“Quick to Pastor, Slow to Speak”

Mike Leake

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger…

…unless you are a pastor. 

I wonder how many dear souls have been wounded by a pastor that is slow to hear and therefore also quick to speak and usually quick to anger.  More personally, I wonder how many dear souls that I have wounded by quick counsel. 

Quick counsel is easy to do.  Most people have the same types of problems and therefore it is tempting to offer simple cookie-cutter solutions.  I know that at times I have been guilty of throwing a few Bible verses at the heart of a weary saint (or perhaps some Christian platitudes). 

Thankfully (for myself and others) I am growing.  I have gotten better at following James’ admonishment to engage in active listening before I assume that I know how to speak.  Here are 4 things that I have tried to do to slow myself down and make sure that I am quick to listen and slow to speak:

  1. Try to rephrase and repeat what I believe they are saying.  “Is this what you are saying”?  This helps me know that I do truly understand (in as much as I can) what the other person is going through and what they are communicating.
  2. Try to defend their position.  This is especially helpful in a lively debate or discussion.  If I am able to accurately defend a persons position, or define it in such a way that they could say, “yes, this is absolutely what I am saying”, then I know that I am in a position to understand and hopefully speak truth.
  3. Maybe I am the idiot.  If I am think that something has a really simple solution it could be possible that I am the simpleton and not the person struggling.
  4. Don’t assume my assessment and counsel is helpful or communicating effectively.  “Is this helpful?  Does this apply to what you are saying”? etc.  I can spend 15 minute rambling about something that doesn’t actually apply in this situation.  It’d be like a doctor spending an hour before emergency surgery prepping a machine that he does not need to use. 
  5. Try to look through the words to the heart.  The heart is the battlefield.  Sometimes the way people phrase things exposes a misunderstanding in the gospel, character of God, view of themselves, etc.  Rather than trying to correct the “way” that somebody says something I try to listen for the heart’s speech. 

When I am counseling someone I try to apply these things.  It may make the counseling session a tad longer—but hopefully more fruitful.  For the busy pastor it is probably beneficial to spend an hour once or twice than it is to spend 15 minutes 40 times. 

Consider these words from Mike Emlet as well:

Dr. Mike Emlet – On mistakes we can make using Scripture in advice giving. from CCEF on Vimeo.  (HT: Dane Ortlund)

7 Questions with Author Kent Dunnington

Mike Leake

Yesterday I reviewed Kent Dunnington’s book Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice.  Today he was kind enough to answer 7 questions about his book and his soul. 

1. What motivated you to write this book?

Three things motivated me to write the book. First, like most people, I have struggled with addictions. When I recommitted my life to God in graduate school, I was a smoker. I was amazed by how resilient and resistant my addictive desires were. I wanted to understand better what was going on there. Second, I did some work in really impoverished inner-city areas where addictions were just destroying people, families, whole communities. As a Christian I had this profound feeling of powerlessness, and I wanted to better understand and articulate the power of the gospel over against the power of addiction. Finally, I had a dear friend and adviser in graduate school who was a recovering alcoholic (the book is dedicated to him). I often attended AA meetings with him. Although he and many of those who attended were not Christian, I was overwhelmed by the kind of vulnerability and love on display in that fellowship. It is not a new thought, but I realized there how much the church had to learn from groups like that.

2. What is unique about this book, as compared to other books on addiction? And who did you write this book for?

The book is unique in trying to provide a philosophy of action that can ground claims about addiction. There has been a great deal written on the biology, psychology, and sociology of addiction, but many of these treatments lack an adequate philosophy of human action and therefore they end up making seemingly contradictory claims. For instance, the claim that addiction is a disease does not sit easily with the acknowledgment (which is as widespread as the disease concept) that addiction is best treated in nonmedicalized treatment settings like AA. There’s something askew here, and I wanted to try to clarify and see if the phenomenon of addiction could be articulated in a noncontradictory way. So the philosophical grounding is what is most unique. And this leads, I think, to a unique theological take. Basically, I argue that addiction is the most powerful and successful alternative to worship available to human persons.

3. In the most basic terms you can offer for my readers how would you define addiction?

In the most basic terms, I’d argue that addiction is any obsessive and all-consuming orientation that leads a person into self-deception. Self-deception is crucial here since Christians aren’t by definition opposed to being consumed by some object. Worship is an all-consuming orientation, and the mystics often speak of it in these ways. But because the goods of worship live up to their promises, right worship leads us into truth. Self-deception is what you get when addictive objects lead us away from what we know to be true goods. We must then disavow the addiction as truly part of us. This is denial, and it’s why many addicted persons will say that denial is the essence of addiction.

4. There is an idea that I have been working with for a little while now concerning addiction and depression. Given your understanding of addiction do you think it is possible that a person can actually become addicted to depression?

