This week, I am going to begin a four-week look at Michael Polanyi’s notion of “moral inversion,” which is a concept that I believe is important to fully understand to help Western culture, and indeed world culture, escape from current problems. In his Gifford Lectures, published as Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical PhilosophyMichael Polanyi gave his fullest philosophical defense of a free and moral society. [1] He begins by noting that any human undertaking, and most importantly the creation and maintenance of a free society, requires a community that respects the values of that society and acknowledges the personal obligation of its members to maintain and extend those values into the future. The love of freedom requires a society that fosters the character and determination to maintain and extend that society’s freedom as a cultural obligation.[2]

Polanyi discusses his theory of social interaction and the problem of moral inversion in a chapter entitled “Conviviality.” [3]The word “conviviality” derives from a Latin root (con+ vivere), meaning “to live with others.” More interestingly, the English term is derived from the French term “convivialis,” meaning “pertaining to a feast or celebration.” One hopes that a post-Nietzschean, post-nihilistic society might return to a social vision of human flourishing as a feast.[4]

Humans as Social Creatures

Humans are naturally social creatures, and as a result, they are inherently connected through various responsibilities to their family, friends, colleagues, and the wider community. These bonds help us support and collaborate with one another, enriching our lives and strengthening our sense of belonging. Polanyi points out that this human propensity toward social interaction is not limited to humans; it exists in other creatures; however, it is most highly developed in humans and in the vast array of social institutions they have created and can create.[5]

These social systems are established and maintained largely through human language and the capacity of human beings to develop political philosophies, constitutions, legal systems, bureaucratic systems, and other incidents of a complicated social structure. These articulated systems, whether scientific or legal, demonstrate the capacity of human beings to create systems of understanding that support human flourishing. Human beings, instinctively and often tacitly, or capable of extending the conditions of human flourishing, as a kind of social beauty, as well as creating systems of oppression.[6]

In political systems, the constitutions and laws that form them are largely composed of written documents, such as the constitution adopted by the founders, the positive laws enacted by the legislature, and the many opinions issued by the judiciary as it seeks to resolve conflicts arising under those laws. No one can understand or participate in such a system without some form of education that enables them to become part of the community. In a political community, such as the United States of America, there are varying degrees to which someone becomes part of the community.

The basics of our system of government should be known by everyone; however, to become a practitioner of the art of being part of society, a person must undertake an apprenticeship through which they learn the community’s basic values and the details of its articulation in human language. To do this, before any important formation can take place, the learner must believe in the tradition’s core values. Polanyi’s favorite appropriation of Saint Augustine, “one must believe before one knows.” [7]

Trusting the tradition of which one is becoming a part does not eliminate the personal nature of the knowledge to be gained, nor does it deprive the one entering a period of apprenticeship in a tradition of their own powers of questioning and doubt. Since one of the primary principles of Polanyi’s system is the principle of fallibility (the idea that whatever my opinions are might be wrong, and therefore I must hold them with a willingness to change my mind), it is part of a free tradition that one joins by personal choice.[8] This requires the virtue of holding ones opinions with a degree of humility and recognition of human limits.

It is impossible to overemphasize the role of conviviality or fellowship in the creation of any society. [9] For example, although the founders of quantum physics disagreed on many matters, they met regularly, discussed them in depth, and respected one another, even during disagreement. There was a degree of conviviality, even among those who consider themselves intellectual opponents. One important indication of the problem with American political culture is precisely this lack of conviviality among those in high positions with great influence who disagree on the specifics of policy. No communal search for freedom can endure a situation in which the participants have lost the ability to communicate and to fellowship with one another.

From Foundations to Institutions

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the basic point: Free societies sit upon a foundation of common values, interpersonal relationships, and trust in a common endeavor, in the case of a free society, the gradual improvement of society through agreement and common action. The structure of the process of institutional evolution looks like this for Polanyi:

1. Shared common convictions
2. Shared social interaction and fellowship
3. Cooperation towards common goals
4. Structures of authority and social coercion.[10]

It is important to note the order: authority and coercive structures, such as law and police, are not primary; they are not first but last. This is crucial to understanding what is wrong with totalitarian regimes, whether soft (relying on bureaucratic and social coercion) or hard (relying on brute force). In a free society where human beings can flourish, shared convictions, social interaction, and cooperation are more fundamental than any coercive structure and rest on the legitimacy conferred by the group’s shared values, community, and action. Structures of authority and the exercise of power should be developed to protect the common convictions, fellowship, and free common action of the society.[11]

Dangers to Modern Societies

Prior to the Enlightenment, throughout most of human history, it was taken for granted that all societies had to have a hierarchical structure of some kind. These hierarchical structures either modified themselves gradually (and were renewed) or were changed by certain cataclysmic events, such as the defeat of the Persian empire by Alexander, the great. With the advent of the modern world, the conviction spread that societies could be improved indefinitely by the exertion of the political will of the people, and that the people should therefore be sovereign, both in theory and in fact. This, in turn, led to the potential for what might be called democratic totalitarianism, or what Marx called the “Will of the Proletariat.” The founders of the United States were well aware of this danger, which is why they attempted to create a system of checks and balances. While the people would have the final say in their government, the Constitution incorporated various safeguards against the abuse of that freedom. Modern totalitarian governments are a return to a pre-Enlightenment static society in which the government can comprehensively impose its will on a society and its members. This is the essence of totalitarianism.[12]

The Moral Foundation of Free Societies

As the foregoing makes plain, Polanyi understood that society and social institutions rest upon a foundation of morality that is deeper than the external features of the social system or society. Morality, custom, and law all perform important functions within any society. Moral judgments are individual actions that involve the whole person and influence every facet of society. [13]Unfortunately, in a critical aid, such as ours, the capacity of morality to sustain itself as a stable course of society Is always precarious.[14]

Using science as an example, Paul argues that the key to maintaining moral values and other cultural norms in a free society lies in the self-organization of people working together on a common task, such as scientific discovery. He also emphasizes the importance of freely adopting standards, under expert leadership, to help the group achieve its shared goals.[15] As in science, there must be enforceable standards (which may change over time), but those standards are maintained not so much by force as by consensus.[16] In fact, I would argue that where force is required, there has been an unwillingness or inability to maintain a rational consensus within the group.

In a free society, civic culture works much like a friendly neighborhood where everyone gradually agrees on shared values. Over time, civic authorities earn the right to uphold these community standards, owing to the collective effort of people who are passionate about understanding what is right—especially those involved in philosophy, religion, and related fields. Constitutions and laws are built on this delicate moral agreement, which needs constant nurturing and care through ongoing reforms. Naturally, such a process involves healthy discussions, debates, and thoughtful decisions to keep everything moving forward positively.

If a fundamental degree of social consensus cannot be reached or honored, the society is in a state of latent civil war. In such situations, the government may resort to coercion under the influence of a dominant group. However, the society itself has lost cohesion and the capacity to make progress, and is in decline.[17] It is almost impossible to deny that this is precisely the situation in which Western democracies, including the United States, find themselves. They have failed to maintain and build that social consensus upon which all free nations rely for their legitimacy and stability.

In the next installment, I will examine both the inevitability of power and coercion, even in free societies, and the dangers posed by resorting to power and its glorification to sustain a free society. When power and its exercise are used to warp the free exercise of individuals’ moral capacities and to force obedience to a fragile or nonexistent consensus, power has been abused, often in the name of “the Will of the People,” God, or national values. Any society that allows this is on the road to totalitarian government.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1974).

[2] Id, 203.

[3] Id, Chapter 7.

[4] There is here a connection with a prior series of blogs on the morality of beauty, especially in Orthodox thinking. The vision of human society as a kind of feast of human flourishing is a vision of a society that is beautiful, and beautiful to live in where human beings can achieve their full potential. See my prior reviews of Timothy Patisis, The Ethics of Beauty (Maryville, MO: St. Nicholas Press, 2020).

[5] Id, 209.

[6] Id, 204.

[7] Id, 208.

[8] Id.

[9] Id.

[10] Id, 212.

[11] Id, 213.

[12] Id, 213-4.

[13] Id, 214-5.

[14] Id, at 216.

[15] Id, at 217.

[16] Id, at 218.

[17] Id, at 223.

Most of us can remember a time when we felt our parents, pastors, and teachers were hopelessly behind the times. One of our children, at the ripe old age of fourteen, announced to us: “Your job is done. I am raised now. I can take care of myself.” Many of us never said that to our parents, but we harbored the same prideful belief that we had reached the point where we knew pretty much all our parents and elders had to teach us. I happened to be such a person. Most human beings reach a point in life when they temporarily lose the habit of trusting God for the answers to life’s questions—and a number of us never develop the habit.[1]

The Awesome Respect God Deserves

Most versions translate the motto of Proverbs as “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…” (Proverbs 1:7, NIV [emphasis added]). Right away, contemporary people have a problem with this statement. The idea that we should be motivated by “fear” is not congenial to our way of thinking. We have the notion that a person ought to be motivated by love or admiration. It is, therefore, important for contemporary people to understand why and in what sense wisdom writers spoke as they did and the nature of the “fear” we ought to have for God.

In the ancient world, rulers were to be feared and respected. God, as the ultimate and supreme ruler of the entire universe, was to be feared and respected above all persons and powers (Colossians 6:10-12). To the ancient Jews, the Lord God of Israel was not just another god among many. The God of Israel was the supreme creator and ruler of all. The Lord God Almighty was not just a god but the only, all-powerful God. Jehovah God was not just a powerful force in the world but the most powerful and important force in the world. God was to be feared and respected—even worshiped—above anything or anyone else.

In the modern, democratic West, people do not consider “fear” an appropriate word to describe citizens’ relationship with their government. This is one reason I substituted the word “respect” in the paraphrase of Proverbs 1:7 at the beginning of this chapter. Unfortunately, “respect” does not fully capture the quality of our relationship with God, even for modern people. There is more to our relationship with God than simply “respecting” him for his status as the creator of the world. We respect the President for his status as the leader of our country. Elections, however, give citizens some degree of control over elected leaders. God, on the other hand, remains the uncontrollable source of all that is and will ever be, immeasurably beyond our control or direction. Therefore, the respect we must have for God is infinitely greater than the respect we have for people, however important.

The respect we owe to God is a deep reverence for Someone infinitely wiser and more powerful than ourselves. I remember when I was young, I once accidentally put my finger in a wall outlet. That experience taught me to respect the incredible power of electricity. Honestly, I still feel a bit wary of electricity today. Whenever I need to do some home repairs involving electrical work, I am extra cautious—I certainly don’t want to get shocked again. Friends who have watched a space shuttle launch describe the incredible amount of power needed for lift-off. Even from miles away, you can feel the ground shake from the force. The energy that propels a space shuttle is comparable to many large bombs, and if mishandled, it could cause serious damage. That’s why it’s so important to always respect such power.

Years ago, while working on a “tie gang” near Black Rock, Arkansas, I looked up and saw a freight train bearing down upon our small group of workers. Because of unusual circumstances, our foreman had not given the normal warning to get off the tracks. Faced with the oncoming power of that locomotive, all members of that tie gang finished what we were doing and ran to get safely off those tracks. The sheer energy and power of the train compelled us to work better and faster than we normally would have. We respected the power of that train. In a similar way, we should respect the silent, patient, loving, but uncompromising love of God.

The path of wisdom begins with respecting the One who is the ultimate power behind all the powers in and of the created universe. Christians confess that we believe in “God the Father Almighty, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth.” The word “Almighty” makes clear that, when we deal with God, we are dealing with One who is the ultimate source of power, including the power of wise living. Thus, the source and ground of all human wisdom lies beyond human wisdom—even beyond created reality. It is a power we cannot control. We can only respect it and live in awareness of its reality. The source and ground of wisdom is the Deep Light of the uncreated wisdom of an all-wise, all-loving, and all-powerful God.

Once we have a proper respect for God, something wonderful happens: we have a sense of our own limited understanding and power. We become humble and, in humility, we become teachable. This attitude is important in any kind of learning. To learn, we must respect our teachers, those who went before us in the field we are studying, the subject matter itself, and the reality it is intended to illuminate. To learn anything, we must understand that we do not know everything we need to know. Without a humble respect for teachers, for a tradition, and for a reality outside us, it is impossible to learn anything.

Wisdom literature teaches that the “Fear of the Lord is instruction in wisdom; and humility comes before honor” (Proverbs 15:33, ESV). These two great qualities, respect for God and personal humility, are closely related and necessary for a wise life. Without a sense of our own finite, limited understanding, we cannot have the kind of humility that believes hopes and loves under the guidance of a loving God. Without a sense of the infinite wisdom and power of God, we will not trust and properly respect the source of wise living.

Respecting the Divine Lover

This brings us to a specifically Christian understanding of what it means to respect and reverence God. In the First Letter of John, we read the following:

God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.  By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love (I John 4:16-18, ESV).

A Christian fear of God is a loving response of respect towards one who first loved us, who draws us into his community of love, who gave himself for us, and who now dwells within in love.

God is not a Cosmic Despot. God is the Divine Father who loves us enough to take on our humanity, suffer our human limitations, and die for our pervasive foolishness, error, and sin in order to heal our separation from the source of Divine Wisdom. Our relationship with God should not be characterized by fearful obedience, but by a loving response to God’s self-giving love. Thus, the “fear” of which wisdom literature speaks is actually a loving, reverent, respectful response to our Divine Parent who loves us and wishes us the best in life.

The wisdom imparted by God the Father is the source of both a natural and supernatural kind of living. It is natural in that it connects us with the world as God created it and human beings as they are. It is supernatural in that it is not finally grounded in the created order or in our own wisdom or experience. This wisdom is the wisdom of the creator God, the ground and source of all human existence.

This is why “the fear of the Lord” is the beginning of wisdom. Without respect for God and trust in his faithful and orderly creation of the world and of human life, we have not taken the first step—a step that puts us into a proper relationship with the personal God who created and sustains all things by his wisdom, love, and power and who loves his creation, including the human race in general and us in particular.

Once we have deep respect for God, we develop an appropriate self-confidence based upon a relationship with God. A relationship with God is a fountain of life and a source of wisdom for our lives (Prov. 14:26-27). The wise person humbly seeks a Godly wisdom that is “pure, then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (James 3:17, NIV). Such a person reacts wisely and without pride to the problems of life. Developing awe and respect for God does not result fearful, dependent lives. A life-giving relationship with God and others results in humble self-confidence. This kind of wisdom can only be gained in a personal relationship with the one who is the source of all wisdom.

The Unimaginable Wisdom God Reveals

This reverent respect for God, the One Who Is and Will Be, is the beginning place of our search for wisdom. Christians do not believe that we can be content with simple shrewdness in order to live wisely and well. The Deepest Wisdom, what I have elsewhere called “Deep Light,” is the uncreated wisdom of God. [2] This wisdom is reflected in the material order of the universe and the moral order of the world we human beings inhabit. However, as wonderful as practical and scientific understanding may be, as magnificent as the meditations of the great moral thinkers of the past may be, they point toward one who is the inexhaustible source and ground of wisdom and understanding. God’s wisdom is the deepest wisdom of all.

We cannot come to the end of God’s infinite wisdom. Throughout the Old Testament, God teaches his people that his wisdom is ultimately beyond human understanding. By the time of Isaiah, the prophets understood that the full nature of divine wisdom was beyond human understanding.  God speaks through Isaiah saying,

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9, NIV).

It was the conviction of the Jews that, while human wisdom reflects God’s wisdom, God’s wisdom infinitely transcends human wisdom. The rationality of the universe and its moral and aesthetic character reflect and point to a greater wisdom by which and through which the world was created.

For Christians, the secret wisdom of God is immeasurably greater than any human wisdom. Paul, when he writes of the revelation of Christ to the early church, puts it this way:

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength (I Corinthians 1:20-25, NRSV).

