The Seven Deadly Sins Meets the Enneagram | Vices & Virtues

Hey, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast,
the last in a series that we’re calling
Vices and Virtues.
And actually, to tell the truth,
this is kind of an add-on.
Michael and I, as we’ve discussed the seven deadly sins,
and that’s been the series we’ve been on,
we have found ourselves kind of overlapping a previous discussion of what is called the
Enneagram.
And I’ll stop right here and say,
if you don’t understand what the Enneagram,
if that’s a new word to you and you don’t know what it means,
we’ve done a series on that.
And this discussion will likely not make a great deal of sense if you haven’t watched that series or if
you haven’t learned something about the Enneagram in another context.
Having said that, we found ourselves kind of intertwining these two conversations at some points.
And we wondered about reflecting on the way in which they might fit together as a kind of bonus episode and a way
to close out this series.
Yeah, so when we were doing the Enneagram,
which is now, I think, a couple of years ago, actually,
the books that we were studying as we went along that process
actually did often make note of some connections to the seven greatest sins.
At the time, I’ll admit to you,
I didn’t give that a whole lot of credence or thought because I quite frankly
hadn’t done a lot of research on the seven deadly sins.
And so certainly as we were going through
this process, there were a few times where it just kind of struck me that I could see how maybe if
you were thinking of this Enneagram type,
how there might be a connection to a particular kind
of sinfulness, especially if someone was living into the sort of weak part of their number at some point.
And yeah, so as that sort of thought spurred,
Clint and I both shared back and forth.
Yeah, I wonder what the Enneagram would have to say about these sins.
And then we got to the end of
our in-person sessions and had a great discussion,
the last video, if you want to check that out.
But now we sort of turn to that final,
maybe you call it like an epilogue almost and offering some
candid and almost in some cases off the cuff thoughts on maybe how these two things might
intersect in interesting ways.
And I think instinctively,
we kind of understand that there
are differences in the way that people are tempted.
You know,
some of us are just not greedy people.
For whatever reason, the idea of having a lot of stuff,
the idea of climbing a ladder and being
recognized is just not a temptation for some of you.
On the other hand,
maybe the same person
is prone to fits of anger and prone to lash out at people and kind of do that explosion thing.
And so there is a kind of home base to most of our struggles with sin.
We find ourselves kind of
going back to some of our familiar struggles often.
And we just wondered about the ways in
which the Enneagram, which essentially shows us something of our personality.
Maybe that’s not quite a big enough word,
but our personal makeup and the seven deadly sins might correspond.
So again,
if you have some work to do on the Enneagram and you’re not up to speed,
we’ll try to remind
you of some of that.
But you’ll likely want to go do that first.
Michael, we jump in at the beginning.
Type 1, the reformer.
And just again, as a refresher course,
reformers are
prone to be very competent,
perfectionist,
very driven,
kind of a sense of justice,
a kind of a
sense of rightness and righteousness.
Ones bring a lot to the table.
But, you know, it’s interesting to think about what their Achilles heels for them might be.
Yeah. So I think at the outset of a
conversation like this, you’ve got to be aware that I don’t think you can peg any one particular
sinfulness against any one particular Enneagram type.
Actually, that’s one thing I found very
compelling about the Enneagram.
And I think it was a helpful frame for me as I came to the seven
deadly sins is this idea that they are all interconnected.
And so I want a name that,
I don’t think that any particular number is going to have a particular sin.
But I couldn’t imagine talking about ones,
Clint, without at some point bringing up pride,
because I believe ones have
this deep inner sense of the ideal of the way that the world should be.
And you mentioned the
word justice.
You know, justice for a one,
I think, is bringing the world to the place that it should
have been from the start that if if you looked at the world and saw all of its brokenness,
I think a one can imagine,
well, you would just fix this and then you would do this.
And then, you know, they work diligently to make that process possible.
Of course,
that can be a force for great good.
