The following story the lost culture of Borneo captures adolescent journey for identity and belonging in a way that raw data cannot:
Once there a boy who was born with only the right half of his body, known as half-boy. Early in life, he was loved and accepted like anyone else in the village, but as he grew up and became a teenager, he became a great source of irritation, embarrassment to his family and the entire village. He was always awkwardly trying to attach himself to other things and even people. Eventually, His halfness and incompleteness become unbearable. He didn’t feel like he belonged anymore, or at least like he wholly belonged, so one day he finally decided to leave the village. He headed past the tree line into the forest and continued until he reached a place where the path crosses a river.
At thecrossroad of the river and the path, he meets another adolescent boy with only the left half of his body. They move towards each other, as if destined to join, but upon making contact, they begin to fight in a great confrontation, pushing and pulling each other and rolling around in the dust—and they accidentally rolled right into the river.
After a time, from the river there arises an entire youth with sides put together. Because he has been in the river and has been in a great struggle, he feels disoriented and doesn’t know where he stands. The new youth walks to the nearest village he could see. Seeing an old man at the entrance to the village, he asks, “Can you tell me where I am? I got lost and carried down the river, and I don’t know where I am. The old man replies: “You have arrived home. You are back in the village where you were born. Now that you have returned whole, everyone can begin the dance and celebration.” A great festival begins and everyone in the village joins the dance, especially the half-boy who had become whole.[1]
This is the adolescent journey. Every child, like every adult, is incomplete. Adults know it, more from their own self-awareness than anything else, but children do not, until one day they wake and discover they do not quite fit—with anyone, especially themselves. They must set out on a journey and discover the greatest struggle before, themselves. Often they leave hostile and embittered from home, hopefully realizing when they leave that all their hostility left with them. But eventually, every prodigal needs to come home, disorientated, half lost but wholly himself, herself, and to find the porch is on—to find their way home. In Sacred Fire, Ronald Rolheiser describes the journey home by way of the runaway:
Simply put, puberty is designed by God and nature to drive us out of our homes. And puberty generally does its job, sometimes too well! It hits us with a tumult and violence that overthrows our childhood and sends us out, restless, sexually driven, full of grandiose dreams, but confused and insecure, in search of a new home, one that we build for ourselves. And this is a time of much longing and searching: searching for an identity, searching for acceptance, searching for a circle of friends, searching for intimacy, searching for someone to marry, searching for a vocation, searching for a career, searching for the right place to live, searching for financial security, and searching for something to give us substance and meaning—in a word, searching for a home (16).
Prodigals need prepared for the journey away from home. It may sound counterintuitive, but the alternative, in that story at least, does not seem promising. The humbled beggar pleads to his father to be restored to the family, the entitled homebody refuses come in, to join the celebration. He never once addresses his father as his father. He “has served [him] all these years” (despite the fact he had been given his inheritance all those years earlier, cf. Lk. 15:1-2). Now, he wants a goat so he can go find friends, now that it is too late, now that everyone else is settling into home. But he never left home, and now he hates it. And the story ends with no resolution.
At some point or through some process, children become adults. Determining where that point or what that process is depends largely on culturally shared definition of adulthood and some equally shared definition about the passage from one to the other. In many cultures throughout the world, female children becoming adults at their first menses—girls become women the moment they can become mothers. Throughout human history, generally speaking, not long after they could become mothers, they did. Womanhood and motherhood were mutually defining. For males, on the other hand, manhood includes puberty but typically only as prerequisite.
Males are not as biologically bound to a social position as females, but manhood has still generally been defined in most cultures precisely in such terms. However, puberty does not tend to have the effect of making growing boys agreeable to the terms placed on them by parents and society at large. Throughout human history there has been seemingly universal recognition that boys do not automatically land in a culture’s definition of manhood, evident in various forms of male “puberty initiations” that can be found throughout human history and across the globe (cf. Eliade 2-4; 108-109). Age does not accomplish a recognizable adult any more than sex accomplishes a recognizable father. Boys need intentional guidance in their journey to manhood, if, that is, they are going to become men who will be as socially committed to their families and communities as women are biologically bound to such. Boys need initiated. (Many cultures do have forms of female initiation, as well, but presumably because the typical lessons coming-of-age initiations are designed to teach are all inherently learned in pregnancy and childbearing (human connectedness, self-sacrifice for the sake of others, life is painful, etc.), it has not been as widely regarded as necessary to lead emerging female adults through initiation processes designed to teach them such lessons.)
The form such initiations take depends on how a given culture defines adulthood. In the Maasai tribe of Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania, for example, the boundary between boyhood and manhood traditionally was a lion hunt.[2] A boy leaves for the hunt with a group of men to and returns from the hunt as a man among men, more specifically, a warrior—that is the culturally shared definition of a Maasai male adult. As a tribe whose survival has historically depended on their men hunting and fighting, risking their lives for the sake of the tribe, the lion hunt is a rite of passage suited to the formation of youth in their journey to adulthood, according to a shared social vision. A shared social vision is the basis for shared cultural definitions of adulthood and otherwise.
In the cultural melting pot of America, by contrast, identifying any culturally shared definitions at all with much precision is hardly possible, much less ones that define an individual’s social and familial responsibilities. Puberty, it is recognized, commences the process into adulthood but where that process ends is not clear. The term for this nebulous and, of itself at least, aimless “stage” is called adolescence. But defining the term is as difficult as defining adulthood. As Laurence Steinberg points out in Age of Opportunity, modern “experts define adolescence as beginning in biology and ending in culture” (47)—not much of a definition of terms, but it does seem to reflect a universal observation throughout the disciplines. Arnold Van Gennep, anthropologist and one of the pioneers in research on rites of passage (see below), demonstrates in multiple examples his claim that “physiological puberty and ‘social puberty’ are essentially different and only rarely converge” (Van Gennep, 65; cf., 66-73, 80-85).
