Ever wondered about the fundamental roles we assign in storytelling and how they shape our understanding of the world? My co-host Matt and I tackle this intriguing topic, discussing how we tend to oversimplify characters as either heroes, victims, or villains. We dive into the subtleties often missed in these narratives and the harm that can occur when we force complex personalities into these basic categories. Biblical stories, with their nuanced character portrayals, serve as a reference in our discussion, and we connect these insights with cognitive behavioral therapy.
We journey into the realm of heroism, discussing the works of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. Their theories on the hero's journey have greatly influenced our modern Western perception of heroes – but what happens when we simplify and exaggerate these stories? We also mine the research of Malcolm Gladwell and Gordon Allport before circling back to the work of mental health professionals and their role in unfolding narratives.
In the final part of our conversation, we examine how trauma impacts memory and storytelling. We discuss 'splitting,' a defense mechanism that leads individuals to view issues in stark black-and-white terms, and how this can sometimes lead to personality disorders. We further explore how the Bible's rich storytelling had a profound impact during its time and reflect on how Christian triumphalism can often lead to a simplified narrative of one's story. So, join us as we appreciate the power of nuance in storytelling and the deeper understanding of complexity and growth it provides. Be sure to connect with our free community library at churchpsychology.org for more insights through webinars, articles, and event notifications.
Show Notes
Ever wondered about the fundamental roles we assign in storytelling and how they shape our understanding of the world? My co-host Matt and I tackle this intriguing topic, discussing how we tend to oversimplify characters as either heroes, victims, or villains. We dive into the subtleties often missed in these narratives and the harm that can occur when we force complex personalities into these basic categories. Biblical stories, with their nuanced character portrayals, serve as a reference in our discussion, and we connect these insights with cognitive behavioral therapy.
We journey into the realm of heroism, discussing the works of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. Their theories on the hero's journey have greatly influenced our modern Western perception of heroes – but what happens when we simplify and exaggerate these stories? We also mine the research of Malcolm Gladwell and Gordon Allport before circling back to the work of mental health professionals and their role in unfolding narratives.
In the final part of our conversation, we examine how trauma impacts memory and storytelling. We discuss 'splitting,' a defense mechanism that leads individuals to view issues in stark black-and-white terms, and how this can sometimes lead to personality disorders. We further explore how the Bible's rich storytelling had a profound impact during its time and reflect on how Christian triumphalism can often lead to a simplified narrative of one's story. So, join us as we appreciate the power of nuance in storytelling and the deeper understanding of complexity and growth it provides. Be sure to connect with our free community library at churchpsychology.org for more insights through webinars, articles, and event notifications.
Show Notes
Hey, my friends, dr David Hall with Church Psychology, today's episode, matt and I are going to unpack how we tell stories in a certain way, specifically the human inclination to put ourselves and other people in our lives in the category of hero, victim or villain. These are key elements, characterizations, I guess, of most storytelling, but they also can lead us down a path of oversimplification, and that's something we want to kind of unpack, challenge and also kind of look at that in the context of how Scripture gives us examples of stories with a lot more nuance, how this relates to mental health, particularly aspects of mental health treatment like cognitive behavioral therapy, of being able to hold onto nuance, why that could be important, and that's what we're going to get into today. So glad you're with us. Go into that intro music now.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Church Psychology, a podcast of the Nagev Institute. We are mental health professionals looking at the intersections of social and behavioral science and the Christian life. Please connect with our free resources in our open community library at churchpsychologyorg. We would be grateful if you would follow, like or subscribe to Church Psychology wherever you are finding us, and also leave us a review as we start. If we are to love the Lord, our God, with all of our mind, it makes sense to work on our head space. It's good to work. Welcome everybody to the Church Psychology podcast. My name is Matt Schooniman. I'm here again with Dr David Hall. Hey, david.
Speaker 1:Matt, it is good to see you. It's been a few weeks since we recorded.
Speaker 2:That's right, I went on vacation, and not three weeks long vacation.
Speaker 1:That had been pretty cool.
Speaker 2:No, but got to get away spend time with the family.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're at the beach.
Speaker 2:Much needed time. That's right. Anybody needs a spot to check out. If you haven't already, it's Hilton Head Island. That place was quite nice.
Speaker 1:Well, you'd said you'd not done it before. Right, Like this was like a first.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't remember. I mean, I think I've been there once when I was like a teenager or early college. I don't remember much about it. I think it was like a day trip or something, but this was really good. I think our kids are getting at a really good spot to where they are excited about everything that has to do with the beach, and so they were having a blast, which made us have a blast, so it was really good.
Speaker 1:That is a big you know for spouses. You know there's the expression happy wife, happy life. But I think it's equally like you know, for kids. Happy kids happy life and where Matt and I live in East Tennessee. There are a few beach spots that are quite popular for people in this part of the country and realize the beach quote means different things, different people where you live, but it's funny that they're the different speeds of things for the.
Speaker 2:They set a different speed, for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as the kids would say, Hilton Head is a little bougie. It is. It's a lot of golf and you see into that. But you know how they the community is designed, how they really try to curate, how the buildings are and things like that. It's neat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is really cool. This podcast is actually sponsored by the town. Oh, it's good.
Speaker 1:So yeah, Matt had a vacay and I had a hernia surgery.
