We men, at our best through noble thumos, are life-supporting and life-donating.  Though we don't give birth, we were designed to sustain, grow, and protect life; we're wired to charge it with energy and verve, going ahead of and providing for those we love.

Though the results of shadow thumos are real and treacherous, there's still another condition that's at least as perilous: possessing little or no thumos at all.

Low-thumos living is one of the biggest challenges of ministering to men who go to church.  They can't seem to get animated about anything.  They're unable to stoke an inner fire that gets them moving to improve the quality of their life and enhance or safeguard the well-being of others.  They feel stuck in the gear of "apathetic neutral," and they're living off the vitalizing will of others.  Usually this will belongs to their wife, and that dynamic does not go down well in families.

"My husband will not take the initiative about anything!" one woman vented at a writer's conference.  "It's like he's dead, but he's not.  Can you help him?"  The answer depends in part on how deep Neutered Christianity has gone into such a man; it depends even more on his willingness to exercise it.

The event that usually stimulates men to take an honest look at thumos is their realization of the sorry state of their marriage.  Often, by this point, they're about to be separated, they are separated, or they're about to be divorced.  At long last, their wife's finally not being able to take it anymore has given them the gift of desperation.

They really want to keep their marriage together; up to now, though, they've utterly failed to muster the fighting spirit necessary to contend for it.  And here is where, once again, their background betrays them.  Their bunny Rabbit faith has them believing that all fighting is striving, or as a pastor of mine used to put it, that they're supposed to "stop trying to make things happen and let God take over." 

One younger man facing divorce told me, "I know this sounds crazy, but all I need to do is lay this situation at the Lord's feet, and then get out of the way and let him take care of it."  Jesus as Super Sherpa, waiting to carry us up life's jagged slopes without any human willingness, cooperation, or synergy—sound familiar?  This is the language of a man who is too "spiritual," and who is insufficiently soulful, to be of any real good.  What do you think would happen if he behaved this way at work when his quarterly report came due or when his assignment had been left undone?

Another definition of thumos the Greeks gave us is "soul-blood," which represents a vital capacity for life: a living, an expression, a movement, and an action that's ever right here and right now.  Women leave weak men who do not care for their soul-blood and who hide their soul-neglect behind a façade of spirituality.  They can tell at an intuitive level that such a man is unreliable, unsoulful, inauthentic and untrustworthy.  They desire a man who has soul-juice.

I worked with one juiceless man for months, helping him battle his fears and become a more proactive husband and father.  He did want to make the adjustment, but he hadn't yet actualized it; his wife, who'd long waited for him to step up to life's plate, also had complained bitterly, even saying, through disdainful lips, "You such the life out of me."

It hurts to so often hear such contempt from wives of low-thumos men; I know how shame-producing it is.  As a young Christian Nice Guy who for years followed the CNG script to the letter, I once heard it from a girlfriend I really loved, and being sliced open by the jagged blade of that comment remains one of the most painful experiences I've ever had.

If you've experienced this, you know what I'm talking about.  It feels like such a sucker punch.  The voice of your emasculated spirituality says that if you're a swell guy, the road to relational happiness will be cleared for you.  It doesn't happen this way.  Many Christian men come to feel like a mushroom: kept in the dark about how the real world operates and fed a lot of manure.  Eventually they tend to turn around and reject the worldview that gave them this worthless outlook.

It's the life-draining, soul-sucking aspect of low thumos that drives a wife to express disgust toward her husband.  And for most men it is their wife—not God—who drives them to their knees; by the time they've hit the floor they feel shattered into a million little shards.  A woman's rejection is the pinnacle of shame for most men.

Here are some words and phrases that help to describe low-thumos life:

Numb, passive, whining, feckless, anxious, yes-man, acedia, sexually bland, pleasant, agreeable, nice, ahdns in pockets jingling change, innocuous, beautiful loser, let's just be friends, wimp, passed by, divorced, naïve, can't knuckle down, dainty, disease to please, procrastinator, doormat, picked on, held down, no boundaries, always a groomsman, never a groom, irrelevant, lukewarm, rootless, failure to launch.

