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Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 3.1 (Community and Therapy)

07 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Psychology

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community, Philip Rieff, Therapy, Triumph of the Therapeutic

The prior post on Triumph of the Therapeutic may be found here.

Community and Therapy, Chapter 3

In this chapter, Rieff begins with an understanding of mental health as provided by means of a symbolic system. By means of a symbolic system, the society creates a matrix in which the individual person can achieve a character ideal. To be a functioning person, the person must belong to a “positive community” which “offers some sort of salvation to the individual through participant membership.” (60)

In this scenario, the system works if the individual functions reasonably well. The system will need a sufficiently robust symbolic format and mechanism for involvement in that system. 

For the individual to function well, the individual not may but must participate in the communal life: it was only the life of the community that the life of any individual would be sufficiently well served.

Rieff then subsumes the history religion and culture into a concept of therapy:

Ultimately, it is the community that cures. The function of the classical therapist is to commit the patient to the symbol system of the community, as best he can and by whatever techniques are sanctioned. (57)

Rousseau provided a seeming break from this concept by introducing the idea that the individual must break free from the confinements of the community. But in the end, Rousseau ended up in the same place, because he merely posited the creation of a new community in the future.  

Marx took Rousseau a step further and argued that the community was utterly broken and that all that currently existed is cash interactions. But Marx was still looking for a community, just a new future community where the individual could finally be integrated into the communal whole.

From a slightly different perspective, De Tocqueville considered the possibility of a wholly democratic society where all communal bounds would be broken down and all life would be private.

But for all that, Rieff contends that prior to Freud, mental health was a matter sociology: it was obtained by means of integrating the individual to the society’s system to simultaneously define and give room for expression of the individual. 

At this point, Rieff places Freud as the one who provides a therapy to the individual when no positive community exists. 

Religion Meddles in All Matters

06 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Ecclesiology, Uncategorized

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Church, community, Ecclesiology, Sociology

[As with everything, I reserve the right to correct this argument; it is like most things here, a draft]

In his history of early Christianity, Rodney Stark noted the following conclusion of those who have studied the mechanics of conversion (that is movement into some religious group to the point of identification):

By now dozens of close-up studies of conversion have been conducted. All of them confirm that social networks are the basic mechanism through which conversion takes place. To convert someone, you must first become that person’s close and trusted friend. But even your best friends will not convert if they already are highly committed to another faith. Clearly, these same principles applied as fully in the first century as in modern times.

Stark, Rodney. Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome (p. 13). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.  In a recent interview, sociologist Harvey Whitehouse discussed the concept of a “fused” identification with a group — a level of relationship with the group which explains as an “intense form of cohesion”.  Both of sources explain that the beliefs of the group become more important to the members after they join the group.

Whitehouse notes how rituals will introduce a person into a group and make them “fused” with that group.  (There is the interesting tone of the article, in which the interviewer and the interviewed both seem to think themselves beyond this primitive act of belonging to some group; perhaps I am wrong, but the tone is there.)  But why is this so? That Whitehouse concedes, “No one really knows.”

The fact that there is a sociology and mechanism by which one enters into a group and that such a pattern seems to be independent of the actual core commitments of that group (Whitehouse notes, “Fusion in football and religion really isn’t very different.”) could lead one to conclude that religion is thus arbitrary.

However, the fact of a mechanism does not tell us “why” (as Whitehouse acknowledges) rituals have an effect upon people. He can only see that they are useful to help form an identification with a group.

If Christianity is true (and I hold it is), then it must and can explain why this mechanism exists:  Human beings were created for worship. When this worship is misdirected, the mechanisms for this worship will continue be active and fasten upon the wrong object. As Paul says in Romans 1, having abandoned worship of the Creator, human beings worship the creature. Rom. 1:25. Therefore, one can worship God or football.

That the mechanism misfires (such as when a person joins a dangerous cult and thereafter engages in crime), or overcharges something which does not deserve the attention (look at your social media and see the people absurdly over-invested in sports, entertainment or politics to the point that it becomes their identity and they reject other forms of cohesion, such as family, in favor of a political party), merely proves the importance of the biblical command, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”

James K.A. Smith, in his book Desiring the Kingdom, argues that these mechanisms which form our identity are the mechanisms which direct ourselves and make them meaningful (in one direction or another):

a philosophical anthropology that recognizes that we are, ultimately, liturgical animals because we are fundamentally desiring creatures. We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends.