Speaker 2:That was what took me out, so one of us was having more fun. I love that you shared that with our 20 listeners, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the. I'm grateful, as I've said, to friends who've asked after my health. I am grateful for modern medicine, to be able to live in an era where I can, things can be repaired and I can go on in life and not have to perish in my early 40s as my ancestors would have for any number of different reasons. So yeah, Well, I'm glad you're back.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you're recovered.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you're back and I'm glad we're back recording today, Looking forward to the conversation today before we get into it. Yeah, Do you want to do a reminder for everybody who hasn't checked out our free community library at churchpsychologycom? Now, we've had in the episodes we've released so far. We'll do different plugs for it, but we want to kind of talk about it a bit more organically, starting at this point, Because part of it is that is, if you sign up for that, when it gives you access to different things that we put out.
Speaker 1:Occasionally, Matt and I will do recorded webinar presentations. They're usually about an hour long and once we have those up, we put them up as part of the community library for free. There are other things we plan on having in the future some exclusive articles. It also the big thing when you sign up for the community library, it connects you with our newsletter. So when we have different events that are going on, we did our first live event for the Nagev Institute, which is the organization that Matt and I work with that is behind the church psychology podcast, and we did our first live event in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Matt and I are, but we plan on doing events in different parts of the country.
Speaker 1:Some of them will be available online and so, as you connect with the free community library, it's a great way for us to hear who you are. We've been so grateful, just as we've. Different people have connected with us in this and we see the downloads and it's funny because we're there's somebody I don't know who you are in Papua New Guinea that has been missing, but we're grateful that you found us yeah we see that we have the downloads from there, so but so check it out.
Speaker 1:At church psychologyorg you can find access to the free community library. It just sign up with your email. It doesn't cost anything. It won't cost anything for the free library card, but it allows us to give you certain access to certain free content we have available and it keeps you connected with us, for us to share news about upcoming episodes and different things we'll be releasing with church psychology and the Nagev Institute in general. So, yeah, you check it out. Yeah, what are we talking about today?
Speaker 2:man. Yeah Well, you know we've been talking a lot off air, but you know, one of the things that we had a conversation about recently was kind of tied to what's been coined as, like, the hero's story. A lot of modern plots of movies and things kind of are the arc of this person's journey of going through adversity and coming out on top and like and just like. Star Wars is based off of that. There's other big movies just based on that kind of, and you can look at it.
Speaker 2:I don't know who coined that phrase first, but this conversation I thought we should have David Moore about, not just about the hero's journey but the idea of heroism in general and just kind of our modern Western view of what heroes are, should be, and how that compares, I think, with really what we see in the Bible is not directly that there's a lot of flawed people, and not only flawed people, but sometimes things don't come to a clean resolution like a lot of our scripted movies do, and just how do we navigate that and how does that, I think, influence us moving forward?
Speaker 1:But yeah, this idea of heroism, yeah, I think we have this idea of well, often tell stories and we will tell a story with a hero. Oftentimes it's ourselves, but it's the, and it will populate with other people.
Speaker 1:And it meant my conversation with this, where I was really interested in thinking and this has come up throughout my work as a mental health provider, I know for Matt, matt's work as a therapist as well. This has come up, but just some things that made me think about it more recently, about how we tell stories, what are the ways that we tell stories that may be overly simplistic, and what does nuance look like and how does that fit within a biblical framework.
Speaker 1:So I have many thoughts on this and I know that's not uncommon, but you brought up the hero's journey.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and that was actually something that was coined by a I guess the anthropologist is the background Joseph Campbell, that's right, and he wrote a book came on the late 1940s called Hero of a Thousand Faces, and it came from.
Speaker 1:He was looking at two different cultures and the mythical, historical literature sort of traditions of the storytelling of different cultures and realizing that there was a structure that across cultures was shared, whether it was African cultures, Asian cultures, European cultures, American cultures, that this story structure was pretty universal. And he was very much influenced and is thinking to you by the early psychiatrist Carl Jung, who helped a lot of what we talked about archetypes, the idea of the hero, the villain or the trickster, the shadow, and I'd like to do a whole another episode of just talk about the science of stories. Somebody who's really interesting to me, who's written about story, is this guy named Kindle Eben and he wrote a book that came out in 2014 entitled oh, I had it up and now Is it your brain on story? Your brain on story is a lecture that he did that we're talking about Okay.
Speaker 1:But he no-transcript, it's a story smart, story smart and basically Kindlehaven's a professional storyteller but he got involved in this research project because he also had, before he became a professional storyteller, he did work as a researcher and because of that there was this department of defense project looking at the neurological nature of story and he was somebody in the storytelling community who understood how to conduct and be a part of the research conversation. So he kind of got to be the point person for this and basically the level of hard wiring that we have as humans for story is pretty deep. It's the oldest thing that we can find in the sense of any human communication, to quote Story Smart. He has this thing of story is not just content, it's the way you organize the content. A story is a way of thinking and of planning and basically we understand our world in story form and if we can't make it fit into a story, we don't retain the information and we will manipulate information as it comes in to make it fit into story. And that's going to be a whole different episode. But it's Story Smart and Kindlehaven, but so we're hardwired towards it, we're drawn towards it. It's how we make sense of the world. And again that would be its whole other episode.
