"There are many reasons why Christ's teaching is not understood...
But the principle reason, which is the source of all the other mistaken ideas about it, is the notion that Christianity is a doctrine which can be accepted or rejected without any change of life."
--Leo Tolstoy
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Richard Beck
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).
The Theology of Faƫrie
The Little Way of St. ThĆ©rĆØse of Lisieux
The William Stringfellow Project (Ongoing)
Autobiographical Posts
- On Discoveries in Used Bookstores
- Two Brothers and Texas Rangers
- Visiting and Evolving in Monkey Town
- Roller Derby Girls
- A Life With Bibles
- Wearing a Crucifix
- Morning Prayer at San Buenaventura Mission
- The Halo of Overalls
- Less
- The Farmer's Market
- Subversion and Shame: I Like the Color Pink
- The Bureaucrat
- Uncle Richard, Vampire Hunter
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- On Maps and Marital Spats
- Get on a Bike...and Go Slow
- Buying a Bible
- Memento Mori
- We Weren't as Good as the Muppets
- Uncle Richard and the Shark
- Growing Up Catholic
- Ghostbusting (Part 1)
- Ghostbusting (Part 2)
- My Eschatological Dog
- Tex Mex and Depression Era Cuisine
- Aliens at Roswell
On the Principalities and Powers
- Christ and the Powers
- Why I Talk about the Devil So Much
- The Preferential Option for the Poor
- The Political Theology of Les MisƩrables
- Good Enough
- On Anarchism and A**holes
- Christian Anarchism
- A Restless Patriotism
- Wink on Exorcism
- Images of God Against Empire
- A Boredom Revolution
- The Medal of St. Benedict
- Exorcisms are about Economics
- "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"
- "A Home for Demons...and the Merchants Weep"
- Tales of the Demonic
- The Ethic of Death: The Policies and Procedures Manual
- "All That Are Here Are Humans"
- Ears of Stone
- The War Prayer
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Experimental Theology
- Eucharistic Identity
- Tzimtzum, Cruciformity and Theodicy
- Holiness Among Depraved Christians: Paul's New Form of Moral Flourishing
- Empathic Open Theism
- The Victim Needs No Conversion
- The Hormonal God
- Covenantal Substitutionary Atonement
- The Satanic Church
- Mousetrap
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
- Your God is Too Big
From the Prison Bible Study
- The Philosopher
- God's Unconditional Love
- There is a Balm in Gilead
- In Prison With Ann Voskamp
- To Make the Love of God Credible
- Piss Christ in Prison
- Advent: A Prison Story
- Faithful in Little Things
- The Prayer of Jabez
- The Prayer of Willy Brown
- Those Old Time Gospel Songs
- I'll Fly Away
- Singing and Resistence
- Where the Gospel Matters
- Monday Night Bible Study (A Poem)
- Living in Babylon: Reading Revelation in Prison
- Reading the Beatitudes in Prision
- John 13: A Story from the Prision Study
- The Word
Series/Essays Based on my Research
The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes
The Theology of Peanuts
The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia
Eccentric Christianity
- Part 1: A Peculiar People
- Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
- Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
- Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
- Part 5: Doubt, Gratitude and an Eccentric Faith
- Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
- Part 7: The Eccentric Kingdom
The Fuller Integration Lectures
Blogging about the Bible
- Unicorns in the Bible
- "Let My People Go!": On Worship, Work and Laziness
- The True Troubler
- Stumbling At Just One Point
- The Faith of Demons
- The Lord Saw That She Was Not Loved
- The Subversion of the Creator God
- Hell On Earth: The Church as the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit
- The Things That Make for Peace
