NINE ELEMENTS OF HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS

 

 

                                                             (Monroe)

NINE ELEMENTS OF HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS

-       Linda & John Piippo

(Linda and I preached this on Sunday morning, Aug. 16, 2020.) 

What we have learned about relationships. Surely there’s more to say.

This is for all relationships - family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, teams, and marriages.

 

9 Components of Healthy Relationships

1.    Love one another. With unconditional, agape love. (No “If-then” love).

 

2.    Understanding each other. Get a PhD in the other person. Don’t judge or evaluate without understanding. To understand is to love; to be understood is to feel loved.

 

3.    Submit to one another (this is life in the Kingdom of God)

         …  with boundaries. (Ephesians 5:21 - Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.)      

4.    Share core values. Have the highest values in common.

 

5.    Address anything that creates a barrier to relationship.

 

o   Don’t let the sun…

o   Nothing is too insignificant here…

 

6.    Be responsible for your own behaviors and attitudes. Don’t live like a victim.

 

7.    Keep your problems between yourselves. Don’t talk to others about the other person. Unless you’re sharing with someone who can guide you in repairing the relationship.

 

8.    Confess and forgive. If you hurt someone, confess (specifically) to them. If your friend confesses to you, forgive them.

 

9.    In all things, speak the truth in love. EPHESIANS 4:15 - Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.

 

o   Feel anger, but don’t sin and respond by hurting back. Deal with your anger by caring and confronting.

 

 

Linda wrote these thoughts about how we have learned to do life together.

·      We choose to love.

·      We share almost everything.

·      We serve one another and look for ways to do that.

·      We pray.

·      We talk about hard things.

·      We read

o   Together

o   Alone

o   And share what we read with one another

·      We talk about hard Bible verses and difficult theological issues.

·      We share insights with others that we have learned ourselves.

·      We tolerate our weaknesses, but don’t let them hurt us.

·      We quickly forgive.

·      We welcome new experiences.

·      We love doing much together.

·      We hold each other accountable to our words and our spiritual lives.

 

EPHESIANS 4:15 - Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.

HOW TO DO THIS!

 

Influence

Maumee Bay State Park (Ohio)

As I watched the beautiful twenty-one-minute film with Bono (U2) and Eugene Peterson (The Message, et. al.), and heard Bono speak of how Eugene writings have influenced him (especially The Message and Run With the Horses), I thought of the power of influence. 

Here we have the power of small. 

Peterson is a small man with a capacious heart for God who pastored a relatively small church. 

I want to be like him.

I want to be used by God to influence people. Don't you? 

I want to be part of a community of influence.

 Eugene Peterson has helped me with this. I have slow-cooked through his The Contemplative Pastor at least three times. I see #4 on the horizon. Maybe after I finish reading Run With the Horses. I can't even get past the Preface, because Peterson writes:

"The American church seems to have lost its nerve. Leaders are stepping up to provide strategies of renewal and reform. If the sociologists are right, more and more people are becoming disappointed and disaffected with the church as it is and are increasingly marginalized. The most conspicuous response of the church at this loss of “market share” is to develop more sophisticated consumer approaches, more efficient management techniques. If people are not satisfied, we’ll find a way to woo them back with better publicity and glossier advertising. We’ll repackage church under fresh brand names. Since Americans are the world’s champion consumers, let’s offer the gospel on consumer terms, reinterpreting it as a way to satisfy their addiction to More and Better and Sexier. 
The huge irony is that the more the gospel is offered in consumer terms, the more the consumers are disappointed. The gospel is not a consumer product; it doesn’t satisfy what we think of as our “needs.” The life of Jeremiah is not an American “pursuit of happiness.” It is more like God’s pursuit of Jeremiah." (Peterson, Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best, Kindle Locations 58-62) 

Wow. 

Everything in me resonates with this. 

Peterson is a crazy, prophetic bearded man typing on a computer overlooking a Montana lake. From his isolation come words for the world. Is anyone listening?