Speaker 1:But to the conversation that Matt and I were having about the idea of how we think of heroes, I got really interested in how it presents to Matt and I in our work as mental health counselors the way people will tell bad stories, and what I mean by bad stories is they're ones that are overly simplistic and the desire to make sense of things. We oftentimes take out some key elements. This was something. The psychology behind this was something I became aware of some of the earlier research. In Malcolm Gladwell, his book Tipping Point, he explores the concept of rumors, this idea of how information spreads, and in that he connected with research that was done by Gordon Allport, who in the late 1940s wrote a book called the Psychology of Rumor. And Allport noticed that there were two things that happened that made rumors spread, and a lot of it has to do with that science of story. The information was shaped in two ways that made it fit, easier and simpler stories and because of that it made it more spreadable.
Speaker 1:And the two things that in Allport's work that were significant, one was leveling, and this leveling refers to the process where a story is simplified as it's passed along, going from one person to another, stories may be omitted, the narrative may become less complex. Really, the only essential points will kind of stay, and sometimes those essential points will be shifted to let it make sense. And then the other thing after everything's kind of leveled out, then there's a sharpening. That's where certain things become much more dramatic or drastic, where there's the simplification at first and then it strips the story of nuance and then it emphasizes certain specific details to make it more vivid or dramatic. So, for example, if you have somebody who has gone through an event in their life that may cause them to retell it later, that they witnessed a traffic accident or they were in a traffic accident or they saw something that was significant in that, what's coming to mind to me is stories of people relating their witnessing to the September 11 attacks.
Speaker 1:That was something that happened in Matt Myer's life, but the story of how people said it. And here's something I realized as I was reflecting on this A lot of people talked about witnessing the second plane crash into the World Trade Center and a lot of people did because it happened live on TV and I honestly told the story for years that I had. But then I did some investigation actually in preparing for this and realized that I hadn't I'd seen a replay of it. The reason I knew I had it is because I knew where I was when these things were happening. I heard about the first plane crash first and I was in class. I was a college student at the time.
Speaker 1:I was in class and I realized it would have been while I was still in class that the second plane happened. And it was after I left class that I did see it, in the sense of that it was being played on the television but I didn't see it live. But I told the story about seeing live. And another example of this in America is how many people were at Woodstock. Well, we know statistically that there were about 500,000 people at Woodstock. The amount of people that have memories of being at Woodstock is a lot larger.
Speaker 2:Or less or less.
Speaker 1:And sometimes this idea is like are people lying? And in? A certain sense, yes, and they're telling an untrue story. But there's a process of how we process stories and certain things kind of come up and anyway the story's changed.
Speaker 2:Well, this is interesting in this sense, yeah. Well, recently we did an episode on trauma and you know I'd be really careful not to insinuate that people that go through trauma or traumatic experiences in experience trauma, then don't see the whole picture of what happened. But I think this plays out a little bit in how people experience a traumatic event. Your mind can only comprehend so much and has to put it in boxes. Even as terrible as the trauma is Like, it has to put it in boxes to understand it. And so it's not that a person necessarily even is intentionally omitting or adding elements of the story. It's just how they can process the chaos. You know, I think that's how we experience trauma sometimes is through this aspect.
Speaker 1:And I think that's an excellent point, Matt, because I think it's important to highlight that this is not a willful process for a lot of people, but because our brains are hard wired to process things in story form.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We try to make sense of things in story form.
Speaker 2:And if we?
Speaker 1:can't make sense of it in story form, we will shift things around to make it work, and I think this is oftentimes the case when someone's particularly young and they experience something traumatic yeah, that's right. And oftentimes they'll have a odd way of telling the story because they, in their limited language or their limited understanding of the world, will try to make sense of what is happening to them. Yeah, and they create a story around it. But you talk about trauma and you talk about how this can often misshapen, how we simplify a story and we often want to tell stories, as I highlighted before, where there are three main components there are heroes, there are villains and there are victims. And we oftentimes will see people in this very black and white sort of way of you're either the hero or the villain and, from a mental health perspective, there's lots of ways that this can kind of come out in how people present either responses to their trauma or just how they are in the world.
Speaker 1:But there's a category of mental health structures or dysfunctions. They're called personality disorders and they're organized in different ways, but two very famous ones that people will talk about is borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, and there are similarities and differences between those two, but one that's very significant is both of those styles of personality, one gauge and something called splitting, and splitting is it's a defense mechanism that involves viewing people or situations in very black and white terms, very all or nothing. It's either all good or all bad. It's a form of cognitive distortion and it can really hinder people from being able to deal with complex things. One of the ways that it comes up in these two personality dysfunctions is we call it in counseling, the idealization, devaluation process, and oftentimes they will, as therapists, will interact with these individuals and oftentimes they will talk about certain people in their lives or talk about us in these very black and white sort of things, and it usually comes in the order of positive first, it's more the idealized narrative first, and that really is this kind of overly simplistic hero sort of story.
Speaker 1:But then something might happen. As a therapist, sometimes it will be we've challenged them in ways or we'll challenge their way of thinking in ways that they have a hard time accepting. Or sometimes there may be something that happens in their life. They may have falling out with a romantic partner or friend or coworker or something, and this may have been a person. You would have heard their story told before and they're in the good spot. They're in the hero spot, that's right, and they shift super quickly into the villain spot and this could be super disorienting. I want to make a few things very clear in this, because I teach a lot on personality disorders. I actually, with another coworker of Matt and I, matt DeHart, he and I teach a course called Becoming a Narcissist Whisperer and I've taught and worked in personality disorders for a number of years. And two things I want to highlight there are a lot of people that can exhibit some of these traits that do not meet criteria for a full blown personality disorder or maybe somebody who does some of this.
