The Categories You Create, Create You
Understanding Created Categories
Every category that we create has the potential to shape us as individuals by modifying the way that we think. These categories can cause us to see things that literally don’t exist; or, we can be blind to real things because we’ve never created a category for them.
Take astrology as an example of such a category. Before the concept of astrology, primeval humans never thought of the stars as influencing their behaviors or circumstances. But once the concept was created, people saw it everywhere. Astral alignments and the order of constellations may not affect anything, but for the individual who sees the category, it not only affects everything else, it also affects the way that they see the world.
Alternately, ancient peoples rarely if ever saw themselves as individuals with complex, competing desires and intentions. Ancient writers almost always refer to themselves in writing in the third person (as Caesar did in his ‘Gallic Wars’ and Xenophon in the ‘Anabasis’). Paul’s analysis of his own complex personality in Romans 7 is something of a literary breakthrough in human history, for he describes himself in a fight against himself. Several hundred years later, his writing so shaped Augustine that the ‘Confessions’ reads more like an internal analysis than the autobiography of an active man. From Paul through Augustine and then into the wider western world came the idea of man as a complex individual with competing desires and intentions. This is fundamentally true of every person (it was even written in inspired Scripture), but it is an observation which ancient peoples rarely thought about, and seem to have practically overlooked.
Concerns with Created Categories
What this means is that we must be very careful about the categories that we create, for they are the categories that create us. The modern psychological movement is responsible for creating a great number of categories, which subsequently shape how we see the world. Verbiage like ‘authentic self’ or ‘inner child’ describe psychological categories which are not necessarily ‘real,’ but are directly responsible for the ways that some people make decisions.
One criticism that I once heard against Biblical Counseling is that it does not adequately address a person’s “inner child”. Of course, this should make us ask whether we actually have an inner child which needs to be addressed! Some people make decisions based on what would be most in line with their ‘authentic self’ or ‘true self,’ but do we even have such a thing? The Bible never speaks in such categories; there is rather the ‘old man’ and the ‘new man.’ Which one is our ‘authentic self’? The New Man is who we are at our deepest level; but the Old Man often feels more genuine, and more in line with our desires. Any attempt to call Christians to live as their ‘authentic self’ fails, because it is a category that doesn’t even exist.
Created Categories and Modern Psychology
This is a great danger of modern psychology. It creates artificial categories, which lead people to see the real world in a false way, and to make real decisions based on an artificial view of the world. Modern psychology has even invaded the church to such an extent that Christian writers borrow these artificial ideas and use them to interpret Biblical categories. (See example here.) Beware the categories you create, for they create you.
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