Want Wisdom? Go to the Old Testament Wisdom Literature.

One of the many pleasures of working at Dallas Theological Seminary is the opportunity to meet and interact with people like John Hilber, who integrate superior intelligence with a humble spiritual maturity. Before John went to Cambridge University to get his PhD, he was Pastor of a church in Washington. It was there that he wrote one of the best articles I have read concerning the importance of the Old Testament wisdom literature for integrating psychological thinking with Christian thinking. Unfortunately, this article had been buried in a 1998 issue of Bibliotheca Sacra (affectionately called “Bib Sac”) and was difficult to access. John was kind enough to convert the format of the article to fit this blog so you can get it easily in its entirety. I delight in seeing several points supported in his article:

• The wisdom literature of the OT invites sources outside the canon of Scripture as well as in Scripture itself for the discovery of truth.
• Wisdom can make use of methods that neither emerge exegetically from the Bible nor utilize the words of Scripture itself. I think this statement would embrace results from secular psychological research as a contribution to truth.
• Wise counselors hold to the Bible as the only perfect authority for guiding faith and practice.
• Wisdom calls for a deeper reverence for God in conforming one’s life to the Creator’s design.

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From: BIBLIOTHECA SACRA 155 (October–December 1988): 411–22 (reproduced digitally with permission). Any formal citation of this work should reference the original publication with the proper page number.

OLD TESTAMENT WISDOM AND THE INTEGRATION DEBATE IN CHRISTIAN COUNSELING

John W. Hilber

Integration of secular counseling theory and methods in the Christian community continues to be a controversial issue.¹ On one side of the debate are those who appeal to the sufficiency of Scripture, contending that modern psychology and psychotherapy are poisoned wells from which Christians cannot drink without compromising biblical truth.² They say no integration is possible. On the other side of the debate are integrationists, who argue that general revelation is a legitimate source of truth and who therefore attempt a cautious use of modern theory and methods regulated by biblical theology and a Christian worldview.³ No consensus among integrationists has emerged on the method of integration or the extent to which integration is possible.⁴ But all integrationists share an openness to the contribution of modern psychotherapy.⁵

Most debate over the validity of integration has focused either on the doctrine of general revelation or New Testament passages dealing with the sufficiency of Christ or of Scripture or the giftedness of the church. But absent from the discussion is any serious engagement with the one area of Scripture that speaks most extensively to the issue of counseling, namely, Old Testament wisdom literature.⁶ This article addresses the integration question from the neglected viewpoint of Old Testament wisdom literature and the role of the sage in ancient Israel in relation to two questions: Where is wisdom to be found? What was the function of wisdom in the Old Testament community of faith?

A Thoughtful Christian Perspective on Homosexuality

Last week, I had lunch with an long-time friend, Steve Sternberg. I enjoy Steve because he is a thinker and he bypasses popularized slogans, cliches and hype. He can talk intelligently about complex issues in a way that clarifies the arguments on both sides while he maintains his own views strongly. So we can talk about homosexuality from a Christian perspective without bashing anyone. Steve gave me permission to reproduce three of his writings which I have done below. They date back to the late ’90’s but constitute a wonderful resource for study that is still very current.

I. “The GLBSO and Education” was Steve’s contribution to the opinion page of the Daily Campus Newspaper. Here he rebuts three claims that the homosexual community made at a lecture on campus.

II. “Homosexuality, A New Perspective” was written for the Daily Campus Newspaper.

III. “What’s Choice Got to Do With It?” gives Steve’s notes that he used in a human sexuality course at SMU.

I recommend that anyone interact with Steve’s material if he is studying this issue at a thoughtful level.

Ainsworth’s Secure Attachment A Picture of “Abiding in Christ”

Now I wish I had read Becoming Attached when it was first published in 1998. Robert Karen, PhD has provided a very readable history and research findings about (the subtitle) First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love. I could not resist carrying these empirical findings into the spiritual realm to gain deeper insights into the truth of the Bible. Specifically, I think our early attachment experience shapes the way we attach to God. So I have played with the patterns of Securely Attached and Anxiously Attached children (a la Mary Ainsworth, 1913-1999) to see how they might describe the Christian notion of “Abiding in Christ” as written in John 15. There are several patterns that are amazingly parallel! For example, in a “Strange Situation” in which mother is away, the securely attached baby actively seeks mother when distressed, maintains contact with her when she comes back, and is readily comforted. The anxiously attached baby in the same situation avoids mother when distressed and seems blasé. Furthermore, this child is difficult to soothe after separation. The child is angry and seeks comfort simultaneously. Isn’t this a picture of how we abide in Christ? If we are secure in our faith and in our relationship with God, then when we don’t experience his presence with us, we actively seek Him and, when we connect with Him, we are readily comforted. But if we are anxious and insecure about our abiding relationship with God, we avoid Him in the midst of stress and we are hard to comfort, even angry at God for “letting us down.”

