After three straight posts dealing mostly with anger, I think we should begin to more fully integrate anger as a matter of the heart briefly touched upon in the post, “What the heart desires…”
I’ve elaborated on what I perceive to be the often primary position of anger as a veil across our minds, but it is certainly not always primary nor the only kind of veil.
Anger of course corresponds quite directly with pain and trauma. But any emotion can cloud our vision and distort the way we perceive reality. That obscure quote, again: “what the heart desires, the will chooses and the mind justifies.”
Perhaps the most obvious example is lust. I can attest to my own experience as a former hormonally-imbalanced teenage boy who wanted to integrate his Christianity with his sex drive.
With the advantages brought from age, learning, and life experience, I now have a fuller grasp on the reasons why the orthodox Christian conviction is that sex is intended for marriage.
Very briefly, it’s because humans emulate God; God is Triune and as such in constant permanent relation within the Trinity; it is as male and female corporately that God formed humanity in His image; thus the way for humans to relationally emulate God through the intimacy of sexuality is to enjoy each other within the bounds of the same kind of commitment the Trinity has within the Godhead.
That’s the bare-bones skeleton of the belief that doesn’t do it or any belief that would disagree any justice.
But, as a teenager, what I knew of that belief was that it was just based on some passages in the Bible. Little horn-dog that I was, though, what my heart desired didn’t take too much massaging of the Biblical text to explain it away.
After all, wasn’t it clearly written to a specific culture with different morals, and clearly those people who thought it should still apply today were missing the point that the references against pre-marital sex in the New Testament were written in a letter addressed to a particular group of people at a particular time with unique circumstances? So, obviously that doesn’t apply to me.
It’d be great if those points were just the machinations of a stupid teenager, but there is some merit to them. Without explaining why I now think those merits are insufficient to overturn the orthodox position, the point is my beliefs were clearly being manipulated by other…ah…motivations, and not the pursuit of truth for truth’s sake.
David S. Wisener 