Thursday Thinking - Caring Theology

When Jesus was asked, "What is the greatest command?" He replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength." He went on to say, "The second is like the first--love your neighbor as yourself, for this is the sum of the Law and the Prophets."

I've always found that last phrase--"the sum of the Law and the Prophets"--to be every bit as important as the commands to love God and to love others. That phrase makes clear that any truly orthodox understanding of what God commands--what is wrong or right or true or false--must be rooted in love for God and love for others. Any doctrine that fails to care is a doctrine that fails.

Richard Beck, Professor and Department Chair of Psychology at Abilene Christian University, is one of my favorite bloggers. Yesterday, on his Experimental Theology blog, he posted some very helpful insights about the relationship between reason and emotion. By extension, he explains how the reason/emotion discussion is relevant to our understanding of the relationship between theology and caring. His observations are totally consistent with my personal life experiences and with what I've witnessed in my 30+ years of pastoral ministry.

To summarize, Beck asserts that theology detached from feeling is bound to be bad theology. I highly recommend his blog and encourage you to read this post, Orthodox Alexithymia.

Here is an excerpt from that post:
When theology and doctrine become separated from emotion we end up with something dysfunctional and even monstrous. A theology or doctrinal system that has become decoupled from emotion is going to look emotionally stunted and even inhuman.

What I'm describing here might be captured by the tag "orthodox alexithymia." By "orthodox" I mean the intellectual pursuit of right belief. And by "alexithymia" I mean someone who is, theologically speaking, emotionally and socially deaf and dumb. Even theologically sociopathic.

(Alexithymia--etymologically "without words for emotions"--is a symptom characteristic of individuals who have difficulty understanding their own and others' emotions. You can think of alexithymia as being the opposite of what is called emotional intelligence.)

Orthodox alexithymia is produced when the intellectual facets of Christian theology, in the pursuit of correct and right belief, become decoupled from emotion, empathy, and fellow-feeling. Orthodox alexithymics are like patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex brain damage. Their reasoning may be sophisticated and internally consistent but it is disconnected from human emotion. And without Christ-shaped caring to guide the chain of calculation we wind up with the theological equivalent of preferring to scratch a doctrinal finger over preventing destruction of the whole world. Logically and doctrinally such preferences can be justified. They are not "contrary to reason." But they are inhuman and monstrous. Emotion, not reason, is what has gone missing.

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