The appendix on page 444 of the book summarizes nine such patterns that I think describe our personal relationship dynamics with God very accurately. It supports my belief that the way we experience parents as infants and toddlers greatly influences the way we view God as adults. Fortunately, nothing is totally determined and any early programming can be reprogrammed to allow for more personal growth.

Ethics, Organizational Trauma, and Hope

 

I had lunch last week with Dr. Dale Godby who, like me, is concerned about how the ethical misdeeds of one part of a group impacts the whole group. How does one bad apple spoil the batch? Dr. Earl Hopper and Meg Sharpe have been researching this issue in London for years. They are coming to Dallas on March 30, 2007 to lead a workshop that will address these issues that we are faced with frequently, but that we don’t often think through extensively. A few examples of the relevance of this topic are the pastor’s involvement with pornography (my last post), the Catholic priests’ involvement with child abuse, and the Enron debacle. None of these are isolated events that we are insulated from. Here’s the announcement about the event that will be cosponsored by CAPS, which I represent, and DSPP & DGAP, which Dale represents.

Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology and Dallas Group Analytic Practice

Saturday March 3, 2007

On Saturday, March 3, Earl Hopper, Ph.D., and Meg Sharpe, BA (Hons), two psychoanalysts and group analysts from London, will present a program on trauma in organizations, with special reference to violations of Codes of Ethics and the recovery of morale and hope.

What happens to organizations when they are broken, wounded or ‘traumatized’? In the case of Enron, trauma and moral corruption were closely linked, and these processes were fatal. In the case of the Church, the cardinal virtues were threatened. Closer to home psychoanalytical organizations have experienced strain, cumulative and catastrophic trauma, involving the loss of hegemony over training mental health professionals, drastic reductions in economic and status rewards, and the apparently widespread failed dependency on leaders who violated boundaries with patients and colleagues. Will these recursive traumas prove fatal for psychoanalysis and related forms of therapy? Can our professional organizations and colleagues rediscover their faith in psychoanalytical values and clinical principles?

Earl Hopper will present his theory of incohesion in the unconscious life of traumatized social systems, and Meg Sharpe will discuss the loneliness of those involved in boundary violations, and the ways in which they personify the roles that emerge in traumatized organizations. Both speakers are concerned with the development of realistic hope and task-appropriate levels of morale as antidotes to the spread of moral corruption that follows failed dependency on our leaders.

 

 

Ethical Response to Porn Charges Against Pastor

We are being confronted frequently with this kind of news. The newspaper article copied below is from Charlotteville, Virginia, but it could be from anywhere. [edit in light of responder: My intent is not to focus on this specific case, but rather to examine our response].  The legal response is easy. When a person breaks the law (child pornography), he must pay the consequences which in this case will mean some jail time. But the ethical response is a little more tricky. [edit in light of responder: In this specific case, we should not presume guilt] Here are some questions that occur to me:

• If you are a friend of the family, do you break off your friendship (feeling deceived) or do you seek to encourage him in the role of a Barnabas?
• If you are a member of that church congregation, do you defend him or chastise him?
• Is a Christian obligated to handle this kind of situation any differently than a non-Christian?
• Is the organizational response to this situation different than an individual’s response? That is, Can the chairman of the board of elders response be the same as a personal friend’s response?
• How much can we learn about how a man can be preaching a message on “A Heart for Christ” (January 14-15, 2006) while carrying on illegal acts on the side? Should we try? [edit: Am I guilty of assuming guilt here?]
• To what extent am I capable of behaviors that are inconsistent with my public declared belief system — even if not illegal or unethical?

Here’s the Newspaper article, how do you respond to some of the questions I pose?

