Dear Reader,
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I'll be away for about about two weeks to visit family for the holidays. I'll also be going to California to meet with the Institute for Research on Psychology and Spirituality.

When I return I'll continue on with my review of the work of Rene Girard and S. Mark Heim's recent book Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross.

Currently, here are the posts in the The Voice of the Scapegoat series for quick reference:

Part 1: The Crisis of Penal Substitutionary Atonement
Part 2: Sacred Violence, Scapegoats, and Myth
Part 3: The Bloody Antimyth
Part 4: Whispers of Victims

Best,
Richard

We continue on with Part 4 in this series working through the ideas of Rene Girard and S. Mark Heim's recent book Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross.

In the last post, we discussed the Old Testament as an antimyth, a religious story that is decidedly NOT cut from the mold of religious mythology. The Old Testament is filled with bodies and blood. It is clearly not covering up the violence, even God-mandated violence. This honesty allows Israel to reflect consciously on its religious story. And these reflections develop over time. In the end, these reflections set the stage for Christian understandings of the cross.

The overt bloodshed of the Old Testament makes the victims of violence visible. There is no Mythic Cover Up. And as these victims are exposed, Israel begins to notice that many, if not most, of these victims were innocent. Overall, this is the great moral achievement of the Old Testament. As we journey with the Old Testament the innocent victims begin to find their voice. A voice that ultimately gets aligned with Jesus on Calvary.

Let's follow this trajectory--listening with Israel to the whispers of the victims--in a survey of the Old Testament.

Although scapegoating and sacrifice are firmly a part of the Old Testament, the witness regarding both becomes increasingly ambivalent as the story unfolds. For example, consider the stories of Abel, Joseph, and the sacrifice of Isaac (Jews more correctly refer to the Akedah, the "binding" of Isaac. Christians refer to the "sacrifice" of Isaac which, technically, is not correct as Isaac is not really sacrificed.). In each of these stories we see the scapegoated party as innocent. This seems clear to us now. But in the milieu to which the Old Testament spoke, this moral development is extraordinary and its importance cannot be overstated.

Victims also begin to find their voice in the Psalms. There are psalms that have this common theme: The speaker/singer is alone, oppressed and blamed by all, and the crowd is crying for their blood. Well, who are the people in this situation? This is the experience of the scapegoat. The voice of the One against the Many. Thus, these are called "scapegoat psalms." Heim cites Psalm 140 as an example:

Psalm 140
1 Rescue me, O LORD, from evil men;
protect me from men of violence,
2 who devise evil plans in their hearts
and stir up war every day.
3 They make their tongues as sharp as a serpent's;
the poison of vipers is on their lips.
4 Keep me, O LORD, from the hands of the wicked;
protect me from men of violence
who plan to trip my feet.
5 Proud men have hidden a snare for me;
they have spread out the cords of their net
and have set traps for me along my path.
6 O LORD, I say to you, "You are my God."
Hear, O LORD, my cry for mercy.
7 O Sovereign LORD, my strong deliverer,
who shields my head in the day of battle-
8 do not grant the wicked their desires, O LORD;
do not let their plans succeed,
or they will become proud.
9 Let the heads of those who surround me
be covered with the trouble their lips have caused.
10 Let burning coals fall upon them;
may they be thrown into the fire,
into miry pits, never to rise.
11 Let slanderers not be established in the land;
may disaster hunt down men of violence.
12 I know that the LORD secures justice for the poor
and upholds the cause of the needy.
13 Surely the righteous will praise your name
and the upright will live before you.

In Psalm 140 we begin to hear the whispers of victims, present and past. We get the clear sense that the communal indictment again the "poor" and "needy," the group most often scapegoated, is unjust and wrong. The Psalmist asks that God align himself not with the Crowd, but with the Scapegoat. God's interests here are being disentangled from the interests of the powerful and being associated with the victim. Thus, it is no coincidence that when Jesus cries out the words of psalm 22 on the cross that this is also a scapegoating psalm.

We also see in the prophets a growing ambivalence with blood sacrifice. God is seen as rejecting the blood sacrifices at the temple as he begins to favor the weak and marginalized:

Amos 5: 21-24
21 "I hate, I despise your religious feasts;
I cannot stand your assemblies.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!"

Again, what we are seeing here is a growing ambivalence about sacrifice. And this rejection of sacrifice is coupled with God's growing preoccupation and identification with the marginalized:

Hosea 6:6
"For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings."

Again, to us, this all makes perfect sense. But can you imagine what a radical break-through this was for the world? Think about the pagan world, steeped in blood sacrifice to pagan gods and Yahweh himself, confronting this radical new message.

Further, Heim considers Job to be a pivotal reflection on the innocence of those "afflicted by God." In Job everyone considers his afflictions to be just and righteous. Job, of course, disagrees and maintains his innocence throughout the book. He accuses God of treating him unfairly. And he calls out for a trial, a place where he can argue for his innocence.

In these details, Job is an incredible book. Just to point out some of the details Heim focuses on, note that Job asks for a trial. This request is noteworthy. Scapegoats, those afflicted by God, are simply assumed to be guilty. This is what Job's friends and his wife assume. But the book of Job questions that assumption and undermines the consensus of the group. We, as readers, know Job is innocent. And that is the destabilizing genius of the book: We see behind the veil. It is true, because we can see behind the veil, that we are often disturbed by God's game with Satan. But this would be to miss the point. The point is that 90% of the book is about the unanimous consensus of the group (that Job is rightly afflicted by God) and that Job, as scapegoat, refuses to agree with this assessment. Then, amazingly, in the end God AGREES with Job's assessment. Heim summarizes:

God's speech to Job does not directly address the substance of his complaint. It neither accepts or rejects it. But alongside this poetic speech, God has a very concise and unequivocal comment to Job's friends: 'My wrath is kindled against you...; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has' (42:7 RSV)...One of the most striking of these tensions is that after so much space has been given to the speeches of the friends, who have defended God at every turn and justified the violence against Job as divinely mandated, we find this flat conclusion that they have not spoken the truth. Job, who has called God his persecutor and denounced God's injustice and indifference, has spoken what is right. There is hardly a more amazing line in the Bible...Job's address to God put this in inescapable terms: Are you on their side or mine? In this struggle over the identity of God, God finally sides with Job...

God's speech to Job does not directly address the substance of his complaint. It neither accepts or rejects it. But alongside this poetic speech, God has a very concise and unequivocal comment to Job's friends: 'My wrath is kindled against you...; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has' (42:7 RSV)...One of the most striking of these tensions is that after so much space has been given to the speeches of the friends, who have defended God at every turn and justified the violence against Job as divinely mandated, we find this flat conclusion that they have not spoken the truth. Job, who has called God his persecutor and denounced God's injustice and indifference, has spoken what is right. There is hardly a more amazing line in the Bible...Job's address to God put this in inescapable terms: Are you on their side or mine? In this struggle over the identity of God, God finally sides with Job... (pp. 90-91, 92)

Finally, the pinnacle of this re-envisioning of the scapegoat and the crime of sacrifice is found in the Fourth Servant Song of Isaiah. It is a long passage, but it's important to examine. I'll break in with commentary in [brackets]:

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
13 See, my servant will act wisely;
he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.
14 Just as there were many who were appalled at him—
his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man
and his form marred beyond human likeness—

[This is a classic account of who gets scapegoated: Marginal people.]

15 so will he sprinkle many nations,
and kings will shut their mouths because of him.
For what they were not told, they will see,
and what they have not heard, they will understand.

[Recall, the myth of religious sacrifice is about obfuscating the murder. The people "know not what they do."]

1 Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

[Note that WE considered him stricken by God. Looking ahead to Jesus, we make the same mistake about his cross. We feel that he had to die because GOD demanded it. But that is our mistake, a part of the obfuscation, the sense that the scapegoat is there by divine mandate. This is critical to interpreting the rest of the song.]

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

[Again, sacrifice solved a real social problem. Thus, verse 5 is sacrificial business as usual. The sacrifice of the Servant brings peace.]

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
And who can speak of his descendants?