Paul perceives that in Christ the God of Israel revealed a surprising hidden wisdom that forms the basis of God’s being, love, and power. This power is a wise love that works in self-giving sacrifice and weakness, even to the point of dying on a Cross. This is a “secret” or hidden wisdom that humans can only receive by revelation. After all, who would expect that the heart of the all-powerful God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is unlimited, self-giving, self-sacrificial love? Without the cross no one would ever have guessed at the full and deepest nature of God’s wisdom.

The Wisdom of Common Grace Revealed to Faith       

Despite the limits of human wisdom, human reflection on life and its problems reveals an orderly universe and a common human situation to which men and women may conform as they live and work in the everyday world. This human aspect of wisdom is not to be despised or undervalued. In fact, human understanding and wisdom are the most valuable things one can acquire in this world. Thus Proverbs teaches,

Get wisdom, get understanding; do not forget my words or swerve from them. Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding (Prov. 4:5-7, NIV).

Once we have humbled ourselves before the Creator and the creation and respect our human limits, our minds and hearts are freed to receive a kind of wisdom that will prosper us all the days of our earthly existence. Next to the wisdom revealed in Christ, this wisdom is the most valuable possession we can obtain.

This “wisdom for life” is the practical, earthly expression of the uncreated wisdom of God. It is characterized by an understanding of people, of the world and of day-to-day situations human beings face. This wisdom is bred of experience and observation. It is the product not only of personal reflection but embodies the reflections on life of countless, nameless generations of human beings from the beginning of human history. As part of the created order, it is available to anyone. [3] The common nature of wisdom should not blind believers to its basis in the uncreated wisdom of God.

The Virtue of Respectful Teachability

In order to receive and benefit from any kind of wisdom, we must be teachable. We must understand our human personal limitations, not think too highly of ourselves, and respect God and others. We think and act from the perspective that the created world has lessons to teach. We understand that human life, though externally different from the life of our forbearers, is lived by fallible human beings and governed by the same moral and practical laws applicable to former generations.

In submitting ourselves to God and to the witness of prior generations, we put ourselves in a position to become wise and avoid mistakes that have haunted human life throughout history. This is a hard attitude for contemporary people to adopt. We are accustomed to thinking that all new ideas involve progress. We are inclined to think of the modern world as having escaped the superstition of the past. We are likely to think in terms of our individual ideas, hopes, and dreams. We find it difficult to accept the notion that the past and our forbearers have important lessons to teach us—lessons that we ignore to our peril.

Habits of the Heart

The lessons of wisdom are not fully learned until they are made a part of our heart and mind. Years ago, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues wrote an influential book called, Habits of the Heart. [4] The book was about the need to recover community and communitarian values in our society. The title speaks volumes about the deepest unmet need of our culture. We are inclined to believe that what we know is most important, as if mere knowledge is sufficient to change behavior. It is not. What we need is a change of heart.

In the Bible the “Heart” is not just a pump that powers the circulatory system. It is the seat of our mind and emotions. The heart is where what we know, desire and will meet in the unity of a person. It is the center of our personality which powerful guides who we are, who we become, the decisions we make, and the instincts we follow. The change of heart we need is a change induced by a changed relationship with God, with other people, and with God’s creation.

Relational knowing and relational changes take time. Changes of heart normally do not occur in an instant, and when they do, there is often a long period of time before that change of heart is reflected in behavior. In fact, the deepest changes of our personality require both a change of mind and a change of behavior. This change of behavior finally results in a deep change in our personality.

One of the biggest changes our culture needs is from a kind of untrammeled individualism to a deep sense of belonging to and being in communion with a spiritual, natural and moral order created by God and a community formed in congruence with order. Both the order of the world and the order of society are older, bigger, and wiser than we are. Humility and teachability are two of the most important qualities we can develop as human beings. It is a first step—and a big step—toward happiness and success in life.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] This blog is based on a chapter from G. Christopher Scruggs, Path of Life: The Way of Wisdom for Christ-Followers (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 36-46.

[2] G. Christopher Scruggs, Centered Living/Centered Leading: the Way of Light and Love (Memphis, TN: Permisio Por Favor, 2010).

[3] Theologians distinguish between “common” and “natural” grace, the loving provision that God gives to everyone and “supernatural or saving grace,” the special grace by which we know the true God and understand his provision for us in Christ. See, Emile Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, previously cited, 89ff.

[4] Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen,William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).

This week, I continue with Fred Rodell’s, Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955. One of Rodell’s strongest points involves his assertion that the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War is probably the most neglected in U.S. Constitutional history. [1] The Court emerged from the Civil War a much-damaged institution. It took a long time for it to recover from the disaster of its decision in Dred Scott and the inevitable adjustments to a post-Civil War era, in which the Reconstructionist Congress claimed ascendancy over both the Presidency and the Court.

The Civil Rights Cases

There can be no doubt that the most significant outcomes of the Civil War were the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Of these three amendments, the 14th Amendment has generated the most litigation and Supreme Court decisions.[2] Superficially, one would think that interpreting the 14th Amendment would be pretty straightforward.

On April 9, 1868, three years after the War’s end and Lincoln’s death, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified by the requisite number of states. Section 1 of this Amendment provides as follows:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. [3]

Superficially, the 14^th Amendment seems to have a simple goal: to prevent the states from interfering with the rights to life, liberty, or property of former slaves. However, its effects went further. Congressman John Bingham of Ohio, the principal author of the first part of the 14th Amendment, sought to nationalize the Bill of Rights by making it binding on the states. When introducing the amendment, Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan clearly stated that the privileges and immunities clause would extend to the states “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments.”

There is some debate over whether Congress, when passing the amendment, or the various states, when ratifying it, understood the law’s broader implications. For many years, the Supreme Court ruled that the amendment did not extend the Bill of Rights to the states.[4] Rodell sees in the adoption of the amendment the seeds of later misinterpretation, for he believes that property owners wanted to ensure that their property rights were not interfered with by State or National governments. This was the root of future problems and Constitutional errors by the Court.[5]

The Civil Rights Cases

Wars leave populations physically, mentally, morally, and emotionally drained. The Civil War was no exception. By 1865, the North achieved a significant victory. They had built a formidable army. But that army was mainly made up of civilian volunteers eager to return home to their families. The country lacked the stomach for a protracted guerrilla war, which many feared might erupt. Many of those who wanted to free the slaves did not necessarily want to make the former slaves equal, nor did they want to face the social pressures of a prolonged occupation of the South. The result was a brief period of radical Reconstruction followed by one of accommodation.

Following the Civil War, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The law declared that citizens of all races or colors, regardless of their history of slavery or involuntary servitude, would have the same rights as any other American to make contracts, inherit property, sell, and transfer real estate, and enjoy equal protection under the law for their safety, just like white citizens.

President Andrew Johnson vetoed that law, which prompted Congress to pass the 14^th Amendment. One purpose of the 14th Amendment was to explicitly state that former slaves were citizens with the same rights as all other citizens. These rights and protections had been outlined years earlier in a significant decision by Justice Bushrod Washington sitting as a Circuit Judge.

We feel no hesitation in confining these expressions to those privileges and immunities which are, in their nature, fundamental; which belong, of right, to the citizens of all free governments; and which have, at all times, been enjoyed by the citizens of the several states which compose this Union, from the time of their becoming free, independent, and sovereign. What these fundamental principles are, it would perhaps be more tedious than difficult to enumerate. They may, however, be all comprehended under the following general heads: Protection by the government; the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety; subject nevertheless to such restraints as the government may justly prescribe for the general good of the whole. The right of a citizen of one state to pass through, or to reside in any other state, for purposes of trade, agriculture, professional pursuits, or otherwise; to claim the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; to institute and maintain actions of any kind in the courts of the state; . . . and an exemption from higher taxes or impositions than are paid by the other citizens of the state; . . . the elective franchise, as regulated and established by the laws or constitution of the state in which it is to be exercised. These, and many others which might be mentioned, are, strictly speaking, privileges and immunities.[6]

Substantive Due Process

The nation grew rapidly after the Civil War. At the outset, the nation was primarily agrarian, but the war spurred rapid industrialization that continued for the remainder of the 19^th and well into the 20^th century. At the time the 14^th Amendment was passed, industrial interests sought to ensure that the record included testimony that corporations had civil rights. Eventually, as states enacted legislation to restrict corporate activities, industrial companies challenged the states’ right to regulate on the basis that such regulation deprived them of property without due process of law. The notion that certain property regulations deprived owners of due process was the original form of substantive due process, which has been viewed differently in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.[7]

Many justices from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were lawyers heavily involved in representing railroads and their associated industries. Justice Miller, who disagreed with some of the court’s substantive due process actions, believed it was almost impossible to shift the perspectives of judges who entered the bench with set beliefs. These views were often formed through their legal work for the railroads.[8]

Ultimately, the development of substantive due process to safeguard property interests has been a complex and often controversial journey. I personally believe that many of the innovations from the 20^th Century, where substantive due process was used to prevent regulations on activities that many states managed and that some citizens felt uncomfortable with, have also faced difficulties and disagreements.

The problem of judges arriving at court with “fixed opinions” has become even more serious as the professional and moral consensus that often transcends ideological disagreements has eroded. When law is only about who has power and who wins, justice is never served. Increasingly, we see the negative impact of judges whose ideological commitments blind them to deeper issues. This is one reason these blogs often emphasize the need for a transcendent commitment to justice.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I’ve shared insights on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s life and philosophy before, but I can’t pass up the chance to highlight his significant influence on the Court, especially when it comes to due process and some parts of freedom of speech. Holmes was, in many ways, a kind of social Darwinist. His time in the Civil War shaped him into a resilient and tough individual. His sharp mind was evident in his clear, focused thinking and logical approach.

Nevertheless, he consistently argues against restrictions on the power of the state or federal government to regulate commerce under either the 5th or the 14^th Amendment Due Process clauses. In one case, he spoke eloquently about the problem:

“If an act is within the powers specifically conferred upon Congress, it seems to me that it is not made any less constitutional because of the indirect effects that it may have…. Congress is given the power to regulate interstate commerce in unqualified terms…”[9]

It took time, and a great deal of political conflict, but by the end of the New Deal, the Court had ceased attempting to limit either state legislatures or Congress from regulating commerce for the public good. Today, many scholars believe that the situation has evolved beyond the framers’ original intentions, as Congress sometimes encroaches on areas that were once primarily the states’ domain.

In Patterson v. Colorado, a newspaper editor was convicted of contempt after printing articles and cartoons depicting members of the Colorado Supreme Court in a derogatory manner. [10] Writing for the majority, Holmes once again wrote that no First Amendment issues were at issue because the amendment limited only the actions of the national government. [11] Then, in Fox v. Washington, Holmes rejected Jay Fox’s claim that his First Amendment rights had been infringed upon in his misdemeanor conviction for printing an article, “The Nude and the Prudes,” in praise of nudity.[12]At that point, it seemed the Holmes “Hands off” judicial philosophy applied not just to property but also to other rights.

World War I gave rise to numerous significant legal cases in which the government sought to hold individuals accountable for seditious activities. In the case of Schenck v. United States, Holmes provided the majority opinion that supported the conviction of Charles Schenck, a socialist, who was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for trying to dissuade draftees from responding to their draft notices. [13] In Schenck, Holmes acknowledged that, in some instances, speech might be limited—particularly when it interferes with the government’s ability to assemble troops. He introduced the idea of the “clear and present danger test,” which helps decide when speech is not protected under the First Amendment. According to Holmes, such decisions should depend on whether the words used create an immediate and serious risk of harm that Congress has the right to prevent. These risks could include plots to overthrow the government, inciting riots, or causing harm to lives and property.

Then, in Abrams v. United States, Holmes broke with the majority and dissented when the Court upheld the convictions of five petitioners also charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. [14] In his dissent, Holmes stated that the principle of free speech remained the same during wartime as in peacetime; he reiterated his belief that congressional restraints on speech were permissible only when speech posed a “present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about.” Holmes had begun to see the limits the Constitution might place on what Congress and administrations might do to restrict freedom of speech.

Finally, in 1927, the Court revisited sedition in Whitney v. California, a case that challenged California’s criminal anti-syndicalism law. The Court upheld the law and recognized that Charlotte Whitney, as a member of a Communist organization, was in a position to attempt to carry out seditious activities, not merely discuss them. Holmes agreed with Brandeis’s concurring opinion, often praised as a beautiful defense of free speech. He pointed out that the First Amendment didn’t protect Communist conspiracies because those involved had both the intention and the means to attempt to overthrow the government.[15] Whitney remains of continuing interest, as it suggests that groups intending to overthrow the government of the United States, or those funded by foreign nations or their designees, may not have unlimited First Amendment Rights.

Conclusion

This is where I’m ending my discussion of Nine Men. The book continues with Brown v. Board of Education, which I have previously covered in these blogs. Its discussion of the Depression years is strong and offers a clear explanation of Roosevelt’s court-packing plan and Charles Evans Hughes’s prudent conduct during that period. The book is sufficient for this discussion. I’ll revisit the First Amendment before I wrap up this series of blogs, as it reignited my passion for constitutional law. Next week, I’ll share an early case that highlights the impact of judicial overreach.

Ultimately, histories of the Supreme Court reveal that it has sometimes made serious mistakes. It has often been quick to cater to powerful special interests and overly supportive of existing factions, which can overshadow its duty to protect citizens’ rights. Additionally, as a product of the Enlightenment, the Court has sometimes lacked the humility needed to genuinely question its own beliefs and those of others.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Fred Rodell, Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955 (New York: Random House, 1955), 141.

[2] The Thirteenth Amendment provided that, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [2] Its impact was to undo the Dred Scott decision granting property rights in slaves and nationalize the freedom granted to slaves by the Emancipation Proclamation. The 15^thAmendment to the Constitution was added to the Constitution to clarify the voting rights of former slaves.

[3] Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment XIV (1868).

[4] National Archives, “14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868)” https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment (downloaded September ).

[5] Nine Men, 149.

[6] Corfield v. Coryell, 6 Fed. Cas. 546 (No. 3, 230) (CCED Pa. 1825). Bushrod Washington was the nephew of George Washington and his executor. He served as a highly regarded Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1798 to 1829. The quoted provision is one of the most important judicial statements in American history, which is why I have quoted it here.

[7] Substantive Due Process is the view that that the Due Process Clause of the 14^th Amendment not only requires that the government respect fundamental procedural rights, but also protects basic substantive rights, such as the right to own and dispose of property without interference. In the 20^th Century, it has been used to protect substantive personal rights, such as the right to procure an abortion. I intend to return to whether corporations should be deemed full persons and whether the late Warren Court and beyond abused the 14^th Amendment to make substantive changes in the Constitution.

[8] Nine Men, 148,

[9] Id, 185.

[10] This portion of the blog is based on Elizabeth R. Purdy, “Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr” at The Free Speech Center of Middle Tennessee State https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/oliver-wendell-holmes-jr/ (downloaded January 6, 2026). See also, Patterson v. Colorado, 205 U.S. 454 (1907).

[11] This is an example of the refusal of the court to declare that the 14^th Amendment made the requirements of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states, which was its intent.

[12] Fox v. Washington, 236 U.S. 273 (1915).

[13] Schenck v. United States 249 U.S. 47 (1919).

[14] Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).

[15] Whitney v. California 274 U.S. 357 (1927).

 

For nearly half a century, the copy of Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955 has been sitting half-read on my bookshelf. [1] I discovered this fact when I began reading it for his blog and realized it had my college underlining and margin notes in portions of the book.) As I started rereading the book, I was struck by two things that influenced my reaction.