But the temptation to a one is to believe that their analysis of what is right or
good or ideal is accurate,
or maybe put differently,
that it’s a whole analysis that they can see all the perspectives,
which obviously no human can.
And so if you’re willing to admit that the sin of
pride is, I think, a particularly salient sort of sin to a one,
because there’s this idea that the
self is capable of analyzing and seeing what is wrong.
And, you know, even if there’s some
humility to say, I know I couldn’t do all of it,
I do think that initial frame may be a very tempting
thing to a one,
you’d have to resist this idea.
Well,
maybe I don’t see the ideal as well as I
think I do.
And I think that might be a struggle.
I went to the exact same place,
Michael, I think pride is the obvious temptation for a one,
people who care very much about being right and doing
right people who are driven by that idea of the right way to do things and people who are
somewhat offended by and somewhat frustrated by people who they don’t feel live up to those very
high standards that they embody.
Possible that there’s some anger,
ones tend to carry grudges,
so there may be sort of probably not big flashes of anger,
there may be some sort of resentment
stuff that happens in ones.
I suppose the same could be true of envy.
If a one looks at someone
who by their estimation doesn’t really deserve the accolades or the success that they have
received, if the one doesn’t think that they have earned that,
I suspect that would be very
frustrating to them.
So I think anger and envy could be in the mix.
And of course,
any sin could affect any person.
But as we try to make some generalities,
I think pride stands out as the
obvious most likely suspect.
Yeah, you know, I think that the one is probably resistant in some
ways to things like gluttony because I think the one intuitively and innately knows how not ideal
that is.
I think it would be a real contradiction of self-identity probably to give into something
like that.
I think, you know, maybe a one does find themselves in a position of anger and wrath,
you know, but I doubt that that is a thing that simmers forever unless there’s been some due cause
that starts it, unless there’s a thing that the one doesn’t feel that they have agency to resolve.
Maybe that eats away over time.
But, you know, I also would say,
you know, maybe a one struggles
with greed in the sense that,
well, there’s a thing out there I’d like to have,
or I think could be ideal for me to have, I should possess.
But on the other hand,
I think lots of ones are so
committed to the idea of pursuing the ideal.
They really don’t give a lot of time and attention to
the stuff that other people have,
the stuff that you might be envious of, because fundamentally,
they’re working to their own vision as opposed to navigating based off of the choices and decisions
of other people.
They’re far more internally driven than that.
So, you know, I think there is some resistances there.
And if you’re a one in the Instagram,
you might say, yeah,
there are some things that are just less maybe initially tempting for me or less compelling
in that whole set.
And I can imagine how that might be the case also.
Yeah, and it may be counterintuitive,
but the interesting place that a one could end up,
I suppose, is sloth, which is probably not a part of the makeup of very many ones at all.
And yet if a one became overwhelmed with the idea that I just can’t measure up,
I just can’t be good enough.
I just can’t hold this incredibly high standard I set for myself.
I can see them kind of going the other way,
mailing it in and just kind of shutting down.
And that’s probably rare,
but I imagine that it could happen in the life of a one.
Counterpoint, though, it may not be sloth as the person laying on the couch.
It may be a cedia, though,
and definitely jump into that conversation if you miss that
suddenly conversation where the one I could easily see a one filling themselves with busyness
to avoid dealing with the awareness of self and the reality that this is that this vision of what
should be is deeply influenced or driven by my own desire and not necessarily what I would like
to believe that it’s whole,
that I have it figured out.
I think a one might be tempted
to be overly busy,
which is another form of that thing that we talked about called a cedia.
Yeah, agreed.
So some thoughts on the one.
Now we move to the two, the helper,
caring,
compassionate, generous,
a people pleaser,
kind of possessive.
And, you know,
again, Michael,
and keep in mind,
those of you that did Enneagram with us or that know something about the Enneagram,
the numbers being close to each other tends to mean that they share a little bit.
And so, again, I went to pride thinking that the two loves to place themselves in the middle of things.