In America, masses of people say they believe in God and are "Christians." But in proportion to their size, their relative influence is miniscule. My college teaching experience and research tell me that "church" is not on the radar screen of most of today's young adults. 

You might be "small" as a person, or "small" as a church ("church"= a community of persons following after Jesus in his Kingdom-mission). There might only be twelve of you. Yet God could use you to influence the world. 

Remember the Twelve.

When I was traveling and teaching in central India I addressed a group of thirty medical students who were Jesus-followers. One of them asked me, "How can you start a revival?" My answer was, and still is: "When revival happens within you, then the revolution has begun." Historically this is how it always happens. Moves of God begin small. They don't happen in mega-situations. (For by far the most part, right?) God could do something in you, right now, that he could use to influence multitudes. 

Remember the mustard seed.

Could a mega-church have influence in proportion to its mega-ness? It's possible, but it would have to be muscular and lean. If a mega-church was the spiritual equivalent of one of the Biggest Losers, then we would have a huge, but flabby and non-influential church. It is a mega-task to maintain such a church with its massive size and massive couch-potato-ness (church with lots of spectators, with more criticism, since non-involvement produces critics). 

Remember the cost of discipleship.

Influence happens underground. God's Kingdom is an underground movement. It is subtle, subversive, revolutionary, and very powerful. This rarely (if ever) happens on TV or the Internet. We spectate and watch "revivals" happen on TV, but televised moves of God are not themselves moves of God (or rarely so). 

Remember the seed growing secretly.

Leadership is influence. Therefore everyone is a leader. Leaders for Christ are led by Christ. Therefore they hang tight with Christ, and the stuff that made for Christ's influence gets into them. 

Remember that we participate in the divine nature. (2 Peter 1:4)

Linda and I were sitting in a Subway, eating lunch together. She had just begun to read Run with the Horses. She said, "John, you have got to see this quote from Peterson, who is quoting William McNamara."

My grievance with contemporary society is with its decrepitude. There are few towering pleasures to allure me, almost no beauty to bewitch me, nothing erotic to arouse me, no intellectual circles or positions to challenge or provoke me, no burgeoning philosophies or theologies and no new art to catch my attention or engage my mind, no arousing political, social, or religious movements to stimulate or excite me. There are no free men to lead me. No saints to inspire me. No sinners sinful enough to either impress me or share my plight. No one human enough to validate the “going” lifestyle. It is hard to linger in that dull world without being dulled. 
I stake the future on the few humble and hearty lovers who seek God passionately in the marvelous, messy world of redeemed and related realities that lie in front of our noses.

"The few." The influencers. I want to be counted among them, don't you?

Frost & the Glory of God

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

- Psalm 19:1

I went outside to start the car early in the morning. The sky was blue, and there was frost on the car window.

I pointed the car towards the blue sky, then took this photo of my frosted window from the inside of the car. The brown thing on the right is a telephone pole.

Then, I cropped some of the detail on the left, and it looks like this.

Now Reading...

 

I'm reading The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory, by Robert S. Smith. 

Christianity Today has given this a "Book of the Year" award.

I continue to read (600 pages!) On Xi Jinping: How Xi's Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World. Excellent. Troubling.

THE GREAT INVASION - Chapter 4 - Jesus Existed

 

THE GREAT INVASION

Chapter 4

Jesus Existed

 

On that first Christmas day, there was a real, actual, flesh-bone-and-blood, physical baby in that animal’s feeding trough. Baby Jesus existed. It’s important to remember, perhaps especially at Christmas time, that this was real.

 

Several years ago, I received a phone call from a high school girl who came to our church. She was crying as she told me about her biology teacher. He had challenged his class by declaring, "There is no evidence that Jesus ever existed." This shocked a number of students.

 

The teacher then added, "If you can show me evidence that Jesus existed, please feel free to bring it to class."

I suggested to her that she bring me into the class to present the case for the existence of Jesus. I wrote a letter to the teacher. When I learned his name, I realized he was, at the time, a student in my Monroe County Community College Philosophy of Religion class.