The book suffers from excessive bias. Rodell openly admits he’s a political liberal. He does not recognize that this bias could make him unfair to many figures. Rodell judges the justices of the court and their decisions by only one standard: whether that judge or decision reflects his personal commitment to political liberalism, which we sometimes mistakenly call “progressivism.” (Presumably, all judges, liberal or conservative, believe they are trying to help society move forward toward a better future for others.)

The book also suffers from an unacknowledged subtext. Rodell also fails to acknowledge his reliance on the work of Charles Beard, particularly his influential book titled “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States” (1913). In his most renowned work, Beard proposed an economic theory of the Constitution, arguing that it primarily reflects the Founding Fathers’ personal economic interests. Throughout his other works, Beard consistently reinforced his belief in the significant influence of financial interests on governmental actions, reflecting the influence of Marx on this thinking.

Rodell saw himself as part of the legal realism school, which believes that laws and judges’ opinions stem from the economic and social interests of those in power, including judges themselves. This perspective suggests that judges don’t just follow abstract rules but also take into account social interests and public policies when they decide cases. For legal realists, laws are shaped by the social conditions and the needs of people at the time. A notable early example of this approach is the Brandeis Brief, which used socioeconomic data and scientific evidence to help make legal decisions.

These commitments sometimes lead Rodell and others to overlook the deep philosophical and moral beliefs that motivate leaders, especially those with whom he disagrees. For example, it’s well known that Madison carefully studied numerous historical works on political philosophy and practice while preparing for the Constitutional Convention. His primary goal was to create the most effective government, guided by the ideas of the leading thinkers of his time. Although his social class and economic interests may have influenced him, they were not the only factors.

Unfortunately, the fundamental problems outlined above weaken Nine Men and diminish its many virtues. Rodell consistently appeals to the class and economic interests of the founders and the judges of the court, almost ignoring the positive philosophical and moral commitments that underpin the work of many judges, even though he disagrees with them. He is often petty and demeaning in his critique of their work. One of my favorite law school professors, and the leading expert of his time on federal procedure, referred to Rodell as the “bad boy” of legal scholarship. His assessment is, sadly, accurate.

Despite its weaknesses, the book remains a classic on constitutional law. Most notably, it is readable and concise. In just over 300 pages, it summarizes the history of the court from its inception to the start of the Warren Court. If readers take away anything from this brief review, I hope it will be a twofold suspicion towards two aspects of what is sometimes called “progressive legal theory”:

1. Legal reductive nominalism in which words like “justice,” “reasonableness,” and “public interest” are merely names we place on ideas and actions we approve of.
2. The assumption that liberal political ideas are the only positive response to the problems of modern society needs to be questioned, and most people need to be constantly vigilant in recognizing this in much of the journalism and scholarship.

Powerful, Irresponsible, and Human

Rodell sees the drafting, approval, and interpretation of the Constitution as inherently political, mainly influenced by the self-interest of its founders. Likewise, he views the U.S. Supreme Court as mainly a political instrument, but he doesn’t fully acknowledge its specific role within the constitutional process. He describes the Court as powerful, often irresponsible, and motivated by human emotions. He also tends to minimize or criticize the key ways the Court manages its docket—such as its ability to decline hearing certain cases, avoid cases that aren’t ready for decision, refuse to give advisory opinions, and limit decisions to the specifics of a case.[2]

Throughout all of this, Rodell seems to miss an important point. While the court is a powerful institution, its abilities are bound by Article 3 of the Constitution. Just like any other human institution, it is appointed for life, has protections, and can sometimes act irresponsibly. But the purpose of its powers is to allow it to act responsibly. Looking at history, the court has generally acted responsibly more often than irresponsibly. And at the end of the day, the court is made up of human beings. It’s interesting that this might seem like such an obvious observation. Of course, the court is human. Naturally, many different men and women with diverse political and social perspectives have served on the court. And yes, the court functions as a human institution, providing justice to people. I really don’t think any of that should be seen as problematic. What’s unfortunate is that Rodell tends to go on rants—and quite often, they’re irresponsible ones.

From A Gleam in the Founders’ Eyes: Marbury v Madison

No book on constitutional law is complete without discussing Marbury v. Madison.[3] I’ve sat in more than one classroom studying the case. It’s interesting how often people blithely state that Chief Justice Marshall invented judicial review. As I read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, it’s clear that most of the founders assumed, to some degree, that the Supreme Court would be able to declare laws unconstitutional. In Federalist 78, Hamilton defends the principle at length. [4]

The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents.[5]

Madison, who was perhaps the most important drafter of the Constitution, is a notable example. He clearly understood that the courts would and should have the power of review. In his own contribution to the Federalist Papers, he concludes:

It is true that in controversies relating to the boundary between the two jurisdictions, the tribunal which is ultimately to decide, is to be established under the general Government. But this does not change the principle of the case. The decision is to be impartially made, according to the rules of the Constitution; and all the usual and most effectual precautions are taken to secure this impartiality. Some such tribunal is clearly essential to prevent an appeal to the sword, and a dissolution of the compact; and that it ought to be established under the general, rather than under the local Governments; or to speak more properly, that it could be safely established under the first alone, is a position not likely to be combated.[6]

Although Madison was most interested in the national government’s power to declare state actions unconstitutional, this provision shows that important drafters of the Constitution anticipated judicial review.

Despite claims of judicial innovation, as Marshall puts it in Marbury v Madison, the principles on which courts base their disregard of statutes they find unconstitutional were “long and well established” prior to that case. In his decision, Marshall puts it:

So, if a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law, the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty.

If, then, the Courts are to regard the Constitution, and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the Legislature, the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.[7]

He goes on to say:

This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written Constitutions. It would declare that an act which, according to the principles and theory of our government, is entirely void, is yet, in practice, completely obligatory. It would declare that, if the Legislature shall do what is expressly forbidden, such act, notwithstanding the express prohibition, is in reality effectual. It would be giving to the Legislature a practical and real omnipotence with the same breath which professes to restrict their powers within narrow limits. It is prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits may be passed at pleasure.[8]

The founders intended for the Supreme Court to have the power of judicial review, and one implication is that the courts could not enforce laws passed by Congress or the states that violate the written Constitution. In other words, such laws would have to be declared unconstitutional.

This directly contradicts Rodell’s claim that the Supreme Court was meant to be a supremely powerful, anti-democratic institution. Quite the opposite, it was the duty of the Supreme Court and lower federal courts to uphold the laws of the land, especially the Constitution. Moreover, this duty would have to be carried out even when the country’s majority opinion was mistaken. The founders trusted that, over time, the best interpretation would win out, either by the Court changing its mind or by the enactment of an Amendment that would clarify the founders’ intent and the public’s desires.

Dred Scott and the Road to War

If John Marshall is to be celebrated as the greatest of our Chief Justices, his successor, Roger Taney, is almost unanimously considered the worst. As Rodell points out, this is unfortunate because it rests on a single terrible decision. If there is any decision that can be said to have divided the country and created serious political instability, Dred Scott v. Sanford is it.[9]

It is hard to understand the Dred Scott decision without understanding the problem it was designed to solve. It is well known that the Constitution acknowledges the existence of slavery. It was necessary to recognize its existence and allow it to continue for the southern states to agree to ratify the Constitution. Privately, many members of the Constitutional Convention, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, southerners and slave owners, believed the institution to be evil and that it needed to disappear in time.

Unfortunately, after the adoption of the Constitution, the existence of slavery became a source of national conflict. In the North, where there were few slaves, the entire institution of slavery was seen as unworkable. In the South, many wealthy individuals owned substantial amounts of property and invested heavily in slaves. In the North, a powerful abolitionist movement emerged. In the South, a strong, proslavery movement grew.

Throughout this period, Congress repeatedly sought a solution to the problem. The most significant event related to the Dred Scott decision is the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted new states and drew a line at 36°30′ latitude, prohibiting slavery north of that line. Then, in 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, organized new territories, and allowed settlers to decide whether these territories would permit slavery or remain free.

Amid this toxic situation, the Dred Scott case came before the court. Dred Scott had been a slave in Missouri. Then, from 1833 to 1843, he lived in Illinois (a free state) and in the Louisiana Territory, where the Missouri Compromise forbade slavery. After returning to Missouri, Scott filed suit in a Missouri court for his freedom, claiming that his residence in free territory made him a free man. After losing in the state court, Scott brought a new suit in federal court. Scott’s master maintained that no “negro” or descendant of slaves could be a citizen in the sense of Article III of the Constitution. Eventually, the case reached the United States Supreme Court.

On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Court’s opinion, ruling that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, not protected by federal law. This decision alone would have been enough to incite strong feelings in the North. However, the opinion also declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, stripping Congress of the power to set the boundaries of slavery. Additionally, it overturned the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leaving Congress without authority to prohibit slavery in a federal territory.

While it is possible that Chief Justice Tawney and the Court believed they were removing the issue of slavery from the national debate, the result virtually guaranteed the Civil War. The decision clearly held that Congress could not restrict the growth of slavery or create a popular sovereignty that would prevent it from expanding in the northern part of the country, or, frankly, that the institution of slavery could not be profitable.

Dred Scott really shows how the Supreme Court can sometimes create division and challenges to national unity, especially when the idea of a “government of laws, not of men” is at stake. Instead of providing clarity, the decision was “overly broad” and closed off many options lawmakers could have pursued. It’s an example of judicial overreach, which can and does have serious consequences. Dred Scott should remind all courts of the potential harm when they overreach and try to address political issues best left to Congress and the Executive Branch.

Conclusion

Having covered about one-half of Nine Men, next week I will discuss another early case in which the Court overstepped its bounds and harmed the institution. In that particular case, an Amendment to the Constitution was passed to overturn the decision. In the case of Dred Scott, thousands of lives were lost, and the nation was divided, before the decision was overturned. It is a lesson to judges and citizens alike of the dangers of judicial overreach and the politics of deadlock, both which we see today.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Fred Rodell, Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955 (New York: Random House, 1955).

[2] Id, Chapter 1.

[3] Marbury v. Madison 5 US 1, Cranch 137 137 (1803).

[4] Hamilton, Federalist Papers, No. 78.

[5] Id.

[6] Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 39.

[7] Marbury Madison, supra at 178.

[8] Id.

^[9] Dred Scott v. Sanford 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

 

O God, you have caused this holy night to shine with the brightness of the true Light: Grant that we, who have known the mystery of that Light on earth, may also enjoy him perfectly in heaven; where with you and the Holy Spirit he lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Christians know that the Christmas story involves a group of shepherds near the little town of Bethlehem on that first Christmas so long ago. It is no accident that the angels appeared to the shepherds, because they were very important in the history of Israel. [1]

Abraham, the earliest ancestor of the Israeli people, was a shepherd, just like Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and the other patriarchs. Moses, the great deliverer and a leading prophet until Christ, despite being educated in Pharaoh’s court, spent his years of preparation tending to his father-in-law Jethro’s sheep. Shepherding was deeply rooted in Israel’s heritage, much as making, programming, selling, and repairing computers and software are part of American life today.

The life of a shepherd was difficult due to the need for sheep to be defended, led, and protected, as well as fed. The job was filled with boring, routine tasks, including finding the sheep’s food and water and keeping them safe. If animals wandered away, shepherds were responsible for finding them. If the sheep were in danger, shepherds were duty-bound to rescue them—though poor shepherds often ran away (John 10:11-13).

The image of a leader as a shepherd has deeply shaped Israel’s history and traditions. David, celebrated as the greatest king, was actually a shepherd in his early days. The idea of the ‘King as Shepherd,’ from the story of David—the “Shepherd of Israel” (Ps. 78:70-72)—holds a special place in Jewish literature and history. David, a young shepherd from Bethlehem, was sent by his father to meet King Saul and unexpectedly ended up fighting a giant. Through his courage, he became Israel’s most revered warrior and king.

If David had the integrity and skill that God called for in Israel’s leaders, his successors generally fell short. God held Israel’s leaders accountable for neglecting their duty to care for the flock because they were self-centered and morally flawed shepherds (Jeremiah 23:1-4). Truly virtuous shepherds should be vigilant protectors of the flock, committed to gathering and caring for God’s people, and attentive to the needs of the sheep entrusted to them. Sadly, after David, Israel’s leaders did not pass this important test (Ezekiel 34:1-5).

By the time Jesus was born, shepherds weren’t seen as very important. As Israel became more advanced and wealthier, and as leaders in religion, business, and other areas gained influence, the role of an ordinary shepherd became less attractive. Sheep can be quite dirty and don’t smell very pleasant, which made it difficult for shepherds to stay clean or avoid ritual uncleanliness—something that was important in Jewish customs. Over time, shepherds went from being respected members of the community to doing more manual work. That’s exactly the kind of people the angels visited that night. They were hardworking men who endured long years of tending sheep in the heat of summer and the cold of winter.

A Shepherd’s Adventure

Nevertheless, the shepherds of Israel always remembered David, just as we think of George Washington today. They also cherished the promises in the Torah about a new kind of Shepherd, a “Good Shepherd,” who would someday lead Israel. While they believed that God himself would become this shepherd, as the prophets said (Ezekiel 34:11), they never imagined it would happen in their own lifetimes.

1. 1. God meets us right where we are. Back in the day, the Jewish people, even during Jesus’ time, practiced animal sacrifices. They often offered sheep to seek God’s forgiveness for their sins and for many other reasons too. It took a lot of sheep to keep the Temple in Jerusalem supplied. Some farmers, who probably had contracts with shepherds, likely supplied these sheep. Their fields were perhaps close to Bethlehem, just a few miles from Jerusalem, where the Temple was. The shepherds mentioned in Luke were tending their sheep in those fields that very night.

I suppose it was just an ordinary night, like the nights they had experienced a thousand times before. They weren’t doing anything particularly religious. In fact, like men everywhere, they were most likely together, telling stories about their wives and girlfriends and dreaming of getting back home and out of the cold.

Why did angels appear to these shepherds? It’s because God often surprises us in ways we never expect. He doesn’t always show up in our plans, but that’s what makes discovering Him so exciting and special. No matter where we are, God always finds us, ready to meet us right where we are. Remember, your own journey of faith can begin right here, right now, with an open heart and a hopeful spirit.

2. A Strange Light. In the quiet of the night, the shepherds suddenly noticed a beautiful light shining from the sky. It was unlike any light they’d ever seen—brighter than the sun yet gentle, not hurting their eyes. This was the glorious light of heaven, the Uncreated Light of God. In that luminous glow, they saw a figure and recognized it as an angel, filling them with awe and wonder.

People often wonder, “How did they know it was an angel?” My only reply is that if you ever meet an angel, you’ll recognize it right away. The word “angel” means a messenger from God, and angels always have a message to share—that’s why God sends them. In this case, the angel had a special message: “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy to all people, for today is born to you in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).

If you’re like me, you might hear those Christmas words so often that they start to blend into the background. It can bring a warm glow and make you think, “Oh, it’s Christmas!” But the shepherds probably experienced a very different reaction. When they heard about the Messiah’s birth, they were genuinely surprised and filled with joy—more than just a little happiness—because they believed the Messiah would restore the kingdom of David. And when the angel called this “good news to all people” (v. 10), the shepherds might have initially felt a bit confused, thinking that the birth of the Messiah was mainly good news for the Jewish people, and not necessarily for others, especially the Romans and Herod, who was the ruler at that time.

            Many of us struggle to fully grasp God’s messages. Sometimes I also struggle to understand what God is saying or doing in certain situations. We all read the Bible, but there are many parts that can be confusing, especially when we read about ancient kings and prophets. Most first-century Jews believed that God would send a savior, but that’s where their understanding stopped. They probably never imagined what kind of savior it would be. Many thought of the Messiah as a mighty warrior and king, expecting Him to come from a wealthy or powerful family. But they often overlooked that David was a humble shepherd boy when God called him. Like us, they sometimes misunderstand the prophecies of the “Suffering Servant” in Isaiah.

