The main guide for this research can be found at A Guide to Spiritual Gifts

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Can Gifts and Personality be Distinguished?

The modern church views spiritual gifts and personality characteristics as phenomena that occur at different levels of our being. Personality occurs at a “natural” level, and spiritual gifts occur at a “spiritual” level. Some teaching systems even describe the results of combining the same gift with several different personality styles.


Current Systems


SHAPE system
The most prominent method of teaching both gifts and personality types is the SHAPE method. SHAPE is an acrostic for

S spiritual gifts
H heart passions
A abilities
P personality
E experiences

In the SHAPE system none of the dimensions of a person are determined by the others. Our spiritual gifts are independent of our abilities, personality, and heart passions. Any personality can be combined with any spiritual gift or any heart passion, so that the gifts do not depend on any personality characteristics.


Mels Carbonell: DISC system + spiritual gifts
The DISC profile system assesses people based on the four behavioral styles of:

Dominance
Influence
Steadiness
Conscientiousness

In his system, each of these four styles can combine with any gift, and Carbonell has done a very insightful integration of the two concepts. The results, though, are similar to the SHAPE system where no gift depends on a personality style, but can be determined independently of personality.


Defining the Problem

There is a growing realization that spiritual gift inventories are not looking beyond personality traits in their attempt to identify the gifts. Stone reports, “It is believed that these inventories are contaminated by personality traits which account for the large amounts of shared variance. This error may be hiding the distinct gifts[1].”

Tim Challies expresses the concern that the spiritual gift inventories can be successfully completed by unbelievers. The questions are generic and he believes “bear an uncanny resemblance to the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator[2].” He proposes that we “ask, then, if these tests are truly measuring spiritual gifts or if they are simply examining personality.” Challies does not miss the implication of this, though he dismisses it quickly. “Is it possible that perhaps we are only given spiritual gifts that compliment our personalities so personality and gifts are one and the same? That would be unsatisfying, because I believe God can work through gifts that may contradict our personalities[3].”

Both Stone and Challies have noticed something that is abundantly confirmed in Part I of this research: That what authors describe as traits of spiritual gifts and what they test for in their spiritual gift inventories are often identical with traits that other authors see in secular personality types. If the two are not the same, then there is some confusion of categories going on, and we are failing to distinguish the concepts. So are we, as Stone believes, missing the true gifts, or are we seeing the gifts as manifested in personality traits, but asserting that we are somehow looking beyond personality; and if it were possible to find spiritual gifts as distinct entities from personality types, how would we do so?

Are the gifts recognizable or hidden?
A basic premise of this research has been that the spiritual gifts should be recognizable if we know how to look for them, based on the reasoning that the gifts would be weak and ineffectual otherwise. If someone is given a gift of mercy and we can’t even recognize that they have more of the qualities of mercy than most other believers then it doesn’t say much for the gift. The question that remains, though, is what are we seeing in the person with the gift of mercy that identifies the gift to us? Is it the same kind of personality factors we see in the secular world, or is it something that occurs at a deeper “spiritual” level.


Distinguishing the concepts of personality and gifts


Evidence
When our most recognized experts on spiritual gifts describe certain gifts, the results are almost identical to specific personality types. There are several clear examples, but one of the strongest is the correlation of the spiritual gift of administration with the personality type ESTJ. The strength of this correlation is documented in Part I, where it is shown that the two descriptions are virtually interchangeable. There are two primary responses to this evidence to consider.

Option 1
This is evidence of a one-to-one correlation of the gift of administration with the personality type ESTJ.

Option 2
Our premise (hypothetically) will be that gifts and type are not the same thing, so we should keep looking for a method of distinguishing them. There are really only two methods that we could use to distinguish the gifts from personality types: Observable behavior and results.

Observable behavior
Things that we could look for as evidence of spiritual gifts include behaviors, attitudes, habits, traits, or any sort of psychological predisposition. We must find those that have not been covered in the personality type literature, otherwise the description can be correlated with similar descriptions in the types, and we have then failed to separate the two concepts. There is, though, really very little about human nature that has not been observed, described, and analyzed; and there is no point in attributing to spiritual gifts traits that have been observed in the type descriptions such as an outgoing nature, decisiveness or objectivity, and then asserting that these traits are somehow different than the identical traits in personality types.

Perhaps, then, spiritual gifts occur at a deeper, spiritual level than personality types. The problem here is that we lack any way of describing another level. We don’t even know how to begin looking for this level. As the gift-type comparisons of Part I demonstrate, the language is shared—there are no special concepts or even a vocabulary to describe the gifts that has not already been used in the personality type literature. If the gifts occur at another level of our being we can only assert that they do, we cannot describe or measure them. The gifts then become something mysterious and ultimately unrecognizable, with the possible exception that we might recognize the gift by the results that come from using these hidden gifts.