Speaker 2:They're not necessarily a diagnosis narcissist, because even black and white thinking I use that a lot in my work and I'm not calling people that I'm talking to having a personality disorder we do naturally put things on a spectrum and put them on the far ends of it and a lot of the work of counseling. We just had a conversation with another colleague, jared, about living in nuance and how, when we make such definitive statements on certain things and make them so black and white, we often do that out of a fear or a defense towards some kind of threat to break it up like that. And so, yes, because you think in black and white sometimes or you split, does not mean you have personality disorder, but it will say that they're common in these, they're common in these.
Speaker 1:If you do meet criteria for borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder, you will do this.
Speaker 2:And so it's not that everybody who splits has a personality disorder.
Speaker 1:But if you have a personality disorder, you will split you will split, and so this is. And so many things exist on the continuum. All of us do a certain amount of this, but it does represent what in cognitive behavioral therapy is talked about, a very common cognitive distortion and part of within the CBT model, the cognitive behavioral therapy model of working with people. It's oftentimes to help them embrace more nuance, because life has nuances.
Speaker 2:That's right. Or a story? Well, not stories. Stories that don't have as much, but life has nuance.
Speaker 1:Good stories do, and I guess that's the thing. We can tell stories without nuance. And those are the very simplistic stories, and all Ports work shows that simplistic stories move more quickly. We can grasp them much more quickly. They're easy to remember, they're easy to tell.
Speaker 2:This reminds me or just makes me think of, because I think in like songs, movies, references, all that stuff. But you'll notice this, I think in oftentimes Disney movies have a very like Now they've gotten more nuanced in time but they have a very natural arc and some of this is really pleasant to watch Because you just need a simple story. But the most artistic stories or movies or whatever they have such nuance to them and that's why I think that they're so artistically like, critiqued or given maybe high ratings, is because it does fit more with the nature of what life is rather than our common way of telling the story. That's very simplistic.
Speaker 1:To say simplistic, for anything to be simplistic it's not bad, but it is simple. And my challenge to people is, if you find yourself or people around you that you're living in a world where it is all stories are all good and bad, it's all this black and white and people in your life are yourself, that you will tell your own stories where they're only people who are either victims, heroes or villains. Yeah, there's no crossover and there's no ability to take nuance. And you mentioned our recent episode, mad About Trauma, and I do want to highlight that to people, if you want to check that one out, because I feel it was a really cool conversation we were able to have.
Speaker 1:But this is not to diminish that. Are there people that do wrong? This is not to diminish this idea that people experience harm and abuse. It's not to minimize, I guess, the stories of pain and to diminish our ability to hear them. But I think if you find that you keep on, particularly in talking about pain, I think, as I'm coming back to this, when everything is overly simplistic of a story, you're missing something and there might be something in that that's going to be really important. It's an easy story to tell, but is it a rich story and does it serve you and does it allow it to be something transformative? And so we've talked some about the mental health context, and this is the thing the basis of most. Psychotherapy involves lots of things, but one of the most common things is moving people, or helping people move from an overly rigid black or white way of processing themselves and the world around them into one that incorporates deeper story in that way, more nuance, and so we just want to talk about the Bible and make stories in that.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're so listening, we just thank you for all the getting through the science of the Bible. I'll talk about the Bible in it. Let's talk about the Bible.
Speaker 1:So I think for those of us, particularly who have grown up in Christian culture, in church and with a lot of familiarity with Scripture, I think there's so much of it that we can take for granted just because it's so familiar. But I can tell you from an historical standpoint Scripture, particularly the Hebrew Scripture in the Old Testament, how particular and rare it is of how it was written. It's really hard to understate because the nature of literature and particularly religious texts that were produced around the same time in other cultures looked very different. If you look at things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, which came out of ancient Samaria, or Homer's writings in the Iliad and the Odyssey you have characters in this and they are.
Speaker 1:The heroes are truly, simplistically heroic. There's not a lot of nuance in this, but you get into the Hebrew Scriptures and then pass that name to the New Testament. There is flawed character after flawed character. It doesn't even meet the simplistic arc of people's flaws or in their past, and then they're redeemed and then it's fine. And this is a challenge too I want to make for Christians. Oftentimes, one of the ways that in Christian culture that we tell bad stories is we get really stuck in something that's called Christian triumphalism. It can manifest in a lot of different ways, but in our storytelling what it can be is it's the common quote, testimony of that.
Speaker 1:how it was selling drugs, and then I was saved, and then it's great.
Speaker 2:Well, that hits me, and that hits Just because I was thinking through or just having flashbacks, but I was having memory of just now, of like testimony in my old church growing up and the pressure to be able to tell your testimony in a place of what's the word I'm looking for, almost like completion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've made it, I've reached the end. Yeah, I've reached into the journey and it's great.
