Monday, February 25, 2008

integration vs contextualization

As a Christian who counsels, I often distinguish between integration and contextualization. The nature of integration, I think, starts with two systems of thought and attempts to take the best of the two of them and to come up with a third something. My problem with this is that one is likely to lose the integrity of both and come up with something that’s a bit Frankensteinish. So if one takes family systems thinking and theology, at what level does one really lose the whole sense of a living, active God, if one’s theology just looks at the human part of the family system? As humans, our choice of what we take and what we leave behind has a great potential to go awry, so when we select from, it causes me some concern that we end up with a mythology (meaning “my theology”) where we end up having from both of the systems only what we choose, and we call that our integrated system.

But I prefer to use the word contextualization, because there’s a sense in which context says that one system is left entirely intact and the other is put within it to ask how the meaning of one is changed by it being in the context of the other. So when one calls one’s self a Christian, one says, “I will no longer see my life story as a life story separate from the life story of God, but I will see the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the context for my story. His story trumps my story.” It’s not that we’re going to try and work out some mutually acceptable terms. What Jesus has done is the entire foundation for my love and acceptance being a reality because of the gift of God, which we call grace.

So I want the nature of theology in my counseling to always precede the use of therapeutic terms, but it doesn’t exclude me from using therapeutic terms, so that when I use the term “family,” there’s something about God’s life as Father, Son, and Spirit, and the whole election of Abraham and all those that follow after Abraham, that shapes something about a family that is connected, that covenants together, that when I come and talk about family systems and what it means to trace out a genogram and to see where triangling is going on, it’s providing language that articulates what I already see in the nature and life of God. When Bowen talks about fight and flight as being responses to fear, we see that fear is foundational. We see in the Bible that perfect love casts out fear, and the nature of fear causing fighting and flight is certainly evident in the lives of all those people who were around Jesus and the way they responded to Him. And so there is an insight that can be seen within the context of Scripture where therapy plays out, gives language for, what’s going on in a way that is not forcing something onto the text, but is an insight that we’ve come to have that they may not have had at that time, but now we have the capacity to see that something’s going on, and it is not alien to what is there; it is further articulating the nature of what is there.

I do think that we have to be careful about always making sure that we’re not foisting onto the whole understanding of God revealed in Scripture from our therapeutic notions, but to recognize that the very purpose of Scripture is to explain the nature of the God-human relationship by first of all revealing who God is and what God is committed to, and then to see how that understanding of God shapes the ways we function in our communities of faith and in our families and in the ways that we engage our neighbors. And so we need to both critique and also employ the articulation of contemporary languages of therapy and leadership to further those biblical agendas once the biblical agenda is given precedence.

That is how I also function in thinking about marketplace as well as counseling as well as everything else -- that the theology sets the agenda, and that one might think of these others merely as languages that we’re translating into, just like translating from Greek and Hebrew into German for Luther or English for us. There is always the tension when you cross over from one language to the other that you may miss something. But if we’re going to keep it ever closer to the people who are supposed to hear the message, we have to act beyond our fears and be involved in that work of translation, or we won’t, as my friend Harry MacDonald says, “We won’t get the hay out of the hay loft down where the animals can eat it.” I think that the Bible wants us to get there, and that contextualized, contemporary modes of thought can be helpful in that journey, but they cannot set the agenda; that must be done theologically by the living God -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Monday, February 11, 2008

conversation in the blogosphere

The whole idea of blogging is a bit overwhelming for a relational person because there’s a question about how many people you can really have an authentic relationship with. It’s conceivable to have literally thousands of people who are on your Facebook friends list or to have people responding to your blog, and to not really have a sense of knowing and being known, which I think is so central to what a relationship really looks like. There is a sense in which even weak connections do have some value; as my friend Dwight Friesen says, that a free-scale network that has many weak connections is a strong network. And so I do believe in blogging, but I just wonder about its limitations and the nature of choices that we have to make as to what it is that we value. Do we have communities of faith, do we have family, with whom we balance our time and our openness, or is it possible for there to be an overtaking of the blogolog (like dialog, except it’s blogolog) that might fill us up or consume our time? So, in the same way that one might say that idolatry is anything that takes the place of a living relationship with Christ (idolatry can include worshiping the church and the Bible and all kinds of good things that are just one step away), so too, all of these communication devices of blogging and skyping and cell phoning and everything can be part of the very connecting life of relationship or they can become idols. And I’m on my own journey of trying to figure out what that looks like. I have a deep sense of many, many years of not being in the conversation in the way that I would like theologically because I haven’t published books (though I have published articles). Since I haven’t published books, some people don’t seem to acknowledge what I think (unless they happen to be my students at one of the places where I teach); they don’t seem to acknowledge my thought or my thought processes as having value simply in the dialog, but it’s the published that seems to take precedence in terms of giving an authoritative voice. And yet I think the blogosphere is creating opportunities for that conversation, so I want to affirm that and to make the connections and move out of the place of exile that it seems that I have been in, and that’s why I’m pleased to be here in the conversation with you all.

