Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Free Will and Discipline, The Christian Trinity Way

“I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts” (Ps 119:45).

In the beginning God builds into human personality the capacity for free-will choices on the one hand, and self-discipline on the other, intentionally creating dialogue partners who voluntarily express their freedom within the blessing of his will and purpose.

Because God’s purpose for creation is larger than any single person or group, he seeks to educate people from their earliest years that their freedom is accountable to him and their personal fulfillment contingent upon the degree to which they cooperate with him. 

God does this through the constant interplay of free will and discipline that intersects every person’s social existence, starting with parental rules and boundaries that nonetheless leave room for childhood expression and exploration, moving into school systems with their behavioral codes, and evolving into an adult lifestyle that must take into account the well-being of others and civil law, alongside one’s freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

In this ongoing human enterprise, God desires individuals and communities to develop a holy self-regulation akin to that of the Trinity, who live together with individual identities that interpenetrate one another in self-transcending love, expressing the freedom of creative expression and the discipline of guarding one another’s well-being.

Christian Trinity

The Trinity's Plan for A Developmental Rhythm of Freedom and Discipline

Infants, with their parent’s help, experience rudimentary forms of a rhythm between freedom and discipline. They begin a lifelong growth path in regulating inner states, like calming themselves down as they go off to sleep. The parent ensures they are fed, changed, free of pain, well hugged and talked with, yet allows the infant freedom to find their particular way of shifting into a sleep state, a process that initially may include some crying, but develops into the self-disciplined awareness of how to go to sleep peacefully. When an infant begins to grasp and eat their favorite cereal, the parent offers the freedom to explore other foods, within limits of safety and parental sanity. The parent respects the infant’s freedom to stop eating when their internal regulator signals “full,” yet removes food if it keeps getting thrown on the floor, an opportunity for infants to absorb the discipline of social rules for eating.

Toddlers are busy declaring their freedom to become the individuals they are discovering themselves to be. They frequently do this by testing boundaries; yet they need and want limits set for them, clearly and without much ado, so that in spite of verbal or physical protests to the contrary, it is often a relief for toddlers when parents step in and let them know who is in charge. The freedom they experience feels overwhelming at times and needs the counter-balance of fair limits set by parents. Toddlers slowly internalize this external discipline, making it their own, as they learn the initial social rules of interpersonal engagement. 

Toddlers learning social rules

Preschoolers like to challenge boundaries verbally and can be very creative in doing so. “Why” questions and well-formed counter-arguments can amaze and bemuse parents, distracting them from the underlying reality that their child is controlling the situation yet again. Because the specter of power struggles looms large, preschoolers respond well to a few essential limits applied as consistently as possible. Then they feel the security of exercising certain freedoms within the overarching safety of wise discipline. Their social consciousness now includes a sense of guilt when they have done something wrong, a sign that they are internalizing the discipline involved in becoming an interpersonal self.

School age children are concerned with fairness. They respond to reason and like being included on discussions of rules and the reasons for them. When given responsibility for tasks that slightly exceed their capability and praise for a job well done, a cooperative dynamic results in which they exercise their freedom by complying with decisions that affect them, a process that in turn develops increased accountability and self-discipline.



School Age Children Showing Fairness


Adolescents experiment with newfound freedoms. Like toddlers, they push boundaries: geographically, in terms of distances they travel away from home; psychologically, in terms of less dependence upon parents; socially, in terms of friends they make and groups they join; behaviorally, in terms of new ways to define themselves as persons. This exploration can create conflict not only with their parents but also within their developing conscience, an inner force for restraint and ethical assessment of their actual behavior. 

Because they are now capable of abstract thought, adolescents can better stand outside behavior that is troubling them and observe it more impartially. And more easily compare it, for example, to how Christ might behave in a similar situation.  They are intrigued by and like to discuss the possible meaning of scriptures like, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa 55:9). This kind of assessment process is part of the spiritual discipline actualized in many adolescents, evident as potential in others.