By Rob Seal, Daily Progress staff writer; Thursday, July 20, 2006

Albemarle County authorities discovered about 100 pornographic images of girls who appear to be underage on the computer of a former Charlottesville pastor, according to police testimony Wednesday. Gregory M. Briehl, 52, was arrested Tuesday and charged with 20 counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of videotaping people without their consent. Until March, Briehl, of 5360 Quint Field Road, was associate pastor of Peace Lutheran Church. The professional counselor also spent a year-and-a-half as the church’s acting pastor, starting in 2000. In May, Albemarle County police searched Briehl’s home, a guesthouse and his business at First Stone Counseling Center. Authorities

Divorce Law Change in Louisiana

Can changes is the law change morality? Can legislative reform help individuals make better decisions that lead to happier lives? Is the law capable of anything beyond punishing wrongdoers? I think so and Rep. Ernie Alexander apparently is confident that better laws can help strengthen families. His recent marriage-strengthening initiative is already capturing national attention. The Advocate is a daily newspaper based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana which published this letter on July 14, 2006.

Hailed as the first uniformly applicable legislation since “no-fault” was introduced in 1969 that makes divorce harder to get, Act 743 doubles the living-separate-and-apart waiting period from six months to one year when minor children would be affected by a no-fault divorce. If it is demonstrated that one spouse is guilty of child or spousal abuse, the current waiting period remains unaffected.

Alexander justified his legislation on the basis that divorce hurts children: “We know that in one-parent families, a child is twice as likely to drop out of school, three times as likely to become pregnant as a teenager, six times more likely to be in poverty and 12 times more likely to be incarcerated.” And he cited a study that said the change could cut the divorce rate by 23 percent.

Sen. Bob Kostelka, a retired judge who led the fight for the law in Louisiana’s Senate, reasoned that divorces “were often granted before the couple had worked out issues of child custody and support. That removed the option of reconciliation, because they would be divorced before they had settled important issues” that might have prompted meaningful counseling.

Louisiana Family Forum Action supported this reform legislation that aligns with recent polling data showing that 60 percent of Louisianians believe “divorce should be more difficult to get for couples with minor children than other couples.” A Time-CNN national poll has agreed with these findings.

Moreover, a study by Dr. Linda Waite revealed that “86 percent of unhappily married people who stick it out, find that, five years later, their marriages are happier.” Three-fifths who said their marriages were unhappy in the late 1980s and who stayed married, said their marriages were either “very happy” or “happy” when reinterviewed in the early 1990s.

Act 743 becomes the first enactment in pursuance of a 2001 study by the Louisiana Law Institute urging the Legislature to consider a number of divorce reforms, including longer cooling-off periods.

Health of Marriage in America . . . or Unhealth?

At lunch with my friend Steve Sternberg the other day, he told me about the National Marriage Project at Rutgers. Steve is a down-to-earth guy who has a keen intellect and a philosophical grounding. I read the essay by Barbara Whitehead and David Popenoe entitled Life Without Children.  

 

A growing percentage of women today are not having any children. In 2004, almost one out of five women in their early forties was childless.  In 1976, it was one out of ten.  “Child rearing is no longer the defining experience of adult life,” says co-director and author of the report’s essay, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. “Parents today feel out of synch with the larger adult world.”

I had intended to write a more lengthy post on this report.  But then I ran across another blogger who had already done it. Steve and Candice have a wonderful blog called Why Family with a long list of good posts. I decided to create a link with them and keep up with their thinking.

Procrastination: Finding Your ‘Round Tuit

The talk by that title that I presented last week as part of The Meadows Lecture Series in Plano, Texas turned out to be a wonderful experience for me. I had planned to enter this post last Wednesday, but . . . well, what I can say? The group was very responsive and interactive. The topic was fun. I enjoyed their energy. Several points emerged clearly in our dialog.

1. Procrastination is not just avoiding a task. It is avoiding the emotions that accompany an uncomfortable task.

2. The most common rationalization from the group was, “I work better under pressure.”

3. The fears that promote procrastination are themselves affirmed and reinforced by the avoidant action of procrastination.

4. Sometimes people rearrange their priorities and chose one task over another, but it is not necessarily procrastination. The key is to weigh one task against another with life goals in view. The one that contributes more effectively to those ultimate goals is the more worthwhile course of action. Ruthless honesty is necessary to tell the difference between avoidance and proactive selection.

5. Many people (more than I thought) had overcome much of their procrastination by deciding to do a task for only five minutes. That is, the hardest part of any task is getting started and getting past the anticipation dread.

I was surprised to find so many web sites that deal with this topic. Most are fun. Most are useful.

