Three Roadblocks To Suffering Well

By M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall

[M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall is Professor of Psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University, La Mirada, California.]

[This is the first article in the four-part series “Suffering and the Christian Life: The Hard Road to Glory,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 2–5, 2021.]

Thank you for the honor of being invited to speak to you on the topic of “Suffering and the Christian Life: The Hard Road to Glory.” Although I have been doing research in this area for a few years, the topic seems particularly appropriate given our present cultural moment. Globally, we have all been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused massive disruption to our day-to-day lives. Over two million people worldwide have lost their lives, and many more have experienced the loss of family and friends. Economies have been disrupted and many people have been threatened with poverty, with huge social and political consequences that may persist for years. The disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the most vulnerable in our society uncovered fault lines of longstanding inequities. Suffering touched all of our lives. And when this happens, it disrupts our sense of meaning in life.

The universal human need for meaning is widely accepted; we all feel the need to understand our experiences and to feel that the world makes sense and our lives have significance and purpose. Suffering challenges our sense of meaning, disrupting deeply-held assumptions about the world and our place in it, and often significantly interfering with our goals and desires. The loss of meaning is distressing, causing us to engage in a form of coping known in psychology as meaning-making. As Christians, we look to our faith to try to understand what is going on around us—to find meaning. This is what this lecture series is all about: understanding how God uses suffering to work for the good of those who love him and have been called according to his purpose (Rom 8:28).

As part of the research in which I’ve been involved, we have interviewed almost a hundred Christians of various backgrounds about their experiences with cancer. It has been a privilege to be let into the minds and hearts of some very thoughtful people who clearly walk very closely with God. There are a handful whose stories have stood out to me. An intelligent, physically fit man in his fifties who has terminal cancer and who feels that it was given to him by God to make him finally dedicate his time to his calling in life: to write a particular novel to touch the minds and hearts of people who don’t know God. A woman in her forties who has had more than her share of difficult life circumstances, who expresses what she feels God is teaching her in beautiful art to share with others. A tiny woman in her seventies who lights up the room with her warmth and clear sense of knowing God intimately.

These interviews have also let me see the cracks in the system: the ways in which contemporary Christianity has failed many people by not providing them with a robust theology of suffering to rely on when they needed it most. So let me begin by articulating the problem we face in our culture, which I hope to address in our time together this week: in our contemporary evangelical Christianity in America, we have an inadequate theology of suffering. This deficiency has been noted by others. American Christianity has been criticized by Christians from other parts of the world—where suffering cannot be avoided as successfully—as having a deficient theology of suffering.[1] At the end of a tour in the US in 1963, German theologian Helmut Thielicke was asked what he considered to be the most important question of that time for Americans.[2] In response, he pointed to the inadequacy of our theology of suffering. Unfortunately, the situation has not improved since then. Our interviews demonstrate three problems with our theology of suffering.

First, it is generic—at best broadly theistic instead of being explicitly Christian. While I highly value the message of Romans 8:28, that God uses our suffering for our good, I have found that the theology of suffering of many Christians starts and ends there. But our faith offers us a much richer way of understanding and entering into suffering (some of which I’ll unpack in a separate lecture).

Scripture offers us a rich Trinitarian view of how to endure suffering, helping us understand the ultimate purpose of all suffering in the form of intimacy with God and providing us a model in Jesus and assistance from the Holy Spirit.

Second, our theology of suffering is triumphalist. It jumps too quickly to the end of the story, ignoring the process of arriving there and shortchanging the growth that is available and the rich biblical resources for going through suffering. Influenced by humanistic perspectives stemming from the Enlightenment and surrounded by technological and scientific advances that have allowed us a great deal of control over our environment, our culture has had the luxury of largely avoiding and marginalizing suffering. In our churches, we tend to follow this cultural trend. We sing primarily uplifting choruses and hymns and read upbeat passages of Scripture. Testimonies end on a victorious note or are not told.

