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.
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