Monday, February 4, 2008

about being persons

Let me introduce you to three influential thinkers who shape what I do.

The first one I’ll speak to is John Zizioulas. John Zizioulas is a Greek Orthodox theologian who wrote a book called Being as Communion. The basic thesis of this book is that when we talk about what it means to be a person, for God, it is not tied up with bodily being, but it’s tied up with that being of God that is known in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where each person of the Trinity is not a person merely by virtue of having a face. The word person comes from the word procopo, which is like a mask or a face that one would wear in the Greek theater. But there’s something more essential to who we are; there is a going out from within one’s self that meets another in conversation, who is also going out to meet you. That’s the transcending of the self -- to go beyond one’s self as your words go and meet another. It’s not just words; it could be any nonverbal being of one’s self, but to say that the whole being of the Son goes out to meet the Father, who is going out to meet the Son, and the same would be true of the Spirit. That whole life of the interrelated going out to one another creates a mutuality between them, an irreducible connectedness, that is the very constitution of God’s life, and John Zizioulas identifies the most basic thing in the universe as this personal being in communion. So, largely based on John Zizioulas, my vision of God is a relational being.

Karl Barth is the second person who is very influential for me. And his basic task in the twentieth century is to say that if we’re going to do good scientific theology, we have to let God speak. And God speaks where? God speaks in the person of Jesus Christ. So all of our theology has to continually go back and ask who Jesus is as the One who fills out all of our terms of God and our terms of humanity. So we can’t ask what it means for a human to be free without asking what it means for Jesus to be free and to actually give content to the meaning of that word. Webster is not the authority, nor any other dictionary, not even Wikipedia. Jesus is the One who truly defines, by living out all of the words of the Christian faith. And so Karl Barth sets us on a whole theological methodology that stands over against filling out our terms with human experience. And the nature of human experience is that we all have different human experiences and therefore we end up with different theologies of what it means for God to be Father and to be loving and all those things, so to not have any of those be our starting point, but to let God be the starting point, as witnessed to by Scripture, looking at the Father-Son-Spirit relationship, opens us up to what Barth calls the happy science of theology.

The third person is John Macmurray. John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher who studied on the nature of what it means for us to be persons. He was a Christian, and his basic thesis is, once again, that the very form of what it means to be persons is not to be merely bodily or to be separate from one another, but it is being in relation. Macmurray said that the whole Western mode of thought is built on thinking or rationality as the basis of what a person is, building on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and Kant’s concepts of the transcendental unity of apperception, which gives the human a priority in all knowledge, and merely attempts to fit God within the limits of human reason. Macmurray suggested that what he calls an act, the act of a human being, precedes any thinking about that act. And so if we are going to really understand the nature of who we are as persons, it’s an acting, and that acting is not something that’s done apart from others, but we grow up from the very time we are babies in the context of relationships. So what it means to be a person is to act in the context of relationships. And so, “I relate, therefore I am” would be a basic thought within John Macmurray’s thought, and that shapes my thinking about the nature of how we work out a God who lives in relationship, who’s revealed to us (Karl Barth) in the person of Jesus to understand that relating on Planet Earth in a way that defines our ethics and our very understanding of being a person in a term that John Macmurray calls friendship. One of his most famous quotes is “All meaningful knowledge is for the purpose of action, and all meaningful action is for the purpose of friendship.”

These three thinkers were focal in my doctoral work and still heavily influence the way that I think as a relational theologian.