Adults are more capable of integrating the rhythm of freedom and discipline without the need to overly emphasize either extreme.

Sometimes young adults, after a fairly freewheeling adolescence, will find a deeper relationship with Christ; yet at the same time overemphasize the discipline side of this rhythm at the expense of freedom. This works fine for a season, since the human psyche needs to assimilate truths of Christian faith and doctrine to the point where the personality and human nature become more spontaneously trustworthy

 
Free Will and Discipline in Christ

But once the principles are internalized and the laws of God inscribed upon the heart, then persons can relax and trust the flow of the Holy Spirit through their being, expressing greater behavioral freedom, not in ways that are self-defeating, but in ways that are creative and intriguing as they expand the meaning of God-with-us. They take in the beauty of Paul’s insight: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1).

Even in the crises of illness, divorce, unemployment, empty-nest syndrome, and advancing age, God wants people to combine the freedom of ever-deepening trust in him with the discipline required to make it through a crisis. He wants to enhance their disciplined choices with divine blessing, strengthening their interpersonal selfhood, while simultaneously intensifying their unity with the Trinity, for “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17).

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Christian Personality Theory

 

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Should You Witness as A Christian?


Among Jesus' last words, meant to guide Christians from his resurrection until his Second Coming, are these: "All authority in heaven has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" (Mt 28:18-19).

Jesus Christ's Great Commission

But isn't it antiquated, and even presumptuous, to believe that the divine Trinity has commissioned a worldwide outreach that remains in force in the 21st century?

Wouldn't Christians do better to act in the spirit of pluralism whereby people keep their religious beliefs to themselves out of respect for those who differ? Isn't it both arrogant and immature to assume that a core dimension of the Christian faith, the Trinity, should be shared with all people throughout the world?

Not from the perspective of the original Abrahamic covenant in which God swore by his name that he would make Abraham a blessing to all nations. Abraham had faith in God and God accounted it to him as righteousness, not requiring the sacrifice of Abraham's own son of the covenant, Isaac, because God foreknew that he would sacrifice his own Son to actualize this covenant with humanity.
 
Jesus Christ is the Trinity's sign and seal of an eternal covenant that brings reconciliation to God to all who receive him (Jn 3:16-17). Life in Christ is everlasting Trinitarian communion. God has removed all barriers from the God side for this life to be received and lived. But on the human side there are many barriers, some religious, some political, some social, and some psychological.
 
While it is true that no one holds a corner on God, and no religions fully have their act together, including Judaism and Christianity, nevertheless Christ seeks witnesses who stand up and are counted among those who have discovered that God as human takes his place among us, God as holy judges us for our sins, and God as divine requires persons who know him to surrender to the transformative power of the Holy Spirit.
 
It is not enough for religions to have rituals or codes of law for ethical behavior. God wants people changed from the inside out. This can happen with or without religion, but not without the knowledge that God yearns to encounter repentant hearts, welcome persons into Trinitarian love, indwell their human nature, and develop righteous wholeness in their personalities and relationships.

Faithful Servants

A Trinity mission statement today might include spreading the Gospel as a faithful servant in one's chosen profession, perhaps as scientist, entertainer, athlete, clergy, teacher, homemaker, politician, factory worker, coach, journalist, or a thousand other occupations where one quietly lives one's faith and fashions friendships with co-workers that emulate Trinity life.

Since the Holy Spirit takes the lead in establishing new churches from Pentecost through today, one might expect, too, that the Spirit is calling new generations of pastors, evangelists, therapists, religious teachers, musicians, and parishioners to celebrate the growing cloud of witnesses from every tongue and ethnic group that come to know and love Jesus as Lord, taking the Father as their very own "Papa," and experiencing the love of God poured through their inner cores by the Holy Spirit.

Cloud of Witnesses

In fact, there is no such thing as static Christianity, other than when Christians lapse into apostasy or become lax and forget their prime calling. Christianity worldwide, however, is growing as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit create opportunities for friendship with God and fellowship with others as compelling as when Jesus said, "Go and make disciples of all the nations."

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