Jason Albertson

Victor Frankl was a Jewish neurologist who lived through the Holocaust. To try to save his family and his life, it looks like he did some unethical experimentation on other Jews for the Nazis, but he and his family were eventually imprisoned anyway. His wife and immediate family all died; he survived alone. Frankl was a neurologist and psychologist, a doctor, and while he was in the concentration camps, he observed the people around him. He wanted to know what psychological factors make the difference between life and death when people are at the very limits of pain and suffering. He wrote a book about his experience and his observations, Man's Search for Meaning . He concluded that no matter how much someone suffered, the difference between life and death was whether someone had a purpose for living. Whether someone was living for the day when they could take revenge on the Nazis or whether someone hoped they could somehow lighten someone else's suffering, having a  wh...

In the last installment, we looked at what we should use our rights for. In this post, we’ll look at what we should do when someone violates our rights. There are several main options, I think, and they’re not necessarily exclusive of one another: Ruminate We can contemplate the wrong done, rehearsing it mentally and verbally. There may be several reasons someone might ruminate over injustice, including self-doubt (“Am I really sure of what happened? Might I have misunderstood?”) and anger (“I’m just furious that they would do that! How dare they [rumination commences here]!”). The danger in rumination is that people have a tendency to be shaped by what they think about. To paraphrase Dallas Willard in Renovation of the Heart , there are people who would not know who they were if they weren’t holding onto and ruminating over an injustice. The tendency to find our identity in how we’ve been hurt increases with time. Rumination is not a permanent solution; eventually, permanent rumina...

What are we supposed to do with rights? Rights are expectations that are backed up by authority, whether inherent or delegated. The ultimate authority is God. He set up the universe in all the ways that give people inherent or delegated rights. True rights come from Him. What we -- I -- should do with other people’s rights is  honor  them. That makes sense, doesn’t it? If I honor someone’s rights, I’m ultimately honoring the one who delegated the rights. I’m bowing to the power of the One higher than both of us. Rights give authority, and authority carries power. That’s an important connection, and it leads toward the answer to a harder question: What should I do with my rights -- that is, the power God has given me? The answer is shaped by the type of universe we live in: this particular universe was made by the God who revealed Himself through the Hebrew and Greek (and Aramaic, sometimes) Scriptures. He created the earth, its flora and fauna, and man, and He endo...

To reiterate what I concluded in part 1 (several months ago), saying “I have rights” is another way of saying “I have the authority to expect things.” Rights/authority can be inherent (for example, Paul founded a church, so he will have authority inherent to his relationship to the church - see 1 Cor. 9:18) or delegated (for example, the government - see Rom. 13:1-7). Lately, I’ve been exploring in one direction in particular. I've been trying to figure out whether this statement is true: When God gives a command or prohibition, He conveys rights on people. I think it is true. For example, He says, “You shall not murder,” and as a result, I have a right not to be murdered. This is delegated authority from God. In the right (but not desirable) situation, I could say authoritatively, “Stop murdering me! I have a right not to be killed.” I don’t have inherent authority to say that, but God has delegated it to me through His law. Another example. God says through Paul, “Fathers, ...

Applies to contents of this very blog. But does it apply to me personally? Where do rights come from? How do I know what my rights are? To what extent should I assert my rights? I’ve been mulling over these questions for a couple of weeks. An unfortunate consequence of childhood is that I sometimes didn’t know how to balance things I heard. I have heard people describe their experience of entire sanctification as, “I gave up all of myself to God. I’ve given up my rights. I’m holding nothing back. I’m completely surrendered to His will.” As a child, hearing “I’ve given up my rights” conveyed the impression that there must have been something wrong with having rights. I started working with 1 Corinthians for a class project this semester. I was surprised to see Paul affirming his own rights repeatedly! That drove me to ask the questions above. I started in the New Testament because that's where I found a believer talking about his personal rights and because I'm more familiar...