A little more about Explanations, spiced with something about intentions and belief

Well I've just finished a chapter on discipleship in Dallas Willard's book The Divine Conspiracy. I think that it's taken me a couple of weeks... long old chapters our Dallas writes!  And frankly it was a little disappointing, I'm hoping that the next chapter on a discipleship curriculum is going to be better.

Willard makes great play on the importance of beliefs and intentions on our actions.  Now, I'm in danger here of overstating my case but I'm really not convinced about this.  But, of course, if Willard is correct about the importance of beliefs and intentions then that would make sense of teaching programmes in church being built around explanation and preaching.  For the explanations would lead to belief and linked to exhortations, which changed our intentions to follow and learn from Jesus, that would mean we would all be well on our way...

but does that sound convincing to you?  How many sermons can you remember that changed you around and changed your intentions as well as your beliefs? And having said that, did your actions actually change from there on?  Come on now, be honest!

I trivial example, which I think that I've mentioned before.

I'm overweight, badly overweight. Now, I believe two things (a) that I am unhealthily overweight and (b) that I know what I need to do to lose weight.  Furthermore, I strongly intend to lose weight.  Funnily enough, however, I'm not losing any weight yet. Perhaps I've stopped putting weight on but I'm not losing it yet.  I could go on and on with examples, perhaps I could tell you of how bad I am at getting down to write and how I try and try to improve that.  And I'm sure that you could furnish me with examples, serious and trivial, from your own life where your beliefs, intentions and actions just haven't fitted together.  Now this is serious stuff for, as Willard correctly and powerfully points out, we are apprentices of Jesus and not scholars about him.  Our discipleship is 'measured' in the resemblance of our actions to his not in our head-knowledge about him.  In terms of our discipleship, explanation just doesn't scratch where our lives are itching.

Why is this?

Well one explanation is that there is no direct link between our thoughts and our actions and, furthermore, there is a very doubtful link between our intentions (will) and our thoughts.  This may sound a bit surprising to most of us educated to believe in a rational mind and the value of thinking before acting!  Those sorts of ideas owe much of their origin to Rene Descartes and his famous aphorism "I think therefore I am".  The idea that has taken hold is that there is a dualism, a separation between thought and action.  The real me thinks and in that thinking forms the speech actions and physical actions that our bodies - servants of our thoughts - then perform.  Now if that's true then it would make sense to design a form of learning that affected our thoughts (beliefs) and will (the linking of thoughts and actions).  Explanation (or preaching) would be a perfectly logical way of communicating and supporting learning.  But

It's perfectly arguable to say that our thoughts don't control our actions - e.g. my weight and dieting problems! :-(  An alternative logic suggests that our actions are always socially performed.  You can only understand our actions in the light of the preceding and succeeding comments or actions.  We could say that the authorship of our actions is shared with the people we're with. From this perspective, our actions are like an improvised performance always new, always being performed again for the first time.  Yes we contribute to what happens around us but that is not the whole story; others, conversational partners, social structures, fashions, events ... all these shape and co-create our actions every bit as much as our thoughts and intentions. 

And that, I would suggest, is one of the reasons that explanation and preaching doesn't scratch where we Christians itch, for their logic is based on an assumption that we are individuals, individual followers of Jesus, linked together in groups by geography, taste and theological preferences.  But we are NOT individual followers of Jesus.  We are the body of Christ and I do not think that we have even begun to unpack the wonderful, emancipatory, holy power of that 'truth'.