Maybe you get confused when you try to read your Bible, and maybe God does not always make sense to you. Personally, I think that is O.K. The important thing is to keep reading and trying to understand. Reading and hearing God’s word in the Bible and trying to apply it to our lives are part of the “Adventure of Faith.”

3. We Must Experience the Good News for Ourselves. The angel told the shepherds they could expect a sign, that they would “find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (v. 13). This probably didn’t seem like much of a sign at the time. Almost all babies in their culture were wrapped in swaddling clothes, so there was nothing unusual about that. The manger was a bit unusual, but shepherds were an agricultural people and had probably seen other babies in just as silly a place while parents worked around the barn. The most unusual thing was that a barn was a completely ridiculous place to find a king. (I am sure you would agree.) One would expect a king to be born in a palace.

All of a sudden, the shepherds saw a host of angels singing, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and goodwill toward those with whom God is pleased” (v.14). Then, just as unexpectedly as they had come, the angels left. They were all alone in a cold field in the middle of the night.

After the angels left, the shepherds excitedly began sharing their amazing experience. The leader of their small group, who was caring for the sheep, likely wanted to stay and keep everyone safe, showing his wise instincts. He might have been worried that if they headed into town, a wolf or lion could pose a danger to the flock. Still, everyone was eager and hurried into town, curious about what awaited them.

Today, you can go to Bethlehem and see a field where legend says we were keeping sheep that night. It is about a mile out of town, so it took us about 20 minutes in the dark to walk there. Once we were there, we had to search for a stable. We found one in a small cave on the hillside behind an inn. There is a Greek Orthodox Cathedral on the spot, the Church of the Nativity, one of the oldest Christian churches in the entire world! According to tradition, this is where the shepherds found Mary and Joseph and their newborn child.

 I often wonder what life might have been like if those shepherds had stayed in the fields that special night instead of heading into the city. Here in our country, we celebrate Christmas with so much joy—exchanging thoughtful gifts, shopping, and carefully selecting the perfect presents for loved ones. But the very first Christmas was much simpler and more meaningful. Hearing the angel’s message and visiting Baby Jesus filled the shepherds’ hearts with wonder. I truly believe that if we take a quiet moment to reflect on that story and allow the presence of Jesus to touch our lives—and the lives of our children—it can become even more special. Remember, even if you hear the story on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve, it’s truly meaningful when you personally visit the manger and invite Jesus into your heart, where He can touch you deeply.

Conclusion

History doesn’t tell us exactly what happened after the shepherds left the manger. We only know they went home, filled with joy and gratitude, saying they were ‘glorifying and praising God for all the things we had seen” (v. 20). As Jesus grew up, people responded in different ways—some as devoted followers, recognizing him as a great teacher and miracle-worker; others turned against him when he was crucified; and a few finally understood his significance after God raised him from the dead. It was then that the importance of the shepherds’ visit became clear. Being among those tending the temple flocks that night meant more than a simple act—it pointed to something special. We saw not only the “Chief Shepherd of the sheep” (I Peter 5:4) but also “the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), highlighting how meaningful that moment was. [2]

What glorifies God in the end is that all of us who have really seen the Babe can or want to do – glorify and praise God, for he does things none of us can imagine. You know what? Telling the story of Jesus to others is the greatest adventure in the world!

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] The description is based on a portion of my dissertation. See, G. Christopher Scruggs, Patterns and Practices for Renewing Mainline Congregations: Case Studies from the Presbytery of Memphis (Unpublished Dissertation, 2004), 31-35. It was also the subject of a first-person sermon I gave some years ago at Christmas in Memphis, TN.

[2] See Barclay, at 17.

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and as our sins sorely hinder us from running the race set before us, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, towhom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and forever. Amen

One of these days, I am going to get around to reading all of Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope.[1] In this book, at one point, he makes an essential point for contemporary Christians:

If it is hope that maintains and upholds faith and keeps it moving on, if it is hope that draws the believer into the life of love, then it will also be hope that is the mobilizing and driving force of faith’s thinking, of its knowledge of, and reflections on, human nature, history and society. Faith hopes in order to know what it believes. Hence all its knowledge will be an anticipatory, fragmentary knowledge forming a prelude to the promised future, and as such is committed to hope. [2]

The hope we celebrate at Christmas is exactly this kind of hope. We cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to a skeptical world that God became human. We cannot prove against all odds that faith is superior to skepticism, that love is more powerful than hate, or that the wisdom of the cross is wiser than the wisdom of human beings or AI engines.

The ancient Jews could not prove to one another that God was faithful even in the midst of attacks by larger and more powerful world powers. What the prophets did do was look far into the future to God’s promises. One of those promises we celebrate at Christmas comes from the prophet Isaiah:

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this (Isaiah 9:6-7).

This and other promises followed the ancient Jews throughout their long history of defeat and captivity by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medo-Persians, Greeks, and Romans. They did not always or even typically understand the promise of God’s deliverance. They did not always or even normally experience that deliverance. But they read these words at the synagogue, they shared them with their children, and they lived in the hope they found in the unfulfilled promises of God.

The Moral Passion of Christmas

Christ and the earliest Christians explained the meaning of the incarnation in terms of the Old Testament, especially Isaiah. It was from Isaiah that Jesus and the Apostles taught:

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:26-27, see also Luke 18:31-34; 22:37; 24:44-47; Acts 28: 23-28; I Peter 1:10-11).

The Jews expected a Messiah who would give them victory over their oppressors in their national history—a Messiah who would be a great conqueror, hero, and king. Instead, they received a crucified Messiah who ruled in weakness and powerlessness upon a cross, defeating the enemies of evil, division, and death in a way that no one could have imagined. This was the “foolishness of the Cross” of which Paul spoke to the Corinthians:

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (I Corinthians 1:18-25).

A key need in modern American politics is for both the left and right to realize that a perfect society cannot exist in human history. We are limited, flawed beings who cannot achieve such a goal, even if it were possible—which it is not. The creation of a perfect society is beyond what flawed humans can accomplish. Additionally, we are driven by endless hopes and dreams and are never content with any achievement, no matter how significant. All we can do is respond to the needs and issues of our time and try to improve things within the boundaries of our place in history, steering clear of the chaos and violence that come with every effort to impose a perfect order on others in history.

We can and should long for a “Wonderful Counselor” and “Prince of Peace,” whose shoulders are strong enough to bear the brokenness of the world and the hopes and dreams of a finite and flawed human race. Still, we should not delude ourselves that such a person can appear within the history of any secular, human society. He came once, and it was not to produce a secular paradise. It was to bear the brokenness of his and every human culture. When Christ comes, human history will not “enter a new secular phase.” Human history will be over and something different and grander will begin.

His next appearance will, instead, mark the end of history as we know it. His coming will not mean a perfect socialist or capitalist world, for whatever world exists at that final moment in time will pass away in the face of the “New Heaven and New Earth” of which Isaiah and Revelation speak. The world we inhabit with all its beauty, glory, uncertainty and violence must pass away when the one who can meet our deepest desires, the Desire of Nations, finally arrives.

In the meantime, what we can do is given to us by one of the prophets when he said:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).

Conclusion

What can be achieved within history is what I would call a humble politics of wisdom and love, of nurturing slow organic change; of eliminating evils gently, even when working with diligence and speed; of patiently working to end poverty and war and all the other scourges of the human race with a wise understanding that we will ultimately fail, because the creation of a perfect world is a task too great for our limited human moral and spiritual abilities. “The poor will always be with us” and “Only the dead will never now war again.” This is the tragedy of history.

I hope by the end of next year we will all recognize that the Romantic hope of a perfect world within history that gave us the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Communist Chinese Revolution and numerous bad policy decisions in the Western Democracies was based upon a harmful delusion concerning the possibilities and potentials of secular politics. What is needed is not a continuation of the Nietzschean, Marxist, or Laisse Faire Capitalist ideal, but something new and different. When we finally end the period of decadent, Hyper-Modernity we are in, there is hope for a more human future.

Jesus and the Apostles urged us not to look to the worldly wise or the worldly powerful for our salvation. Instead, as we celebrate this week, they suggested that we look at a baby born in a manger and at a broken body nailed to a cross. We do not want to think that our true hope lies in a poor, helpless baby in a manger or a dying man, but paradoxically, this is our best and only hope.[3]

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1993).

[2] I found the quote at https://www.logos.com/product/43568/theology-of-hope-on-the-ground-and-the-implications-of-a-christian-eschatology(downloaded December 8, 2025).

[3] This post was a fairly substantial rewrite of a sermon prepared for Advent Presbyterian Church in Cordova, Tennessee several ears ago.

Holy, Powerful, Savior God: We praise you for though we doubt and become depressed, you are faithful, though we forget your mercies past, you never cease to show us mercy. Though we often lack the joy of your presence, you are always present to bring us joy. In Jesus Name, We Pray, Amen.

One unfortunate result of growing old and having many responsibilities is that it can rob us of the joy of Christmas. When we were young, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day were filled with a kind of magical anticipation. My brother and I looked forward to Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. We wrote letters to Santa Claus. We went shopping with Mom and Dad. We helped decorate the house and the church. We were filled with the joy of anticipation as we knew Christmas was right around the corner.

            Every Home Improvement Project I’ve ever undertaken has a similar character: at the beginning, it seems impossible. Then, you begin to sense progress. From there on, the project picks up steam, and you don’t feel so hopeless. There is a growing sense of joy. The Gospels tell us the story of God’s World Improvement Project – the coming of the Savior, the Messiah, the Christ. In this meditation, I want to talk about the growing senser of joy, a moment of joy near the beginning of the project, the moment when Mary and Elizabeth were captured by the Holy Spirit and anticipated the happy end—and how that growing sense of joy can be ours.

            In Luke 1:39-55, the writer tells the story of a hurried trip that Mary made to visit with her cousin Elizabeth during her pregnancy. It goes like this:

 At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!”

 And Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers.”

Joy is a Major Theme of Scripture

Some years ago, I started coloring in orange whenever the words “joy” or “rejoice” appeared in Scripture. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had overlooked a major theme in scripture. The theme of joy and the joy that God’s presence brings to our lives recurs throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Last week, I mentioned that the peace God offers isn’t the kind secular society often expects. Similarly, the joy that God provides isn’t just the kind of happiness that comes from being successful in life. The joy discussed in the scriptures is the joy of the Lord.

Joy in the scriptures connotes more than a mere emotion. It combines a sense of happiness with a state of blessedness. In the Old Testament, joy is the characteristic of public excitement at times of festival (Deut. 12:6ff.), which is similar to what we refer to as the joy of Christmas. It is also a word used to express relief when an individual had a grievance which he could bring to the Temple for settlement or when Israel is victorious over its enemies (Ps. 43: 4). This too is a kind of earthly pragmatic joy.

Joy is a prominent element in Luke’s gospel (2: 10; 19: 37). In Luke’s gospel, angels visit shepherds with a message of joy:

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly, a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (Luke 2:8-14, emphasis added).

The birth of the Messiah was the occasion of great joy and the announcement of a great joy that would change the world. The Messiah Israel had expected and prayed for for a millennium had finally been born.

There are several places in Scripture where the characteristic of joy is ascribed to Christ. Jesus is the shepherd who “rejoices” at finding one lost and straying sheep (Matthew 18:13). Jesus is filled with joy when the disciples return from their test mission to share the gospel without Jesus present. Luke records that,

“In that same hour he [Jesus] rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will” (Luke 10:21, emphasis added).

In Hebrews, we learn that it was for “the joy that was set before him” that Jesus could endure the cross—a joy that we should have when we face difficulties:

And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart (Hebrews 12:1-3, emphasis added).

Paul teaches that joy should be the natural fruit of the presence of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit when he lists joy as a fruit of the Spirit:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-25, emphasis added).

This leads to a hard teaching about the kind of joy that Christians can expect: It is not necessarily a joy that eliminates suffering. Instead, it is an anticipated joy that endures suffering with an expectation of its redemption by God. Living by the Spirit did not eliminate the cross from Jesus’ life and experience. Living by the Spirit will not have a different impact on our lives either.

Joy in Uncertain Times

When Mary was filled with joy at the announcement of Elizabeth’s blessing for her child, she was in a period of uncertainty. It’s been my guess over the years that one of the reasons Mary went to visit. Elizabeth had to do with the wagging tongues of Nazareth. She was pregnant without a full completion of her marriage. Beyond that, she probably had plenty to worry about. We know that Joseph was pondering whether or not he should divorce her or put her aside because of her pregnancy. We also know that she was living in an occupied country with plenty of political instability. In the midst of all that uncertainty, she was filled with joy at the promises of God—and specifically the promise that the promises of God to her country were going to be fulfilled in her.

What we today call the “Magnificat” is filled with anticipation that God’s promises will be met. Those who have abused their power will be cast down. Those who have been trampled underfoot will be lifted up. Those who have been poor will find their needs met. Sometimes scholars call this the “Great Reversal.” Maybe it’s better to think of it as the Great Consequence of God’s Mighty Acts in history. God is in the business of bringing justice into the world.

We live in uncertain times. From 1900 to the 21^st century, Americans lived through an era of unprecedented economic growth. The United States also became the world’s leading power and largest economy. We’ve all enjoyed the results. Because of the great oceans on either side of our continent, there was little chance of an enemy invading successfully. After the scourge of the Civil War and the end of slavery, America became a great industrial power. By World War I, we were potentially the most powerful nation on earth, and by the end of World War II, we were.

However, history progresses, and times are changing. The modern world we were all born into and have lived most of our lives in is coming to an end, and a new chapter of human history is beginning—one we often call “postmodernity.” I don’t believe that’s the right term, because it simply means after modernity. Without assigning a specific name, I hope this period will be one in which the human race rediscovers ancient truths and the eternal need for humility and recognition of our human limits.

Perhaps even more disturbingly, the American Century (20^th), and there is every sign that the United States has both reached a limit and lost confidence in its unique place in history. Being the world’s greatest power is not unique—a lot of nations have held that honor and lost it, most recently Great Britain. No nation gets to be top dog forever.

The result is change and uncertain times—uncertain times that will certainly last for a long time to come. If we are going to find true joy, we cannot find it in creating or trying to create a world without uncertainty. We must find our joy within a world of uncertainty.

Welcoming Christ and Christmas with Joy

In the meantime, it’s the Christmas season. It’s a season in which we anticipate that great joy of which the angels spoke. We even experience some of that great joy if we join with all of those who are celebrating the mysterious birth of Israel’s Messiah and the beginning of the new age of Christ. We can invite our neighbors to experience just a little bit of that joy.

I live in a fairly secular part of town. Most of my shopping is at stores that my neighbors frequent. Fewer than half of them ever go to a church service, and many don’t believe in God. But I see smiling faces in the checkout lines, as if the joy of Christmas can reach even the coldest human heart. That’s worth remembering. We can share our source of joy as we join in the happiness of our friends, coworkers, and neighbors, without insisting they think or believe as we do before we share the joy they already know and understand at this stage in their lives.

Sharing Christmas joy with others is not the ultimate or even the most important part of the season for Christians. Here, we celebrate the coming into the world of the source of all joy, and even a special kind of joy to be shared by his followers. In retirement, I do not miss spending Christmas Eve conducting three or more services from late afternoon until 1:00 am the next day. Still, I vividly remember singing “Silent Night” at midnight and experiencing just a bit of the joy the angels announced in that first Christmas Carol ever sung.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

As I mentioned last year. we have family and friends in Israel. For more than two years, I have checked the news many times a day, following the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. I have also followed the conflict in Ukraine, where thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have died in a historic border dispute.[1] For the past year and more, we have all been waiting for peace in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. We were, of course, happy for the people of Israel and Lebanon when a cease-fire was announced. We hope for a peace agreement in Ukraine as well. However, the Bible warns us that “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.” (Matthew 24:6). I have often quoted the notion that “only the dead will never know war again.”[2]

Watching for a Prince of Peace

The ancient Jews were not a particularly warlike people, and the size, strategic location, and vulnerability of their land meant that foreign powers often attacked them. For most of their history, they were a conquered people: by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medo-Persians, Greeks, and Romans. They saw a lot of war during their history, and most of the time they experienced it as a conquered and helpless people. They longed for peace and believed that the peace they longed for would be created by a deliverer they called “the Anointed One” or “Messiah,” which in Greek is translated “Christ.” The Messiah would be anointed by the Holy Spirit in such a way as to liberate captive Israel.

