The Table Video

James Houston (Regent College) discusses spiritual formation in the context of human nature, scientism, man’s hubris (pride), and what it means to be a human person.

Transcript:

Dear brothers and sisters, I am deeply moved by the opportunity and privilege of being with you this evening and all the more so because of the honoring that we are giving this evening to our dear friend and brother in Christ Dallas Willard.

What greater privilege could I have than to speak as it were, with the continuation of his voice. When we think of the context of Dallas I can’t help but think of the events of the early summer of May 1962. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought us to the brink of Nuclear apocalypticism. We were terrified.

And what followed the shaking in the foundations of the Western world because of that, was then of course, the Student Revolts, the Hippie Movement the Sexual Revolution, the Feminist revolt. All those issues that we now think are of as postmodern were shaking the foundations of our society during the ’70s in to the ’80s.

And Dallas was the prophet for that period. Because in the anarchy, the moral anarchy that we were going through, this voice of the need for the spiritual disciplines was exactly the prophetic voice of its times. And so very often, as it is, certainly I think of Dallas, that it’s great times that create great prophets. And it’s in that context that I certainly give my tribute to Dallas tonight. We first met each other at a conference in Pietermaritzburg in the late 1980s, I think it was 1988, convened by Africa Enterprise.

Then engaged in challenging the growing crisis of Apartheid. He was addressing his favorite theme of the spiritual disciplines, while I was with him on a complementary theme of the spiritual classics. And we certainly embraced each other straight away. During that leisurely week of initial friendship it led later to numerous strangers constantly saying to me, oh you must know Dallas Willard, you speak like him on the same themes.

And that was indeed more than a complement, for it gave me reassurance that we were certainly speaking on the same wave length in counter-cultural kind of way. And so as a Christian philosopher, dear Dallas has been such a bright beacon as we’ve heard tonight, for the pursuit of godliness. And we certainly will continue to sorely miss his presence. When John Coe first brought his issue of his foundation as an institute of spiritual formation of Biola I urged him to integrate it, as far as possible, with the Talbot School of Theology.

And so I am privileged to be invited to continue the dialogue in this address. For there was a time when I was on the board of Fuller Seminary when it was seriously questioned whether Fuller should remain a seminary or become a university with three divergent schools going in three different directions.

And I’m also delighted that Dr. Stephen Evans is with us at this conference. For I think it was he, who first raised the question in 1989, in his book Wisdom and Humanness in Psychology, can psychology be Christian? Certainly Dallas echoed the same question which now lies behind my address tonight. Can psychology be Christian?

For some university experiences, as an academic advisor, I have seen the incremental crisis of Christian Orthodox facing our Christian colleges and universities in America. And this I believe to be consequent upon the unexamined marriage of Neburian Christianity and culture with scholarship in the humanities, within our Christian colleges. It’s an unholy alliance. It is the uncritical embrace of deistic premises for the creation of human sciences in the 19th century.

If deism is not expressive of the living God, how then can enlightenment human sciences ever be human enough? Is this not the basic cause for the disenchantment or what Charles Taylor calls the malaise of modernity? And so my address tonight will focus on three issues: Christian blindness in having a professional identity that is not primarily to use polling language in Christ; Cultural blindness in the shallow understanding of human depravity on what has been throughout this century, this last century, a secure continent.

And thirdly, the postmodern shift from social ethics, the nominations and ideologies towards the personal, the converted, and the committed as the reshaping of Christian identity for each Christian. Because we’re here then, to focus upon psychology, we will start by looking at what is the Christian blindness in having a professional identity. In focusing of course on this one profession, we could say that the same critiques could be applied to many more of our disciplines. As it is, you may be judging me already as being fairly presumptuous. After all I’m not at all trained as a psychologist so I’m speaking from the outside.

But let me share with you what are some of the hidden assumptions in psychological professionalism. For when we examine the interface between Christian soul care and formation and the disciplines of psychology, we face profound inconsistencies. Weber, in seeking a place for religions, spoke of the iron cage of rationalism. But I believe that we are in a subtle trap in extending ourselves to embrace the iron cage of professionalism. Perhaps we are like the proverbial blind man describing the elephant.

