Bonnie Zahl on 'Grace and the self'

Listening to: Jonsi: Go

Bonnie Zahl’s talk on ‘Grace and the self’ is a demanding but rich talk (not surprising for someone educated at Harvard and Cambridge).

These are my notes on what she says, although I add in some of my own interpretation. You can listen to it here. There is also a Powerpoint.

She explains that we all have ‘self-schemas’ through which we interpret our experience. They are: “cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experience, that organize and guide the processing of self-related information contained in the individual’s social experiences” (Markus, 1977, p. 64)‏.

So to be “To be schematic (as opposed to aschematic) for a particular trait is for a person to consider themselves on either extremes of that trait, and to consider that trait as personally important.”

For example, to be schematic for weight is to be quick to evaluate food on its health benefits, quick to remember times when your weight was different, to evaluate comments about yourself as to do with your weight (e.g. ‘you’re looking well’), but to be resistant to information which challenges how you feel about your weight (e.g. NHS charts say you’re underweight, but you disagree).

We all have three different selves:

1. Actual self – Who I actually am‏
2. Ought self - Who I ought to be (Ought-Own) / Who I think other people think I ought to be (Ought-Other)‏‏
3. Ideal self – Who I would ideally like to be (Ideal-Own)/ Who I think other people would like for me ideally to be (Ideal-Other)‏
‏

When our ought and ideal selves do not match our actual selves then serious problems result. We despair of ourselves.

Psychology offers three possible solutions to the problem of discrepancies between our actual and ought/ideal selves:

1. Self-awareness - Helps us to understand the cause of our problems, important but doesn’t fully deal with the problem.
‏
2. Minimising the difference between our actual and ought/ideal selves - This would solve the problem, but is very difficult. As we are ‘slaves’ with bound wills we struggle to change who we actually are. Lowering the standards is equally difficult. Many ought/ideal selves are written into what it means to be human so we can’t deceive ourselves that they are different. Some ought/ideal selves are social constructs, but it is hard to block out what our society is telling us.
‏
3. Increasing self-complexity - This means seeing ourselves in different ways (e.g. as intelligent as well as thin). This means that when there is a discrepancy within one schema (‘I feel I ought to be thin but I’m fat’), then others can hold me up (‘but at least I’m intelligent’).
‏

What difference does Christianity make?

1. The law (in Moses, Christ or elsewhere) show us how humans ought and ideally should be. As such it strengthens and heightens many of our ought/ideal selves making the discrepancies between selves more extreme. However, it does devalue many of our ought/ideal selves – e.g. looking beautiful is not as important as our society says.

The law (in the history of Israel’s failure, direct statements of our guilt, e.g. Rom 3, experience etc) shows us how we actually are. As such it further depresses our opinion of our actual selves making the discrepancies between selves more extreme.

The law therefore helps us with point 1 more than secular psychology: self-awareness. The Bible encourages confession. However, it is not enough because it has also made the problem worse (sin is made sinful beyond measure, Rom 7:13).

2. In the atonement of Jesus Christ where we are given a new actual self which matches the ought/ideal self of the law. There is no condemnation for those of us in Christ Jesus because we are who we ought to be and who God’s would like us to be. By the Holy Spirit this new reality is breaking into our lives as the old actual self wastes away and the new actual self grows (2 Cor 4:16).

3. The Gospel also gives us a host of different schemas by which we can relevatise other schemas. I may not be thin, but I am a child of God. I may not have a successful career, but I am human being with dignity made in the image of God. I may not have a functional biological family, but I have the family of the church. Etc.

Transforming love and hope

Commenting on Romans 8 Luther recalls the famous saying of Augustine that "The soul is more where it loves than where it lives".

Steven Paulson explains that if the person you love is on the other side of the country your thoughts, money, time is spent there as much as possible. Inevitably, unless the love ends, the lover and the beloved will move together and the identity of each will be found in the other. As Luther says, "love transforms the lover into the beloved", or as Jesus said "two shall become one flesh".

Paulson, sees Luther then explaining this movement as part of the more significant movement of hope. I'm not sure if that is right, but Luther certainly sees hope as important and performing the same movement.

Luther criticises the philosophers for seeking to understand things by focusing on the present and metaphysics. He sees Paul focusing his attention not on creation itself but on what it is waiting for. Paulson comments:

In the forest a birdwatcher learns to listen for birds more than watch for them. A therapist learns to ignore patient projections and to listen for the true source of pain. A theologian must... learn to hear the creature waiting.

If we want to understand people, and all creation, we need to know what they are hoping for as well as what they love. Because, "hope changes the one who hopes into what is hoped for".

I've met those people who ask you off the bat "what would love to do on your ideal day?" or "what do you love most about your church?" I've also been in interviews where you are asked "where do you hope to be in 5 years?" Those are questions that probe right to the heart who you are so they are questions worth asking people you want to know.

Soon I will be moving jobs and cities. Already relationship dynamics are changing, money is being spent on things I can only benefit from after the move, thoughts are in the place where I will end up. I am becoming what I hope for.

[Tim Keller has a sermon series on the transforming power of the Christian hope]

A call to the real world of worship

In his lectures on "Biblical Spirituality" Eugene Peterson remembers that he received the biggest postbag of angry letters when he wrote an article criticising Myers-Briggs profiling. This surprised him as he didn't realise how it was so precious to people.

He probably got a bigger postbag after he endorsed The Shack though. I tried to find the Myers-Briggs article on the internet and failed. I did find this paragraph though:

Every call to worship is a call into the Real World. You’d think that by this time in my life I wouldn't need to be called anymore. But I do. I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I’m always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.

(p. 28, Take and read: spiritual reading: an annotated list)