Given the nature of a pluralistic society and resultant blurring lines of all cultural boundaries, if any univocal cultural definitions can be identified in America it is likely only with recourse to legal (rather than cultural) boundaries—since legal boundaries in America both transcend and shape every American subculture—and if that is case, practically speaking, the legal boundaries that mark the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood can be identified at a particular point: at 12:00 AM on their eighteenth birthday, adolescent youth in America cross the threshold and become adults. At that point, as legal adults, they can now exercise their newfound rights as an adult—vote, change their name, move out of their parents’ or legal guardians’ house, book a room, enter an “adults-only” place of commerce, get married, get a divorce, bet on a horse, join the military, buy cigarettes, and so on—and go to prison.
Adulthood in America, if not clearly defined, is largely associated with an increase in individual rights or “personal liberties.” In that light, the social vision of adulthood is indeed bound to one of the few culturally shared definitions that can still generally found in America: freedom—in that strict American sense spelled out in Declaration of Independence. The social vision shaping America’s definition of adulthood, in a word: the autonomous self in pursuit of the American Dream. Both women and men have been freed by and large from their responsibilities within the nuclear family, including raising children that born or even birthing children that are in utero. Manhood and womanhood have become legally, and increasingly therefore culturally, severed from any communally defined roles according to a socially shared vision of life, including the most basic roles of fatherhood and motherhood.
The notion of adulthood being characterized by personal liberties is a relatively new idea in human culture. Historically, adulthood has been characterized most not by an increase in individual rights but social responsibilities. It is not hard to imagine how pluralism, as a political philosophy designed to protect individual rights and guard against group discrimination, would inevitably, if paradoxically, both nurture social integration and at the same time social fragmentation. The rights of the individual prevent discrimination from the outside on the basis of group identity and thus open up intermingling highways of social integration. Those same rights, however, also largely prevent the formation, formal or informal, of cultural demands with regard to family duties and social responsibilities from the inside a group, demands on which the sustained identity of the group practically depend.
Throughout history and still today throughout most of the world outside of the West, adulthood is not characterized by an increase of rights in society but an increase in social responsibilities. Pluralism, as a political philosophy, can only be maintained by freeing people from social responsibilities (other than the largely negative responsibility not to impinge on the rights of others) and culturally defined identities based on one’s social position within the collective. Both women and men have been freed from their traditional familial and local responsibilities. Manhood and womanhood have become legally, and increasingly therefore culturally, severed from any communally defined roles, even from the most basic such (archetypical) roles of fatherhood and motherhood, which, regardless of biological status, is the biblical model of the life cycle. But becoming fathers and mothers to the extended family or a given community has been largely erased in the Western ideal, which has little in the way of directives for elders after retirement.
This shift in relatively fixed generational roles not only poses a crisis of identity for elders themselves but for youth looking ahead into a stunted vision of adulthood. Richard Rohr suggests, “[youth] need elders to know who they are…We are not a healthy culture for boys or men…surely one [the] reason[s] is that we are no longer a culture of elders who know how to pass on wisdom, identity, and boundaries to the next generation” (Rohr 11-12). Thus, in the words of Ellen Goodman, “adolescence isn’t a training ground for adulthood now; it is a holding pattern for aging youth” (Grothe 8). Such is the cost of the building society on the foundation of the sovereign self. Whether that cost is worth its benefits is not the concern of this discussion. Rather, it is simply necessary to point out in order to appreciate the need for local churches to cultivate a social vision for emerging adolescence in their journey toward adulthood.
How a young adult exercises his or her rights, and whether and what they adopt in the way of social responsibilities, depends largely on what vision(s) of adulthood they have embraced and/or rejected in their pursuit of happiness and search for wholeness. Any number of sources can be combined in an emerging adult’s vision of adulthood in general, and of their adult self in particular, which come in the form of both positive and negative examples they implicitly or explicitly embrace or reject as models or “icons” of what James K.A. Smith calls simply “the good life,” that is, “the ideal picture of human flourishing”: parents, siblings, extended family, peers, mentors, peers, coaches, teachers, community leaders, political leaders, fashion models, actors, musicians, etc. (cf. Smith, 26).
However short- or far-sighted a person’s particular vision of their self-as-adult may be, the journey to get there can be thought of as a form of initiation, or self-initiation. Whether it requires passing the state medical boards to become a doctor or killing a rival or random stranger to become a local gang member, adolescents intuitively know they need to undergo some form of transformation, ritual, educational, or otherwise, a perceived passageway to wholeness in themselves and belonging in the world. For most of human history, societies across the globe have recognized this need found ways of actively guiding them through the passage into adulthood.
Addressing the challenges universally recognized in nurturing youth through the adolescent years, Michael Ventura, coauthor of the book tellingly entitled We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Therapy And The World Is Getting Worse, makes the following observation: “our models for dealing with these issues are psychological. Which is absurd. You can’t reduce a collective phenomenon that cuts across every class and culture, a phenomenon with fundamentally the same elements in Harlem and Beverly Hills, at Woodstock and Tian An Men Square, in English soccer matches and Palestinian villages—you can’t reduce a phenomenon like that to individual or family causes” (Mahdi 52). The mistake parents and adults often make, according to Ventura, when they see adolescents pushing boundaries of exploration is heeding their impulse to resist it. He suggests “it’s in our genetic coding…to crave extremes” (54). For any number of reasons, the only way for some adolescents to differentiate themselves from their family is to swing the pendulum of exploration to the opposite of pole represented by their home address. While this can adolescent energy can lead to self-destructive behaviors, it can also function to prepare youth to face the great wide world of possibilities—and threats—they must race head on.
In The Thirst for Wholeness: Attachment, Addiction, and the Spiritual Path, Christina Grof suggests that the virtual disappearance of rites of passage in American culture represents the “loss of a major tool for transformation” and is a “critical factor in the increase of various forms of social pathology.” Referring to the work of anthropologist Margaret Mead, she writes, “on the basis of her cross-cultural studies, she concluded that we carry intense emotions and impulses in our personality structure that, if we do not deal with them internally, we project into our everyday life.” Thus, in lieu of “sanctioned rites of passage,” she writes, “we create our own pseudo-rites of passage, usually without knowing it” She refers to certain behaviors of emerging adults as pseudo rites of passage because they follow patterns reflective of rites of passage found in various cultures throughout the world, whether “ritualistic components of a gang…wearing of certain symbolic clothes, hairdos…danger and competition; confrontation of fear and other limitations; an encounter with death; separation from the daily life of the culture; and experience of nonordinary states of consciousness.” She goes on to point out that “none of these elements is harmful in itself [and] can [even] be used in positive ways. Of prime importance are the context[s] in which they occur and the intention that motivates them. If we were to provide an accepting and loving context in which individuals could confront and integrate their inner impulses and emotions, it might prevent some destructive and self-destructive acting out, including addictive behavior” (Grof 134).
