These Essays: Scripture Colonizes the Mind

Of course, there are psychological transformations and then there are psychological transformations. Christians have been interested in those which we may judge to have been better. Psychology is, for Christians, a moral arena. Scripture’s morally transformative nature figures heavily in the work of Ellen Charry. Her By the Renewing of Your Minds advances Scripture’s aretegenic, or moral-building, purposes, which include the alteration of both behavior and cognition.

She develops, of course, the twelfth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans and his injunction that they are not to be conformed to the pattern of this world (Romans 12:2). We are, Paul implies, to follow the pattern of Christ instead. While Paul seems not to have been entirely clear on precisely what virtue or ethic this might entail, Charry argues, along with a number of secular theorists, that the act of reading itself changes the reader. This happens via a sort of cooperative colonizing of the mind, an interactive conspiracy between author and reader through a text.

The author intends to help the reader; by reading, the reader solicits this moral, psychological, and emotional aid. In other words, if Scripture gives us Christ, our reading Christ in Scripture might be something of how this happens. It may be the case that the Bible colonizes the Christian mind because we ask it to. Such holistic colonization of the mind is true of all texts generally; to be informed is to be transformed, to be of a new mind, often in ways similar to those an author intended. We “absorb” their good—or their evil.

Yet this cognitive alteration is not exhaustively true of Christian Scriptures which also insist, particularly in the case of Paul, that Christian identity is also ontological transformation. The language of the New Testament does not mean to be “merely” moral, though we follow Ellen Charry in saying that it is certainly so. But the transformation Paul concerned himself primarily with was Gentiles beginning to follow the way of Christ.

And Paul's treatment of pagans, that particular group of people from which most current Christians come, is on the whole positive, and certainly salutary of outcome. God’s universal call to pagans precedes both scripture and the creation of the world. They are the ultimate focus of God’s attentive plan, and thus endowed with both dignity and self-respect. Freed slaves, they receive the clothing of baptism in Christ as both liberation from sin and as moral responsibility to aid one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

If pagans are to be embarrassed, it is because of their current failures to live into the goodness of their new identities. Paul chides them not for being impure, or for failing to be better, but rather for their refusal to change holistically, for being weak in Christian identity. That is why Paul writes to them, to urge them into the abundant life inaugurated by Christ crucified. He hopes that they will read, and either be transformed or open to the transformation offered by God in Jesus Christ.

Reading changes us. Reading Scripture in particular changes us in particular ways. 

Charry’s point in advancing her aretegenic reading of Scripture, and one of my purposes in proposing a criterion of salutary force, is the hope that the way we are reading Scripture may change us in ways more particular and desirable still. As she writes, “the proposal for aretegenic reading, then, is that attending to the psychological dynamics and rhetorical art of a text may disclose its moral shaping potential.”

One might hope that if we understood and explained Scripture as though our healing were possible and preferable, our interpretations would more often change to healing ones. This would be in more accordance with God’s purposes for both Scripture and ourselves. As Charry argues, by saying that Scripture wields therapeutic authority, we are also implying that knowing its wisdom will perhaps be like knowing medicine—which we see as both science and art, things which grow best in practice.

These Essays: Scripture Unleashes Psychology

Those who read the Bible holistically—as whole people reading whole Scripture—have the best chance of understanding Scripture’s explicatory power. In this vein, Gerd Theissen eschews any particular psychology as he reads various Scriptures in his Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology. By combining learning theory, psychoanalytic thinking, and cognitive understanding into a “hermeneutical psychology,” Theissen connects all interpretations to psychic phenomena we are given to experience. 

The psyche’s pervasive wholeness in both reader and text is such that “the correspondence of an interpretation with the whole of a text” trumps the consistency of any psychological theory. So here we find the textual fidelity I initially addressed: exegesis of the Scriptures reveals such a broad and profound explication of human experience that our own psychological theories fail—any psychological theories fail— to encompass it.  

 A few brief examples must suffice. Theissen’s reading of Paul gives Christ as the center of the transformation of both behavior and experience. The gospel of Christ becomes an unconditioned positive reinforcement of transformation through its annihilation of the law. No longer will we be punished for our sin. Rather, our suffering through Christ will be exalted and rewarded in new life. Such a system frees us from anxiety so that we can seek reconciliation with and provide help for our fellow human beings.

And this transformation becomes psychologically possible because Christ not only extinguishes the power of the law, but through his death allows the darker energies of the unconscious to come into focus. It is not that we are unaware of our sinfulness. Rather, that Christ means that our consciousness of sin—after Christ, we do know what we do—yearns for the integration and redirection of our entire selves toward God.

For example, through the phenomenon of glossolalia, in new life even our unconscious may praise the divine. And Christ as the rule of this new life lives in the members of the redeemed body of believers through the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit, shifting one’s perceptions of oneself, one’s community, and the world. One no longer understands the self as isolated, but together with those of Christ. If Christ does anything at all, Christ changes one’s psychological identity—in terms of behavior, in terms of psychodynamics, in terms of cognitive understanding.  

Perhaps Theissen’s study of 1 Corinthians 3 will better clarify what he means about identity. In this passage Paul criticizes Moses for failing to effectively model transformed behavior. But this failure happened not because Moses was who he was but because the law was what it was. Laws in stone cannot change the human heart.

