Attachment With God, wk 5 (The Nurturant God)

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Vince closes our series using attachment science to improve our relationships with God, by bringing in one last psychological framework to help us intentionally shape our images of God to be more like Jesus’ loving parent image.

SPEAKER NOTES

Attachment With God, wk 5 (The Nurturant God)

Story

  • Picture with me: Saturday chores time for the kids at the Brackett house. Tidy the bedrooms, surface clean the bathrooms, put the dirty laundry in, empty the dishwasher, and then, the most offensive suggestion of them all, fold the clean laundry.
  • That’s when it starts: The weeping and gnashing of teeth. “This is the worst!” “I hate this!” “This is going to take 4 hours!” The mutiny. The resistance.
    • Sometimes I don’t have it in me to smile at this like I am now; I get upset, I don’t have room for their feelings because I’ve become hyper-focused on the job at hand. This is not productive to our family relationships, because I end up missing the forest for the trees. I’m no longer focused on our family commitment to chores; I’m focused on them learning their lesson!
    • Other times, I’m able to be really kind as they express their feelings, but I struggle to hold the line on our family commitment to Saturday chores as I sit with them. I end up folding the laundry or putting the dishes away for them. This also is not productive to our family relationships, because my kids gradually learn that I won’t stick to what I say; my words are unreliable.
  • I remember feeling so helped in this dilemma when an interview I listened to introduced me to a parenting framework from psychology that has now become a North Star for me. It looks like this: a two by two matrix measuring warmth and then measuring expectations and structure (or limits and boundaries as it’s described in this visual).
    • Authoritarian: high expectations and structure, low warmth
    • Permissive: high warmth, low expectations and structure
    • Nurturant: high warmth AND high expectations and structure
  • When I’m in a shouting match, I’m going authoritarian. When I’m struggling to hold to our family commitments, I’m permissive. But what we’re shooting for is Nurturant parenting. It’s work to hold together high emphasis on these two values at the same time. Honestly, for the younger ones, it’s not actually faster or more efficient for our family for them to do their chores — it’s a sacrifice of the short term for the sake of longer term formation. So it makes sense that it feels hard. But it can be done! It is possible to warmly and kindly come alongside my kids who are upset about having to do chores, receiving their feelings without minimizing them, AND still hold to the family commitment that, yes, you still have to fold your laundry.

Context

  • Psychology can be a gift to parents.
  • Likewise, for the last month we’ve been talking about how psychology can be a gift to theology, because it helps us take really seriously Jesus’ preferred metaphor for God: loving parent.
    • Is the image of God we’ve absorbed in life like a good, loving parent?
    • If not, maybe our image of God is not worthy of being called God!
  • In particular, we’ve been using the framework of attachment science — which is about secure vs insecure.
  • Today, to close, I want to add to our conversation this other framework from psychology: nurturant parenting as the combination of high warmth AND high expectation and structure.

Transition

  • This will help us identify two popular but ultimately disappointing images of God that are extremely common for Americans, correlating with authoritarian and permissive parenting.
  • There will be some overlap with the way we’ve tried to identify less-than-worthy images of God in our last few messages using attachment science, but I think looking from this different angle will be beneficial.
  • Then we’ll finish talking about God as a nurturant parent — what our use of this framework recommends. visual off

Authoritarian

  • The authoritarian God (low warmth, high expectation) - wants us to “learn our lesson”!

  • The disciplinarian God is a phrase we’ve already used this series.

  • For example, this view of God has an over-reliance on scriptures like Hebrews 12.

    Endure hardship for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children, for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline?… [Human parents] disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but [God] disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share [God’s] holiness. Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

  • Now, as I’ll come back to, I think there are situations in life where Hebrews 12 is a useful scripture…

  • But a serious problem in popular views of God today is taking Hebrews 12 to be universally applicable to every circumstance of hardship: Saying that every suffering in life can be explained as God’s discipline. slide →

  • This is a major reason so many people view God as an authoritarian parent.

  • And the consequences are significant…

    • When someone experiences pointless pain — cancer, random birth defects, rape, natural disaster, a betrayal — and the only interpretation they are offered for their hardship is “God’s discipline”, the pain added on top of their pain can be enormous.
    • A 2022 Gallup poll showed that belief in God among Americans had hit an all-time low, especially among 18 to 29 year olds.
    • Not enough careful research has been done to empirically parse the reasons why Americans report not believing in God,
    • But if you're plugged into these conversations that represent 60 to 70 million Americans, like I have been for the last decade and a half as a pastor, you'll know that the most common thing you hear is disenchantment with an authoritarian disciplinarian God.
    • Usually some version of the question: “Given all the suffering in the world, how can I believe in God?” (philosophers call this the problem of evil)

  • If God is an authoritarian and Hebrews 12 explains every circumstance of hardship, I think people are right to question belief in God. I don’t believe in that God either.