Smith, James K. A.. Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (p. 40). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. The “liturgies” are the  “rituals” which Whitehouse noted created the cohesion of the group.

Now, when we think of these liturgies, we must be careful not box them up to some special place — like a church. Political idolators have very few temples to attend. Sports only take place a limited number of times a year and yet adherents can be consumed in the off-season. The rituals or liturgies are all around us all the time.

As Richard Sibbes writes in The Spiritual Man’s Aim, “Religion meddles in all matters.” While he is referring specifically to Christianity as “religion” (and the word “meddle” in the 17th century did not indicate a busybody, but rather involvement with), his proposition is more broadly applicable: that thing which is our religion, that matter which forms our most basic commitments and gives us an identity in relationship to others will invest itself into all matters of our life.

A person who is nominally connected to some identity, such an occasional religious adherent may live a life utterly inconsistent with his religious pretensions. Such casual hypocrisy is everywhere realized. But there are other commitments which formative and which that person will not violate. When it comes to commitments and communities (if you will) which are the de facto positions of that society, the commitments will appear effectively invisible to the adherents. They will likely seem themselves as members of no group and “fused” with nothing other than their reason and individual existence.

It also then true that one’s relationship to the group will be critical to maintaining one’s position with the group — the de facto position of the broader society will create a sufficient gravity to pull one into the primary cultural commitments (the liturgies of the broader culture have the advantage of being everywhere always present; you could make a Marxist argument for reification of sorts).

When it comes to the Christian life, the presentation of Christ to the world in the life of the Church is the Church’s apologetic (as Francis Schaffer rightly said), and must be thereafter part of the process of maturation:

The invitation implicit in this story is not simply to an individual relationship with God (though that is one implication). The invitation is to become part of the new people of God, the bride of Christ. It suggests a spirituality with a much more communal orientation. Here is a spirituality in which we grasp the amazing dimensions of Christ’s love “together with all the saints” (Ephesians 3: 18). We model and embody God’s love for one another (1 John 4: 12). I have a relationship with God because we have a relationship with God. There are persons of God because there is a people of God.

Chester, Tim; Timmis, Steve. Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Re: Lit Books) (p. 149). Crossway. Kindle Edition. And:

We need to create church cultures in which it is normal and expected for everyone lovingly to confront and persuade everyone. As William Lane says, “The avoidance of apostasy demands not simply individual vigilance but the constant care of each member of the community for one another.” 2 Sin is deceitful (v. 13). It never presents itself as sin. It creeps up on us, camouflaged and reasonable: “Of course you have a right to be angry after what they did.” “Of course you ought to sleep together since you’re planning to get married.” “Of course you should have a drink with that man— you need some of the appreciation your husband never gives you.” Often we are the last to notice its deceit, but others can and often do. That is why being part of a gospel community is so vital.

Chester, Tim; Timmis, Steve. Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Re: Lit Books) (pp. 150-152). Crossway. Kindle Edition:

12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

Hebrews 3:12-13 (ESV).

In the Christian life, we have often seen how one first breaks with the church and then with the doctrine. There is a moral break, and then there is an intellectual “explanation”.

 

Now it is precisely here where Christianity must be clear that the relationship is not ultimately to one-another: the true “fused” relationship is with Christ:

Jesus’ call itself already breaks the ties with the naturally given surroundings in which a person lives. It is not the disciple who breaks them; Christ himself broke them as soon as he called. Christ has untied the person’s immediate connections with the world and bound the person immediately to himself. No one can follow Christ without recognizing and affirming that that break is already complete. Not the caprice of a self-willed life, but Christ himself leads the disciple to such a break

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Martin Kuske et al., trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, vol. 4, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 93. Bonhoeffer elsewhere explains that our relationship to one-another is a relationship to one-another in Christ: you and I related to Christ and thus to one-another.