In a similar observation of such pseudo rites, Richard Rohr describes forms of “self-initiation” in his Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation. He writes, “today young men try to self-initiate by pushing themselves to the edges and into risk in various ways.” Rohr suggests initiation is a necessary preparation for the challenges of adulthood, which he generally describes as consisting in two stages or “halves” that ideally follow a distinct pattern or path: the first half of adult life is described as the path of ascent (forging identity, finding belonging, securing a place in society, etc.), the second half as the path of descent (bestowing blessings, letting go, divesting possessions, preparing for death, etc.).
“Classic initiation rites,” he suggests, “brilliantly succeeded in preparing men for both stages of their life: training young men for the necessary discipline and effort required in the ascent of the first half of life, and preparing them ahead of time for the necessary descent and letting go of the second half of life.” Without a proper orientation to the demands of life, which he suggests certain rites of passage are designed to provide, youth stumble into adulthood still pursuing the stunted visions of their youth. Adulthood is thus imagined to be increased power and freedom without a proportionate increase in responsibility. He concludes, “every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality, a lessening of ability to see, to adjust, to understand, to let go, to be human. It makes men finally incapable of the wisdom of the second half of life because they keep seeking the containment and private validation of the first half of life” (Rohr, 8-9).[3]
Michael Meade describes the uninitiated manifesting destructive forms of self-initiation in an attempt to rally community elders around their common interest in the future of society. He points out that “societies that attend to the initiation of youth provide rituals that require everything else come to a halt.” For them, questions of tribal survival are at stake: “Will this generation of youth find a connection to spiritual meaning and beauty that will keep the light at the center of the tribe burning? Or, will they be a generation of possessive, power-driven people?” He provides a perspective on adolescent energy from the vantage point of the Gisu people of Uganda, who have a name for it—“Litima. To them, Litima is the violent emotion peculiar to the masculine part of things that is a source of quarrels, ruthless competition, possessiveness, power-drivenness, and brutality.”
It is also, however, “the source of independence, courage, upstandingness, and meaningful ideals. Litima names and describes the willful emotional force that fuels the process of becoming an individual. Struggles with this ambiguous, fiery force characterize the period between childhood and maturity” (Mahdi 57). He describes the behavior of adolescence in terms of a search outside themselves for resonances they feel deeply on the inside. The inner chaos and grandiosity takes the form of new interests in heavy metal or rap, risk-taking or dating, change in self-presentation and new forms of competition. Adolescents make “harmonies of [their] conflicts, and…[make] conflicts where there [are] dull, predictable harmonies” (58).
Bob Burton and Steve Rogers, founders of VisionQuest, a corporation that provides programs for troubled teens report that the four the main issues they have identified with the youth who come through their programs are (1) abandonment, whether from death, divorce, neglect or otherwise; (2) boundary issues, resulting from a failure of parents to set limits or from setting too rigid limits; (3) abuse, which includes abuse of others and/or self-imposed substance abuse, both of which are accompanied by issues of shame and personal power; and (4) self-esteem, the most common of all the issues, which they associate with youth entering into destructive relationships they feel they deserve “because they have a negative idea of who they are” (Mahdi 204).
Their approach, regardless of the particular issues being addressed, is grounded in a system of honor. This includes honoring them, which itself, they believe, is the way to cultivating in them honor for others. Just as dishonor breads dishonor, just as hurting people hurt people, the same his true of honor. They emphasize the importance of leading them into an encounter with nature. Thus, “when they go on a wilderness quest, they learn quickly they cannot compete with nature; they learn that they must harmonize with it. The wilderness…[its power and beauty]…[has] a way of softening the pains they have experienced because of fragmentation in their families or confusion in their communities” (204).
In Ritual, Politics, and Power David Kertzer demonstrates that ritual elements can be detected at every level of Western society, highlighting symbols and ceremonies in political practices that function to center consciousness of society at large in support and celebration of perceived collective power. This does not necessarily demonstrate a lust for power by those who celebrate and support it (though it surely does for some) but for many it may simply “expresses innate strivings for social solidarity” (62). In this view, ritual is not simply something humans do so much as it is the thing humans do, not simply an act of humans but the way humans act.
The irony of American culture, it might be said, is something like absentee helicopter parenting. The trend toward extracurricular-everything, single-parent homes, and endless entertainment options are leaving many children sitting in front of the flat screen with their dinner. In Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers, Chap Clark suggests “abandonment” is “the defining issue for contemporary adolescents” (23). Clark suggests that what characterizes the adolescent experience in Western culture is “systemic abandonment.” He cites a number of factors, ranging from literal abandonment with the rate of divorce in the West to functional abandonment in view of the over-involvement of children in extracurricular- and school related activities and under-involvement in family and adult-led community activities (as opposed to community activities based around children, e.g., sports and school functions).
Clark points to a similar phenomenon as what Robert Bly describes as the “sibling society,” according to which adolescence becomes less of a stage of life or passage from one stage to another and more of an absolutizing mold for the values and vision of adulthood (cf., 27-38). Moreover, “the more we leave kids alone, don’t engage, the more they circle around on the same adolescent logic that has caused dangerous situations to escalate” (Hersch viii). Thus, Clark concludes, “The young have not arrogantly turned their backs on the adult world. Rather, they have been forced by a personal sense of abandonment to band together and create their own world—separate, semisecret, and vastly different from the world around them” (28).
At the same time, there is trend toward extreme “safetyism” among parents who are at once less engaged and more protective of their children. In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation for Failure, Greg Lukainoff and Jonathan Haidt describe a general shift in American society with regard to nurturing children and preparing them for adulthood, particularly evident in parenting and educational trends, that they argue errs on overprotecting children in childhood at the expense of adequately preparing them for adulthood. They cite studies that demonstrate a widespread and dramatic increase of “fragility” among children and adolescence to physical, emotional, and social stressors.