  • However, there is a hidden assumption behind this questioning:

  • That the only way to conceive of a powerful God is an all-controlling God --

    • When we conceive of God's power, we unfortunately seem to fall into all or nothing thinking
    • If there is a God, we all seem to assume, everything that ever happens must come back to that authoritarian God, who causes or at least allows everything, including hardship, for disciplinary purposes.
    • If not, then there must not be a God.
    • It’s all-controlling God or no God.

  • We often point out this all-or-nothing assumption here at BLC, because we don’t have to accept it!

    • Over the last century, the emergence of things like feminist and queer thought and critical race theory and class analysis are helping more people see that this assumption (about power being control) is mostly due to the legacies of white-supremacy, male-supremacy, and unchecked versions of capitalism that favor the rich.
    • And, hey, 2000 years ago, there was this guy Jesus, the image of the invisible God, who showed divine power as something VERY different from all-controlling power.

  • So, if we push past all or nothing thinking, we can believe in a different kind of powerful God — I’ll also come back to this in filling out a picture of God as a nurturant parent.

Permissive

Before that though, the other side of our warmth-expectation matrix shows another popular image of God that inevitably disappoints.

  • The permissive God (high warmth, low expectation).
  • This is well captured by research from the largest ever study of American young people and religion — called the National Study of Youth and Religion, started in 2001 by the Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith.
  • Smith makes a very compelling case that the most common religious belief today is not Christian belief or any historic wisdom tradition’s belief, it is what he calls “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” — a sort of stepchild of Christianity, mostly born of the American Church-Growth movement of the 1980s and 1990s that led to the rise of mega churches.
    • Moralistic — meaning God wants you to be good and nice
    • Therapeutic — meaning the central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself
    • Deism — meaning you believe in God, but God is largely uninvolved in day-to-day life
  • Unlike the authoritarian image of God, this is not an intense, high expectation God by any means.
  • This God is unlikely to cause trauma, so that’s a positive.
  • In short, this God is “not bad”.
  • But, in a way, that’s the problem — it’s “meh”. It’s high warmth, but low expectation.
  • This image of God is just not all that inspiring. It’s sort of benign.
    • Moralism about being a good little boy or girl and finding the Aesop’s Fable “life lessons” in Bible stories can be fine when you’re a kid, but eventually it feels thin as you get into the world of complex thinking and gray moral dilemmas.
      • That’s really different than a Tradition of Wisdom and Justice with a captivating Story that calls to us with virtues and values, and invites us to participate in changing the world.
    • Being happy and feeling good about oneself are obviously desirable pursuits — I want that for all of you! — but all people, even those with the most charmed and privileged lives, inevitably must face the hardest things of life that bind us all together: the death of a loved one, the failure of an effort or relationship, regret, betrayal, anxiety, evil.
      • When these things happen, surface-level religious beliefs and behaviors built around being happy and feeling good just can’t deliver on what they promise, and we rightly leave them behind, and look for deeper, weightier things to sustain us.
  • The Permissive God of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism may feel warm to us, but is not confident or vision & values-driven enough as a divine parent to lead us anywhere we can’t go by ourselves.
    • If Christian Smith is right, and MTD is the most common religious belief among anyone who has come of age since the 1990s, is it any wonder the fastest growing religious identification in America over the last three decades has been “none”? slide →

