Ten Commandents for the Scrupulous

[Nick]

I have used the Ten Commandments for the Scrupulous for awhile now to help me with my scrupulosity. But I have been thinking about the tenth commandment and what it implies, or what I think it might imply rather. It says:

1. You shall put your total trust in Jesus Christ, knowing that he loves you as only God can love, and that he will never allow you to lose your soul.

To me this seems to be saying “don’t worry, there is nothing you can do to seperate yourself from God.” This is obviously not true, but I think this is not the intended understanding since the other commandments imply the reality of mortal sin. Is there a better way to read this? Thanks.

 

[Della]

1. You shall put your total trust in Jesus Christ, knowing that he loves you as only God can love, and that he will never allow you to lose your soul.

I believe the key is the words “total trust.” If we place our total trust in Christ (and that means living for God day by day) then we can be assured that Jesus will not let us lose our way and so be lost. I’m sure it doesn’t imply “once saved always saved” (OSAS), but is meant to allay fears since the scrupulous tend to overreact to their every little sin and flaw. Yes?

 

[Greg27]

I am a highly scrupulous and contemplative person, so I’ve found the monks who retreated to the desert useful in this regard; they had to fight extremely hard against temptation, and also had to understand the psychological/spiritual origins of sin and the temptation to sin. In a way the spiritual journey is like a small boat crossing an angry sea, and the writer of the Cloud of Unknowing says one can’t become a true master of the spiritual life unless one first has fallen many times into sin and weathered its assualts and then overcome them by God’s grace and mercy and constant effort to examine one’s heart right to the deepest depths to find God speaking there and repentance from sin.

When one sounds out the darkness in the soul in silence, one slowly learns to hear the voice of God and to use that to fight against temptation to cut oneself off from the precious fountain of life which exists inside one’s soul after the grace of baptism.

 

[JimG]

Remember that the ten commandments for the scrupulous are not intended as a general moral theology, or as catechetical instruction. They are a pastoral guide specifically for the scrupulous.

The pastoral approach to the scrupulous must of necessity be quite different than, for example, the pastoral approach to the lax–or someone who has no or little sense of sin.

And it is a typical tendency of the scrupulous to try dissect the moral implications what are merely pastoral guidelines!

 

[drafdog]

Seems to me that you missed something in reading the letter to the Romans. Go back and read it again. If we are truly trusting in God, and doing the best that we can, God won’t let us fall through the cracks.

Matthew