This absence of a robust theology of suffering can perhaps be attributed to a triumphalist emphasis on the conquering Christ, the Christus victor, Jesus’s power and victory over sin, with a corresponding de-emphasis on the suffering Christ, the Christus dolor, his passion and identification with human suffering. With this emphasis on the transcendent aspect of Jesus’s life at the expense of his immanence, he is left with little to say to those who suffer. We need to regain the richness of biblical resources for addressing suffering, including passages of lament, the books of Job and Lamentations, and the New Testament wisdom included most substantially in the books of 1 Peter, 2 Corinthians, and the eighth chapter of Romans. Later I will address this need for a biblical process of suffering, in the form of lament.

Third, our theology of suffering is defensive. Many evangelicals, when they think about suffering and their faith, default to thinking about theodicy. The assumption is that the biggest problem the believer faces when something hard happens is how to reconcile God’s love, power, and omniscience, or even God’s existence, with the presence of suffering. It is assumed that the natural reaction to suffering is doubt. This then leads to the impulse to try to defend God to people who are suffering. There are probably cultural reasons for this. Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor in his monumental work A Secular Age notes that an increased preoccupation with theodicy seems to be a feature of our cultural assumption that we know how the world works. He writes,

Earlier, in dire straits in the world [God] made, we can more easily be inclined to appeal to him as helper and savior, while accepting that we can’t understand how his creation got into this fix, and whose fault it is (presumably ours). Now that we think we see how it all works, the argument gets displaced. People in coffee-houses and salons begin to express their disaffection in reflections on divine justice, and the theologians begin to feel that this is the challenge they must meet to fight back the coming wave of unbelief.[3]

Once we recognize the source of our pressure to defend God, we can intentionally turn to issues of suffering that are more central to a biblical theology of suffering. The biblical writers seemed much more concerned with the “how” of suffering than with the defense of God. Even in the book of Job, where Job clearly put God on trial, the book does not end in a discourse on why God was justified in allowing the suffering; instead it ends with a powerful and intimate encounter with God. There is now a fairly substantial philosophical and theological literature on theodicy. But these defenses of God’s character are not primarily what people who are suffering need. For those who suffer, our theology of suffering should be primarily oriented to providing guidance toward what God is accomplishing in their lives through these experiences.

Our own research suggests that very few people who are suffering have theodical questions.[4] In our sample of evangelicals with cancer diagnoses, we asked whether they had experienced any tension between their Christian beliefs and their cancer diagnoses and also asked what God’s role was in their cancer. Two-thirds of our sample did not report any kind of tension between their faith and their diagnosis. In fact, we found that suffering often serves as a kind of “anti-theodicy.” Rather than challenging God’s love, suffering led these participants to experience increased confidence in God’s goodness. Rather than challenging God’s power, their suffering led them to greater understanding of God’s control. Rather than challenging God’s omniscience, their suffering caused them to express intellectual humility in the face of God’s knowing. Rather than challenging God’s existence, their suffering reinforced for them God’s intimate involvement in the details of their cancer journey. When our participants did report struggling, the resolution (if it had happened) did not take the form of theodicy. They did not arrive at an intellectual understanding to the problem of their suffering. Instead, they spoke of surrendering to a God who was present to them. If we offer suffering people theodicy as our only theology of suffering, we are not helping them. We need a positive and pastoral theology of suffering rather than a theodical one.

As a side note, it seems to me that theodical questions are much more prevalent among those who walk alongside those who suffer or who observe the suffering of others than among those who suffer. When we hear of a young mother diagnosed with terminal cancer, we ask ourselves why God would allow that. But people who are experiencing suffering from the inside rather than those who observe it from the outside have other concerns. They want to know how to get through their suffering. The “how” question becomes much more prominent than the “why” question that we spend so much time on. And some of their experiences with God, things that from the outside we can’t see or know, seem to provide them with answers to their suffering that we don’t have available from the outside. Ironically, and in spite of our infatuation with theodicy, the biblical writers did not seem to talk much about it. Instead, they addressed the problem of how to endure suffering.

