Searching for God # 105

 Jesus makes clear that all rewards and punishments are intrinsic. According to Jesus, reward is integral to the activity for which it is a reward. The reward for loving one’s neighbor is an unqualified relation to that neighbor. However,  the church developed a doctrine of extrinsic rewards and sanctions to undergird its power and authority. If love is its own reward, why should human beings be rewarded for loving?

This quote, from Robert Funk’s Honest to Jesus, appeared in the last post in this space. Why have I excerpted it and repeated it here?

We live in a culture in which classical conditioning, in and through the design, administration and assessment of success is almost exclusively extrinsic rewards. Even the church operates on the basis of extrinsic rewards. The number of people in pews and dollars in plates is a primary, if not in too many cases, the exclusive focus of the hierarchy in mainline churches. With mainline churches closing at a furious pace, excepting the Roman Catholic church, where there appears to be a surge in numbers seeking ‘admission,’ one has to wonder about the cultural difference between the corporation, the academy, the public square and the ecclesial sanctuary.

And the practice of bargaining with God, ‘if you do this for me, I will…..for you’ is another form of the perhaps unconscious personal, organizational and cultural bias in favour of extrinsic rewards. There is an implicit ‘justice’ or injustice within this mind-set…..if I have ‘done’ this for you, I expect that you can and will do this for me’…..And if that is not reciprocal, then there is a sense of betrayal, often a withdrawal of connection and another reinforcement of the extrinsic reward system.

B.F. Skinner, the author of behaviourism, (from Britannica.org) was an American psychologist and an influential exponent of behaviourism, which views human behaviour in terms of responses to environmental stimuli and favours the controlled, scientific study of responses as the most direct means of elucidating human nature. Skinner was attracted to psychology through the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov on conditioned reflexes, articles on behaviourism by Bertrand Russell, and the ideas of  John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism….His experiences in the step-by-step training of research animals led Skinner to  formulate the principles of programmed learning, which he envisioned to be accomplished through the use of  so-called teaching machines. Central to his approach is the concept of reinforcement or reward. The student, learning by use of the machine at his own pace, is rewarded for responding correctly to the  material he is trying to master.

Why such a lengthy explication of behaviourism in a post about ‘intrinsic rewards, from a theological perspective?

The pervasive concepts of behaviourism lie at the foundational of the thought process, and the accompanying attitudes about the nature of reality, that we also live in a culture that, as James Hillman reminds us, operates on the basis of literalism, empiricism and all of the implications of that ‘mind-set’. Objectifying behaviour, through the design and application of extrinsic rewards, impacts our salary grids, our competitive promotional ladders in organizations, our systems of performance reviews, and also our ‘termination’ approaches.

If everything about everyone is measured in numerical digits, of some sort, then one’s value and worth morph into a psychological notion of one’s identity. We but and sell out time, our skills our insights, and our precise attitudes, through such digital manipulation as opinion polls, marketing research, and the like. And once the numbers of people reach a certain benchmark (the one that determines whether or not the bills of the congregation can be and will be paid) the decision is taken to sell the building, and close and lock the doors.

Bells that ring for dogs to learn how to acquire food, for example, in the Pavlov experiments, are one specific application of the classical conditioning of behaviourism in operation. At a base level, perhaps, humans too are conditioned to ‘perform’ like trained seals to the satisfaction of their employer, and are consequently rewarded through one of the various extrinsic reward systems, most of which are embedded in personnel policy and practice.

Those who are less attracted to, or perhaps even completely immune to, the extrinsic reward system, naturally are considered ‘deviant’ and ‘different’ and often even untrustworthy.