The two loves to keep track of who they’ve helped and who owes them things when they’re not healthy at
their best twos are more gracious than that.
But when twos struggle,
it often is this with this
sense of everything I’ve done for them and they don’t appreciate me,
which I think pride could
be rearing its ugly head in that.
And maybe greed,
not in the sense probably of materialism,
but in terms of people’s time,
people’s attention,
I think twos can be very demanding when they’re
unhealthy.
And I didn’t know where that fit.
It seemed to me that greed is probably the place on
the list of the deadly sins that something like that would be couched.
Oh, that’s interesting, Glenn.
I was probably going to word that through the lens of envy because I think that for me,
when I think of the two who has given and given and given and given,
I think the refrain I hear
over and over again is,
“Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if I could just have a simple quiet night like
everyone else instead of volunteering to do this thing or baking cookies or delivering this thing?
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone thought of me like I think of everyone else?” And if that resonates
with you, I think it’s easy to look at other people’s lives or what we consider to be
maybe grass is greener and to sort of dream about what that might look like.
So I think that that,
Clint, is maybe just a different way of framing what you’re saying there.
I think another one
that I just want to affirm,
I was also going to say pride.
And I think you’re also going to find
pride in an interesting way in number three.
I don’t think these three,
one, two, and three, I think, do share pride in a very substantial way.
I think for two,
it’s the awareness of what people need,
which they are often very good at.
In other words, I think the two is often very right
because they spend so much time and thought honing their sense of what people do need.
The danger is when they believe that they are the arbiter of that or that they have identified that
other people don’t even know maybe what they…
Maybe people don’t even know themselves what they
need.
And the moment that the two does that and they start filling in blanks that maybe they
weren’t even invited to fill in,
that’s when pride really begins to set in deep.
And I think that
could be a real danger if you’re a two.
Yeah, absolutely.
And we probably should have said at
the outset that we are clearly talking about the least healthy or the less healthy expressions of
our types because we are specifically dealing with a list of sins.
And so there are wonderful
things about all of these types,
but we’re thinking about where are they weak in regard to
the seven deadly sins.
You mentioned the three, Michael, the achiever,
pragmatic,
success oriented,
kind of driven, image conscious, all of those things that we tend to think of in that category.
Where do you think their root struggle might be?
So I think pride very much lives in that conversation as well.
Like I said, I do want to point out, I think that this is a surprising turn because I think threes are so outer devoted
with their attention.
They’re so aware of the external that in many ways the three comes to
believe that there is no center,
that there’s no self,
that there’s no deep personal sort of identity.
And when one begins to do that,
essentially, instead of being prideful in the
sense that you’re hobby and puffed up,
you become prideful in the belief that you are the only person
in the world who doesn’t have an identity.
So really kind of interesting shift,
I think.
And what happens in that shift is the three no longer takes any kind of responsibility for their own identity making.
And that is a form of pride because it says to yourself that I’m not worthy
of being the person God may be to be,
that I am a special case,
that I am apart from others.
Everyone else deserves my time and attention,
but I don’t.
And that’s a very kind of dangerous,
insidious backwards kind of pride.
But I think it’s very much at the root of that experience of the world.
Yeah, I had pride as well.
Interestingly enough, I had envy, I think threes
being people that tend to look up the ladder,
that tend to look at other people to sort of frame
their own sense of what they should do and who they should be.
I think envy is probably
somewhere in that mix,
possibly, and also gluttony.
Not in regard to food,
probably or necessarily, but in the idea that threes tend to overdo things in order to get people’s attention,
in order to stand out,
in order to succeed or be recognized,
that the three can find themselves
gluttonous in the sense of not having healthy boundaries and knowing when to stop.
Yeah, I actually think anything that could possibly be used as a tool for the sake of self
advancement and sort of fitting into the crowd,
I think is a real danger for the three.
So I think
you could easily name here things like envy,
which was also on my list.
But I think lust,
I think gluttony both would apply because I think there’s a sense in which the pursuit of
those kinds of goods could be perceived in some cases as being successful.
