Lot's of discussion out there about Time magazine's cover this issue. As I look at it my heart just breaks and I struggle all over again with how to stand with the woman in the picture, the victim of Taliban violence.

I go back and forth with my inner Niebuhr and Yoder on this. Should I be "realistic" and understand that the only way to protect this women is to keep the US military involved in the war in Afghanistan? Or do I "go with the grain of the universe" and stand with the pacifists?

I find the responsibility of being a Christian in the world to be confusing, frustrating, and heart-breaking.

We continue to work through, psychologically and theologically, the Christological sections of the Apostles' Creed. We've considered two of the four doctrines I set out to review: The Imitation of Christ (Jesus as "Lord" and "Judge") and the Incarnation ("born of the Virgin Mary"). In this post we take up the doctrine of the atonement: "Was crucified."

There is little doubt that the early Christians viewed the death of Jesus in sacrificial terms, mainly through the Hebrew Day of Atonement. According to Leviticus 16 the High Priest would slaughter a goat as a "sin offering" and then sprinkle the blood on the Mercy Seat, the cover of the Ark of the Covenant. The word for "Mercy Seat" comes from the Hebrew kapporeth which means "cover." The notion of "cover" is twofold, being both a literal cover and also the place where the sins of Israel were "covered" over.

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I've been thinking since my last post about the virtue contrasts between the early Christians and the Greeks, the Stoics in particular. I'd mentioned that the Greeks privileged self-control while the Christians gave love pride of place.

I'm not sure where I read this, but that discussion reminded me of the contrast some have made between the deaths of Socrates and Jesus. Socrates died the ideal Greek death. Self-composed, stoical, and philosophical. While his students grieved and wept, Socrates calmly drank the hemlock that would kill him.

Jesus, by contrast, sweats blood in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus resists death and is in agony as he faces it. A far cry from Socrates.

In short, the Christian ideal isn't to be stoical. The goal isn't emotional resignation, apathy, or detachment. The Christian ideal is to weep. We see this not only in the garden of Gethsemane, but also in the gospel of John when Jesus confronted the death of his friend. There it says succinctly, "Jesus wept." And, following the Man of Sorrows, Christians are commanded to "weep with those who weep."

To be a Christian is to weep. A lot.

Why?

Because, it seems to me, weeping is the only way to see the suffering and pain in the world as objectively bad. The goal isn't to stoically accept the pain, suffering, and death. We aren't supposed to be reconciled to the suffering. We are supposed to emotionally resist. We are supposed to weep. To lament. To cry out. Life isn't okay and I'm not supposed to act like it is. To weep is to object, to protest.

And to be clear, I admire the Stoics. Socrates remains a hero of mine. But in the end, my sensibilities are Christian. I weep.

Like my Lord, I weep.

One of the implications of Jesus being confessed as "Lord" in the Apostles' Creed is the Imitatio Christi, the "Imitation of Christ." That is, Christians seek to model, follow and "imitate" the life of Jesus.

But what does this look like? To answer this question many of the New Testament writers deployed virtue lists to articulate the essence of a "Christ follower." The two most influential lists are the theological virtues of faith, hope and love and the "fruits of the spirit": love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Virtue lists such as these were common among the ancients. The Greeks, following Aristotle's seminal treatment, focused heavily on virtue. For the Greeks, virtue was pursued to create or maximize eudaimonia. Coming from the two roots eu for "good" or "well-being" and daimōn for "spirit," eudaimonia is often translated "happiness, "joy," or "flourishing" (eu-daimonia = a "happy spirit").

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During our visits to Pennsylvania one of the joys I have is being asked to guest preach at the church I was raised in.

This last Sunday I was preaching out of Acts 2. I was reading this text from Peter's Pentecost sermon. Note the transitional "but"...

Acts 2.22-24
"Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him."

Reading this passage I wanted to emphasize the apocalyptic interruption of the resurrection:

"You put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

But!"

So, to do this, after I read the line "You put him to death by nailing him to the cross" I read the word "But..." and look up and say, with the greatest seriousness:

"This is the biggest but in world history."

Only later, on the drive home, does my wife explain why she started laughing in the middle of my sermon...

It is notoriously difficult to define religion. Most definitions suggest that religion is, at root, an experience or encounter with a sacred and spiritual dimension. In this, few definitions of religion have improved upon the simplicity of William James’ definition in The Varieties of Religious Experience: religion encompasses “the feelings, acts, and experiences” of persons as they “apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” The religious life, then, “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” Broadly speaking, James’ definition fits the Christian religion: Christians believe in an “unseen order,” a spiritual realm they consider to be “divine.” Further, Christians strive to “adjust” themselves to live “harmoniously” with their notions of the divine.