One of the most familiar Christmas passages is from Isaiah:

For to us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace, there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore (Isaiah 9:6-7)

Israel thought of their Messiah in political and military terms. At Christmas, we celebrate the arrival of that Prince of Peace and anticipate the final victory of his peace over the forces that limit and destroy human flourishing. Yet, the arrival of the Prince of Peace did not bring the kind peace that Israel desired nor does it bring the kind of “power-peace” we humans today often desire. This is why Jesus, when he promised his disciples peace, did not promise the kind of peace the world seeks (John 14:27).

The Peace We Seek

Old Testament scholars helpfully remind us that the passage from Isaiah was not written in a time of peace but in a time of war. Isaiah probably believed that the newborn child of the current Israeli king would be the anticipated Messiah/Savior. He would bring the kind of peace won through military force that David achieved. Indeed, one meaning of peace in the Old Testament (and today) is the absence of conflict based on the victory of one side. It is very possible that this is the kind of peace Isaiah anticipated.

However, scholars remind us that the meaning of “shalom,” the Hebrew word for peace, goes far beyond simply the absence of conflict. It signifies “wholeness and completeness,” a state where all aspects of human flourishing—physical, mental, moral, spiritual, and social—are in harmony. In ancient Hebrew, if someone asked, “Is your family Shalom?” they meant, “Is your family okay?” Just as today, they would not be asking, “Has your family stopped fighting?” Instead, they wanted to know, “Is your family doing well?” Therefore, shalom encompasses well-being in every part of life.[3]

If the Messiah had merely been a military leader, perhaps a bit more moral than David but fundamentally “David on Steroids,” he would not have brought Israel the kind of shalom God wants for the world. He would have brought victory and cessation of hostilities. In order to give the human race the hope of victory over all that inhibits human flourishing and happiness, God had to send a very different sort of Messiah.

Personal and Social Shalom

We need the shalom (peace) that goes beyond just the absence of conflict. We need a shalom that includes personal wholeness and well-being. Social scientists tell us that human flourishing involves several components, such as:

• A feeling of well-being
• A sense of meaning and purpose in life
• Economic security
• Mental and physical health
• A sense of integrity and virtue
• Close and meaningful social relationships
• An absence of personal and social conflict.[4]

This list reminds us that there is much more to shalom than an end to fighting. We human beings are social animals. We need close, healthy, non-conflicted social relationships; without them, we wither on the vine of life. As a pastor, I have observed that healthy relationships characterize happy families. On the other hand, dysfunctional families are often characterized by unhealthy relationships. People who grow up in unhealthy families are wounded by the dysfunction they experience as children. These wounds can take decades to cure—and sometimes, they are never cured.[5]

As a pastor, I have also often noted that healthy relationships among and between members characterize happy, growing churches. The same phenomenon is true in business and other organizations. When human relationships among people are or become dysfunctional, there is a lack of health and wholeness, and everyone suffers. Fortunately, the Holy Spirit can work within our spirit to restore the wholeness for which we were intended—which is one of the primary roles of the Christian church. In addition, those who are touched by the spirit can act has vehicles to increase shalom and human flourishing in every situation of which they are a part.

When Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Shalom-makers), he means a lot more than “Blessed are those who engage in transnational peacemaking.” He means, “Blessed are all those who enter any situation, personal or social, in which human beings are not experiencing the wholeness for which they were created and work to restore health and wholeness.” This blessedness of true shalom is one of the primary fruits of faith in Christ, the forgiveness of sins, and the healing and restoring power of the Holy Spirit. God wants this not just in politics or in the church, but in every single relationship human beings have.

Jesus does not promise us the absence of conflict in this world. The words, “I come to bring not peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:24), alert us that conflict may be the price we pay for a better, fuller, more humane peace. God also does not promise disciples success in the endeavor of peacemaking. Instead he promises us the same kind of cross he endured in this own mission of peace.

Jesus as our Peace

Near the end of John, Jesus warns his disciples about the peace or shalom he came to provide. “Peace I give you, my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let your hearts not be troubled nor be afraid” (John 14:27). Jesus warns his disciples that the peace, shalom, wholeness, and flourishing that he will provide is not the “personal peace, pleasure, and affluence” that the secular world seeks and its apostles promise. It is a deeper, richer, and more lasting peace that sickness, age, disease, and death cannot take away. It is ultimately faith in God, forgiveness of past wrongs, peace with God, and the feeling that one is within God’s will.

In his gospel, Luke records that, after Jesus was born, angels visited sheperhds who were watching their flocks by night (Luke 2:13). When they appeared, the sang  or spoke a divine message:

 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” (Luke 2:13-14).

We often sentimentalize this verse as a promise of peace on earth no matter what we do by the sheer power of God. Unfortunately, this is not the best reading of the text. It is not “Peace no matter what.” It is peace to those who respond to God’s gracious favor of peace in all their relationships. [6] It is a peace for those who live in this peace and share it with others. This is the shalom we celebrate on Christmas Eve when we hear the angels sing, “Peace on earth, Goodwill to men.” Jesus is a peace that will transform the world as it becomes our peace, which we share daily in relationships of love with others.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] This is a reworking of a blog I did last year with more information and depth.

[2] The quote is attributed to Plato, in General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell address to the cadets at West Point (May, 1962). It is also attributed to Plato in the movie Patton. Patton. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, starring George C. Scott and Karl Malden, 20th Century Fox, 1970. Finally, the source of the quote may be the philosopher George Santanya. In the entry on George Santayana in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy on the Web, one can read: “Santayana’s stay in Oxford during the Great War led to his famous counter to Wilson’s war to end all wars: ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.‘ (Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 102). Whatever the source, I think the thought is probably correct.

[3] See, Donald E. Gowan, Shalom: A Study of the Biblical Concept of Peace (Pittsburg, PA: Creative Edge, 1984). This helpful study was a part of the Kerygma Bible study program sponsored by the Presbyterian church some years ago. This study was central in preparing this blog.

[4] This particular section of the blog is dependent upon research done by the so-called “flourishing initiative” being led by researchers out of Harvard. The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) seeks to carry out research and teaching to bridge the empirical social sciences with the humanities on topics related to human flourishing. See, for example, the Flourish Initiative at https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/.

[5] I do not want to indicate at all that every emotional scar indicates a dysfunctional family, as all families have some dysfunction. Nor do I want to suggest that these emotional scars from childhood cannot be cured. They can. See, Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality updated ed (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017). Today, the Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Relationship Courses are available as the “Emotionally Healthy Disciples Course,” which includes books, study guides, teaching videos, devotional guides, and teaching helps. Finally, for leaders, the following can be helpful. Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform your Church, Team, and World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).

[6] William Hendriksen, “Luke” in New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1978), 156.

Eternal God: You are beyond our words and our understanding, yet have revealed yourself to us in Holy Scripture and in the person of Your Beloved Son, Jesus the Christ. Come by the power of Your Spirit this morning that we might be filled with a desire to listen to Your voice and live according to Your leading, even at the price of taking time out from our busy activities to await Your coming in silence, solitude, and prayer. This we ask in your Precious Name. Amen.

            A Pausing our Busyness

When I was doing my doctorate, I was asked to read a little book by Robert Benson, a writer from Nashville, titled “Living Prayer.” [1] It is the story of one man’s journey into a life formed by prayer, silence and solitude. Benson is a Christian, though not a religious professional. I have used a quote from his book as the meditation for the day: “We take our place in the race and watch our lives disappear in the daily grind. We rush through the present toward some future that is supposed to be better, but generally turns out only to be busier”. [2] For Robert Benson, the realization that he was not centered in God in his day-to-day life was the beginning of an adventure, a spiritual adventure of learning to live his life around habits of prayer, silence, and solitude.

This Advent season, Kathy and I are focusing our attention on listening for God. Both of us are relentlessly busy and active people, and slowing down to hear God does not come naturally. But, after eight weeks of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship and its constant reminder that what is most needed in contemporary American life is a “slowed down spirituality,” we decided to spend the next four weeks being more contemplative.[3]

            Most of us live busy lives, with jobs, spouses, children, schools, after school activities, parents and the like for which we must care. This is important, for as our mission statement reminds us, we exist to share God’s love with others as we have seen it in Jesus Christ. There is, however, a trap in all this activity. If we are not careful, what begins as a well-intentioned sharing of God’s love by supporting our families and caring for their physical, emotional and spiritual needs becomes just another activity or group of activities without a meaningful center in God or God’s will for our lives and theirs.

            It is important to live an active Christian life by demonstrating God’s wisdom and love to others in practical, everyday ways. However, it is also crucial to take time to pause, meditate, and reflect on God and His will, so that we can be drawn more deeply into His heart and become more of who God wants us to be. The ancient Jews waited nearly 500 years for their Messiah—500 years of prayer and silence. During Advent, we begin by remembering the patient waiting of God’s people.

Christmas is Busy and Our Lives are Busy

            I want to start with just one verse from Mark: “When it was early morning, while it was still dark, Jesus went off to a solitary place to pray” (Mark 1:35). For those unfamiliar with Mark, the first chapter shows a busy series of activities by Jesus. Then, he takes time to pray. Jesus made time to pray even on the busiest days. If Jesus could find time to pray, this Christmas, maybe we can too.

I know Christian pastors who dread the arrival of Christmas. There are so many activities and services that we often lose sight of the true meaning of Christmas—and gradually disconnect from the Divine Love that brings the joy of the season. Interestingly, I’ve also spoken with laypeople who feel the same way from time to time. During one Christmas season, I was visiting a member who had been caught up in a continuous stream of busy days and nights leading up to the holidays. He was completely exhausted by the time Christmas arrived.

            For most of us, our busy Christmases reflect our busy lives. Robert Benson expresses this in his book:

Our work has become almost everything to us. Our lives are built around it, and the fruits of it. Productivity, success, and efficiency have become the watchwords of the day. It is no wonder that our days seem very often to be devoid of meaning. At best, they are built around about a fourth of who we are. It is not necessarily the work itself that is killing us; it is the way we give it such meaning and power and control over our lives. [4]

            One reason I chose to leave the practice of law was a growing sense that I was merely going through the motions, and that much of what I was doing was often more or less meaningless. I often tell a story about a day in Washington, D.C., when I was negotiating a transaction for a client. We had been working endless days and nights on this deal. One morning, we debated a very abstract point of merger law, and the discussion had gone on for a very long time. Suddenly, I realized it really did not matter who won the debate. That made me think: “I am spending twelve hours a day, nights, and weekends on things that might not matter at all in the grand scheme of things.” My life had become a never-ending cycle of meaningless activity.

            Now, don’t get me wrong: our customers and clients matter. Contracts matter. Doing our best matters. Serving people matters. The point is that sometimes we focus on all the little things that matter to the exclusion of the things that truly matter most.

            It is comforting to know that Jesus was busy too. In the first chapter of his gospel, Mark records Jesus’s activities from his baptism until the verses I read just a moment ago. In the first chapter of Mark, Jesus is depicted as constantly active. Once he was baptized in the Jordan River and began his public ministry, Jesus chose his disciples and started teaching, preaching, casting out demons, and healing the sick. If we read the Gospels carefully, we see Jesus continually busy with the Father’s work.

Now, the kinds of things Jesus did might differ from what you and I do, but the same issues could have occurred in Jesus’s life as occur in ours: He might have just been doing things. Jesus could have ended up like many people in caring professions in our country—burned out from doing good. The reality is that, as many studies have shown, caring professionals are especially at risk of burnout. Pastors are leaving the ministry at unprecedented rates. Jesus did not burn out because He took time to maintain His connection with God the Father.

Time for Prayer and Rest

            If we want balanced lives, we need to make time to think, pray, plan, and be silent alone with God. This is how we grow close to God and not just do good things, but do what God truly desires. We can learn from how Jesus maintained a life of constant loving activity. Jesus took time for silence, solitude, prayer, and reflection. The key to Jesus’ activity is found in moments of stillness. His ability to do God’s will depends on the time he spent alone in prayer. Jesus understood that while activity is important, it is even more crucial to do the right things at the right times. Often, good is the enemy of the best, and those who do too much too often miss out on the best that God offers and only experience the good.

Taking Time to Listen

            For just a few moments, I want to suggest some things we can all do to ensure we are doing what God wants us to do and avoid just busywork that leads to burnout. I want to divide these into daily times of silence, solitude, and prayer; weekly times of silence, solitude, and prayer; and less frequent but still critical times of silence, solitude, and prayer.

First, all of us need daily times of silence, solitude, and prayer. We need to take time out daily to think, to pray, to be quiet and to recharge our batteries. This can and should involve some kind of morning quiet time, but it also needs to involve other times during the day when we stop doing and take time to just be. In particular, at the end of each day, we need to take stock or what we have done and left undone.  An Episcopalian named John McQuiston has written a book, Always We Begin Again, which many people have found useful. [5] In his book, McQuiston takes the Rule of St. Benedict and creates a kind of order for living that he uses in his profession and that others in our congregation find useful. However we do it, we need to find ways to create a balanced life.

Second, we need accountability. Then, weekly, we need to find time to pray and hold ourselves accountable. Several of the men in one of my congregations met at 8:30 every Saturday morning to share our lives and pray. Most of those meetings consisted of sharing experiences of worship, daily devotional study, experiencing Christ personally, and acting as Christ’s hands and feet in the community. [6] Our group happened to be a Reunion Group, but there are many, many different ways for one, two or a few people to get together and share their lives briefly each week. This can be done as a couple, as a two men or women meeting together, or in slightly larger groups. These kinds of groups should not be too large or the time commitment to share deeply gets to be too great.

Third, we need some time in solitude and reflection. Once or twice a year, we need to take time out to be silent, to be alone, to pray and think about where we are going in the year to come. If you are fortunate, you have a place to go for solitude. However, it can be as simple as walking into your bedroom and shutting the door. In a few weeks, most of us will have a bit of time to celebrate the coming of a New Year. This is a good time to take a few moments or hours, turn off the electronic media and take stock of where we have been in the year past and where we are going in the year to come. Perhaps one of the benefits of doing this for just a few moments in a quiet room will be to convince some of us that we need to take more time to think, listen and to pray and grow closer to God.

During my time in ministry, I aimed to take a solitary retreat for at least three days each year—and most years I managed to do so. Usually, I visited a retreat center where I could have three meals, a place to sleep, and areas for prayer. Toward the end of my professional career, my annual retreat was often held at a Catholic retreat center near where our family used to spend the holidays. I found that Thanksgiving week was the best time in my schedule.

Conclusion

            One year, on December 7^th (my father’s birthday and Pearl Harbor remembrance day), during one of the busiest periods at our church, I went on a two-day silent retreat. Although we are all busy, much of what we do is busy work. So, when I was asked to attend this retreat, I decided to go away just to gain some perspective on Christmas, the church, where Advent might need to head in the next year, and what Chris needed to do in the upcoming year. This was not the first silent retreat I’ve attended—and I hope it will not be the last.

