Enacted codependency

Today I'm reflecting on my experiences with codependent relationships. I've come to recognize that I have trouble with being codependent with people who want to be dependent upon someone else. A recent experience with a new person in my life that is causing me to feel guilty and responsible for their feelings and self-defined crises is causing me to reflect on some things our church has been wrestling with.

As a church we read When Helping Hurts. As I read it I was in agreement with many things, but also frustrated by the book. There are some at our church that are pushing for us to "be a blessing in the Twin Cities" by "helping the poor." My main question as we read the book is: can we really "help the poor"? As I read the book what struck me is that you could basically define help that is harmful as codependent helping. If we all learned about codependency and how to love rather than be codependent, we would not be doing harmful helping.

Codependence is:

• helping others out of guilt (avoiding being seen as uncompassionate, avoiding being disapproved of or rejected) or pity (seeing them as less than made in the image of God) 
• doing for others what they can and should do for themselves, thereby robbing them of the dignity of responsibility  (this needs to be distinguished from not helping others because they don't deserve it -- which is something entirely different and is a denial of grace and a denial of the reality that none of us deserve it)
• rescuing or shielding others from the consequences of their own decisions (robbing others of the learning that comes from experiencing the results of their own choices)
• seeing oneself as a savior, as indispensible, as god to that person

What is interesting is that When Helping Hurts deals only with private charity. But the principles in it apply just as well to governmental help. What I would ask is, how much of governmental attempts to help the needy are actually codependency enacted through legislation? 

But that sounds way too uncompassionate. How do we distinguish between showing mercy, vs rewarding/enabling irresponsibility?

Those who actually help the needy learn through hard knocks that it really doesn't help people to lead with your compassion. You need to step back and evaluate what is going on in terms of what a healthy person would think and do. Is it best to short-circuit the painful consequences of patterns of behavior before that pain can bring that person to a point of willingness to take a look at what they are doing, rather than seeing the problem as everyone else and circumstances? Of course, sometimes it is just circumstances beyond their control. But oftentimes that person and the compassionate helper are blind to some things that the person in crisis was choosing that led them to that point, that if not changed, will continue to bring them into repeated, continual crises. 

So, is modern day (as opposed to classical) Liberalism simply enacted codependency? And is it mostly motivated by a phobia of looking uncompassionate?

In saying no to someone who was pouring on the "I'm a victim" and "I have it so much worse than you do" and "you have to help me or terrible things will happen to me and mine" I was feeling the pressure of others around me judging me as lacking compassion if I refused to do what they thought I should be doing for this person. What was ironic about it was that I was doing more than anyone else around me for this person, yet feared their judging me as not doing more. No one else was involving themselves personally in helping this person, yet I feared their deeming me as not loving enough!

The problem with people who judge others for not doing enough to help the needy, is that unless you get truly involved in trying to help someone who is demanding help, you do not have to face the reality that the help is not going to help them. You are living in a delusional world where you imagine that someone else can do for the needy person what they are unwilling to do themselves and that the problem is outside them and in everyone around them. You believe they need help, rather than willingness to change. So you blame others for not helping. And if you are trying to help them, and it feels overwhelming, you can blame (as I did) others for not joining you in trying to do the impossible, instead of gaining sanity and realizing that more people doing what doesn't work will not make it work better. More of futility does not yield success.

Problems with Darryl Hart's Secular Faith: Part 1

Hart presents the view that:

“…Christianity in its classic formulations, especially the Protestant traditions of Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican, has very little to say about politics or the ordering of society. This does not mean that Christianity has nothing to say.” (p. 10)

Is it true that Christianity and the Bible historically have very little to say about politics or the ordering of society? Is this a historically accurate statement?

This claim of his is hard to support when there is so much contrary evidence from history. There is a long-standing tradition of Christian legal thought going back at least to 1200AD (perhaps the earliest would be the Christianization of the Roman legal code under Justinius in 500's AD), that sought to apply the foundational truths of Christianity to government, law, justice and the ordering of society. This body of thought developed progressively as the common law tradition of England and later the founding principles of the United States.

Most Americans are ignorant of the history of our system of laws, justice and government, even those who study history or law. Sadly, we Americans have lost touch with our roots. We are ignorant of the great heritage of careful Christian scholarship that provided the foundation for the American experiment. This ignorance has been aided and abetted by revisionist history written by historians who are ignorant of the Christian view of general and special revelation, and the positive biblical view of the relationship between faith and reason. Because of this ignorance, historians have made crucial mistakes in their reading of Christian thinkers of the past and of America's founding fathers, and Christian historians have similarly either failed to read the original works of thinkers, or have at times seriously misread them because of their ignorance of Christian legal thought or adhering to false assumptions.