[It is clear here that the Servant sacrifice was unjust. The RSV reads in verse 7 that the Servant was taken away by a "perversion of justice." Thus, the killing of the scapegoat is wrong.]

For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was stricken.
9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.
11 After the suffering of his soul,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.

[The song ends on an ambivalent note. It is clear that the Servant was wrongly scapegoated. And, in order to demonstrate the travesty of this situation, God will stand beside the scapegoat, vindicating the victim. This alone makes the song an amazing passage and speaks to Job's request for a Vindicator in heaven. The Servant, it appears, will receive just such a vindication from God. But there are also some puzzling moments in this section and the one before it: "the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all" and "Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering." What is going on here? Is the text confused? Was it wrong or not to sacrifice the scapegoat?]

Like in Job, the Servant Song is ambivalent. The victim--Job and Servant--are innocent. Their affliction is unjust. God, in the end, sides with each. But, in both stories, God also seems implicated in the affliction. Heim compares Job and the Servant Song:

The servant song tells a story like that of Job, from a different perspective. This time there is no doubt about the scapegoat's innocence, no doubt about the evil of the suffering afflicted, no doubt about whose side God is on. The focus has shifted. Now it rests on the sins of the persecutors. Us. Job poses a question: How can God be justified in face of the arbitrary suffering of a righteous person ganged against by everyone, including God? The servant poses a different question. Assuming that God decides to side with the scapegoat, how can those who do the violence ever be justified? If the first was about how the one can be rescued, the second is about how the many can be saved. (p. 101)

In the end, Girard and Heim conclude, the Old Testament does not definitively answer these questions. But the Old Testament has taken us on an amazing moral journey. It begins with a bloody sacrificial God but ends with us being deeply disturbed about sacrifice. We are also very uncomfortable believing the scapegoat is guilty. After both Job and the Servant Song, whenever we see someone unanimously claimed as being "afflicted by God" we now wonder if the Crowd got it right. Maybe God is actually on the side of the victim. By giving the victim a voice, the Old Testament has completely reworked the sacrificial psychology of the ancient world. True, the Old Testament has not completely extricated God from sacrificial violence, but it has taken us a long way toward that goal. The final revelation about scapegoating and sacrifice will be found later in the cross of Jesus.

From the last post...

Civilization is built atop a scapegoating mechanism. But this harmonizing and cathartic murder is obscured by religious myth, giving ultimate sanction to our violence. The murder is reframed as divine sacrifice.

Thus, our sin is both the blood on our hands and the blood shed to support our civilizations. Humanity truly has a multitude of skeletons in its collective closet.

But more than blood, our sin is also implicated in the silencing of the victim. The Mythic Cover Up, hiding the evidence. The sacrificed--those marginalized and powerless persons--have no voice. Thus, the One killed for the Many is lost to history. Many times over. Our lies, called religion, silence the blood crying out from the ground.

But the blood begins to cry out.

In the Old Testament...

***

We continue on with Part 3 in this series working through the ideas of Rene Girard and S. Mark Heim's recent book Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross. In this post we finally turn the the biblical text. We start with the blood-filled Old Testament.

The Old Testament is bloody and scandalous to modern sensibilities. To intelligent critics of Christianity, how could we in good conscience claim those blood-filled, violent texts as a part of our guide for moral life and practice?

To this question Girard has a startling response: Your scandal at the Old Testament is Exhibit A that you are a child of these texts. For without the Old Testament your scandal--the very moral code you use to indict the Old Testament--would not exist.

How could Girard make such a claim?

Recall, ancient myth obfuscated the scapegoating mechanism. Ancient myths hid the blood and the murder. Ancient myth denied the victim its voice. This was the milieu to which the Old Testament spoke. And, curiously Girard notes, the Old Testament doesn't read like any religious myth before or since. Atheists might try to equate the two--pagan myth and the Old Testament--but a student of myth quickly sees the difference. The Old Testament claims to read as history, with real people, with real failings, in real locations. The stage of the Old Testament is humble and workaday. There are no frolicking gods, no mythic serpents, no grand quests into the heavens or underworld. No, the Old Testament is earthy, sweaty, and, offensively, bloody.

The blood in the Old Testament is a key to its proper reading. The Old Testament is not attempting to hide the blood. The blood is right there, out in front of the story. Thus, we quickly know that this story is different. It is not in the mythic mold of obfuscation and coverup. Rather, the Old Testament is making a claim on reality. It is not a myth. It is an antimyth. Heim helps us see this:

What is violence doing in the Bible? It is telling us the truth, the truth about our human condition, about the fundamental dynamics that lead to human bloodshed, and most particularly, the truth about the integral connection between religion and violence. There is no way to be truthful without exhibiting these things. If we complain that the tales of Genesis and the bloody sacrifices of Leviticus, and the fire for revenge in the Psalms, are too sordidly, familiarly human to have any place in religious revelation, we make an interesting admission that they reveal our humanity all too well. We always knew this was the way things were, we claim. We don't need a religious text to tell us so. We need cures, not diagnoses. But is that true? What if our cures need diagnosing?

...A simple way to put it would be to say that our reconciling violence is not evident to us, but always goes under another name: Revenge, purification, divine sacrifice. If that is a basic fact of human life, then where violence is not being faced it is being justified. Where it is not being explicitly described, it is not absent, but invisible. To exhibit violence is to run the risk of enflaming people's appetite for it. But to veil it under euphemism and mythology, to be piously silent before its sacred power, it is to make its rule absolute. (pp. 101, 102)

But the Old Testament has the courage to tell the truth, to expose the blood. And for that, for refusing to go along with the pagan mythic coverup, it gets criticized! Heim continues:

Critics of Christianity attack the 'violent God of the Old Testament' as the sociopathic cousin in an extended family of much better adjusted deities. But the offense of the Bible might be put the other way around. It suggests that the better adjusted deities are (literally) a myth. (p. 102)

The point for both Girard and Heim is that, to be honest, we must start with a bloody God. That is the start of religion. You can't make moral progress until that fact is owned and recongnized: God has been used (and is still used!) as a coverup for violence. And the Old Testament has the courage to both recognize that fact and start us on a moral journey. For the God of Leviticus is different from the God of the prophets. And that suggests that something deep and profound is being worked out in the Old Testament. That God is slowly being disentangled from the bloodshed. Heim continues:

The God described in the Bible appears in a variety of characterizations. The God represented in the passage about collective stoning in Leviticus looks different from the God presented in Amos or Isaiah, for instance. Such diversity is a cue for valuable critical-historical investigation. (p. 102)

Yes, from our Christian vanage, we look back on the moral journey begun in the Old Testament and find its documenation embarrassing. But without that journey and its documentation--full of bloody and brutal truth-telling--we don't get to those noble Christian sensibilities we so pridefully use to indict the Old Testament.

In the end, the Old Testament, steeped in blood, seeks to tell the truth:

The Old Testament is an antimyth. It is thick with bodies, the voices of victims and threatened victims...This is not mere background material. It unveils a truth without which Christians would be incapable of formulating their own faith... (p. 103)

But more is going on in the Old Testament than its refusal to hide the bloodshed. Oh yes, the Old Testament does more, much more.

For in the Old Testament not only is the blood not hidden but the scapegoat begins to find a voice...

Before turning to those bloody, sacrificial Old Testament texts it will be necessary to understand the setting to which those texts spoke. It was a time of sacred violence, scapegoats, and myth. This post will abstract the argument of Rene Girard's book Violence and the Sacred and parts of Chapter Two of S. Mark Heim's Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross

Human culture is built atop our imitative abilities, our ability to serve as and learn from social models. Culture is contagious, with information, behavioral norms, and innovations propagating quickly through a population. This capability greatly enhanced our ability to cope with changing environs and circumstance. But this adaptive flexibility came with a price. Just as the "good things" in life can propagate through a group so can the bad things. Rumors, gossip, stigma, and hate are also radically contagious. Like a wildfire, groups can quickly be aroused to paranoia, hysteria, panic and, ultimately, violence. In short, the imitative engine that makes social life possible also makes it volatile and unstable.