Theologically, this extrinsic reward proposition has another profoundly significant and tragic application. Traditionally, the Christian faith has operated on and propagated the notion of an extrinsic reward of an afterlife in Heaven for those who have been saved. Nightly, people like Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist, Billy Graham, appears on some television channels offering ‘salvation’ and forgiveness of sins, for those who ‘give their lives over to Jesus Christ….and there is a phone number on the screen to call to have one of his staff pray for those who call. Such marketing and proselytizing tactics and strategies are, like those ‘pious’ acts of religiosity in public, the antithesis of the spirit of that same Jesus, at least as considered by the participants of the Jesus Seminar. Extrinsic rewards for ‘surrendering’ and for the exclusive status of attaining the rank of being ‘chosen’ so that, with the apocalypse, they will be assured of their place in heaven, while the ‘rest,’ the ‘unsaved’ will be sentenced to Hell…the whole so-called Christian theology, at least this branch of it, relies on, and proudly boasts, an embrace of extrinsic rewards from God, embraced, incarnated and embodied by millions of Christians

Here is another quote from Funk, detailing more of the sinister and self-serving aspects of the extrinsic reward of that apocalyptic heavenly afterlife:

 Apocalypticism is world-denying and vindictive. The apocalypse is a protest against injustice in this life, which is what makes it appealing. But it is ethically crippling because the apocalyptic mind looks for rectification in another world, rather than seeking justice in this one. In addition, the apocalyptic vision anticipates that those of us who have suffered in this life will be freed from pain in some future existence. That seems unobjectionable. But apocalypse adds that those who have prospered here, and especially those who have harmed us, will suffer in the hereafter. Those who advocate the apocalyptic solution are seeking vindication for their mistreatment in this life and punishment for someone else’s unmerited favor. The desire to reward and punish in the next world is self-serving in its most crass, pathetic form. It is unworthy of the Galilean who asked nothing for himself, beyond the simplest needs.

The numbers ‘game’ also applies to the social and cultural pattern, in the West, whereby churches claim success based on the size of their congregation the size of their trust fund, and the appointments of their sanctuary, not to mention the names of ‘elite’ social leaders in the town or city. The notion that everyone, all of us, is considered equal, with none being ‘superior’ in any way to another, is missing from the cultural ethos.

More from Funk:

 The authentic words of Jesus reject the notion of privileged position among his followers: the first will be last and the last first; those who aspire to be leaders should become slaves of all.

Jesus robs his followers of Christian ‘privilege.’ As John Dominic Crossan so pointedly puts it, Jesus robs humankind of all protections and privileges, entitlements and ethnicities that segregate human beings into categories. His Father is no respecter of persons…..What is the basis for one denomination to claim superiority over another? Is there a basis in Jesus’ views for one individual to think that he or she has a favored position in God’s eyes?

Many of the propositions from Funk expose the difference between what the scholars learned from the gospels, and the letters, when studied in a detailed manner, and the creedal and dogmatic documents that emerged from debates hundreds of years after the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Many churches continue to recite the creeds (Nicean and Apostles’ and Athanasian) as cornerstones of the ‘belief system’ on which they purport to rest their religious faith and conviction. For many, the words echo as a hollow chant, for most their meaning and import, and their relative meaning is lost in the fog of the memorized or read chant.

The notion that Jesus was envisioning a new world, the kingdom of God, tends to get lost in the sanctimony of some of the creedal, dogmatic and expectations of the church fathers and their impact on the faith. Returning to Jesus ideas, notions, and especially the non-confining and non-prescribing aspects of what amount to many paradoxical concepts and notions, can bring a revisioning of Christianity.

To shed much of the currently behaviouristic, hierarchic, empiric, and literal aspects in favour of a more tolerant, accepting, loving and inspiring perspective not only of morality but, more importantly of the intrinsic worth and value of each person, irrespective of title, bank account, ethnicity, religious affiliation, linguistic heritage..for many would look like something unenforceable, indefinable, and chaotic. For others, it would represent a kind of liberation that opens the human heart and imagination to new visions and interpretations of each and every moment, including the highly dynamic relationship with God, as envisioned through the life and words and eyes of Jesus.