But, if one studies the history of Christian legal theory, Christian natural rights theory, and common law theory, one cannot help but conclude that America would not exist, and this form of government would not exist, were it not for the development of thought that was derived explicitly from the Bible by Christian thinkers over the course of 800 years.

It is to our detriment as a society that scholars, both secular and Christian, have sanitized the Christian worldview roots of Western civilization from contemporary scholarship. It leaves us with no workable basis for a common understanding of how to govern and relate as a society, as evidenced in our current polarized political milieu.

Problems with Darryl Hart's Secular Faith: Part 2

Here is another quote from Hart's book:

Instead of asking what role is permissible for Christians and their religious institutions in a liberal democracy, this book begins with a very different question: What does Christianity require of its adherents politically? … My argument is that the basic teachings of Christianity are virtually useless for resolving America’s political disputes, thus significantly reducing, if not eliminating, the dilemma of how to relate Christianity and American politics (p. 11).

I will discuss this quote point by point, since there are so many problems with it. Today the first point:

1. Hart states that Christianity is virtually useless "for resolving America’s political disputes."

Question: Is Hart right to see the goal and purpose of "politics" or civil government as being "the solving of political disputes"?

Is the purpose of government to resolve disputes and reduce conflict? My understanding of the Bible is that it teaches that government was instituted by God to establish and enforce justice regarding external behavior -- ie- to protect the God-given rights of human beings. Romans 13 speaks of rulers as punishing those who do evil and rewarding those who do good. The Old Testament speaks of rulers establishing justice, just weights and measures, guarding the rights of widows and orphans, being impartial in executing justice regardless of how wealthy or poor a person is. Even in the case of civil courts, the resolution of conflict must be done in accord with a standard of what is just, not simply toward a goal of resolving conflict without regard to what is just. And justice is defined by the fixed standard of God's character and moral law, not pragmatically in relation to a goal of peace and harmony. If we take Hart's goal as the standard we end up with a very sub-biblical view of government and the use of power. The problem is that when his whole thinking is premised upon this false view of what the purpose of government is, he cannot help but go astray.

It is either ironic, or completely fitting, that Hart advocates that we not use the Bible to inform our politics, and then we find out that the Bible certainly has not informed his view of the purpose of government or politics itself. He says we don't need the Bible and it won't help resolve political issues, and so he fails to use it to resolve those issues that the Bible clearly does speak to, and ends up with a very un-Christian understanding of politics and government as a result, having learned his view from the surrounding secularistic/naturalistic culture.

In the very beginning of my class on Biblical Principles of Government taught by Dr. Gary T. Amos, he taught us one of the most important differences between a Greek worldview and a Hebrew/Biblical worldview. This is very important because so many historians and thinkers today claim that the American system of government owes it origin to the ancient Greeks rather than the Bible. While there are many contributions that the Greeks made to our society, there is a failure to realize that our system owes more to the Bible than to the Greeks.

According to the Greek worldview, there is no distinction between authority and power. Power is all there is. Apart from a distinction between authority and power, might makes right. There is no fixed standard by which to judge that someone's use of power is wrong.

The Hebrew worldview articulated in the Bible presents a profound distinction between power and authority. Sometimes our Bible translation may not reflect this difference, since the translators under King James were influenced to favor a Divine Right of Kings view by translating the word "authority" as "power." So, for instance, when reading Romans 13, it is necessary to use the NASB which correctly translates exousia as "authorities" rather than "powers."

In the biblical system, God holds all authority over all created things by virtue of being the Author of creation. Authority simply means the right to do something. God has the right to decide what He will create and what each created thing's purpose will be. He then delegates limited authority to individuals, and to institutions such as the family, the civil government, the church according to what they are designed for (their purpose). A person has the right to do what God has commanded him to do, and other people do not have the right to stop him from doing what God commands. If someone prevents him from doing this duty to God, that person is doing wrong to you and to God and is violating your rights. That is where the theory of human rights originated, by the way, from the Biblical concepts of duty and authority. A vertical duty to God translates into a horizontal right toward other men.

Only with a system that distinguishes between authority and power can we actually sit in judgment over an authority figure and say they were wrong to do something. Only if there is a higher law that stands above the person in power over us is there the possibility of saying they were wrong to use their power a certain way. This is the concept of "Rule of Law" which flowed directly out of the Bible as Christian legal theorists applied biblical truths to law and government.

So, my conclusion is that Hart's understanding of the purpose of government is inadequate and this leads him to conclude that Christianity has little to add to helping governments to fulfill this purpose. He uses a false standard, though it isn't totally clear what this standard is, whether it is bringing all Americans to a consensus, or causing people on the political left and right to come together in harmony, or getting rid of partisanship in Congress. If that is the goal, then Christianity will not solve it, that's for sure. But neither will anything else, because the goal is utopian. In a fallen world, we will not all agree. Only when Christ returns will we have true peace and complete harmony, but only after great conflict!