With this spirit in mind, fill in a few words and phrases of your own.

Single Christian men who do not have the gift of celibacy, who want to be married, and who are unanimated by courageous vitality have it especially hard.  Their letters are among the most heartbreaking that we receive at Coughlin Ministries.  Most of them struggle with pornography, and their dating life is a veritable sea of disappointment.

Their low-thumos ways pretty much ensure they won't kindle any kind of spark with the women they date.  Many of these women say things along the lines of, "I wish I liked you more."  They really do want to like such men; in many ways they already are so lieable.  Yet in a foundational, crucial inevitable way they are not want-able to women.  Most women, most of the time, are attracted to men with thumos heat. 

I remember the conversation I had with a single man who works for Compassion International.  He caught only a few minutes of a presentation I gave, but he said he felt as if I'd been reading his mind.  He said I'd mentioned things I don't remember saying, statements that weren't even in my notes.  He told me he wanted to be married more than anything and that he knew something significant was missing in him. 

I said that if he's like many other men today, his Achilles' heel is his backbone.  I encouraged him to disagree with his next date, when appropriate, without being dismissive and to stick to his guns without being obnoxious.  I also suggested that he gently tease his date, to show he wouldn't be rigidly fixed upon her complete approval (something most healthy women will appreciate).

But, like many Christian men, he was an approval junkie, so my advice sounded almost sacrilegious to him.  He was shocked, even scandalized.  I wish he'd have been willing to give something else a try; it was obvious his blueprint wasn't getting the house built. 

The Bible tells us it's not good for the man to be alone, and upon this biblical truth I rest my case against Nice Guy theology and all the damage that goes with it.  Men are alone because of an orthodoxy and an orthopraxy—a belief, and that belief lived out—that's constantly been draining and disposing of their God-given thumos.  Their boldness, their courage, their will needs to be animated and seasoned by the Holy Spirit; it's not to be suppressed, it's not to be destroyed, and it's not to be crucified!

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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While there have been many, I particularly remember one sermon illustration that drained my thumos and yet at the same time unfairly, even cruelly, was designed to compel me to lead with boldness and strength.  I call it the Parable of the good Chauffeur, and it was my early spiritual development.

As the story goes, there was a wealthy man who needed a new chauffeur.  He tested three.

The first took him up a windy and dangerous road, and in order to showcase the fine points of his skill, he drove near the edge of the pavement—so close that the wealthy man could see to the bottom of the canyon below. 

The second drove quickly and efficiently; he preferred the left lane on the freeway.

The third drove slowly and safely down the middle, taking no chances.  You can guess by now which chauffeur my pastor lavishly praised and the one he said was most pleasing to God.

Through this and similar anecdotes that promote the Official Script, the message is clear: The Lord favors caution-oriented men who play life safe, who refrain from taking risks.  Don't climb any spiritual trees—you might get hurt!  (This same pastor also was wont to say that women are more sensitive to the Holy Spirit than men.)

Divine blessing, then, is said to rest upon placid men who stay within the bull's-eye of God's breezy, status-quo will.  Like many men, I was taught to be overly cautious, continually concerned about what others thought of me, never to offend and always to please.  Such fear-encrusted, smotherly-motherly advice leads to a life that's very much unlike the life of Christ.

Here's the ugly irony: While this pastor heaped shame onto people of thumos, behind the scenes he was a man of tremendous thumos.  Because he so carefully kept it concealed—he hoarded power to lord it over those he weakened—he was viewed as a spiritual traitor, a grim reaper of masculinity.  A number of men have told me they can trace the destruction of their marriages back to the deception and naivete of the man's teachings.

Exhausting people of their courage, or preventing them from developing it and then exhorting them to be strong, is an equivalent to the pharisaical sin of heaping onerous burdens upon others while refusing to offer help.  Ministry should lift burdens, not make them heavier.  Without thumos, life is depressing.

