The Table Video

James Houston (Regent College) explains his theology of the personal and why it’s so important to develop a deeply personal understanding of spiritual formation in the context of ministry. Moderated by Steve Porter (CCT Associate Director).

Transcript:

Bruce mentioned the personal and I know that’s been a theme that you’ve been talking about for many years now, of the importance of the relationship we have with one another and the havoc that individualism has caused in the Western world.

If I’m a pastor and I’m trying to minister to my people but I have, whether a large congregation or a small congregation too many needs not enough time, I’m stretched thin, too many responsibilities, and yet I’m convinced that my ministry needs to be moving towards this life on life, how does one do that? How do you suggest a pastor enter into a way of life that’s going to be able to particularize the people that he or she is ministering to?

Well I think we live in a culture of workaholism, and so what I do determines who I am. And that mentality is therefore making ministry very self-conscious for us. So naturally if we can be more unconscious and forgetful about who we are and what we’re doing then the whole role of being personal is not eclipsed.

But the personal is eclipsed by the official or the professional attitudes that we have, so it’s a change of attitude. But I think it’s also an awareness that we ourselves are in a major cultural change because I think the twentieth century was the century both of the rise, but also the graveyard of ideologies, that you belong to an ism and this is all there is ism whether it’s Marxism or socialism or fascism tragically so, but even Evangelicalism or Catholicism these are all in a sense, having an identity by association.

The twenty-first century has got disenchanted with that, and so part of the malaise that we’re feeling is the disenchantment with the human sciences not being human enough. And as a consequence of that reaction that we’re facing then of course the iPod and everything else that’s I, I, I with the Apple and every other tech industry, so the tech revolution has intensified our individualism but it could also maturely be very fruitful in more individuation.

And so when the Christian is much more responsible for his own Christianity and he doesn’t go to the pastor for his soul as he goes to the tax accountant for his taxes or to the lawyer for his legal counsel. When we get away from that mentality then I think there will be a robust revival of Christian life as being much more virile a personal life. But of course the personal life it’s also got its own mystery to it that basically the tension of I myself, ipse as the Latin has it, has to be somehow in correlation with the idem, the same as.

Well the last generation was much more concerned about being the same as, this generation is going to be much more reactionary to the ipse so how in that tension is the Christian to operate? And what is personal is that you introduce a new verb that you might call othering that I’m the self as the other as Paul Ricoeur has expressed in one of his books, and I think that whole awareness that my identity is in tension between the unique self and at the same time the relational self. [relaxing guitar music]