Psychosomatic wellness

I’m getting the hang of this blog business. When it’s the weekend and you want a rest, apparently what you do is drag out some ancient or obscure quote, and let that suffice for a post. The Pyromaniacs do this with Spurgeon, and it works a treat.

However, given how fast the world is moving, and how short our attention spans are, I don’t think it’s necessary to go nearly so far back for our classic quotes. The late 1980s or early 90s should do. And anyone can quote Spurgeon or Ryle or Luther, but who out there in blog-land (I ask you) is quoting classic snippets from those early edgy editions of The Briefing?

Well, as of now, we are. Here’s Phillip Jensen, from Briefing #39, December 1989:

In my job I keep meeting people who suffer from psychosomatic wellness. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, psychosomatic goodness.

I understand that some doctors spend a lot of their time telling their patients that they are not sick at all; it is all in their minds.

I have the opposite problem. People keep coming to me telling me that they are spiritually well, that they are good people. Since I know there are no good people, I instantly realize that they are suffering from psychosomatic virtue.

The dream dies hard. The evidence mounts on all sides, but people continue to believe. They are seemingly reasonable, rational people. One event after another belies their blind faith, but they stick to it.

The whole purpose of faith is to trust what’s trustworthy—not what is unreliable. How many times does your hypothesis of life have to be shown to be wrong before you discard it?

Western liberalism has a blind faith in the good and perfect nature of man. It is an unreasoned faith. It relies on vague desires for personal freedom. It exists against all the evidence of this century and others: against the evidence of two world wars, of the Holocaust, of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Korea, Chile, South Africa, racism, sexism, and so on, and so on.

We know we cannot trust the words of anybody. Our locks, our legal safeguards, our property insurance, our weaponry, our police, all testify to our working faith in human immorality. That humans are basically immoral is demonstrated daily in the media, in society and in our own actions.

How can we worship a (human) being who is so seriously flawed? We must pretend. It is better, in our minds, to worship the lie than the truth.

(From ‘Bad Dreams in Good Faith’, Briefing #39, December, 1989, pp. 4-5.)