Each psychological discipline, whether it be clinical or social, experimental, cognitive, or developmental psychology is biased towards a particular professional viewpoint. All assume we know what it means to be human. If then ones personal identity is so restrained, all ones perspective of the human spirit become distorted and even blinded. But to engage in critical thinking about the hidden assumptions of each of these disciplines is to make ones own professional identity too vulnerable for sustained exposure.

An example of this is the irony that lies behind the history of Erickson’s redirection from being a psychoanalyst to being a specialist in identity studies Which marked his new approach when he started researching on the Young Man Luther in 1956. For in mid-life crisis, Erickson was discovering that his professional identity was coming under discredit. It wasn’t Luther’s, it was probably his that he was more motivated about. Because psychoanalysis was beginning to be condemned under scientific scrutiny.

Ever since then, the fascination with identity studies reflects, among other things, the precariousness of having only a professional identity. In a very different book that I have written recently with a physiatrist on the challenge of aging to the church: we’re overpopulated with seniors who’ve lost their identity, it’s a new subtle form of apartheid for people who have no identity other than the pursuit of starting out their lives with coffee spoons at Starbucks in the morning and their only monument lasts couples in the afternoon. As a senior, we’re getting overpopulated with seniors.

But more serious is the professional blindness already alluded to. So let me expand, in the discipline of psychotherapy, the Martial law observed in 1976 that with the crisis of conventional morality, psychotherapists have become the new moral authorities of secular priests. Then a series of writers began to recognize that the profession was accorded primacy within in mythic cult of self-fulfillment.

And if each individual being seen as the center of his or her own universe, it was what the physiatrist Philip Cushman called the bounded masterful self. Further reactions have been towards virtual ethics are being value free but such tend to be moral chatter, vulnerable to cultural change not grounded in basic human values.

Or take the dilemma of social psychology, which assumes the human being is social and yet dealing with individuals having individual properties. As Paul Ricoeur has observed of sociology, it has no reference of the neighbor as a moral category, for one does not have a neighbor, one makes ones self someones neighbor. Indeed the world of the personal is indefinable in sociology. One of the finding fathers of sociology, Georg Simmel, was largely ignored in his generation because he was trying to give due diligence to individuation in a culture of bias towards sociality.

Which the more popular fathers of sociology like Camp and Durkheim and Weber were all advocating. They were dealing with the rise of the urban industrial expansion of the masses in new systematized forms of knowledge. But in contrast, Simmel’s non-conformity was seeking to cultivate morally educated individuals within society.

He saw the uniqueness of the human as being far more complex than what socio, modern sociologist’s could compromise with in their notions of atomism, social and information. The former is the idea that society is composed of self contained units called individuals, each seeking their own purposes, while the latter is tied up with the general liberalist, liberationist, individualist society, that is now so prevalent.

Both types of agent fit well into Cartesian hyper cognitive and instrumental self of both our modern and postmodern cultures. Again, in cognitive, as a psychology, the Pongchong for the scientific study of the human is as strong as in other branch of psychology. Have we got, sorry, have I got the next one? Its focus is upon memory, perception, attention, learning and their disorders.

But his reliance of efficient causation and mechanism enhanced greatly by the artificial intelligence gained in computer science, and now also by neuroscience, all exaggerate individualism. It presupposes what Charles Taylor has called the punch itself, a self viewed as free and rational to the extent it can fully distinguish itself from the natural and social worlds and be able to treat these worlds instrumentally.

Or finally, upon the hidden assumptions of developmental, and here we are, should we pass these on? I’m sorry, I’m not used to this high-tech stuff, I don’t belong quite to that generation. Or finally, we have developmental psychology, what originally Piaget calls genetic epistemology. Trained as a biologist Piaget argues thus simulation and adaption are essential biological functions which are applicable to the development of human intelligence. And flexible and instable, unstable and inflexible in the child, they become stabilized with adult development through the four stages of childhood that he maps out.