- The Lord of the Flies
- On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
- Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
- Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
- Redemption and the Goel
- The Psalms as Liberation Theology
- Control Your Vessel
- Circumcised Ears
- Forgive Us Our Trespasses
- Doing Beautiful Things
- The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
- Targeting the Dove Sellers
- Christus Victor in Galatians
- Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
- The Triumph of the Cross
- The Threshing Floor of Araunah
- Hold Others Above Yourself
- Blessed are the Tricksters
- Adam's First Wife
- I Am a Worm
- Christus Victor in the Lord's Prayer
- Let Them Both Grow Together
- Repent
- Here I Am
- Becoming the Jubilee
- Sermon on the Mount: Study Guide
- Treat Them as a Pagan or Tax Collector
- Going Outside the Camp
- Welcoming Children
- The Song of Lamech and the Song of the Lamb
- The Nephilim
- Shaming Jesus
- Pseudepigrapha and the Christian Witness
- The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs
- The Second Moses
- The New Manna
- Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
- "A Bloody Husband"
- Song of the Vineyard
Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision
Civil Rights History and Race Relations
- The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
- Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
- Black Heroism and White Sympathy: A Reflection on the Charleston Shooting
- Selma 50th Anniversary
- More Than Three Minutes
- The Passion of White America
- Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
- Will Campbell
- Sitting in the Pews of Ebeneser Baptist Church
- MLK Bedtime Prayer
- Freedom Rider
- Mountiantop
- Freedom Summer
- Civil Rights Family Trip 1: Memphis
- Civil Rights Family Trip 2: Atlanta
- Civil Rights Family Trip 3: Birmingham
- Civil Rights Family Trip 4: Selma
- Civil Rights Family Trip 5: Montgomery
Hip Christianity
The Charism of the Charismatics
Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action
Being Church
- Instead of a Coffee Shop How About a Laundromat?
- A Million Boring Little Things
- A Prayer for ISIS
- "The People At Our Church Die A Lot"
- The Angel of Freedom
- Washing Dishes at Freedom Fellowship
- Where David Plays the Tambourine
- On Interruptibility
- Mattering
- This Ritual of Hallowing
- Faith as Honoring
- The Beautiful
- The Sensory Boundary
- The Missional and Apostolic Nature of Holiness
- Open Commuion: Warning!
- The Impurity of Love
- A Community Called Forgiveness
- Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
- Freedom Fellowship
- Wednesday Night Church
- The Hands of Christ
- Barbara, Stanley and Andrea: Thoughts on Love, Training and Social Psychology
- Gerald's Gift
- Wiping the Blood Away
- This Morning Jesus Put On Dark Sunglasses
- The Only Way I Know How to Save the World
- Renunciation
- The Reason We Gather
- Anointing With Oil
- Incarnations of God's Mercy
Exploring Preterism
Scripture and Discernment
- Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
- Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
- Songbooks vs. the Psalms
- Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
- Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study
- Pawn to King 4
- Allowing God to Rage
- Poetry of a Murderer
- On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
- Heretics and Disagreement
- Atonement: A Primer
- "The Bible says..."
- The "Yes, but..." Church
- Human Experience and the Bible
- Discernment, Part 1
- Discernment, Part 2
- Rabbinic Hedges
- Fuzzy Logic
Interacting with Good Books
- Christian Political Witness
- The Road
- Powers and Submissions
- City of God
- Playing God
- Torture and Eucharist
- How Much is Enough?