And wherever that theme
lives for a three,
I think it’s very clearly going to draw them into it.
I do want to underscore,
I think envy is probably the strongest force for a three would be my guess because of its external
nature, because you’re looking out at the other.
That is very much one-to-one with a threes
experience of the world.
So I would name,
if you’re going to pick one for the three,
I mean, I think I would pick envy.
Yeah, that makes sense.
That brings us to four.
The individualist
fours are, remember, sensitive,
tend to be withdrawn,
kind of melancholy,
self-absorbed, sometimes temperamental.
They have an experience of kind of whiplash emotions.
They temptations that stand out for me would perhaps be sloth and the sense of apathy that fours tend to isolate themselves.
And in their not healthy moments that they tend to withdraw,
that sense of melancholy is very much expresses some of our conversation on sloth.
Interestingly enough,
maybe also lust.
Four is drawn to the idea of relationships that go beyond what “average” people
have, what other people have.
And I think four is kind of the category of many of the great artists
historically,
and how many of them have we seen when they melt down,
it ends up being drugs
and lust and those kind of very base behaviors.
And so I think the four is drawn in those ways,
perhaps, when they’re not healthy.
Yeah, I think if you’re willing to look initially at the fours,
the one who very much has a very strong interior experience,
then it might make sense
that a four might be drawn to those very heavily external kinds of sins.
I very much agree.
I think lust,
I think even gluttony could probably fit there this idea of I’m going to fill this internal
pang, the sense that something’s not entirely right or whole with me and be easy to fill that with some external,
especially maybe even physical kind of thing.
Often these folks are very, very
physically able.
I mean, they’re creative.
They can make things exist in the world that didn’t exist before.
That’s an amazing gift.
And I think that there’s a kind of externalizing that happens
there.
I think there’s a kind of simultaneous internalizing,
like if I could get this person
in my heart, or if I could get this possession or this status,
whatever that might be,
there may be a sense of meeting that perceived gap between who I should be and who I am.
And so I think there
could be a kind of placeholder filling that would be particularly tempting to the four.
Which might bring greed into the mix,
that the idea of climbing a mountain,
of having a lot,
of having the right people,
of having the right experiences,
that may be something that could
show up as well.
That moves us on to the five,
the sort of investigator.
Think your introvert, your reader, your architect, your engineer,
generally a little bit of isolation,
a little bit of withdrawal,
deep love of information,
categorizing things,
keeping things
mentally,
a lot of internal life for the investigator.
This wasn’t for me a natural
one, Michael.
I’m not sure.
I think there are lots of ways this could go.
I think in regard to relationships,
we might talk about a sin like sloth.
Sometimes fives are not
good at nurturing relationships.
They don’t sort of natively keep up with people real well.
Sometimes they don’t notice things.
Sometimes they’re not attuned and attentive to people.
Pride, I mean, they do tend to be pretty sharp.
They tend to be well-read.
They tend to be
deeply involved in the things that interest them.
Greed in the sense that they treasure stuff,
information often, but sometimes that could
turn into other things.
There is a sort of natural drive and a five that could lead itself to
wanting more,
which so maybe Greed,
but I didn’t have one that just jumped out.
I don’t know if
you had a different experience.
I think I might lift up a couple here.
I think I might say Envy.
Some of the folks that I think of as maybe this being their primary number,
I think there is a
sense of disappointment when they look at others who are maybe less well-read or less capable,
and they are advanced.
I think there is a kind of disappointment.
I think of lots of the academic
profession where when you get that book published by that one publisher that’s really famous,
there’s often a lot of back chatter grumbling like,
“Oh, they deserve that,” or,
“I could have written that better than that.” I think the acclimation of information and a person
who works very hard to sort of hone that ability to frame and understand I think could very easily
both see in someone else who’s advanced a disappointing kind of envy.
I think there’s also maybe a kind of longing for life that’s maybe even more simple.