As a liberal pro descent, he desired a reconciliation of religion with science, arguing God to be imminent, not transcendent. So the questions about God should not be sought biblically but simply empirically. Corresponding to August Camps, Three Stages of Man is a theological and metaphysical, and the scientific or positivistic Piaget posited three moral stages of the animistic or magical: the religious, morality, and the morality of social reciprocity.

It was when Nietzsche announced God is dead in 1882 that the theories of these physiologists were then coming too life. Today however, there’s growing reaction to these narrow views of personal reality. From many different distinct perspectives such are high regard participatory philosophy of complex engagement with the world, or Clifford Gearts’s stratigraphic control models of the self or the moral space of Taylor, or the self as the other in the thinking of Lebanese and Paul Ricouer Gaining more clarity about ourself tends then to lead developmental psychology fragmented than in quid as expressive of a lack of moral cohesion.

Further blindness is of course the result of scientism being so significant in the rise of psychology. And this occurs in being ahistorical about ones own discipline. For doing ones profession is not the same thing as critiquing the history of each profession.

That is seeing its own subculture arising from within a specific temporal context. This is more than simply knowing that Wundt created the first laboratory in 1879 in Leipzig for experimental psychology. Or that Freud first developed interest in interpretation of dreams at the end of the 19th century for his further elaboration of psychoanalysis.

Or that William James first began to explore varieties of human consciousness about the same time. What we have to recognize is that each has a historical, contextual development that we’re creating new subcultures, each having their own social concerns as ideas whose time had come to be explored. Something new had appeared which challenged exploration of a new territory in need of being known in the ongoing history of ideas.

Historically, psychology is as old as philosophy, both arising from the Western classical tradition. But the new prominence given to psychology as a science as an independent series of disciplines in the latter 19th century, gave psychology the opportunity to seek a similar emancipation from philosophy. Now the mirage appeared as in being ahistorical, psychology could become also a new series of sciences.

The assumption was then added that method uncovers truth, which then deepened the pursuit of empirical knowledge as the scientific method to follow. Yet even in science, verification is less capable of application the more complex a system becomes. So now many scholars within psychology readily grant that human beings are less subject to falsification, a corollary of verification and simply physical systems.

Mathematical models also can only go so far in interpreting human behavior. If you’ve ever visited Eugene Peterson at his Montana farm there’s a bus in the morning and Eugene is landed with his visitor for the rest of the day. There’s only one bus out at night. So, he starts with a basic question. And so Eugene said to this young innocent sociologist from Alberta, “Oh you’ve come to see me, what’s your specialty? “Statistics, oh, well then I reckon “your profession resembles pornography, twice over, “for you promise intimacy but you don’t deliver.” [audience laughing]

Without critical appreciation then, of cultural history, one remains blinded by ones own specialization. Especially when it concerns the deep mysteries of being human. Again, without psychology being a moral science it tends to see only the cannons of normativity, not of good and evil. In general the whole profession of psychology then is deeply embedded in the Morris of individualism.

And therefore cannot be a critical voice against our contemporary culture. Thirdly, there’s a blindness of hubris. This is to say taking ones research assumptions for granted and never seeking plausible alternatives because of the desire to quickly succeed in the narrow field. Like the pursuit of success itself it entails a restrictive quest which generates its own seeds of failure by being too narrowly and often too hastily focused.

Recent scientific studies have demonstrated that articles in nature are rather specialized journals are now reporting more frequent claims than in the past. So the number of discoveries that are then found to be false have intensified because of impatient self ambitions to acclaim fame. Such self deception prevails in designing new discoveries to be expressive of ones own cleverness rather than often the generosity of team work.

It becomes a form of professional narcism. In a powerful chapter, Self Deception, and the Structure of Social Sciences Robert Trivers explores how self deception is so ingrained in our human condition that the greater the social context of a discipline, especially in the sphere of the human, the greater will be biases due to self deception and the greater the retardation of the field compared with less social disciplines. Actually, many of the contemporary forms of psychology are expressive as we’ve seen of 19th century theories, whose problems and methods are now questionable.