This instability and proneness to violence typically manifests itself when the group is placed under stress (e.g., famine, epidemic). During these times of fear, people grow more anxious, fearful, distrustful, and paranoid. And this fear, via the contagion of culture, propagates until the entire group is facing massive outbreaks of violence. At this juncture, one of two things will occur. If the group doesn't find a way to vet its paranoia and aggression, violence will break out and, given the imitative nature of human culture, the violence will escalate in reciprocal bouts of revenge killing. Eventually, due to the unchecked violence, the society will disintegrate and be lost to history. We have no knowledge of the many fledgeling societies that chose this route. Simply, they did not survive.

At the height of communal violence other cultures took the other route. A tragic but effective route. For some reason, different in different times and places, the ire of the group fell upon a certain person or subgroup. This person, typically a marginal person, a person of no account and with no voice, is blamed for the crisis. At first only a few make this attribution. But like gossip and rumor, this blame also propagates. Eventually, the community reaches the unanimous conclusion, "This person is to blame! They have displeased the gods! They must be punished for bringing this crisis upon us!" And in this moment the solidarity of the group, miraculously, reappears. Once fractured individuals now stand together against the scapegoat. The violence of the group is brought to bear upon the One to save the Many. And the sacrifice occurs. And in the wake of the sacrifice the blood lust of the group, now unified, is sated. Peace returns.

This this the theory of primitive religion offered by Girard in Violence and the Sacred. Girard contends that scapegoating sacrifice emerged in human history as the solution to a very real problem, the management of communal violence. Human societies are like dry kindling, ready, at a moment's notice, to burst into flames of violence. Sacrifice was the cultural innovation that aided humans in managing this violence. Further, the scapegoat united the once divided group. Thus, after the sacrifice of the scapegoat, a violent mob is both pacified and united. This communal catharsis appeared "magical" and, thus, became associated with supernatural power and significance. Over time the scapegoat and the sacrifice became incorporated into the mythic structures of the group's metaphysical worldview. The sacrifice becomes necessary, eternal, and sanctioned by the gods. Heim summarizes:

The sad good in this bad thing is that it actually works. In the train of the murder the community finds that this sudden war of all against one delivers it from the war of each against all. The sacrifice of one person as a scapegoat discharges the pending acts of retribution between members of the group. It 'clears the air.' The contagion of reciprocal violence is suspended, a circuit breaker has been thrown. The collective violence is reconciling because it reestablishes peace. This benefit seems a startling, even magical result, an outcome much greater than could be expected from a simple mob execution...The one mobbed as the most reprehensible criminal now is revered as the bringer of peace, one with a divine vocation to die and restore order for the people. So the victim becomes a god, memorialized in myth, and the killing becomes a feature of a foreordained plan, a pattern and a model. In the face of future threats, similar response will be required. Rituals of sacrifice originated in this way, tools to fend off social crisis. And in varied forms they are with us still. (pp. 43-44)

But Girard goes on to note that this "solution" to communal violence--a simple murder--must be, to remain effective, "hidden." Heim continues:

In other words, in perfectly good faith both the nature of the crisis and the kind of behavior responsible for it are described in mistaken terms. This misunderstanding serves to increase the effectiveness of the sacrificial process. It works more smoothly when we 'know not what we do.' If it were obvious to all that sacrifice was a ploy in the ordinary round of rivalry and violence, a bone thrown to satisfy everyone's lust for revenge, it would be much less effective...Without a canopy of sacred awe and the conviction of unspeakable crimes, suspicions might arise about whether the victim was chosen arbitrarily, about the interests of those who picked the victim. (p. 51)

Religious myth, therefore, is fundamentally about obfuscation, about hiding a truth. What truth? That human society has been built atop and is still built atop murder:

Myth is an account of a murder that routinely obscures the fact that it was a murder at all. It describes a collective killing that was completely justified, entirely necessary, divinely approved, and powerfully beneficent. (p. 52)

All this might seem like an interesting anthropological analysis if Girard did not go on to suggest that this sanctioned scapegoating is still with us. Heim continues:

If sacrifice was simply failed science, and accomplished nothing, it would have no importance for us now. But it does work, and continues to work, whether the community is question is a clique of middle school girls or a country in the grip of economic collapse...The same scapegoating dynamic is alive in our setting. (p. 61)

We can now step back and try to summarize Girard's theory:

1. Sacrifice was a real solution to communal violence.

2. But for that "solution" to work the truth about its mechanics had to be systematically obscured.

3. Religion, via its mythical structure, provided this obfuscation.

4. The obfuscation was this: The voice of the scapegoat, the very personal cries of the one being murdered, had to be silenced. Thus, scapegoats were chosen (and are still chosen) from marginalized groups, powerless people. Further, the murder of the scapegoat must not be seen for what it is (i.e., a murder). It must be a divinely sanctioned "sacrifice."

5. This scapegoating mechanism--rationalized, sanctioned, "religious" violence--still defines the human condition. Our collective Sin is this machinery of violence.

6. Thus, in order to save us, the scapegoating mechanism must be exposed.

But how will this mechanism be exposed for what it is? How will our violence be unmasked? How can we be saved from this blindness and violence?

Here's how. By allowing the scapegoat, for the first time in human history, to speak. To pull aside the religious myth that has hidden the victims from our eyes and hushed those we have killed in the name of God. To hear the voice of the victim. The voice of the scapegoat.

Enter the Old Testament...

I have wanted to post for some time about the work and ideas of Rene Girard. A recent book by S. Mark Heim titled Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross has prompted me to start this series.

Saved from Sacrifice is one of the best theology books I've ever read. Please get yourself a copy. In Saved from Sacrifice Heim gives the church a Girardian reading of the bible. This work has been long overdue and we owe Heim a debt of gratitude. Girard's analysis of the scapegoating mechanism and its relation of the bible is a profound achievement, or, as Heim argues, a rediscovery of a more foundational reading. Currently, Girard's work is mainly known to scholars, the ideas have yet to trickle into the pews of our churches. Heim's book will go far toward making this happen.

I want to use this series to walk through Girard's main theses and Heim's explication of them. My goal is to arouse your interest to take up both Heim and Girard directly to study them for yourself.

***

The Crisis of Penal Substitutionary Atonement
In Saved from Sacrifice, Heim situates his reading of Girard in the modern crisis surrounding penal substitutionary atonement (henceforth, PSA). Over the last few centuries in the Western church PSA has grown to be the dominant lens on the crucifixion of Jesus. Succinctly, PSA claims that due to our sin God's wrath was kindled against us. Or, alternatively, our sin created a debt so large we were unable to pay it. Jesus, in PSA, steps in and dies in our place. Jesus, being the perfect sacrifice, both satisfies the wrath of God and passes on his merit to us (which we claim by faith) canceling our debt of sin.

This formulation is so common I don't know why I'm even reviewing it. For many Christians this is the ONLY view they have of the cross. Questioning PSA is, for some, tantamount to questioning Christianity itself. Which really is a stunning situation.

The situation is stunning because Eastern Christianity doesn't emphasize PSA. Nor did it seem to be emphasized by the early church. No, the focus on and intensification of PSA seems to be a fairly recent Western phenomena. Heim traces it back to St. Anselm, who's writings on the atonement lead to some fatal missteps in many sectors of Western Christianity.

These missteps have proved costly to the church. Why? Because the foundational ideas of PSA are growingly untenable. Worse, many find PSA downright objectionable and offensive.