And so, the observation of these sociologists describe something which was already inherent in Christianity: the need for a worshipping community, the Church to bring people into fellowship and to bring about maturity. As John writes in his first epistle:

1 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4 And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

1 John 1:1–4 (ESV)

Note: 

The priority of life over intellectual adherence may sound odd or even wrong to a Christian, because Christianity is a religion of a very definitive doctrinal commitment (although many call themselves Christian without any commitment to any proposition). We must admit that the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God to create the Church. Yet, what does that Word command?  Love God and love your neighbor (and yes the nature of the love is carefully laid out, it is not a vague emotion).

Jesus says that our love for one another will be both admission to the world of our being disciples of Jesus and a verification of Jesus’s claim to be Messiah. As important as doctrine is, we are not saved to become theologians (although all have a duty to be theologically sound, as this is necessary for maturity); we are saved for good works.  Eph. 2:10

It is in the worshipping community that we come to understand the full depth of Christian thought and life. It is a thing which can only be rightly understood on the inside.

And, it is also the case that only the Holy Spirit’s operation on a person is sufficient to make that person find the Christian life and commitments sufficiently desirable that they will make the commitments and investment to become part of the Body of Christ. That is why “Church” mechanisms which rely upon attraction and flash and look little different than the attraction of a musical act or a sports team do not create actual Christian conversions. It may create an adherence to some local congregating group with the word “church” on the door (but often not); but it cannot create a member of the Body of Christ.

 

Every Joint, Every Part

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Ministry

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1 Corinthians, Body of Christ, community, Dangerous Calling, Ministry, Sanctification

What are the dangers inherent in convincing ourselves that we can live outside of God’s normal means of personal spiritual health and growth? They are equally clear in this passage. If we attempt to do what we are not wired by redemption to do, we will be susceptible to lingering immaturity in specific areas of our life and to doctrinal error or confusion, and we will live in danger of being deceived. Think with me for a moment. Each of us is able to cite occurrences of each danger in our own circles of pastors. I have counseled pastors who damaged their churches because they had failed to grow up. I have experienced churches damaged by pastors who were moved away by the latest wind of fad doctrine. I was a self- deceived pastor, thinking I knew myself better than I did and thinking I was more spiritually well off than I actually was. These warnings are not just for the average Christian but for every member of the body of Christ. They call everyone in ministry to humbly admit that in the middle of the already–not yet, there is a war that is still taking place for the rulership of our hearts. And because there is, we all need the warning, protective, encouraging, rebuking, growth- producing ministry of the body of Christ.

Now, what methodology has God chosen to employ to guard, grow, and protect us? It is the public and private ministry of the Word. This passage particularly emphasizes the member ministry. Again the words are specific and clear: “Speaking the truth in love . . . joined and held together by every joint . . . when each part is working properly . . . builds itself up in love.” There is no indication in this passage that any member of Christ’s body is able or permitted to live outside of the essential ministry of the body of Christ. But I think it is exactly at this point that we can be tempted to draw conclusions from this passage that it doesn’t actually teach. Because it ascribes to the pastor the responsibility of training God’s people for their member- to- member ministry function, I am afraid that we have unwittingly concluded that the pastor is above a need of what the rest of the body needs and does. But the passage never teaches this; it actually teaches the opposite. The pastor is in the unique position of not only training the body for this ministry but also of personally needing the very ministry for which he trains them. Remember, the words here— “every joint,” “each part”— do not leave much room for exemptions. Again, I think of it this way: if Christ is the head of his body, then everything else is just body, including the pastor, and therefore the pastor needs what the body has been designed to deliver.

Paul David Tripp, Dangerous Calling

The Community Aspect of Biblical Spirituality

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Fellowship, Sanctification, Worship

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community, Fellowship, Hearing God's words, Maturity, Peter Adams, Sanctification, Tim Chester, Total Church

God’s love for the individual as a consequence of the gospel, not the heart of the Gospel. This has big implications for evangelicalism, which has always prided itself on getting the gospel right. Here it has particular implications for spirituality, for it means that genuine biblical spirituality will reflect an express this corporate gospel. Many traditions of spirituality 10 towards individualism: evangelical spirituality, if it is biblical, I’ll not fall into the same trap. Stanley Grenz tells us that spirituality for a post modern age will need to be communitarian rather than individualistic, and Christianity that is lived as well as believed. This is biblical spirituality.

