Download London 10 - Growing Up Into Christ

Growing up into Christ: some
insights from psychology
Joanna Collicutt
Heythrop College,
University of London
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Contours of the Christian life for
individuals AND communities
• Perfection
• Orientation
• Re-orientation: turning
• Growth
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Perfection
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Be perfect, therefore, as your
heavenly Father is perfect.
• Teleios means ‘complete’
– Also ‘perfect’, ‘whole’, ‘full-grown’, ‘mature’
– So – ‘grow up!’
• Teleios and cognates mentioned about 30
times in the NT
– 8+ times as an adjective
– 16+ times as a verb
– Occasionally as a noun
– Features prominently in Hebrews, where it
refers to Christ and his work
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
The Christian life is telic
Not that I have already obtained this or have
already reached the goal (teteleiōmai); but I
press on to make it my own, because Christ
Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not
consider that I have made it my own; but this
one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and
straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on
toward the goal (skopon) for the prize of the
heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3.12-14
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Psychological approaches to goaldirected behaviour
1. Dan McAdams: Three level model of
personality
2. Robert Emmons: The psychology of
ultimate concerns
3. Charles Carver & Michael Scheier:
Control process account of affect
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
McAdams: Levels of personality
description
• Level I – decontextualised traits, basic
tendencies, temperament ~ ‘having’
• Level II – strategies and plans, personal
projects, personal strivings, what the
person is consciously trying to do ~ ‘doing’
• Level III – identity or life narrative,
integrating Levels I and II into a coherent
system ~ ‘making’
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Emmons: Three levels of goal
directed action
1. Ultimate concerns
2. Personal striving
3. Action programme
(2.& 3. roughly correspond to McAdams’
Level II)
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Carver & Scheier: Three levels of
goal reference value
1. Idealised self-image
2. Principle
3. Action programme
(2.& 3. roughly correspond to McAdams’
Level II, 1. us related to his Level III)
•
This model is
•
•
Strongly hierarchical
Relates emotional experience to rate of approach
to as well as distance from desired goal
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Summary of models
Life narrative
Strategies & plans
Ultimate concerns
Personal striving
Action programmes
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Idealised self-image
Principles
Life goals and well-being
• Self-concordant goals
– At all goal levels there is a clear relationship to sense of
identity (self-image) ~ vertical coherence
• Congruent goals
– Goals are self-determining or intrinsic, not
• External ~ imposed
• Introjected ~‘negative’ guilt-driven
• Identified ~ ‘positive’ duty-driven
• Coherent goals
– At level of ‘personal strivings’, ‘strategies and plans’,
‘principles’ goals help bring each other about (see
Ephesians 4.16) ~ horizontal coherence
Sheldon & Kasser (1995)
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Orientation
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
From ultimate concerns to THE
ultimate concern
• At the heart of the Christian life is its
orientation
• The fundamental expression of this is
prayer
– An intentional Godward-directed stance
• Listening to God
• Responding to God in word and action
"Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name. Your kingdom
come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in
heaven.”
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Re-orientation: turning
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Goal–directed behaviour
• Metanoia means ‘repentance’ (NOT
‘conversion’)
– Also ‘change of heart’, ‘turning from sin’,
‘change of way’
– So, it is about changing direction
– Re-orientation
• It is a continual process involving
– Returning
– Remembering
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Re-orientation
• A change of perspective
• Where this change is radical and sudden it
is associated with ‘epiphanic experiences’
– Quantal shift into a new and utterly convincing
way of seeing the world, including greater
clarity in relation to meaningful goals
– Such shifts are understood as a natural part
of childhood development, especially the shift
from an egocentric world view and the
development of ‘theory of mind’
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Piaget’s three mountain experiment
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Epiphanic experiences: Seeing
things differently
• Characteristic of scientific
‘breakthroughs’
– e.g. Kekulé, Darwin
• A dominant image in the Bible
– Isaiah 6.10  Matthew 13.15 (where it is
closely related to turning)
– John 9
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
The psychological conditions for
epiphanic experiences and metanoia
• Developmental crises
– Luke 2.42ff
• Major cognitive incongruity
– Parables
• Outright trauma
– Acts 9.1ff
NB Fast rate of change has a different emotional
tone from gradual change (cf Carver & Scheier’s
control process model)
William Miller & Janet C’de Baca (2001) Quantum Change: When
epiphanies and sudden insights transform ordinary lives. New York,
Guilford Press.
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Developmental crises
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Returning, remembering,
arising, and growing up
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Parables
• Jeremy Duff & Joanna
Collicutt Mcgrath (2006).
Meeting Jesus: human
responses to a yearning
God. London, SPCK.
• Meeting Jesus is a
recursive process
• Parables are
– Incongruous
– Paradoxical
– Ambiguuous
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Trauma
• Involves the shattering of assumptions about the self
and the world (Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1992/2002) Shattered
Assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma. New York, Free press)
• Is a breakthrough of reality
– Offers a glimpse of the eschatological imagination
• Is central to the accounts of the journeys to
– Emmaus (escape from aftermath of trauma)
– Damascus (attempt to avoid inevitable trauma)
– Both accounts end with the protagonists
• Arising
• Changing direction
• Posttraumatic GROWTH (Richard Tedeschi & Lawrence Calhoun
(1995) Trauma and transformation: Growing in the aftermath of suffering.
Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage)
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Growth
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some
evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of
ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of
the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity (teleion), to the
measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed
to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by
their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must
grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the
whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is
equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in
building itself up in love.
Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as
the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their
understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and
hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned
themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That
is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and
were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your
former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts and to be
renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new
self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and
holiness.
Ephesians 4.11-24
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Personality change following
conversion
• Psychology
– Goals change
– Personality traits don’t change
• NT
– Goal orientation changes – Godward
– So principles must likewise change – virtues
• connection depicted as ‘spiritual fruit’
– Relatively little is said about action
programmes
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Living out a Godward orientation I
• Following Christ
– The idealised self-image is identified with Christ
– For the self-concordant person strategies, plans,
strivings, and principles relate to Jesus as role
model:
..let us run with perseverance the race that is set
before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and
perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy
that was set before him endured the cross,
disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at
the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12.1b,2
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Living out a Godward orientation II
• Receiving Christ
– I-Thou
– Being known by God
– Bearing fruit of the Spirit
– For the congruent person these strategies plans,
strivings, and principles flow naturally from a
relationship with Christ:
…I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who
abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because
apart from me you can do nothing.”
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
John 15.5
There is a dialectic between
• Persevering in the race and bearing fruit
• Following Christ and receiving Christ
• Prayer is
– Work
– Rest and play
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Bearing ‘fruit worthy of metanoia(s)’
• There is a delay between planting and harvest
– avoid premature judgment
– allow time for fruit to ripen
• There is a process of transformation at work
– unpromising folk can yield amazing fruit
– don’t be mislead by first impressions
• There is a deep connection with the past self
and a radical leaving behind of the past self
– ‘I will make you fish people’
– respect both processes
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Recognising fruit of the Spirit
• There is no simple prescribed relationship
between principle (virtues) and action
patterns
– ‘Peace’
• Might be passive or assertive
– ‘Love’
• Might be emotional or practical
– ‘Joy’
• Might be loud or quiet
• Respect personality traits and abilities
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
Spiritual gifts
• Outpouring of God’s grace
– For building up the body of Christ, evident in
its collective fruits
– To orient, and re-orient the body
– Point towards Christ
– Correspond more to ‘states’ rather than ‘traits’
The Beautiful Mind? HTB
The Beautiful Mind? HTB