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

Thursday, February 15, 2007

The Consequences of our Spiritual Gifts Theology

Most people approaching the subject of spiritual gifts genuinely desire to use what they learn to better focus their service to the church. They want to contribute to their local group of believers in the best way possible, which they surmise, is through their gift(s). Their first glimpse into the literature on spiritual gifts, however, may be one of confusion where every expert is contradicted by another and no aspect of the doctrine is without dispute. The major result of this confusion is the implicit belief that spiritual gifts are unknowable except in a vague, oblique manner. The Holy Spirit moves as He will and cannot be pinned down on any question regarding the gifts, including how many gifts there are, how many a person can have, and are any of Paul’s terms simply two words for the same gift?

The consequences for this lack of clarity may not be apparent, but we do have a model for comparison regarding consistency of viewpoint: The psychological type community. Within the circles of those who teach or just study MBTI types, there has been a consistent view about how many personality types exist and the basic definition of each one. The results of this have been profound in two areas. First, it has led to a sustained enthusiasm for the topic and its applications. Second, there has been a progressive understanding of the personality types over time, as authors build incrementally on the work and insights of others.

Sustained Enthusiasm

Personality type enthusiasts are common enough to have generated the very term “type enthusiast.” Spiritual gift enthusiasts are fairly rare. This is unfortunate because we would expect the very idea that we’re all gifted to bring about a passion for the subject. There is an initial excitement when the subject of spiritual gifts is introduced to a congregation, but rarely will we find the same people discussing the topic a year later. This enthusiasm is dampened mostly because we seldom identify clearly defined gifts. It’s not that they don’t exist, but preconceived ideas cloud our perception. The largest culprit in this case is the belief that most of us have two or three gifts, often called a “gift-mix.”

For example, if we look at a person with a single gift, encouragement, believing she has both the gifts of encouragement and mercy[1], we will falsely identify some of her behavior as arising from the gift of mercy, which will cloud our perception of both encouragement and mercy. With the gift of encouragement we will limit our understanding of it by explaining away some of the gifts empathic abilities to the gift of mercy. With the gift of mercy we will skew our understanding by falsely attributing behavior to it which does not actually arise from the gift of mercy. This error will make it more difficult then to correctly identify the gift of mercy in the future, because we will likely be looking for traits that we saw in the encourager[2]. This also makes it more likely that we will identify someone with the gift of mercy as having other gifts in addition to mercy in order to explain the new behavior that we had not previously associated with mercy, further confusing the picture. We find this creeping vagueness of perception as one foggy observation of a gift leads to another.

The very enthusiasm generated around the MBTI, by contrast, suggests that the sixteen types actually exist, not fourteen or twenty or some other number. If the theory did not match the reality, the observed evidence would have to be distorted to match the theory and much of the enthusiasm for the MBTI would wane as it has for most other typing systems. The MBTI, then, provides a view of what happens when we look for clearly defined types that actually exist. The observer looks at those around him as if each person has a specific personality type. He may not know that type immediately, but believes that behind the observed behavior there is a type which holds a great deal of explanatory power regarding the behavior. If the observer has a fellow type enthusiast to compare notes with the process of type identification is greatly accelerated.

Progressive Understanding over Time

Each time a person’s type is discovered there is an “aha, that makes sense” moment, with even mistakes in identification providing fuel for later understanding. The process leads to a cycle of increasing clarity that type-watchers understand well: The theory sharpens our observations, and our observations confirm and increase our understanding of the theory. As we understand the theory better, we sharpen our observations even further. This progressive understanding of personality types displayed in individuals is seen to an even greater degree in the community as a whole as the leading authors in the field build on the works of others to see ever-deeper levels of structure in the personality types.

The study on spiritual gifts has progressed much slower than its secular cousin. The work of Peter Wagner from 1979 provides definitions of spiritual gifts that are borrowed often but seldom improved. In contrast, the work of David Keirsey on the sixteen types, also from 1979, while still a favorite of many, has provided a springboard for others in the field to provide more refined and comprehensive portraits of the various personalities. Lenore Thompson’s descriptions of the functions expand the portraits by showing major distinctions in the introverted and extroverted versions of each function. A sensing function that is focused inward (Si), as in the ISTJ or ESTJ, has profound differences from a sensing function that is focused outward (Se), as with the ISTP or ESTP. Another extension of the theory comes from Jonathan Niednagle and his understanding of the body mechanics of each type and its application to sports.

These major advancements in our understanding have no parallel in the study of spiritual gifts. Two reasons were discussed in the last section also apply here: A lack of sustained enthusiasm and a lack of clear definitions for the gifts. A third reason is our narrow application of the gifts to our lives as a whole. We tend to limit our knowledge of spiritual gifts to what we see in the moral and spiritual realms[3]. With personality types there are no such limitations. Our choice of careers, hobbies, marriage partners, and just about everything else we do is seen as impacted by if not primarily explained by our personality type. With the amount of raw material considered applicable to our insight of personality types, it is not surprising that the field of study would progress much faster than its religious counterpart.

References

[1] Mercy is especially susceptible to being claimed as a “second” or “third” gift by any of the feeling types, who often see their own empathy, or ability to identify with others, as a form of mercy. It is also, along with discernment, an introverted feeling gift, and these two gifts are less likely than others to assertively stake out and define a social territory, leaving the ground open to claims by those who may be sincere but don’t actually have the gifts.

[2] It is possible and understandable to associate mercy primarily with extraverted feeling, the dominant function of the ENFJ and ESFJ and the secondary function of the INFJ and ISFJ, and thus entirely overlook the quiet kindness of the ISFP whose feeling function is focused inward and is more difficult to see.

[3] An exception to the rule is Lloyd Edwards who recognizes that our gifts affect everything we do, Discerning Your Spiritual Gifts (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1988), 5, 12.

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