Results
An alternative to looking for the gifts in personality traits is to observe the results of a ministry or act of service and to infer the gift behind the results. If, however, we view the results of using a gift as if they have no connection to observable behavior we have another problem. In our daily life results are nearly always connected to observable behavior. Our minds perceive the cause and effect relationships.

For example, how could the results of mercy come from someone without the observable personality traits of kindness and gentleness? Imagine a man, Frank, who comes with a group to visit a friend in the hospital. Frank isn’t kind and gentle, doesn’t have a cheerful disposition, and doesn’t even smile. Let’s assume the hurting friend is comforted and cheered up by the visit. Would we attribute the results to a hidden gift of mercy in Frank? It would never occur to us, even if Frank had the gift of mercy, to attribute the results to him. It would forever be a mystery that Frank had the gift, because there would never be a cause/effect relationship whereby we could attribute the results of his gift to any kind of cause that we would understand as connected to a gift of mercy.

If, though, we assume that personality traits get in the way of finding the gifts, we must rule out kindness and gentleness as a marker for the gift of mercy, because both of these traits have been clearly attributed to one or more of the personality types. Unless we can identify other traits of the gift of mercy, we wouldn’t ever see the gift because there would be no cause to attribute the effect of mercy to, and there just isn’t much to find that hasn’t already been claimed by the secular descriptions.

If a gift can contradict our personality traits, then observing the results of using a gift is not a satisfactory method of recognizing the gift either, because we would never attribute the results of the gift to the correct person. We make this kind of connection through personality traits, and if these are ruled out as a marker for gifts, the results become a mysterious effect without a cause.

To use another example, if an administrator did not focus on the traits that most good administrators have, but instead focused inwardly, on abstract ideas, made personal judgments, and refrained from decision making until necessary, in other words—displayed poor administrative skills, the organization or group would not likely run well. If it did run well the conclusion would be that the members of the organization run it well despite the deficiencies of the administrator, or that God intervened to transcend the person’s ability, not that the results derived from a supernatural gift that cannot be detected.

Take the ESTJ and INFP types as examples. The affinity and skill of the ESTJ at administrative tasks has copious documentation, as noted in the gift-type comparison for the gift of administration. The lack of these same skills in the ESTJs opposite, INFP, is just as obvious, prompting the observation that INFPs “cannot administer their way out of a paper bag[4].” It could, however, be argued here that God can give gifts that are inconsistent with a person’s personality (natural talent).

Could God give the gift of administration to an INFP? If God did would he also give the INFP the traits that are almost universally associated with good administrative ability, such as an outward focus on the world of people and things, a preference for the concrete rather than the abstract, logical rather than personal decisions, and a structured rather than an open ended approach to decision making. If these traits were not given to our hypothetical INFP administrator, we would still see the cause/effect disconnect, where the effect of good administration would seem to have no identifiable cause. If, on the other hand, these traits were given to the INFP, then the INFP would, by definition, no longer be an INFP, because a preference for the aforementioned traits is the very definition of an ESTJ.

Assessment of a Cause/Effect Disconnect as a Factor in the Awe and Wonder Produced from Miraculous Gifts

1. Start with Wayne Grudem’s assessment of the miraculous as “that which produces awe and wonder."
2. “Miraculous by definition” categorical distinction divides the miraculous from the non-miraculous gifts. It does so by separating those gifts that cannot be defined by or attributed to normal personality characteristics.
3. When the results of a gift such as a supernatural healing cannot be attributed to normal personality characteristics it breaks the usual cause/effect relationship whereby we connect results we see such as effective leadership to causes such as a visionary, analytical and decisive mind.
4. When the normal cause/effect relationship is broken we begin looking for other causes. When no “rational” cause can be found, many people begin looking beyond normal causes to God, other spirits, or some not understood mystical ability.
5. This results in miraculous gifts producing awe and wonder, because they cannot be attributed to the effects of anything we understand in human nature such as personality types or traits. This analysis would likely be done almost instantly in the case of obvious supernatural events.

Note - I have borrowed a distinction made by Wayne Grudem in his book The Gift of Prophecy. Grudem uses the distinction to make a practical point about prophecy, but might not agree with my stronger application of his practical distinction.


References

[1] John Kenneth Stone, “Relationship between personality and spiritual gifts” (Ph.D. diss., Andrews University, 1991), 2. More specifically, “Post hoc findings suggest that personality factors accounted for about 50% of the error variance”, iv.

[2] Tim Challies, “Spiritual Gift Assessments and The Bible” Challies.com Blog, 25 January 2005, http://www.challies.com/archives/000754.php (24 October 2005)

[3] Ibid.

[4] Roy M. Oswald and Otto Kroeger, Personality Type and Religious Leadership (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1988), 49.

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