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Conflict in the New Testament
My booklet gives three New Testament "signposts", but
there is of course much more that could be said about the theme of conflict in
the NT. There is some useful biblical material, practically applied, at www.teal.org.uk/conflict/conflict1.htm
and www.teams.org.uk/conflict.htm.
I have written more extensively about NT conflict in Anvil, Vol.
20, No 3, 2003 (www.anviljournal.co.uk).
In that I article, I explore the attitude of NT authors in relation to conflict,
with the following conclusion:
It is clear that to all of the NT authors, practical ministry
meant dealing with conflict within the church. All of them responded to conflict
in ways which depended on formative experiences in their lives. Yet, although
each person's experiences were quite distinctive, for all of them faith in
Christ was the most formative one.
Some of the key themes that I have identified are Godward in
their thrust: respond to grace (Paul); seek wisdom (James); be open to the
Spirit (Luke); cultivate relationship with Jesus (John). Other themes focus on
one's response to fellow Christians: beware of arrogant leaders (Peter); follow
the example of Jesus (Mark); deal with resentment swiftly (Matthew). What is
striking is that these are all about the motivation for, and practicalities of,
maintaining real community, koinonia, amongst Christians.
Learning Skills for Transforming Conflict
Skills for transforming conflict can be described in books, but they
can only really be learned by doing. For me personally, the training methods
used by Mennonite Christians have been very helpful. Much of their expertise in
this field has been developed in the USA, but since the mid-1990s the London
Mennonite Centre has been running Bridge Builders training courses (www.menno.org.uk/BB/index.html)
in Britain. They are intensive, biblical and highly practical, and I warmly
commend them.
British Christians can also learn a lot from the example of fellow
believers who work for peace in troubled areas of the world. I have been greatly
affected by getting to know Israelis and Palestinians, as I have described in my
article "Dealing with Conflict in the Church of England" in Anvil,
Vol. 20, No. 4, 2003 (www.anviljournal.co.uk).
The following organisations are doing excellent work:
Using Typologies as Tools
Human beings can be classified into different types in a number of ways. Why
is that relevant to Christians in conflict? The point being made at various
stages in my booklet is that friction in church life can arise from a failure to
understand, or a refusal to accept, that other people can think and communicate
quite differently from oneself, as a result of both nature and nurture.
Recognising at least four different types of people can be a starting point for
gaining a better understanding of oneself in relation to others - although it
should not be a finishing point.
In my booklet I have used two different typologies. Neither of them is
particularly well known in Britain, but I think they deserve more recognition.
The typology devised by Gilmore & Fraleigh (www.friendlypress.com),
which is the basis for the character portraits on page 11, is in my view much
more accessible than that of Myers & Briggs, or the Enneagram. (In addition,
it has none of the associations with pagan mysticism that have been noted in the
work of Jung, whose work is the foundation for the Myers-Briggs typology, and
Gurdjieff, who popularised the Enneagram in the western world. See Grove
Pastoral booklet P
61 The Empty Self and Grove Spirituality booklet S
57 Personality Indicators and the Spiritual Life.) Gilmore & Fraleigh's
scheme has the advantage that it uses no technical vocabulary and takes an
essentially pragmatic approach to describing different personal
"styles", in order to help people communicate more skilfully with one
another. Moreover, it focuses on the way one's style of communication alters
when under stress. I am not aware of any other scheme that does so.
Gilmore and Fraleigh describe only four basic types. However, they do not
suggest that any individual will fit neatly into one of four boxes, only that
everyone has style preferences. They provide a questionnaire which allows the
respondent to come up with a style profile, i.e. a set of numbers, each of which
indicates one's degree of similarity to one of four types. The numbers taken
together indicate how the individual's own personal style can be seen as a
weighted mixture of four stereotypes. Many people turn out to have a fairly
strong leaning towards one of the four styles especially when they are
communicating under stress.
Below is a summary of the four styles, showing Gilmore and Fraleigh's own terms
in bold type. The associated colours, which I use in my booklet, were suggested
by Barbara Date. Gilmore and Fraleigh do not attempt to correlate their types
with those of Myers & Briggs, but they do note that there is some
correlation between their four types and the temperaments described by the
ancient Greek philosopher Galen - so I have included those in the table too.
| Task-focused styles | Green Achieving/Directing Choleric |
Blue Analysing/Preserving Phlegmatic |
| Person-focused styles | Red Affiliating/Perfecting Melancholic |
Yellow Accommodating/Harmonising Sanguine |
Corinne Ware's scheme of four "spiritual types" (www.alban.org/bookdetails.asp?ID=884), which is the basis for the person portraits on page 19 of my booklet, is in turn derived from the work of Urban T. Holmes (See A History of Christian Spirituality, Seabury, New York 1981, p 3ff). The selector test she has devised for determining one's spiritual type is unusual in that it is not a "forced choice" questionnaire. Under each of a number of headings, four possible responses are offered, one corresponding to each type, and the respondent may choose any number of them. This prevents any feeling that one is being forced to fit into a neat category at each point, and usually shows a respondent to be a mixture of all four types, but perhaps with a distinct leaning in certain directions.