Peter Adams, Hearing God’s Words: Exploring Biblical Spirituality

This community spirituality clearly requires a certain level of relationship. We need to be sharing our lives. We need to be with other Christians “daily.” We need friendships that are real, open, and intimate. We need to give one another license to dig into our lives and challenge our hearts. We need leaders who foster this culture by giving and receiving this daily exhortation, who lead not only from their pulpits but with their lives. The word of God needs not only to be central to church life but thoroughly to pervade every aspect of it.

Chester, Tim; Timmis, Steve (2008-08-21). Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (Re:Lit) (Kindle Locations 2117-2120). Crossway. Kindle Edition.

A Community of Evangelism

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Book Review, Evangelism

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Book Review, community, Evangelism, Ministry, Tim Chester, Total Church

In their book Total Church, Tim Chester & Steve Timmis discusse evangelism in a way a bit different than how we typically discuss it. Their overall point in the book is that the Gospel creates a type of “life together” (to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase). The community created by the Gospel is the basic orientation of each member of the church (he contrasts this with a church as a “preaching center” where people appear once a week to get their “spiritual groceries” and then go back to their real lives).

This works out in evangelism as the entire congregation is participant in evangelism. Rather than evangelism being a only proclamation, “Jesus died for you” (they by no means discount the actual proclamation), the proclamation is embodied in the congregation (all of them) (John 13:35).

The gospel word and the gospel community are closely connected. The word creates and nourishes the community, while the community proclaims and embodies the word. The church is the mother of all believers, Calvin asserted, in that she “brings them to new birth by the Word of God, educates and nourishes them all their life, strengthens them and finally leads them to complete perfection.” Martin Luther believed that “The church . . . is constituted by the Word.” He also likened the church to a mother “who gives birth to you and bears you through the Word.”

The evangelism he envisions is actually more demanding, not less demanding that what we typically think of as evangelism:

Continue reading →

The Sacrifice of Love in Romans 12:1

10 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Fellowship, Ministry, Romans

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Charles Gore, community, Ecclesiology, Fellowship, James Dunn, love, Love, Love fulfills the law, Ministry, one-another, Paul, Romans, Romans 12, Romans 13, Self-denial, Self-Examination

Romans 12 presents an interesting quandary for the modern, North American Christian. Verse one presents a command: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

That command receives further detail in the next verse: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

The diligent, serious Christians reads these verses and thinks, I must do something. Yet, as John Street (TMC, head of Biblical Counseling department), explained once, Probably every sermon you have ever heard on this passage is wrong. Not wrong in the sense that it is used to teach a dangerous heresy. Rather wrong in the sense that we miss an important aspect of the passage.

The default of far too many Christians is to read an individualism into the passage which Paul never intended. We read the command “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” and think I, personally and independently, must do something. But consider the matter carefully: Bodies is plural, but the sacrifice is singular. All of you are presenting one sacrifice.

Consider the movement of the passage: Paul commands a living sacrifice. He then explains that we must live differently from the terms of culture; rather, our mind must be transformed. We not think of ourselves more highly than we ought. Why? Because all the individual believers make up one body:

3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

Something rather interesting happens at this point: the next several verses do not contain a finite verb. A general rule of Greek grammar is that a sentence has a finite verb which is the main verb and other verbs which are either participles or infinitives. You could think of this as a main idea with the other verbs as related ideas hanging on the main idea. In fact, we have go to verse 14 and the word “bless” before we get a “normal” sentence.

It is typical to simply break this up into various sentences and infer a finite verb. For example, the translation handbook reads:

In Greek verses 6–8 form one sentence, and it is rather complex. It begins with a participle and there is no main verb in the entire sentence. Although a verb is not present in the Greek, the context makes it clear what verb is implicit: we are to use (RSV “let us use them”; NEB “must be exercised accordingly”).

However, as James Dunn (Word Commentary, Romans) explains, there is a different way to understand the structure which takes into account the actual grammar and the flow of Paul’s argument:

It is almost universally assumed that v 6 begins a new sentence (e.g., neb, Barrett, Michel, Käsemann), with the second halves of the subsequent phrases filled out with imperatival force—so particularly rsv: “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them” (the last four words having been added to the text). This forces the sense too much in one direction (a “somewhat harsh ellipse,” as SH recognize). The sentence reads more naturally as a continuation of the body imagery of vv 4–5 with the meaning of ἀλλήλων μέλη spelled out in terms of different charisms. The point then of the following phrases is that they are a description of the Christian congregation functioning as “one body in Christ” ….