In one study published in 2008, for example, reported that the “rate of peanut allergies in children more than tripled between 1997 and 2008.”[4] While opinions about the cause the increased peanut allergy rates varied widely, the response was generally the same: “Kids are vulnerable. Protect them from peanuts, peanut products, and anything that has been in contact with nuts of any kind” that has been in contact with nuts of any kind” (20). In 2015 “an authoritative study was published” with surprising results. The LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) study recruited 640 children who were considered high risk for developing a peanut allergy (having either severe eczema or other allergies). The control group eliminated all contact with peanuts, while the experimental group were given peanut butter snacks three times a week.
“The results were stunning. Among the children who had been ‘protected’ from peanuts, 17% had developed a peanut allergy,” whereas among the those that had been “deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3% had developed an allergy.” The conclusion of the study confirmed that “regular eating of peanut-containing products, when started during infancy…[actually] illicit[s] a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction.” The way to prepare children for potential harm in life, at least in this case, is to expose them to it. To shelter them from harm, however counterintuitive, made them more vulnerable to it.
In a similar assessment, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, writing against the so-called “hygiene hypothesis” in The Wall Street Journal, cites the same peanut allergy study and expands on its implications, suggesting, similar to Lukainoff and Haidt, that it is representative of a much more pervasive issue in American society at large:
Thanks to hygiene, antibiotics and too little outdoor play, children don’t get exposed to microbes as they once did. This may lead them to develop immune systems that overreact to substances that aren’t actually threatening—causing allergies. In the same way, by shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master.[5]
Nassim Taleb, a mathematical statistician, writing from a systems’ perspective, suggests in Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, speaks to this issue first by identifying a distinct quality of human beings as complex systems. Simple systems or items can generally be characterized as fragile—such as a glass jar, which is rigid and unbending but weak and susceptible to breaking—or resilient—such as a plastic cup, which is flexible and durable and not susceptible to breaking. But complex, particularly organic, systems, fall into a third category: antifragile. Taleb suggests not only that shielding children from risks and stressors may inhibit healthy child development, but leading them into risks and helping them learn to assess risk soberly but without fear may help them. Furthermore, depriving them of stressors (such as physical exertion climbing a mountain or various other social and physical challenges) may help keep them safe but only at the cost of helping them grow strong. He points out that human bodies, like all complex systems “are weakened, even killed if deprived of stressors,” such as in a case of bed rest leading to can muscular atrophy. He continues: “much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions…which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most” (Taleb, 2016, 5).
Lukainoff and Haidt suggest this trend toward “safetyism” was generally restricted to increased measures to guard physical safety of children in the late twentieth century. However, it “underwent a process of ‘concept creep’ and expanded to include ‘emotional safety’” shortly after the turn of the century, reflected in an emergence of policies and “safety measures” being taken (especially on college campuses) to protect people’s “feelings” from getting hurt, as well as in shifts in clinical definitions / diagnoses of mental disorders. This ranges from colleges providing “safe spaces” where students are “protected” from being to “harmful” ideas (i.e., ideas they disagree with) to unprecedented attempts to compel speech regarding gender pronoun usage.
One of the more telling examples of this trend came from observing revisions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In 1980 the DSM revised the entry for post-traumatic-stress-disorder from referring to a traumatic brain injury to a mental disorder, qualified however as the result of an event that would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and, more specifically, be “outside the range of usual human experience,” emphasizing that “the event was not based on a subjective standard” and did not include events, such as “death of a spouse” because “they are normal parts of life, even if unexpected…These experiences are sad and painful, but pain is not the same thing as trauma” (25).
By the early 2000s, however, revisions in the DSM changed dramatically: “experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful…with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being” (26). The subjective standard became the new standard for determining the diagnostic criterion of “trauma,” which in turn paved the way for an increase in antianxiety medications, contributing to the arguably far more severe problem of addiction in America.
This transition from objective criteria to a subjective standard in the medical field both feeds into and is illustrative of a wider transition in English vernacular concerning matters of human identity. Gender identity, for example, is undergoing a major definitional transition from objective biological criteria to subjective psychological criteria. In some circles, it has become taboo to question the legitimacy of a person’s self-defined identity, because such questioning is tantamount to an act of “violence.” Thus, Lukainoff and Haidt write that “in today’s culture of safetyism, intent no longer matters; only perceived impact does, and thanks to concept creep, just about anything can be perceived as having a harmful—even violent—impact on vulnerable groups,” which include virtually any group whose self-definition goes against “traditional” definitions of social groupings. And hence, “anything that can be construed as an attack on a group can serve as an opportunity for collective punishment and the enhancement of group solidarity” (104-105).
Addressing these issues of human identity and human responsibility from a specifically Christian perspective, it could probably be said without much dispute that the New Testament prescribes as a whole prescribes both an ecclesiologically realized Christian identity and a corresponding philosophy of Christian life within the body of Christ. With regard to the former, David Setran and Chris Keisling write, “identity is not simply a personal choice or achievement. While there is a need to internalize and own beliefs and convictions, Christian identity is always tied to a community of truth that bestows an identity—ultimately through baptism—of communal membership in the body of believers. In other words, identity in Christ is inextricably intertwined with participation in the church” (79). Since Christian identity in relation to baptism constitutes the majority of this discussion, a few comments regarding what a philosophy of Christian life might include, in contrast to the conventional “wisdom” described above, will conclude this section on “Human Identity: Initiation & The End of Adolescence.”
For, to the degree Jesus Christ is understood as the basis of human identity, a philosophy of life in Christ will involve adopting a specifically Christian perspective on how human suffering. Such is in large part the goal of coming-of-age initiations. Richard Rohr, to be sure, summarizes the essential lessons of such initiations in five basic claims that fly in the face of the general perspective of life contemporary Western culture: (1) life is hard; (2) you are not important; (3) your life is not about you; (4) you are not in control; and (5) you are going to die (cf., Rohr 35-107). However crass and in need of qualification, these lessons do seem to reflect a general perspective found in Scripture regarding human identity and the Christian life. The New Testament, in particular, seems far less concerned with protecting Christians from suffering and far more concerned with preparing Christians for how to suffer, as a matter of Christian responsibility. A few of the many possible examples demonstrate not only that Christians should prepare to enduring suffering but why. Three interrelated reasons follow.