• Procrastination Research Group, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada has some substantive research findings.
• Procrastination Research Group Podcasts provides podcasts of talks, but several people have complained about the low volume.
• International Society for the Promotion of Procrastination has some fun with it but has many useful links.
• The Prcrastinators Club of America also has some fun with it though I couldn’t find much content there.
• A delightful site from the University of Calgary is full of chuckles as well as more serious information. I smiled a lot at their long list of quotations.

Several sites offered “tests” for procrastination.

• From Discovery Health
• From Psychology Today
• From Psychtests.com

I wonder what the need to take a test to see if you are a procrastinator says about a person? Hmmm.

I’ll enter my next post when I get ’round tuit.

Cohabitation: A Poor Substitute for Marriage and a Lousy Preparation

It would be easy to simply criticize those who cohabit as making bad decisions or, worse, being bad people. Instead, I wonder what drives this recent trend in cultures around the world. I think a lot of young people are observing the unhappiness that exists in the marriages (and divorces) they know and are reacting against the institution because it doesn’t seem to work. They conclude (wrongly, I think) that marriage is just a piece of paper or that it has become an outmoded form of living.

Are those who chose to move in together simply giving the relationship a trial run to ensure that the marriage that follows will be lasting? Statistics show that this doesn’t seem to work. More than half of the marriages that originate with cohabiting couples end within five years.

Are they thinking that a relationship free of obligations or commitment will be stronger? Again, the facts say no. Half of cohabiting relationships end within one year. However, rather than judging these people, I wish we in the married community would work harder to create authentic harmony and deeply rooted stability so that we could be a model to follow.

I think if we would surrender ourselves to one another, keeping our focus on God’s design and purpose for marriage, reasonable people would ask “How can I build a good marriage like that?” rather than “How can I find relational fulfillment in some way other than marriage?”

There is wonderful resource of statistics and perspective on cohabitation that provides statistics as well as perspectives on this trend that amounts to a dead end street. The stated goal of the site is

“The goal of this web site is to help couples build strong quality relationships that will grow into marriages lasting a lifetime. Its purpose is to (1) detail the harmful effects of living together on the stability and satisfaction of relationships, in general, and marriage, specifically; and (2) suggest ways to help minimize these adverse effects in order to have a successful marriage.”

In addition, The Institute for the Study of Civil Society provides another good site with sensible perspectives on this and other related issues.

Smart Marriages just sent a UPI announcement of a recent study at Cornell showing that cohabitation is a poor preparation for marriage:

– STUDY: COHABITING NOT PRELUDE TO MARRIAGE
Consumer Health\UPI

ITHACA, N.Y., July 10 (UPI) — A U.S. study finds that one-half of all
cohabiting unions end within a year and 90 percent within five years and may
just be “an intense form of dating.”

Cohabitation is easily entered into but is unlikely to lead to the altar, especially for poor and minority women, according to researchers at Cornell University.

The study, published in Demography, reports the cohabitating unions end because couples break up. “The common view of cohabitation as a steppingstone to marriage needs to be seriously questioned,” said Daniel Lichter, professor of policy analysis and
management and director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell.
“Instead, serial cohabitation may be an emerging norm as cohabiting unions
form and break up.”

If marriage promotion programs hope to target poor cohabiting women, our results seemingly suggest that the likelihood of success is not assured, according to Lichter.

 

Encounters with Nature in Telluride

 

People of different cultures relax differently. My wife, who is from Colombia, explained that South Americans would sit and visit on the patios and balconies while the kids played in the shallow river. I preferred to hike every day and conquer some physical challenges (Click here to see additional pictures). She said, “South American’s would never have such violent encounters with nature.” But there’s something bonding about being close to nature (part of nature) along with my son and one of my daughters. Prior to hour six when I got so winded (at 12,000 feet) that I couldn’t talk beyond a grunt, we had some good philosophical talks. He warned me of the dangers of drawing “universal principles” from correlates from two different fields. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help seeing the complementary harmony of colors from opposite sides of the color wheel as an illustration of how people with opposite characteristics often attract to each other and form very compatible relationships. I want to believe that differences need not constitute problems; they simply pose a challenge to intermingle those differences in harmonious ways, like the blue sky as a backdrop for the deep green evergreens (which I learned contain a lot of red — opposite blue). In nature, these differences don’t seem to fight. In humans, differences too often trigger opposition. If we could function more like nature, maybe our relationships could be more supernatural — like our original godly design.