And so this is well surveyed by Daniel Robinson in his book Intellectual History of Psychology. The whole phenomenon of the claim that psychology is a science, is a 19th century idea which cuts it off from the longevity of psychology as we’ve seen as the twin discipline with philosophy, that is traceable back to the classical world. For the two great actual dimensions of human mental intelligence and emotional consciousness are such that philosophy and psychology should never be separated.

Likewise to link psychology morally with Judaism and Christianity is a much more fruitful dialogue which would prevent such folly as to eliminate the category of the soul from the history of humanity. Likewise if secular psychologist assume human consciousness could only be understood as areligious then they’re also assuming such human studies are also ahistorical. Some schools of philosophy have such empiricism, notably a logical positivism as I was struggling with when I was in my early days at Oxford with Louis.

But as Louis so loudly proclaims against it, they failed as being too reductionistic of the human condition, which must always include the ethical as well. So, hidden assumptions tend to be most hid from reductionistic thinkers. As Brent Slife and his colleagues, in their book Critical Thinking About Psychology has spoken of the hidden assumptions and the plausible alternatives, we need to realize that we’re taught to be critical but are we taught to be critical of our own profession?

And so covering six major psychological sub-disciplines, the authors of this book Critical Thinking About Psychology explore what are the assumptions that are peculiar to each field, that are of course distortions of reality. And so, in his book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life that I’ve already referred to Robert Trivers has a section on the psychology of self deception as a form of psychic immunology that we all inherit in our own social behavior. For the hallmark of self-deception is the denial of self-deception.

And so Trivers explores the possibility that neurophysiology may open up that the human brain itself is self-deceiving in its distinct functions between the right and the left hemispheres. Certainly Freud was himself self-deceived in claiming psychoanalysis to have the status of a science and religiosity too of course can be hugely self-deceptive. But the vigorous denials of secularism and materialism are also profoundly self-deceptive.

Indeed, whatever quest for self possessiveness is exercising egotism, ambitious power and hubris, will all contain their own seeds of deception. Its the deepening of humility, the deepening of self consciousness, the sharing with good friends, the meditative life in reverence that will all help us to be less vulnerable to the self-deceptive traits of our fallen nature. So we come now to our second major topic, and that is cultural blindness in shallow understanding of human depravity.

And what I’ve recently been exploring is the contrast between the whole environmental culture of North America and the contrast that we find in Western Europe. You see, these theories of Thomas Hobbes are indeed of John Locke or Jean Jacques-Rousseau or all the others that followed through the 19th century, were doing this as a kind of laboratory of individualism in North America, which was an empty continent, there was no conflict with the natives in terms of ideologies.

There was in terms of their disappearance and violence, think of the fact that individualism has been unchallenged in North American culture from day one. And think of the contrast in Western Europe where the social hierarchies, even though there was the rise and fall of monarchy and the rise of republicanism and the various other forces. But nevertheless, there were always social constraints on the abstract theorizing about the philosophy of the South.

And so, what also we should bear in mind is that two world wars have destroyed Western culture in a way in which the North American culture was never attacked in the same way. You’ve had huge issues over civil war and you’ve also still inherited all the results of the cultural slavery, which is still embedded in North American culture.

But the significance that I find in Europe is that the destruction of the enlightenment Prussian culture after the first world war led to a radical rethinking of life in Europe. And so a variety of thinkers after first world war, notably Jewish and German thinkers, in societies like the Patmos Club that was set up in 1918 tried to reimagine eschatologically, like John of Patmos what a new German society could become. It is a radical view of the reconstruction of German society Its members were as diverse as Karl Barth, Martin Buber, George Simmel, Max Scheler, Dietrich von Rosenstock-Huessy and Dietrich von Hil-debrand. Some of their mentors like Husserl and Max Weber were also sympathetic and Austrians like the economist Ludwig von Mises were also highlighting the role of the human agent acting not only from necessities but from ideals.

As a consequence European thinkers in the human sciences were much more influential in conceiving of the human being much less individualistically as the agents of social change and moral reconstruction. In America, as we said, this unchallenged culture of individualism has been incapable of critiquing itself.