Speaker 2:But every time that you almost do that, and then you have a slip, or you have a moral failure, or you have maybe it's a addictive pattern that you have, or whatever you know. It's like, all of a sudden, my story is now nope, I'm not done with the story. I gotta keep going before I can tell my simplistic, heroic arc.
Speaker 1:Well, I wanna go to because one of the areas that you work a lot in, Matt, is men's sexual addiction, sexual integrity sorts of issues, and I think the temptation for the simple story can be really problematic for that. Because there's this someone may, in their story, reach a point of they experience some freedom from the addictive patterns they were in before. They feel like they've had some accountability and repentance and they're in a much more positive, positively regulated place. Yes, but if that feels like the end of the story when they experience future struggle, they don't have a way to compartmentalize it because it's too simple of a story, they can't process their continued struggle and it can be very compounding in a sense of shame and avoidance. And hiding.
Speaker 2:It becomes existential in nature, in the sense that all that I thought before is now flawed. And so you mentioned the word shame. That's where shame expounds upon that.
Speaker 1:So to move past, I think, what's an overly simplistic narrative that we can tell in church culture. I wanted to highlight the story of three specific biblical characters, and basically there's very few biblical characters that are presented to us that don't have major shortcomings, and again, that's so in the context of when and how these things were written that is so weird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's not how things were written. Particularly, it's a story of kings. It's a story of rulers, people that even if the stories were not committed to writing during their lifetimes, necessarily there would still be this idea to wanna show these people in a more perfect, flawless sort of way and that's not how they were written and that's weird. So the three people I wanna highlight because we can highlight so many people, but the reason I wanna pick these three is because they feel significant and the nature of their shortcomings come up throughout their lives. It wasn't just that because you could have somebody like the apostle Paul, who was murdering and persecuting Christians, met Jesus on the road to Damascus, had this sort of conversion experience, and we don't see a lot of Paul's shortcomings afterwards. It's almost like the bad part of his story was very much in the front.
Speaker 1:There were some things that came up, but he didn't get along well with John Mark and that caused a split with him and Barnabas. But I think there were several biblical characters that wanted to highlight that their mistakes come up throughout. The first is Jacob, so my man, jacob, jacob. So he let's start with the kind of the downside of it. He was manipulative at the beginning he manipulated his brother, esau, in a few different ways. Part of it was, we hear the story of, when Esau gave away his birthright for stew.
Speaker 1:But there is a sort of a sense of like if you've had siblings, sometimes you may have made some underhanded deal with them that you know in your heart you shouldn't like hold them to particularly when they're hungry or there's something like that and you know, he caused strife amongst his wives Part of it, the issue of having multiple wives and having children with multiple women and he showed favoritism amongst his kids in ways that caused struggle.
Speaker 1:We talked about the story of Joseph in the past and part of the dynamic that made Joseph so impocetable with his older brothers is he showed very clear favoritism to Joseph and Benjamin as the children of Rachel over his other children. But Jacob also. He became the founding patriarch of the Hebrew people and in the process of wrestling with God, he was given a new name. He ceased to be Jacob and he became Israel and that became the name of the people to follow and it was from him you initially promised to his grandfather Abraham, but it came from the multiple sons of Jacob, the people of Israel and God's chosen people in that. But Joseph doesn't quit messing up, or not Jacob? Jacob doesn't quit messing up, like you know, till pretty late in his years. Stories of his clear flaws are coming up.
Speaker 2:Which is interesting too, because so when he's renamed, it's this hallmark moment You're wrestling with God or a messenger of God, however you want to interpret that You're given a wound which some have thought he carried with him for a long time. A great book by Dan Allender is leading with a limp, which kind of reflects on leadership through wounding or hurt, but just that kind of concept of he had this limp for a while. He was renamed to Israel, which then became the nation that it is, but after that moment had many other failings to where you would think, if the story was simple, he would enter that space, become a leader even with the limp. That would be kind of his martyrdom thing that he could carry and he would do well from there and make right choices and honor God and all that he does. But that's not what happened.
Speaker 1:He kept failing even after that moment and I think that's important and I'm glad you highlighted that, matt, because that feels like you said, the hallmark moment, and it does feel like that's the conclusion of the hero's journey, that once you wrestle with God or the angel, what it's again, it depends on interpretation. This is out of Genesis 32, starting versus 22, where he's wrestling with this angelic or divine manifestation and is wounded but gets a new name in the process of that, and that feels like the moment Okay, once you cease to be Jacob and you become Israel, then it's all good and it's not.
Speaker 1:And that is and he's a flawed person.
Speaker 2:He said to go to Esau to meet with Esau like sent everybody else, he like stayed on the back and there was a reason probably. He did that, but there was this sense of such fear. Esau asked him to go with him and he said, yeah, I'll follow you. And then he didn't, like, he went away. He's still playing his game a little bit, yeah, and Old Testament. Now we're going to go over the New Testament. I can talk about Jacob all day.
Speaker 1:Good Peter, good Peter. So and same thing. We've referenced Peter and some like. There's some classic things. In his time as a follower of Jesus, he was known for being pretty impulsive. He was rebuked in Jesus in a very strong way. Particularly, this happens in all four of the Gospels where his denial of Jesus is recorded after Jesus' arrest and that's recorded in Matthew 26 and Mark 14 and Luke 22 and John 18. All record this example of Peter denying Jesus after Jesus told him he would deny him.
