Biblical and Theological Visions of Resilience

Pastoral and Clinical Insights

Christopher C. H. Cook, Nathan H. White, Christopher C. H. Cook, Nathan H. White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429671357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In recent years, resilience has become a near ubiquitous cultural phenomenon whose influence extends into many fields of academic enquiry. Though research suggests that religion and spirituality are significant factors in engendering resilient adaptation, comparatively little biblical and theological reflection has gone into understanding this construct. This book seeks to remedy this deficiency through a breadth of reflection upon human resilience from canonical biblical and Christian theological sources.

Divided into three parts, biblical scholars and theologians provide critical accounts of these perspectives, integrating biblical and theological insight with current social scientific understandings of resilience. Part 1 presents a range of biblical visions of resilience. Part 2 considers a variety of theological perspectives on resilience, drawing from figures including Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Part 3 explores the clinical and pastoral applications of such expressions of resilience.

This diverse yet cohesive book sets out a new and challenging perspective of how human resilience might be re-envisioned from a Christian perspective. As a result, it will be of interest to scholars of practical and pastoral theology, biblical studies, and religion, spirituality and health. It will also be a valuable resource for chaplains, pastors, and clinicians with an interest in religion and spirituality.

1 Introduction

Biblical and theological visions of resilience

Nathan H. White and Christopher C.H. Cook

Though the term ‘resilience’ has come into vogue in recent years to describe the phenomenon of positive human adaptation despite adversity, resilience itself is not new – human beings have employed various strategies for sustaining well-being despite difficulty for millennia. Yet today discussion regarding resilience has perhaps never been more relevant. Its presence within many meta-discourses in Western society is often an all-but-assumed presupposition. For example, amidst the political discourse surrounding those in the millennial generation who have been termed ‘snowflakes’ is a subtext of an implied lack of resilience – these individuals possess a veneer of personal stability so thin that it is as ephemeral as a snowflake, so the polemic goes.

Nevertheless, what might be termed a growing ‘obsession’ with resilience in Western society is indicative of exactly the inverse – a burgeoning lack of well-being experienced amidst perceived difficulty by those in Western culture at large. This trend is especially pronounced in younger generations where indications, both anecdotal and evidential, abound. However one may desire to measure this phenomenon – be it an exponential rise in anxiety and depression, increasing suicide rates, unprecedented rates of addiction, or a general trend towards a sense of lack of purpose – the data are alarming in their consistency and persistence within the West. Those in Western society, as a whole, seem to be growing less resilient rather than more (Gray 2015; Pistorello et al. 2017; Flatt 2013; Burstein, Agostino, and Greenfield 2019; Twenge et al. 2019).

Critics point to various factors as potential contributors to this mounting lack of resilience. Western individualism (Harvey and Delfabbro 2004) and a lack of community/relational connection are often singled out (Luthar, Barkin, and Crossman 2013), as are the advent of new technologies and digital media (Twenge et al. 2019) and what could be termed ‘helicopter parenting’ (Haidt and Lukianoff 2015). The roots of these phenomena may be debated, but the reality of their existence is increasingly hard to ignore.

To counter a growing sense of the fragile nature of human existence within Western society, a number of stratagems have been proposed as means of increasing resilience among those who are deemed to lack it. These approaches have varied from the optimistic – positive thinking and positive self-image as cure-alls – to the pugnacious – a Nietzschean ethic of ‘will-to-power’ and Stoic virtue as prescriptions du jour. Yet could it be that the roots of this societal epidemic go deeper than cursory self-help or fashionable treatments may cure? If so, what means can be utilised to address it?

While the term ‘resilience’ is new in advent of use when referencing human behaviour (within the last 40–50 years), the positive adaptation to adversity that the term describes is as old as the human experience of difficulty. This is to say nothing of the term itself, which dates back to the 17th century in English, not to mention its more ancient Latin predecessor, resilire (Alexander 2013, 1260; Onions 1967, 759). Although ‘resilience’ has a rich and diverse history, ‘few scholars seem to be aware of the term’s long and distinguished history’, creating an impoverished understanding of how the term and concept could be used today (Alexander 2013, 1258–59). Perhaps the sources that have sustained Western civilisation to this point may shed some light on the phenomenon of resilience, which, it turns out, is not so new after all. To this end, this volume seeks to uncover and appropriate insights from the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is our contention that resources from this tradition – found in canonical texts and the work of theologians through the centuries – can helpfully inform modern discussions of resilience. We believe that resources such as these can provide a much-needed perspective on resilience that is currently missing in modern academic discourse – a discourse that too often is stunted by naturalistic materialist assumptions.

What is ‘resilience’?

While the construct of resilience has undergone intense scrutiny in social scientific studies of human behaviour, the complexities underlying resilient adaptation are often not well understood. In addition to the use of resilience within many academic fields – ranging from psychology to ecology, political theory, and engineering – resilience has become a part of everyday discourse, being used to describe everything from sports teams that overcome various setbacks to the purported effect of various self-help treatments.¹ Indeed, one expert notes that

something called ‘resilience’ appears to have proliferated across multiple, at best partially connected, domains of life. Resilience, whatever it is, appears now to be everywhere; the latest iteration of the promise of security … offered as a desperate hope of survival in a world of roiling crises, and demanded of subjects, populations and systems.