1. Christian Witness: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice so as to share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed…. Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name” (1 Pet. 4:12-16). Peter’s perspective: (1) suffering is inevitable (do not be surprised); (2) how one responds to suffering is not inevitable, and as a Christian that response is willful and proactive, not automatic and reactive (rejoice when it comes…glorify God). That may seem idealistic, but given the great cloud of witnesses who have embodied this example (and the fact that it is God’s Word) it cannot be regarded as impossible or impractical. But youth and adults alike need to understand what is at stake, that is, the purpose of taking such a proactive approach to suffering.
Peter makes it clear, here and elsewhere, that given the inevitability of suffering the proper Christian orientation is to prepare accordingly but, furthermore, the purpose of how a Christian suffers is a matter of witness. Since everyone is going to suffer, when a Christian who is suffering is seen to respond peculiarly—resisting the natural impulse to become embittered, reactionary, vindictive, self-pitying, etc.—it becomes a decisive opportunity for Christian witness: thus, “by doing good [while suffering, [you] silence the ignorance of foolish people…For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps” (1 Pet. 2:15-21). This perspective not only has a negative dimension (not suffering like others) but a positive relational dimension for Christian witness in the form of empathy and compassion. For example, Paul writes, “praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4).
2. Christian Character: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces patience, and patience produces character, and character produces hope, and hope will not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:3-4). This reaffirms the same perspective on human life in general—suffering is part of the human package—but speaks, not to the impact it can have on others, but to the potential suffering has for Christian formation. Namely, how a person suffers is a critical component of character development. The progression Paul describes from suffering to hope is not necessarily intuitive. The key is the initial response: patience.[6] The logic of patience (sometimes translated endurance or perseverance) in this connection can only be understood by recognizing that the word itself (ὑπομονή), and especially in Paul’s use of it, is a fundamentally active, not passive, word.[7] It is not active in the sense generally associated with perseverance, a quality necessary to, say, run a marathon. It is not about exercising self-control toward a desired outcome but about not losing a sense of self-control in the face of undesired circ*mstances. Suffering can involve any and every dimension of the human experience (physical, psychological, emotional, or otherwise), but is generally always experienced as something that has, is, or will happen to me against my will.
Thus, at its existential nucleus, it is the experience of being out of control. Paul is describing a paradoxical quality of being out of control of a situation without the accompanying anxiety or worry or restlessness, etc., of feeling out of control. It is the experience of an of inner freedom, and the development of Christian largely character depends on it, because without it, a person’s character develops as a predictable series of “equal and opposite reactions” to one’s (often negative) circ*mstances. That experience is inherently related to hope, but of particular relevance to this discussion (especially in light of the aforementioned parenting trends) is an observation of the corollary made by Erik Erikson in his Identity: Youth and Crisis. He writes, “From a…sense of loss of control and of parental overcontrol comes a lasting propensity for doubt and shame” (Erikson 109-110).
Doubt and shame are twin features of a life that is regularly met with disappointment in one’s expectations of others and the world and expectations of oneself, particularly when one’s expectations of life have no room for failure and suffering. Rohr writes with regard to the first lesson of initiation (“Life is Hard”), “all great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. So the first lesson of initiation was to teach the young man not to run from pain, and, in fact, not to get rid of any pain until he had first learned its lessons. Human life could not risk being mere self-legitimation and pleasure-seeking’ a man could not risk always taking the easier way or he would miss life’s central and transformative pattern of descent and ascent” (35).
Rohr suggests that Christian character follows the pattern of death (descent) and resurrection (ascent) that characterizes the whole movement of Christ’s life, death, and indeed resurrection and ascension. He suggests that a proper orientation to the pain of life is critical to the healthy transformation of a person’s character. Without such, an unhealthy transformation follows. Thus, he continues, “If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it in some form. Take that as an absolute. If we do not learn this all-important spiritual lesson, at least one, maybe all, of the following things will happen:
1. We will become inflexible, blaming, and petty as we grow older.
2. We will need other people to hate in order to expel our inner negativity.
3. We will play the victim in some form as a means of false power.
4. We will spend much of our life seeking security and status as a cover-up for lack of a substantial sense of self.
5. We will pass on our deadness to our family, children, and friends” (37).
This is all characteristic of what Rohr describes as the “false self,” which might be understood as the character that develops in the vacuum of Christocentric truth. Rohr describes the false self as our mental self-image and social agreement, which most people spend their whole lives living up to—or down to. It is all a fictional creation….It is endlessly fragile, needy, and insecure, and it is what we are largely dealing with in the secular West. The false self is inherently fragile because it has no metaphysical substance whatsoever (43).
Rohr points out that a “natural deconstruction of the false self tends to begin in midlife,” as one faces the losses and limitations of life that served to prop up and support one’s self-identity, and hence the need to learn how to identify and deconstruct the false self and reconstruct the true self according to one’s identity in Christ. Or, in the Apostle Paul’s words:
But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Eph. 4:20-24).
This describes the essence of Christian Character and—especially in light of Paul’s identification of deceitful desires—the basis of Christian Contentment, which is the last noted feature of in this discussion of how the New Testament orients a Christian’s perspective on suffering.
3. Christian Contentment: “Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned the secret of being content in all circ*mstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation. In any and every circ*mstance, whether in times of plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:11-13). This oft-quoted last verses is not often quoted with the preceding verse, apart from which it cannot be understood. The context (literary and historical—he is writing from a prison in Rome; cf. Phil. 1:12-26). Paul is not talking about his ability to do all the things he wants to through Christ’s strength do but his ability to endure all the things he otherwise would not want to do through Christ’s strength. But this gets to perhaps an issue of particular relevance for adolescence preparing as they are for adulthood. In this passage, Paul does not just describe the secret of being content in times of scarcity and want but also in times of abundance and plenty. This attests to what he describes in Ephesians as a “manner of life corrupt through deceitful desires” (cf., Eph. 4:22).
As those living in one the most prosperous societies in human history, perhaps the biggest secret people need to discover is not how to find contentment in scarcity but how to find contentment in abundance. The relationship between an abundance of possessions and a lack of contentment can hardly be understood apart from some notion of the pursuit of deceitful desires. In Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire, William Cavanaugh suggests the desires of a consumerist culture (which is how he chiefly characterizes Western culture, arguing that its unifying feature is more overtly economical than political) are inherently self-destructive by design.