When the time came for me to speak on the existence of Jesus at Monroe High School, so many students had heard about this that it was decided to hold the event in the school auditorium. 175 students filled the auditorium as I spoke for sixty minutes, making the historical case for Jesus' existence. 

 

There was a Q&A after my talk. Several students stayed to ask questions. They were so interested in the subject of Jesus! Now, years later, I've had people who were in the high school auditorium that day tell me how much it impressed and influenced them. Some of them enrolled in my college philosophy classes as a result of this.

Perhaps you have heard, or read, on the Internet, the claim that Jesus never really existed, and that the figure of Jesus in the Bible is all made up. That claim is false. As small a point as it seems to be, Jesus actually existed. No reputable New Testament scholar believes otherwise (actually, maybe one does, but he is in the extreme minority). Even the skeptic Bart Ehrman believes Jesus existed.[i]

One of the best explanations of and refutations of "the legendary Jesus theory" is Paul Eddy and Greg Boyd’s book The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus. While the whole book needs to be read, here's a summary of reasons why the biblical Jesus story can be considered reliable.[ii]

1.      "The general religious environment of first-century Jewish Palestine would not have provided a natural environment for birthing a legend/myth centered around a recent, Torah-trumping, cruciform-messianic God-man."

2.      Core "countercultural and embarrassing features of the Jesus story provide further evidence against the Synoptic portrait(s) being significantly legendary."

3.      "The claims that Jesus's identity was inextricably bound up with that of Yahweh-God and that he should receive worship, the notion of a crucified messiah, the concept of an individual resurrection, the dullness of the disciples, the unsavory crowd Jesus attracted, and a number of other embarrassing aspects of the Jesus tradition are difficult to explain on the assumption that this story is substantially legendary."

4.      "The fact that this story originated and was accepted while Jesus's mother, brothers, and original disciples (to say nothing of Jesus's opponents) were still alive renders the legendary explanation all he more implausible. In our view, it is hard to understand how this story came about in this environment, in such a short span of time, unless it is substantially rooted in history."[iii]

5.      "Attempts to argue against the historicity of the Jesus tradition on the basis of the alleged silence of Paul or ancient secular writers have not been forceful."[iv]

6.      "Much of what we have learned about oral traditions in orally dominant cultures over the last several decades gives us compelling reasons to accept the earliest traditions about Jesus as having been transmitted in a historically reliable fashion."[v]

7.      "The Synoptics themselves give us plausible grounds for accepting that the basic portrait(s) of Jesus they communicate is substantially rooted in history. Yes, they are "biased," but no more so than many other ancient or modern historical writers whom we typically trust." (Ib., 453)

Eddy and Boyd conclude: 

 

"Where does all this leave us? We suggest that these lines of evidence… provide reasonable grounds for the conviction that the portrait(s) of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels are substantially is rooted in history.”

As you celebrate the Christmas season, keep in mind that the gospel accounts are not human-invented myths, but are rooted in

---

[i] See Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. See also Craig Keener’s article “Jesus Existed,” and my blog post “Jesus Existed (but of course…)”.

 

[ii] Eddy and Boyd, The Jesus Legend, pp. 452-453.

 

[iii] See also Richard Bauckham's excellent Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. And, Craig Keener, Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels.

 

[iv] Ib.

 

[v] Ib.

 

Breaking Free from Institutional Measures of Success

(Ladybug, in my home office)

Dallas Willard's interview on measuring spiritual growth among Jesus-followers is prophetic and subversive (the two often go together!). Many churches, he says, measure the wrong things, "like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts."

Why don't churches measure spiritual effectiveness by these things? Because these qualities are "not worth bragging about." "We'd rather focus on institutional measures of success."

People in today's American churches are suffering, especially pastors and their families, because "much of North America and Europe has bought into a version of Christianity that does not include life in the kingdom of God as a disciple of Jesus Christ. They are trying to work a system that doesn't work. Without transformation within the church, pastors are the ones who get beat up. That is why there is a constant flood of them out of the pastorate. But they are not the only ones. New people are entering the church, but a lot are also leaving. Disappointed Christians fill the landscape because we've not taken discipleship seriously."

