Notes From The Real War: The Psychology of Being Christian

 

Waiting for Dust-off

Notes From The Real War

The Psychology of Being Christian

By Scout

There are some practical concerns about being a Christian that bother me. The psychological effect of living the Christian life is one of them.  We are common clay, but we have stepped into the big-time arena of eternal life and theosis.  It transcends all that we do know and can know. It means a re-interpretation of reality.  This will have an impact on our psychology.  I am going to lift an example of this kind of psychological effect from the war in Vietnam. m. 

The Surrealism of Dust-off

Dust-off refers to the medevac by helicopter of wounded soldiers in Vietnam. The U.S. armed forces had the ability to pluck wounded men out of the combat zone very quickly.  These men were brought to rear area hospitals for recovery.  Sometimes, from there, they would be returned to the United States.  The effect was that one moment you are in an intense firefight, and the next moment you are back home.  Your reality changed instantaneously.  

Though it is not technically dust-off, the same phenomenon happened with men who finished their tour of duty. They would be transported out of the combat zone and were processed out of the armed forces.  While this usually took a few weeks, sometimes a guy would be in a fierce firefight one day and a few days later would be sipping beer with friends in a bar back home.  Anne Linscott, a veterans disability attorney, wrote this:

Many mental health professionals in Psychiatry attribute the high incidence of PTSD in Vietnam-era veterans to a lack of “decompression” time. During the Vietnam War, it was not uncommon for veterans to be in combat one day and back home with their family a couple of days later due to the availability of jet travel that was not present in previous wars such as World War II.

While lack of decompression may seem like just an odd fact about the war in Vietnam, it has a profound relevance to Christians.  It is one of the many practical matters of being a Christian that nobody seems to discuss. 

Christians and Dust-off

This World wages war on Christians.  It is the real war.  The war for the human soul. The siege against all of God’s plans and purposes – prominently, human salvation. Paul refers to the battlefield as the “present evil world.”  When Christians die, one day they are combatants and a few seconds later they are at home in paradise sipping a beer with friends.  Just like soldiers returning from Vietnam. The change is instant and without decompression, apparently.  

What will this sudden change without decompression do to us psychologically?  The Vietnam vets did not fare well.  This is a problem with many facile answers, but nobody really knows what’s going to happen.  It is about human weakness colliding with divine eternity. We are, after all, psychological persons and subject to the ravages of human experience.  And there is a further point here that must be made about God and psychology. 

God Transcends Psychology

One can readily develop the mistaken belief that we are ready for paradise.  That we can embark upon eternal realms without trepidation.  Paul does refer to it as “being home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8, ESV), like we are returning to where we should be.  But it may not be that easy.  If there is anything I have learned as a Christian about living life, it is that many things are not as easy as we might think.  My concern about our sudden transition to the afterlife is rooted in the fact that God is not a psychological person, and we are psychological persons.  God is at home in transcendental realms, and we are not. 

What does it mean when I assert that God is not a psychological person? From my perspective, God is beyond human psychology.  You cannot psychoanalyze God.  He is not subject to Pavlovian behavioral modification.  He does not develop psychoses.  He does not develop fixations and tics.   He does not engage in manipulation to get his way.  Psychology is a vulnerability, and God does not have vulnerabilities. He is not traumatized, nor does he need decompression to process difficult life changes. God creates reality; he is not subject to it as we are.  God in perfection transcends psychology. I am not saying that he does not have a personality. He has personality, but he is ever so much more than that. As created beings, our minds are finite. His mind is infinite. 

So, we are not ready for God’s realm out of the chute.  This caused C.S. Lewis, though an Anglican, to conjecture that there might be some form of Purgatory for us all as a preparation for paradise.  I might not align with the details of his view, but I think he must be right in principle.  Surely, there must be some onboarding process for paradise that we must all experience and benefit from. 

The Armstrongist Counterpoint

Let me not neglect to consider Armstrongism.  Just as Armstrongists believe that God has a human-like body, I think they also believe he has a human-like psychology.  The God-as-God-is-God idea of human destiny in Armstrongism implies that we as humans have the full Godly nature in just a temporarily attenuated form for now as humans. God, to Armstrongists, is a super-human power.  God is simply like us, only more so.  Rather than humans having a tiny subset of God’s unknowable, transcendent powers.  However, it must be stated that this is implicit in Armstrongist belief and not explicit. This view of a limited God makes the idea that Armstrongists will ultimately become God-as-God-is-God seem plausible.

This fundamentalist view, held by Armstrongists and many others, that God is a psychological being, is inadequate.  I believe God is a person and his personhood is perfect.  His perfect personhood is reflected in us in a limited form.   And this collection of limited traits of mind constitutes what we know as our psychology.  The behaviors produced by this limited persona are the object of the study of the discipline of psychology.  It is not a surprise that God’s uncreated personhood transcends what we know as the human psychological personality.  

For instance, psychology deals extensively with emotion.  I believe, like most theologians, that God is impassible.  He is the source of love, knowledge, reason, and relationship, but he does not have a fluctuating temperament conditioned by external circumstances like a human being.  God creates reality.  He has no need to make an emotional response to something he knows fully and generates himself. The language of emotion in the Bible is anthropomorphic, just like the language that portrays God as having a human-like body.   

Some will respond to this by asserting that God is then lying if he says he has a hand and he doesn’t have one. Or that he is angry, as we know anger, and he is not.  This argument does not have traction.  That is because the Biblical use of body parts and emotions pertaining to God is symbolic.  They are a vocabulary for conveying principles that we can understand.  It is the underlying principle that is the truth.  And, further, in theophany, God can appear to be whatever he wants to appear as.  If God wants to have a hand, he can have one.  If he wants to portray himself as angry in order to communicate sharply that something is wrong, he can do that. But theophany is not his essence.   In the last analysis, human emotionalism attributed to God is anthropomorphic. 

Summation

We are created beings, and we are not God, who is uncreated and never will be.  We will have the privilege of partaking of the divine nature to some degree. The division between God and humans can be seen in the fact that we are psychological subjects and God is not.  The limitations of our being psychological subjects present some concern.  For instance, how will we cope with the sudden change from life to afterlife?  This side of the afterlife, all we can do is render up our opinion.  In the meantime, I will be waiting for dust-off.