I think some of those
folks I think have lived in very complicated,
nuanced mental lives, and sometimes they just
love to be able to be a little bit more whimsical.
They just be able to throw off the chains,
and so there may be some envy in that.
I also think potentially there could be a room there for some
of the physical sins,
the idea of gluttony,
the idea of lust,
the idea of filling a body instead
of a mind may be particularly compelling to these individuals.
The thing I think that makes
it interesting is they may not be tempted towards the relational sins,
something like wrath,
maybe even something like greed,
because of the fact that they just simply don’t really frequent
the social encounters as much by nature of who they are.
That said,
that is itself a possible
place for sinfulness.
There may be a kind of rejection of relationship,
a kind of avoiding
of the richer fullness of human interaction,
and to whatever extent that might be,
some of these other sins may actually present themselves in some strange and alternative sort of under the
surface ways.
Yeah, I think the five is sort of a funnel.
To some extent, I think
maybe all of the sins could find their way in.
In a strange way,
they’re kind of a counterbalance
to the seven in that they tend to overdo it,
though they tend to overdo it internally, not externally,
and so things like lust and greed may be a part of that struggle.
I think that’s interesting,
and it would be fascinating to talk to some fives and see
how they felt they interacted with a list like the seven deadly sins.
Yeah. Brings us to the six.
The loyalist,
committed,
care about society,
care about structure,
generally either very much like or very much dislike status quo,
depending on which side
of the sixth fence they fall on.
I think, again,
probably pride may rear its head here.
Michael, the six,
likes to be convinced they’re right.
In fact, they use those structures to convince
themselves they’re right.
They love the idea of my team.
They go all in kind of on the way it either
should be or shouldn’t be.
Again,
depending on how they’re wired,
I suppose that makes room for
anger too, especially if they live on that contra-six side where they’re against structure,
then they sort of want to tear things down in an unhealthy way,
probably even prone to violence potentially.
But anger and pride were the two that came to mind most quickly for me.
Yeah, I’m going to just straight up agree with that.
I think I would have maybe started with the
anger and then got to the pride.
I think of the six probably being most tempted by anger.
That may not be right,
but I think the reason for that is when you live in a very sort of
contradictory relationship with the world that surrounds you,
when one of your primary goals is safety, stability, reliability,
and you live in a world which we all know is constantly not that.
The world cannot be controlled.
Though we can try to find a safe place in it,
the world is by definition not safe.
And so because of that,
I do think there is a kind of burning ember that always
lives inside a six,
a kind of anger that the world is not as the world could be and should be,
different than the one,
whereas I think the one’s trying to reach for an ideal.
I think the six is
seeking a sense of internal stability and security and safety.
And in the process of desiring it,
but never acquiring it,
I think it’s very easy to see how a six would be angry,
both angry with those who are maybe closest in personal relationships that they certainly if there’s a kind of failure
and that failure impacts that sense of self and stability,
how quickly that might turn into anger at that person.
And then of course,
in the world that’s highly politicized,
in the world in which
there’s teams and back and forth and fighting,
how easy it would be to identify with one of those
teams and to very much reject and angrily attack whoever’s on the other side.
So I would have
picked anger, but I think pride’s there as well.
That was on my list too.
Yeah,
those spoke to me as well.
That brings us to seven that sort of an interesting group of people, the enthusiast,
life of the party,
involved in lots of stuff,
kind of ADD,
scattered,
busy,
all of those kind of
things.
And interestingly enough, Michael,
I think of the sevens as particularly prone to the physical sins,
the excessive sins.
So lust,
gluttony, greed, if not material,
certainly of experience,
wanting to try everything, do everything,
maybe not have everything,
though I suspect that
can be in the mixed as well.
But I think those physical sins are probably particularly compelling
and particularly tempting for sevens.
Yeah, absolutely.
Maybe another way to look at this
is I think of the seven as often being driven by the intense inner need to not think about it
and to not really think about self,
to not really process one’s emotions,
to not really come to
grips with a difficult history or things that the seven would rather not be.
