Texting
Treatise: Different Responses to Temptation
The first section contains the types of responses or non-responses to sin, where a person rejects the idea that they should be repentant about it.
Blindness
Lack
of Awareness:
unaware of what you are doing
Qualified
Unawareness:
aware of what you are doing, but think it is good. Unaware that it is sin
Incorrigibility
Apathy: aware it’s wrong but don’t
care to change it
Minimization: aware it’s wrong but deny
the severity of it
Defiance: aware of the wrongness and
severity and willingly indulge it anyway without contrition
In this next section are different types of responses to sin that contain a measure of contrition (feeling sorry) or repentance (genuinely desiring to flee from or overcome the temptation). For the sake of making it seem more interesting, psychologically, I’ve arranged them in a potential ‘maturity scale’ that the hypothetical average sinner might progress through while dealing with recognized temptations to sin in their life.
Contrition
Sub-set: Vain Heroics
Halfhearted
Abstinence:
an attempt to break from it, but not strong enough in conviction to persist.
Likely followed by binging on the particular temptation (shopping, drinking,
sexual activity, surfing channels/websites, abandoning healthy eating or
exercise, etc) upon crashing
All
or Nothing:
can lead to longer sustained abstinence, but more often leads to more time in
between attempts, because of the fear of failure. Successive failure leads to
disillusionment with pure abstinence and leads to a variety of different
attempts to deal with the issue:
Sub-set: Allowances
Hesitation: failing with abstinence
doesn’t immediately lead to abandoning that method, but can cause a person to
rationalize not trying right now, while they’re waiting for the perfect moment
to start. They tolerate giving in to the temptation because they tell
themselves that they’re planning to try to abstain from it soon
Banking: sinning more in the short
term to satisfy an imagined quota that your flesh desires, so that you can hope
to have better success in your abstinence effort. This leads to an expectation
of high indulgence, which produces a cycle of periodic abstinence followed by
binging, which is worse than the initial ‘halfhearted abstinence’ program.
Putting
it Out of Mind:
not thinking about it, in the hopes that it was one’s focus on trying to deal
with the temptation so strongly that led to the catastrophic failures in the
past. When this inevitably fails, it is modified to
Tolerance: not keeping track, and letting
yourself get away with indulgence in the hope that by not “banking” it, you’ll
end up indulging in it less, and that by not trying to abstain
all-or-nothing-wise, you won’t have a “crash.”
Sub-set: Searching for Loopholes
Rhythm/Scheduling: when tolerance doesn’t end
up diminishing your gratification of your sinful desires, and you catch
yourself, you may try to “out-think” yourself, by intentionally planning to
give in to the temptation at certain points, but insert periods of focused
abstinence in between. It’s basically a modified “banking/all-or-nothing”
approach with shorter periods of abstinence that make success more likely. When
the periods are extended in the effort of “weaning” yourself off of a
dependence on the indulgence, you reach the level of
Gradual
Improvement:
this can be reached with or without the “scheduling” stage; it’s basically an
attempt to “play a long game” and start comfortably with a high tolerance for
your indulgence, gradually decreasing how much of an allowance you’ll give
yourself. This is basically a more intentional version of
Fatalism: aiming for less than
perfection because you can’t get it. Whereas the “gradual improvement,” “scheduling”
and “banking” approaches tolerate sin for the sake of trying to build some sort
of spiritual immunity to it (doesn’t work, by the way), fatalism is the final
resting place of many people (note that this scale does not have to be limited
to Christians). They decide that they’ll accept a certain amount of giving in
to temptation over a certain length of time, indefinitely, because they’ve
decided that they’ll never have victory over it. Such thinking can lead a
person from being contrite to becoming incorrigible. However, some people may make a few further desperate
steps to dealing with the issue of their temptation