Ware derives her four types by distinguishing preferences in two different ways, firstly according to how one prefers to acquire knowledge, and secondly according to how one prefers to think of God. The first distinction is based on knowing things intellectually (by wrestling with questions about God or moral issues) vs knowing things affectively (by intuition or feelings). The second is based on thinking of God as Spirit (beyond imagination) vs thinking of God as revealed (able to be grasped in mind or heart). Hence the following table of spiritual types. Ware does suggest some degree of correlation with Myers-Briggs types (although she does not think it is very exact), so I have included them in brackets.
| Tends to think of God as Spirit (N) | Tends to think of God as revealed (S) | |
| Prefers intellectual knowledge (T) | Kingdom Pragmatic |
Head Thinking |
| Prefers affective knowledge (F) | Mystic Contemplative |
Heart Affectionate |
Ware has researched the most helpful pathways for spiritual growth of each type. Her work has interesting resonances with a project currently being undertaken by the Bible Reading Fellowship and others. Foundations 21 is an ambitious "e learning" resource for Christian disciples, due for release in mid-2005. It offers four different learning pathways, corresponding to the four canonical gospels. Each pathway tries to pick up on the distinctive discipleship style of one of the gospels and to offer an appropriate style of learning. The Matthew style is to trust and obey, learning by orderly study. The Mark style is to decide to believe, learning by story-telling. The Luke style is to follow the journey, learning by building community. The John style is to see and know, learning by intuitive grasp of the truth. In order to make a link with these ideas, I have suggested in my booklet which of the four gospels is likely to appeal to each of Ware's types. In making the connections, I have also drawn on the work of Richard Burridge (Four Gospels, One Jesus? SPCK, London, 1994), who has helpfully described the different "portraits" of Jesus offered by the four evangelists. He notes that each gospel has traditionally been linked with one of the four beasts around the throne of God (Rev 4.7, cf Eze 1.10), and he shows how each beast can symbolise Jesus in a different way. Mark's Jesus is a like bounding lion, energetic and not predictable, proclaiming and demonstrating in action that the kingdom of God is at hand; this would inspire Ware's "kingdom" type. Matthew's Jesus is the Teacher of Israel, symbolised by a human face; this gospel's systematisation of Jesus' teaching appeals to the "head" type. Luke's Jesus is the Bearer of Burdens, represented by the ox, chief of the domestic animals; by highlighting Jesus' sympathy for needy people, Luke is in tune with the "heart" type. John's Jesus, like the eagle, comes with piercing vision from on high and returns there; this gospel of signs and symbols is attractive to the "mystic" type.
It appears to me that there are significant correlations between Ware's
typology and Gilmore & Fraleigh's, so I have drawn the two tables above so
that they map onto one another thus:
|
Achieving/Directing |
Analysing/Preserving |
|
Affiliating/Perfecting |
Accommodating/Harmonising |
My implication is that there are natural parallels between the way one tends to respond to other human beings and the way one tends to respond to God. Development in one area may well influence development in the other. Now, growth in Christian maturity involves learning to relate more deeply to God, responding to him in new ways as he leads, not just as we would prefer - or, putting it another way, becoming more Christlike. That means becoming more like the one who embraced all four ways of relating to his Father, who could call on a wide range of styles in communicating with other human beings, and who can only be known fully by drawing on all four gospels. But where does one start? Ware suggests that whatever one's instinctive spiritual type, one will most readily understand the type diagonally opposite in the table. "Kingdom" and "heart" Christians grow towards one another, as do "head" and "mystic" Christians (In Myers-Briggs terms this would be called embracing one's shadow). This offers a useful tool for spiritual direction, and I think it may also help people to see why they find some styles of communication easier to cope with than others.
What justification is there for settling upon four (rather than, say, nine or sixteen) types of people? I would hesitate to claim some deep mystical significance, but it is interesting to note how often fourfold patterns crop up both in the Bible and in human thought more generally. Some of these depend on the fact that when you move about you only have four basic choices of direction: left, right, forwards and backwards. So there are four points of the compass, and "four corners of the earth" is an ancient idiom meaning "everywhere". The number four therefore has a sense of "all-encompassing" about it. By visiting the four corners of the earth, one would see the whole world in all its diversity. The same idea - creation as a diverse whole - is symbolised when the number four occurs in biblical visions. As already noted, there are four different beasts around throne of God. At the corners of the earth there are four winds held back by four angels (Rev 7.1, cf Isa 11.12, Jer 49.36, Dan 7.2, Mat 24.31). And so on.
More pragmatically, a useful property of many fourfold schemes is that you can present them diagrammatically using a two-by-two matrix or a circle divided into quadrants. For those with tidy minds, that is probably enough justification in itself. Furthermore, a fourfold typology will usually permit you to characterise diversity without being either unduly simplistic or over-complex. It is rather limiting to recognise only two or three types. But by contrast, although there is nothing to stop you using a large number of types in order to achieve subtlety, schemes with more than four are much less easy to understand or remember.
When the aim is to encourage people to learn through conflict, the typology is simply a tool, not something to be trotted out as an end in itself, as if mastery of codes like INFP has some intrinsic value. Moreover, it is a tool for understanding better how one can grow in love towards God and other people, not for gaining self-knowledge for its own sake. Each of us needs to learn how to adventure "outside the box" not merely to feel more comfortable within it.
One problem with fourfold typologies is that there are now so many of them! It is tempting to try to get them all to fit together but I do not think it can be done. Nevertheless, I see some value in the work of Honey & Mumford and Keirsey - but you won't find that his colour scheme matches the one I have used.
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