That’s an interesting question. It raises a nest of thorny questions about the neurological bases of depression. No doubt, persons can become attached to their depressive tendencies. The Romantics, for instance, thought you weren’t a very interesting person unless you were deeply depressed. And I do think that there can be something tempting about depression (or, I might prefer to say, about melancholy) and that, moreover, melancholy can become part of an identity that we are wary of relinquishing. I don’t know how helpful it would be to speak of persons becoming addicted to depression, though. Some persons may have dispositions to melancholy, but a disposition is quite different than an addiction.

5. You do not offer many practical suggestions for dealing with addiction; neither for the church to consider or for an addicted person. This does not appear to be your focus, why did you choose to do this? Will there be any sort of follow-up offering advice on ministering to those with addiction?

I just didn’t feel all that qualified to make such suggestions. I think good practices flow out of good theology, and I was interested in trying to say something theologically substantive and suggestive about addiction. I don’t foresee a follow-up. I suppose if there are a lot of requests for it, I could try. But honestly, I think other people who are more familiar with the current programming available to the church would be better placed to make such suggestions.

6. The chapter that I found most intriguing, and probably most helpful, was your chapter on Addiction and Modernity. Here you note that addicts are “unwitting modern prophets”. I am curious about any research you may have done on third-world countries and addiction. How would you explain addiction in third-world countries where their time is given to survival?

That’s a terrific question. Although I did research on minority populations in “developed” countries (such as Native Americans here) I didn’t do any work on addiction in the “developing” world. But now that you ask that question, I think I should have!

7. I noticed that you got your M.T.S. from Duke. As a fan of college basketball and one that has a perennial distaste in my mouth of all things Duke, I’ve always been curious about this one…How does it feel to not have a soul?

Oh, that’s cold. You know, one of my professors at Duke used to say, if you want to see what worship looks like just go to Cameron Indoor for a Duke game. I’d just rephrase that and say that’s what addiction looks like. Now that I’m back in the Midwest, I’m in recovery. But I still have to get my fix from time to time.

Much thanks to Kent for taking the time to answer these questions.  I’m glad to hear that he’s recovering from his days at Duke.  If you want to purchase Kent’s book, which I’d suggest, you can do so here: Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice

Review of Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice by Kent Dunnington

Mike Leake

“I can’t stop”

The young man in my office was broken by his continuing lapses into the darkness of pornography.  He truly wanted to stop, at least it seemed.  He hated pornography.  But he kept going through seasons of “feast” and famine.  Sometimes he could quit for months at a time.  At other points he was engaging in sexual deviance multiple times per day. 

Did he have a disease?  Yes, it is quite true that pornography probably had changed his brain structure.  So there really is legitimacy to his saying, “I can’t stop”.  But isn’t the gospel more powerful than brain structure?  And isn’t it a little simplistic to say that just because his brain structure has changed that he now can’t stop?  If his brain structure was able to change in a deviant form isn’t it possible to “rewire” it again? 

Disease is too simplistic of an explanation. 

So it’s all his choice then, right?  This young man must really not want to change or else he would just make the choice to stop.  If that is the case then why is he in my office?  He obviously wants to stop but he doesn’t know how.  As he talks to me (and this is the case with a myriad of “addicts”) he feels utterly helpless to this problem.  Furthermore, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” doesn’t seem to be the Bible’s method of Christian growth.  (But then again, neither does a helpless “let go and let God”.) 

Choice is too simplistic of an explanation. 

Then what is it?  If disease is too simplistic and choice is too simplistic, how do we come to understand the nature and experience of addiction?  This is the question that Kent Dunnington sets out to answer in his work Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice. 

Dunnington’s Position:

Through mining the thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Dunnington believes that these two giants of thought provide a solution. He believes that addictive action is fundamentally the result of habit. Habit, says Dunnington, is “a relatively permanent acquired modification of a person that enables the person, when provoked by a stimulus, to act consistently, successfully and with ease with respect to some objective”. (62)

This helps us to see that what is taking place in addictive action is something that resides deeply within the person. “Rather than being things that we have (as diseases are), addictions are more like things that we become.” (72) But it also explains why addiction is often incontinent action (approving the good, desiring the bad, and driven by this habit ends up doing the bad).

Addiction is not simply an inordinate desire for sensory goods. It is not mere intemperance, but according to Dunnington it actually is a pursuit of moral and intellectual goods. The addictive habit is an attempt to provide a “unifying rationale” (a meta-narrative) to life and thus give the addicted person at least something of necessity. This is why, perhaps, addiction is so prevalent in our contemporary society, because:

“Addiction provides a response to the underwhelming life of boredom that plagues the bourgeois in its leisure time by making one thing matter. And addiction provides a response to the overwhelming life of boredom that plagues the working class with fragmented and compartmentalized striving by making one thing matter. For those who are bored with nothing to do, addiction stimulates by entangling and consuming; for those who are bored with too much to do, addiction disburdens by simplifying and clarifying.”  (118)

Addiction, then, is an “embodied cultural critique of modernity”. And if I am reading Dunnington correctly he believes that addiction is fundamentally a worship problem. The reason we are so “addicted” in our culture is that we have rejected true worship and engaged in counterfeit worship. In fact addiction, it is argued, is counterfeit worship. And this worship problem will be fixed through the gospel coming to bear on a person through gospel-saturated communities.