But instead of slowing and facing that,
they often run and they try to outrun it.
They try to run faster.
They try to find ways to distract.
And so yeah, absolutely.
I think from that vantage,
it would make sense then
that any tool that would help really bring in experiences to distract from that process,
the thing that needs done,
but instead filling it with the things that maybe want to be done.
I think those certainly fit the list.
Lust,
gluttony, greed,
all of that I think fits there.
I would say maybe a strange one that you might not think of to be on the list,
but I would add to
the list.
I do think is pride.
I think sevens have a unique form of pride in this idea that they
shouldn’t have to slow down and face it,
that they should get to be the life of the party,
that the attention should be on them,
that as long as they keep living out that kind of external draw,
they have a very compelling kind of presence in most settings.
And I think that that is itself a form of pride.
And in the sevens case,
maybe even particularly destructive,
because it crafts this
narrative that they keep living into,
that it’s good for them to not face these things,
when in fact, I think that’s a very dangerous thing for the soul.
Yeah. And then I think you’d also probably
have to lay at their feet acedia.
When we talked about sloth,
we mentioned that one of the ways it
can manifest itself is not laziness,
but it’s sort of hyper-business that never really stops long
enough to have an inner life.
And that can be the very definition of seven, who then,
because of that, uses these other sins to accomplish that.
So yeah, I think that’s,
I bet that’s pretty close.
I feel like that’s a likely scenario for a seven.
Brings us to eight,
the challenger,
a lot of confidence,
kind of willful,
confrontational,
people who tend to want to throw themselves
into the front, people who want to challenge others,
people who are wired to kind of push
back on everything, sometimes for no real reason,
other than that’s what they find themselves doing.
Michael,
I think eights are people
who value or at some point maybe even crave intensity.
So again, I think physical sins,
I think anger,
I think lust,
I think greed,
maybe not in the sense of procuring and having,
but in the sense of winning.
If your neighbor has one car,
the eight might want a second one,
just to kind of stay on top of the heap like that.
And it wouldn’t probably be about the
things themselves, but about what it communicated.
And so those are the places I went right away.
Yeah, I think eight may actually be a fascinating sort of number on the Enneagram in the sense that
I think there may be a presenting sin and then there may be sins that are actually deeper and
not often seen.
I think most folks would think eight and they would immediately think anger
and wrath.
I think the eight is generally dialed up to number 10 and people in society experience
them to be unbelievably intense.
And I think an eight walks away from an encounter and thinks,
that was kind of a four,
some words were shared there.
And another person walks away thinking
like, oh my goodness, that was an all out kind of conflict.
And I think so.
People may pin
anger on an eight because of that.
Well, I think maybe interesting would be to dig under the surface
though to see that the actual sinfulness may not be driven entirely by anger itself,
but rather a sense of loss or a sense of lack,
a kind of covering that may happen there.
And that I think
would be easy for an eight to flip in and out somewhere between pride,
loss, gluttony.
I think there could be a sense in which these things could grow together to meet whatever that individual
person sort of inner need actually was,
whatever that strength has been built up for the purpose
of may indeed be the thing that could become a seed bed for one of these sins as well.
Yeah, I would agree.
And I think probably as in most places,
pride is very likely to find its
way into the life of an eight.
The confident,
the idea of sort of who’s in charge,
the challenge,
you know, the idea that they have the sort of standing to do that in most circumstances,
I think pride can be another struggle that lands us on nine,
the peacemaker,
easy going,
receptive,
reassuring, agreeable,
and, you know, at times complacent.
And the most obvious one here,
Michael, I think is sloth.
Yep.
The idea that
nines really sort of,
they like to keep people happy so that those people then leave them alone
and they tend to withdraw.
I think underneath that though,
while that might be the most obvious,
I think anger,
certainly they’re part of that anger triad.
And I think, you know,
the stress nine is very likely to sort of burst out.
You know, they keep a lot behind the dam.
And when the cracks start,
it usually explodes.
