God revealed Himself in a human context. To address the fallen human condition, God declared Himself in terms of what He requires of us, specifically explaining that such requirements are in our own best interest, because they line us up with the very nature of His Creation. He fully intended that we should read between the lines of His Law Codes to see His character. We are supposed to recognize His divine character in other manifestations. Anything coming along later that properly agrees with that character is a reflection of His commands and a reflection of Himself.
Pointing out these manifestations of God’s revelation from alternative sources is my calling, my mission on this blog. It’s the other edge of the same sword that points out where things fail to agree with God. All truth is God’s truth; all deception is a lie against God. All truth is a manifestation of God Himself.
I find that most of Western Civilization as a structure is itself a matrix of lies with very little truth. There are places and times where something arising from Western minds can approach God’s truth. Thus, I like the work of Dr. Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who said most of psychiatry was nonsense. This was no academic theory, but a recognition that the disease model of “mental health” was the single biggest flaw in the science of helping people integrate their consciousness with reality. He said the vast majority of such problems were moral, not a matter of illness.
Dr. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled) told us that neurosis was a failure to adjust to reality. Our human existence on this earth is supposed to suck; some suffering is entirely a legitimate fact of reality. If you don’t accept that, you’ll just create new artificial suffering that drives you deeper into neurosis. He wrote that while still a secularist, and this first book of his is the one I actually recommend to folks.
Then there was Dr. Eric Berne (Games People Play). He moved away from theory in the sense that it wasn’t necessary to analyze what’s in someone’s psyche. All we really need is a model for norming a person’s interactions with other people. Fix that and most everything else becomes manageable. The norming itself was a matter of function, based on some philosophical assumptions about human nature that just happen to accord with God’s revelation enough for Berne’s model — Transactional Analysis (TA) — to work well in many cases.
I don’t recommend reading all the books that attach to these men and their work, unless you already know it’s your calling to do so. It’s enough that you are acquainted with some basics of their ideas. For example, we see that TA relies heavily on assumed roles in human interactions. Related work by Dr. Thomas Gordon of Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) fame makes much of the idea of domain, in the sense of taking ownership of some problems along appropriate refusal of others. It echoes that old “Prayer of Serenity” — some things you cannot change so you learn to live with them. If you feel the urge to read some of this stuff, I suppose any of Gordon’s books would be the least wasteful of your time; there’s also one for Teachers (TET) and leaders of other kinds (LET).
Let your cynical side remind you that all of these basic ideas have been turned into a highly commercialized franchise that carries things way too far. Deifying a reflection of truth is behind the warning in the Bible about worshiping the creature instead of the Creator. It’s more than just animals or inanimate objects, but ideas, too. Modern Judaism worships a foul caricature of God, deifying their understanding of His revelation, to the point they claim He is bound by their analysis of His commands (though they probably wouldn’t admit as much). That sort of craziness is built into Western Civilization.
But I use bits and pieces of all of these things, and a lot more from sources most Western Christians refuse to consider. I’m not smarter than anyone else, but I do know what God requires of me. That is, by degrees my discernment of whether something echoes His call on me sharpens daily. I am firmly convinced that He is able to do the same work in you, so I try to express elements of that journey here. There is no franchise here; I don’t take my self and my ideas that seriously, as if there were something universal in my discoveries. My hope is that you’ll recognize those bits and pieces that you can use because they sound like the call of God for you.