I would like to address these cracks in the system during these lectures. I want to suggest to you that our faith offers a rich, nuanced meaning for our suffering, accomplished primarily through identification with Christ in his suffering, which I will be discussing in the third lecture. Our faith also offers guidance in terms of the process of our suffering by providing a structure for meaning-making—lament. I will be addressing this in the final lecture. Finally, our faith provides hope in the form of a robust vision of the ultimate purpose of our suffering, intimacy with God, arguably the most important part of a theology of suffering that I will be offering this week. So let’s turn to that ultimate purpose of suffering now.

Intimacy With God

Kate Bowler, historian at Duke Divinity School, recounted her experience of being diagnosed at age 35 with Stage IV cancer in her book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. She recalled having an experience that, for a time, she felt uncomfortable telling anyone. “It seemed too odd and too simplistic to say what I knew to be true—that when I was sure I was going to die, I didn’t feel angry. I felt loved.” She felt she had experienced a secret about faith: “I kept saying the same thing: ‘I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back.’ ” She went on to recount,

That feeling stayed with me for months. In fact, I had grown so accustomed to that floating feeling that I started to panic at the prospect of losing it. So I began to ask friends, theologians, historians, pastors I knew, and nuns I liked, “What am I going to do when it’s gone?” And they knew exactly what I meant because they had either felt it themselves or read about it in great works of Christian theology. Augustine called it “the sweetness.” Thomas Aquinas called it something mystical like “the prophetic light.” But all said yes, it will go. The feelings will go. The sense of God’s presence will go. There will be no lasting proof that God exists. There will be no formula for how to get it back. But they offered me this small bit of certainty, and I clung to it. When the feelings recede like the tides, they said, they will leave an imprint. I would somehow be marked by the presence of an unbidden God.[5]

This intimacy with God, expressed by Kate Bowler, is what I’d like to talk about. It might seem as if it’s too obvious a point. If all the jokes about the right answer in Sunday School are true, then “Jesus” is always that answer. But if there is a close second, it must be “relationship with God.” That is the whole point of the gospel: a reconciled relationship with God. Yet surprisingly, in our studies, while many people spoke about the cancer growing their faith or their character, very few described changes to their actual relationship with God. When they did, it was quite striking. An older woman in our African American sample, who had lived a long and saintly life, said of the cancer, “This was a turning point in my life, and it drew me closer to God. . . . It wasn’t that I wasn’t close, but your relationships grow, and they get more intimate. . . . I’m not glad that I went through it but I’m just so glad that he was with me, and that I’m here today because of him. You know. I trust him, I lean on. . . . He’s my all, he’s my everything. I’m just so grateful.” In further attempting to describe her experience of these changes, she said, “It’s deeper. It’s deeper, you know. And it’s better. And I think, I think I hear him. I think I hear him more. I think I be still in him and I can hear him clearer, and be more discerned when it’s him.”

Throughout the ages Christians have described the importance of this kind of intimacy with God. For example, in the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas said, “The end of the spiritual life is that man unite himself to God by love.”[6] In the sixteenth century, Teresa of Avila expressed a similar sentiment in prayer, emphasizing more the phenomenological experience of intimacy: “ O my Lord, my mercy, and my good! What more excellent blessing can I wish for in this life, than to be so united to you, that there may be no division between you and me?”[7] In the Protestant tradition, Charles Spurgeon, the “Prince of Preachers,” described this intimacy as follows, “See, loving heart, how He delights in you. When you lean your head on His bosom, you not only receive, but you give Him joy; when you gaze with love upon His all-glorious face, you not only obtain comfort, but impart delight.”[8] It is clear that these brothers and sisters were speaking of more than a metaphysical reconciliation with God.