The transformation will not be legislated. We can understand this as Paul complicates the Old Testament tradition of the veil, which separates Moses from the people, and more importantly, the people from the transforming glory of YHWH. As a result, the glory of Moses fades. But the glory of the Lord, as seen in a mirror, will transform the people from glory into glory.

Christ as model through the Spirit trumps Moses as model through the law because the gospel of Christ lodges in the community. Through Christ the Corinthians become their own message, with new conduct and new identity written on their hearts. Astoundingly, this is also true for Moses, whom Paul has physically turn toward the Lord.

The passages carries a valuation of interiority through the metaphoric comparisons of letters and tablets and hearts and the light of glory. It is possible, then, to read the veil as symbolizing the divide between the manifest consciousness of the law and the latent unconsciousness of the Spirit. If so, its elimination in Christ symbolizes the transformation of the whole person by Christ’s divine glory. More, the passage itself has those who understand the law through the spirit rather than externally as those who have had the veil removed from their eyes.

The familiarity of the language of even this kind of psychological reading should tell us, at least in part, that we are always already reading the Bible psychologically. We read the Bible with psychology in mind all the time, because of course in the mind is where psychology resides. Part of what my criterion of salutary force is trying to address is that there are, psychologically, both better and worse readings of the Bible available, interpretations both more and less explicatory of the human heart and mind. 

And I would suggest that those interpretations which consciously recognize the psychological power of Scripture’s contents would be more likely counted among the former than the latter.

Page a Day: One Hundred Twenty Seven

           I should have fired from the hip. I was not fast enough. He knocked the shaft down with the flat of his blade and drew his quicksword back for a piercing thrust. I turned to jump toward Jerem Cozak and took the impact in the side. I gasped when it hit, an icy shaft of flame and pain that went clear through my chest. I kicked back at him, the full force of the Profusionist armor behind it. But he was ready for that and stepped aside. Then he shoved me off his blade. My feet slipped from the mastodon. And I was falling five paces to the deck below, thinking gods, not again. Then blackness came, and blackness took me whole.   

Page a Day: One Hundred Twenty Six

            They did not stop us. We were thirty charging mastodons. We impaled, we trampled, and we gored. We flung many over the side. We ignored severe cuts to legs and feet and tendons because in battle you learn to give the mastodon your sensorium to drown out the pain. And the mastodon heals, and the mastodon keeps going and you ride the beast clinging to its fur and screaming thoughtless because in turn you have taken its physical sensations so that you can navigate. You feel the blades. You feel the bleeding. You feel the bestial rage of the charging herd. And you wonder if you are still quite human.

            When we gained the top of the ramp we charged into the midst of them, a packed mass of Augers  shielded and unshielded. We charged through, ankles cut to the bone by those who had quickswords. The Augers did not turn. They did not run. They were not civilian anymore. They were fanatics, minds black with nightwind and obeying its commands to stop, stop this charge at any cost. We pressed on. We slowed, shoving and goring our way toward midships.

            The trouble came when Jerem Cozak’s beast lost its foreleg below the knee. It reared and bellowed and he lost his hold upon the straps, tumbling into the crowd. The two Never-born jumped off with him and I swerved my beast over toward the wall so that the charge could press a little bit further and other mastodons could come round and protect Jerem Cozak. I stopped below a ladder and hatch and the Never-born jumped off and started climbing. All along the wall others were doing the same. 

            My beast closed the circle of the herd around the fallen matriarch. I fired into the crowd of Augers trapped around Jerem Cozak and the Never-born. They were trying to tear him limb from limb and he had been saved only by his armor. Some of the Augers were also armed and armored and now fought the Never-born sword to sword. Then I cried out and cradled my arm as pain cut my wrists open to the bone. My mastodon knelt, the tendons of its forelegs severed. Vision blurred, I barely saw the Auger climb up its trunk and atop its head. I brought my lightspear up as he came.  

Page a Day: One Hundred Twenty Five

            We formed up. Jerem Cozak ordered a column three mastodons wide, all the space the greatship’s entrance would afford. He took the lead and I was glad that he, at least, would know the layout of the docks. I did not even know what we would be charging over. But we stood ten mastodons deep, all tossed trunks and heightened senses. The Never-born named Laches and Gorgias had mounted up behind me, clinging to the ropes that held them. And waited again, because the artillery still needed to break the gates. It took longer, because our line had fallen back so far that the artillery captains could not see what they were shooting.  

            But the walls fell, in time. In the fog I guessed it was about noon. I followed Jerem Cozak as we charged around the warehouse and across the plaza at full speed. They knew we were coming because they could see the breaches in the walls. Artillery fire bloomed around as we neared the gaps. Then it fell among us, behind me as the Augers tried to break our formation. Hair singed, mastodons roared and reared and some riders were blinded because I was momentarily so. I glanced back to see three mastodons fallen, struggling to pull themselves along the ground, their legs and sides charred ruins of flesh. The herd flowed around them. Jerem Cozak pressed on and the last mastodons cleared the wall two and three abreast. 

            Then we were on the docks and too close for the artillery’s calibrated range. The Augers were slow to adjust and we were moving three times as fast as any man could run. The docks were all clanking Profusionist metal beneath us and slick with the fog and we did not even slow as the greatships reared up ahead of us like sheer blocks of mountains. Other herds sped north and south along the docks to head for the other ships. Jerem Cozak steered straight for the one ahead of us. The ramp sloped down from its gaping maw like a great tongue and it vomited Augers, their shrouds awake and glowing the color of jade in the day’s diffuse light.