Churches, and Jesus-followers, must change their definition of "success." Or, perhaps, abandon it entirely. Like Mother Teresa, who once said, "I am not trying to be successful. I'm trying to be faithful."

"They need to have a vision of success rooted in spiritual terms, determined by the vitality of a pastor's own spiritual life and his capacity to pass that on to others. When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success—models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture. They begin to think their job is managing a set of ministry activities and success is about getting more people to engage those activities. Pastors, and those they lead, need to be set free from that belief."

***

My Books

 Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (co-edited with Janice Trigg)

Deconstructing Progressive Christianity

31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship

31 Letters to the Church on Praying

The Great Invasion: 31 Days of Christmas 

Change the Ideology, Change the Behaviors

 

The first sentence in my book Deconstructing Progressive Christianity is: 

This is a book about beliefs.

Beliefs shape and determine, to an extent, behaviors.

Therefore, understand beliefs in order to see the rationale, conscious or unconscious, of behaviors.

Worldviews and noetic frameworks shape behaviors.

Praxis emerges from ideologies.

This way of thinking is core to understanding the behaviors of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. So says Kevin Rudd in his brilliant book On Xi Jinping: How Xi's Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World. Change belief systems and you change behaviors. Rudd writes:

"A central assumption of this book is that ideological worldviews still matter for the CCP—not just as theoretical abstractions for the delectation of party intellectuals, but as a practical guide for officials in shaping or reflecting changes in policy direction in the real world." (P. 26)

David Chalmers's Zombie Argument Against Physicalism

( periodically re-post David Chalmers's philosophically famous "zombie argument" against physicalism. In philosophy, few worldviews are more frightening than physicalism.

***

One of my academic interests is "the hard problem of consciousness." The urge to understand this poked me again as I read "I Me Mind: The Unending Quest to Explain Consciousness," a book review by Michael Robbins. Robbins appears to have read much of the relevant literature. He concludes, probably rightly, that no one has a clue how to solve this problem.

One of the major discussants is neuro-philosopher David Chalmers. Chalmers is a "property dualist," which reasons that consciousness is an emergent property of the physical brain. The upshot of this, for Chalmers, is that physicalism is false, because a non-physical property, viz. consciousness, exists. (Chalmers is not a "substance dualist," like philosopher J. P. Moreland is. See here.)

I used to present David Chalmers's "zombie argument" against physicalism in my logic classes. I thought the word "zombie" would interest my students. It's a hard argument to understand. And hard to teach. Here it is. 

The “Zombie Argument” Against Physicalism

THE ARGUMENT:

1. If *physicalism is true, then it is logically impossible for p-zombies to exist. ("P-zombie" = "philosophical zombie. Physicalism entails the logical [or metaphysical] impossibility of zombies. See here Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Zombies," part 2 - "Zombies and Physicalism.")

2. It is logically possible for p-zombies to exist.

3. Therefore, physicalism is false.

*Physicalism - physical facts determine all other facts. This means that, on physicalism, there are no non-physical facts.

*P-zombie - i.e., "philosophical zombie" - a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, sentience, or sapience.

If physicalism is true, then there cannot be a world that is a physical duplicate of ours (that is, where everything is physically like in our world), which is not a duplicate simpliciter of our world (that is, which does not contain anything more or less than what our world contains). 

But zombies are conceivable: creatures that are physically exactly like us, but which creatures lack conscious experiences.

Therefore, physicalism is false. 

If it is logically possible for zombies to exist, then consciousness cannot be explained reductively, and non-physical reality exists.

Or... try this.

1. If physicalism is true, then physical facts determine all facts.
2. If physicalism is true, then anything that is physically identical to me will be in all ways identical to me.
3. I can conceive of a zombie; viz., a being that is physically identical to me.
4. But a zombie is not in all ways identical to me – it lacks first-person subjective consciousness.
5. Therefore physicalism must be false.