Heim begins Saved from Sacrifice by describing the most significant of these objections. The one I would like to highlight is the view of God lurking behind PSA. To quote Heim,

...traditional interpretations of the crucifixion are criticized for moral failings, especially the picture they paint of God...If a debt is owed to God why can't God simply forgive it, as Jesus apparently counsels others to do? If God is ransoming us from other powers, why does God have to submit to their terms? If this is God's wise and compassionate plan for salvation, why does it require such violence? The idea that God sent his Son to be sacrificed for us is indicted here for impugning the moral character of God. (p. 25)

PSA works its great power because it is a vision of RESCUE. We are SAVED. Death was intended for us, but Jesus steps in to "take our place." What is so morally problematic about this? Later in the book Heim is discussing the formulation of the cross worked about by Anselm:

If Christ steps in to intercept the blow meant for us, where does that blow itself come from? It is occasioned by our sin (so far, a view fully in accord with the general tradition). Anselm's departure is to insist with new systematic rigor that it is actually coming from God. What we need to be rescued from is the deserved wrath and punishment of God. God wishes to be merciful, and so God becomes the one to be punished... (p. 299)

The problem with Anselm's formulation is twofold:

To return to our simple image about Jesus stepping in between us and an evil bearing down on us, we can say that Anselm unequivocally states that what is bearing down on us is God and God's wrath. This radically bifurcates the God of justice and the God of forgiveness, and it appears to require a plan of salvation that sets Christ and God against each other. (p. 300-301)

In the end we have an emotional and theological puzzle. First, the bible unequivocally states that we were, in some profound way, "saved" and "rescued" by the cross. But saved from what? God? Saved from God!? That surely is confused. But if we are not saved from God, if God isn't the one delivering the blow intercepted by Jesus, where is that blow coming from? A second puzzle is that the cross is a bloody sacrifice. Consequently, if God is demanding this sacrifice, why is he so blood-thristy?

Heim points out other problems with PSA. I've just focused on these issues because they are the ones most personal to me, they are the issues I've most struggled with. I rejected PSA a long time ago for just these reasons: I could not believe in a confused and blood-thirsty God.

But to make this rejection leaves one in an akward relation to the bible. Clearly, the bible is a bloody document. And the cross is intimately tied up with the notion of "sacrifice," a theme that links both the Old and New Testaments. So, to reject PSA on moral and theological grounds leaves you holding a lot of problematic texts. Bloody, sacrifical texts. Do we have to reject these texts? As someone who loves the bible, I don't want to. So what do we do?

Enter the work of Rene Girard. As Heim notes, the work of Girard allows us to adopt these bloody sacrificial texts in a way that not only surmounts the problems of PSA but replaces them with an amazing new vista. What was before considered to be morally repugnant--bloody sacrifice--is now adopted as critical feature of the bible and, amazingly, feature that places both God and Jesus over against the violence. As Heim states in his final chapter (p. 294):

The way forward is not to go around all these elements, but to go through them, integrating them in the biblical vision of God's work to overcome scapegoating sacrifice. The true alternative to distorted theologies of atonement will not be one that says less about the cross, but one that says more.

This is my final post in this Attachment to God series. For psychology students and researchers interested in attachment to God research I hope you've found these posts to be a good, albeit informal and personal, introduction to the literature. For all other readers I also hope you've found this research interesting and illuminating.

In this post I want to both look ahead in the attachment to God research as well as express my current views on this literature.

Looking Ahead
In the coming years I see four outstanding areas of future research.

1. Attachment to God in Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism
Again, the attachment to God model works if the relationship with God is experienced as "personal." Thus, attachment to God should apply to Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism. Although Hinduism is not monotheistic, persons do tend to have more unique relationships with a particular god out of the fuller Hindu pantheon. However, very little work as been done to apply attachment to God models outside of Christianity.

2. Attachment Styles Over Time
In my last post we noted that anxious attachments in the human sphere tend to manifest themselves in the God attachment as well. Are these people then condemned to be anxiously attached to God throughout the faith journey? Evidence from marriages suggest that those who began their marriages as anxiously attached gradually grow more securely attached as time goes on. And this makes sense. As years pass the person should be less fearful of both intimacy and abandonment. I think a similar thing should also happen in the God relationship. If the faith journey proceeds in a healthy church community people should grow more securely attached to God over time. We just need the research to support this contention.

3. Peer Attachment and God
In the first post in this series I noted that the two biggest love images of God in the bible are parental and romantic. But there is a third: Friendship. Work in psychology is just beginning to examine peer attachments and now, with instruments like the AGI, attachment to God research can move concurrently with those developments. My friend Angie McDonald is already doing some of this research.

4. Dismissive Attachments, Agnosticism, and Apostasy
Some attachment researchers have suggested that a Dismissive attachment to God is symptomatic of agnosticism. This seems confused to me and I've tried to clarify this in my publications. To have an attachment bond one must, of necessity, believe that the attachment figure exists. You can't have an attachment bond for a relationship that might or might not exit. This then raises the question as to the exact relationship between Dismissive attachments, agnosticism and apostasy. My hunch is that a Dismissive attachment is probably best seen as a precursor of agnosticism and eventual apostasy.

My Current Views on Attachment Theory
Although I have contributed to the attachment to God literature I have of late cooled on the approach. My reasons for this are twofold. First, I think the attachment to God model does an excellent job of describing healthy relations with God. That is, the attachment features of proximity maintenance, haven of safety, separation anxiety, and secure base of exploration all seem operative when the attachment bond to God is at its best. However, and this is my concern, I don't think that the attachment model is comprehensive enough to describe the complications that can arise in the God-relationship. And this relates to my second concern. When difficulties do arise in the God-relationship the labels "Fearful," "Preoccupied," or "Dismissive" signal pathology. As if difficulties with God are not "healthy." It is true that these labels will apply to some believers. Some believers will own these labels to both identify and describe how their relationship with God is somehow "sick" and in need of improvement. But I don't think these labels cover the entire domain of what needs to be explained. For some people, whose struggles with God are at a Book-of-Job-level intensity, to label their struggle with God as "Fearful," "Preoccupied," or "Dismissive" would be downright insulting to their experience.

In short, my optimism about attachment theory has waned in the last few years for these reasons: Attachment theory is not comprehensive enough and it tends to view struggles with God as "diseased." Thus, in the last year or two I've been working with a different model of the God-relationship that builds on top of attachment theories but addresses the problems I've just outlined.

A hint of this model was recently published in Beck, R. (2006). Communion and Complaint: Attachment, object-relations, and triangular love perspectives on relationship with God. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 34, 43-52. A fuller theoretical explication of this model is now under peer review with the Journal of Psychology and Christianity (keep your fingers crossed that it will get accepted).

In Beck (2006) I did a factor analysis of a variety of God-relationship measures. The Attachment to God Inventory was in this mix. What I discovered was a two dimensional structure that explained most of the variance between these measures. One dimension I labeled Communion. I called this dimension Communion because the subscales that loaded on this factor assessed the degree to which the believer experienced engagement with God, the feeling of having God as a regular feature in your life. For example, the AGI-Avoidance of Intimacy subscale correlated negatively with the Communion factor (i.e., if you were high on the Communion factor you did not avoid intimacy.)

The second dimension that emerged in Beck (2006) was orthogonal (i.e., perpendicular, at right angles, uncorrelated with) with the Communion factor. When I looked at the measures that loaded on this factor they all seemed to share a single feature: They all expressed some sort of "complaint" toward God. When I first saw this factor I didn't know how to label it. So I called my theology friend Dr. Mark Love and read off the items that loaded on this factor. After hearing them Mark said, "Those items sound like the Complaint Psalms." Bingo! The second factor appeared to capture the emotions of complaint and lament expressed in many of the psalms. The Cry of Job. Of Jeremiah. Of Jesus on the cross. So, I named the second dimension Complaint.

I hope you can see why I was so excited about hitting on this structure. Recall, the attachment model is not comprehensive. It seems to trivialize the deepest struggles with God. Can you imagine labeling Job "Preoccupied"? Second, the attachment model pathologizes complaint toward God. But in the Communion/Complaint structure both of these problems are overcome. First, the Communion/Complaint structure is comprehensive. It is possible to use the model to describe someone like Job. Job would be high on the Communion dimension because he is very engaged with God, obsessed with God in fact. But Job would also be high on the Complaint dimension: He has a lot of issues with God, big issues. But further, the Communion/Complaint model does not pathologize Complaint. That is, Complaint is not a diseased state nor is it incompatible with active engagement with God. It is true that complaint might be diseased or dysfunctional but that is best explained by the interplay of Communion and Complaint.* Job's Complaint is not dysfunctional because his Communion is so high. Job's Complaint is expressed to God, within the God relationship. However, Compliant expressed when Communion is low is more diseased. It's complaint expressed outside of the relationship. Like complaining about your wife to a coworker. This type of complaint is dysfunction and destructive to the relationship. In short, the disease in not Complaint per se. The disease is the interplay of Communion with Complaint. And this, to me, is a much richer model of the God experience.