A distinctive aspect of the Christian encounter with the divine is that it is an inherently moral experience. As noted in the Apostles’ Creed, Jesus is “Lord” and will “judge the living and the dead.” Thus, within the Christian experience James’ “adjustment to the divine” has a ethical and moral flavor. The encounter with the sacred has normative implications, it is an experience charged with notions of good and evil, sin and salvation, commandments and imperatives. Christians attempt to live on “earth” in a way that “aligns” with God’s “kingdom of heaven.” As it says in the Lord’s Prayer: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

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When I searched the empirical literature for research concerning the Incarnation I found only a single study investigating how Christians experience the defining doctrine of their faith.

(This, if you’ve been following along, is a recurring theme. My survey of the psychological literature revealed huge and theologically significant gaps. What’s going on? More on this in a post to come.)

This lack of empirical attention regarding the Incarnation is odd as Christians display a great deal of diversity in how they reconcile, psychologically, the cognitive dissonance created by the confession that Jesus was both fully God and fully human. For example, theologians talk of a “high Christology” which leans toward the divine and a “low Christology” which leans toward the human. We also see what I’ve called “Incarnational ambivalence” in Christian anxieties when the humanity of Jesus is robustly portrayed in art, literature, theatre or film. Many Christians, it seems, struggle with the notion that Jesus fully participated in the human condition, particularly when the issues are metabolic (i.e., eating and excreting) or sexual.

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Just to recap, this series (which will be very long) is roughly following the content of a chapter I just submitted for a upcoming APA handbook on psychology and spirituality. My task was to overview the Christian faith noting its theological distinctives while reviewing the empirical psychological literature associated with these particular beliefs. As noted in Part 1 I selected the Apostles' Creed to be the theological "outline" of the chapter. In Parts 2-5 I shared some of my psychologically-oriented reflections on the first part of the Creed dealing with God the Father. In these next few posts we move into the Christological sections of the Creed.

The second part of the Apostles' Creed deals with Jesus Christ:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

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We're in the middle of some family vacationing and today my son Aidan (aged 9) bought a necklace with a turtle on it at a gift shop (Aidan loves reptiles). All afternoon Aidan kept insisting that his turtle was "good luck." And, wouldn't you know it, after Aidan bought his necklace good things started happening. We caught buses when we needed them. Waiting lines were shorter. And, at the end of the day, we saw the prettiest rainbow we've ever seen.

So walking back to the hotel Aidan and I have this conversation:

Aidan: "My turtle necklace worked, didn't it? It brought us good luck, right?"
Me: "Well, metaphysically no. But psychologically, yes."
Aidan: "What does that mean?"
Me: "It means it worked."

The final words in the first part of the Apostles' Creed are these:

...the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

In the last two posts we've been discussing the psychological literature regarding the notion that God is "Father." In this post (and all these posts are following the sections of a recent book chapter I wrote) we take up the notion that God is "almighty" and the "creator of heaven and earth."

There is a experiential tension created when we confess that God is omnipotent and the creator of heaven and earth. Specifically, the Creed prompts us to make God responsible for the world, at least for its origins. This is troublesome given the chaos, disorder and suffering we experience in the world. However, even if God isn't the proximate cause for suffering and pain (although as creator God may be distally responsible) we also confess that God is "almighty." Which makes us wonder if God should not intervene more to alleviate the most horrific of our sufferings.

In short, the confession that God is both "almighty" and "creator" throws up all the classic issues related to the "problem of pain" and theodicy. However, my concern in the chapter I wrote wasn't focused on our theological attempts to reconcile our experience of pain with the creedal assertions. My focus was on the psychological experience associated with the problem of suffering.

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Given that Christians conceive as God as "parent," psychologists have suggested that the relational schemas associated with the child/parent bond are imported into the God-relationship. That is, the emotional and cognitive dynamics governing our first love relationship gives us a psychological "language" to approach the love relationship with God.

John Bowlby's attachment theory is, perhaps, the most influential theory we have regarding the nature of the parent/child bond. In the psychological literature, Lee Kirkpatrick was the first to suggest that the four aspects of the attachment bond (as described by Mary Ainsworth) characterize the Christian's relationship with God:

Proximity Maintenance
Christians desire to be "close," "near," and in intimate "communion" with God.