The more we contrast the continuous uninterrupted individualistic culture then of North American life, the more we realize that the partial theology that was developed after the second world war in America was simply in cahoots. It was in line with the whole therapeutic culture of the self-fulfilled individual, and this whole notion of the empty self was itself of course an advertising development, a device of turning the enormous industrial productivity for war into now plowshares. So, you could see the plowshare in our shopping malls.

They’re our credit cards, there are consuming society that has created this myth of the empty-self. And it’s in that culture that again we realize that much of our partial theology in North America has had a very cozy kind of alliance between Christ and culture. But who is that Christ? Is he a deistic Christ? As the Hebrews were really assuming or is he truly the living Christ? But the assumption that our Christian colleges could adopt that the human sciences unquestionable as a result of that liaison of Christ and culture is still a legacy with us today. So that’s why I ask in this whole lecture, and that is, is spiritual formation still somewhat hijacked by the culture that we’re in?

Now, one of the things that, what we see has happened in our spiritual formation is thirdly that it has been really a device that was adopted by the Association of Theological Schools to really be in tandem with the Vatican two crisis of the recruitment of priests and of the demoralization of the priesthood as a result of child abuse. And the consequence was therefore by the United American Association of Bishops, Catholic bishops, that we must do something about the reform of priestly formation.

So it was priestly formation that gave the cue to the association of theological schools, to then have spiritual formation. And so one of the issues which I haven’t had time to elaborate on in this lecture now is: is spiritual formation not something far more profoundly than the whole question of a priestly identity? One of the issues that really is still challenging all the devout and there’s a lot of very pious and very devout literature on priestly formation but this issue still remains: is there a priestly formation essentially a liturgical identity that the priest uniquely is the one who can perform with the mass the repetition of the in carnet crises as flesh and the blood, or is the Catholic identity of priesthood much more servant-leader or a shepard?

Is it more the pastoral identity that he has? And one of the things that’s come out from recent surveys which is very significant is that those who have a liturgical identity tend to remain longer in the priesthood and to have a more secure identity in their liturgical identity than those who are really more cast into the whole life of their community and all the pressures of society.

And they’re the ones that are more likely to give up in disenchantment or in bornite and sometimes disillusionment. So we’re facing today one of the big issues of a pastoral identity, is that we have now a new anonymous society like AD for alcoholics anonymous, is for atheist anonymous. Who have been Christian leaders but who longer have lost their identity as Christians and certainly lost their identity as Christian leaders.

We had an article in our local paper just two weeks ago of the pathos of a young man who had been to bible college and then been to bible school and then he taught the bible in China and was working in the underground Church for 20 years and now he’s one of the founders of Atheist Anonymous because he’s totally lost his faith.

So the precariousness of having a functional identity or professional identity extends to that level in our culture today. Well I think I’m going to move then on to the last issue. And that is: what then are we prescribing this evening? What I have lived for all my life, certainly since the 1950s and sacrificed everything for is not to have a professional identity but to have an identity as a person in Christ. It’s a been a big struggle.

A lot of misunderstanding because it’s so anti-cultural. The question that we all ask each other when we meet a stranger is: what do you do? We have a functional identity. And so the paradigm of moving from the professional to the personal is a huge transition for all of us. It’s not easy And so, the kind of thing that has inspired me is to realize that this shift to being a person a Christ was recovered after the dark ages after the debacle of the Shang empire when Christianity in a sense became dead or certainly needing revitalizing that the devotional movements like Bernard of Clairvaux and [mumbles] encouraged a new individuation and a new personal commitment. Bernard refused to be a knight because he was a knight in Christ.

He therefore attacked the whole feudal structure of his society and of his own family background to become truly one of the [speaking in foreign language], one of the converted. And I think his conversion was much more than the life of the monastery because he only spent about a third of his time in the monastery. And the rest of the time he was facing the whole European culture as perhaps the most famous spokesman of Christianity in the 12th century, a unique figure indeed. But all of that was because he was standing up to the culture of his times.

That movement of individuation that really was part of the change of his period as of course is the thing that continues. Because, when you’re a person in Christ you’re never more yourself than when you are in Christ Jesus. There’s no greater richness to having your identity than to be a person in Christ. Now, what does this therefore mean for us?

