The Trauma of Doctrine by Paul Maxwell

Author:Paul Maxwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781978704244
Publisher: Fortress Academic

Figure 6.1 The Traumatized Cycle and the Family System.

Bentovim explains: “Betrayal is felt through the manipulation of trust, violation of care, and lack of protection in the family.” 60 In the Reformed view, it is not inconceivable that God sufficiently meets this definition of “Betrayal” except for the fact that, in this view, God does not use his meticulous control of every human action to manifest care or protection, and so to trust him for salvation from such things would be overstepping God’s expressed boundaries of trust.

Reformed Faith and the Crisis of Fiducia

Claudia Welz comments that the epicenter of the issue of faith and trauma “is our fiducia . . . fiducia that is utterly needed and yet constantly at risk. . . . the emphasis on trust in God—the reliance on his grace—despite all that counts against it is central.” 61 Reformed theology and trauma jointly have the potential to harm faith in three ways—three harmonies of pistic disruption—which correspond to the three operations of the imagination, which precedingly correspond to the threefold nature of faith.

The first harmony is to change one’s ideology altogether or to depart from Reformed theology in order to maintain a sense of fiducia toward God. This harmony is called “Non-Reformed,” and is disruptive to faith insofar as it requires a modification of the content which constitutes it. In the Non-Reformed harmony, the ideology of faith changes in order that one may conceive of one’s trust in God according to a commonsense moral standard, 62 which Reformed theology characteristically inverts. The Non-Reformed harmony is, in terms of the imagination, a rupture of the notia of faith (it abandons MP and TD) for the sake of the fiducia of faith. The Non-Reformed harmony can be confessed by the traumatized in the following statement:

God does not have MP.

God is good.

God did not ordain my abuse.

I did not deserve my abuse.

The second harmony is called “Reluctantly Reformed,” because it maintains one’s moral calculus, while simultaneously retaining MP and TD. However, the culpability of God in this harmony becomes unbearably obvious and fiducia becomes an unattainable, and/or unsustainable psychological state. Faith is stuck in what Calvin calls “implicit faith”—or, mere notitia and assenus, with no fiducia. In this view, God is perceived as a moral monster, and anger at God is explicitly facilitated—not as the God who created a world in which evil came about through free will, but as the “perpetrator God” who exists “as evil, dissociated and in unconscious opposition” to the self. 63 The Reluctantly Reformed harmony can be confessed by the traumatized in the following statement:

God does have MP.

God is evil.

God ordained my abuse.

I did not deserve my abuse.

The third harmony is called “Convicted Reformed,” in which fiducia is maintained, as well as a convicted belief in MP and TD. However, one’s commonsense moral standard is compromised, since God’s MP does not entail any moral responsibility for evil on his part, and the human lack of libertarian freedom (entailed indirectly by MP, and manifested directly in TD) does not diminish humankind’s responsibility for free will in any way.

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