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February 10, 2006
> 2:44 PM
brokenness > 2 Our brokenness can become more broken. Cracks can become more cracked. Fissures can go deeper. It's not a static thing. If not one way (toward being fixed), then not the other. Due also to the connected and broken world we live in, some of even our initial inherited broken nature may be more or less broken from the beginning. I think, absolutely so. I'll say this before I go any further, I reject, for many reasons that I won't get into here, a theology that attributes any inherent brokenness we might have to God, as if He intended it to be so. This would be evidenced in statements akin to this: "I've always been this way, I can't help it, God must have made me this way or I wouldn't be this way." There are so many deep problems with a thought like that, I shouldn't have to get into it, and I won't anyway right now. I just wanted to make sure it was clear what the basis of my premise is. That business is right out. As the world and people have developed through the years, I'll say it like this, the brokenness has mutated and spread and become even more splintered. It has come to manifest itself in many varied twisted ways. Nonetheless, it is still brokenness, still a result of that ontological fracture I was talking about, and therefore, is not desirable. This faulty life-order, however it might rear its ugly head, is something we need to learn how to recognize for what it is and, in Christ, we can move away from it and toward healing and transformation. So, from the beginning, built-in, like faulty wiring from the factory, we are all damaged. I've started with that already. What I'm saying now, is that there are obviously some people who are more broken than others from the outset. This has nothing whatever to do with personal guilt or anything being their fault. And you're right, it's not fair. The whole ruptured mess isn't fair. Evil is like that. It creeps in and twists and hurts and doesn't care. That's what we're dealing with. It's serious business. As my friend said when I was talking to him about this a bit: "so a child molester is more broken than someone who looks lustfully at someone" - I say "absolutely" - of course they are. Let me drag that out a little more. Someone who mysteriously "ends up with" a sexual desire for children, which never goes away, and boils inside them to the point of acting on it, perhaps then raping and killing children - this person is undeniably more deeply fractured than a woman who looks at a man crossing the street in those tight jeans and thinks, "mmm" and then gets in her car and goes home to be with her husband. The latter is actually a pretty natural thing, a desire in line with how people are created to function. Now, if she somehow had a built-in constant and insatiable desire for sex with men, which then boiled up in her and lead to acting on it, perhaps to having sex with many men per week whether they were married or not, whether she was married or not - SHE would absolutely be manifesting a deeper brokenness than simply being sexually attracted to a man she saw on the street. Again, I'll say this a few times to be clear, I'm not talking about personal guilt for committing a sin or breaking a law of some sort. I'm not talking at all really about any legal notion of being close to or not close to God or being acceptable or unacceptable to Him because of these things. I'm talking about being broken, having a spiritual nature that is not in proper working order. I'm talking about what causes people to do bad or evil things. As I said before as well, I'm talking about people who are in Christ, people who have been grafted into the Life of God in Jesus - in whom the Holy Spirit now lives and is doing that surgical work I mentioned. That all came to us by God's Grace - by and through His Love for us and His power, the gift of His ability. OK, that said, we have cooperative responsibility in this whole process. Response-ability. When God comes with His Grace, we are given the ability to say yes -- or no. We can respond positively and God's Grace does what it "came" to do, and we can say no and it will not. Following this, when we say no and act out of that no we've said to God, we cooperate with brokenness. What we do is analogous to walking on a broken leg against the advice or our Doctor. What happens to the bone when you do that? Doesn't take a genius to figure out, it breaks more. And the more and the harder you walk, run or anything else on it, the more broken the bone will get. That was you who did that. This is how it is with us in our lives - in this process - which is admittedly a bit complex - of spiritual fixing and brokenness. We are most definitely broken in some areas (again some more than others) and if we then act in that brokenness, we further damage ourselves. And if this area of brokenness is particularly broken, acting in or on it can be particularly damaging. We don't think about things this way often. I think what we seem to focus on is guilt and forgiveness. We are on the surface of the problem when we do this. We talk about how something is or is not our fault and how we can get it said that we are fine again because we have confessed our sin so we can start all over. Once again, I'll end a paragraph by saying I am not talking about a legal understanding of guilt and innocence. There may be something to talk about there but I'm not talking about it right now. I'm talking about something deeper, underneath all that. OK, I've got some more to throw in here but that's enough for this post. More soon. Pax vobiscum. technorati tags > brokenness, sin, original sin, theology, spiritual formation, discipleship, spirituality Labels: spiritual formation, theology 0 Comments:| permalink | e-mail me | 
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