As we break down the issues of our time? Well I think one of the things it does mean is that when we’re talking now about conversion we have to have a far more radical understanding of what conversion is about. The Christian in a sense is never living but in a process of conversion. He was, or she is, or she will be, but always past, present, future the conversion continues. Or the transformation continues.

And what helps us, I think, to see how radical our conversion is: is that we have, which is an interesting thing that Rene Girard when he was asked how did you become a Christian? As a literate critic, as a cultural anthropologist, Rene, how did you become a Christian? Well he said, “I became a Christian “by reading great literature.” He said, “It was an Earl’s guiding Dante “that also was a guide for me.” Now what do you mean by that? “Well it means that Angus in his Virgil and his Angus, “is critiquing the utter corruption “of the Sodom and Gomorrah “of first century BC Roman society.”

And so, Dante uses Virgil as his guide to see the utter corruption in the 15 century of the Florentine society of his day. And of course Proust uses the utter corruption of the Bohemian Edwardian life of Paris at the beginning of the 20th century in order to indicate where we flee from the city of destruction. And so Girard said, “It was first of all “through great literature, “by diagnosing the status quo of the culture that we’re in.”

So, that’s the first thing. But then what in his essay you might be interested to know that Girard like Ricoeur, are both people who definitely pinpoint a radical metanoia in their lives. Questioning the Devoir by Charles Taylor is that he never recites or reflects on any radical conversion that he had. He started as a Marxist Catholic, which is a oxymoron, but then he became left wing Catholic and then he became a more orthodox Catholic.

But there’s a more sunny kind of optimism about the self in Charles Taylor that you certainly don’t find in Ricoeur or you certainly find in people like Girard. And so in his essay, Conversion and Literature in Christianity, Girard points out that the problem with the Latin word [speaking in foreign language] is that it only means: turning around in a circle. As one who does with a translation, whereas truly Christian conversion is linear, open ended, irreversible. So that the word conversion is really two weak a word.

And so, what he realizes that we have to do is to perhaps embrace what the Greek church did in the early days of Christianity as a form penance to use the word metanoia. Metanoia is a change of mind that involves a radical transformation of the paradigm that one is living in. There’s no reverse about it. Every word with Ray has got the suggestion of reversal. You can recant, you can reform, you can even repent but when you’re under pressure, you can change your mind. But with metanoia there’s no change of mind. There’s no change of heart. You’re like Bunion, now have left the city of destruction and you’re on a pilgrimage that will never end till you reach the celestial city.

And so it’s metanoia that produces martyrs who are unafraid of death. It’s metanoia that produces great literate classics. The Savanties is ridiculing the whole feudal system in Darhihorty as Dante is exploring all the subterranean corruption of high Florentine society in his day as Dostoevsky did with his czars entourage in Moscow or as we said a Proust who had this again profound turnaround from where hell was.

So, today as Christians we need to show how hellish our culture has become. And we therefore have to realize what dark forces there are. Now as you know those of you who’ve read his work. He simply focuses on one of the cardinal’s vices envy. But we need young scholars to explore all the cardinal vices as evil ecosystems that have the sustainability and habitability in total darkness and destruction. So, we now today as Christians, recognize that what is pivotal to our life is the cross of Christ, is the death resurrection of Christ.

That which turned fearful and bewildered disciples into men and women that were given a new identity. And no wonder the apostle Paul more than 200 times is referring to this constant phrase of being in Christ. Now, being in Christ is also the basis for being an individual. I suspect that the word individual is a Christian creation of the early Church.

And it was used in the primary sense that you are individuated when you accept the equality of all humans where there’s neither Jew nor Gentile, there’s neither bond nor free, there’s neither male nor female for all are now one in Christ Jesus.

To individuate is to liberate with equality. While to personalize is to give moral space to be the self for the other. It is then your mandate, my mandate as Christian educators, to critique our status quo of the human sciences as just not being human enough.

And without this our human future as human persons lies in jeopardy. May I leave with you this last thought that if we have witnessed the death of God with the secularism of the 20th century, we are witnessing the death of humanity in the 21st century. Without God there is no future for humanity. Thank you very much