The basic logic is simple: if the goods and services of a consumer culture produced lasting satisfaction, consumerism as such would suffer. That is, “there would not be a market for all the goods that are produced in an industrialized economy if consumers were content with the things they bought” (46). Thus manufacturers conceived of products in terms of first and future iterations, according to a principle of planned obsolescence, so that, for example, an iPhone 10 would not even work with the characters and software compatible with an iPhone 1. This “is more than just a continuing attempt to make a product better,” Cavanaugh writes, but “is what the General Motors people called ‘the organized creation of dissatisfaction” (Ibid). This is the logic that drives the advertising industry, which only succeeds to the degree desire finds its “substance” precisely in what one does not (yet) have rather than on the basis of what one truly needs. Hence, Peter Joseph quotes Paul Mazur, a leading Wall Street banker who worked for the Lehman Brothers writing in the Harvard Business Review in 1927:
We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old had been entirely consumed…We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.
Mazur identifies this desire in what one does not have in positive terms of a desire of change. “The community that can be trained to desire change, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed, yields a market to be measured more by desires than needs” (Mazur 24).
Cavanaugh suggests this dissatisfaction or discontentment is evident in the fact that the “materialism” of our consumer society is characterized not by attachment to material things but detachment from them. The consumer tendency is not to “hoard treasured objects” but to endlessly collect one object after another in “constant dissatisfaction with material goods.” Thus, “consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else; that’s why it is not simply buying but shopping that is at the heart of consumerism.” Indeed, “possession kills desire; familiarity breeds contempt” (47). And yet, consumerism thrives because “for many people, consumerism is a type of spirituality, even if they do not recognize it as such. It is a way of pursuing meaning and identity, a way of connecting with other people…in relentless pursuit of the requisite material things of the American Dream” (Cavanaugh 36).[8]
In light of this analysis of Western culture in general and contemporary adolescent culture in particular that a robust approach will be needed to cultivate Christian identity among youth in local churches. Children in the West are being raised in a culture according to which they will, apart from an intentional cultural disruption, be ill-prepared to face the inevitable pains and discomforts of life as followers of Christ. It stands to reason that apart from intentional teaching otherwise, they will be inclined to see themselves as exceptional victims to what should be regarded as the inevitable the inevitable rule of human life. In such case, one could not possibly expect that such confrontations with the inevitable will be encountered with a Christian perspective and dealt with according to their cruciform identity in Christ. The following section thus addresses what perhaps is necessary in order to develop robust approach to Christian identity formation among adolescence.
Transcending Stages & Structures: Identity Development in Exile
Of all the contributions from the sciences and the humanities in recent history that help describe the development of adolescent identity, such descriptions have not yielded a commensurately helpful contribution of theoretical prescriptions for nurturing the developmental processes they describe. (If they did there would presumably be a growing consensus in how best to do so. Nor should it be assumed, insofar as the reality of living and active God assumed, that descriptions of human beings derived from methods that cannot take into account that assumed-albeit-unverifiable variable necessarily translate to accurate diagnoses inferred from data analysis, much less correlative prescriptions.
There is still nothing close to a consensus in the sciences and/or the humanities concerning even the most basic question: What is a human being? Not this or that aspect of the observable animal, but the whole animal that attempts to observe such things in an act of self-transcendence, that is, the immediate act of human consciousness.[9] It is not unreasonable, at the very least, to point out the odd fact that to question “identity” or “identity development” or “selfhood” is to neglect a more foundation question. It is strange enough that any animal should begin asking and describing and modeling this or that, but the fundamental question that is continually buried beneath all the answers and data and formulae is Why does the most incomparably intelligent animal on earth not know what on earth it is? Below is a brief introduction into the complexity of the question from the philosophical post-Enlightenment Western world. The purpose it serves is simply to adequately problematize the situation, or simply put a finger on the nature of the problem, which then will, perhaps, allow for an appreciation of the more ancient perspective—biblical and global—perspectives that follow, whose wisdom is far more universally accessible.
The biblical perspective in this section will be restricted to observations from a few select texts concerning human origins and ends, without which the identity of anything cannot be understood, in narrative form (in keeping with something more akin to majority world hermeneutics). The global perspective will focus on texts from traditional cultures and early Church history with a particular view to gleaning insight from outside contemporary Western culture regarding community involvement in nurturing the adolescent development process. The following poem will frame the discussion appropriately:
“I Am Not I”
I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.~ BY Juan Ramón Jiménez, translated by Robert Bly (Bly 367)
Soren Kierkegaard, in an infamously difficult definition of the self in The Sickness Unto Death writes, “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself” (43). Whatever else this means, it does identify an important component of the subject-as-object / object-as-subject experience, which is in full bloom throughout adolescence, namely the blurring indeterminacy of one’s relationship with oneself. Grammatically at least, the I-me, subject-object distinction is simple to understand, but existentially it is much more like the “is,” “to,” “or,” “is not,” “but…” that Kierkegaard describes in his painfully qualified definition. He goes on to “simplify” the “human being” as such in terms of a “synthesis,” which includes all those parts of speech (and more), identifying the real reason, from a Christian perspective at least, “the self” (as opposed to “the human being”) is essentially impossible to define: “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self” (Ibid).
This description, however difficult and inaccessible it may be, brings into consideration the underlying condition that generally cannot, of methodological necessity, be addressed in the modern academy, namely, the condition of the fall—alienation and exile. But alienated from whom and exiled from what?