- From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
- The Catonsville Nine
- Daring Greatly
- On Job (GutiƩrrez)
- The Selfless Way of Christ
- World Upside Down
- Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
- Christ and Horrors
- The King Jesus Gospel
- Insurrection
- The Bible Made Impossible
- The Deliverance of God
- To Change the World
- Sexuality and the Christian Body
- I Told Me So
- The Teaching of the Twelve
- Evolving in Monkey Town
- Saved from Sacrifice: A Series
- Darwin's Sacred Cause
- Outliers
- A Secular Age
- The God Who Risks
Moral Psychology
- The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
- Philia Over Phobia
- Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
- On Love and the Yuck Factor
- Ethnocentrism and Politics
- Flies, Attention and Morality
- The Banality of Evil
- The Ovens at Buchenwald
- Violence and Traffic Lights
- Defending Individualism
- Guilt and Atonement
- The Varieties of Love and Hate
- The Wicked
- Moral Foundations
- Primum non nocere
- The Moral Emotions
- The Moral Circle, Part 1
- The Moral Circle, Part 2
- Taboo Psychology
- The Morality of Mentality
- Moral Conviction
- Infrahumanization
- Holiness and Moral Grammars
The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity
The Theology of Everyday Life
- Self-Esteem Through Shaming
- Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
- Online Debates and Stages of Change
- The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
- Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
- Social Media as Sacrament
- The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
- Hating Pixels
- Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
- The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
- Tattoos
- The Ethics of :-)
- On Snobbery
- Jokes
- Hypocrisy
- Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
- Gossip, Part 1: The Food of the Brain
- Gossip, Part 2: Evolutionary Stable Strategies
- Gossip, Part 3: The Pay it Forward World
- Human Nature
- Welcome
- On Humility
Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option
George MacDonald
Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate
Alone, Suburban & Sorted
The Theology of Monsters
The Theology of Ugly
Orthodox Iconography
Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt
- The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
- Pragmatism and Progressive Christianity
- Doubt and Cognitive Rumination
- A/theism and the Transcendent
- Kingdom A/theism
- The Ontological Argument
- Cheap Praise and Costly Praise
- god
- Wired to Suffer
- A New Apologetics
- Orthodox Alexithymia
- High and Low: The Psalms and Suffering
- The Buddhist Phase
- Skilled Christianity
- The Two Families of God
- The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity
- Theodicy and No Country for Old Men
- Doubt: A Diagnosis
- Faith and Modernity
- Faith after "The Cognitive Turn"
- Salvation
- The Gifts of Doubt
- A Beautiful Life
- Is Santa Claus Real?
- The Feeling of Knowing
- Practicing Christianity
- In Praise of Doubt
- Skepticism and Conviction
- Pragmatic Belief
- N-Order Complaint and Need for Cognition
Holiday Musings
- Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
- Advent: Learning to Wait
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 2
- It's Still Christmas
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
- The Liturgical Year for Dummies
- "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
- Pentecost and Babel
- Epiphany
- Ambivalence about Lent
- On Easter and Astronomy
- Sex Sandals and Advent
- Freud and Valentine's Day
- Existentialism and Halloween
- Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead
The Offbeat
- Batman and the Joker
- The Theology of Ugly Dolls
- Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
- The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
- Weddings Real, Imagined and Yet to Come
- Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
- Believing in Bigfoot
- The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
- 2012 and the End of the World
- The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
- Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
- On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies
Amen. From the perspective of the first intercultural mission, I think something was lost in the translation of emunah, the Hebrew concept of faith, into Greek. In the letters, you see Peter and James and Paul all trying to explain to a Greek-speaking audience how emunah is not like pistis, where pistis is understood in the rhetorical way that a lot of Greeks understood it. Still, I think this goes much deeper than translation. We keep deciding that Jesus wanted pistis, in the sense of 'being convinced by an argument', because we don't want him to be able to ask for our emunah.
Leo Tolstoy is probably right. . . it just seems that most "Christians" in History have not rally bothered to follow the ethics of Christ. I know that critics will just accuse me of regurgitating the no true Scotsman fallacy.. but honestly, if you read the behavioral/social teachings of Jesus can we honestly say that most of the christian world has done anything near live up to them?
The no true Scotsman fallacy doesn't work here, for so many reasons. But you're right, some people would bring it up. I think the misapplication of the no true Scotsman fallacy needs its own special name, since it happens so much. I'd vote for calling it the "Scotsmen are leprechauns" fallacy.
Slightly OT.. I've noticed this trend on the internet quite a bit. Folks seem very keen to label a "fallacy" as soon as they think they see one. The assumption I guess, is that if you just name-it.. it goes away (sounds like some versions of charismatic "spiritual warfare"...)
My favorite is the "double godwin". This occurs when you make a very valid comparison to Nazism. The objector then says "Godwin!" without realising that this has done nothing to assist the discussion.
Maybe whole fallacy-fallacy needs its own name? The Phallissy? .. ;)
Sorry for bringing the tone down a few notches Richard....
