Purity and Defilement: Part 1, Mercy and Sacrifice

This spring I'm giving the opening Plenary Address at the Christian Association for Psychological Studies conference.  The title of the talk is Unclean: The Psychology of Purity and Love.  To prepare for that talk in the coming posts I want to work back through and elaborate upon some of the material related to my "Spiritual Pollution" research.

The best place to start discussing the tensions between purity and love in Christianity is in the gospels.  For example:

Matthew 9. 9-13
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. "Follow me," he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.

While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and "sinners" came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"

On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

The tensions in this story are complex.  On the one hand we have the impulse Jesus calls "sacrifice."  This it the purity impulse and it is the impulse that is driving the concerns of the Pharisees.  Jesus has come into contact with something that is "unclean."  Worse, Jesus has welcomed this pollutant into a sacred and intimate space:  Table fellowship.  Something has been mixed.  Ontological categories that should be separated have come into contact.  In the language of Mary Douglas's work Purity and Danger this ontological mixing creates the phenomenon known as dirt.  Hence the label "unclean."  

Against the purity impulse Jesus speaks of mercy.  Mercy is the impulse of hospitality.  Of welcoming the "unclean" and the "sinners" into a circle of sustaining and affirming relationality.  

In short, deep in the fabric of the Christian religion is a tension between mercy and sacrifice.  Between welcome and purity.  Between hospitality and contamination.  Between love and holiness.  It is the tension between the Greatest Commandment and the command "like unto the first": Loving God versus loving your neighbor.  

In the end, urgent Christian conversations tend to boil down to this fundamental tension:  Mercy or sacrifice?  If we tilt too far toward mercy, if we collapse the transcendent into the imminent, Christianity reduces to a benevolent humanism.  Christianity flattens into a moral code, stripped of the sacred and the holy.  It is the situation called the "immanent frame" by Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age.  

By contrast, if we tilt too far toward the pursuit of God and holiness we begin to trample people underfoot.  Pursuing God and becoming an "obedient one" before God leads to holy wars, Inquisitions, hate crimes and 9/11.  

To once again illustrate this tension consider the famous definition of true religion in James 1. 27:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

What possibly could this passage mean?  The mercy impulse favors the first half ("look after orphans and widows") while the holiness impulse favors the last half ("keep oneself from being polluted by the world").  Read superficially, there is no tension.  Widows are cared for and one keeps away from spiritual contaminants in the world.  But a moment's reflection quickly brings James 1 .27 into conversation with Matthew 9.  There are times when mercy (the impulse of caring for the broken and helpless, the "widows and orphans" amongst us) conflicts with sacrifice (the impulse to "keep onself from being polluted").  That is what is happening in Matthew 9.  Jesus and the Pharisees are having a disagreement about what it means to "keep oneself from being polluted by the world."  Both Jesus and the Pharisees, we can surmise, would feel justified by James 1. 27.  How then are we to define "mercy" and "pollution"?  When does the embrace of the sinner become an embrace of the sin?    How does holiness relate to love?

These are the questions that will occupy us in the coming posts.  The tension between mercy and sacrifice will be our grand subject.  But the novelty of our method will be to approach mercy and sacrifice from the vantage of psychological research.  The value of this approach is that I hope to show that the tension between mercy and sacrifice might be less theological than psychological.  That is, I will argue that there are psychological dynamics in play that make reasoning about mercy and sacrifice extraordinarily difficult and unstable.  I'll argue that the reason a "balance" between mercy and sacrifice is so hard to achieve is due to the fact that such a balance is psychologically untenable.  We tilt one way or the other.  The mind, for reasons I'll make clear, will break toward mercy or toward sacrifice.   And if this analysis is correct it might explain why the the seemingly simple solution of Matthew 9--"I desire mercy, not sacrifice."--remains so elusive, controversial and difficult.