1. A philosophical zombie or p-zombie is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, sentience, or sapience. When a zombie is poked with a sharp object, for example, it does not feel any pain. It behaves exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil from the stimulus), but it does not actually have the experience of pain as a person normally does. (See “Philosophical Zombie,” in wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)

2. According to physicalism, physical facts determine all other facts. This means, on physicalism, that there are no non-physical facts. Therefore, since all the facts about a p-zombie are fixed by the physical facts, and these facts are the same for the p-zombie and for the normal conscious human from which it cannot be physically distinguished, physicalism must hold that p-zombies are not possible. Therefore, zombie arguments support lines of reasoning that aim to show that zombies are possible. Another way to put this, from SEP: "If a zombie world is possible, consciousness does not in that sense logically supervene on the physical facts, and physicalism is false. If that view is correct, therefore, to prove that a zombie world is possible would be to disprove physicalism."

3. NOTE: The zombie argument against physicalism is, therefore, a version of a general modal argument against physicalism, such as that of Saul Kripke's in "Naming and Necessity" (1972).The notion of a p-zombie, as used to argue against physicalism, was notably advanced in the 1970s by Thomas Nagel (1970; 1974) and Robert Kirk (1974).

4. See the “zombie argument against physicalism” developed in detail by David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind (1996). According to Chalmers, one can coherently conceive of an entire zombie world: a world physically indiscernible from our world, but entirely lacking conscious experience. In such a world, the counterpart of every being that is conscious in our world would be a p-zombie.

The claim of Chalmers and others is a strictly logical claim. Which means: Since such a world is logically conceivable, Chalmers claims, it is possible; and if such a world is possible, then physicalism is false. (Note: “square circle,” or “married bachelor,” are examples of concepts that are logically inconceivable; there is no logically possible world in which such things could exist.) Chalmers is arguing only for logical possibility, and he maintains that this is all that his argument requires. He states: "Zombies are probably not naturally possible: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its laws of nature." It’s easy to imagine a “zombie.” A “zombie” is a creature physically identical to a human, functioning in all the right ways, having conversations, playing chess, but simply lacking all conscious experience.

So if a person can be physically identical to us yet without consciousness, then it would seem that consciousness is not a physical thing. “There is an explanatory gap here that is really something of an abyss,” says Chalmers.

Five Core Beliefs of a Praying Life

 

(Linda, on a Lake Michigan beach)

(From my book Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.)

Since 1981 my extended praying day has been Tuesday. On Tuesday afternoons I go alone to a quiet place, away from distractions, and talk with God about what we are thinking and doing together. Solitary praying is one-on-one, God and I, for several hours. As I meet with God, I carry certain core beliefs about God with me. They are...  

1. God exists. God is real. There is a God. God is. Without this, praying is an illusion. In the act of praying I am keeping company with the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, necessarily existent (everlasting; without beginning or end), personal agent who created and sustains all things. This is no small appointment I have! 

2. God is a personal being. God desires relationship. The Christian idea of God as a Trinity makes sense of God as essentially relational. God, in his being, is three relating Persons in One. God, as a Three-Personed Being, makes conceptual sense of the idea that God is love. Everlastingly, the Father has been loving the Son, the Son has been loving the Spirit, the Spirit has been loving the Father, and round and round in the Big Dance. To pray is to accept God’s invitation to the Big Dance. 

3. God made me. For what? For relationship with him. God desires relationship. He made me for such a partnership as this. When I pray, I am living in the heart of God’s desire for me. 

4. God knows me. In praying, God’s Spirit searches me out. God is aware of my deepest thoughts and inclinations, many of which are beyond me. God knows me better than I know myself. This would be devastating, were it not for the fact that… 

5. God loves me. God, in his essence, is love. Therefore, God cannot not-love. This is good news for me! As I put 4 and 5 together, I’m singing “Amazing Grace,” accompanied by tears of gratitude and joy. God desires me to love and know him in return. God has called me into a reciprocal relationship. Between God and me is a give-and-take.