The pursuit of this intimacy is woven into contemporary Christian life. There is a robust emphasis on cultivating an intimate relationship with God through various means, such as daily devotion-al times intended to foster this intimacy. The spiritual formation tradition, dating back to the early church—which has historically found expression in various Christian traditions, especially segments of Roman Catholicism but also in movements such as Puritanism and some forms of Methodism and Pietism—has recently been rediscovered by many contemporary Protestants. The common goal was for the believer to experience this kind of intimate relationship with God. In Roman Catholic theology, the eschatological goal of growing more intimate with Christ was often referred to as “union with God”; however, for much Reformation and post-Reformation Protestant thought, “union with God” is reserved for our positional standing, achieved through Jesus’s work so that, as Paul says, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). In other words, because a believer is united to God, out of that union he or she can and should grow in the experience of intimacy with God. Consequently, in Evangelicalism, we tend to speak of our felt sense of closeness with God as intimacy with God, cultivated through practices such as prayer and fellowship.[9]

In spite of the frequency with which intimacy with God is mentioned, I’m not sure we are always actually clear what we are referring to. So I’d like to spend some time describing the experience of intimacy as a way of addressing why this intimacy appears to be tied in some special way to suffering. One of the clearest contemporary descriptions of the experience of intimacy with God is found in the work of Catholic philosopher Eleonore Stump.[10] Stump highlights three components of intimacy with another: a kind of significant personal presence, mutual closeness, and intersubjectivity. I’ll be using these three components as a framework, supplementing Stump’s work with psychological insights about the nature of intimacy.

Mutual Presence

The first and most basic component of intimacy is being mutually present to each other. Obviously, God is omnipresent and is always present to us, but an important facet of intimacy is constituted by our corresponding awareness of God’s presence. In the psychological literature on human intimacy, mutual presence is assumed rather than explicitly explored. This is likely due to the difference between intimacy with other humans and intimacy with God, reflecting the differences between a relationship with a physical person and an immaterial person. While, between humans, closeness is most often achieved by the senses, such as through vision, hearing, or touch, this is not the case with an immaterial God.

While mutual presence may be assumed in intimate human relationships, it cannot be assumed in relationship to God. Our awareness of God is influenced in part by our attentiveness. Virtuous habits of attentiveness aid one’s awareness of God; many of the spiritual disciplines are aimed at increasing our attentiveness to God’s presence, which in their turn facilitate the other two components of intimacy: mutual closeness and intersubjectivity.

Mutual Closeness

The second component of intimacy is mutual closeness. Among other things, the psychological literature suggests that self-revealing behavior and responsiveness to the other are two essential parts of intimacy that form part of this mutual closeness.[11] When we are intimate with others, we are not merely aware of those with whom we are intimate (the first component of intimacy), but we also interact with them. We choose to reveal thoughts and feelings to them. We feel the need for the other, and open up to them with vulnerability. Self-revealing behaviors are those that include personal, private aspects of the self; this includes revealing the expression of vulnerable emotions such as guilt, hurt, or sadness. The importance of self-revelation in relationships is supported by an early study that found that self-disclosure accounted for just under half of the variance in ratings of couples’ level of intimacy.[12]

Interactions expressing closeness also include responses to others. Psychologists Harry Reis and Phil Shaver, in a model that has become one of the predominant ways of understanding human intimacy, suggested that revealing oneself is not sufficient for intimacy, that appropriate responsiveness on the part of the partner is also necessary.[13] Responsiveness involves communicating understanding, validation, and caring in response to self-revelation.

In relationship to God, mutual closeness involves both revealing ourselves to God and responding to what God has revealed to us. Scripture frequently encourages us to reveal ourselves to God, for example in Peter’s exhortation to “cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Pet 5:7). We also respond to ways in which God reveals God’s thoughts and feelings to us; we express our interest and concern for those thoughts and feelings. In the Christian tradition, interactions with God, both revealing and responding, typically take the form of prayer in all its various forms (e.g., contemplative, petitionary, lament). Meditation on Scripture is also a way of attending to God’s self-revelation while also helping us cultivate the necessary attention to God (necessary for mutual closeness, the first component of intimacy) that is often so difficult for us humans. In spite of the differences between mutual presence and closeness with God and with other humans, research indicates that we use the same psychological capacities in both. For example, one study showed that highly religious participants use areas of the brain used in other forms of social cognition when praying.[14]