*Footnote:
For a fuller phenomenological and theological description of the interplay between Communion and Complaint see my post on Winter Christianity from my online book Freud's Ghost.

Dear Reader,
One of the research areas I've been heavily involved in over the last few years has been the Attachment to God research. My biggest contribution to this literature has been the publication, along with my friend Angie McDonald, of the Attachment to God Inventory, a widely used measure in the field.

Attachment to God, pioneered by Lee Kirkpatrick, is a hot and growing area in the psychology of religion literature. Why? For a few reasons. Much of the psychology religion literature has been built around motivational or well-being measures and these assessment models have proven either problematic or limited.

From the motivational camp many researchers have attempted to identify the correlates of intrinsic versus extrinsic religious motives, the ones famously described by Gordon Allport. However, Allport's Religious Orientation Scale (ROS), intended to operationalize these motives, has been a disappointment. Specifically, it appears that the Intrinsic subscale of the ROS (the measure intended to capture mature religious strivings) simply captures a generalized interest in religion.

Other researchers have tended to focus on spiritual well-being. The Spiritual Well-being Scale (SWS) is a commonly used measure in this area. I myself use the SWS a lot. It's a great tool. The trouble is that the SWS is atheoretical. Thus, the God-relationship might be "hot" or "cold" as assessed by the SWS, but the SWS doesn't give you a model as to why the relationship feels as it does to the believer. It's like asking someone how their marriage is. The answer "It's okay" just doesn't give you a sense as to what is going on. Why is it just "okay"? The SWS is kind of like this. Good at description but poor at explanation.

So, much of the enthusiasm surrounding the application of attachment theory to religion is that it moves past mere interest in religion and gets more directly at the God-relationship (and thus improves upon the intrinsic/extrinsic models). Further, attachment models are theory-rich. The supporting framework of attachment theory is huge, both theoretically and empirically. Thus, attachment to God research swims in a deep ocean of ideas, insights, and results (an improvement of over the spiritual well-being approach).

So, welcome to Attachment to God research! This series is an informal and personal tour of the main ideas and developments in the literature. One researcher's take on the field. Hope you enjoy it.
Best,
Richard

The Attachment to God Series:
Part 1: God as Parent and Lover
Part 2: God and the Attachment Bond
Part 3: Attachment Styles and God
Part 4: The Attachment to God Inventory
Interlude: Denominational Personalities
Part 5: Correspondence or Compensation?
Part 6: Reappraisal and the Road Ahead

The biggest question in the attachment to God literature, again one first articulated by Lee Kirkpatrick, involves the Correspondence versus Compensation hypothesis. These are hypotheses aimed at predicting how attachment to God should interface with or relate to human attachments.

The Compensation hypothesis goes as far back as Freud. This hypothesis predicts that relationship with God compensates for deficient caregiving bonds. Specifically, as Freud posited, the idea is that if your home life was not filled with love, warmth, or responsiveness a relational ache and void would result in the child and, later, the grown adult. Later still, this person encounters God, a substitute attachment figure, who is experienced as the Perfect Parent who soothes the ache and fills the void. Here God compensates for something missing in world of human love.

The Correspondence hypothesis states that attachment styles will tend to remain stable across all attachment domains: Parental-Romanic-Peer-God. That is, if you are Securely attached in one domain this should predict Secure attachments across the other domains. Attachments styles correspond.

Empirically, what would be the "fingerprint" of either the Correspondence or Compensation dynamic at work? Well, in the literature there is some confusion on this. Attachments can manifest in both behaviors and internal working models (e.g., view of Self and view of Other) and these don't always line up in very clean ways. So researchers need to be careful in how they frame the problem. (I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Todd Hall, the editor of the Journal of Psychology and Theology were Beck & McDonald was published, for conversations that greatly clarified my thinking on this issue.)

In two studies I've been involved in (Beck & McDonald, 2004; McDonald, Beck, Allison, & Norsworthy, 2005) we have used the Attachment to God Inventory and compared it with both parental attachments and romantic attachments. Recently, Angie McDonald has also compared the AGI to peer attachment measures. The verdict from these studies? Support, albeit weak, for the Correspondence hypothesis. That is, for example, if someone has a Preoccupied attachment style in one domain they will tend to manifest this style in other domains as well.

This finding seems reasonable and the the "internal working model" framework helps explicate the dynamic. To just give one example, let's say a person has a "negative view of self." Generally, this view comes from early childhood, so it is no surprise to see this dynamic in the parental attachment. But, as the child grows, this view of self is also carried into the romantic sphere. Thus, anxieties about self-worth begin to manifest in this domain as well. And, even if God is seen as loving, we can see how, if the view of self is poor, spiritual anxieties can emerge as well. In short, we see the attachment dynamic creeping into every domain of relationship. Correspondence.

So the evidence seems to favor the Correspondence position. Or does it? Early work in this literature done by Lee Kirkpatrick and others has tended to favor the Compensation position. Kirkpatrick's research, however, was looking at a different variable: Conversion. Specifically, what Kirkpatrick found was evidence that Preoccupied or Fearful (often lumped together as the "Anxious" attachments) humans attachments tended to predict conversion to religion. This dynamic suggests a compensatory dynamic at work. The ache in the heart (those anxious attachments) is causing a person to fill the void by finding religion, a relationship with God.

But we found in our studies evidence that suggests that these relationships with God tend to look like the human attachments, a correspondence. So which is it? Correspondence or Compensation?

Well, here's my best take on the literature. The answer is that BOTH Compensation and Correspondence are at work. How might this be? This is what I think is going on:

The call of religion, with it's vision of a loving God, would have extraordinary appeal to someone who has never been loved before. Those early, warm rushes of emotional experience in worship or prayer would create a powerful pull. Thus, as Kirkpatrick's work suggests, these people may have higher conversion rates than others.

However, once the God-relationship is initiated the warm glow of early conversion begins to wear off. And as this happens the pre-existing internal working models may begin to manifest themselves. The new convert might start looking around and see Christians that seem "better" than they are. These Christians are more knowledgeable about the Bible, more giving, more kind, pray more powerful prayers, appear to be blessed more by God. All these observations start to activate those anxieties about abandonment, about being "good enough." And thus, over time, the compensatory dynamic that produced the conversion gives way to the correspondence of the attachment style. Compensation and correspondence are both at work.

This post is an interlude in the Attachment to God series. It will be of particular interest to people who know a little about the Churches of Christ, the Christian tradition I am associated with. I you don't know much about the Churches of Christ you can read more about us here. Regardless, I think this post will be of interest to anyone interested in "denominational personalities."

In the paper which published the Attachment to God Inventory (AGI; Beck & McDonald, 2004) we wanted to validate the AGI across some different Christian denominations. So, we, along with Joe Toren who used some of this data for his Masters Thesis, administered the AGI to three different denominations in the Abilene community. The first group was Church of Christ. The second group was Catholic. And the final group was a non-denominational Charismatic church. So, three pretty different churches were compared.

Recall that the AGI gives two scores: Anxiety about Abandonment and Avoidance of Intimacy. Also recall that High vs. Low scores on these two dimensions creates one of the four attachment styles: Secure vs. Preoccupied vs. Dismissive vs. Fearful.

We ran an analysis comparing the AGI scores across these three churches. We found (and this is reported in Beck & McDonald) that the Catholic and Charismatic church were comparable on the AGI scores. Interestingly, however, the Church of Christ group differed from BOTH of these churches on BOTH measures. Specifically, the Church of Christ was higher on both Anxiety about Abandonment AND Avoidance of Intimacy. Referring to our attachment styles:

We see that this means that the Church of Christ displayed the Fearful attachment style relative to the other churches.

That is, the Church of Christ group reported two basic things (relative to the other groups):

1. They did not experience or appear to need emotional "closeness" with God.
2. Yet, they appeared fearful that God would "abandon" them or that God didn’t “love” them.

(For a more detailed insight into the dynamics of Anxiety about Abandonment and Avoidance of Intimacy see my last post for content from the AGI on each of these two dimensions.)