Considered in this way, the nature of the spiritual sacrifice comes into view. The sacrifice is not longer a “me and Jesus” sacrifice of radical individualism (whether the song means precisely that is a different question), but is a sacrificing of oneself in love: this is a passage which introduces an extended discussion on Christian community (see, e.g., 1 Peter 1:21-22, sanctification and being “born again” bring about a radical transformation of brotherly love; Paul’s argument concerning the law is that love fulfills the law, Romans 13:10).

Gore explains that transformation sought by Paul is more than isolated holiness; it is a holiness, a transformation, a sacrifice which brings about a radical transformation of human life together:

And when St. Paul, justifying himself here, as before and later on, by the special divine favour which has made him the apostle of the Gentiles, proceeds to develop his exhortation, it appears that with him, as with St. James, the form in which ‘divine service’ shows itself must be love of the brethren. To be called into the body of Christ—the society which is bound into one by His life and spirit—is to be called to social service, that is, to live a community life, and to cultivate the virtues which make true community life possible and healthy. Of these the first is humility, which in this connexion means the viewing oneself in all things as one truly is, as a part of a whole. Of the faith by which the whole body lives, a share, but only a share, belongs to each member—a certain measure of faith—and he must not strain beyond it. But he is diligently to make the best of his faculty, and do the work for which his special gift qualifies him, in due subordination to the welfare of the whole whether it be inspired preaching, or ordinary teaching, or the distribution of alms, or presidency, or some other form of helping others which is his special function. Besides humility there are other virtues which make the life of a community healthy and happy, and St. Paul enumerates them, as they occur to his mind, in no defined order or completeness. There must be sincerity in love, that is in considering and seeking the real interest of others; there must be the righteous severity which keeps the moral atmosphere free from taint; there must be tenderness of feeling, which makes the community a real family of brothers; and an absence of all self-assertion, or desire for personal prominence; and thorough industry; and spiritual zeal; and devotion to God’s service; and the cheerfulness which Christian hope inspires; and the ready endurance of affliction; and close application to prayer; and a love for giving whenever fellow Christians need; and an eagerness to entertain them when they are travelling—for ‘the community’ embraces, not one church only, but ‘all the churches.’

Nay in a wider sense the community extends itself to all mankind, even those who persecute them.

In short, the spiritual sacrifice is a sacrifice of myself in love of God which leads to love of neighbor.

Volume 2 of the commentary on St. Paul’s
Epistle to the Romans, A Practical Exposition

By Charles Gore, D.D.
Lord Bishop of Worcester
Chaplain to His Majesty the King

The Fatherhood of God and Individualism in the Church

24 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by memoirandremains in Carl F Henry

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Carl F Henry, Church, community, Family, Father, God, individualism

The fact that divine paternity in the New Testament has individual believers in mind in a way not found in the Old Testament economy represents a remarkable spiritual advance. But it also constitutes a high risk, that of neglecting the parallel fact of God’s fatherhood of the family—not just the family of mankind on the ground of creation, but especially the family of believers on the ground of redemption. God’s interest in individuals is not at the expense of the entire community of believers, but for its good. The New Testament presents Jesus Christ the risen Lord as the head of the body of believers (1 Cor. 1:3; Eph. 4:15, 5:23; Col. 1:18); it declares also that the Father “gave him to be the head over all” (Eph. 1:22, kjv) and that “the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3, kjv). By God’s grace the regenerate brotherhood of the church is the new community, one that knows and communicates the only enduring hope of social order; this it does as an international, interracial and intercultural family. It remains for Christian churches, divided as they are by doctrinal and ecclesiastical disunity, to exhibit convincingly to the world just what adoption into the family of the redeemed truly means in terms of community concern. That many organized churches reflect little more than a Sunday morning regrouping of problem-ridden secular society is a great tragedy. But where churches proclaim new birth and new life in Christ, where they comprise a fellowship of love and peace and of moral power and joy and are concerned for personal and public integrity, there they will extend to the world a far better hope and way than that proffered by the status quo with its frustration-born revolutionary clamor for change.

Carl F. Henry
God, Revelation and Authority
Vol VI, The Fatherhood of God

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