Dr. Ian Osborn's three "steps"

Some of you may be acquainted with Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz's four steps for dealing with an obsession.

Well, here are Dr. Ian Osborn's three steps.

I admit to some reservations about Step Three. One of the biggest problems with American religion is the tendency it has to tell you that you're saved by grace alone, through faith alone- and then to spoil it all by telling you to "prove" that you have faith by your works.  Now, it's both completely biblical and absolutely true to say that faith always bears fruit. But how, in practice, does "proving" that you have faith and therefore are therefore saved by doing a good work differ from being saved simply by doing that good work?

It doesn't. I'm not sure that Dr. Osborn's third step won't land you right back in the soup if you interpret difficulty in letting go of excessive responsibility and turning responsibility instead over to God as evidence of a lack of faith. Faith will produce works. But requiring works as proof of faith undermines faith. Whenever Law and Gospel are mixed- whenever what we do and what God does aren't strictly distinguished in our living of an experience as well as in are talking about it-  the Gospel and grace and faith lose out, and as a practical matter works are all you're left with. 

A subtle distinction is necessary here. As Luther observes. before the question of whether works are to be done is even asked, faith is already doing them. That's the very nature of faith. While our good works need the Law to inform them, insofar as we're talking about the New Self we never need the Law to motivate them! You don't need the coercion to produce the fruits of faith- trust and confidence in what God will do- and employing it undercuts the whole process.  Calling in the Law to help the Gospel motivate the fruits of faith undermines the Gospel. Instead of trust in God, it directs us to ourselves.

Nor, of course, that Dr. Osborn intends that. But one does not promote confidence in what God does as a solution to excessive worry about whether we are doing enough by asking us to prove that we believe! The hypothetical "man in the street" James uses to make the point that works are evidence of faith is speaking in the abstract. He's not suggesting that we turn our attention away from Christ as the object of our faith back to ourselves and whether we have it! One does not promote confidence in something outside of ourselves by directing our attention to our potential deficiency in something within. That just undoes the whole business. And since biblically faith is a gift rather than an achievement, it doesn't even make sense!

The Law is like "Chinese handcuffs." The more one struggles to pull one's fingers apart, the more tightly they are held.  Faith is letting go,  ceasing to strive and to produce what is needed by one's own efforts, and trusting in Christ to supply it. It's the opposite of striving. That it can be harder than striving itself at times doesn't change the fact that one cannot summon greater confidence in what is outside of us by looking within. Where Law and Gospel are confused, and works (including ignoring obsessions and resisting compulsions)  become a matter of reassuring ourselves of our own adequacy (even in that we have faith), grace and the Gospel are effectively removed from the equation. Even faith is not a good work we do. Faith is a gift of God- and one which at any given moment may or may not be strong enough to enable us to shake that obsession or forego that compulsion. If we fail at doing these things, that doesn't mean that we don't have faith, just as scrupulosity itself is the result of faulty wiring in our brains rather than of unbelief!  Letting God worry about our obsessions and using trust to combat compulsions is a struggle that will inevitably take time, and we will often fail in that struggle. It is simply not a primarily spiritual issue, but a medical one.  We are fighting our broken brains as well as our fallen natures!

When we fail to resist an obsession or a compulsion, the last thing we need is to conclude that we need to try harder. The solution, rather, is precisely- as Dr. Osborn stresses- to put our weakness in God's hands. At that point, we need encouragement to forego self-blame and instead to rely on God rather than on ourselves even more strongly. But presenting that as something we must do rather than as something God will do always throws us back upon ourselves. Instead, what we need is to be reminded that God is faithful, and can be trusted and that no matter how many times we try and fail His grace and His trustworthiness will never fail. The fruits of faith are a very different thing from the works of the Law! They are something God produces, rather than something we are called upon to produce. And if I read him right, that's exactly what Dr. Osborn is calling upon us to do: to let God assume the responsibility for changing our hearts rather than to redouble our efforts to do what by definition we cannot do, and change them by our own efforts.

We need Gospel here, not Law. I don't think Dr. Osborn means to suggest that to struggle to let God have our obsessions and compulsions means that we lack faith (and thus that our obsessions are valid after all). But although American Christianity has a difficult time coming to grips with this,  to call upon someone to "prove" their faith by their works points them away from God's faithfulness and sufficiency to ourselves. It's Law, not Gospel- and especially given the tendency of OCD to grab hold of anything to obsess about, it's a yawning pit in the path of a believer who rightly recognizes that the only relief from the torment of their scrupulosity is in the grace of God, the very insight for which we owe so much to Dr. Osborn for pointing out to us.