We're often told to stay away from any behavior that could be deemed irresponsible.  You know, like what Simon and Andrew did after Jesus invited them to be "fishers of men": They immediately "left their nets and followed him."  Notice, though, that he didn't scorn their seemingly careless action.

They didn't drop to their knees and pray really hard about their decision.  (Oops.)  They didn't consult their wives.  (Those cads!)  And they didn't go to their elders for counsel.  (Yikes—weren't they worried they'd lose their "spiritual covering"?)  If they were anyone else, we would denounce their gutsiness as rash, foolish, and of course, anti-family.  We'd regard them as heathen—not fervent men following God himself in the flesh.

The common belief that everything in life is predetermined doesn't help either.  Dallas Willard writes about the troubling connection many Christians have between fatalism/determinism on the one hand and apathy/cowardice on the other:

If you were to get to the bottom of my theology you would find me pretty Calvinistic, but my sense of ministry is to judge the lay of the land for your times and shoot where the enemy is.  The enemy of our time is not human capacity, or over-activism, but the enemy is passivity—the idea that God has done everything and you are essentially left to be a consumer of the grace of God, and that the only thing you have to do is find out how to do that and do it regularly.  I think this is a terrible mistake and accounts for the withdrawal of active Christians from so many areas of life where they should be present.

In order to help thumos create spiritual growth and strengthen our soul, we will need to amend, while not destroying, some very pivotal and popular teachings that comprise much of the Official Script.

At the top of this "reassessment list" is a better understanding of what we've been told are the fruits or manifestations of the Spirit.  Jesus told us that after he returned to heaven God would send us a Comforter that would help direct our lives.  He called him "the Holy Spirit," and Paul apprised us of the qualities a life has when the Spirit is in the driver's seat.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Against such things there is no law.

These nine traits have been taken by many to be exhaustive.  But it's erroneous to believe that there are no other attributes of the Holy Spirit's living in a person's life to strengthen, comfort, and direct us.  It's also untrue that God does not expect us to graft other qualities into our lives.  A more comprehensive understanding of his Spirit likewise can give us a better comprehension of this mysterious power.

Note Paul's qualifying statement that "against such things there is no law."  He didn't write this because he was trying to add more words to his letter or fill up his parchment.  He wanted us to realize and understand that there are additional manifestations.  He didn't intend for his letter to the Galatians to put forward a complete list.

Paul refers his readers back to their initial experience with the Spirit, which included, for example, illumination and moral transformation, neither of which are in the Galatians list of attributes.  In Acts, the most regularly mentioned spiritual manifestation is inspired speech—speaking in tongues, prophecy and praise, and bold utterances of the Word of God.  These also are not listed in the "original nine."  The Spirit is invisible, but for those willing to take a broader and deeper look, the manifestations of the Spirit's presence were readily detectable.

For the sake of your thumos, consider a few things.  First, notice the words "bold utterances of the word of God" as a manifestation of his Spirit.  As our spiritual training has many of us compliantly and pleasantly behaving like Pavlov's dog, you'll likely notice that boldness appears to clash with the Galatians list that today holds court over all others, the list that contains the word gentleness.  We don't think legitimate boldness and actual gentleness should come out of the same person, but looking at the life of Christ and the lives of the godliest people we know reveals that boldness and gentleness aren't at all incompatible.

Those in whom the Spirit reigns are gentle when gentleness is required, and they are bold with the life-giving Word of God, sharper in truth and wisdom than any two-edged sword, when that's required.  Here there is no contradiction but rather completion.  Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way: "No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked."  King used antitheses to mean that men should possess tender hearts, tough minds, and a heated thumos in order to play our part in God's plan for our lives.

The spiritual fruit of love is not always gentle or pleasant.  Surgeons and dentists and physical therapists and psychiatrists bring pain into (or reveal pain already in) our lives in order to help us heal, to escape disease, and to experience freedom.  Their love for others brings creative tension, significant discomfort, and healthy disruption to the object of their care.