I committed to this weeks ago, and it didn’t get any easier as the retreat day approached. (I also had to tolerate teasing from the staff, who doubted I could stay quiet that long.) The goal was to find a place where the phone didn’t ring, where email and texts weren’t accessible, and where DirecTV was unavailable. Then, after disconnecting from all the noise that surrounds us most of the time, I was to listen for God. Although I’ve brought books on retreats before, I try to limit myself to a Bible and my journal because all I wanted was to spend a couple of days listening for God, listening for that still small voice we can’t hear if we are surrounded by sound and information.

The point was not to become a monk. I had no intention of becoming a monk. The point was not to ignore my family. I had every intention of returning home in time to take care of those responsibilities. The point was not to ignore the needs of the church. In fact, I was back in time to prepare for a Sunday service and teach a Bible study. The point was not to ignore the needs of the world around us. The point was to grow closer to God to be sure that we do those things in the right way.

I sincerely hope that everyone reading this blog has a wonderful Advent season. Additionally, I wish that everyone will take a few moments this holiday season to be silent, listen, pray, reflect, and sense God’s will for you in the coming year, so we can start the new year in just the right way.

God bless you all.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Robert Benson, Living Prayer (New York: NY: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998).

[2] Id, at 71.

[3] Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021). See also, The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and World(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).

[4] Id, 72.

[5] John McQuiston, II, Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living (Harrisburg, VA: Morehouse Publishing, 1996). The Rule of St. Benedict is the most common monastic rule. Benedict structured the lives of his followers around times of worship, listening to Scripture, silence and work. Although modern folks may think of the rule as somewhat restrictive, what made the Rule attractive in the beginning was its modest, Biblical center. Recently, many protestant groups have seen Benedict’s rule as helpful to guide lay people to discern a way to structure their own lives in a more spiritual way.

[6] Order of Reunion Group, Madisonville, KY: Lampstand Ministries, 1992. The Order of Reunion Group is a designed as a follow up to what at Advent we call the Great Banquet, which is like the Presbyterian and Catholic Cursillo and the Methodist Emmaus Walk. It is a three day retreat during which people here fifteen talks on the Christian life, mostly given by lay persons.

One thing that sets leaders apart is an instinctive understanding that progress rarely happens by accident. In other words, if a person or organization is going to achieve something, there usually needs to be a plan in place to reach the goal. The Christian life is no different. If we want to advance in the Christian life, we require a plan or strategy to move forward. A “Rule of Life” (or what I will later call a “Life-Plan”) is a plan of action that helps us embody the life of Christ in our actions, feelings, thoughts, and imagination. In essence, a Rule of Life isn’t just a to-do list to complete someday, but an active and embodied way of engaging with everyday life.

One issue with theological education and many modern discipleship programs is that 90% of the focus is on studying the Bible, theology, pastoral care, liturgical options, and similar topics. There isn’t much time in the curriculum for real practice and truly living out the faith in everyday life. However, everyone knows that once you leave school, what really counts is how you apply what you’ve learned. It is the doing of the Christian life that matters most.

One of my favorite stories involves a colleague of mine who graduated from seminary and started a local church at exactly the same time I did. We had both been trained to start and run a specific kind of children’s program. Five years later, I was managing a program with over 100 children enrolled each week. When I met him at a meeting and asked how it was going, he responded, “We’re still thinking and praying about it.” When I retired from ministry, he was still thinking and praying, and the church was declining. In the life of discipleship, what matters is not what we think, but what we actually embody and do.

The Problem of an Unconscious Plan

In the past, I’ve written about what is sometimes called a “Rule of Life.” A rule of life is simply a plan for how we choose to live. Almost everyone who discusses this subject starts by saying that we all have a plan for living, whether we recognize it or not. The issue is that, for most of us, this plan or rule isn’t something we create intentionally; rather, it’s an unconscious result of how we were raised, the pressures from society, our obligations to family, children, colleagues, and others, as well as the expectations from organizations we belong to, like the church.

For many years, I followed an unwritten rule of life. It went something like this: “I wake up early and try to be one of the first people at the office. I’m usually there between 7:30 and 8 a.m. I work until 7 o’clock at night and try to be one of the last, if not the last, to leave. During the day, I aim to get an hour for lunch or exercise. I come home just before the children go to bed. Sometimes I have enough energy to tell them a story. Most of the time, I don’t. I work half of Saturday to meet my superiors’ expectations, and I take at least half of Sunday off to go to church.” No one ever told me I had to follow this rule. I never decided to adopt it. I didn’t write it down. I just lived by it.

The issue with this rule of life, which, by the way, was the rule of life for a pretty serious Christian, is that there wasn’t much truly Christian about it except maybe the sense of needing to take the family to church on Sunday mornings and join a Sunday school class. The rest of the time, I was just fulfilling the expectations set by my superiors and our success-oriented society.

Years ago, as the pastor of a church in a community with many recreational options, I had several church members whose lifestyles were somewhat different. Their rule of life was to work just enough hours to go hunting, fishing, boating, and enjoy other hobbies. Again, none of these people had a rule of life that said, “I organize my life around my hobbies.” But, in reality, that’s exactly their situation.

As a pastor, I’ve known many people who organize their lives around their children or grandchildren. They may not have a conscious rule of life that states they spend all their time trying to meet their children’s needs, but that’s exactly what they do. In my experience, many of these people are very serious Christians.

This is the problem with an unwritten rule of life: it’s easy to just do what others expect of you, what your family of origin trained you to do, or what your close friends believe you should be doing, or what our society thinks you should be doing. Becoming an Emotionally Healthy Disciple requires conscious decision-making and action to grow in Christ. To use a term we have used before, to become a well-differentiated Christian, you must be able to resist peer and other pressures to conform to expectations that are inconsistent with what you believe.

A  Problem with a “Personal Plan of Life”

About thirty-five years ago, I began following a personal rule for living out the Christian life. The rule I still adhere to is just a modified version of something I started working on back in seminary. I quickly realized an important thing about this personal life plan of mine: it was entirely my own. I didn’t share it with anyone, so there was no accountability for whether I actually followed it. In other words, it was completely subjective.

The rule of life I established many years ago was biblical, aligned with the church’s teachings, and a variation of rules that Christians have used for ages. The problem with my rule was that I didn’t follow it. I had it on my computer. Sometimes I carried it in my briefcase. Occasionally, I would look at it. Over time, I looked at it less and less because it was convicting to be reminded how far off from reality the rule was. I wasn’t really doing anything different from what I had been doing before I made a rule of life.

Personal rules of life are appealing in our society because we are very individualistic, and it seems to us that people should choose their own way of living. This overlooks the community aspect of any rule of life. When early monastics developed their rules, those rules were not personal. Pachomius, who wrote the first rule, lived in a community governed by it. Saint Augustine, who founded the Augustinian rule, lived in a community with about eight others who followed it. Saint Benedict, who led an order, initially started with a small group of people who held each other accountable and genuinely followed that rule of life. The same is true for every monastic rule throughout history. They were fundamentally communal rules.

If unconscious rules are impossible to follow, then strictly personal rules are impossible too. The reason is simple: I decide what the rule is and can change it whenever I want. In other words, I don’t really need to change or grow because of my rule. There is no accountability or community support for my growth and maturity in Christ. A better option for Christians is to join with others who are trying to follow a common rule.

The Rule/Action Gap

One crucial aspect of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship is recognizing that there is always a gap between what we believe we should do and what we are actually doing at any given moment. Change generally takes time and some pressure for most people. For real change to happen, not only must a plan for life be written down and agreed upon by more than one person, but it must also be reflected in individuals’ and the community’s actual behaviors.

This week in Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, they talked about a five-stage process that characterizes personal change. It goes something like this:

1. We become aware of the need for personal change.
2. We think about what would be involved in making a change.
3. We come to value what a change would accomplish.
4. We failed to act because of what is called the action/behavioral gap.
5. We change our priorities so that we actually change our behavior.
6. We actually internalize and own the behavioral change we want to make.

Most people fail to change because they don’t realize how important the behavioral gap is or how hard it is to overcome ingrained habits. I believe that, in some ways, people who have been addicted to drugs or alcohol probably understand this problem better than most of us who have never experienced such episodes. I’ve had family members who tried to quit smoking. Generally speaking, they know they need to stop smoking, and they decide they need to stop sometime before they’re actually able to do so. This is because of the gap between what we know we should do and what we actually do.

Most of the addicts I have known who have recovered were in some kind of Twelve Step program where they met regularly with others with the same goal and who held them accountable for change. Those of us who want to overcome the problems of our culture and society need the same kind of social support.

A Functioning Plan (or Rule) of Life

To have a functional plan for life, we need to realize that social support is essential for personal change. We don’t have to go to a monastery; a Sunday school class, a small group, an accountability group, a professional group, or any other group where people can share openly and hold us accountable can suffice.

When Emotionally Healthy Discipleship introduces this idea, it highlights the fact that most Americans don’t like rules. The word “rule” comes from the Latin “regula,” which itself comes from a Greek word for “trellis.” Everyone who has ever tried to grow grapes knows that grapes grow on a trellis. You need a trellis if you want to harvest grapes. The trellis supports the grapes and arranges them so they can mature and be ready either to eat or to be turned into wine.

A rule of life is the same for Christians. It is simply an organized system designed to help us grow spiritually. For example, if I decide to pray for at least thirty minutes each day, that period acts as a standard to gauge my progress in my Christian walk. The same applies to attending church, reading the Bible, going to confession, being part of a small group, attending a Sunday school class, doing a silent retreat once a year, or any other activities we include in our plan of life. The plan provides support for cultivating the spiritual fruit we hope will flourish in our lives.

I’m jumping the gun a bit, but one of the churches Kathy and I often attend has a simple rule of life for its members. It’s not complicated; it includes about three or four things: attending church, taking communion, being part of a small group, and praying and studying the Bible daily. There isn’t much accountability involved, but the pastoral staff makes an effort to incorporate this rule of life into the church’s culture.

Recently, those of us involved in Emotionally Healthy Discipleship were informed that EHD is developing a rule of life for their pastoral leadership cohorts. It’s a way for EHD to provide its leaders and the leaders of churches deeply engaged in the program with a form of accountability in the Christian life and discipleship growth. I’m hopeful that it will prove effective. Occasionally, I used to attend an Episcopal church where some members were lay Benedictine Oblates. These lay oblates followed a rule of life. It was not the full Benedictine rule, nor did it require the frequent attendance at multiple worship services and the cycle of prayer, worship, and physical labor associated with a monastery. However, it does offer a level of accountability for those who choose to be part of it.

Creating an Emotionally Healthy Church or Organization

This is the final blog in this series on Emotionally Healthy Relationships. I hope readers have enjoyed it and that it has inspired some to get involved in Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. I believe it will bring significant benefits to you personally, to your church (if you have one), to your business (if you own one), to your school (if you’re part of one), and to any other organization you’re involved with. The next step for readers is to contact Emotionally Healthy Discipleship and sign up for the same leadership course that Kathy and I have been taking for the past year.

A word to senior pastors: no one believes that Emotionally Healthy Discipleship can be successfully integrated into a church and truly change its culture unless the senior leadership is entirely on board. Buying into it means more than just saying “it’s OK if you do it.” It involves spending enough time learning the materials so that you genuinely can’t lead the transformation of your church’s culture without it. It also means being willing to invest time in discipling your senior leadership—both staff and laypeople—so they can then make meaningful changes within the groups they lead.

One of the most insightful illustrations in Emotionally Healthy Discipleship highlights Jesus’s approach to making disciples. He didn’t spend all his time preparing sermons and preaching to large crowds. Although he did deliver sermons to large audiences, he dedicated significant time to being with 12 ordinary people. These twelve, who seemed like unlikely candidates, went on to establish what we now call the Christian church after the crucifixion and resurrection. Yes, they were empowered by the Spirit, but they also carried the memory of spending three years of their lives with Jesus.

This is the challenge of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: taking the time to slow down, become personally emotionally healthier, and then investing in personal relationships to build a leadership team that will transform your organization’s culture.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

One of my favorite aspects of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship involves conflict resolution. [1] Often, Christians believe that conflict indicates failure in a church, relationship, business, or any organization. In this way of thinking, conflict is rare and should be avoided. Although there is some truth to this, the larger truth is that conflict is part of human life. In fact, conflict is one of the ways people, relationships, businesses, churches, organizations, and even political communities grow. What matters is not whether conflict occurs but whether it is managed wisely and with a view toward greater wholeness, integrity, and harmony —personal and social.

Kathy and I have been married for about forty-six years, and I’ve been a lawyer, leader, pastor, and church leader for a little longer than that. Over the past half-century, I’ve had many opportunities to observe how conflict is handled poorly. For most of that time, I viewed conflict as a failure and believed that (usually myself) had failed. This belief made me both avoid conflict and feel threatened by it. Having emotionally healthy relationships has allowed me to see the entire problem from a different perspective.

Blessed are the Peacemakers

First of all, let’s examine a text. In the Beatitudes, Jesus says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9). As every first-year seminary student knows, the word translated as ‘peace’ in English comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Shalom,” which is often translated as ‘peace’. However, the idea of Shalom is much broader than just the absence of conflict. Shalom is a state in which everything is in its proper place. This helps us understand the nature of conflict and why we should not necessarily avoid it.

Conflict as a Warning Signal

When there’s conflict, shalom is absent. Usually, that absence of shalom indicates that something isn’t right. Something needs to change in my marriage or family. Something needs to change in my church. Something needs to change in my business. Something needs to change in our social organization. The presence of conflict isn’t just a problem to be solved; it’s a chance for personal and community growth. In other words, conflict is a warning sign that there is a lack of shalom and that we need to pay attention and take action to improve things. What’s important isn’t the conflict itself, but the root cause of the conflict.

Several times in my professional career, I’ve been involved in situations in which an organization was experiencing serious conflict. Interestingly, these conflicts are in some cases more than thirty years apart. However, they have some common characteristics:

1. Inside the organization, leaders and/or persons involved had a disagreement that they were not openly discussing or trying to resolve. Instead, they were involved in either manipulation or power struggles.
2. Organizational leaders and/or the persons involved lacked self-awareness about what was motivating their decisions, making them vulnerable to manipulation and imprudent actions.
3. The root of the conflict was often not the issue that sparked the conflict. In at least two instances, grief over a departing or former leader sparked conflict, as some mourned the loss while others took the chance to seize power. In both cases, the stated reason for the conflict was not the true cause and fear of change was a part of the unacknowledged cause of the conflict.
4. Organizational leadership and/or parties involved ignored the conflict until it erupted into an unmanageable situation. In other words, rather than face disagreements within the organization, they submerge those disagreements until the dysfunction reached the point where conflict was inevitable and uncontrollable. In most cases, once this point is reached. It’s also unsolvable and the organization will be damaged as a result.
5. Once the conflict broke out, instead of trying to understand the situation, many organizational leaders or persons involved simply took sides with one or more groups trying to gain control. After that, no one listened to anyone.

Learning to Dialogue in Difficult Situations

A wise older pastor once shared his observation about conflict in marriages. He said, “Most of the time, people ignore marital problems until the issue becomes so severe that counselors struggle to get them to communicate effectively and resolve the conflict. Most of the time, by the time they seek help, it’s already hopeless.” Unfortunately, my experience with all kinds of counseling and organizational conflict is exactly the same. By the time the conflict erupts, it’s often too late to fix the problem. The sad part is that most of the time, the issue could have been resolved—perhaps easily—if the parties had communicated earlier and better. In other words, most destructive conflicts are rooted in a failure of communication. The warden in the movie “Cool Hand Luke” so memorably said, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” [2]

If communication failure is the problem, then communication success is the solution. In other words, leaders and organizations need to learn to communicate effectively, kindly, and wisely so that conflict can be either avoided or resolved and shalom restored, created, or enhanced.

