I just came across this incredible TED lecture over at the Daily Durias, where Derek Sivers explains the findings of sociological research demonstrating that expressing your goals verbally actually makes you much less likely to achieve them than had you kept quiet. He argues that the voicing of your intention to do a certain thing creates a social reality, which creates an effect in your brain equivalent to your having actually done it. Moreover, actually accomplishing the goal has no effect on the identity formation at stake: either way, you have announced yourself as the sort of person who would do something like this.
My thought immediately was that this is exactly what Jesus was concerned with in his injunctions to keep our faith secret, whether that was not telling our left hand what our right hand was doing (Ethics/Training-in-virtue) or keeping quiet regarding his identity as the Messiah (evangelism). My friend Chris once remarked about how weird it is that Evangelicals call reading their bibles “doing devotions” – shouldn’t we call “doing devotions” the actual doing of what the Bible says?
I think this has large implications for our understanding of witness to Christ. Thoughts hereby solicited.
Quite interesting and resonates fairly well with my experience of evangelism as well as my critique of some discussions where feeling like we have figured out an issue allows us to move on, instead of seeing that figuring out an issue is but the first step in a long process.
And it is a quite interesting insight into some of the sayings of Jesus. Also interesting is that it appears the implication of us as social beings is that we are more interested in how others perceive us than in the actual doing of the task. Seems like there’s some sort of illustration of “incurvitas en se” in that.
It’s crazy how the sort of social justification we seek from others takes a forensic shape: it’s not a matter of how we change personally or how we act differently towards them, but rather just a shift in their perception of us along with a corresponding pronouncement of our status as justified.
I just listened to it again and I love this line: “your mind mistakes the talking for the doing”. Aint that the truth! I need to find out who this guy is.
It seems to me that the opposite would also be true — that not telling someone about your faith is also less likely to make it happen. At least this seemed true of the campus ministries at the state university I attended.
I don’t necessarily disagree. My point here is that often when we do share our faith, we feel that we have fulfilled our witness just by telling someone we are a Christian, and that this pronouncement of our identity often shortcuts the task of witnessing to Christ in action.