It was so fun to have Meredith Miller join us At Home With the Lectionary. We discussed the readings for Easter 4, including the martyrdom of Stephen and Jesus’ declaration that He is the Good Shepherd.
Join wherever you get your podcasts!
#Easter4 #John10 #Acts7
@lectionaryhome.bsky.social
It was so fun to have Meredith Miller join us At Home With the Lectionary. We discussed the readings for Easter 4, including the martyrdom of Stephen and Jesus’ declaration that He is the Good Shepherd.
Join wherever you get your podcasts!
#Easter4 #John10 #Acts7
@lectionaryhome.bsky.social
Join Fr. Aaron & @mburtwrites.bsky.social, with guest Meredith Miller, for Easter 4
They discuss the martyrdom of Stephen, the table imagery of Psalm 23, Peter's teaching on suffering, and Jesus the Good Shepherd
www.buzzsprout.com/1891089/epis...
I am not! Will look into this. Thank you!
Starts at 9AM PT. Hope you can join us! substack.com/@mburtwrites...
Every Friday in April and May, I’m sharing past posts I’ve written about scrupulosity and spiritual drivenness. If this topic resonates with you, I hope you’ll consider filling out my survey—I’d love to hear about your experience! Find the link in my linktree.
I wrote about this dynamic a few years after my experience with postpartum OCD/anxiety, because hitting rock bottom was my invitation to go all in on grace and I’ll conclude with those words that still ring true for me so many years later:
It’s a painful grace that for some the gateway out of the exhausting legalism & cognitive-prosperity-gospel-promises of the nouthetic comes when the promises fail, when Trying Hard or memorizing more verses or praying more doesn’t relieve the OCD or PTSD or ADHD.
Because it doesn’t work. The anxiety doesn’t dissipate, the depression doesn’t lift, the child doesn’t grow up to take the desired path, and then what? Did God Himself fail people? Is it user error? Or could it be that the Bible itself is unsound?
Because for both, if you believe hard enough, if you try hard enough, if you say the magic biblical words, you can curry God’s favor, feel in control, and gain the outcome you desire. Or at least that’s the idea.
In many ways, I think MacArthur, and those who adopt the biblical counseling worldview, offer a cognitive version of the health and wealth prosperity gospel (which, ironically, they often so loudly reject).
There is no physical or mental or emotional “excuse” for the sinful deeds that you should be “putting off” according to the biblical counseling framework. Here is Ginger Hubbard, for instance, telling parents to spank feverish children, because sickness is no excuse for sinning.
A community’s family life teaching is always revealing, because the way children are treated in the family will be the way adults in the church system are treated, which is how you end up with MacArthur dismissing suffering and physical realities from the stage.
Tripp’s work also envisions children as mini adults whose behavior is motivated by sins as defined by the biblical counseling framework. This results in 1st graders described as “modern Pharisees [and]…relationship junkie[s]” with “sexually loaded” thoughts.
In fact, Tripp advises parents to give their children a biannual performance review to evaluate their behavior. Elsewhere he offers evaluative questions like those below that normalize introspective and scrupulous examination.
But Tripp and Hubbard quickly diverge into the nouthetic, because *the goal* of such communication—for both parents and biblical counselors alike—becomes sussing out and diagnosing the sin in a child’s heart.
When I first read Tripp’s book, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that his communication scripts read much like recommended scripts of today: ask a child about what they are thinking and feeling in any given moment and reflect back what you are hearing.
Relational circumstances like domestic abuse or biological realities like brain chemistry are immaterial in light of the legalistic goals of sin management. This becomes quite clear in biblical counseling parenting resources.
John MacArthur publicly shamed and excommunicated Eileen Gray for her “unrepentant sin,” b/c Eileen refused to reconcile with her ex-husband who is now serving time for child molestation and abuse.
This is how MacArthur can, in the OG clip, dismiss PTSD as “grief,” how Broger can use the case study of an abusive husband as a lens for counselors to diagnose the wife’s sin issues. Broger’s approach is hardly theoretical in the biblical counseling world.
Their mental health, their physical presence, their unique circumstances are *all* irrelevant, b/c rooting out the sin & “putting on” right behavior and thoughts becomes all that matters. Listening to someone’s story & circumstances becomes only a tool to parse out their sin.
It's also true that the nouthetic, or biblical counseling, approach is inescapably pastorally detached.
When you have lists and systems and formulas for victorious living, the person in front of you doesn’t matter.
When I first saw MacArthur’s clip, I thought: How can anyone who has done any kind of pastoral ministry say such things? It could be, as some theorized, that MacArthur hasn’t done personal pastoral work in years.
B/c even a benign sermon on spiritual disciplines might flay the conscience of a person with scrupulous tendencies while appropriately convicting someone else.
Or adults either, an especially relevant consideration in an age where there are endless streams of podcasts, sermons, books, and self-help. Christian preachers and teachers might well consider whether their audience has been fed a steady diet of Try Harder Christian excellence
Everything from Koine Greek flashcards for preschoolers to board books that teach doctrine to inductive studies for elementary kids. But, it is irresponsible to presume that just b/c we market something "Christian," it will nourish children to have a steady unexamined diet of it.
Devout parents may find such charts and systems appealing, because they offer a sense of control, an identifiable way to “Christian harder. There’s a market that supports family piety, offering the-more-&-earlier-the-better Christian ed resources
This kind of systemization of performative Christian excellence is a relatively recent innovation & is rooted in cultures shaped by the Puritan work ethic. Systematizing victorious Christian living sometimes requires redefinitions of various terms, as Bill Gothard did:
You can see the nouthetic “put on/put off” reliance on sin categories in her still popular resource Wise Words for Mom. Parents are thus taught to redefine all behaviors through sin frameworks they have received from (whether they know it or not) nouthetic influences.
