I've been thinking about this MBTI and its tendencies to pigeonhole people. It might work heuristically, but from a Christian point of view it is an issue of concern, particularly with the ways that people (especially corporations) use it. Consider the following question:
What is the Lord's personality type?
After all, He is fully human. If He is fully human then He must have a personality type. If He has a personality type then there must be one personailty type that is better than others, that has a pre-eminence amongst personality types, that is the one that must be adhered to if we are to follow Him. Can we believe that (roughly) one sixteenth of the world's population has a head start in being closer to God because they all share the same personality attributes?
Okay, this may seem a little petty. Christ was male; one half of the world's population is male; does that make men preferable to women? Well, I might believe, being a member of the Catholic Church, that women cannot be ordained but that doesn't mean that I hold the idea that women are in anyway inferior in their humanity to men.
Christ was Jewish, but that doesn't mean that the Jewish people are in any way superior (or inferior for that matter) to others. Christ probably had a beard (unless the earliest Icons of a beardless Christ are accurate), so does that mean that the hirsute are preferred?
We are not saved by anything other than the love of God which is utterly disinterested in who we are. However, the question is interesting because we are to respond to God's love in order to open ourselves to become more like God. If Christ has a personality type according to Jung, then this shows monothelitism cannot be correct, since this would mean that God Himself has a specific personality type which is describable in Human terms.
So the MBTI, if correct, has its uses in refuting 7th century heresies. However, it still rankles with me that there should be a personality type more capable of perfection than another. Describing a personality is more defining of an individual than a specifying race/sex/hairiness. This begs the question, are we human beings defined as individuals by our personalities?
If we are then MBTI shows that there is a better personality to have because it is empirically capable of producing a perfect human personality. If there is no best MBTI, then we would need sixteen perfect humans to demonstrate to a recalcitrant humanity how each of us is to live.
MBTI exists by comparing one human being with another and measuring just a few aspects of how their personality interacts with the world around. However, Christ tells us to deny self, to deny the pursuit of self-discovery as a means to realise one's being in a transient and faddish world, but rather to seek our true being and self-knowledge in the service of God.
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FWIW I'm an ISFJ.
FWIW I refuse to be so rated. When an Evangelical church I belonged to began a program of gifts and personality evaluation I cooperated for a while. I took the gifts test. Somehow the fact that it actually was fairly accurate bothered me, though it told me nothing I didn't already know. Then they began pushing the Myers-Briggs. I simply wouldn't do it. Frankly I regard this kind of testing and pigeonholing as a more scientific-appearing attempt to do what astrology has long been used for: a deterministic classing of people into categories they cannot escape. That works well with the Muslim God of kismet, perhaps with a full-fledged double-predestination Calvinism, but not with any theology I can buy.
ed
While an undergrad I studied the psychooogy of C G Jung. His headiest book took four years to write. It is PERSONALITY TYPES. Many personaoity inventories are based on his theory. Jung'4 4 are:
Thinker
Feeler,
Intuitor, and
Sensator.
I think that people who enjoy football are Sensators. I don't. I am a Feeler with a dash of thought.
All are not equal. We all play a part .. as the apostle would say.
Certainly each of us can find our gifts. But what do we do then? That don't mean we gotta use 'em !
Mostly gifts are those things we use without thinking anyway.
Rev'd W E Bauer (EMC)
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