The human being is that creature made in the image of God (cf., Gen. 1:26-28). Whatever else that means, it most certainly not reducible to structuralist terms of “role” or “vocation” or “cultural mandate” or whatever, all of which may well be true but is only derivatively so. If the question of identity is going to be understood, especially in light of the problems with regard to identity crisis, a confessional presupposition must take into account the basic revelation of the human being as a distinct kind of relationship, the quality of which will always evade natural description, just as the quality-of-the-thing a father or mother sees when they look at their son or daughter evades natural description, yet there is nothing they know to be more deeply and immediately and truly real, however unverifiably so. The problem is not parents suffer a delusion when they see the infinite value of their children. It is not that they are blind to the rule in this one exceptional image but that the image they see is the one (perhaps few) exception to their blindness. A simple assertion that anyone can confirm follows from even a superficial reading of Genesis 1, if it is granted as a reliable source of truth regarding human identity:
"Then God (singular)said, 'Let us (plural)makeman(singular) inour (plural)image (singular), after ourlikeness. And let them (plural)have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God (singular) created man (singular) in his own image (singular), in the image of God (singular) he created him (singular); male and female he created them (plural). And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and ever every living thing that moves on the earth"(Gen. 1:26-28).
The assertion is that on the whole, when the average person looks at oneself or others that person does not perceive anything they would describe as the image of God, except perhaps in the rare exceptions to human blindness. If, following inferences from Stryker’s structuralist method of forming new classifications through symbolic social interactions, perhaps it should begin by speaking into life the meanings that have been revealed in the class called the image of God.
Human being, and therefore human identity, began with God—an us—announcing what he desired to create—a him—then acting toward his desire create a them, male and female. For the purpose of subject under consideration, comments will be researched to what the grammar of this revelation suggests. At bottom, the creature that is “the image of God” cannot be understood or understand itself in isolation from the triangular relation between it, itself, its other, and their Referent. God is the mediating other between the two who see God and themselves in the eyes of the other. It is a communion: in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. male and female he created them. Not even God is an island.
The plainest reading of the first creation account makes it clear that the image of God belongs to the community as a community. The elemental form of “the image of God” thus includes human subject, human object, and human relationship in a procreative union—and only as such, the image of God, indeed “very good” (Gen. 1:31). All components held together precisely in this structure are necessary. It is not a fusion of identity, but a union of identities that is the image of God. Only Male and female, who remain differentiated, can come together to be fruitful and multiple. It is not a fusion; it is a union; harmony, not hom*ogeneity—something like the Trinity.
Surely for that reason, it would seem, that when the narrative rewinds, slows down, and zooms to give a ground account of the creation of this image of something like a family, it begins by preserving the difference and distinction. When all God sees is the image of the lone man, what he does not see is very good, and in fact just the opposite. Before the first sin entered human history the reader is made aware of something that is “not good” in God’s otherwise very good world. “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). If God sees something he then calls “not good,” could that selfsame image in the eyes of God rightly be called the image of God?
This judgment stands in remarkable contrast to the judgment of creation when “man” as “the image of God” consisted of “male and female” (Gen. 1:27). The reader knows, however, that man as such was not yet complete. That is not to say he is not human, only to say that the image of God was not complete. Not man is an island, at least not a very good man. Goodness, implies purposefulness, and God did not say his gardening was not good or anything in particular characteristic of bachelor life, except that he was a bachelor.[10]
After God brought forth before the man every beast of the field and bird of the heavens he had formed, “he found none fit to be a helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:21). Genesis 2 has now made two equally surprising claims about what typically is described in paradisiacal terms. Not only is this lone man “unfit” to be called the very image of God. But the man himself was looking for something, and apparently for a long time, as long as it takes to name “every beast of the fields and birds of the air” (Gen. 2:19). In other words, what God called not good sent the man on a search. It awoke the first desire. But he will not find his desire apart from divine intervention, apart from one who will mediate between the two, in a third perhaps most surpring way. The image turns dark and, by any ordinary reading, rather graphic. God puts the man under the knife. He carved out the a piece of the man’s rib—that place that guards the heart—to make from it the woman, who, like Jesus, was in the bosom of her beloved (cf. Jn. 1:18)—not a confusion, nor fragmented into a diffusion, but the two become two so they can become one. That is the image that is fitting to be called the image of the God who is love. Love requires (in its finite form) separation of subject and object, object and subject, because love must be reciprocally given and received in mutually self-giving. Thus, he raised both to life anew to share life of love and love of life God’s very good world as God’s image. The first song was sung: “Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). This is the aesthetic image of love, self-donating, without smothering. And in remarkably similar language to what the bride of Christ would day come to use to describe the nature of the bond with their beloved—hypostatic union—Adam, breaks out in song: “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman because she was taken out of the man”—the body of Adam broken for Eve; the blood of Adam shed for Eve. He shared his life, he shared his name, and together they shared love. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24; Eph. 5:32).
Everything was in perfect balance. Men, not women, would leave, disentangling themselves from family ties, becoming vulnerable like Adam became for Eve (though it does not appear he had much say in the matter), becoming a single one before uniting two as one. It is no surprise Erikson suggests the first crisis after identity is intimacy. “It is only when identity formation is well on its way that true intimacy—which is really a counterpointing as well as a [union][11] of identities—is possible” (135). As Henri Nouwen writes in Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life: “When our loneliness drives us away from ourselves into the arms of our companions in life, we are, in fact, driving ourselves into excruciating relationships, tiring friendships and suffocating embraces…No friend or lover, no husband or wife, no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness. And by burdening others with these divine expectations…we might inhibit the expression of free friendship and love and evoke instead feelings of inadequacy and weakness” (30).
Weakness and inadequacy. That is what alienation feel like, especially in the desert, and they were about to find out firsthand. The temptation that swayed them was to live without boundaries. They had been given all the trees in God’s very good world, minus one, the tree that reminded them all other trees were a gift, the tree that reminded them that God was God and they were not; they were his image. They could call things whatever name they so chose, but they could not call things good. God was the arbiter of good and otherwise, and as yet there was nothing evil, except the freedom to become something they were not, death, which was evil; and the serpent deceived the woman, while the man stood watch, silent—the only one whom God had explicitly told not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, just before he named all the animals (including the serpent?). But the serpent tempted them, claiming “God knows that when you eat of [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] you will be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). They crossed the boundary, trying to fuse into an identity other than the one they were given. They had been created like God, but wanted to become like gods in a different way, not based on relationship with God and with one another, which is the only way to be like God, as 1 John says, that to see him is to be like him: “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn. 3:2). They chose not to receive all they had been give, but to take the one thing they had not. And they ate. The bond was broken and the two unequal yokes exposed.