I've called that 'fallacy fallacy' the classification fallacy, but that isn't nearly as fun, and doesn't capture the infinite regress of accusation that is lurking beneath the surface. Maybe the real underlying issue is a disposition and not a fallacy at all. I will dub that the "Lord grant that I may not seek to understand, so much as to be understood fallacy which isn't a fallacy but an intellectually unvirtuous disposition." It is routinely abbreviated as the lgtimnstusmatbufwinafbaiud non-fallacy. To make a futile but earnest attempt to link this back to the OP, maybe what we need are generous dispositions and ways of interacting, instead of an ever-expanding list of psuedo-intellectual arguments and gotcha' lines. But jokingly expanding the fallacy index might be a good way to point us back to that...
No worries. As long as people aren't being mean in the comments I'm cool.
I joke all the time that I've never actually met a Christian. Or I'll joke that there are, like, three Christians in the world today.
For myself, I think of myself as someone who is trying to become a Christian. And I do think that developmental frame helps here. That is, the more you become like Jesus the more you understand, the more truth is revealed to you. Knowledge and praxis here go hand in hand. You know what you do, not what you think.
There are, in my opinion, fundamental flaws in what we call the Gospel. I began teaching our Senior women's class the other day, 10 or so women in their 70's, and the lesson was on judgment. I asked them what they thought about when they thought about judgment and the first answer I got was that when she stood before God that she was good enough to let into heaven. I completely destructed that myth and this group of women were smiling from ear to ear when we finished. I could physically feel a wash of relief come over the group. I'm a fifty year old man, by the way. We really need to get at the root of the problem of American Southern Christianity. The Emperor is naked.
Oops!!!!!!!!!!!! "deconstructed"
This is true. However, this itself is easy to misunderstand. It's easy to go from rationalized Christianity to moralized Christianity. As Paul Tillich was so fond of pointing out, faith includes the intellectual, volitional, and affective dimensions of humanity, but it can be identified with none of these without losing itself. And that's another reason that Christianity (as faith) is not understood.
I have appreciated what Peter Rollins says on this, which is essentially that I can may aspire to be a follower of Jesus, a Christian, but whether I succeed or not, whether I truly am Christlike, I can only know by asking my neighbor, or more importantly, my enemy.
Or we could call it skepticism. ; )
Yours does have a certain ring to it though!
It all seriousness though, I think that the heart of this disposition is the unwillingness to open one's self to seeing things from a new perspective. It is the fear that to say that another's view has something yo offer means that my own tenuous grasp on control over my world is threatened. The cure, of course, I to come to a place where one really truly knows, in the heart rather than in the head, that it is not my grasping that offers security, but the fact that I am being upheld by another who will continue to do so no matter what I believe with my head.
I recently read a super post at The Evangelical Liberal entitled Why I am not a Christian which speaks to this so very well http://evangelicaliberal.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/i-am-not-a-christian/. I think you might relate to some if his points, Richard. I sure did.
Nietzsche: "The last Christian died on the cross..." Is there a quote more amenable to alternative interpretation?
Yes, there needs to be balance. I then to think of it as an ordering, getting first things first. Here's an oversimplified sketch of how I see things:
Orthodpraxy leading to Orthopathy leading to Orthodoxy.
Practice ---> Affection ---> Belief
"Restful unknowing" is an elegant and helpful phrase. Yours or Rollins?
Reminds me of a saying a professor of mine had
Head ---> Heart ---> Hand
As always, thank you for these daily reminders.
From a developmental perspective, that does seems to make the most sense, roughly speaking.
We might think of practice as more than a mere "doing." Practice could be thought of as the whole environment of relations from which affect and cognition take flight. Screw up that initial environment that gives shape to our meanings and the "ortho" drops off of pathy and doxy as well.
I wasn't quoting anyone in particular, but Rollins says similar things and the idea has been around a long long time. I grew up hearing similar things from my Dad.
In the 14th century an unidentified Christian mystic wrote a book called "The Cloud of Unknowing." This is the earliest use of the term in Christian context in English that I know of, but I haven't studied it or anything.
Really though, it's in the Bible!