Speaker 1:There's the rebuke that Jesus gives him in Matthew 16, 21 of the get behind me Satan.
Speaker 2:If you want to be rebuked, you can be called Satan.
Speaker 1:There's the sense of Peter being this impulsive person, but then he has the moments of he's filled with the Holy Spirit at pen and cost, as told in Acts 2 and Acts 4.
Speaker 2:So he is amazing teaching that he did in Peter.
Speaker 1:He faces down the Sanhedrin, there's the sense of him being imbued with this power and that feels like the natural place where people would end Like. That would be like, and the Holy Spirit came, and then it was great. But what I love that we're given and this is related in Paul in the book of Galatians Galatians 2, 11, where Paul is recounting the rebuke he gave Peter when they were in Antioch, because Peter was showing favoritism to certain men, this idea of they were those of Jewish ancestry over those of Gentile backgrounds, and this idea that it was this kind of hypocritical thing. Not only was he showing favoritism, but before these men came, peter was fine to socialize with the Gentile Christians and then, once there was this pressure to show favoritism towards those of Jewish descent and Paul calls them out. And I think this is because this is after Pentecost, this is after Peter began his preaching ministry and again, that's not the overly simplistic story that we are inclined to believe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 1:And, depending on your church tradition too, the significance of Peter as the first Bishop of Rome. As Jesus in the book of Matthew says, you are Peter. Now, like Jacob, peter got a new name because Peter was Simon. He was given a new name, and so even the sense of being renamed and the sense of the transformative moment that represents in that culture, well, even in our own.
Speaker 2:So carry that to the gospel message of being rebirthed as a believer in Christ. The language that we use in Christianity is to die to self and be reborn, and that's where the born again Christian phrase comes from. And so, even after that rebirth or the renaming, we still fail, we still sin, and this is what I think. If we look at these types of stories, they're less idealistic in the sense of like we can't be this idealistic self but they are comforting because they give us a sense of like okay, this is the path, we will, it's like. So Jared I mentioned him earlier Jared Justice is a counselor that we have here and he's one of my favorite counselors and he and I do a group together with these men that are struggling and we always use the term an imperfect journey towards sexual wholeness.
Speaker 2:But it's the imperfect journey. We're still moving, and I use the example a lot of times with people as you're going up a trail in the woods or in the mountains, whenever there's a stumble or fall, it's kind of this conscience thing. If it's the simple story, then I go all the way back to square one, but I tell them like if you're literally on the trail and you fall down. You may fall back a few feet down the trail, but you're still miles ahead of the trailhead, you're still at this mile marker three or whatever the mile is, and you can get up. You're hurt a little, you're dirty, yes, but you're still there. And so that's what I get with this is, you know, even after renaming, even after the transformation happens, we're allowed to fail, and what these men learn through that process is amazing, you know. To then read some of Peter's writings in Scripture, first and second Peter and just knowing his story and then reading that makes it even more powerful, I think.
Speaker 1:Last biblical character I want to touch on is King David, and he's big in both sides throughout his life. So his virtues, there are lots of ones we can talk about. You know, the kind of his courage in the face of Goliath at the initial bit, his. But some things I want to highlight that are particularly virtuous of David, and this kind of sticks out in the story. His story for me, as he's being hunted by Saul, his continued desire to show honor and loyalty to him, even though this is somebody who's turned on him. There's the moment where he comes upon Saul in a cave and decides not to kill him, even though David's men are saying like you need an end this. But he just cuts off a part of his garment and shows Saul Like I could have killed you. Is this His grief when Saul and Jonathan are killed, even though there's been this battling against him?
Speaker 1:The one of my favorite stories is that, after you know, because of David's love of Jonathan, after he's dead, david seeks out Mithibbeth's son and invites him into the. This is in 2nd Samuel 9 where he asks like is there any of Jonathan's children or relatives still alive that I can show kindness to? And invites him to be at his table. And there's so many cultural taboos that are being broken by this, by David and the act of kindness. One is this idea of having a disabled person elevated to sit at the king's table.
Speaker 1:This is somebody who some would argue that he wasn't necessarily a threat because he was crippled, because this idea of kingship and warriorship in that time were very much tied together. And if you could not lead in battle, you would not have the ability to be king. But the typical thing still would have been done if, because this was, you know, this was the family. This is the rival family. You don't typically leave your rivals alive. And the fact that he does this, and so his loyalty and his true love, sacrificial love that he shows to his enemies and this is, I think, is really significant. And there are other kind of great things about David, but let's talk about so first off, the most famous one that gets talked about in the story of his interactions with Bathsheba and Uriah. So this idea of we talk about David's adultery, but I think in our modern years we kind of miss some of the tones of this too what level of consent that Bathsheba would have had in the context of this relationship is really limited and qualified.
Speaker 1:One of the nature of who David was and the nature of the society. This is just as easily can be interpreted in the sense of that this was sexual assault that David committed. Because this idea of her consent to any of this is not, it can't be taken for granted in the context of where this was.