Intersubjectivity

According to Stump, a third component is necessary for intimacy: intersubjectivity or what she calls an “intermingling of minds.”[15] On the psychological side, a prominent theory of intimacy heavily weights the notion of intersubjectivity as a foundational component of human intimacy.[16] Intersubjectivity implies mutual awareness but moves beyond it. It involves transcending individual subjectivities so that two people share a common interpretation of events that lie within their joint experience. It is an important basis for the development of intimacy because intimacy is typically built on a “common ground” of understanding between the partners that allows for trust when revealing personal or vulnerable information to the other.

When intersubjectivity is achieved, the individuals involved may experience the other as being included in their self, a kind of union or overlap of self and other in which identity boundaries are diffused.[17] Intimacy can be conceptualized as the end point of closeness in which no further closeness can be achieved. An interesting body of psychological research helps us understand this concept of intersubjectivity. Research shows that greater intersubjectivity is generally associated with greater relationship satisfaction and commitment.[18] An important consequence of intersubjectivity is the expansion of the self, in that the resources, perspectives, and identities of the relationship partner are now at the disposal of the self. For example, one study showed that our cognitive representation of our self partially merges with our representation of our significant other. This showed up when people were asked if they had a certain characteristic.[19] When their partner did not match them on that characteristic, their response times were slower. Presumably, given the overlap between self and other, they had to think harder to figure out if they had that characteristic. In another study, intimacy has been shown to result in increased diversity in spontaneous self-descriptions (presumably because characteristics of the other are incorporated) and in the sense of an increase in perceived self-efficacy.[20] We take on as ours the characteristics of our intimate other. This maps beautifully onto the concept of identification with Christ, prevalent in Paul’s writings, in which being “in Christ” provides us with Christ’s resources, including the power to become like him.

With respect to intimacy with God, Stump points out that there is an even more profound kind of personal presence that is possible than with other humans in the form of what theologians refer to as God’s “indwelling” in the person of the Holy Spirit.[21] This indwelling allows the kind of intersubjectivity of mental states seen in intimate human relationships to progress to a sharing not of mental states but of persons. What is shared is not just another person’s thoughts or affect but the other person himself or herself. This intimacy does not constitute a merger; the person does not take on, for example, God’s omniscience, nor does the person lose his or her own self, mind, or will. In Stump’s description of this state, the person “will be aware of the Spirit’s mind within her own, and there will be shared mind-reading and empathy between them so that there is a kind of intimacy between them that surpasses what would otherwise be available to [the person] alone or in union with another human being.”[22] This brings to mind Paul’s depiction of the Spirit interceding for us with groaning that is too deep for words (Rom 8:26). Because of God’s nature, this indwelling is experienced predominantly as love. This perspective fits well with theological language of intimacy with God, such as Teresa of Avila’s desire to “be so near [God] that there is no division between [God] and me.”[23]

The incarnation is also particularly important here as a foundation for intersubjectivity with God. Jesus had to become “like his brethren in every way,” sharing in our weaknesses, being tempted in every way, so that ultimately we might “draw near” in a relationship of intimacy to “receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb 4:14–15). Jesus’s suffering is also a point of intersubjectivity to which we will return in the third lecture.

What might this intersubjectivity look like? Someone who is intimate with God cares about and is intentionally attentive to the things God attends to. God loves all creation and especially loves humans who are made in God’s image. Someone who is intimate with God sees others as God sees them, with eyes of divine love. They are also aware of God’s attentiveness to their own thoughts and activities.

In addition to research on human intimacy, there has been some psychological research on intersubjectivity with God. One study found that people who have relationships with God develop the same kind of self-other overlap with God that people in close relationships do with other people, and that those with more committed relationships to God show more overlap.[24] Nicholas Gibson drew on research showing that after being asked to rate targets on a series of adjectives, words rated for familiar but nonintimate targets (such as the president) are recalled less frequently on a surprise memory test than words rated for self or for familiar and intimate targets (such as a family member).[25] The more intimate the target, the more the recall for target adjectives was to the recall for “self adjectives,” that is, adjectives describing the self. He successfully used this recall technique as a measure of what he called intimacy (but more akin to what we are here calling closeness). His research demonstrated that evangelicals rated as more intimate with God than both atheists and nonevangelicals.

