One of my favorite thinkers is Soren Kierkegaard. He is quite creative and this is in large part because he is always theorizing based on his own experiences and frustrations. He was no abstract theorist and was deeply critical of ideas like some of those proposed by Hegel that made the individual just part of the whole. However, Kierkegaard stole an idea from Hegel (well actually more than one). This was the notion of Aufhebung. It is a nuanced idea, but more or less we can think of it as a consuming or transcending of your opposite but in such away that it is persevered. Kierkegaard made use of this notion in particular with his idea of life stages. He spoke about the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Each of these contains the best of those below it without their drawbacks. However, they are not exactly similar. There is a qualitative shift in motivation and goal in each of them.
This is sort of a funny introduction, but this idea of qualitative shift is very useful. It is the kind of thing that we get stuck with when we are devoted to something that is getting in the way of what we want. For example, when you are really chasing the productivity dragon and you have worn yourself out doing so, you decide to take a rest to be more productive. However, you discover over time that your rest is not able to do its job because you are always trying to force it to well do a job for you. For rest to be rest you would need to have a qualitative shift in understanding it. Until you step out of your paradigm of work, rest will only ever be just a strange kind of work. However, once you do, rest can be the thing you have been needing it to be.
I think we can say something similar of the therapeutic’s relationship to the spiritual. To make a broad statement that probably deserves a great deal of qualification, a dominant view of the human endeavor these days is that of a sort of individualistic pragmatic self-expression. It has a positive and negative form. On the positive side there is the notion that we can make use of anything that does not harm others to the pursuit of our happiness and self actualization. A lot has been written about this already so I will leave this aside for now. However, the negative side I think is probably more of a daily companion for must of us. It is more or less summed up by the phrase “do whatever gets you through the day”. Where on the one hand we have the idea of self-determined self-expression on the other we have an ethic of existential pain management.
With the dominant picture of human life being that it is beautiful, tragic, meaningless, and only material. These two options are very at home. They are reasonable responses to this picture. And this picture is very persuasive. However, it leads to some funny things in the world of faith. While many Christians would reject the view of the world that sort of underwrites all of this we often approach questions of faith still with the motivation of existential pain management on the negative side and on the positive side the idea of marketing the gospel. This is not just a liberal/conservative issue. But I would not be surprised if liberals tended more towards the notion of pain management and the conservatives more towards marketing the gospel.
Now before going any further I want to say that I strongly believe in be attentive to communicating the gospel well, and I also believe that the truth has tremendous power to heal and that the gospel even the very truth about existence itself is a word of healing to the afflicted. I even suspect that this definition is helpful in checking ourselves to make sure if we have understood it.
However, I want to point out a particular notion that it a good litmus test of whether or not we have either a pragmatic or therapeutic relationship to faith. This is the notion of God’s holiness. Now before going further I need to step back. Often God’s holiness is talked about in conversations about why he does not tolerate sin. I don’t disagree with this, but if we make this our only discussion of holiness it will only be a sort of esoteric way of referring to something more crassly put as the “rough edges” of God. What I want to recover here is a sense of the overwhelming wildness and tremendous immensity of God. The sort of terrifying cliff-edge dizzyingness of the idea of the greatest, highest, most important being in all of existence that has absolutely no need of us but at the same time is deeply connected to and knowledgeable of us. It is both the most foreign and familiar thing in all of existence. Greater than any idea or picture we might ever come up with.
This is the subject of obedience and spirituality. Worshiping this God is not something we do because it is good for us, but because it is right. Following the words of this God are things that we don’t do just because they are good for us, but because he is the one that defines reality itself. It is when we give self-concern in these things up, though, that we find the greatest benefit to ourselves. It is part of how seeking first the kingdom brings with it all the other things that we strive for. The challenge though returns us to the beginning of this: we have the challenge of seeking God first not as a means but an end.
Though the good news is that God is merciful. Christ continually reveals that he receives those merely looking for a healing of their wounds and we should not expect that we are different than those people. However, Christ is more than just salvation and that is why gratitude make sense. A bandage is used and forgotten, but a free gift of healing requires a response.