Nurturant

  • So, let’s fill out what this parenting framework can drive us toward: God as a nurturant parent, BOTH high warmth AND high expectation.
    • In theology, this most connects with what is called the Open and relational view of God and life - what we teach here.
  • First, to return back to Hebrews 12, the Biblical passage about enduring hardship as discipline —
    • Seeing God as a nurturant parent allows us to receive the good of Hebrews 12 without inappropriately making it universally applicable.
    • The nurturant God can distinguish between pointless pain and hardship with a purpose (the pain of growing up, of coming to the end of my ego, of maturing, of learning from my mistakes and regrets).
    • Hebrews 12 makes total sense to me if it’s about purposeful hardship.
    • What a gift to receive the hardships of maturing and being humbled by life as discipline from a high warmth and high expectation parent, rather than as the cold consequences of an indifferent universe!
    • I don’t want my kids flailing alone when they experience regret; I want them feeling my support! That I accept them even if they find it hard to accept themself.
    • I remember all the mentors who have done this for me, their warmth and their belief in my potential.
    • Alternatively though, when it comes to pointless pain, Hebrews 12’s talk of enduring hardship as discipline should not be a go-to scripture.
    • Pointless pain is not God’s discipline; it is what God is trying to redeem.
    • The Authoritarian God doesn’t make the distinction between pointless pain and purposeful hardship. It just calls all suffering God’s discipline, which is inappropriate and harmful.
    • The Permissive God doesn’t do this either actually. It just calls all suffering intolerable, which fails to trust in maturity and development and resilience.
  • The other thing I want to come back to is a different way to believe in a powerful God, that doesn’t fall into all or nothing thinking.
    • One of my favorite Scriptures in the Bible is what’s known as the Philippians 2 hymn (it’s the writer St. Paul quoting one of the earliest recorded poems we have about Jesus)
    • Probably set to music, it sings of Jesus showing us God because Jesus didn’t count “divinity” something to be grasped or taken advantage of but humbled himself in the form of a servant.
    • True divinity is NOT all-controlling power over,
    • BUT all-influencing power with.
    • God is the most powerful force in all of life, present with and serving all of creation, in every moment powerfully influencing our choices and chances toward the most beautiful, most good, most just possibilities, bidding us to participate.
    • But God’s power is never controlling or coldly disciplinarian, it is NOT high expectation, low warmth, pushing creation around, coercing creation.
    • Yet it is power. It pulls and persuades with a vision and values and an aim, it has expectations and structures, it is not warmth alone. slide →
  • Another example from parenting hits this home for me.
    • When my three year old is wound up at bedtime, I so often feel tempted toward authoritarian parenting because it seems most powerful and effective: “Just get in your bed!” I insist exasperatedly. And I physically pick her up and put her in her bed and wrap her up in her blanket. But it doesn’t work. She never “learns the lesson”. She’s out of her bed again two minutes later.
    • In other moments, I feel tempted toward permissive parenting: I don’t do anything to lead her for fear of being too stern and sacrificing warmth, but in the process I set her up to be out of routine and dis-regulated and short on sleep the next day, because while I am right that I should not sacrifice warmth, I am wrong to assume that she is developmentally capable of leading herself back to sleep. She is the child and I am the adult; it is my job to lead her!
    • In my best moments, I come and lay down next to her when she’s wound up, I read her a short story, I stroke her hair for a minute, rub her feet, gently coax her toward sleep… and with a little investment and a little patience from me, she falls asleep.
    • That is power: power with. More powerful than power over, I believe.
    • Because it’s high warmth AND high expectation.
    • Even though our culture tends to associate power most with authoritarian behavior, I believe nurturant power is the most powerful force in all of life. DSK off

Takeaways

So we are not children wound up at bedtime and not developed enough to lead ourselves to sleep,

BUT we are adults who struggle to live up to our values! And we are societies of people with deep systemic problems!

We need powerful leadership, not just warmth.

AND we need that leadership to be power with, not power over. We do not need an authoritarian God! (Especially if we want to be done with authoritarian heads of state!)

We need a nurturant God, like Jesus’ loving parent God.

And I think that’s the God that actually exists. We, as individuals and groups, can train ourselves to look for and perceive more readily the Nurturant God in several ways, but those ways may involve shifts to ingrained beliefs and practices that assume an Authoritarian or Permissive God.

So here are some takeaways we often repeat here:

  • Pray for God to break through rather than break in.
    • If we are praying for help or healing, the Nurturant God's help and healing emerge like a break through from below or from around us, more so than they are dictated from above by an authoritarian breaking in (power with not power over).
    • I personally don’t like the language of “divine intervention”, because it makes us think that when God helps it’s interrupting the usual rules of life; I prefer the language of “divine alignment”: God’s help is not a separate thing from human help or medicine’s help, or societal progress; God is the artist, invested in all things, always actively trying to weave life together for a good purpose. And sometimes, in rare moments, we might see such incredible alignment we can call something a miracle.
  • Look for God to speak in Yellow lights, rather than red or green lights.
    • When we feel stuck and need guidance, we often want green lights or red lights, because that feels easier when life is so overwhelming. But the Nurturant God always wants to include us and our freedom to choose — it’s much more likely that God’s guidance will come to us as: “this is a yellow light, you can go, or stop, it’s up to you and I will be with you and behind you either way.” Because that’s high warmth AND high expectation.
    • If we’re looking only for red lights or green lights we’re going to miss a lot of God’s presence and guidance in our lives.
  • Pray for more possibilities, rather than specific outcomes.
    • People who grew up being taught to pray are mostly familiar with praying for one specific outcome (for this job, for this test result, for a person to see reason this way, for our country to change this way), BUT what if the real power of prayer is NOT narrowing the future to one specific way for good or meaning or justice to be realized? What if the real power of prayer is expanding the future to include more possibilities for good or meaning or justice to be realized? What if that’s how our prayers impact life? Our prayers give God more possibilities to work with.
    • Praying to open up the future, rather than restrict the future is so much more resilient, because it trains you to see God answering prayers more often. That means we are much less likely to feel our belief or hope fade away because of an uninvolved, "meh” God, and much less likely to feel resentment overtake us because of a supposed-controlling God who frustratingly refuses to answer our prayers.

Prayer

We've brought in several Psalms from the Bible during this series, so I have one more to close today. Let me lead us in prayer with this selection from Psalm 32 that beautifully balances high warmth & high expectation from a Loving Parent God…

7 You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.

And then the Psalmist has God saying back to us…

8 I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.

Hebrews, Philippians, PsalmsVincent BrackettAttachment With GodComment