On sin and self-analysis
Thoughts on psychology and repentance
A short post about how the modern person has been trained by counsellors to replace repentance with self-analysis, and how the Christian gospel can allow us to escape the cycle of sin-self analysis-reliving old trauma and becoming more traumatised etc.
The Christian gospel is simple: whenever we sin, we must turn back to the Lord, apologise, pick ourselves up again, and try to salvage the relationships we’ve hurt with apologies and restitution if possible. As Christian believers we are never lost, we don’t have to save ourselves, we are already justified by our faith in Christ. Christ’s righteousness is given to us because the truly innocent Son of God died on the cross and paid for every last skerrick of sin. This means that we don’t have to explain or justify our sin, as we have been justified already, undeservedly, completely freely and graciously, by the Son of God when He died on the cross.
Various types of psychological analysis says there are causes for our sin, that come from the past, particularly traumas from childhood and other major traumas.
There is a great temptation for people today who have been counselled to analyse why they did what they did in a manner that absolves them of responsibility for their actions; this type of analysis which blames parents or guardians or teachers etc of course logically leads all the way back to Adam and Eve, at which point the very first sin and the first trauma happened: the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the ejection from the garden of Eden.
The truth is that understanding these traumas or the various psychological forces that lead us to have particular quirks or shades of sin are not helpful — it concentrates the sinner’s thoughts on the past and allows them to get away with ascribing the responsibility of their own actions to the actions of others and leads them to reference their lives by the past trauma instead of the future hope, trapping the person in obsessive thoughts about the past.
The best way to become stuck in obsessions is to obsess about them: the best way to get free of obsessions is to leave them behind and resist the temptation to think about them or talk about them. The very act of talking about phobias or obsessions or bad memories or traumas strengthens the power of the obsession and the trauma. Rather, think of other things. Leave the past behind, move into the future. (I think this might be why people who get counselled after tragedies do far better when they talk to friends rather than counsellors1 — their friends will eventually get sick of hearing about it and say, “let’s talk about something else, you have to focus on the future” — the counsellors, being paid by the hour, will talk about the tragedy ad infinitum)
The Christian life is very simple: it means being absolved by Christ, who died on the cross for us, and justified completely by Him, Who gave us His righteousness to substitute for our own filthy rags of righteousness, and being filled by the Holy Spirit, who gives us strength to live a new life in Christ. There is no need to justify anything with explanations, because He has already justified us by dying for us.
We don’t have to understand why we did what we did: sin by its nature is inexplicable. And yes, the past influences our behaviour in unconscious and conscious ways, but the trauma can only be healed by the Holy Spirit; the more self-analysis and self-fixing we try to do, the more fixated we become on the past and on ourselves. God knows us better than we know ourselves, and loves us more than we can ever imagine or comprehend. Rather than try to heal ourselves, what we must do is to learn to trust the Spirit of God to do the healing.
It is far better to let God do the healing and to put our own focus on the future: the new creation with Christ, the future New Jerusalem, the aims and goals God has given us for this life, and simply repent and turn back to the Lord and say sorry whenever we sin, whether it is conscious sin or some sort of unconscious psychological reaction that we have no control over.
God would prefer us to take complete responsibility when we stuff up, rather than casting the blame on any person or event or anything else; this allows Him to lift us up. This is the meaning of Christ’s righteousness.
And this is the meaning of the following one of Jesus’ parables - we are to take the least important place at the feast of eternal righteousness, the place of the sinner who cannot justify himself:
When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Luke 14:7-11
There is a study to this effect. People who talked to friends after the trauma did best, those who talked to no one did okay, those who talked to counsellors after the tragedy suffered the most PTSD. I don’t know the reference off-hand.