Okay, so here's your homework assignment: If you know the Churches of Christ, why does this group appear so Fearful relative to other groups? I'll leave this question up for a day or so to see if anyone would like to post some speculations.* Feel free to send this to other CofC friends to get their speculations as well. To non-CofC people, feel free to join in this psychoanalysis. Let’s put this denomination on the couch to see what’s going on.

*Footnote:
When we first submitted the Beck & McDonald article I had given my own theological/ecclesial hypotheses as to the root causes of this CofC difference, but the editors made me cut it as they thought it too speculative. After a day or so I'll post my speculations that never made it into print.

Update:
Here is the deleted passage from Beck & McDonald speculating on why the Church of Christ participants were Fearful relative to their Catholic or Charismatic counterparts:

"Since the two primary authors are familiar with Church of Christ practice and theology, and many readers may not be, we can offer some tentative explanations for these trends. Specifically, the Church of Christ is both conservative and fundamentalist in theology and has traditionally de-emphasized experiential and mystical interactions with God. (By contrast, these experiences are common in both Roman Catholic tradition and Christian charismatic worship services.) Thus, due to a general suspicion about emotional or experiential interactions with God, Church of Christ members might appear more avoidant of intimacy with God when compared to other Christian groups. In addition, the Church of Christ has, historically, had a salvation theology deeply rooted in the Protestant work ethic. Consequently, Church of Christ members may express greater anxiety over abandonment and lovability in that their perceived affection from God is linked to ethical performance, leaving the believer vulnerable to thoughts of 'not being good enough'."

This analysis is basically the one posted by Steve and Jason. So, prizes for all! Do we know this tradition or what?

When I started reading the attachment to God literature there wasn't yet a measurement instrument that assessed attachment to God. For better or worse, as measurement goes so goes experimental psychology. But it is difficult to measure psychological constructs. Often we are reliant on self-report. That's a weakness in psychological research, but you work with the tools you have on hand. It is for this reason--measurement issues-- that my discipline is considered to be a "soft" science.

Generally in psychology advances in an area cannot be made until a decent measurement instrument is developed. And when I entered the attachment to God literature no good instruments were on hand. So my colleague Angie McDonald (who is now at Palm Beach Atlantic) and I set about to develop and validate the Attachment to God Inventory (AGI). As we were set to go to press with the AGI a few other attachment to God measures also appeared in the literature. Researchers now have some choices if they want to measure attachment to God, but our AGI appears to be a popular choice. In fact, I just found out that some researchers in Canada are planning to translate the AGI into French. The AGI can be found by either e-mailing me or here: Beck, R. & McDonald, A. (2004). Attachment to God: The Attachment to God Inventory, tests of working model correspondence, and an exploration of faith group differences. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 32, 92-103.

We patterned the AGI off of a very popular adulthood attachment measure The Experiences in Close Relationships Scale (ECR) developed by Brennan, Clark, and Shaver. The ECR gives two scores on the attachment dimensions of Anxiety about Abandonment and Avoidance of Intimacy. We patterned the AGI off of this instrument, reworking questions as best we could to mirror the ECR.

More specifically, we tried to pick items that captured the various sub-themes of Anxiety about Abandonment and Avoidance of Intimacy. I think these sub-themes may be of interest to readers of this blog.

In my last post, I discussed Anxiety about Abandonment in a superficial way, suggesting that it mainly dealt with fears about being "left" by the attachment figure. This is true. But that fear tends to manifest itself in all kinds of dysfunctional ways. Here are some of the Anxiety about Abandonment themes captured by both the AGI and ECR scales:

Angry protest: Getting angry if the attachment figure is not as responsive as we wish they would be.
Example ECR item: "I get frustrated if romantic partners are not available when I need them."
Example AGI item: “I often feel angry with God for not responding to me when I want.”

Preoccupation with relationship: Worry, rumination, or obsession with the status of the relationship.
Example ECR item: "I worry a lot about my relationships."
Example AGI item: “I worry a lot about my relationship with God.”

Fear of abandonment: Fear that the attachment figure will leave or reject you.
Example ECR item: "I worry a fair amount about losing my partner."
Example AGI item: “I fear God does not accept me when I do wrong.”

Anxiety over lovability:Concerns that you are either not loved or are unlovable.
Example ECR item: "I need a lot of reassurance that I am loved by my partner."
Example AGI item: “I crave reassurance from God that God loves me.”

Jealousy: Concerns that the attachment figure prefers others over you.
Example ECR item: "I resent it when my partner spends time away from me."
Example AGI item: “I am jealous at how God seems to care more for others than for me.”

Turning to the second attachment dimension of Avoidance of Intimacy, the AGI and ECR assess sub-themes here as well:

Difficulty with dependency: Anxiety about depending, relying, or counting on the attachment figure.
Example ECR item: "I find it difficult to allow myself to depend on romantic partners."
Example AGI item: "I prefer not to depend too much on God.”

Difficulty with emotional intimacy: Trouble with expressing affection or communicating intimately with the attachment figure.
Example ECR item: "I prefer not to show a partner how I feel deep down."
Example AGI item: “I am uncomfortable being emotional in my communication with God.”

Self-reliance: Need for autonomy, independence, and self-reliance within the relationship.
Example ECR item: "I try to avoid getting too close to my partner."
Example AGI item: "I just don’t feel a deep need to be close to God."

A couple of things amazed me when Angie and I constructed the AGI. First, I was amazed at how close the AGI could mirror the ECR, a romantic attachment measure. It truly impressed upon me how much people do experience their relationship with God as a human love relationship. The parallels between the experiences are remarkable. Now, I, personally, don't relate to much of the AGI content (more on this later in the series), but clearly many, if not most, Christians find the content of the AGI extraordinarily descriptive of their experience with God.

And this brings me to my second point. I never had thought much about things like jealousy in the God relationship. But in study after study in which I use the AGI people report being jealous. For example, these believers feel envious of how close other people are to God relative to themselves. They get upset if God seems to answer someone else's prayers and not their own. They, in short, feel jealous. Like a frustrated or paranoid lover. I've found this phenomena fascinating.

I have not yet got around to more closely studying spiritual jealousy, but it seems like a real and complex phenomena. Maybe you can take up this research. But at the very least constructing the AGI impressed upon me that there is so much about the God-relationship that is left to be discovered. To date, the attachment to God research has only scratched the surface.

From our last post it appears that relationship with God may be fruitfully explored using attachment theory. However, to do so, we need to explore the literature on what are known as attachment styles.

The attachment bond does not simply vary in intensity, going from a strong attachment to a weak attachment. Rather, one of the discoveries of attachment theory is that attachment is a multidimensional construct, a mix of features which combine to create a unique attachment experience, the attachment style.

Attachment styles were initially investigated in the laboratory of Mary Ainsworth. By observing children in the Strange Situation (a laboratory protocol that scripted separation and reunion events between a child and caregiver mixed in with the presence of a stranger) Ainsworth was able to observe the intensity of the two attachment anxieties, stranger anxiety and separation anxiety. What Ainsworth noted was that children displayed different levels of attachment anxiety. Some children showed excessive anxiety (both stranger and separation) and were labeled Anxiously attached. Some children showed almost a complete absence of anxiety (and this is not a good thing, a child who doesn't care if they are separated from parents or who doesn't display some wariness with strangers is worrisome) were labeled Avoidantly attached. Finally, children who showed appropriate but not excessive levels of anxiety were labeled Securely attached. Later on, a fourth style was added, Disorganized attachment, for children who displayed inconsistent manifestations of anxiety making them difficult to classify. What we take away from all this is that although we have our attachments--parents, lovers, friends, God--we don't experience these attachments in the same way. Some of us are needy, dependent, jealous, fearful, and anxious. Others of us are dismissive of relationships, self-reliant, disinterested in intimacy, and hesitant to make commitments.