Separation Anxiety
Related to the desire to maintain proximity, Christians are distressed when they feel distant, separated, forsaken, or abandoned by God.

Haven of Safety
Christians seek God in times of trouble or distress, finding God a source of comfort, support and protection.

Secure Base of Exploration
God functions as "home," the location of identity and "groundedness" and, thus, the location of confidence and courage.

In short, the human experience of love functions as a psychological template for how we experience the relationship with God. Attachment creates the emotional texture and tone for the experience of God's love.

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After noting the lack of research regarding the Christian Trinity, the first section of my chapter dealt with God. Right out of the gate with the Apostles' Creed we face these words:

I believe in God, the Father...

Christians believe in a "personal" God. That is, Christian believe they are "in relationship" with the Creative Force of the Universe. Consequently, Christians deploy a variety of anthropomorphisms to grasp what this "relationship" looks like. One of the most common anthropomorphisms is that God is a "parent" and we are God's "children." Generally, God is understood to be "Father," but God is also metaphorically experienced as "Mother." Some of the parental--paternal and maternal--images in the bible:

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As noted in my first post, I used the Apostles' Creed to structure my psychological and theological review of the Christian faith for my chapter in the forthcoming APA handbook on psychology and spirituality.

Structurally, both the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds have a Trinitarian structure. Each has three sections devoted to one of the three persons of the Trinity:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty...

I believe in Jesus Christ...

I believe in the Holy Spirit...

Consequently, my chapter had a Trinitarian structure, with three separate sections devoted to the Christian experience related to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

But before I started into these sections I was curious to see if there was any psychological research regarding Trinitarian belief, experience, and practice. Concretely, I wanted to know if there was any social-psychological research which had examined the correlates of Trinitarian belief. In short, socially and psychologically, does believing in the Trinity make any difference?

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In light the continuing discussion about the interplay of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the last two posts, I came across this quote in Rowan Williams' Tokens of Trust. As always, the Archbishop of Canterbury strikes what seems to be a good balance:

What Jesus was remembered as having stressed was that the kingly rule of God was about to arrive and break in to the human world. We were about to learn what it was for God to be king, what it was to live under his rule and no one else's. And Jesus' bold proposal was that living in a world and a community in which God was king was something very simple. To live in this world was what happened when you said 'yes' to what Jesus himself was saying and offering; to live under the kingship of God was deciding to live in the company of Jesus and trusting what he said about God and about you.

Trust this, live in Jesus' company, and you become a citizen of a new world, the world in which God's rule has arrived. You will still be living in the everyday world in which many other powers claim to be ruling; but you will have become free of them, free to co-operate or not, depending on how far they allow you to be ruled by God. And what you do and say will become a sign of what is coming. Your life will give a foretaste of God's rule; and it will be directed to inviting as many as possible to come under the same rule, and to resisting the powers (natural and supernatural) that work against God and seek to keep people in slavery.

This last bit, about our relationship to the Powers, seems important to reflect on in light of the coming July 4th celebrations. The quote continues along these lines:

The famous text known as the 'Beatitudes' in the fifth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel ("Blessed are the poor in spirit...") isn't so much a list of rules to follow; it just tells us what sort of lives show that God is in charge--lives that are characterized by dependence on God's goodness, that show forgiveness, single-mindedness, longing for peace and for justice, and patience under attack. People who live like this already belong in the new world: the kingdom is theirs. And, as this ought to make clear, this message is both a very sharply social and political one, and one that will never be captured by political and social reform alone. The changed life that these texts outline will challenge all sorts of things in our present world, but the change in question is one that can only begin in a personal yes to what Jesus is saying and offering.

There's a teaching of the Buddha that has had a great impact upon me. It's often called the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow.

The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow

One day, a new follower of the Buddha approached him with a series of questions.

He asked, "Master, do we have a soul? And does the soul survive our death?"

The Buddha responded, "Why do you wish to know these things?"

"Because," the man replied, "without these answers what is the point of following you?"

The Buddha responded:

"This is what your are like. You are like a man who has been struck by a poisoned arrow. Your friends take you to the healer so that the arrow can be removed and an antidote given for the poison. But you refuse to allow the healer to remove the arrow until he first answers all your questions. Who shot the arrow at you? What was his motive? What kind of arrow is it? What kind of poison did he use? On and on you ask your questions as the arrow remains in your body with the poison seeping into your blood. And so you die before your questions are answered.

You want my teaching to answer your questions.

My teaching only removes the arrow."

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