“And the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed themselves fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths… therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.” (Gen. 3:7). The only thing they saw was what good knew: they had become unlike God, diffused, halved, incomplete, weak and inadequate, and tragically because they had forgotten, willfully or not, they were already like him. But only God himself can determine how to be like God. And to find completeness in a crisis of incompleteness, there are no amount of garments that can cover the infinite outer darkness that the infinite God alone can cross.
The identity crisis of adolescence is, perhaps, has something to do with an awakening to the awareness of the human condition, which may be why some cultures associated it with demon possession (see below)! The sense, a subjective revelation of the fall—in precisely the sense of the self as object as described in Genesis 3: their eyes were opened, they knew they were naked, they covered themselves. This preoccupation of human life begins in earnest in adolescence—eyes open to see the whole world as if for the first time aware of its possibilities, only to be struck at once with an even more glaring awareness that everyone is looking at “me”—naked!—and so a long dialectical process of adding to the self to cover up the self, while reaching out to others trying to complete the self, commences. It is a tension between identity and belonging, of discovery and recovery.
To have a name is no longer enough, to be a son or daughter, brother or sister, is no longer enough, either to feel whole in oneself or to belong with others. But nothing will be enough until they “put on Christ” (Rom. 13:14), indeed until God himself comes to them in their nakedness with “garments of skins and clothes them (Gen. 3:21). The journey of their desire is not something that can be taken, but as it was in the beginning so too in the end—and in the middle, on the road back to wholeness: “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10:30); “Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, as we are…just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us” (Jn. 17:11-21).
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[1] Adapted from Crossroads: Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage (Mahdi, xxi). Stories like this describe many of the elements of adolescent development in a way raw data, even personal testimony, from modern methods of study cannot. The descriptions in such traditional stories come form from obversions of life over centuries and throughout generations, and thus are not restricted to the same limitations of time and subset representations of sample groups. That is not to say they are more or less useful or accurate, rather simply to say that they represent a kind of methodology that has a certain level of irrefutable legitimacy, what G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy describes in a defense of tradition (in a different application) as “the democracy of the dead” (77).
[2] Lion hunting was outlawed in Kenya in 1977. The “Wildlife Act [in Tanzania] allows traditional groups to obtain hunting rights” (Oryx, Volume 47, Issue 4).
[3] It is telling that in recent history the Cambridge Dictionary included an entry for the term “kidult: an adult who likes doing or buying things that are intended for children”; and the Oxford English Dictionary includes an entry for the term “adultescent: A blend ofadultandadolescent, the nounadultescentdenotes an adult who has retained the interests, behaviour or lifestyle of adolescence.” Just as telling, with regard to the latter, is their theory of where the term originated: originated as a marketing term because the earliest instance that it has recorded is fromPrecision Marketingof 17thJune 1996: Consider the importance ofadultescentsto the music biz—they make up over a third of the audience at gigs, but have more cash to spend than teenagers” (Tréguer).
[4] Quote from source cited in book (https://www.webmd.com/allergies/news/20100514/peanut-allergies-in-kids-on-the-rise#1)
[5] Gopnick, A. (2016, August 31). Should we let toddlers play with saws and knives? The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/should-we-let-toddlers-play-with-saws-and-knives-1472654945
[6] It should be said, however, that Paul presupposes such a response applies only to those who “have been justified by faith…[and] have peace with God” and, moreover, have opened themselves up to receive “the love of God…poured into [their] hearts by the Holy Spirit,” so the logic of the progression depends on prior faith (Rom. 5:1, 5).
[7] ὑπομονή: 1. the ability or capacity to hold out or bear up in the face of difficulty, patience, endurance, fortitude, steadfastness, perseverance; 2. the act or state of patient waiting for someone or someth., expectation (BDAG).
[8] For perhaps the most demonstrable evidence of the relationship between consumerism and the cultivation and formation of human desire, see Arthur Asa Berger’s discussion regarding the purpose of the advertising industry in “manufacturing desire” in Manufacturing Desire: Media, Culture, and Everyday Life (Berger, 57-70).
[9] See, e.g., Hart The Experience of God (157-158): “[It] should be obvious, even to the most committed believer in empirical method…there is an absolute qualitative abyss between the objective facts of neurophysiology and the subjective experience of being a conscious self, and so a method capable of providing a model of only the former can never produce an adequate causal narrative of the latter. While one may choose to believe that the brain’s objectively observable electrochemical processes and the mind’s subjective, impenetrably private experiences are simply two sides of a single, wholly physical phenomenon, there is still no empirical way in which the two sides can be collapsed into a single observable datum, or even connected to one another in a clear causal sequence. The purely physical nature of those experiences remains, therefore, only a conjecture, and one that lacks even the support of a plausible analogy to some other physical process, as there is no other “mechanism” in nature remotely similar to consciousness. The difference in kind between the material structure of the brain and the subjective structure of consciousness remains fixed and inviolable, and so the precise relation between them cannot be defined, or even isolated as an object of scientific scrutiny” (Hart, David Bentley. The Experience of God (p. 157-158). Yale University Press. Kindle Editio)
[10] The creation accounts in Genesis are archetypal—not to say they are not historical. In other words, they are representative. Indeed, Eve is the “mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:20) and “in Adam, all die” (1 Cor. 15:22). That means, it is both about husband-wife relationships and human relationship, human relationality, as such, so it should not be restricted in its applications only to husband-wife relationships.
[11] I chose to replace his choice of the word “fusion” with “union,” not only in preference for maintiaining a ‘trinitarian’ grammar, but the grammar of love. Family systems therapists make the same distinction, suggesting fusion is a bad metaphor, because refers to a kind of bond that changes the structure of each molecule such that the pressure of ‘together’ by each invading the space of the other totally destroys the integrity of both, a different, undifferentiated identity, something quite unlike what is reflected in “male and female he made them” and “Father and Son and Holy Spirit.” So, e.g., Friedman, Failure of Nerve (Kindle Edition 3214 of 4858), within medicine the immune system today is defined as the capacity to distinguish self from non-self. It is its dedication to this principle that sometimes makes it reject transplants even when they are in the service of the organism. But if its main activity appears to be protection, the immune system is also essential to love, since without “immunity” not only would we never dare touch, but many of us would lose self if we got too close because of emotional fusion.”
