https://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/jake/the-therapeutic-ctd/
Last year we raised a number of concerns about the ubiquity of therapeutic discourse within the evangelical movement.
In particular, a number of writers associated with Mere O, including myself, are alarmed by two things in particular:
- First, the ways in which therapeutic techniques seem to be replacing Christian discipleship as the means for pursuing personal growth.
- Second, with the ways in which categories of mental health and wellness seem to be replacing Christian maturity as the chief end of that growth.
And so when I see projects like this and language like this, well, I think my friends and I are rather vindicated in those concerns:
With the help of the Enneagram, powered by the gospel, you can experience transformation.
04. Be Transformed
And finally! You’re on your way to transforming your life and relationships.In some sense, many of the people falling into these habits of thought have been somewhat ill-served by the church. We are now 40 years into the seeker-sensitive liturgical experiment and the results, with regards to discipleship and catechesis, have been fairly abysmal. If our churches have behaved as if “Christian discipleship” largely consists of “holding the right ideas in your head” and “consuming the right content,” then it isn’t terribly surprising that many Christians would encounter the difficulties of life and feel radically unprepared for them. Their churches didn’t teach them to expect suffering, didn’t give them models for resilience and dependence on God, and didn’t provide practical guidance in mortifying sin and offering oneself up to God. So of course we now have many Christian people who are a bit at sea, particularly given how chaotic, angry, and uncertain this cultural moment has become. In such a scenario, techniques like the enneagram have an obvious appeal.
And yet the way of imagining the Christian life as conceived by this particular sort of approach to the enneagram seems hopelessly compromised to me. For 2000 years Christians have seen transformation through the Gospel without availing themselves of the enneagram. They have endured torture, persecution, the loss of family and status, and much else besides and have done it all without the aid of modern therapeutic technique. So while I understand that the failures of the attractional model created a vacuum that therapeutic technique has rushed in to fill, I also know that the cost of allowing therapeutic technique to persist in this work is far too high.
What is that cost, exactly? The cost is that the people of God would forget how to understand themselves using the language that the people of God have always used. ...
[5:07 pm, date of publication--I just got this idea that Meador may want to, if he hasn't already, go through Ephraim Radner's A Profound Ignorance for the trajectory of how Christianity in the West dropped talk of martyrdom and discipleship in favor of personal triumph over adversity via pneumatology. Nobody in the post-seeker-sensitive milieu may embody the doctrinal and ethical vices of what Radner called the "pneumatic man" quite like the guy who used to head up a megachurch here in Seattle since he bailed on Seattle, but I"m getting ahead of myself after the fact]
Having gone my whole life until a year or so ago having never heard of the Enneagram I have to admit that it’s a challenge to understand what people use it for and why Christian writers would balk at what sounds like a variation on the Meyers Briggs Temperament Index which itself was openly indebted to the four temperaments of Hellenistic speculative thought and philosophy. The point I'm going to make will, as usual for me, take a while, and it springs off of some of Meador's concerns.