Pete and Geri Scazzero, in Emotionally Healthy Relationships, have very helpfully set out a way to enhance communication in conflict even providing handouts and skits to show how the process works. [3] For many years, I have used a handout in regarding conflict for use in counseling that goes like this:

Rule 1: Be mindful of what you say. In any argument, avoid name-calling, insults, put-downs, or swearing. Putting the other party down or criticizing their character shows disrespect for their dignity. The best way to be careful with what you say is to refrain from speaking until you’ve clearly thought out the issue bothering you and even written down what you decided to discuss.[4]

Rule 2: Never resort to physical actions. Using physical force or threatening to do so—such as raising a fist or issuing a verbal threat—is completely unacceptable. Develop the self-control to manage your anger and behavior beforereaching this point. If anyone uses physical force or violence during a conflict, seek professional help. Force includes pushing, shoving, grabbing, hitting, punching, slapping, or restraining. It also includes actions like punching a hole in a wall, throwing objects, or damaging property out of anger. Acting out your anger in these ways breaks the other person’s boundaries and sense of safety. Everyone has the right to feel safe and free from abuse or physical danger in their relationships. Such behavior is a form of abuse.

Rule 3: Avoid anger, yelling, and similar behaviors. Expressing excessive anger or yelling only escalates any conflict. When emotions are running high, chances are nothing will be resolved. If you’re angry and feel like yelling, it’s best to step away and cool down. Keep in mind that what I consider yelling can be subjective. What seems like shouting to the other party might not feel that way to you. Maybe you’re unaware of how loud you sound. Or perhaps you grew up in a home where family members were loud and passionate, so talking loudly when upset feels normal. The other party’s experience is what counts here, however. If it feels like yelling to your spouse, then you are at least raising your voice, if not yelling. Consciously lower your voice. The meaning of your communication lies in how your message is actually landing with others. If you can’t tone it down because you are upset, then it is probably best to take a time-out.

Rule 4: Don’t hit below the belt. Everyone has vulnerable areas. Please avoid using your confidential knowledge of another party’s weaknesses and sensitivities, as it can hurt them and give you an unfair advantage. One reason for this is that it makes further conflict inevitable and, at the least, delays compromise.

Rule 5: Don’t play the Blame Game. Blaming the other party distracts from solving the problem at hand. It invites the other person to become defensive and escalates the conflict.

Rule 6: Never threaten divorce or abandonment (unless you truly mean it). During a heated marital argument, threatening to leave is manipulative and hurtful. It also introduces a negative option that should be avoided if possible. Such threats cause anxiety about abandonment and undermine your ability to resolve issues. They quickly diminish your partner’s confidence in your commitment. Trust, once broken this way, is hard to regain. It makes your relationship problems seem much worse than they actually are. This principle is equally applicable in organizational conflicts.

Rule 7: Don’t bring up the past. Stay in the present and resist the temptation to use the situation to raise other past issues. It’s discouraging to keep bringing up the past. You can’t change the past. You can only change today. You can look forward to a better future. Try to keep your focus on what can be done today to resolve the issue at hand and go forward from there. If you get off-topic, onto other topics, stop yourselves and agree to get back on track. You can always come back to other issues later.

If you do find yourself bringing up issues from the past, it is likely because those issues were never resolved in the first place. Things may have happened that you and your spouse never really talked about. Or you may have tried to talk about it in the past, but without fighting fair. This rule will be easier to follow going forward if you both commit to discussing issues as they arise rather than letting them fester.

This rule incorporates another rule: Every disagreement has to have a focus. One issue. It is not possible to resolve every issue between parties at one time. Be content with progress on one issue.

Rule 8: Talk about your feelings and experience, not the other party’s motives or experience. We all think we understand others’ motives and purposes. But the truth is, we don’t. We are only experts concerning our feelings, motives, and purposes, not anyone else’s. So, use words that describe how you feel, and what you want and need, not what the other party feels, wants, or believes. It may seem more straightforward to analyze your adversary than to analyze yourself, but interpreting another person’s thoughts, feelings, and motives will distract you from identifying your own underlying issues. It will likely invite defensiveness. More importantly, telling you’re the other party what he or she thinks, believes, or wants is presumptuous.  You are saying that you know your spouse’s inner world better than your spouse does. Instead, work on identifying your own unmet needs, feelings, and ways of thinking, and describe these needs and feelings to your spouse.

Rule 9: One person should speak at a time. During a discussion of differences, only one person should talk at a time. While one person is speaking, others should listen honestly and sympathetically—not just think about their reply. Take turns talking and listening so everyone can share their thoughts. Don’t start thinking about your next point or response while listening. Focus only on listening when it’s your turn.[5]

Rule 10: Keep an Open Mind and Be Willing to Compromise. Listening during an argument and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes is important. First, it helps you understand their point of view. Second, it shows that you are not rigidly attached to your own opinions. In other words, you are open to changing your mind. Finally, although there are times when one party is right and the other is wrong, it’s often possible for the parties to find a fair compromise. If the parties view any argument or disagreement as a conversation in search of a mutually agreeable solution, they are more likely to find a solution that benefits all concerned. [6]

A Witness to a Broken World

If Christians and others can find ways to renew a commitment to dialogue and conversation among people with differing viewpoints, we perform a valuable service to our society. There is no skill more lacking in our society than the ability to listen and engage in dialogue with others about difficult but important matters in the search for agreement or compromise.[7] This is one of the best ways we can incorporate the verse, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,” into our lives.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved 

[1] As mentioned previously, these blogs are based on Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017). See also, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021). Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Updated Ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017). The Emotionally Healthy website is https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/. The materials needed to guide individuals through emotionally healthy discipleship training are available on the website and most Christian and secular online book retailers. The Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Relationship Courses are offered as the “Emotionally Healthy Disciples Course,” which includes books, study guides, teaching videos, devotional guides, and teaching aids. I cannot recommend these materials more highly to blog readers.

[2] Rosenberg, Stuart. 1967. Cool Hand Luke. United States: Warner Bros./Seven Arts.

[3] See, Peter and Geri Scazzero, “Clean Fighting Worksheet” (available through Emotionally Healthy Discipleship). See also in Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Relationships: Discipleship that Deeply Changes Your Relationships with Others (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2023), Appendix F. I have used my own take in this blog, which does not in any way indicate a lack of agreement with what Pete and Geri Scazzero have produced.

[4] See the discussion of the Ladder of Integrity, which is a wonderful tool for determining what the issue is and who to address a conflict in G. Christopher Scruggs, Journeying on the Path of Life “Integrity: The Well-Formed Disciple” https://gchristopherscruggs.com/?p=4186 (Posted November 10, 2025). Finally, if one desires to learn the Scazzero method there are helps on their website at www.emotionallyhealthy.org.

[5] See the discussion of Incarnational Listening in G. Christopher Scruggs, Journeying on the Path of Life: “Integrity: Listening to be a Better Disciple and Person” https://gchristopherscruggs.com/?p=4186 (Posted November 10, 2025)

[6] Chris Scruggs, Rules for a Fair Fight (Unpublished Counseling Handout, updated November 2025).

[7] In two entirely different contexts—those of political philosophy—I have written extensively about the issue of the lack of genuine dialogue in today’s discipleship theory and political culture. See G. Christopher Scruggs, Crisis of Discipleship: Renewing the Art of Relational Disciplemaking (Richmond, VA: Living Dialog Ministries, 2023) and Illumined by Wisdom and Love: Essays on a Sophio-Agapic Constructive Postmodern Political Philosophy (College Station, TX: Virtual Bookworm, 2025).

When I was a young Christian, I was fortunate to have a very good friend who was in the construction business. In fact, his company was one of the finest construction firms in Houston. We used to go to lunch about once a month. He would describe to me some of the projects he was working on. One of the things I came to understand is how important the foundation and the structure of a building, which hardly anyone sees, are to its success. If a building lacks a good foundation and its structural steel is insufficient or poorly designed, builders say it lacks integrity. That is, when pressure is put upon the building, it might fail.

And came from a family well known in Houston, active in a local church, and, for generations, had provided leadership in the construction business. Their buildings were known to be well-built and likely to last. The family and their buildings had integrity.

Meaning of Integrity

The word integrity evolved from the Latin adjective “integer,” meaning whole or complete. It is defined as ‘an undivided or unbroken completeness’, or ‘a state of being full or whole. In construction, it conveys being well-built. In mathematics, integers are whole numbers. In banking, it concerns the ongoing value of collateral held for a loan. In professions, it involves following the ethical guidelines of the profession in question. For example, in medicine, a doctor with integrity does not harm the patient. In ethics, it has to do with having a kind of virtue that can withstand pressures to compromise one’s values.

In our continuing study of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, this week, the discipline was “Climbing the Ladder of Integrity. In other words, integrity is a habit that we develop, and we develop it by gradually increasing our capacity to live in accordance with our underlying values and, for Christians, the values of Christ.

Barriers to Integrity

Everyday life presents barriers or threats to living with integrity. We all face pressure to compromise, and from time to time, we do compromise our core values. Sometimes, we have good and valid reasons for doing so; other times, we do not. The main obstacle to maintaining integrity is our lack of awareness about what our true values are. In daily life, we can lose sight of who we are, what we aim to achieve, and our fundamental goals. Climbing the ladder of integrity helps us remember our true selves and what we truly value.

The False Self. One key concept for developing our integrity is understanding the difference between our true self and our false self. Our true self is who we really are, embracing our true values. Our false self is a projected identity that tries to present an external but false version of ourselves to the world. For example, I spent many years as a lawyer. In law, it helps to be strong and tough in negotiations. But fundamentally, that’s not who I am. I projected that persona for a long time until I believed I was someone I was not. It didn’t work out for me.

Whenever we develop a false self that we project onto the world, either to protect ourselves or to accomplish some goal, we begin to hide from the world and from ourselves who we really are.

The Accommodating Self. The second way we fail to develop integrity is by repeatedly adapting ourselves to others’ unjustified expectations. In its simplest form, people around us may pressure us to adopt immoral or unfair strategies and behaviors to succeed. If we accommodate these pressures, not only do we fail to become our true selves, but we also build a life that will not last.

The Self-Centered Self. No parable is more relevant to the issue of integrity than the parable of the man who built many barns. Jesus put it like this:

Jesus told the crowd this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest.  He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain.  And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink, and be merry.”’ “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night, your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16-21).

The man in the parable has become so focused on himself, his own desire to be wealthy and cured, that he has closed his eyes to a fundamental principle of the wise life: “teach us to number our days so that we may become wise.” The rich man did not remember his days properly, and he spent his time living a false life without considering eternity. Whenever we become self-centered and focused on our own will, desires, objectives, and plans, we gradually lose sight of what true integrity means.

Differentiation and Integrity

Until and unless we fully understand who we are, it’s hard to have integrity. A person who is not well differentiated finds it challenging to hold onto their integrity under stress. For example, if someone hasn’t properly resolved past issues, especially with their family of origin, they are more vulnerable to threats to their integrity related to family matters. This means it’s essential to do the work we’ve discussed, such as exploring the iceberg. Creating a genogram and reflecting on significant past issues help one to differentiate properly.

Scazzero puts it this way:

Differentiation refers to a person’s capacity to define his or her own life’s goals and values apart from the pressures around them. A differentiated person has the ability to think clearly and carefully, to set priorities and make decisions. Differentiation means you know how to hold onto who you are and who you are not regardless of your circumstances. Your level of differentiation is determined by how well you are able to affirm your values and goals apart from the pressures around you (separateness), while remaining close to people important to you (togetherness). Your convictions, goals, and values don’t change even under pressure. You can make healthy choices, before God, without being controlled by the approval or disapproval of others.[1]

A key part of understanding Emotionally Healthy Discipleship is the nature of true differentiation. True differentiation doesn’t mean completely rejecting or rebelling against our past or our family of origin. Instead, a genuinely differentiated person has integrated their past and family history in a way that allows them to become their True Self. Naturally, the more severe the dysfunction in the family of origin, the harder it is to integrate, and the more of the past must be rejected. This makes sense.

Ladders of Integrity

History. In Emotionally Healthy Relationships, there is an entire week focused on “Climbing the Ladder of Integrity.” [2] In Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Scazzero advances an adaptation of the Benedictine Ladder of Spiritual Growth, from which the Ladder of Integrity is taken. [3] The original goes something like this:

1. Keep the fear of the Lord before your eyes
2. Abandon self-will, seeking only the Will of God
3. Submit to the proper authorities in life
4. Endure everything, especially contradiction, without seeking escape
5. Confess your thoughts, especially your sinful ones
6. Be willing to accept menial work
7. Regard yourself as no better and perhaps worse than others
8. Act according to the rule of life you have adopted
9. Restrain your speech and embrace silence
10. Refrain from “ready laughter”
11. Speak gently, seriously, modestly, and reasonably
12. Demonstrate humility not only in heart but in your entire demeanor (nothing ostentatious).[4]

Scazzero has adapted this idea to modern life and the needs of independent Protestant churches in America. When used correctly, the Ladder of Integrity provides a practical way to develop the integrity of character that St. Benedict teaches by guiding you through a series of questions that help identify what truly matters to you, even when there may be interpersonal implications involved.

Worksheet. The worksheet asks the inquirer to answer statements grouped into three main categories based on the image’s labels:

What is going on inside me (1-6): This section focuses on self-awareness, feelings, needs, personal responsibility (“my part”), and physical reactions.

• Right now, the issue on my mind is:
• I’m anxious in talking about this because: ….
• My part in this is: …
• My need in this issue is: …t
• My feelings about this are: …
• What my reaction tells me about me is: …

What I value (7-10): This section addresses core values, what is willing/not willing to do, potential improvements to the situation, and important information to share with others.

• This issue is important to me because I value… and I violate that value when…:
• I am willing/not willing to: …
• One thing I could do to improve the situation is: …suggest setting a firm ground rule for meeting start times and perhaps implement a quick check-in at the beginning to see if everyone can commit to it.
• The most important thing I want you to know is: …

What I hope (11-12): This final section looks to the future, addressing hopes and how honest communication might benefit the relationship.

• I think my honest sharing will benefit our relationship by: …
• I hope and look forward to: …

In recent weeks, I have begun using this ladder to analyze my reactions to people, situations, and decisions. One of the remarkable results is the ability to look more deeply into one’s own motives and hidden agendas regarding decisions. If I had used this method when I was an active leader, some of the decisions I made might have been wiser,  clearer, and more lovingly presented. As Pete Scazzero puts it:

“The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out” (Proverbs 20:5). This captures the “Ladder of Integrity.” If we are willing to be rigorously honest with ourselves and take time to sit with our hearts—layer by layer—we will be closer to meeting our true selves and God. [5]

It goes without saying that when we understand our true selves and embrace them in the day-to-day problems of life, we build the integrity we all desire in our deepest hearts.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Relationships Day by Day: A 40-Day Journey to Deeply Change Your Relationships (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 178-9.

[2] Peter & Geri Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Relationships: Discipleship that Deeply Changes your Relationships with Each Other Expanded Ed., (Grand Rapids, Mi: Zondervan. Harper Collins Resources, 2023), 120.

[3] Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Updated Ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 134.

[4] Benedict, Saint, Abbot of Monte Cassino, The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 7.

[5] Pete Scazzero on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/petescazzero/posts/the-purposes-of-a-persons-heart-are-deep-waters-but-one-who-has-insight-draws-th/861107545817856/ (March 8, 2024) downloaded November 9, 2025

 

 

Incarnational listening is the ability to focus fully on a speaker, understand what they’re saying, respond appropriately, reflect on the conversation, and remember the information for later. This includes paying attention to the speaker’s body language and tone, as well as the content of their words, keeping both the listener and speaker actively involved in the conversation. In other words, Incarnational listening is an activity of the entire person, mind, body, psyche, and spirit.