Is there any way to make these sense of these differences? Early on in the attachment literature an attempt was made to appeal to "internal working models" to explain the different attachment styles.
These models were cognitive and emotional representations of Self and Other. First, you could have either a Positive or Negative view of your Self. Second, you could have a Positive or Negative view of your Attachment Figure. The mix of these models was believed to create the four attachment styles observed both in childhood and adulthood. This can be seen in the figure here. (Note that there is some terminology change from Ainsworth's early terms. The Key is: Anxious = Preoccupied, Avoidant = Dismissive, Secure remains Secure, Disorganized = Fearful. The former terms tend to be used by childhood researchers and the latter terms by adulthood researchers. I know, it's confusing. I even had to clarify this for a reviewer of a recent article of mine. Ph.D.s even have trouble keeping the labels straight.)

If you think through the attachment styles and their associated working models the mapping makes good sense:

You're Securely attached if you have a healthy view of both yourself and your attachment figure.

You're Preoccupied in your attachment if you think you are a piece of trash while your attachment figure is wonderful and amazing (e.g., "I don't deserve her. She's too good for me.").

You're Dismissive in your attachment if you think you are wonderful and amazing while your attachment figure is a piece of trash (e.g., "I can do better than this. She's not good enough for me.")

You're Fearful in your attachment if you think everyone is trashy. You are unworthy of love and people are untrustworthy. Thus, all relationships are filled with anxiety and negativity.

Later on in the attachment literature the "internal working model" scheme gradually gave way to a model that focused more upon the emotional experience of the attachment than upon the cognitive representations of Self or Other.


What are the main emotional experiences involved in attachment styles? Two dimensions appear to capture these experiences. The first dimension is Anxiety about Abandonment: The anxiety that you will be abandoned, left, or discarded by the Attachment Figure. The other dimension is Avoidance of Intimacy: The need to avoid relational commitment, dependency, or intimacy. People can be either High or Low on these two dimensions creating the familiar four-fold attachment typology. The figure here shows this new scheme.

What does any of this have to do with God?

Well, if relationship with God can be understood as an attachment bond then attachment styles should tend to manifest themselves in the God-relationship. That is, people should manifest an attachment style with God. What would these look like? Well, following the schemes above, the expectation would be that people would tend to have one of four main experiences of God:

The Secure Attachments:
These believers would have a healthy view of themselves. They would also have a healthy view of God. That is, they would have little fear or concern that God would abandon them. God is experienced as trustworthy and dependable. A keeper of His promises. Thus, intimacy with God is sought and longed for.

The Preoccupied Attachments:
These believers have a positive view of God but a negative view of Self. Thus, they feel "not good enough." That is, they will feel guilty, shamed, and "bad." This "badness" leads to worries that God will reject or abandon them due to their sinfulness. They crave intimacy with God but this intimacy is tinged with a need to "perform" for God to secure His favor and continued presence.

The Dismissive Attachments:
These believers have a positive view of themselves and a negative view of God. Thus, these believers will be more self-reliant and less willing to rely or depend upon God as God is deemed to be "unpredictable," "unreliable," or "untrustworthy."

The Fearful Attachments:
These believers have a negative view of themselves and God. That is, they are chronically caught in an approach-avoidance conflict with God. They fear abandonment by God but reject intimacy with God at the same time. Either way--pulling away or drawing close--they are afraid.

Clearly, attachment theory cannot explain ALL of the God experience. But look at the list above. Have you seen these types in your church? Is not this theory capturing a part of the God-experience? If so, might not pastors, ministers, and church leaders need to be aware of the relational dynamics at play in their churches?

This is what I think attachment theory is teaching us: Loving God is complicated. In ways we might might not have fully realized. And I think church leaders need to be aware of these complications. There is no "generic" relationship with God. And, thus, no one way to get people to be "closer" to God. In my view this has been a chronic mistake in our churches, the assumption that people simply vary in on how "close" they are to God. That is, some are "close" to God while others are "far" from God. That is too simplistic. Some people have issues with God that affect how closely they will approach Him. Others have issues with their own intrinsic lovability. Despite assurances to the contrary, these believer suspect that God doesn't love them. Still others are simply confused by the whole God-relationship. Some are worried. Some are apathetic.

In short, it's complicated. Like love, God is a roller-coaster ride.

Which means you need to know where people are coming from before you try to help them.

Attachment theory is, currently, the best psychological tool we have for investigating love. Can this theory be applied to the God-relationship?

To answer this question we need to look more closely at the attachment bond itself. Mary Ainsworth, a pioneer in the study of childhood attachments, delineated four features of any bond we wish to call an "attachment." These criteria are:

1. Proximity Maintenance: We wish to be near or close to our attachment figures.

2. Separation Anxiety: When separated from an attachment figure we experience distress.

3. Secure Base of Exploration: The attachment figure functions as "home," our emotional "base camp."

4. Haven of Safety: When hurt or fearful or distressed we go to the attachment figure for protection, healing, and/or comfort.

To help build up our intuitions, let's reflect on how these criteria play out in childhood and adulthood.

Proximity Maintenance:
Children desire, from birth, to be near their parents. And this feature continues into adulthood. We desire to be near attachment figures (parents, lovers, friends). I ask my students this quetion: If you were free, right now, to go to anyone in the world where would you go? The answer is to either their parents, a boyfriend/girlfriend, or a cherished friend. Ask a solider deployed in Iraq this question. The answer tends to tell us, pretty clearly, who we love.

Separation Anxiety:
Children show distress when separated from parents. They can begin to panic if they make the attribution that they are "lost." Adults show less separation anxiety, but distress is manifested. I'm uneasy when I say good-bye to my wife on a trip. I don't feel comfortable when I'm away from my children. I still miss my childhood home where my parents live. Watch lovers do their leave-taking and you get the point.

Secure Base of Exploration:
Watch a child explore a new playground. Imagine there was wet paint on her feet the entire time. Let's examine the geometry of those footprints when the child has left. What will we see? We'll notice a kind of "exploratory center of gravity." A place where the child returns to time after time or the subtle "center" of the exploratory donut. That is where the parent has been sitting. In adulthood, our "exploration" is less physical and more emotional. We feel it as "confidence" which translates into expansion into the adulthood world of challenges and opportunities.

Haven of Safety:
When hurt, anxious, or distressed children turn to their parents. As adults, we also turn to attachment figures, those we love, when in need of care or emotional support. These are the ones we seek out for "help."

Okay, we have a sense now of what an attachment bond looks like. The question is, does relationship with God look anything like this? Can attachment theory be applied to the God-relationship?

Well, first we have to note that God would need to be experienced by the believer as a "Person." If God is experienced or known as impersonal then attachment theory would fail to describe the believer's experience. Consequently, for religions without a notion of a personal God (e.g., Buddhism) or for those holding to more abstract notions of God (e.g., Spinoza, Einstein), attachment theory will be of limited value in describing their experience.

However, in both the bible and the general Chrisitan experience, God is experienced in personal terms. We speak of being "in relationship" with God. For these believers, attachment theory may indeed be an effective tool to map the terrian of the God-experience. The first researcher and theorist to deeply apply Ainsworth’s attachment criteria to the God relationship was Lee Kirkpatrick. Let’s informally walk through Kirkpatrick’s analysis:

Proximity Maintenance:
Although God in not located in time or space, believers do express their relationship with God in spacial language. We can be "close" to God. Or feel "distant" from God. And, given this language, believers express the desire to be "close," "near," or "intimate" with God. Images of this intimacy often are understood as being "held" or "embraced" or "touched" by God. In short, the first attachment criterion seems to apply to relationship with God.

Separation Anxiety:
Jesus cries out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And this sentiment tends to capture the distress experienced by the believer when she feels "separated" from God. Generally, this distress is expressed in the language of lament, which captures the emotional devastation associated with being "abandoned" or "orphaned" by God. So, our second criteria also applies.

Secure Base of Exploration:
Again, our criteria seems to apply here as well. God is often experienced as "home," our True Home. Further, God is experienced as a source of strength and confidence which energizes the believer. "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."

Haven of Safety:
Our final criterion also applies. When in distress or in need of comfort believers "turn to God" and seek out God's presence. And this presence, when experienced, is generally found to be healing and a source of peace and security. "Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."

In summation, Kirkpatrick's work strongly suggests that relationship with God is experienced as an attachment bond. In fact, the convergence is remarkable. The criteria are a great fit. But this is perhaps not overly surprising given that "love" and the "attachment" bond is the only way we humans understand love. Attachment is the language of love and it is the only language we speak.