There’s a sense in which the nine hides themselves,
gluttony,
something like that,
sort of trying to quiet the internal dialogue with an
outside thing.
That may be in the mix for some nines.
And in a strange way, I think envy,
less of wanting what people have and more that sense of quiet.
And if I didn’t have to deal with these things,
I might be able to have more peace.
And that sort of quest for that quietness for a
nine, I think in an interesting way could lead them toward envy.
Yeah, I think another aspect
of that too might be the longing for another person’s drivenness or another person’s ability
to sort of put themselves out there.
I think nines often feel that the world is very loud.
And so people who can really navigate that strongly,
I could see a nine looking at them with some envy and saying, Hmm,
I wish that I had that I wish that I didn’t have to fight so hard to move things
ahead.
Because I don’t, I think many nines would say,
I don’t even know what I’m fighting for or towards.
I’m just sort of trying to make it through this day.
And so obviously, you don’t talk about a nine.
In fact, I think almost every Enneagram text named the nine struggle as being
with a version of sloth.
And so I think that there’s a particular sort of maybe pureness to
that for their struggle.
That said,
that’s in large measure,
because in lots of ways,
nines, I think do have antibodies to a lot of these other things.
I mean, nines aren’t particularly greedy,
they’re not out there looking to enrich themselves.
They legitimately do have very wholesome motives.
And, you know, though, yeah, that maybe they would be tempted by lust or gluttony.
I think that the nine often is going to be Teflon to some of those things,
because they’re really looking
for more of an inner life experience than they are an external one.
So maybe,
you know, if I had to
really be blatant about it,
I think I would label a majority of it for a nine lives somewhere in that
wrath and somewhere in that sloth area.
And, you know,
that largely, I think in lots of other
places, they they have some some good productive protective mechanisms.
Yeah, that’s an interesting point.
I think a good one that the nine is generally not out trying to
win anything, right?
They just want to be left alone.
They just want a sense of of peacefulness
of sort of stability,
really. And, you know,
sloth, one of the words that comes up is apathy.
And when you describe apathy to a nine,
I think they just say, I live there,
you know, the idea of trying to make yourself care and trying to bring yourself to get everything done and try not
to be overwhelmed, but try to really get after it.
And and that sense of apathy of just I don’t want
to.
And the nine goes,
yeah, wait, what?
Yeah, that’s just life.
Right.
So I think certainly
sloth is is probably the place they they start from,
at least by by Constitution.
You know, Clint, I think one of the things I find most helpful here in this conversation,
and I just want to bring up this circle for you here,
is the thing that the Enneagram does that
I find so helpful,
that is often not clear in like the personality type things,
is instead of it trying to put you in a box and say,
here you are, this is what you are.
I think the Enneagram
is far more of a journey understanding that you start at one place on this circle,
you see how the
the numbers one through nine stretch around the circle.
And the idea with the Enneagram is
that every single one of these contains an image of God,
that each one is a conditional sort of
human instantiation of good things.
But each one also has its weaknesses.
And of course, we focused on that today from the lens of sinfulness.
So the story of the Enneagram is how you make your way
around the circle, how you how you go from whatever number you are to embody the best of these other
numbers so that you can you can engage sort of the wholeness of the story.
If you’re willing to look
at the Enneagram that way,
I think it has fascinating implications for these sins that we’ve been talking about.
Because it would be easy for us,
I think, each to sort of feel that one or
maybe a second sin that really hit home,
that just we realized when we went through the study,
oh, man, yeah, I’ve got a lot of envy,
or I’ve got a lot of pride,
or wow, anger is always on my doorstep, whatever,
you know, that might be for you.
What the Enneagram gives us is this idea of
the journey around the circle.
And what the what that may give us in the conversation of sinfulness
is that so too,
though we may have one or two places of substantial impact,
the rest of these
are also working in often very subconscious ways.
And so can we become people who embody
the virtues around that entire circle?
Can we slowly grow as Christians?
