I come from a cold empathy-less family, where practicality reigns.
Pragma denotes a love that is enduring, mature, and based on commitment and understanding, often found in long-term relationships.
I used the term “practicality”, but I could have just as easily have used the word “pragmatic” to describe my family environment growing up. Most marriages are based in pragma in addition to Eros, ludus, and storge.
Most marriages begin with ludus and Eros and end in bedpans, medical appointments, and paperwork. That statement is pragma. Many recent church teachings about marriage have emphasized pragma and philia at the expense of Eros and ludus.
Were your parents also Christian and very serious about the faith?
Yes. We used to read
Our Daily Bread every night, attend church every Sunday, and we went to Awana on Wednesday. My mom had us practice our Awana verses at home.
If it helps to paint a picture of my own personal experience with Christians, I was raised non-denominational.
I was raised non-denominational as well, though it was in a “Bible Church” setting that emphasized intellectual prowess (scripture memorization, understanding, and application) rather than any sort of empathy or martyrdom glorification.
What you are describing sounds more like “charismatic” non-denominational, more in line with Pentecostalism than the more Dallas Theological Seminary-style preaching environment I’ve known. Formalities have varied, I’ve attended three churches with pews and about as many with chairs, but all have plain crosses at the front, no crucifixes, if there was anything on the walls at all.
The very concept of mixing God and love seems to be a very toxic way to teach love to a child. Regardless of the religion or just as a default belief in a God.. you are teaching them to find love in a being who has allowed horrible suffering in the world. A religious child has to make sense of that.. while an atheist child does not. This seems like a fundamental difference between the theistic and atheistic mindset. A distinction I find very important.
The ready explanation I was given was that love has to be a choice - in order for us to truly love, we had to be free to not love, and also suffer the consequences of not-loving. What not-love does to us is horrifying and damaging, but it had to exist to allow us to voluntarily commit to the true good of God, and ourselves.
Deuteronomy 6:5 said:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
Or as another put it “God wants sons and daughters, not robots.”
Again, this was given to me as a child, I wasn’t left to grapple with the question. God wanted us to be able to love him, and that is why he let us fall and went to the pain of redeeming us. Love is an expensive virtue that comes at a heavy cost.
To God, the cost was a lot of us, “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” that are going to end up in the lake of fire. Not to mention the separation between his only Son and Him for hours on the cross and watching Him die a horrific death while He poured out His wrath that we deserved on Him.
To us, the cost of love is fighting our fallen bodies and the fallen creation that that the fallen bodies rely on to proclaim the Gospel for as long as God allows us to stay here. The suffering we endure is in fighting to stay alive, not racing toward death.
In view of that, martyrdom glorification is garbage. The reason the church esteems martyrs is because they proclaimed the Gospel and continued to proclaim the Gospel in the face of corrupt governments that killed them. The reason they are esteemed is because of their stand for the faith, not because of their death. The fact that they did not waver from their testimony of the Truth is authenticated by their death, but you don’t need to suffer a death at the hands of a corrupt government to know that Your faith in the Gospel is real. That idea is absurd. Was Billy Graham martyred? No? Does anyone question his Christianity? Does the church not rightly esteem him for his stand for the faith and his willingness to proclaim the Gospel?
What about my uncle who preached the Gospel at rescue missions and at churches and was faithful to Christ and the Gospel until the end? He died of pancreatic cancer. Does the method of his death make him less of a Christian? I think not.
Abuse thrives in uncritical environments.
I agree with this.
However, an important caveat: some abusers are world champion criticizers. In order for criticism to root out abuse, it has to be a two-way street. The criticism must flow freely from victim back to the abuser for that to work. If the abuser is criticizing the victim, that’s not a sign of growth in the relationship.
Uncritical environments allow abuse to thrive; but a critical environment does not prevent abuse either. Criticism becomes insults which turn into threats and punishments, and then we’re back at abuse. True criticism allows the recipient to solve the problem and repair the relationship to the critic; abusive criticism is assigning impossible tasks to people for the purpose of insulting and punishing them for not doing what they cannot do.
I don't think you are being harsh. I want people to be honest with me.. we would just lead to slanted conclusions otherwise.. I am critical of empathy.. especially it's tendency to make one overly sensitive to criticism. Either to yourself or select others.
Sadly how realistic is it to not romanticize martyrdom?
I’m being a little bit forceful because a lot of this is personal to me, and when my emotions get behind words I get the “you’re too harsh” accusation, especially from those who grew up with empathy. But seeing as you are critical of it, maybe I took the right tack. I’m actually pretty self-critical, because I know that I’m posting from a position of bias because I was raised in a harsh and critical environment.
The way I think about this is pretty simple: “To live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21). But also, the 4th command against murder is against taking one’s own life too.
Imagine that you are in a closed country where the Gospel is not allowed to be proclaimed, and you are within a mile from the border of an open country where you will be safe. You are in a holding cell, and you have 24 hours to get out of the cell before you are moved to the central capital for your execution. You notice 1 loose brick in the back of your cell that is cracked. Do you pull the brick out on the slim chance you can pull the wall out and dig a quick tunnel to the surface and escape?
Or do you sit down and say to yourself “I will accept my glorious death on behalf of the Gospel.” and not do anything? What do you think a good Christian would do?
Everything in me is
screaming “Pull that brick and get out of there!”. If you could go on, if you could live, is giving up and resigning yourself to your death not suicide? You’re cutting yourself off when you could have gone on. How many more people could have heard the Gospel if you had made it out of that cell? Accepting martyrdom when you could have avoided it is a cause for guilt in my view.
Which is harder? Accepting death is passive. It requires no effort. When you’re suffering from spiritual trauma from people you may love rejecting you for your faith, it’s easier just to give up and die rather than dig a tunnel, run a mile, and fill out asylum applications and building a new life in another country. It’s always harder to live.
Back in 2016, I wanted to commit suicide, and Christianity actually stopped me from doing so. I was suffering because of my stand that my abusive father was violating several passages of Scripture, which wasn’t really as intense as the Gospel, but I was pretty much at the end of my psychological rope. My nervous system was suffering from severe trauma, I was barely able to get out of bed in the morning and playing Solitaire on the computer until my nervous system passed out from giddy shock. I thought the easy way out was just to off myself.
I thought about it for a few days. But in the end, I concluded that I didn’t deserve to die and I would be better off shooting my dad and everyone else who was not listening and taking his side instead. I didn’t want to explain to Christ why I had given up. In your view, it seems, after I killed myself, I would have entered heaven to applause and “well done, good and faithful servant”. I refuse to believe that. I’m pretty sure a firm talking to for my sin would have happened. I didn’t want to explain to God why I had given up.
Of course, I didn’t end up killing my father either, because that would have sent me to jail, and I think I am more effective for Christ out here. The point was that I was able to think of a solution to my problem, no matter how bad, so I had no excuse for giving into death. This led me on the path to thinking of better solutions. This is true of martyrdom situations as well. It’s hard to escape the Roman Empire, so I cut the Roman martyrs some slack, but I think you get the point.
To be a martyr is, on some level, to be a failure.
Some people have taken this story and claimed my resistance to suicide is not Christianity and it’s only me, but my retort is that is a Jungian argument. They are not arguing from Christianity when they make that claim. The return is that, well your argument against suicide is Jungian and Kantian then. I return that by telling them that two philosophies can arrive at the same result, that doesn’t mean they are the same, it’s an intellectual simulacra. Using the sustainance of my rational consciousness to proclaim the Gospel is using it as a means to an end and that’s anti-Kant. Christ is the hero I am proclaiming and that’s anti-Jung.