Matthew 11:25-27 (NLT)
25 At that time Jesus prayed this prayer: “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clever, and for revealing them to the childlike. 26 Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way!
27 “My Father has entrusted everything to me. No one truly knows the Son except the Father, and no one truly knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
28 Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”
My dad has always been fond of explaining this passage saying that a young inexperienced, unbroken ox is yoked by the neck together with a sturdy experienced ox. He can rebel and thrash around all he wants and the older ox is unperturbed and just keeps plodding forward patiently. Peace comes for the young ox when he learns to rest under the yolk of the older ox. The yoke will feel like a heavy, restrictive burden to one who is tugging against it or running from it, but to humbly keep in step is to find peace.
This is not a popular notion today to say the least. It is misunderstood because we assume that freedom is the ability to do whatever we want, when true freedom is in the peace that comes with doing what we are made to do.
I've read "The Cloud of Unknowing," and was appropriately bewildered. But I gleaned enough to know that it tracks with the Biblical passages you cite.
Thanks for the help!
Haha, well, you did better than I did then. I only tried to read it and was definitely bewildered. I keep meaning to find a more modern translation and give it another go. It's one of my dad's favorites (along with St. John of the Cross's books) so I've heard a lot from him.
The struggle for me is integrity in practice. When I feel alone, like God's not there or does not care, I begin to have doubts. My intellectual thoughts affect my practice. It feels hypocritical for me to practice without belief, but I must agree that continuing to practice even in the midst of doubt does eventually seem to produce belief again. I guess "fake it, til you make it" contains an element of truth?
Hi Kevin, I'm sort of cool to the whole "fake it, til you make it" notion when it comes to faith. I think the key thing to search for isn't something beyond the practices but the practices themselves. That is, the goal is to find the practices as intrinsically rewarding rather than something you do expecting something to change or pay off in the future.
For example, I was thinking about prayer this morning on my bike ride to work. The description of prayer that came to my mind was this: prayer is an embodied practice of reverence. Prayer teaches me how to treat things as sacred. And if I neglect prayer what do I have? Just the ways our consumeristic culture shapes us, where nothing is sacred, where nothing is reverenced and everything is monetized by markets. Sure, there are practices of reverencing other than prayer. But prayer is one of them, and if we neglect it we'll be deeply impoverished as human beings. There is nothing to be doubted about or hoped for in any of this. The practice is the reward.
Beautifully put. I'm hearing Alasdair MacIntyre's account of "goods internal to a practice" which he later came to as an instance of Aquinas' relation of being and good in his 5th question. Engaging in the practice of prayer as you describe it, Richard, has a way of developing a new ontology in us, one in which terms like belief and doubt mean different things than they do in our usual ways of thinking (I'm thinking here of Charles Taylor's suggestion the ontology we live by is an outworking of our moral experience).
Thank you, that's very helpful to me to think about. I don't think I have been considering the practice as the reward, but only as a vehicle to some greater enlightenment or something else. Maybe I could view exercise the same way and stick to it easier.
Thinking of Tolstoy... there is a marvelous collection of his short stories...
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/tolstoy/23storie.pdf
The two that go along with your quote: Where Love is... and Three Questions...
Thanks for the quote.
Richard, I have always had trouble being convinced of the "fake it til you make it" perspective. It seems to me that if I condition myself, I'll be convinced of any thing. Perhaps even a placebo effect? It's almost as if it is a counseling prescription, ie tell your wife you love her fives times a day even if you don't, and perhaps one day you will. What's to say the mind does not convince itself of a spiritual presence regardless of it's there or not? Just something I would like to hear your take on.
It depends upon what we are talking about. In this conversation we are talking about a "fake it until you make it" in regards to a belief in something supernatural. That's a bit of an odd application, faking something to eventually believe in God. Which is why I don't think it applies in this case. Or at least not very well.
But in other situations "fake it until you make it" makes perfect sense because what is being changed isn't belief but feeling. I act a certain way and then I come to feel a certain way. Here behavior is pulling emotion, rather than metaphysical belief.
yes and thats a good reason to take babies to church. So long as it's a community of love.