Barriers To Intimacy With God

In our everyday life, there are significant barriers to intimacy with God. First, human finitude is such that the infinite divine mind will never be fully accessible to any limited human. Second, our intimacy with God may also be influenced by underlying interpersonal competencies; some people are more skilled than others at relating to others. One of the well-established findings in the psychology of atheism is that it is more common among people with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).[26] What seems to cause this relationship is the difficulty people with ASD have in mentalizing (that is, the ability to infer mental states in others) what others believe, know, feel, desire, etc. Even without ASD, people vary in their ability to mentalize. Since God does not usually present himself to our awareness in bodily form, challenges in mentalizing may also be a barrier to awareness of God.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, our intimacy is impeded by our sinfulness. Sinfulness is connected with hiding from God, rather than opening ourselves up to God. Christianity has drawn attention to this pattern of hiding from God’s presence since the narrative of Genesis chapter 3, where it is a response to human sinfulness. Sometimes we do not really want to be close to God because of fear of God’s holiness or because God’s moral perfection makes us more aware of our own failings. Sometimes we do not want to have cognitive access to God because we prefer our own ways and choices and would rather be unaware of God.

Stump noted that the internal fragmentation and the failure to will what God wills caused by sin are significant barriers to intimacy with God.[27] In other words, even after justification has occurred, the process of sanctification is necessary to overcome barriers to relational intimacy with God. Post-fall, we often want our own way and our own pursuit of pleasure more than we want what is good for us. Even when we have reconciled with God, we can be internally fragmented, wanting the good with our higher-order will, but wanting something other than the good by our first-order will. Paul describes this state in what, following a long theological tradition, I take to be an autobiographical statement in Romans: “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Rom 7:15 NIV).[28] By definition, if we do not will what God wills, we are not experiencing the intimacy of intersubjectivity.

Suffering And Intimacy With God

This is where suffering comes in. There is a long Christian tradition of seeing suffering as a way of addressing these barriers to intimacy with God. At the most basic level, suffering prompts us to turn to others for comfort, including turning to God. In this way it facilitates awareness of God. Suffering causes us to pour out our hearts to God, often in very raw, honest ways. In this way, suffering facilitates the self-revealing that is part of mutual closeness with God. Suffering also brings us to the end of ourselves, facing us with the limits of what we can control or do to help our suffering. In this way, suffering makes it more likely that we will turn to the one person who is in control and does have the power to help our suffering. Through the recognition of our own limitations and the awareness of God’s character, we can surrender to God. We can yield our will and our desires to God in a loving and active manner. In this way, the internal fragmentation and failure to will what God wills that Stump describes are overcome, allowing for greater intersubjectivity with God.[29] Suffering, in this way, becomes a kind of shortcut to intimacy.

First Corinthians 13:12 tells us that we now only see God in a limited way, but that one day we will see God face-to-face, knowing and being known in a relationship of intimacy. C. S. Lewis picks up on this idea in his last and most mature novel, Till We Have Faces, which tells the story of a woman’s journey from internal fragmentation to wholeness.[30] Orual’s ugly face, symbolic of her destructive bitterness and jealousy, is reflected in that of the destructive god she worships, who is described as having no face and a thousand faces—an image of fragmentation. Her suffering eventually leads her to learn to sacrifice and put others ahead of herself, and culminates in an encounter with the gods. In the midst of this encounter Lewis puts in her mouth this profound insight: “How can [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?”[31] The gods then resolve her fragmentation and grant her a face, one of great beauty. She finally finds that source of all love and beauty that she had longed for all her life in her face-to-face encounter with God. In God’s redemptive mercy, our suffering always has a purpose, reshaping our faces so that we too can ultimately see God face to face.