Here is how Pete Scazzero puts it:

To listen incarnationally is to enter into another person’s world, at a heart level, with the empathy of Christ, attending to their nonverbal cues as well as their words. This is how we demonstrate our love for them. We genuinely listen to what they say and feel…. And, in doing so, by God’s grace, they experience the presence of Christ through us.[1]

Incarnational listening is essential for disciples of Christ because it helps us build strong relationships with others, foster trust and rapport, resolve conflicts, ensure understanding, and create a Christlike environment in our churches and small groups. When people practice active listening, they are better able to understand the needs and concerns of others, leading to more effective communication and resulting action.

The Basic Skill of Incarnational Listening

The basic elements of Incarnational Listening are these:

• Paying total attention as a unified person to what the person is saying and to nonverbal cues, such as body language.

• Giving natural, empathetic visual proof that you are listening, including nodding and eye contact.
• Asking clarifying questions when you genuinely do not understand what is being said.
• Eliminating distractions and interruptions, including looking at your computer, cell phone, or email notifications, and the like, and discouraging people from interrupting.
• Demonstrating a focused presence, allowing the speaker to feel heard and validated.
• Confirming that you understand what the speaker has said, by repeating back to them your understanding of what is being said.
• Building a harmonious relationship with the other person, remaining in tune with what they are saying, what they are feeling, and how they are reacting.

Importance of Incarnational Listening

Many people find it hard to understand why practicing Incarnational listening is so vital in the life of a church, small group, or even in businesses, non-profit organizations, or government. A good way to overcome these feelings is to recognize that when we listen to others, we are taking a meaningful step toward showing our love and respect. When we listen in a nonjudgmental, caring, and respectful way, people feel valued. They also see that we truly understand or want to understand where they are coming from. Plus, there are other benefits to learning how to practice incarnational listening.

• Incarnational listening shows that we value the information others share with us. One vital aspect of building a relationship is letting people know that we appreciate their unique personality, struggles, strengths, and weaknesses. Incarnational listening demonstrates that we are in tune with their personal feelings and struggles.
• Incarnational listening promotes deep understanding among people in various relationships, including churches, families, small groups, and workplaces. Being an attentive listener encourages others to share openly and thoroughly, helping you better grasp important issues and allowing you to make wise decisions and take appropriate action.
• Incarnational listening promotes understanding among people, which, in turn, creates a healthy atmosphere within any group. Being a strong, attentive listener encourages people to share information, helping you better understand relevant issues and enabling wise, loving actions.
• Incarnational listening promotes psychological safety. Being a loving and attentive listener —reflecting back what you have heard, asking questions, seeking clarification, and encouraging others to share their perspectives — strengthens relationships, helping people feel comfortable and committed to the relationship.
• Incarnational listening helps develop those around you to become more effective, appreciated, and understood. It fosters the kind of profound personal change that disciple-makers seek—not just mental growth, but also emotional, physical, and spiritual change, as they aim to influence people emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
• Incarnational listening helps cultivate a listening-focused environment that is open to change and new ideas.  You and everyone around you become more emotionally mature and more willing to accept diverse possibilities, especially during conflict. Practicing Incarnational listening develops a culture of wisdom, love, and respect.

Steps toward Emotionally Healthy Listening

All human beings struggle to listen. We are often “in our own heads,” thinking about what we will say or do next. We think about our schedules and the many things we need to accomplish. Everyone struggles with short attention spans and the tendency to view and listen to the world around us through our own perspective. As a counselor, I have occasionally returned to my office after a hard workout and lunch, only to find myself fearful that I would not listen to the person across from me, but might actually fall asleep!

The remedy for all this is to learn a few simple lessons.

First, pay attention to the person you are speaking to. One goal of active and effective listening is to allow the speaker to think and speak without interruption or finishing their sentences. Learn to delay responding. Don’t cut the other person off, finish their sentences, or start formulating your answer while the others are speaking. Be aware of and control your body language while active listening. Stay in the moment, make eye contact, and try to enter the speaker’s thought world.

Second, try not to judge the other person or offer solutions to their problem while they are speaking. If you disagree with what is being said, find something true or helpful in what they are saying. This is sometimes called “suspending judgment.”  Most people do not come to another person when they feel that the other person is automatically going to criticize or reject what they are saying.

Third, Incarnational listeners repeat, reflect, and validate as much as possible what the other person is saying. Much of the time, we do not understand what another person is saying because we would not have said it or in in the same way. By repeating what another person is saying and paraphrasing their words, we allow them to correct our understanding, which may completely change what we think they said!

Fourth, clarify your understanding when you experience doubt. When I was in seminary, we were required to learn Incarnational listening (under the name of “active listening.” It was invaluable. In the course, we were discouraged from asking questions because the instructor wanted us to learn to listen intently to others. However, in everyday life, we sometimes need to ask questions to clarify our understanding. Learning to ask carefully thought-out, open-ended, clarifying, and probing questions is an essential listening skill. Additionally, they help the speaker reflect on whether what they have said is accurate.

Fifth, summarize for the speaker what you have heard and what they would like you to do in response. This allows the other person to correct any misunderstandings and prevents inappropriate actions.  Telling the other person what you have heard and asking what you can do helps both parties understand the desired practical outcomes of the conversation.

Finally, in a leadership situation, it is often necessary to share your reactions. It is important to remember that the end of a conversation is not necessarily—and usually not—the best time to share a response. It is always appropriate —and sometimes important —to say to another person, “I need time to process what you have said.” Often, a conversation is about what another believes you, an organization, or even God expects of them. Often, the best course is to take on the role of a coach, suggesting alternatives, providing new information, and drawing on your experience and that of others. It is essential not to give the impression that you have listened only to provide advice and direction. People want to be heard, and only if they feel truly heard will they accept new ideas or direction.

Connecting with the other as a Thou

To deeply listen to another human being, it is necessary to avoid seeing the other person as an object —an employee, a colleague, a parishioner, a child, a parent, etc. We must see the person as a person, as a “Thou.” When we do this, we enter the world of the other person in a deep and abiding way. In 1 Corinthians 6:6, Paul makes what might be seen as a harsh comment: “Don’t you know that he who is joined to an immoral person becomes one with that person? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.”

Embedded in this comment is a truism we should all remember: We become, in some way, connected to those with whom we have intimate relationships, for good or for bad. This is true beyond the subject of sex. We can be joined mentally, emotionally, or spiritually with another person. Human beings become joined in a special way to those with whom they have any kind of intimate relationship. This is true in every area of life. Once we develop a relationship with another person, we are never the same. Nor is the other person. That is why we must be careful to have self-giving, loving relationships with those we meet.

Seeking the Wisdom of the Eternal Thou

One reason to delay before offering advice and instruction immediately is that a key listening skill for Christians is to hear God’s voice in the situation. This applies in religious and secular settings. It is important to remember that Christ is the very LOGOS, or Word of God, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made that has been made (John 1:1-14).

This means, among other things, that the Word is the ultimate source of all real wisdom, both secular and sacred. The methods of science, technology, and business differ from religious methods, but the truth sought is the truth that God has embedded in the universe, human lives, and institutions. Christians, therefore, should respect all searches for truth, and non-Christians should respect the Christian search.  In the end, we are all on the same team.

When responding to others, we aim to foster understanding, care, and empathy. Our goal is to find a path that creates more love, wisdom, harmony, and progress for everyone involved, regardless of their spiritual, emotional, or physical state. This is true in our families, friendships, neighborhoods, social organizations, businesses, and governments.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved 

[1] Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Relationships Day by Day: A 40-Day Jouneey to Deeply Change Your Relationships (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 132.

One of the key concepts in Emotionally Healthy Discipleship is “Differentiation.” Basically, a well-differentiated person can preserve their sense of self while fostering healthy relationships with others. Mature differentiation is an essential element of emotional maturity. Differentiation is also a core concept for followers of Christ and those who lead them. As Christians, we aim to be the people God calls us to be (differentiated) and to share that love through meaningful relationships (socially connected). Of course, no one is perfectly differentiated or perfectly socially adapted. However, the life of a disciple of Christ is (or should be) a life in movement towards becoming both the person we are called to be in Christ and the member of the body of Christ God would have us become. This means that differentiation is essential for the church, which should model what an emotionally healthy community looks like.

Self and Others in the Christian Life

This need for Christians to be differentiated stems from the very nature of God. In Christian belief, the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, but the Father. The Son is not the Father or the Spirit but the Son. The Holy Spirit is not the Father or the Son but the Spirit. They are differentiated and distinct. However, the creed states that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God, existing in relationship with one another—so close that they are “one being and one essence.”

Though this remains a mystery, it sheds light on human beings created in God’s image and our need to become our true selves while maintaining close relationships. It also offers guidance on what the Church and disciple-making relationships should look like. We do not want to make disciples who are robotic followers of a strong leader—that would resemble a cult. Instead, we seek to create disciples who think independently and possess a strong sense of their Christian identity. In fact, we want disciples who are so self-differentiated that they can engage in deep relationships where they give of themselves for others—just as Christ gave Himself for the church.

Differentiation involves maintaining a healthy sense of self along with healthy relationships with others. Essentially, a healthy sense of self includes the ability to stay in relationship with others while also being attuned to your inner self, with integrity to who you really are and what you truly believe and value. A person with a healthy sense of self can listen to criticism, valid or invalid, and endure conflict, necessary or unnecessary, while remaining open to reality even when things are confusing. Reality is difficult to discern, and, importantly, to act and respond out of a deep understanding of who they are and the call to be in Christ, despite the temptation to compromise. In other words, healthy selfhood involves the kind of integrity that can say “No” when it must.

Competing or Integrating Values

From a psychological perspective, we need to recognize two values that are important for healthy discipleship and healthy community:

1. Healthy Selfhood. We need to understand ourselves—our strengths, weaknesses, talents, limits, and similar qualities. Until we know ourselves, we will always be at the mercy of others. A healthy person can resist pressures to act or behave in ways that violate their core identity. For Christians, this means being willing and able to live as Christian disciples despite pressures to compromise their true selves.
2.  Healthy Relationship. On the other hand, we must be able to live and be in community with others. Jesus, when he was among us, lived in a concentric circle of healthy relationships: his family, his closest disciples, and the crowd he ministered to.

The key is to be so well defined as a person that we can integrate smoothly into the communities we belong to, especially our church community. People lacking a strong sense of self are often at the mercy of others, trying to meet their expectations, sometimes long after their parents are gone. This is one reason why disciples need to understand their family history and system. We cannot become the individuals we aspire to be unless we know the psychological and other forces that influence and distort our self-identity. In this regard, no set of forces impacts us more than our family systems and family of origin.

The Importance of Families and Communities of Origin

We internalize our level of differentiation as we are integrated into and emerge from our parents and family of origin. Children initially accept and reproduce their parents’ levels of differentiation or lower because that is what they know. Our sense of self develops over our lifetime through the families we originate from and the communities we join. Family and social communities exist before we become self-aware. Humans are born into a social fabric that is already in place—such as families, communities, nations, churches, friendships, and more—long before they become conscious, make choices, or influence their environment. In other words, people are born into communities, and the qualities of those communities greatly affect the person they become and shape the events that form their sense of self. [1]

On the other hand, we need to be healthy individuals. Much is said about the excess of individualism in modern America. Still, we may focus too much on that and miss a more profound truth: people have always been and become individuals. The Bible speaks of the faith of people from Abraham to the apostles. Each of these people of faith had a distinct personality. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, the prophets, or the Twelve were unique individuals. In the New Testament alone, anyone who studies it carefully cannot ignore the differences in the personalities of its authors, from the Gospels to Revelation. Peter was not Paul, and Paul was not John. This is true throughout the Bible’s entire history.

We must make the same journey from families and communities of origin to authentic selfhood in Christ. This is where we come to Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. Essentially, EHD seeks to help Christians become authentic selves in the image of Christ, so they can be genuine members of Christian communities and share the gospel more lovingly and wisely with others. But, to do this, we must look deeply into ourselves and our families of origin.

Differentiation and the Capacity to See a Person as a Thou

Several weeks ago, I discussed Martin Buber and I-Thou relationships. According to Buber, relationships can be categorized as either “I-Thou” or “I-It.” In a healthy I-Thou relationship, people experience a mutual sense of connection, respect, and engagement. Conversely, an “I-It” relationship involves treating others as objects or instruments. An individual treats the other as an object, often involves seeing the other person as something to be used, manipulated, or controlled for personal benefit. This creates a sense of detachment and objectification, leading to a superficial connection.

Teaching about the distinction, I sometimes talk about a former executive assistant of mine from the years I practiced law. We actually became very good friends because we were together about 12 hours a day, five days a week, for about six years. I knew her personal life, social struggles, and every other aspect of her life. Because she kept my schedule and made sure I took care of business and family, she knew a lot about me. Sometimes, when we talked, we had what might be called an eye-to-eye relationship. We treated each other as people for whom we wish the best. On the other hand, every year I had to decide on pay raises for the staff, including my executive assistant. It was very interesting to me how objective I could be and how little I was concerned with her feelings in those circumstances. The reason? Well, it was a law firm, and I was going to take home every dollar I didn’t spend. I would treat her as an object or a tool in making salary and other performance decisions. Could I have escaped that? No. It was part of my job to decide how much to pay certain staff members.

Nevertheless, the people we are close to—our family, friends, close associates, and fellow church members—are human beings, and our relationships with them must involve a certain element of an I-Thou relationship; otherwise, they will not be healthy. As I mentioned, well, sometimes my assistant had to be treated as an object, as an employee of the firm who stood in a relationship with other employees of the firm, our effectiveness as a team required that we have a deep, personal understanding and appreciation for the other person. We are called to model healthy relationships in all the relationships of life, including those in which it is easy to fail to do so.

What does this have to do with differentiation? Everything. People who lack a strong sense of their own selfhood often find it very difficult to maintain healthy relationships with others. Good I-Thou relationships with others depend on my having good relationships with myself and with God. God in particular is never an object—an it. God is always a Thou—a person. One of the problems with much academic religion begins at just this point: God is a person, in fact THE PERSON, the person who has made human beings persons in his own image and therefore infinitely valuable. Buber describes God as the Eternal Thou, that is the one person who was, is, and will always be a Thou to me.

An implication of the I-Thou relationship is that differentiation does not mean separation. If I see another person as a genuine thou, I recognize that we are connected as persons within a web of personal relationships, of which both of us are a part. My individual differentiation cannot be so complete that it prevents the other from their own personal differentiation and identity. In fact, the I-Thou relationship involves a kind of interpersonal regard that Christians call self-giving love, which is the ability to want and seek the best for the other, even in difficult situations, sometimes requiring personal sacrifice. The process of emotional maturity is not about seeing myself as isolated from others but about perceiving myself as an individual within a deep, self-giving relationship with others.

People who are emotionally wounded and lack proper self-regard rarely consider others. In fact, this is a significant issue in our society. Conversely, emotionally mature individuals are characterized by their ability to appropriately respect the feelings, needs, hopes, and dreams of both others and themselves.

Differentiation, Being and Doing

One of the main principles of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship is promoting what is called “slow down perch spirituality” in Christian discipleship. We slow down so that we can be ourselves (a true thou before God) and find our primary sense of meaning in that relationship with the Divine Other.

A major problem among Christians is the tendency to try to find our sense of self through what we do for God and others. Many pastors struggle with a kind of workaholism based on the belief that we are defined by our actions. Interestingly, when we fall into this trap, we treat ourselves as objects that gain their meaning from what they do. Of course, this leads us to judge ourselves by appearances, earnings, possessions, pleasures, and a host of other things that turn us into objects even in our own eyes. One of the main meanings of the Christian term “Grace” is that our identity has nothing to do with what we do, but with who we are as children of God. Our being as children of God comes before our doing as disciples or Christian leaders.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] G. Christopher Scruggs, Illumined by Wisdom and Love: Essays on a Sophio-Agapic Constructive Postmodern Political Philosophy (College Station, TX: Virtual Bookworm, 2025).