Speaker 1:The same way, someone in power in our day that would be the case, but even more so in his day and in the response to this. And so this is and Uriah comes back, who's a foreigner in the service of David showing de-boilty to the king. He's trying to play this off and trying to get Uriah back, tries to make him think that he's the one that got Bathsheba pregnant and out of loyalty, uriah is doing all the wrong things and so David's response is to have him killed. And so this isn't just this is, he's a murderer and sexual abuser. In this and in our context that we rank those things very egregious, as we should, I think. And now there's the story of he's confronted by the prophet Nathan. In this he is pronounced judgment on him through Nathan. There's repentance, there's also the effects of his adultery and the sense of them losing the child. But I think it's also important to look even past that.
Speaker 1:David continued even this moment of screw up and repentance, and all that gets back on the trail in your kind of metaphor. But again, later in life, there's the and again this comes to an issue of abuse and response to abuse. Again there's the assault of Tamar, his daughter, by his other son, abnon, and David does not respond. It says the scripture says in 2nd Samuel 13 that he's mad but he doesn't do anything. So his other son, because David did not do anything, takes matters into his own hands and kills his brother and leads to rebellion. And so, basically, david's unwillingness to discipline and respond to the abuse in his household leads to further destruction. And that happened after years after.
Speaker 1:And so but we're called I mean David is called in the man after God's own heart and the scripture reference for that is, I believe that's it's in Acts 13. It's referenced in 1st Samuel 13, when David is first come on the scene of how God speaks to Samuel in that. But it's referenced again by Luke in the book of Acts 1322, but describing a man after God's own heart. This is somebody and within the Hebrew narrative, the significance of King David is important, but his flaws are, and here's the thing these things aren't told in the story and excuse. They are told in the story in the sense that these represent deep failings, because you would have stories about the Greek gods and things like that, where they would commit sexual assault, but the story wasn't told in the sense that they were bad because of it was just like recounting what they did. This is told in scripture, in the idea that these things are done and these are wrong, these are displeasing to God and they're worthy of God's judgment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, anyway, it's powerful. Well, I think that that's really so. A couple thoughts I have with this is the story arc of scripture is one that is so unique because you can see the whole picture from creation, fall, redemption, eternal life, like all of that is within this whole thing. So you can kind of zoom out and see everything as here's why Christ was needed for the gospel message. But then you come inward and it's the transcendence and eminence that we talk about God in general, like he's so big, yeah, so close, that you can take like the large side of this and be like, well, it's just the narrative, the whole thing. Well, yes, it's true, but these are also real people. It's not just like a story of a Greek mythological character. These are documented people outside of just the elements of scripture, that actually lived, and for us to tell their story in a way, or the Hebrews to tell them their story in a way that is so realistic and not idealistic, shows, I think, something unique about it, and I think for me, at least in this moment, hearing them and just knowing kind of my own story, it's a place of comfort to some level, that life is so much more nuanced than the black and white of hero, villains and victims.
Speaker 2:I was going to reference this earlier. There's a show about to come out upon recording. It's the Loki series on Disney. I guess, if you're a nerd like me and you follow that stuff, when he was first introduced as a character, or at least even in the comics, he was a villain, big time villain, actually one of the main villains of like the first Avenger movies. Well, now his story arc is coming into a place of is he a hero? Is he a villain? He's a victim and it's this nuance of all three of these in one character, and so it's.
Speaker 2:I don't know if that's going to be a great show like the second season but the way I'm thinking about it is that we all kind of carry a little of each of these people.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think that's a huge. You talk about Camarid, different stories, and a lot of us can identify a lot of simplistic stories, and simplistic stories may be really enjoyable to hear. It's nice to. I think of when I was a young kid.
Speaker 1:I was really into professional wrestling like watching it on TV like the whole Kogan era and all that and like the good guys and the bad guys were really clear and there's something kind of comforting as we approach stories like that. And you reference older Disney things, Matt, but as a juxtaposition you talk about Loki. I'm going to give something a few years older, but one that I can't verify. At least the first few seasons were really enjoyable, which was down to Navig. I really enjoyed down to it. I did fade on it, like a lot of people did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but Maybe it had a good first few seasons though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, first few seasons, but as soon as Matthew left the series I feel like out Whatever, yeah. But here's why I highlight it, because if you just take the first few episodes, certain characters are presented in ways that are far more simplistic. For those who haven't watched it, it's a fictionalized story of a English-titled noble family in England in the early 20th century and about the different dynamics of both the members of the family as well as their serving staff, of the footmen and butlers and maids and things like that, and it's kind of these parallel worlds that are separated by class. But here's the thing If you get into that series, most of it's so well written, and one of the things that makes it really well written is the characters are complex.
Speaker 1:There are certain characters that for those who are familiar with the story. Lord Grantham is one of the main characters. He's the father of the family and the first few episodes he's seen is very noble and that's kind of it for him. But as the series gets on you see different things in it. You see, then, some ways he's kind of pompous and he's kind of short-sighted and some of his flaws get shown and it isn't meant to undo what you saw before but to add complexity. And there's another character like Thomas, who's kind of villainous, but then there are moments where you deeply sympathize with him. Or the grandmother played by Maggie Smith. She's very much kind of a less than wholesome, likable character in the first few episodes, but you get into nuance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially as that character arc goes throughout the entirety of those seasons. Man she, you really start falling in love with that character.
Speaker 1:It's really interesting, yeah, but there's a richness to it.