Notes

1. Richard J. Mouw and Douglas A. Sweeney, The Suffering and Victorious Christ: Toward a More Compassionate Christology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 1–11.
2. Gary Inrig, A Call to Excellence (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 119.
3. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard, 2007), 232–33.
4. M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall et al., “Theodicy or Not? Spiritual Struggles of Evangelical Cancer Survivors,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 47.4 (2019): 259–77.
5. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (London: SPCK Publishing, 2019), 121–22.
6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1911–1925), IIa–IIae, q. 44, arts 1.
7. Saint Teresa of Avila, Conceptions of Divine Love, trans. John Dalton (London: C. Dolman, 1852), 259.
8. C. H. Spurgeon, Day by Day with C. H. Spurgeon, comp. Al Bryant (Grand Rapids: Crossway Books, 1980), 224.
9. Kelly M. Kapic, Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2007).
10. Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010); Eleonore Stump, Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
11. Karen J. Prager and Linda J. Roberts, “Deep Intimate Connection: Self and Intimacy in Couple Relationships,” in Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy, ed. Debra J. Mashek and Arthur Aron (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 43–60.
12. E. M. Waring and Gordon J. Chelune, “Marital Intimacy and Self-Disclosure,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 39.2 (1983): 183–90.
13. Harry T. Reis and Phillip Shaver, “Intimacy as an Interpersonal Process,” in Handbook of Personal Relationships: Theory, Research and Interventions, ed. Steve Duck, Dale F. Hay, Stevan E. Hobfoll, William Ickes, and Barbara M. Montgomery (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 1988), 367–89.
14. Uffe Schjoedt et al., “Highly Religious Participants Recruit Areas of Social Cognition in Personal Prayer,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 4.2 (2009): 199–207.
15. Stump, Atonement, 131.
16. William Ickes, Joanna Hutchison, and Debra Mashek, “Closeness as Intersubjectivity: Social Absorption and Social Individuation,” in Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy, ed. Debra Mashek and Arthur Aron (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 357–74.
17. Arthur Aron, Debra J. Mashek, and Elaine N. Aron, “Closeness as Including Other in the Self,” in Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy, ed. Debra J. Mashek and Arthur Aron (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 27–42.
18. Arthur Aron and Elaine N. Aron, “Self-expansion Motivation and Including Other in the Self,” in Handbook of Personal Relationships: Theory, Research and Interventions, 2nd ed., ed. Steve Duck (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1997), 251–70; Arthur Aron, Elaine N. Aron, and Danny Smollan, “Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the Structure of Interpersonal Closeness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63.4 (1992): 596–612.
19. Arthur Aron et al., “Close Relationships as Including Other in the Self,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60.2 (1991): 241–53.
20. Arthur Aron, H. Fisher, and Elaine N. Aron, “Falling in Love: Prospective Studies of Self-Concept Change,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69.6 (1995): 1102–1112.
21. Stump, Atonement, 342.
22. Stump, 139.
23. Saint Teresa of Avila, Conceptions of Divine Love, 259.
24. Sara D. Hodges et al., “Nearer My God to Thee: Self-God Overlap and Believers’ Relationships with God, Self and Identity 12.3 (2013): 337–56.
25. Nicholas J. S. Gibson, “The Experimental Investigation of Religious Cognition” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2006).
26. Edward Dutton et al., “The Myth of the Stupid Believer: The Negative Religiousness-IQ Nexus Is Not on General Intelligence (g) and Is Likely a Product of the Relations between IQ and Autism Spectrum Traits,” Journal of Religion and Health 59.3 (2019): 1567–1579.
27. Stump, Atonement, 342.
28. See, for example, J. I. Packer, “The ‘Wretched Man’ Revisited: Another Look at Romans 7:14–25, ” in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. Sven K. Soderlund and N. T. Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 70–81.
29. Stump, Atonement, 59.
30. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (Glasgow, Scotland: Collins, Fount Paperbacks, 1980).
31. Lewis, 305.