Because as we do that,
I think it has a cumulative effect as we go around the Enneagram circle,
we understand these other types, and we try to embody the best of those images of God.
So the same as we embody
these virtues, we I do think become more and more naturally resistant to the kind of temptation that
these seven sins may have over us.
There’s a kind of cumulative effect there,
that at least as we
went through this study,
I thought that’s a really helpful frame.
Instead of thinking of sinfulness
as a tally sheet where we mark off,
oh, I’ve got that, and you’ve got that,
it becomes a kind of
navigational resource for the growth of our own Christian discipleship.
And I think our background,
our heritage helps us there,
Michael, because as Reformed Christians,
we sort of start with the
premise that sinfulness is going to find its way into every life,
that inevitably as sinful people,
we are going to have an experience of brokenness,
whether it be conscious or not.
And the idea of
our faith is that it opens our eyes to that brokenness and allows us to begin to see how
the grace of Christ may work in us to push against that brokenness and move us toward wholeness.
And I think the Enneagram conversation is interesting because it essentially provides
a framework for us to say,
as a person who tends to be like this,
you might find yourself
struggling more often with this brokenness than this brokenness.
And you may find yourself sort
of having a little bit of immunity to this part of the human struggle,
this part of the
sinful
temptation, but you’re going to need to be careful over here,
perhaps.
And I do think,
without wanting to put people in boxes in pigeonhole,
I do think that kind of map
can be helpful as we do self-examination and as we ask hard questions about,
“Okay, given the way that I am or the way that I’m trying to be,
where is it that I’m doing well and where is it that I might be prone to struggle in?” And I do
think that can have some real upside for us.
Yeah. And very briefly, I don’t want to continue
on too long.
I just want to make a quick note here.
I think that there is a relational communal
sense here that we might miss because the subnetly sins is very much,
I think, a self-reflective tool.
But be aware that if you don’t struggle with greed,
lust,
envy,
if you don’t struggle with
anger or wrath or sloth,
if there’s an area where you are naturally somewhat,
I’m not going to say immune.
That’s not the right word.
But if you have some antibodies to those sins,
surely in the midst of your Christian community,
there are those who could use that
blessing and that gift.
There is a kind of beauty that comes as Christians come together
and as we support one another in that effort.
So if you have a Christian friend and you see them
going out and buying another luxury thing that they didn’t need and you’ve seen that happen over
and over and over again,
there’s a kind of blessing in having a Christian friend that says,
“Wow, another car, another this or another that.” And clearly,
I mean, that’s tricky and we’ve
always got to be aware of it.
But if we have the kind of relationship with other Christians,
we can be honest with one another.
There’s a kind of benefit that comes to the whole community
when you recognize, “Yeah, I have some strengths here.” And there are others who inevitably don’t
have those strengths.
And that’s a very kind of Pauline understanding of the church,
but I think it can be very helpful to recognize it’s not all about,
“Hey, look at me, I’m a sinner.” Though we
talk about that a lot in the Reformed tradition,
it’s also,
“Hey, look at the blessing and grace
that God has given to me.
How does that contribute to help my brothers and sisters in Christ?” That
also exists and it’s worth noting in the conversation.
Yeah, because the most dangerous
sins I think are the ones we refuse to deal with.
And so that experience of saying,
“In this area, I’ve struggled, but I may be able to through that struggle help some other people,
or perhaps I may be able to speak into an area that is a struggle for someone else,
less so for me.” So yeah,
there is a certain communal aspect to that.
Well, friends, thanks for listening.
We hope this was helpful.
We’re going to be honest,
this is kind of one that just grew out of our conversations and we kind of wanted to
give it a shot.
So maybe there’s something in it that sparks some thought.
And if so,
great, we appreciate you listening.
We’ll be starting another series soon and we’ll let details
out on that here pretty quick.
But we are grateful that you would spend this time listening,
thinking through these things with us.
As always, we’re open to comments and feedback.
Let us know what you think and we’d love to hear from you.
See you later.