(Anderson 2015, 60)

If anything, however, the wide use of the term has muddied rather than clarified its meaning and value (Anderson 2015, 60). Scholarly usage of the term ‘resilience’ has increased eight-fold during the past 20 years (Panter-Brick and Leckman 2013, 335), leading to the suggestion that ‘resilience is a “meme” or conceptual unit capable of “extraordinary replication” ’ (Panter-Brick 2014, 438).²

Definitions of the construct abound.³ In the field of psychology, resilience could generally be understood as ‘positive adaptation or development in the context of risk’ (Masten 2013, 580). Another definition highlights the fluid nature of the construct: resilience is the ‘process of harnessing biological, psychosocial, structural, and cultural resources to sustain wellbeing’ (Panter-Brick and Leckman 2013, 333). This concept, then, beyond promising to counterbalance generalised societal anxiety,⁴ purports to transform the anxiety into something positive. Resilience could be said to possess the fabled Midas’s touch – whatever it encounters turns to gold. Yet, as with Midas, the exact means of this occurring remains somewhat mysterious.

The substance of the concept is simultaneously both vague and ubiquitous. Resilience, Catherine Panter-Brick argues, makes ‘intuitive sense but often elude[s] simple definition’ (2014, 432) – a difficulty that lies partially in the metaphorical nature of the concept itself. The flexibility of the term is evident in that ‘resilience has been frequently redefined and extended by heuristic, metaphorical, or normative dimensions’ (Brand and Jax 2007, 23). Drawn from the physical sciences where it was used to describe the ability of various materials to bear heavy loads (McAslan 2010, 2; Alexander 2013, 1262–63; ‘Resilience, n.’ 2014), ‘resilience’ is now used across many academic disciplines, including the natural sciences (Holling 1973; Hughes et al. 2005), economics (Pendall, Foster, and Cowell 2009; Pickett, Cadenasso, and Grove 2004), geology (Brown 2014; Manyena 2006), and sport science (Sarkar and Fletcher 2014), as well as in society at large.

Amidst the variety of definitions of the construct, resilience in human beings is generally seen to include three core components: (1) the experience of significant risk or adversity, (2) the utilisation of resources to cope amidst adversity, and (3) a positive outcome (Windle 2011, 159). We shall therefore briefly consider these in turn.

Overcoming adversity

Resilience would not be needed apart from the presence of a substantial stressor (or stressors)⁵ that would normally lead to negative outcomes. The causal connection between extreme adverse circumstance and long-term negative health outcomes is well established (Amstadter, Myers, and Kendler 2014, 279; Bruce 2006; Mundy and Baum 2004), and can include negative effects such as acute stress reactivity (Loman and Gunnar 2010; Heim et al. 2000) and psychopathology (Nelson et al. 2002; Kilpatrick et al. 2003).

Some have seen resilience as a rejection of the necessarily causal relationship between adversity and a negative outcome (Yehuda and Flory 2007, 435–36). Resilience has also been described ‘as a counter-narrative to discourses of vulnerability and social suffering’ (Panter-Brick 2014, 439)⁶ – a vision of resilience also containing ideological implications wherein resilience offers ‘a powerful narrative, embraced by the political discourse of the left, which endorses civil society, and by the politics of the right, which holds individuals responsible for their own actions’ (Panter-Brick and Leckman 2013, 335). But if resilience possesses the ability to empower individuals in such a way, how does it do so? Significantly, many of the mechanisms of action by which positive resilience outcomes are promoted have been identified. Researchers have termed these ‘protective’ and ‘promotive’ factors.

Utilising protective and promotive factors

Protective and promotive factors have been dubbed ‘the defining attributes of resilience’ (Windle 2011, 164). These are significant not only because they could be said to be descriptive of the mechanisms by which positive resilience outcomes are achieved, but also because they could be understood as possessing predictive power in the promotion of resilience (Hjemdal et al. 2006, 195).

These protective/promotive factors can generally be categorised as:

(1) individual (e.g. psychological, neurobiological), (2) social (e.g. family cohesion, parental support) and (3) community/society (e.g. support systems generated through social and political capital, institutional and economic factors).

(Windle 2011, 157)⁷

Within a diversity of studies, a broad and consistent consensus has emerged regarding the identity of protective and promotive factors, ‘suggesting that fundamental adaptive systems support and protect human adaptation and development in the context of adversity’ (Masten 2013, 579). Some researchers have highlighted the following as among the most significant contributors to resilience:

positive emotion and optimism, loving caretakers and sturdy role models, a history of mastering challenges, cognitive flexibility including the ability to cognitively reframe adversity in a more positive light, the ability to regulate emotions, high coping self-efficacy, strong social support, disciplined focus on skill development, altruism, commitment to a valued cause or purpose, capacity to extract meaning from adverse situations, support from religion and spirituality, attention to health and good cardiovascular fitness, and the capacity to rapidly recover from stress.

(Southwick and Charney 2012, 80)

Though factors such as these can be identified as having an effect on positive resilient adaptation, it is vital to recognise that resilience, being the outcome of a dynamic interplay of many ‘time-variant and context-dependent variables’ (Tol, Song, and Jordans 2013, 455), is more than the summation of individual protective and promotive factors. In essence, one cannot simply fashion a ‘shopping list’ of predictors for resilience due to the ‘complexity and limitations of resilience’ (Tol, Song, and Jordans 2013, 449). Yet resilience is coherent as a concept only because of the unique working of protective and promotive factors. Because resilience necessitates the experience of significant adversity, it must be understood as ‘not the mere absence of risk, but rather the presence of protective factors or processes that buffer effects of adversity’ (Hjemdal et al. 2006, 194–95).

Achieving a positive outcome

While adversity and protective/promotive factors may be quite common, the presence of a third factor – a positive outcome – determines whether a response actually is resilient or non-resilient.

The positive outcome assumed within the construct of resilience has been variously identified as ‘positive adaptation’ (Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker 2000; Rutter 1999) or the absence of psychopathology (Nigg et al. 2007; Luthar 2006). The related concept of ‘flourishing’ has also been suggested as the goal of resilience, but some see this construct as being more at home in the realm of positive psychology where the aim is good outcomes for all people rather than just those facing significant ad...