Speaker 1:And so there's a call, I think, because Scripture puts in front of us complex characters, complex stories, and I think there's a call to step into that complexity for ourselves and the sake of others. To tie in also to something else you were referencing, matt, that I think is hugely important, of the need for Jesus to step in the story, Because, basically, what the Archive Scripture is showing us is, no matter how heroic, no matter how important these people are to our stories, they are deeply flawed until the person who is not shows up. That's right, that's right. And so even one of Jesus's sinless lies there aren't the flaws in his story and how he interacts with those who did have flaws, because he's surrounded by very flawed individuals, and how he lives with them and loves them kind of not. I think oftentimes we have this idea that Jesus will say something that God accepts us as what we are, but I think a deeper way of telling that story is yes, he does, and he loves us well enough not to leave us where he found us.
Speaker 1:And part of loving us well is to call us out of and to move away from those things that are flawed. And here's the significance that I want to draw to this as we're getting closer to him, particularly as I wanted to leave David to the end, because I feel his sins, particularly in the context of the world we inhabit and how our moral sense his sins are particularly egregious. That's right and I do not want to make light of that. I think it's significant that the fact that a king took a woman that was not his wife was it weird or rare in his age, because Scripture was significant in saying that this is unacceptable for God, that you are, as Nathan confronts him, like you are, the rich man that took from the poor man, took his own lamb. And the sense of God being the advocate for the oppressed and the downtrodden comes in early in this.
Speaker 1:And this sets the tone of what we carry forward in this idea, like this was truly wrong and I don't think this is about glossing over. It's like but David was a man after God's own heart, so this doesn't matter. No, it's because he was a man after God's own heart that this matters even more. And for those who've experienced hurt, I don't think none of what we're talking about right now is this idea to abandon the call for repentance, accountability, boundaries all those things are in place and as believers and for Matt and I, both in our work as mental health counselors, we very much believe and support that. But if you want to see the people in your life is overly simplistic. If you want to have your hero category of people or your villain category of people, and that be it.
Speaker 1:And not being able to see nuance and not being able to see the idea that, because what that does is if we will see somebody who has done bad and will really want to make it really bad. There's a perverse desire we have that we want the villains in our life to be truly villainous and inversely. We will ignore the inconsistencies in the heroes in our lives, including ourselves. We will ignore our own inconsistencies because we'll say, well, I'm a good person and I see people completely gloss over things in their life that really need to be brought to the surface because it doesn't fit the overly simplistic story they want to tell for themselves and you find yourself, or you find yourself around people that are drawn very much to these thin, simplistic stories and they can't move past them. We would challenge that. We challenge that from a mental health perspective, on the best science of that, that needs to be challenged and the arc of scripture that we're given, that needs to be challenged.
Speaker 2:Yes, right, that's really good. It reminds me of I think it was in Luke, but Jesus is talking about. There's like two people praying. There's the Pharisee, and then there's the leper or the poor man, I can't remember which one and the Pharisee is praying. Thank you, lord, that I'm not like this poor person and I do these things every day and I give my tithe and all this stuff. And then there's the other person that's had mercy on me, for I'm a sinner, and Jesus reflects on the man. Who's crying out for mercy is the one that is can't find the word not most accepted but most desired by God in that moment, it's like, and so His offering is more pleasing. I believe it was a tax collector.
Speaker 2:It wasn't just a leper Tax collector that's right, tax collector, which is even more significant in the system of that day. And so, anyway, I think that we can carry all of our heroic, villainous victimhood to the cross, but we have to bring it with a sense of humility and ask for mercy in that and that's what I think makes David significant is we have so much of his heart towards God after his brokenness. Obviously it didn't fix everything because of what we talked about, like later in his life, and he continued to fail, but his heart was for God and redemption of that relationship, and so A significance about David too is, I think, because we have both the historical narrative David as given in Chronicles and Samuel, but also we have David's own writings as coming down through the Psalms in a way which is just amazing.
Speaker 1:And so we have that window in. That's different than some of the other characters we talked about in. If you've listened to any episodes, I don't know if there's a single episode that Matt and I have done where we don't talk about the importance of tension. And if you want the simple story of like well, was this good or bad? Was David good or bad? He was both.
Speaker 1:God does not want to ignore his flaws, but it doesn't also change the fact that he was set by God up in a certain way and it doesn't deny the way Basically it's. I think what God's constantly bringing us back to is that David's not the standard, peter's not the standard, jacob's not the standard. They are measured against the standard of the one who was perfect. And so when David or Jacob or Peter or anybody else in the history, or our lives, our current lives, when we are being as God calls us to be, it is good, and when we are not, because they're not the standard we're holding ourselves up to and to there's nuance and I guess that what keeps on coming back to, and that's why it was really I've appreciated this conversation and why this would have so much on my mind, because we. I love story, it's so significant. But we wanted today to be a challenge about not to tell bad stories or overly simplistic stories when we're called to see and to hear and to learn from these deeper stories.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I hope for you too, as you listen, as it produces curiosity towards your fellow man, to not put people in boxes of either three of these, but to try to understand the complexities and what God may want to teach you through that. So, david, it's been a great conversation. We'll leave the people there and to all you have listened, thank you Check our resources at churchpsychologyorg and we look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you again for being a part of our latest episode of Church Psychology. If you have enjoyed it, we hope that you will share this episode with others in your life, and please do remember to follow, like and or subscribe to Church Psychology wherever you're finding us and leave us a review. We look forward to connecting with you again soon.