The same is true for God, who disciplines those he loves.  And friends sometimes wound each other because they care—they don't want the ones they love to screw up their lives.  Wounds from a friend have love as their motive, so they can be trusted, but they sure don't feel gentle at the time, do they?  If this experience is foreign to you, then chances are you've not yet experienced the tremendous blessing of brotherhood.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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Lack of thumos disgusts more than wives—it disgusts us as a culture as well.  You might remember seeing footage of or hearing about an elderly man being assaulted by a young man trying to steal his car.  That elderly man was ninety-one-year-old war veteran Leonard Sims of Detroit, who was punched in the face and neck more than twenty times during a brutal carjacking in 2007.  The attack was caught on video and broadcast throughout the world.  But what most of us didn't see was the wide-angle footage that showed four bystanders watching the attack—and doing absolutely nothing to help the man being pummeled like a punching bag.  They stood there like ravens on a power line, like the proverbial monkeys who saw, heard, and spoke no evil.

Mr. Sims was unable to life his hands—he used them to brace himself against the gale-force attack until he was knocked to the ground and was almost run over as the shadow-thumos thug pulled away.  The punk stood only five-foot-nine and was slim; the crowd could have taken him easily.  Instead they just watched.  They didn't even call 9-1-1.  A nearby convenience store clerk did.

We witness low-thumos life and feel gut-piercing remorse, righteous anger, and stomach-turning disgust.  We're designed this way.  This is a natural, God-given response to one of the most despicable behaviors in humans (especially men).  God made us to disdain cowardice, not so that we'd be consumed by guilt and shame, but so that when we face trials we'll be compelled within to forge greater character: fortitude, strength, boldness, courage, and love.

British preacher Paul Scanlon talks about a baby who was dying in a nursery ward in England.  The child's chart showed how doctors conducted every possible test to find out why this child was dying.  Then, at the bottom of the chart, in the sobering diagnosis field, was written, "Failure to thrive."  This child had no fighting spirit, no lust for life.  Unlike other children in that nursery, he was missing an animating quality or soul-blood that would compel him toward the activity necessary to survive.  He seemed to have been born without the essence that no machine could install or induce; he needed an animus to help move him past adversity and into a life of vitality and growth.

Many of us adults have the same actual but mysterious ailment that's killing us spiritually.  Gichin Funakoshi, known as the creator and founder of modern karate, gave us something essential to chew on regarding this lack: "That in daily life, one's mind and body be trained and developed in a spirit of humility; and that in critical times, one be devoted utterly to the cause of justice."  He meant real humility, not the false form of humility that tells us that we are nothing but worms—that's just another form of lying.

Worse, our false humility undercuts our God-given gifts and power, and I don't think this is a coincidence.  When we reject our strengths or our talents it's often because, like thumos, they make us conspicuous.  We show up on people's radar.  In other words, if we woke up to their realities, then we would wake up to their responsibilities.  Fearful and selfish, instead we slink away with a pious smile, a pledge to pray, and a wish for blessings.

Thumos helps us to play our part in the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom of love, light, and truth.  It also help us to avoid what Francis Schaeffer noticed with chagrin:

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is ask them to be conservative.  Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.  To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo, and the status quo no longer belongs to us.  If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo.

Schaeffer wasn't using the word conservative in its popular and narrow political dimension.  He meant it in the broader sense of how young Christians are inculcated into maintaining what currently is.  What currently is includes a vast indifference to the well-being of others and catering to our own comfort.  Cain's comeback to God—"Am I my brother's keeper?"—is often our unsaid snotty remark, except that we usually lack the audacity to be so direct.  Nonetheless, our actions too often are the same.

We know that thumos deficiency is a spiritual ailment.  But is it a psychological disorder as well?  Counselors complain that sometimes their best insights go unheeded by clients.  They often scratch their heads as to why one finds his way to healing and spiritual growth while another barely moves in a better direction.  I think thumos has a lot to do with this quandary.  If one has no internal urge to push past a misconception or neurosis, does he really have a chance?  If he has no inner urge to grasp the better life above him, and if he's too cowardly to face his fears, he simply isn't going to make much progress.