My Take

I absolutely love Dunnington’s thesis and I tend to agree with him.  Addiction is something more profound than simple models of disease and choice.  These addictive patterns become such a part of us; that is why I like his model of habit.  It explains why it feels uncontrollable, like disease, gives hope that it can be overcome, while at the same time not undercutting that hope by relegating to the deterministic “disease” paradigm. 

I believe that Dunnington’s work here is very foundational and could help move the discussion in addiction and mental health issues forward.  No longer do we need to spend our time fighting about whether addiction is disease or choice, instead we can rest in a helpful third position (habit), that says at the same time it is “both/and” but also “neither/or” disease and choice. 

Personally, I believe that this work could even be used to garner some understanding in what happens with depression.  In the world of biblical counseling we spend a good amount of time arguing about whether depression is caused by biological problems that need to be fixed by medicine or whether it is a sin problem that needs to be fixed by the gospel.  Dunnington’s model would provide helpful navigation. 

This book will hopefully start a conversation.  It probably will not end it, but I believe it will further our discussions on the issue of addiction.  All those that decide to write about addiction must now consider Dunnington’s work and interact with his hypothesis. 

Something to Build On

I find this book to be very helpful in shaping a theology of addiction.  The problem is I am not sure how to apply it.  Nor do I think the technical writing lends itself to most pastors laboring through and then thinking through its implications.  Because of this I am praying that someone far wiser than myself picks up Dunnington’s work and begins to tease out its implications.  I think Dunnington wants us to read his work and flesh out our own applications.  Fair enough, but I feel he has such a good grasp on this I would have liked to have seen a chapter fleshing out the implications of his work in a church setting.

Nonetheless, I find this book very helpful.  It will not be for everyone, as some of the language is technical and the concepts at times are a little difficult to follow.  For the typical addicted person that picks this up I’m not certain that he/she will find much help.  But for those that are discussing the nature of addiction—and those that hope to help those battling various addictions this book is a very helpful addition to your library. 

I thought this book was releasing in September but it looks like Amazon may be shipping it out now.  I got a free pre-release copy from IVP in exchange for a review.  You’ll have to buy it in paperback or on your Kindle.

Tomorrow I will be posting a recent interview I did with author Kent Dunnington…

Paul’s “Onesimus”

Mike Leake

I noticed something really cool the other day when studying for Philemon to preach it on Sunday evening.  (By the way you can listen to a few of my sermons by going here; but the Philemon one is not up yet).  In many of the commentaries and sermons that I read through in studying I did not find a ton of people making this connection.  So I proceed with caution.  I could be way off here, but I don’t think I am…

More than likely what happened to provoke this letter is that Onesimus (Philemon’s slave) had ran away from his owner, somehow ran into Paul, and as many people who “ran into Paul” happened to do—he became a believer in Jesus.  Onesimus has now become deeply useful to Paul but he must send him back to Philemon and be reconciled to him.

So here we have Onesimus standing at Philemon’s door with a letter from Paul.  Inside this letter (the one we call Philemon in our New Testament bibles), is Paul encouraging Philemon to model the gospel by welcoming back this new convert.  Philemon, who is known for “refreshing hearts” (v.7), is now being urged by Paul to “Refresh my heart in Christ” (v.20).  What he means by that is clear from verse 12 when Paul refers to Onesimus as his “very heart”. 

Here in Philemon, then, we have a story of a runaway slave that is to be welcomed back into his household and now treated as a brother and not a slave.  A beautiful picture of the gospel–as Jesus has done the same thing with us wayward sinners and as Paul did (v18-19) asks that every bit of our debt be charged to His account.  And a beautiful picture of gospel reconciliation—“receive him as you would receive me”. 

Paul’s “Onesimus”

Rewind a couple of decades.  You can pick the story up in Acts 15:36-40.  Here there is a sharp disagreement between Paul and Barnabas over a young man named John Mark.  Apparently Mark (as he was later called) had ran away from them on the mission field.  Much like Onesimus, we do not know much of the details to his running away.  We only know that he ran away from where he should have been. 

Paul did not want to welcome him back and let him go on this follow-up mission trip.  Barnabas, always the encourager, wanted Mark to go.  The two separate: Mark goes with Barnabas and Silas goes with Paul. 

Now fast-forward back to Paul’s letter to Philemon.  Notice a name in verse 24, “Mark”.  Most believe that this is in fact the very same Mark (John Mark) that had left Paul and Barnabas and jetted back to Jerusalem; also the same Mark that would later go on to write the Gospel of Mark. 

We do not know the story behind Mark’s being welcomed back by Paul and his now being useful.  But we do know from 2 Timothy 4:11 that just like in the case of Onesimus the formerly “useless” Mark has now became “very useful” to Paul “for ministry”. 

Here his name comes up in Paul’s letter to Philemon.  I do not know that Philemon would have known the story of Paul and Mark’s reconciliation.  But it is worth noting that apparently Paul practiced what he admonished Philemon to do.