Amazing!

The Aardvark, his blog's margin announces, shares my Myers Briggs personality type!

Both of us are ENTP's. We almost never become pastors, and constitute between two and five percent of the population, and between three and seven percent of the male population.

What are the chances that two ENTP's who both decided to go into the ministry would be among we few, we happy few, we band of siblings who constitute the Lutheran Blogosphere?

Comments

Pomeranus said…
The reason for your uniqueness lies perhaps in the type of screening used by seminaries, Wartburg Seminary for sure, based on Myers-Briggs. The personality types are based on Jungian "psychology" (actually an anti-Christian cult). In the Jungian scheme the intuitive element is commonly correlated to "spirituality". The fly in the ointment is that in Jung's scheme of things, the intuitive is related to an openness to the occult. That you and Aardvark are not typical is only to your credit. What about those chosen for ministry based on their M-B score which indicated "spirituality." This might explain much of the paganism which has been permeating clergy rosters for the last several decades. It would be interesting to see how Martin Luther, John Gerhard, Charles Porterfield Kraut, Wilhelm Loehe, CFW Walther or many other Lutheran Lights would check out on the M-B.
The Myers-Briggs was actually developed by a mother-daughter team, neither of whom, as I understand it, had any particular psychological credentials. There are a lot of people who are extremely anti Myers-Briggs, many on exactly the grounds you mention.

Whatever Jung may have meant by the term, though, as its used in this scheme to refer generally to the non-cognitive in human apprehension of reality. For sure this can include the occult, as well as Schwaermer-type Christian spirituality (a word, BTW, with which my experience of Wartburg left me a profound suspicion). But it also embraces some very real phenomena, which I suspect are really cognitive after all, but using different part of the brain for the cognition. In general it seems to indicate the very valid and quantifiable phenomenon of "right-brained" thinking.

Certainly it also true that there are people- generally "intuitives," in the Myers-Briggs scheme of things- who tend to relate to reality in a manner which transcends the materialistic. I think there's a real and legitimate phenomenon being described by that term, and I don't think it can be simply equated to openness to the occult.

None of this means that I buy into Myers-Briggs hook, line and sinker, by any means. But I find it interesting that there is a close parallel between criticism of type theory and criticism of the concept of ADHD. Interestingly, David Kersey- perhaps the best-known exponent of Myers-Brigg around- is one of those who argues that there is no such thing as ADHD. His logic strikes me as dubious- but also reminiscent of at least some of the critics of Myers-Briggs.

I guess my experience with Pietism and "Evangelicalism" has taught me to be suspicious of too easy an equation of even dubious ideas and practices with the occult. But that doesn't mean that I don't agree that Myers-Briggs, like that other fad, the Enneagram, shouldn't be approached with a healthy dose of suspicion.

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