Thumos is part of what philosopher William James described as "reserve energies," a capacity that every person possesses and that should be depleted by the end of life.  The energy in this reservoir lifts people to higher and better places; as a man who was horrified by the waste of human energy in armed conflict, James believed this energy should be used to "drain marshes, irrigate the deserts, and dig the canals, and democratically do the physical and social engineering which builds up so slowly and painfully what war so quickly destroys."  This energy recognizes that while there will be defeats, there also are victories yet to be won.

As a lay minister, I know that people who are unable to carry on through life's inevitable suffering and pain are eventually somehow stuck, very much like people addicted to drugs.  If they are skilled at manipulating others, they usually will prey upon the weak and the earnest to meet their cravings.  They will line others up like bowling pins and mow them down.  Cowardice is an orientation toward life that leads to apathy in all who possess it; in some it likewise leads to manipulation.  These sound like psychological ailments.

Making matters worse, we don't live in a world that rewards courage, except the selfish kind where we'll applaud others who have enough thumos to keep our borders safe.

But what about the kind of courage that rushes toward Twin Towers ablaze?  "What happened to the respect for that kind of manliness?" a friend asked me during a recent fishing trip.  "For a time we really appreciated people like that.  Now we've just slipped back into a flat existence where we don't even acknowledge heroes, much less honor them.  We're not even sure they exist anymore.  I mean, everywhere you turn, including church, it's as if everyone is trying to rip courage out of you."

This is a man with a prophetic nature, a man who believes that some things are right and others wrong.  He recently had to clean up after a head pastor made a shambles of his congregation and was eventually fired.  The wreckage took place right under the noses of deacons and elders who did virtually nothing to contain (let alone stop) it.

This angered him profoundly.  "You guys are a bunch of cowards," he told them.  "One of the reasons he [the pastor] made such a mess is because you watched it happen and did nothing."  He said there's still more cleanup to do, and he's afraid there isn't nearly enough will to create the necessary healthy changes.

"Can you create a coalition of the willing?" I asked.

"I really don't think it's there," he said, sounding tired.  "What do you think I should do?"

This is among the hardest questions to answer since I know what it often leads to.  In an average group of ten people, one, two at the most, have a functioning thumos.  That's plainly a minority.  You can comfort yourself by saying that one person plus God is a majority—and it may be.  But I speak from experience in affirming that it doesn't always work that way.  People of noble thumos often get their head handed to them on a platter, actually or figuratively.

So I replied, "It may not be a battle that's worthy of your blood."  After thinking about it more, though, I said, "But then again, your integrity and your loyalty to Christ will take a beating if you don't speak up.  If you do speak up, make sure it's done lovingly and with wisdom, but then expect to be slandered and ostracized later.  Planning on this can take out some of the sting and disappointment.  And, if you're right, time eventually will vindicate you."

I'll say it again: Thumos is a burden made lighter by Christ, who is life itself, who is disruptive courage, and who honors those who tell the truth the way he did, does, and will.

Paul Coughlin is the author of numerous books, including Unleashing Courageous Faith, No More Christian Nice Guy and No More Jellyfish, Chickens or Wimps. He also co-authored a book for married couples with his wife Sandy, titled Married But Not Engaged. His articles appear in Focus on the Family magazine, and he as been interviewed by Dr. James Dobson, FamilyLife Radio, HomeWord, Newsweek, C-SPAN, The New York Times, and the 700 Club among others. Paul is founder of The Protectors, the faith-based answer to adolescent bullying, which provides curriculum for Sunday Schools, private schools, retreats, and individuals that trains people of faith to be sources of light in the theater of bullying. 

Visit Paul's websites at: http://www.theprotectors.org, and http://www.paulcoughlin.net

Visit Sandy's website for reluctant entertainers at: http://www.reluctantentertainer.com

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