What this implies, as God is experienced as an attachment figure, is that all that we have learned about attachments, theory and data from over 50 years of research, can be fruitfully applied to understand our experience and relationship with God. Over the last 10 years, attachment to God researchers have taken up this work. I've been a part of this work. What have we learned? Well, more to come.

Here’s an idea for an Advent bible study or discussion group.

If you are a regular reader you know I’ve written a lot about body ambivalence. See my chapter on Body from Freud’s Ghost as well as my post on Feeling Queasy about the Incarnation.

Well, last Sunday night, the first day of Advent, I was in charge of leading the discussion/study for my small church group. Having been reflecting too much, in my own estimation, about body ambivalence, I figured Advent would be a good time to reflect on a positive view of the body and what it means to be human. The Incarnation is God’s profound and mysterious embrace of the body. And I wanted to reflect on that embrace.

So, here’s what I did. I intermingled some theology, some bible, and some poetry.

For theology a pulled from the fantastic list done by Kim Fabricius from the blog Faith and Theology. Kim’s list on 10 Propositions of Being Human is a great mediation on what it means to be human.

For bible, I printed out the Advent passages from Luke, Matthew, and John.

For a poem on the body I used Walt Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric.

Okay, I then cut up the theology propositions, the bible passages, and parts of the poem (each slip was self-contained and coherent). I then went around the group and asked each person to pull, as from a deck of cards for a magic trick, one of the theological reflections, a part of the bible reading, and a part of the poem.

After selection we when around the room, following the order of Kim’s list (the person who pulled proposition #1 went first and so on). You were to read the theological reflection first, then the poem, and then the bible passage.

My interest in this randomizing of theology, poetry, and text was to see if interesting juxtapositions would emerge as we reflected on Advent, the Incarnation, our bodies, and what it means to be human. After each reading—theology, poem, text—we paused for comments.

Well, it was an amazing time. You should really try this sometime with either these materials or materials of your own devising.

Here were two of my favorite juxtapositions:

First Favorite Juxtaposition:
Theology:
To be human is to be relational. Again, of course: this is because God, as Trinity, is relational. The perichoretic God makes perichoretic people. God’s being-as-communion overflows in humans’ being-in-community. Jesus was the “man for others” (Bonhoeffer); humans have no being apart from others. Humanity is co-humanity: our very identities are “exocentric” (Pannenberg). Margaret Thatcher notoriously said that there is no such thing as society; on the contrary, there is no such thing as autonomy. Here lies the bankruptcy of all social contract theory. Further, as relational, social beings, we are linguistic beings, modelled on the Deus loquens. Here lies the theological import of Wittgenstein’s observation that there is no such thing as a private language.

Poem:
I have perceiv'd that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly
round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking
on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

Text:
At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!"

Second Favorite Juxtaposition:
Theology:
To be human is to be spiritual. But not, needless to say, spiritual as against physical. Unlike Greek anthropology, Christian anthropology is not dualist, it understands human beings as ensouled bodies and embodied souls. Faith itself, Luther said, “is under the left nipple.” Hence the crypto-gnosticism of any soma sema “withdrawal” spirituality. We may speak of the “inner life”, of “interiority”, but it “is neither a flight from relation, nor the quest for an impossible transparency or immediacy in relation, but that which equips us for knowing and being known humanly, taking time with the human world” (Rowan Williams). The self is not secret, it is social.

Poem:
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping,
love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked
meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward
toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the
marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

Text:
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

What does it feel like to love God?

Over the last few years, much of my scholarly research has been involved in the attachment to God literature. This series is intended to introduce you to that literature and popularize that research.

An attachment is generally defined as a close affectional bond. In many ways, "attachment" is a kind of shorthand for "love." That is, we are both attached to and love our parents, spouses, children and friends.

The formal study of what is known as attachment theory began with the work of John Bowlby. In the early 50s, Bowlby, a British researcher, noted that juvenile delinquency seemed to be associated with early maternal separations. This data point led Bowlby to investigate the power of the attachment bond upon childhood development. Concurrent work done by Harry Harlow supported Bowlby's notion that we have an innate need for love and attachment. (An excellent book, which a class of mine is now reading, on the early history of Harlow's work and attachment theory is Deborah Blum's Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection). Attachment theory received an enormous boost in the 1960s with the work of Mary Ainsworth and her use of the Strange Situation to assess childhood attachment styles. We'll look more closely at Ainsworth's work next post.

For about 25 years attachment theory largely focused on childhood attachments, the relationship between parent and child. However, in the late 80s researchers began to apply attachment theory to adulthood love relationships. The reasoning went like this. As children we develop "internal working models" of ourselves and our relational Other (i.e., parents). That is, during childhood we internalize notions regarding both our intrinsic lovability and the trustworthiness of our caregivers. Some of us have internalized positive notions of Self (e.g., I'm a good boy), while others have internalized negative views of Self (e.g., I'm a bad girl). In addition, we also internalize notions of our Loved One (for most, our parents). We learn how likely we are to be cared for and how likely promises will be kept. In the language of Erik Erikson, we learn to Trust or Not Trust the people around us.

The adulthood attachment researchers observed that if these internal working models get set in early childhood they should linger and then manifest themselves in our adulthood attachments, mainly in our romantic relationships. This observation has lead to over 20 years of fascinating research regarding how attachment dynamics play out in intimate and romantic adulthood relationships.

In coming posts I'll talk more about the childhood and adulthood attachment literatures. For now I simply want to reflect on this question: What does it feel like to love God?

As humans, our language regarding God will be in terms we can understand. And when we look at the bible, the description of the love relationship with God has generally clustered around two human love relationships: Parental and romantic.

For example, loving God is often expressed in the bible as a child/parent relationship (the brackets give the context):

[God speaking to his people:] “As a mother comforts her child so I will comfort you.” (Isaiah 66:13)

[God’s people speaking to God:] “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father.” (Isaiah 64:8)

[Jesus teaching his followers how to address God in prayer:] “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” (Matthew 6:9)

[God comparing his love for his people with a mother’s love for her child:] “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has born?” (Isaiah 49:15)

[Jesus comparing his love for the people of Jerusalem to the protective behavior of a mother hen:] “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem…how I have often longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings…” (Luke 13:34)

[God comparing his love for his people to a parent teaching her child to walk:] “When Israel was a child, I loved him…it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them in my arms.” (Hosea 11:1,3)

[God comparing his love for his people to a parent raising a rebellious child:] “For the Lord has spoken: I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.” (Isaiah 1:2)

In addition to characterizing relationship with God as a parent/child bond, the Judeo-Christian tradition also conceptualizes relationship with God or Jesus as an adulthood love relationship. A few more examples from the Old and New Testaments:

[A description of God’s love for his people:] “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.” (Isaiah 62:5)

[A description of God’s relationship with his people:] “For your Maker is your husband—the Lord Almighty is his name.” (Isaiah 54:5)

[An image of Jesus, the Lamb, marrying his people, the Church:] “ ‘For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.’ Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.” (Revelation 19:7-8)

[A continuation of the above image from the book of Revelation, where the people of God are compared to the new Jerusalem:] “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” (Revelation 21:2)

[The New Testament author, Paul, comparing marital love with Christ’s love for his church:] “Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” (Ephesians 5:25)

In sum, when we speak of relationship with God we tend to express our love as either child or spouse. Loving God is experienced in either familial or romantic terms. God as Father. God as Lover.

But we also know that familial and romantic love can be complicated and conflicted. Love can also be peaceful and reassuring. Why these differences? If we look at the bible, and around our churches, it also seems that the love relationship with God has its ups and downs. Further, no two people seem to experience loving God in the same way. Again, how to understand these differences?

Interestingly, the very best theory psychologists have to study parental or romantic love is attachment theory. More specifically, attachment theory has had its greatest successes in studying parental and romantic attachments, the very same two love relationships that dominant the biblical witness concerning loving God. That's a neat convergence. The model best suited to the study of love--attachment theory--is ideally situated to tackle the data--the religious experience of God.

And this convergence made some psychologists wonder if attachment theory might be effective in exploring what it feels like to love God and be loved by God.