discussions is that our little community here in the UK has been thwacked from out of nowhere with some startling form of conservatism that I’ve never seen up close before.

As a theological pipsqueak, I’d never heard the term “total depravity” before this week. But as a woman of God I’m determined to develop a vocabulary to explain why I reject the concept.

So when I say Original Sin, I mean a natural tendency to put self first. If we believe that everyone is afflicted, no matter how “well” they appear to be (ie the Pharisees), then no one can be beyond Grace just because of current behaviour.

I guess I see it as the only real level playing field in the world of poverty and exclusion by class, education and opportunity. (in any country or culture). I hate the thought of wounded people being battered into the Kingdom. I’d much rather be able to say – actually, the basic problem is not that you rob banks/take dugs/are a racist thug (we’ll deal with that later); it’s that you and I both care more for ourselves than for God or the people around us.

Thanks for helping me get my thinking straight and I apologise is this all sounds simplistic.

Original Sin/Original Virtue

What do you think that belief in original sin is designed to explain?

This is one doctrine that I’ve never felt to be stumbling block. It doesn’t just explain why the world is so broken; it also tells me so much about who I am and why following Jesus is a conscious decision rather than something that is the privilege of those born naturally “good”.

But it’s only a liveable doctrine when paired with the fact that we’re also born with the natural ability to reflect our Creator.

I recently spent just over a year working in a secular job in a prison. I used to say to the guys on my course, “You know, before I came here, I thought this place full of criminals.” They’d laugh and say, “It is!”

But it isn’t – it’s full of people, some of them kept in cells and others who arrive for work and go home again. Sometimes the “bad” men in the cells acted better (ie did more for the Shalom of the whole community) than the “good” people.

Over the year, in every course, someone would say something like, “It’s all right for you Trish; you don’t have a criminal mind.” And I’d have a great time trying to explain that I could have a criminal mind without trying too hard at all – that I actually have to make daily decisions in order to be the “good” person that they think I am. And even then, I get it wrong morally, if not legally, all the time.

The “reflected Creator” side of the doctrine goes a long way to explaining why these guys could be kind and generous and honest when they chose. One of the lifers explained how they’d all get different ingredients off the canteen list and cook up meals for everyone to share. Community.

There were times when I couldn’t see anything in a person other than malice, greed, and an arrogance about their ability to profit from the vulnerable, (yeah…..drug dealers aren’t my favourite people). But then I’d be confronted by the enormity of God’s grace and the ability of his love to encompass these guys – not on the condition that they become “good” but on the condition that they acknowledge their state of sinfulness and turn to the one who can redeem that. In other words, they are exactly like me and everyone else who reads this.

Original sin means we are reliant on God’s grace – no matter where society places us on its scale of good and evil. Without a doctrine of original sin we could chose to exclude people from that Grace.